Reimagining Reservoirs: The opening of Walthamstow Wetlands
A year and a half ago a project not more than ¼ mile from my home in Seven Sisters, London, caught my attention. It was the repurposing of 10 privately owned water reservoirs into urban #wetlands, and so intrigued me that it became the topic of my Master’s dissertation. Having spent much of my life living in rural areas, with access to almost unlimited outdoor space, I tend to notice places that provide respite from the city’s manic pace. London is well known for being one of the greenest #cities in the world. In the year and a half that I’ve lived here, the continual discovery of such spaces has given me hope that cities can be more integrated into the natural world.
Housing without Debt
It is now more or less universally accepted that there is something fundamentally wrong with our housing economy. Not just the centralised industrial production models we use to produce housing: our dependence on a few large development companies to buy the land, beat their way through local community resistance, and build rows of poor quality, unsustainable mass-housing that fewer and fewer of us can afford. The Big Short is not about those industrial housing models. It’s about the economy behind them.