CityLab: How Reykjavik's Sheet-Metal Homes Beat the Icelandic Winter

 This housing’s relative newness still reveals a striking factor that distinguishes Iceland from the rest of Europe: Though Iceland has been inhabited for almost 1,200 years, only a modest number of its surviving domestic buildings predate the late 19th century.

That’s partly because, as Iceland emerged from centuries of hardship, it turned its back on traditional building types associated with poverty, leaving them to deteriorate. Until the late 19th century, most Icelanders lived in turf houses. Compensating for a lack of local trees, which grow slowly in Iceland, these houses built up walls of earth and grass-growing sod around timber frames. The few remaining survivals look delightful under their coating of lush grass. To live in, they were frequently damp, dark and poorly warmed by a single kitchen hearth, while the walls needed regular repair or rebuilding to remain solid and watertight. “People think of turf houses as like regular ones but with grass-growing roofs” says Icelandic TV host, former city councilor and campaigner Gísli Marteinn Baldursson, “but in fact living in one was almost like living in a hole in the ground.” [...]

These houses became the default type both in Reykjavik and elsewhere in Iceland. When the city experienced a major fire in 1915 that left metal-clad houses largely unharmed, the city made this trend into law, requiring a corrugated coating for all new houses built close together. Kept in place until the mid-1920s, this bylaw ended up giving Iceland’s capital the largest cluster of metal-clad buildings in the world.

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The Guardian: The wurst is over: why Germany now loves to go vegetarian

Around 42% of those questioned said they were deliberately reducing their consumption of meat in some form, by keeping to a diet that was either vegetarian, vegan, pescatarian or “flexitarian”, meaning centred around plant food with the occasional piece of meat on the side. A further 12.7% of respondents said they “don’t know” or would “prefer not to say”.

The flexitarian approach has considerable support among environmentalists: a recent report by the UK Climate Assembly advocated people changing their diet to reduce meat and dairy consumption by between 20% and 40%, rather than cutting them out altogether. [...]

France, the other great European carnivore nation surveyed in the project, trailed behind its neighbour, with 68.5% of respondents claiming to eat meat without restraint. In both countries, those who have curbed their meat eating said they had done so out of concerns for animal welfare and the environment. [...]

Overall, meat consumption in Germany and France remains higher than in the developing world, and any declining tendency is expected to be outweighed by developing countries becoming more carnivorous as their purchasing power increases: global production of meat is forecast to increase by 15% in the decade to 2027.

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Deutsche Welle: How the coronavirus has spurred change in Germany

 But now, more than half a year after the pandemic broke out, an increasing number of people are seeing COVID-19 not solely as a disaster, but also as a possible catalyst for reforms. And as an event that has torn down mental barriers that were hitherto thought permanent. [...]

Claussen said he was particularly impressed by the German government's Neustart Kultur ("Culture Relaunch") intitiative, a €1-billion ($1.2 billion) scheme passed by parliament at the end of July. "There is no premium for scrapping cars, but money for art and culture," he noted, referring to aborted plans to boost the car industry by paying car owners to trade old cars for new. For Claussen, this was a sign that Germany still saw itself as a country that values culture even amid the coronavirus crisis. [...]

German Labor Minister Hubertus Heil is already working on a bill that will give people the right to work from home if possible. Heil, from the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), has pushed for changes during the pandemic — especially, for example, in the meat industry. After COVID-19 outbreaks in several slaughterhouses, contracts under which workers are employed by sub-contractors will be banned in the sector, along with the use of agency workers.

The coronavirus is also speeding up some climate protection measures in the energy sector. Politicians were forced to link both the German government's €130-billion aid package and the historic €1.8-trillion EU aid package to climate protection measures.

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The Guardian: How Nespresso's coffee revolution got ground down

For the people who sell it, the way coffee looks has long been as important as how it tastes. Until the late 19th century, beans were prized for their size, colour and symmetry. Nespresso applied a similar approach to its capsules: they started rather plain, in greys and golds, but evolved into a full spectrum. Red means decaffeinated, with darker purples and greys for the stronger, more intense flavours. “You are trying to give people visual clues about the origins of the product,” said Spence. “People prefer the taste of things when they think they have made a choice about it.” The Nespresso system made every customer feel like a connoisseur: you had to make a choice every time you put a capsule in the machine, even if it was just between black or purple. [...]

One crucial factor behind Nespresso’s rise, unmentioned by Gaillard, was timing. In 1998, Starbucks arrived in the UK, and elsewhere in Europe from 2001. (Although not in Italy, which somehow held out until 2018.) Previously it had been difficult to get a decent coffee anywhere outside Italy. At Starbucks, you could enjoy Italian-style coffee, which is to say freshly made and with frothy milk, marketed with Italian-style language. According to the historian of consumption, Jonathan Morris, Nespresso capitalised on these new tastes: “When customers started to ask how they could have [Starbucks-style coffee] at home, Nespresso was the best-placed product to take advantage of that.” Between its Fortissio and Vivalto pods, it had the cod-Italian ready to go, too. [...]

Unlike plastic, used by many of Nespresso’s rivals, aluminium is 100% recyclable, but there is a big difference between offering recycling facilities and getting consumers to use them. Nespresso says its global recycling rate is 30%, and that 91% of its users have access to one of its 100,000 collection points around the world. But some experts have suggested that just 5% of Nespresso pods are recycled. Even if Nespresso’s figure is accurate, with a conservative estimate of 14bn capsules being sold each year, and 0.9 grams of aluminium per capsule, that means 12,600 tonnes of Nespresso aluminium end up in landfill annually, enough for 60 Statues of Liberty.

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Cautionary Tales: A Tsunami of Misery

Saving people from an urgent threat can cause their lives to be blighted in profound, yet hidden ways. A monstrous wave and then a nuclear disaster forced Mikio and Hamako Watanabe from their home. But being saved from the potential dangers of a radiation leak destroyed their lives in a different way. Why do urgent dangers prompt us to take action, when far worse long-term ills are so often ignored?

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Aeon: Money and modern life

Time is no longer governed by the seasons or celestial bodies, but is abstracted and measured. The city also compresses space, social and geographical. Diverse classes, strata, cultures, linguistic groups and vocations are brought into close proximity. This is why, as Simmel observed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche preached against the city bitterly: it threatened to subsume his noble individualism into a mass.

While Simmel was a deep reader of Nietzsche and shared his romantic attraction to ‘an endless succession of contrasts’, he took an urbane distance from the latter’s aristocratic radicalism. Instead of seeking extremes in the mountains of Sils Maria, Simmel found them in the metropolitan crowd, where one can feel the uniquely modern loneliness of passing a thousand faces without recognising a friend. Nietzsche’s peaks and valleys produced noble heights and abject depths. Simmel’s metropolis instead cultivated blasé citizens who, afraid of being subsumed, distinguish themselves with externally cool indifference. [...]

Instead, he concluded that ‘truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it’. Simmel saw that the individual’s quest for truth would inevitably fail, revealing itself to be as perniciously circular as the movement of money. Thus, relativism – a doctrine of constant flux – was to be the only viable absolute. Simmel presented this as liberating: ‘the expropriator will now be expropriated, as Marx says of a process that is similar in form – and nothing remains but the relativistic dissolution of things into relations and processes.’ But there is also an element of tragedy here: to love truth is to love something we feel duty-bound to seek, even though it remains always out of reach. Like Herman Hesse’s protagonist in Steppenwolf (1927), Simmel chased an elusive absolute.

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City Beautiful: How to design a great street

This video is based primarily on the fantastic book "Great Streets" by Allan Jacobs. I highly recommend picking up a copy.

City Beautiful: What is a suburb?

The Art of Manliness: The Strenuous President

In the first year of his presidency, the press used Theodore Roosvelt’s name in connection with the word “strenuous” over 10,000 times. He was known as “the strenuous president,” and with good reason: from his youth, TR had lived and preached a life of vigorous engagement and plenty of physical activity.

Today on the show Ryan Swanson, professor of sports history and author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete, discusses not only how TR was shaped by what was called “the strenuous age,” but how he shaped it in turn by promoting sports, and participating in athletics himself. We begin our discussion with what was going on during the late 19th century that got people interested in what was then called “physical culture.” We then turn to the beginning of Roosevelt’s introduction to vigorous exercise as a boy, and how he famously decided to make his body. We discuss TR’s fitness routine when he went to Harvard, and how his becoming a fan of football there led to him supporting the preservation of the game as president. We then discuss how TR lived the strenuous life while in the White House, and thereby inspired the American public to live vigorously too. We take a fun look at what TR thought of the game of baseball, how he went to a health farm at age 58 to get back in fighting shape, and what kind of exercise and athletics TR would be into if he were alive today.

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BBC4 In Our Time: The Gin Craze (09 August 2018)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the craze for gin in Britain in the mid 18th Century and the attempts to control it. With the arrival of William of Orange, it became an act of loyalty to drink Protestant, Dutch gin rather than Catholic brandy, and changes in tariffs made everyday beer less affordable. Within a short time, production increased and large sections of the population that had rarely or never drunk spirits before were consuming two pints of gin a week. As Hogarth indicated in his print 'Beer Street and Gin Lane' (1751) in support of the Gin Act, the damage was severe, and addiction to gin was blamed for much of the crime in cities such as London.

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WorldAffairs: Eco-Anxiety: Climate Change and Mental Health

A burning Amazon rainforest. Thinning ice sheets. Sea level rise. Wildfires in California. Thawing Arctic permafrost. It’s no surprise that many of us have anxiety about our planet’s future. The mental health impacts of climate change are increasing distress about the future while intensifying the trauma of natural disasters already happening. On this week’s episode of WorldAffairs, Caroline Hickman, Executive Committee member of the Climate Psychology Alliance and teaching fellow at the University of Bath joins WorldAffairs co-host Ray Suarez to discuss eco-anxiety in the age of climate change.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Loneliness

Loneliness - Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History at the University of York, charts the emergence of loneliness as a contemporary emotional state. Also, Janne Flora, postdoctoral scholar at Aarhus University, explores the deep connections between loneliness and modernity in the Arctic, tracing the history of Greenland and analysing the social dynamics that shaped it.

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UnHerd: Where the American Dream goes to die

His new home costs $650 a month. This is about one-third of average rental prices in Imperial Beach, where rents are rising fast and at a higher rate than the national average. Little wonder that amid a housing crisis that spans the United States, there are 22 million Americans — an astonishing one in 15 of the population — living in what is politely termed ‘manufactured housing’. Most own their trailers but rent the land beneath them. Some sites look like the dishevelled Hollywood stereotypes, filled with noisy families and tatty trailers, but many are neat and homely. [...]

Increasingly, trailer parks reflect something more sinister as well: the rapacious nature of unchecked capitalism that sees the homes of poor people as an asset to be bled, rather than pockets of humanity that deserve protection. Private equity firms, hedge funds and rich speculators are muscling in on the parks, sensing higher returns than on many other property investments. They are buying out traditional ‘mom and pop’ operators — a state of affairs that alarmingly echoes the sub-prime crisis that forced many families from their homes. And it is sparking loud claims of exploitation as low-income tenants complain angrily of rising rents and reduced maintenance. [...]

To appreciate the scale of the US housing crisis, consider this finding from a survey last year, quoted in the Financial Times: median-priced homes are too expensive for average wage earners in three-quarters of the country. In Imperial Beach, the median sale price last year was more than $620,000. Meanwhile mobile home sites are often sitting in prime real estate locations; many started as housing for returning troops after the Second World War, and were built on the outskirts of towns and cities before becoming enveloped by urban sprawl over subsequent years. Thousands are situated near the sea, lakes or other desirable attractions.

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CNN: Welcome to London's rental market, where $2,000 a month gets you a bed beside the toilet

And the asking price? £1,500 (US$1,940) per month for the 27-square-meter flat, according to estate agent Foxtons. CNN contacted the company -- one of London's leading realtors -- but it declined to comment on the price or how much interest the ad had generated. [...]

This week, Berlin became the first city in Germany to freeze rent prices for the next five years. The price cap will affect around 1.5 million rented homes -- 90% of all rental households in the capital, Berlin's Department for Urban Development and Housing told CNN. [...]

Just over a quarter of Londoners -- around 2.4 million people -- rent privately. And they're spending an average 37% of their income doing so, a spokesman from the Mayor of London's office told CNN.

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UnHerd: Will Britain join the European baby push?

For anyone who’s stood on a packed train lately, the idea that Britain faces a population crisis might seem absurd. But the platform crush belies a demographic crash, little noticed when England and Wales recently posted its lowest birth rate figures – of 1.7 babies per woman – since records began. [...]

Indeed many demographers view Britain as oddly unsupportive of natalism, and of 41 OECD countries, the UK comes in 34th in paid parental leave. While in France mothers receive extra-long maternity leave and a cash bonus after their third child, and there are travel perks and reduced income tax for large families, in Britain child benefit is means tested and capped at two children. Oh Mon Dieu! [...]

From the Baltic to the Black Sea, governments are thinking long-term demographic thoughts. Hungary, which now spends four times more on pro-natalist measures than it does on defence, aims to get the birth rate up to replacement level — 2.1 babies per mother — by 2030. [...]

If he has at least two terms in office, Boris will serve to see other countries grapple with demographic challenges, and might be surprised by what he sees. When Vladimir Putin gave his annual state of the union address last month he spent 20 minutes on constitutional reforms and twice as long on the need to remedy Russia’s birth-dearth. Here, as elsewhere, religion is increasingly invoked; in neighbouring Georgia, the birth rate jumped after the Orthodox Patriarch took to personally baptising babies.

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The Log Books: "Crashpad needed"

Runaways and rough sleepers, communes and flatshares, crashpads and catastrophes... Stories about home feature heavily in Switchboard’s log books. Tash and Adam listen to LGBT+ people who searched for somewhere to live in the 1970s, and hear about the persistent problem of homelessness in 2019.

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BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Nudity

NUDITY – Laurie Taylor explores the cultural history of nudity and its impact on ideas about the body from the early twentieth century to the present. He talks to Sarah Schrank, Professor of History at California State University, about the unusual eras and locations in which it thrived - from Depression-era collectives to 1950s suburban nudist communities—as well as the more predictable beaches and resorts. They’re joined by Barbara Górnicka, Assistant Professor in Sociology at University College, Dublin, who asks why we find exposing bodies shameful and draws on her own participation in a nudist swimming club.

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The Guardian: Freedom without constraints: how the US squandered its cold war victory

As the Soviet Union passed out of existence, Americans were left not just without that enemy, but without even a framework for understanding the world and their place in it. However imperfectly, the cold war had, for several decades, offered a semblance of order and coherence. The collapse of communism shattered that framework. Where there had been purposefulness and predictability, now there was neither. [...]

The final element of the consensus was presidential supremacy, with the occupant of the Oval Office accorded quasi-monarchical prerogatives and status. Implicit in presidential supremacy was a radical revision of the political order. While still treated as sacred writ, the constitution no longer described the nation’s existing system of governance. Effectively gone, for example, was the concept of a federal government consisting of three equal branches. Ensuring the nation’s prosperity, keeping Americans safe from harm, and interpreting the meaning of freedom, the president became the centre around which all else orbited, the subject of great hopes, and the target of equally great scorn should he fail to fulfil the expectations that he brought into office. [...]

Arguably, Americans were enjoying more freedom than ever. Were they happier as a consequence? Polls suggested otherwise. In the 2007 “world happiness” standings, the US had ranked third among developed countries. By 2016, its position had plummeted to 13th. [...]

What role did Trump play in shaping this US that worked nicely for some while leaving many others adrift and vulnerable? None at all. Globalisation, the pursuit of militarised hegemony, a conception of freedom conferring rights without duties, and a political system centred on a quasi-monarchical chief of state each turned out to have a substantial downside. Yet the defects of each made their appearance well before Trump’s entry into politics, even if elites, held in thrall by the post-cold war outlook, were slow to appreciate their significance. None of those defects can be laid at his feet. [...]

The post-cold war recipe for renewing the American century has been tried and found wanting. A patently amoral economic system has produced neither justice nor equality, and will not. Grotesquely expensive and incoherent national security policies have produced neither peace nor a compliant imperium, and will not. A madcap conception of freedom unmoored from any overarching moral framework has fostered neither virtue nor nobility nor contentment, and won’t anytime soon. Sold by its masterminds as a formula for creating a prosperous and powerful nation in which all citizens might find opportunities to flourish, it has yielded no such thing. This, at least, describes the conclusion reached by disenchanted Americans in numbers sufficient to elect as president someone vowing to run the post-cold war consensus through a shredder.

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PolyMatter: How IKEA Became Sweden’s National Brand

Prospect Podcast: Veganism in the era of climate change

Veganuary; fake cheese; lab-grown meat. “Plant-based” diets have become trendier and more mainstream over the past few years. But how much can going vegan really help fend off climate change? Journalist Hephzibah Anderson joins the Prospect interview to talk about the curious history of veganism, the academic debates around its environmental promises, and the easy traps of politics based around consumer choices.

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