Olivia Poston is a designer, researcher, writer, and educator based in Boston, Massachusetts. Her design practice studies environmental narratives of resource security and landscape urbanism by employing data visualizations and cartographies to reveal the spatial relationships between urbanism, labor, landscape, and minerals. Her research on the energy transition, climate infrastructure, and resource extraction has received generous support from the Norman Foster Foundation, the Penny White Project Grant, the Climate Solutions Living Lab, and the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research. Olivia holds a Masters of Design Studies at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design within the Ecologies domain and a Bachelors of Architecture from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
As cities around the world brace for extreme temperatures and waves of unrelenting heat, urban greening is one of the best solutions for leaders to combat this reality. The benefits of planting trees for physical health, mental well-being, and thermal relief are well documented, and a mature canopy can transform a space by several degrees on a hot day. Trees cool the air through evapotranspiration, filter pollutants and absorb stormwater, and enhance biodiversity in urban spaces.
Urban planning is often confused with adjacent disciplines: urban design, environmental policy, civic strategy, local politics, or data analytics. Moreover, the overlap in training and responsibilities between planning and urban practices makes the field difficult to define clearly. In practice, it is often easier to recognize the consequences of bad planning than to articulate the outcomes of good planning. When planning is working well for residents, it should disappear altogether. It should remove friction from daily life so that people would not think to credit a discipline at all. At its core, urban planning is the relationship people have with their environments, and when that relationship is functioning, the mechanics of housing, transportation, affordability, access, and inclusion should feel ordinary and expected.
This has not always been the lived experiences of planning practices, and in many places, it still is not. Urban planning has historically served as an instrument of division, used to segregate, exclude, and erase communities under the language of progress and order. Zoning maps, infrastructure investment, and land-use decisions are expressions of who holds power and that history is embedded in the boundaries that continue to organize cities around the world. It is embedded socially, as well as physically, in the assumption that participation in planning requires expertise or formal training that most residents lack.
Cities are increasingly designed to mitigate risk, and by doing so, need to collect data on climate, infrastructure, biodiversity, and social fragmentation so that the language of resilience becomes a fixture of planning. Yet the underlying conditions that produce polarization, civic disengagement, and ecological breakdown often remain unquestioned. The tools that dominate urban practice tend to address only one register of human experience, while the emotional and imaginative dimensions of transformation are not treated as reliable solutions.
Philosopher Felix Guattari proposed that sustained ecological transformation depends on simultaneous attention to three distinct ecologies: the ecology of the mind, the ecology of society, and the ecology of the environment. Mainstream environmental politics tends to concentrate on one or two of the three, flattening a complex condition into a defined problem with a clear answer. Ancient rituals remind us that transformation depends on practices that simultaneously engage the body, the community, and the environment.
ReGreeneration is a Horizon Europe-awarded project working across nine cities to advance urban regeneration through nature-based solutions, participatory governance, and integrated approaches to climate resilience and social equity. The nine cities in the project portfolio span a range of urban typologies, scales, and planning traditions, forming a living laboratory for rethinking sustainable urban transformation in practice. Each city brings distinct challenges and ambitions to the collaboration, and this series of articles explores what each city is doing and what the broader design community can learn from it.
For centuries, chickens have lived alongside people in settlements of every scale, from rural farms and village compounds to dense urban neighborhoods. Across much of the world, keeping a flock has been part of everyday life, providing eggs and meat to residents, or pest control for the surrounding agricultural land. The structures built to house chickens varied according to local materials, climate, and cultural practices, yet they shared a common purpose: to create a space where chickens and humans could coexist. The chicken coop is not a new architectural typology nor a contemporary response to urban living. Instead, it is a form that has continually adapted to changing social, environmental, and spatial conditions.
Environmental justice confronts a simple but uncomfortable truth: the benefits and burdens of the environment are not shared equally. Marginalized communities bear a disproportionate share of polluted air, unsafe water, toxic land uses, extreme heat, and the accelerating risks of climate change in cities around the world. These are the consequential products of decades of policy decisions, investment patterns, exclusionary planning practices, and planning choices that have consistently favored certain communities over others.
In cities and landscapes alike, these injustices are written into the physical fabric of places, even revealing extreme differences in environmental conditions between neighborhoods and districts. Dense neighborhoods with little tree canopy, for example, absorb and hold heat, exposing residents to higher rates of heat-related illness. Highways, industrial corridors, ports, and waste facilities cluster near low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, shaping conditions of health, air and soil quality, and long-term safety.
For centuries, architecture has been defined by unmoving permanence. A building is assumed to be fixed, its walls and foundation immobile in space. A growing number of architects are now challenging this assumption by incorporating movement into the very fabric and tectonic structures of buildings.
When roofs hinge, walls slide, and entire structures respond to their occupants, something remarkable happens: the architectural spaces become an active component of daily rituals. These moments of opening, closing, shifting, and translating spaces ground buildings in the present moment and demand active engagement from users. The architecture becomes less of an object or a monument and more of a choreography of participation.
Emerging in port cities and working-class neighborhoods throughout the nineteenth century, the shotgun house became a durable response to density, climate, and constrained urban parcels, becoming one of the defining domestic forms of the Southern United States. Its narrow footprint, sequential plan, and deeply shaded porches produced a spatial logic that was economical and environmentally responsive before either term became central to architectural discourse. From New Orleans and Mobile to Houston and Louisville, shotgun houses formed the physical fabric of neighborhoods shaped by migration, labor, community, and cultural life. Though often dismissed as ordinary, vernacular construction, the housing typology has long embodied sophisticated ideas about climate adaptation, social adjacency, and incremental urban growth, making it one of the most influential domestic forms in the history of the American city.
The dogtrot house emerged across the South of the United States during the late nineteenth century as a direct response to humid climates, material availability, and patterns of rural habitation. Found throughout the Appalachian Mountains, coastal Carolinas, and lowlands of Louisiana, the dogtrot house appeared in numerous regional variations, yet its fundamental spatial logic remained remarkably consistent. Two enclosed living masses are separated by an open central passage and unified beneath a continuous roof, creating a dwelling that is simultaneously economical and responsive to long, hot summers. Although architectural historians continue to debate the precise geographic origins of the dogtrot, the typology represents a broader vernacular intelligence that emerged through the convergence of environmental necessity, local construction practices, and rural living.
The relationship between constraint and design excellence is well established in architectural theory, yet often remains underexplored in discussions of site-specific practices. When architects encounter extreme topography, they face a fundamental choice: transform the landscape to accommodate the building, or modify the building to fit the landscape. The first approach is straightforward and requires the builder to cut, fill, terrace, and build on level ground. This choice, however, carries cascading consequences as any amount of earth moved may destabilize slopes, disrupt drainage, and fracture ecosystems. A growing body of innovative architectural work demonstrates an alternative to earth-moving and retaining walls.
In the high desert of the San Rafael Valley, a few miles from the United States-Mexico border in Lochiel, Arizona, an adobe schoolhouse has stood for more than a century. Built before 1905, before Arizona was an incorporated state, the schoolhouse served generations of Mexican American students from Arizona and Sonora, cultivating shared cultural experiences, stories, and relationships that transcend physical and political boundaries. Over decades of education and shared histories, it became a place where language and narrative moved freely, even as geopolitical tensions continued to rise along the border. Today, it is one of the last remaining one-room adobe schoolhouses in the United States.
Adobe is among the oldest building technologies in the American Southwest, and among the most demanding to steward. In desert climates, earthen walls face intense weathering from temperature extremes, cracking due to seasonal shifts, and accelerated decay after storm events. These vulnerabilities require sustained and skilled maintenance over many seasons and compounding decades. After years of encroaching abandonment and structural threats, a twelve-year restoration effort by local community members who understood this building as critical cultural infrastructure brought the schoolhouse back from the edge of demolition. That the community chose to undertake this effort, given everything Adobe construction demands of those who care for it, is a statement about what the loss of this building would have cost. The result is a structure that now stands as a monument to Mexican American heritage and a living archive of rural border education.
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
The modern sustainability project is built on the promise that evolving technologies can reconcile urban and economic growth with ecological responsibility. By the metrics developed by the built environment professions and the policies adopted by governments, progress is tangible and accelerating: buildings consume less energy per square foot than they did a generation ago, vehicles emit fewer pollutants per mile, and urban infrastructure is more integrated and measurably cleaner in many cities. And yet total resource consumption continues to rise. Sustainability, as currently practiced across the built environment professions, has become a strategy for optimizing consumption rather than reducing it. Until the profession is willing to question the scale and structure of demand rather than the efficiency with which that demand is met, its most celebrated achievements will continue to fall short of the problem they claim to address.
The ReGreeneration project, a Horizon Europe project led by Inetum and supported by C40 Cities, ARUP, Placemaking Europe, and several others, operates as an active collaboration with local governments, private companies, academia, and civil society organizations at the intersection of urban regeneration, green public spaces, and neighborhood-scale design. Its premise addresses how European cities are built and maintained and how they experience a changing climate, arguing that cities must fundamentally change to remain livable under accelerating climate pressures.
Architects carefully calibrate their relationship to the earth, adjusting foundations to soil, groundwater, climate, risk, and culture. Driven timber piles, rammed-earth platforms, and poured concrete slabs are each a response to a specific set of ground conditions, and each shapes the architecture that rises from it. The way a building meets the earth determines its durability and its limits because foundations are among the most consequential design choices an architect makes.
The city of Rotterdam sits approximately one meter below sea level, an organizing condition that shapes daily life in the Netherlands' second-largest city and is a growing preoccupation amid unstable coastal conditions. The city occupies the delta of the Rhine and Maas rivers, a landscape that was never naturally dry but has been kept functional through centuries of hydraulic intervention. The water boards in this region are among the oldest democratic institutions in the world, created in the thirteenth century to manage shared water drainage and still operating today as elected bodies with technical capacity. As sea levels rise and rainfall across Northern Europe grows less predictable and more extreme, Rotterdam faces a significantly increased risk of coastal storm surges and urban flooding driven by overwhelmed drainage infrastructure.
Pilgrimage is one of the oldest and most persistent cultural practices, a spatial expression of humanity's search for meaning that has taken form across geographies and religions. While traditionally tied to formal belief systems, its definition has expanded in recent decades, reflecting new understandings of what is sacred and where meaning can be found. This shift reveals something fundamental: the act of moving through space remains central to how people construct meaningful experience. Yet most built environments constructed today are designed to be approached at speed from roads, transit corridors, airports, and optimized urban cores. The Camino de Santiago stands as a sustained counterargument to this condition. It is a piece of distributed architecture, refined over centuries, that remains a sophisticated example of design organized around the moving human body.
In 2023, ArchDaily's editor-in-chief sat down with Tarek Qaddumi, Executive Director of the Line Design at NEOM, at the closing of the Line Exhibition in Riyadh. Qaddumi described a layered, three-dimensional city organized around the idea of a "five-minute sphere" of access: walkable communities stacked vertically, connected by high-speed rail, freed from cars and conventional street infrastructure, and designed to coexist symbiotically with the surrounding natural landscape. It was a compelling vision, and in the context of the moment, it was simultaneously credible and appealing. For architects and urban thinkers grappling with the failures of twentieth-century city-building, the ideas articulated were worth engaging and planning.
San Francisco is a city that has always remade itself under pressure. Its Victorian streetscapes have survived seismic retrofits and glass towers, its neighborhoods defined as much by change as by its resistance to change. But no force in the city's history has reshaped the built environment as completely, or as quickly, as the technology economy. What began in the postwar sprawl of Silicon Valley migrated north and inscribed its logic onto the skyline and the lives of residents. The result of this logic is an architectural culture of considerable technical refinement and refined material palettes, yet one that remains largely indifferent to the existing population.
The cost of indifference is measurable and mounting. San Francisco must accommodate more than 82,000 additional housing units by 2031 under California's Regional Housing Needs Allocation framework, in a city where median rent already ranks among the highest of any American metropolitan area. Teachers, healthcare workers, and service employees are actively displaced by a real estate market calibrated to a single sector's income levels rather than the city's largest workforce.
Every city contains two transportation systems. One is the visible network of roads, rail lines, sidewalks, and bus routes mapped in planning documents. The other is the invisible geography of privilege and exclusion embedded within it: the neighborhoods that received highways instead of parks, the communities whose bus routes were cut, the sidewalks that abruptly end at the edge of a district. For many years, built-environment professionals have treated infrastructure as a technical challenge. Mobility justice insists it is, fundamentally, a political one.
