Tag: urban transformation

Space for the Departed: Bone Ash Apartments as an Alternative to Cemeteries in Urban China

xinyi wu November 13, 2025
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Many people in China have started buying residential apartments, not to live in, but to store the ashes of deceased family members. These are called bone ash apartments. Some people think it’s creepy and unlucky to be neighbors with them. Others say, “Honestly, I’d rather have dead neighbors than noisy ones.” So, I started asking, how did bone ash apartments become a real alternative to cemeteries in China? This isn’t just about space—it’s about how land, death, tradition, economy, and policy collide in today’s urban China (UN-Habitat 2020). (read more...)

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Urban Acupuncture Design Theory: Researching New Development Practices in South Africa

Laurin Baumgardt February 18, 2021

Sometimes it only takes a “spark,” a “simple, focused intervention,” a “single stroke of genius,” or “the single prick of a needle” to release the flows and create new energies. This is the defining assumption of “urban acupuncture,” an urban design theory that has become very popular among socially engaged architects and urban planners in recent years. Urban acupuncture borrows from traditional Chinese medicine to analogously think about, and also treat, the existing urban fabric as a living body with flows and blockages, wounds, and pain. (read more...)

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Technologies of Representation: Possibilities of Social Media in Tarlabaşı, Istanbul

Alize Arıcan February 6, 2020

“Every week somebody comes here to take photos of our laundry and put it up on the internet. Today, I took one and put it up right here. It’s not our laundry, but it’s a bear. This might be a dump, but this is my dump, and I care about what goes on the internet about it.” (read more...)

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