Cities are so deeply rooted in the history of mankind that we hardly ask ourselves why we live in them or what the reason is for us to group together in urban settlements. Ciro Pirondi, Brazilian architect, points out that we live in cities because we like to have someone to talk to, while Paulo Mendes da Rocha classifies the city as “the supreme work of architecture.” The city is the world that man builds for himself. These are immense collective constructions, palimpsests, and collages of stories, achievements, and losses.

Earth has been mostly urban since 2007. By 2050, the percentage of people living in cities should reach 70%. In the coming years, megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants are expected to multiply, mainly in Asia and Africa, and often in still-developing countries. Such a projection raises questions about sustainability and climate change that cities inevitably catalyze. It also raises questions about how cities can provide an adequate quality of life for its inhabitants, and how they can prosper and develop in contexts that are often not ideal. How can urban spaces benefit their population and vice versa? While old centers will require transformations and updates, city peripheries will require new homes and public facilities, in addition to adequate infrastructure. How can this process help urban centers become more intelligent, using the technology already available to benefit their inhabitants in a creative and efficient way?

Urban acupuncture is a design tactic promoting urban regeneration at a local level, supporting the idea that interventions in public space don’t need to be ample and expensive to have a transformative impact. An alternative to conventional development processes, urban acupuncture represents an adaptable framework for urban renewal, where highly focused and targeted initiatives help regenerate neglected spaces, incrementally deploy urban strategies, or consolidate the social infrastructure of a city. 

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Density has long been an essential consideration for architects and urban planners, yet its importance has only increased as the world’s urban population skyrockets and cities become denser and denser. For much of the history of urban planning, this term has been plagued with negative associations: overcrowding, poverty, lack of safety, and so-called ‘slums.’ The garden city movement, initiated by Ebenezer Howard in 1898, sought to remedy these ills by advocating for greenbelts and anti-density planning. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City is one of the most well-known urban plans building from these ideals. Yet in the 1960’s, sociologist Jane Jacobs famously overturned these long influential urban planning concepts: she pointed out that density of buildings was not identical to overcrowding of people; suggested that some highly dense urban areas, like her neighborhood in Greenwich Village, were safer and more attractive than nearby garden city projects; and highlighted how America’s conception of ‘slums’ were often rooted in anti-immigrant and anti-Black ideologies. Density is not inherently bad, she suggested, but it has to be done well. Today, we continue to grapple with the question of how to design for our increasingly dense cities – how do we keep them open, but simultaneously private? Free, but controlled when necessary? In particular, how do we keep them safe – both from crime and, in the age of COVID-19, disease?

Recycling has long been an entry point into sustainable design. It's personal, achieved at a micro scale where individuals can reduce waste and preserve energy. But between resource shortages, environmental habitat loss and the global climate crisis, there has been a shift in daily practices towards more circular thinking. Increasingly, the need to sustain life is part of a continuous process of production, resorption, and recycling where waste becomes the input for production.

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