CityLab: Appetite for Deconstruction

Domicology recognizes the cyclical nature of the built environment. Ultimately we’re imagining a world where no building has to be demolished. Structures will be designed with the idea that once they reach the end of their usefulness, they can be deconstructed with the valuable components repurposed or recycled.

The U.S. reached a record high of 7.4 million abandoned homes in 2012. When people leave homes, the local commercial economy falters, resulting in commercial abandonment as well. The social, environmental, and economic consequences disproportionately affect already struggling communities. Abandoned buildings contribute to lower property values and are associated with higher rates of crime and unemployment. Due to the scale of the problem, local governments are often unable to allocate enough resources to remove blighted structures. [...]

Currently, publicly financed demolition and landfilling are the most frequent methods used to remove abandoned structures, but these practices generate a huge amount of material waste. Upwards of 300,000 houses are demolished annually, which generates 169.1 million tons of construction and demolition debris—about 22 percent of the U.S. solid waste stream.

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The Calvert Journal: Booming Baku: lifting the veil on social divisions in the new Azerbaijan

“I’ve never seen so many luxury brands on the streets,” was how Italian photographer Flaviana Frascogna described Baku after spending a month travelling around Azerbaijan. She arrived in the capital at night after taking a bus from Tbilisi, greeted by the city’s dazzling Flame Towers, lit day and night by 10,000 LED panels and impossible to miss from any vantage point. Baku’s recent luxury facelift is fuelled by oil and gas money, yet the lifestyle it purports is hard to come by for everyday citizens. Frascogna gives us a glimpse into modern Baku, a fairground for those who can afford it. Her photos also take us to the capital’s largely uninhabited suburbs, more specifically the Absheron peninsula where oil is actually extracted. “If you continue north the landscape becomes apocalyptic, with derelict drilling towers, pylons, abandoned factories on land poisoned by slag and waste,” she says of an area a world away from the grand architecture of the capital. “Outside of Baku, the country lives below the poverty line. Much of the wealth of natural resources goes into the pockets of the elite.” One of Baku’s most popular spots is Shikov Beach, recognisable for the large disused oil rigs that break the sea-view. This much-frequented resort area in polluted waters is more emblematic of Baku’s real identity than the ambitious projects of star architects springing up around the city.

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The Calvert Journal: Peter Trembeczki: discover the relics of Hungary's industrial past

Peter earned his BA degree as an economist and later graduated from the Photography MA programme of the Moholy-Nagy University Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary. Interested in collective memory, his photo story Victory is an exploration of Hungarian public and industrial buildings that have been either abandoned or modified. Owing to the various degrees of erosion and reconstruction they have experienced, these buildings have taken on an alternative, and at times, grotesque, identity. They have become subjects of collective remembrance — instances of a nation’s socio-political psyche.

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Politico: Three out of four Europeans say the euro’s a good thing

A big majority of people in all 19 eurozone countries support the common euro currency and think it’s a good thing for the bloc, an annual Eurobarometer survey found — as first reported by Brussels Playbook.

Ireland, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Spain are the leading euro supporters, with 80 percent or more of respondents saying it’s a “good” thing for their country. Italy, Cyprus, Belgium and France are the least convinced. [...]

In Italy, 70 percent of respondents no longer convert euros back to the lira — up 4 points from last year. In France and Germany, 60 percent and 58 percent, respectively, have weaned themselves off their old francs and marks.

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The Guardian: For hard-right revolutionaries, Brexit is cover for a different end

The vultures circle a wounded prime minister, who is attacked by the hordes of extremists in her party while beset by new inconvenient facts daily exposing the damage Brexit can do. Look, the British army is preparing for the worst: emergency troops are at the ready. Operation Temperer, which usually provides soldiers for terrorist attacks, is now ordered to make 10,000 soldiers available to keep order on the streets and in shops, and to distribute emergency medicines in case of a no-deal crash-out. [...]

What few realise is that we are living through a revolution that has been a long time brewing among Tory party entryists. Those clawing to dethrone Theresa May are of a different ilk, only just within a recognisable Tory penumbra. Infiltrators, bent on destroying from within the party that harbours them, inhabit another planet from Heath, Clarke or Heseltine – but nor are they Thatcher’s children, either. Leaving Europe is only a part of their revolutionary project, a means not an end. Because they are revolutionaries, the more dramatic the break and the wilder the chaos, the better. They are bent on the creative destruction of a stagnant old order, so as to plough up the ground for a fertile new radical right beginning. Tax-haven Singapore beckons. [...]

Their seminal work in 2012 was Britannia Unchained, written with other 2010 young turks, Liz Truss, Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel and Chris Skidmore. They belong to the much larger – 40 or so – Free Enterprise Group of MPs, sponsored by the Institute of Economic Affairs, which handles their media. (The IEA is under investigation by the Charity Commission after a Guardian/Greenpeace investigation into US cash for ministerial access and Brexit campaigning.) [...]

This cadre is so much more extreme than Thatcherism that they iconoclastically dismiss her era. “The last 30 years of public debate have been dominated by leftwing thinking,” says their book, which gained notoriety for its most famous line: “British workers are the worst idlers in the world” who “prefer a lie-in to hard work”. With that, they blamed low UK productivity on the workforce, not on a failure to invest. [...]

Raab says no deal would be a “manageable situation”. Yes, they would find it useful. Just as David Cameron and George Osborne used the cover of the great crash to roll out their state-shrinking agenda, so Raab and his Free Enterprise Group would use Brexit havoc to take a yet more radical axe to the state.

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