Photographer: Jan Kattein Architects | ArchDaily

Health, Habitat, and Civic Infrastructure: Designing the City as a National Park

Olivia Poston — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:30:00 +0000

Cities around the world share a common goal: to become healthier and greener, supported by civic infrastructure that restores ecosystems and strengthens public life. The question is how to reach this. Global climate targets, local building codes, and municipal standards increasingly guide designers and planners toward better choices. Still, many cities struggle to translate these frameworks into everyday, street-level comfort and long-term ecological protection. What happens if the city is no longer treated as a traditional city, but as a national park?

Cities Need Care, Not Perfection: Rethinking How We Build the Urban Future

Olivia Poston — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 07:30:00 +0000

What does optimism feel like in cities that can no longer rely on perfection as their ultimate ambition? Across the world, urban environments bear the weight of overlapping pressures: climate volatility, spatial inequality, political fragmentation, public distrust, and chronic infrastructural disinvestment. These realities render the idea of an ideal city increasingly detached from lived experience. Yet the hope for building better systems persists. While utopian visions may seem like an escape from the growing complexities of the modern world, the greater challenge for contemporary city-making is to confront those complexities rather than avoid them.

Ebury Edge Community Center / Jan Kattein Architects

Bianca Valentina Roșescu — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 06:00:00 +0000

Ebury Edge comprises temporary affordable workspaces, a café, and a community center to provide a continuous place for residents old and new to meet as the Ebury Bridge Estate is re-developed phase by phase. The Ebury Bridge Estate had been identified by Westminster City Council as urgently requiring improvement to homes and the external environment. Working closely with a representative steering group, the City Council first established a right of return for all residents before developing proposals for the redevelopment of the estate. Unusually, Westminster is committed to the delivery of new community facilities in advance of the principal scheme.