All articles by barbara speed
barbara speed
What makes a successful Olympic legacy?
For as long as the Olympics have been running, eager host cities have expected them to do far more than…
A designer is creating "smell maps" of cities
When you think of the cities you’ve visited, you probably recall the skyline, the architecture or the quirky details of…
High-rise cemeteries are now a thing
Not to be morbid about it, but there are currently around 100 billion dead people on this planet. In our…
Cairo’s traffic problems are costing Egypt around 4 per cent of its GDP
Last year, a documentary about Cairo won the prize for best Arab documentary at the Abu Dhabi film festival. It…
A Detroit charity is giving writers free houses to improve city life
Things in Detroit haven’t been going so well lately. The city’s bankrupt. The water company’s shut off supplies to thousands…
What’s Hong Kong protesting about?
For days now, the world’s media has been plastered with images of Hong Kong residents wielding umbrellas in a desperate…
Hong Kong’s low birth rate blamed on women’s “sexual problems”
In a recent study, Bloomberg found that Hong Kong will be the world’s most crowded city by 2025. So far,…
Guess where the future's most crowded cities will be
Unless you’ve been living in a hole for the past five years, you’ll probably know that the world’s cities are…
Whatever happened to Abu Dhabi’s carbon neutral city?
Around 10 miles from downtown Abu Dhabi, something is very slowly rising from the desert. Masdar City, designed by British…
New transparent solar panels could fit invisibly over windows and phone screens
Much as they’d hate to admit it, most people are far more likely to make eco-friendly life changes if they…