Ricky Schodl

One sunny afternoon in June, Clara Rogowski stood at the base of a 16-storey apartment block on the outskirts of Leipzig. As she pointed her iPhone upwards, her screen framed a familiar motif. Rough washed-concrete panels divided the near wall into a grid that stretched to a sharp point against a pale cloud-wisped sky. “As an East German person, you sort of have that in your identity,” she said. “We all know these GDR blocks.”

“When the project came up, I knew we had to take it,” says Professor Jo-Anne Bichard about Our Future Foyle. The urban intervention aims to redesign the river area in Derry, Northern Ireland. In the city with the highest suidice rate in the UK, the Foyle and its namesake bridge are notorious spots for people taking their own lives. The Northern Ireland Public Health Agency (PHA) commissioned a team of designers to revitalise the area, and prevent cases of suicide.

In the huge Library of Gender Studies—a feminist non-profit organisation in Prague—Alexandra Doleželová struggled to find any data on women’s poverty in her home country of the Czech Republic. After sharing her thoughts with friends and fellow activists, they decided to take the matter into their own hands. They would carry out their own research, starting by visiting emergency homeless shelters in the Czech capital.

Buildings keep us warm, allow us to gather, and are often sites of idea- generation. They are places of residence, comfort and safety. But they come at a huge environmental cost. The construction industry accounts for 38% of global energy-related CO2 emissions—11% of which results from producing brand-new materials such as steel, cement and glass, according to the Global Alliance of Building and Construction.