How can we get more people to leave the comfort of their homes to spend time getting to know their communities and appreciating public urban spaces? Artist Eddy Kaiser and the Theatre Group Powerboat have an idea: give them a living room that’s just as cozy and inviting as their own. ‘Urban Living Room‘ is a blue-painted hangout space currently set up in Rotterdam.

Standing out against city settings in its shocking shade of blue, Urban Living Room offers a comfortable, convenient locale for spontaneous small-scale meetings. Moved around the city of Rotterdam, it has hosted school children, random passersby and free performances by local musicians.

Once its time in Rotterdam is up, Urban Living Room will be traveling to Istanbul and Hong Kong as an interactive exhibit of Dutch design. The furniture chosen for the installation is based on research into the archetypal living rooms in the Netherlands.

Kaiser previously collaborated with design office HUNK-design on the Flying Grass Carpet, a pop-up installation that turned large public plazas into greenery-filled parks. See more photos of Urban Living Room at Facebook. [Via Pop-Up City]

What is trash, really, but materials that certain people decide are no longer useful? Scraps of wood, broken furniture and other piece of so-called junk sitting in a dumpster might seem destined to rot in a landfill, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Dutch designers Rikkert Paauw and Jet van Zwieten of Foundation Projects not only transform that trash into useful building materials – they make the dumpsters themselves the basis of miniature bars and cafes.

The designers transport the dumpsters to urban locations and then fill them with materials that are either sourced from the streets or other dumpsters nearby, or donated by local residents. Using the dumpsters as foundations, they build quirky structures that become community meeting places.

The pair carried out the project at the Vienna Design Week in 2010, the Milan Public Design Festival in 2011 and in their hometown of Utrecht in April 2012, yielding entirely different results each time. One of those structures became a bar called Straatlokaal, which offered breakfast debates, music and speakers from various local districts. The story behind some of the donated materials, like those that came from a renovation or vacant land, was projected onto the buildings at night.

“People from all walks of life will find their way to the project. People that hang out on the streets, but also architects, residents that come to donate materials and people interested in design. One of Foundation’s main goals is to bring people together and inspire dialogue between persons from different backgrounds. Until now, that is exactly what has happened at all previous projects and that is why we will just carry on.”

This is just the latest example of innovative dumpster reuse. A project called TrashCam turned dumpsters into pinhole cameras that were used to capture urban scenes. ‘Skip Conversions’ by Oliver Bishop transformed them into swimming pools, skateboard ramps, gardens and public toilets.

What is urban life without a little excitement, spontaneity and strangeness? A popular article on unusually legal street art prompted some of our readers to inquire about organizing or attending flash mob events. The internet has, fortunately, made the organization of these urban events a whole lot easier. However, flash mobs aren’t just about gathering at a store to stare at a carpet.

Subway parties and subway installation art vary in terms of legality, but can add some color and interest to an otherwise uneventful ride. Of course, subway cars provide some interesting built-in features, such as poles for dancing, in addition to party favors brought on board. Some subway parties have themes, while others are simply named with the color or number of the train or line.

Believe it or not, a popular kind of spontaneous urban gathering is a pillow fight flash mob. These can have all kinds of interesting themes including Christmas, resulting in the Santa pillow-fighting squad seen above. Some of these affairs, such as a recent pillow fight on the streets of San Francisco, have even been caught on video.