If you’re old enough to remember making quarter calls on pay phones, you might also be old enough to recall an edgier, grittier, graffiti-covered New York City, when the streets were lined with mom and pop shops and punk legends vomited on the sidewalk outside CBGB. Whether you mourn those days or celebrate the city’s evolution, slick corporate facades and general gentrification have swept most of that away, but somehow, the fossil-like remains of half-functional phone booths still stand on many corners. Soon, that will change, too.

In an age in which just about everybody has a cell phone and people under 25 barely even know what a landline is, the need for these booths has vastly diminished, and they tend to just take up valuable sidewalk space. Soon, most of them will be replaced with something the city could actually use: a system of free, super-fast wi-fi hubs via a project called LinkNYC. These hubs transmit ‘gigabit wi-fi,’ which is up to 100 times faster than average public wi-fi and mobile LTE networks.

In addition to offering wi-fi to anyone nearby equipped with their own device, the kiosks will feature built-in tablets that enable web browsing, maps, directions and access to city services like transit. Lest you worry that marginalized people who can’t afford gadgets won’t be able to make calls, the kiosks also offer free phone calls to anywhere in the U.S. using either the Vonage app on the tablet or the tactile keypad and microphone. You can plug in your own headphones for privacy, and there’s a dedicated red 911 button for emergencies. Oh, yeah: you can charge your gadgets here, too.

The streamlined design of the hubs takes up less public space, and illuminated ads on the sides fund the whole shebang. The city is in the process of replacing over 7,500 pay phones across five boroughs with the kiosks. LinkNYC is currently in beta phase, with trial kiosks going up around the city and at least 500 more set to be installed by summer 2016.

top image via: runs with scissors/Flickr Creative Commons

Dispose of your empty plastic bottle in this little sidewalk kiosk, and it’ll dispense enough food to feed a stray cat or dog. Aiming to help both the environment and homeless animals, the vending machine by Turkish company Pugedon operates at no cost to the city since the value of the plastic pays for the food.

Referred to by the company as ‘ecological life support,’ the vending machine is an answer to a pressing problem in Istanbul: around 150,000 stray cats and dogs. Anyone passing by with a little bottled water can also choose to empty the rest of their water into the machine for the animals.

These animals generally rely on the kindness of local residents to survive, and while some love having them around, others believe they’re dangerous and a source of disease. The locals who host Facebook campaigns to gather supplies to care for the animals are countered by attempts to poison them.

While this vending machine isn’t an answer to the problem of homeless animals, it does offer an interesting compromise to care for them without putting a burden on Istanbul residents or the city.

If you could have a vending machine spit out a small object in any shape you could dream up, what would it be? The DreamVendor, an interactive 3D printing station for Virginia Tech students, is envisioned as “a vending machine with an infinite inventory” that’s only limited by the imaginations of those who put it to work.

Created to enable students to quickly fabricate prototypes for academic and personal design projects, the machine reads CAD files from the user’s SD card, prints the three-dimensional part desired, and dispenses it into a bin when it’s done. The prototype machine is located on the Virginia Tech campus, but soon, new DreamVendors could pop up in retail centers for use by the general public.

Anyone who walks up to a DreamVendor kiosk – located inside a store, likely beside photo booths and soda machines – can choose to either load their own CAD designs into the system, or choose a pre-designed item to print. Plans are still in the developmental stage, but production is expected to begin next year.

3D printing pop-up shops have already begun to appear around the world, from a Baltimore studio that will help you create personalized products to a Japanese cafe that will scan your face and turn it into an edible chocolate treat.