In Lima, Peru, harvesting water from air became possible by repurposing an existing billboard. In the heart of Lima, Peru, a stark paradox emerges. Despite being the second driest city globally, right after Cairo, Lima is nestled within Peru’s coastal desert, making the availability of clean drinking water a significant challenge. A majority of its inhabitants are forced to depend on small wells, which unfortunately are often tainted and far from ideal. However, an intriguing fact is that the air hovering above Lima boasts a humidity level of 98 percent. This presents a unique opportunity to h ..read more

Waste to Energy Technologies: An Overview The rapid urbanization and population growth of the 21st century have generated a staggering amount of waste, posing a significant challenge to cities worldwide. Repurposing the City isn’t only about finding new use for the structures of the city, but all urban resources. Recent advancements in waste to energy (WtE) technologies have offered a promising solution for repurposing waste into energy, providing a sustainable and efficient means of managing waste while also generating valuable energy.  Waste to Energy (WtE) technologies involve the conv ..read more

A note of appreciation for an act of reuse that transforms a Stockholm public space. Equality is a difficult notion for cities. Perfect in concept, imperfect in delivery. Before boarding a plane for a talk in Sweden, I received an email asking me to submit an image that represented urban equality to be projected during a panel discussion on the topic. There are only two people who know the struggle of choosing such a singular image for such a complex concept: myself, and the person sitting next to me in seat 3C who mistook my laptop for his inflight entertainment display. I began thinking abou ..read more

Could the Future of Industry be Source Material for Adaptive Reuse? As industrial operations move away from dense and expensive urban cores, existing industrial buildings may offer a resourceful future of industry by repurposing their chimneys as building blocks for skyscrapers. Evolo’s Editor’s Choice for their 2021 Skyscraper competition went to the “Rebirth of Chimney” concept by China’s Jiahui Yao and Peng Zhang. As the duo states in their proposal for reusing chimneys in the future of industry: Nowadays, many big cities are facing economic transformation. Cities that once relied on indu ..read more

San Francisco’s BART transportation agency has released eight ideas for old subway cars that were the winning proposals to repurpose retired trains from the fleet. BART has been working on an ambitious plan to create a “Fleet of the Future” for the Bay Area. Which begs the question – what will become of the “Fleet of the Past?” “These cars are iconic to the Bay Area and to the people that not only live in the Bay Area now, but grew up riding these BART cars,” said BART Manager of Special Projects Brian Tsukamoto. “We’d like to see them given a new life. We’d like to see them repurposed and hav ..read more

Design With the City, Not For It originally appeared on Architizer.com. Seasoned computer gamers know the power of “unlock codes”—secret keystrokes or controller movements that access hidden dimensions and increased capabilities. Well, cities have their own unlock codes, too, and resourceful planners and designers have begun discovering them. Whether it’s repurposing a billboard to act as a humidity collection system for clean drinking water in Lima, Peru, or integrating Wi-Fi capabilities into Madrid’s paving stones with the iPavement initiative, cities are increasingly expanding the capabili ..read more

Urban Mining and Harvesting City Resources Can Create a Sustainable, Circular Economy 50 Ways to Mine the City is an exploration of ways in which the city’s outputs, byproducts, and under-utilized assets can be recovered, reimagined, and used in new ways by mining the city. It reveals how innovators are transforming the function of the city from a consumer of resources to a generator of them. Featuring diverse projects from around the world researched and curated by Scott Burnham, the book creates a global narrative of how the circular economy, urban mining, and resource recovery are coming ..read more

London firm Boano Prišmontas developed a modular structure for a project that repurposed railway arches and can be used in other marginal spaces in the city to create temporary affordable workspaces. The project is a create a kit of parts that can be assembled and employed in any underused or disused urban space to quickly provide affordable workspace for local businesses and start-ups. Behind the Blue Doors: Repurposed Railway Arches Become Affordable Workspaces It is the winning entry of the “Arches Challenge Competition”, launched In 2017 by Meanwhile Space and supported by Lambeth Cou ..read more

Recovering energy from infrastructure has long been an area of opportunity that has only recently gained wide attention. One of the early proponents of recovering energy from the daily functions of the city is Oregon’s InPipe Energy. Reprogramming the City followers will know we’ve written about them before, and feature them in our book. InPipe deserves some more attention now, having just launched their new In-PRV (pressure recovery valve) as an integral piece of infrastructure to generate power for the city of Hillsboro, Oregon. The In-PRV leverages what was once an incredibly inefficient pi ..read more

When the going got tough for live entertainment, parking garage performances became a way to create and connect. Social distancing requirements due to Covid-19 has rattled everyone’s lives and livelihoods. Of the many industries that have faced immense struggles during this time, live entertainment has been one of the hardest hit. Yet performers and performance companies are used to reinvention and innovation during tough times. Staying active during the pandemic required them to dig deep, and when they did, they found that parking garages were ripe for reuse as spaces for performance, rehears ..read more