Dec 31
Rob Ford, CitiBike, Bay Area tech woes, China’s crippling smog: You’ve seen all the big headlines for cities this year. But here are a few of the urbanism stories that might have flown under your radar.
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Dec 18
As Chinese cities grapple with explosive industrial growth, they also grapple with the side effects, like millions of citizens with pollution-related ills. At Chengdu No. 7 People’s Hospital, those patients are a common sight—and now, the hospital has opened a dedicated "smog clinic" to treat them.
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Dec 10
What’s that saying—if life gives you lemons, make lemonade? Well, how about when decades of destroying the environment gives you a cancer-causing smog problem, make it part of your national defense strategy?
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Dec 06
Choking pollution sweeps through China, new development could eradicate Mexico’s emerging wine industry, and Yahoo can tell you everything that’s wrong with where you live (congratulations, Memphis, you’re apparently a hellhole). All this and more is What’s Ruining Our Cities.
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Dec 05
China has an awful smog problem
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Nov 05
There are lots of reasons not to love smog. It stinks. It makes it hard to breathe. It gives children cancer. And, for certain countries, that decreased visibility makes it really hard to spy on your citizens. We’re looking at you, China.
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Oct 22
Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde has designed everything from smart highways for the United Kingdom
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Mar 28
The best way to deal with smog is to make less of it, but it’s too late to just do that. And when it comes to cleaning up your already polluted air, mesh structures like this one in Mexico City are a stylish way to filter a whole city’s worth of air. More »
Mar 27
Most modern cities have bad air, it just comes with the fact that when people live very close together, and they have a lot of cars and industrial complexes, they pollute the environment. Heavy traffic doesn’t help at all, and that’s why this unusual new kind of structure has been conceived to help clean things up.
The PH Conditioner Skyscraper is a concept for a large-scale floating pollution-combating platform that aims to manage the effects of acid deposition due to pollutants, and turn them into reclaimed water as well as chemical fertilizer.
While this might look and sound like science-fiction, designers Hao Tian, Huang Haiyang and Shi Jianwei developed this in the hopes of deploying them in Chongqing, China. The structures look like robotic jellyfish, and the project aims to set them at between 650 to 1,000 feet in height, where most of the acidic pollutants gather. The top of these structures would be filled with hydrogen to provide buoyancy. Porous membranes absorb the pollutants, which are collected and put into a purifier.
It will be interesting to see the impact on large cities if and when this is deployed in China. Personally, I welcome our robotic jellyfish overlords, especially when they come bearing clean air.
[via designboom]
Feb 10
Beijing’s smog problem isn’t exactly new information, but it’s been getting way worse lately. In response, local artist Matt Hope decided to integrate an air purifier into his bike so riding around the city would be less hazardous. More »
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