In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

Across the globe, populations of older people are growing dramatically, and few plans are in place to properly care for them. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) says 8.5 percent of people worldwide are over 65, and that number will jump to nearly 17 percent by 2050. The need for supportive long-term housing and healthcare has never been more urgent, especially for those with dementia. But elder care is modernizing, and in many cases, that means doing away with the concept of the institutional nursing home.

IKEA is getting in on the game by partnering with construction company BoKlok to launch low cost flat-pack housing for people with dementia. The Swedish retailer has been working on these “SilviaBo” homes since 2015, designing them with a host of sensitive features. They’re meant to be arranged in small communities with gardens and clubhouses that encourage socializing and spending time outdoors.

Named after Sweden’s Queen Silvia, the homes are a modified take on BoKlok’s other affordable flat-pack units. They’ll feature kitchen appliances with old-fashioned knobs and buttons instead of digital controls, bright red shower railings, doors and other components that can easily be seen. There are no mirrors or dark-colored floors in the bathroom, which can confuse people with dementia. The company says these are just a few examples of the 50 slight changes made to the SilviaBo home.

“In March 2017, the first two SilviaBo homes began to be assembled – a quick timeframe made possible thanks to the focus and effort of everyone involved. It’s a process of assembly, as also key to the affordability of a BoKlok home is a highly efficient system of industrialized construction in which truck-sized housing modules – complete with finished interiors including flooring and even cabinets – are produced in a factory. They are then hauled to each site and lifted into place to form the houses.”

IKEA is reportedly ready to start putting the houses into use. A small pilot community with six apartments was trialled outside Stockholm, but residents haven’t moved in yet due to an ongoing permit dispute with neighbors. The houses will rent through BoKlok’s “Left to Live” payment model, which allows residents to pay what they can afford after taxes and living expenses.

How can we make housing more affordable, livable and sustainable in the face of climate change, rapid urbanization and other pressing issues? IKEA has some ideas. The Swedish retailer just unveiled its upcoming collaborations and projects at its annual event, Democratic Design Days, and they range from a new modular way of building entire cities to robotic furniture for small spaces.

The Urban Village Project

SPACE10, IKEA’s global research and design lab, worked with EFFEKT Architects to develop an urban housing concept rolling together a wide variety of sustainable and equitable approaches as well as emerging technologies. The Urban Village Project “rethinks how we design, build, finance and share our future homes, neighborhoods and cities,” focusing on flexible homes built entirely from sustainable cross-laminated timber – and that’s just the beginning.

“Our cities are facing some of the biggest challenges to date—from rapid urbanization to aging populations, from a climate emergency to increasing feelings of loneliness and anxiety in our urban environments. On top of that, we experience rising and unpredictable housing prices in cities all around the world and the prospects are bleak. We need to almost double our cities in just a few decades to house a rising urban population—which creates a strong link between how we choose to evolve our urban areas and the fate of humanity. Therefore, we need to rethink our built environment, starting now.”

Not only are these houses based on IKEA’s signature flat-pack, modular design ethos, so they can easily be customized for the needs of individual residents and families, they’re designed for disassembly, unlocking “a circular material loop” so that almost all building components and materials can be disassembled and replaced, reused and recycled during and after the lifecycle of the building. They’d be pre-fabricated, mass-produced and flat-packed to drive down costs, and crucially, IKEA introduces new ideas for democratic access inspired by community land trusts and co-operatives.

“The Urban Village Project seeks to make everyday life more affordable. The idea is to maximise the advantages of living in a community that can pool and share resources. First, we’d introduce a monthly rate for all your essentials: rent, electricity, water, heating, maintenance and shared facilities. Secondly, we’d unlock better deals on daily needs like food, media, insurance, transport and recreation through flexible add-on subscriptions. Thirdly, each month every resident would have the option of buying ‘shares’ of real estate—to access ownership progressively and cash in later as the property value increases.”

“The Urban Village Project would enable more people to become homeowners by creating a form of housing co-operative. With significantly lower monthly rents and more disposable income, this unique legal setup would allow residents to buy ‘shares’ in the property—when they want to and when they can. This would get rid of expensive down payments upfront alongside interest rates which limit first time buyers from entering the housing market. Over time, the property would be owned by the community, and residents would be able to cash in on the profits.”

But sustainable and equitable modes of living don’t stop at how the structures themselves are designed, built and purchased or rented. Access to community is an important component, with the subscription-based housing model providing multi-generational co-living to promote a sense of well-being. Since the homes are so customizable, they’re accessible, as well. As older people age out of their homes, they can move into more accessible units in the same village, remaining a part of their neighborhood. Residents share access to local food harvesting, renewable energy and composting, and can choose to partake in communal dinners, shared daycare, urban gardening, fitness and other activities together; flexible subscription services provide transportation, insurance, media and recreation too.

Products Made of Ocean Plastic & Manufacturing Waste

IKEA plans to introduce more recycled materials into its own products, as well. The upcoming Musselblomma collection, a collaboration with Spanish designer Inma Bermúdez, incorporates plastic collected by Spanish fishermen in the Mediterranean sea into a series of polyester fabrics in vivid colors and patterns. The series takes visual inspiration from the source of these materials; you’ll find abstracted fish shapes, soothing blue-greens and corals throughout the collection of bags, cushion covers and tablecloths.

As part of its new initiative called “Better Air Now,” IKEA is also transforming a common manufacturing byproduct into tactile, organic woven items. Förändring (which means “change” in Swedish) is a collection of rugs, bowls, lampshades and baskets made with rice straws, a harvesting residue that’s commonly burned for disposal, contributing to air pollution and smog. Coming in deep shades of blue and black, these items are expected to be released by the end of the year.

Robotic Small Space Solutions

Since they’re already known for expertly packing a ton of function into tiny spaces, it was probably only a matter of time before IKEA got in on some robotic transforming furniture items. The brand is collaborating with MIT-based startup Ori Living to offer “Rognan,” an all-in-one room solution offering a trundle bed, movable walls, a sofa, storage and simple touch-screen operation so you can transform a living room into a bedroom within seconds with virtually no effort. Set to launch in Hong Kong and Japan in 2020, Rognan will undoubtedly be anxiously awaited by everyone who’s ever dreamed of enjoying this kind of functionality in their own spaces. Hopefully it won’t be long before it’s available everywhere else, too.

IKEA furniture can get your interior design most of the way to where you want it, but another Scandinavian company has enlisted three world-renowned architecture firms to help get you the rest of the way to a high-end design.

Reform enlisted architects from Bjarke Ingels Group, Henning Larsen Architects, and Norm Architects to create a series of finishing touches for existing IKEA products, from customized handles to stylized surfaces. Tapping into the popularity of Nordic design as well as the thriving industry of IKEA hackers, Reform aims to make luxury design affordable.

The company specializes in kitchens, seeing them as oft-overlooked spaces of opportunity for design improvements, but they also are working on mods for living rooms, bathrooms and wardrobes. Here are the three core designs, with notes on inspiration and materials from their designers:

“The kitchen is simple, but exclusive in its timeless design. Carrying no handles, it presents a table top covering the entire surface and adding to it an exquisite finish – like the best design furniture. The materials, which have seldom been used in kitchens, give away a clean but raw expression. They come in three different variants: Fiber-concrete, bronzed tombac, and sawn and smoked oak.”

“For a thoroughly personalised kitchen you can stand on the shoulders of Norm Architects and add your own mix of materials creating a the visual expression of your liking. All the natural materials have been selected for their durability and reaction to wear. That is, the kitchen does not grow ugly. On the contrary it will patinate beautifully, which the bronzed tombac is a fine example of. Slowly it will shine golden in those areas of continuous wear.”

“Location, location, location” might be the mantra of the real estate industry, but that mindset could change radically with the advent of autonomous vehicles. It may take a while, but once driverless cars are adopted by consumers on a wide scale, everything from land usage to property values could shift as parking space is freed up and workers become more mobile. Some experts say we could see fleets of driverless cars on the roads by 2022, others predict that it’ll be closer to 2030, but either way, they’re almost certainly coming.

Autonomous electric vehicles are expected to reduce travel costs, commute time and congestion while boosting safety, and experts believe they’ll also free up millions of parking spaces and allow people to live longer distances from their workplaces. Automobile manufacturers are reflecting these expectations with designs that incorporate zero-emissions electric cars right into the home or double as mobile spaces for working, dining, shopping or even as a new form of housing on wheels.

Autonomous Cars as Mobile Living Spaces

The most obvious and immediate change that commuters would enjoy as driverless cars become the norm could be the freedom to do whatever we want during our travel time instead of driving. That could include getting ready for work, eating meals, working on projects or taking a nap, activities that can be difficult (or impolite) to do on public transit. The spaces remain private – a consideration that’s often cited as a primary motivation to drive instead of taking the bus or train – and even solo commuters could add hours back to their day that they’d normally spend cursing at traffic.

Concepts like Renault’s new EZ-ULTIMO, the latest in a trilogy of concept cars “illustrating the future of shared mobility,” act like first class mobile lounges. The EZ-ULTIMO cabin is designed to make passengers feel like they’re in a millionaire’s living room. The brand’s SYMBIOZ car and residence combo takes that a step further by making the car a room within a room, entering the home to provide additional seating and make the transition between home and travel as seamless as possible.

Hyundai’s Mobility Vision concept may not be quite as self-consciously highbrow as Renault’s, but it employs a similar idea, blurring the line between architecture and automobile in a whole new way. A driverless car powered by a hydrogen fuel cell to eliminate dangerous emissions plugs into the house once travel is complete, with a single large door opening its cabin up to the living room. The driver’s seat slides right out into the living space, so you don’t even have to stop what you’re doing when you arrive or depart.

Volvo’s 360c fully autonomous vehicle aims to make us as comfortable as possible while traveling, potentially eliminating the need to take short flights (which could help significantly reduce greenhouse gases, by the way.) All-electric and covered with a glass dome, the car acts like a mobile bedroom with seats that can be converted into a bed.

Volvo points out that while it believes many people will still want to own personal vehicles, cars like the 360c could be integrated into sharing services, too. In fact, none of these concepts necessarily have to be accessible for ownership. The beauty of autonomous cars is that we could summon them whenever we want them and send them away when we don’t. But it’s also not hard to imagine people choosing to purchase an autonomous vehicle just to sleep in, especially if they’re on the go a lot.

Offices, Restaurants and Shops On Wheels

Honda’s IeMobi, IDEO’s Work On Wheels and a new series of concept spaces by IKEA’s “future living lab,” SPACE10, abandon all attempts to make autonomous vehicles sexy in favor of more space. That makes them more functional as extra “rooms” you can still use once you’re at home, or to serve a greater number of people. Honda’s boxy concept is envisioned as “ a guest room to invite friends or a mobile pantry for weekend shopping,” while the Work On Wheels pod is a mobile office for your entire team.

The SPACE10 concepts go beyond commuting to present autonomous vehicles as unstaffed, driverless mobile services that can go virtually anywhere, from mobile cafes and hotel pods to farm stands and medical clinics that venture into underserved areas. The design team notes that autonomous cars won’t just change how we get to and from various destinations, but also how we interact with cities.

“Transportation difficulties are one of the three major barriers curbing access to healthcare, especially for low-income communities,” says SPACE10. “It’s known as the ‘last mile’ problem: health solutions tend to make it as far as medical outposts – but won’t reach end users. Healthcare on wheels solves ‘the last mile’ problem by getting medical professionals to visit people in need, not the other way around.”

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