“Why do an equality lineup now? Because we should have done it ages ago.” It’s 2019 and we’ve all had enough. Frustrated with a lack of diversity and ‘male, pale, stale’ panels and lineups at events, one Spanish festival has declared a 50/50 gender ratio benchmark. They’re calling this ‘The New Normal’. We’re talking about Primavera Sound.

Read more

Something special is happening inside an old school made from recycled salvage from a theatre company, decommissioned bio labs and art freight containers. As London’s first incubator workspace for urban farming entrepreneurs and ‘agritech’ startups, the Green Lab is creating a vibrant city community for creative sustainable food innovators. Having previously co-founded Fab Lab London, Ande Gregson was

Read more

A microgreen-fingered hydroponic hero is proving that ‘zero km’ is possible – in London’s disused bomb shelters. With his groundbreaking subterranean farm Growing Underground, Richard Ballard demonstrates how plants don’t need sunlight and that urban agriculture can help tackle food scarcity. Located 100 feet (33 metres) under the streets of London in a disused World War II air raid shelter,

Read more

If we had asked former chief architect of Barcelona City Council Vicente Guallart what his favourite city in the world was in the 1990s, he would have said Barcelona. In the 2000s he preferred Colombia’s Medellín. Vicente uses the principles of global connectivity and local self-sufficiency to invent the city of the future and build it in the

Read more

Imagine if you could get a ‘city’ to agree to making the world more self-sufficient. A creative team of pioneers and makers is doing exactly that. They’ve created a set of ten principles as a sort of instruction manual to build a more sustainable and inhabitable new world. And they’re getting cities to agree to it. In fact, 28

Read more

In an era of rising environmental awareness, cleantech has become the fastest-growing technology sector in the world. And sunny California loves it. That’s why they buy more electric cars and do more recycling than any place else. So what is ‘cleantech’? At its simplest, it’s any technology that helps a more efficient use of natural resources. We travelled

Read more