The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents an exhibition (now in Chicago) with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.

The 99 actions featured include projects related to the production of food and possibilities of urban agriculture; the planning and creation of public spaces to strengthen community interactions; the recycling of abandoned buildings for new purposes; the use of the urban fabric as a terrain for play such as soccer, climbing, skateboarding, or parkour; the alternate use of roads for walking, or rail lines as park space; the design of clothing to circumvent urban barriers against resting on benches or sliding on railings; among others.

Here are some of the projects.

Ping-Pong Connects Neighbours (© Droog Design - Photo by Misha de Ridder) The Table Tennis Fence subverts the fence as a dividing element. A built-in ping pong table can be opened for neighbours to play with each other, transforming the fence into a meeting place. Share Fence is a related project with cut-outs in the shape of gardening tools like trowels and a watering can. Neighbours can hang tools to be shared in fence holes where they are accessible from both sides. Droog Design was founded in Amsterdam in 1993 by Bakker and Renny Ramakers. NEXT Architects was founded by four graduates from the Delft University of Technology.

Sheep and Lambs Eat City Parks (©Daniele Hosmer Zambelli)

The city of Turin saved 30,000 euros by using sheep to mow lawns at three public parks. In Pasture in the City, cows were also used during the experimental first year, but because they produced too much manure they have not returned. Traffic is diverted for the herd of sheep to enter the city. After the animals are rotated through fenced-off parks for two months, they return to the Alps for the remainder of the summer. The sheep aerate and fertilize their temporary pastures.

Reclaim Vacant Lot with What City’s Got (© Recetas Urbanas)

A proposal made to the city of Seville for legislation to assist in the temporary transformation of public and private solares – vacant lots walled off for security – into public spaces for at least six months. Wall rubble is incorporated into the design, and elements of car and pedestrian barriers are used to construct benches, see-saws, swings, and bike racks with readily available plastic materials like concrete. Instruction sheets were produced to allow residents to construct their own furniture. The project is designed to minimize material movement, cost, and other barriers to change. Santiago Cirugeda is an architect based in Seville who has proposed semi-legal strategies for housing and urban renovation under the name Recetas Urbanas, or “urban prescriptions,” since 1996. He inhabits gaps between laws, exploiting overlap and oversight to practice autonomous architecture.

Outlaw Gardeners Beautify City (© Richard Reynolds)

Richard Reynolds, or Richard 001, as he is known in the Guerillagardening.org organization, descends on traffic islands, forgotten parks, public gardens, and roadway edges with troops around the world; he transforms ignored spaces into beautiful gardens. Other troops focus on productive planting, encouraging vegetable and fruit farming in the city.
Although Richard 001’s little war against mundane landscaping began in 2004 when he became fed up with the sorry condition of the yard in front of his apartment building, the guerrilla gardening movement can be traced back to at least the 1970s, when artists like Liz Christy and Gordon Matta-Clark used the term to describe illegal, and often nocturnal, horticulture missions.

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On August 28 2009 Danish Minister of Culture Carina Christensen presented the Time to design – new talent award 2009 at the National Workshops for Arts and Crafts.

Corian PING PONG table, design by Hunn Wai - Photo credit: Daniel Peh

The jury selected two talented young designers: Hunn Wai and Francesca Lanzavecchia, as winners of the talent award from more than 35 different countries all over the world.

Corian 'PING PONG table' design by Hunn Wai - Photo credit: Daniel Peh

The two will meet in Scandinavia to take on the challenging task: their winning project "Spaziale Series: New expressions of skin and structure". The project that is based on voids, skin and structure. Taking inspiration from fashion, architecture and human behaviours, they will amalgamate those inputs, according to their vision, into a new breed of interior objects that will question our perception on the rituals of possessions storage and ecology-awareness within furniture manufacture, distribution and construction.

'Tre di Una chairs' design by Hunn Wai - Photo credit: Myoung Won Suh	'Skin Shelf' prototype /sketch

The designer-duo will work with flexibility and susceptibility in different types of materials. The key is the potential changes; the mean is the mystery emerged out of the imagination of what is hiding behind the wrapped items. By adding the concept to a series of products the duo will let new possibilities and perspectives grow in relation to the function of furniture, aesthetic, interaction and purpose.

Francesca Lanzavecchia, proaesthetics, disability artifacts, lingerie	'Wood x', plastic shelf, design by Hunn Wai

Wai & Lanzavecchia began the cooperation at the Design Academy Eindhoven, where both studied IM Master (Interior / Industrial / Identity Design) under the management of Gijs Bakker, co-founder of Droog Design.

What qualifies as a crisis? Royal College of Art Design Products students’ Sold Out Shop will offer the stimulus to rethink what a crisis actually is...

George Fereday - Perpetual Crisis Manifesto	Krystian Kowalski - Something out of Nothing

During the Milan Salone 2009, a team of young design students from Platform 10, one of six teaching units within the College’s department, will be taking up residence at the prestigious Seves glassblock showroom in the heart of the city.

Claire Ferreira - Rush Bag	Billur Turan - Crisis Chocolate

The fourteen postgraduate student designers will stage a makeshift Crisis Shop, exhibiting a range of crisis products. The shop layout will embody the very nature of a potential crisis - a canopy, attached by suction pads, hooks and grommets will stretch across the glass surfaces of the showroom. Under extreme tension, the canopy serves to communicate a sense of urgency, a material under stress and physical tension.

The Shop isn’t about making a commodity out of a crisis but investing in the means to respond to crises at large. One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity. All products in the Crisis Shop are examples of opportunities in disguise.

Maciek Wojcicki - Snooking Corner	Florie Salnot - Plastic Bottle Jewellery

The collective response to this state of alert can be broken down into two clearly defined product categories: those that require an ‘Immediate Response’ and those that opt for ‘Mutations’. The group have deliberately emphasised the ‘closeness’ in crisis and consequently closeness to the body. Subsequent incarnations frequently deal with this through solutions of wear-ability.

Exhibition from April 22 to 27 2009
Showroom Seves glassblock - Via Lodovico il Moro 25/27 -  20143, Milan, Italy

The magazine focuses on the international trends in the Neocraft movement. Following the revival of craft, the magazine deals with the latest news in illustration, graphic design, textile art, ceramics, glass and book art. The initiators, Katja Kleiss and Pascal Johanssen, intended to launch a magazine which presents and discusses international trends in new craft.

The title is programmatic: OBJECTS is interested in the individual artistic craftwork, the object. "Unique things remind us of our individuality in a standardised world," says Pascal Johanssen, "the selection of these "objects" is a statement. While design is made for the masses, craftwork is dedicated to the individual." Each issue features academic essays, non-academic interventions of artists and multipaged spreads.

Authors of the first issue are art critic Colleen Shindler-Lynch (Toronto), artist Robert Revels (San Franciso), designer Scott Ballum (New York) and art director Gregori Saavedra (Barcelona). The essays are complimented by plenty of illustrations.

The magazine is now distributed in Germany but you can order it to everywhere on the globe through Illustrative's online shop.

The theme of MUJI AWARD 03 was "Found MUJI": learn from the wisdom accumulated by our predecessors all over the world, find good points in such long-established merchandise, and convert them into a design that fits our modern life.
The competition was open to applicants for two months. Some 1,986 entries from 35 countries were received.

The winners are as follows:

	Gold Prize: Straw Straw by Yuki lida (Japan)   The original meaning of the term "straw" was "wheat straw". Wall art depicting people using straws of wheat to drink from have been discovered from ancient Mesopotamian ruins. Straws of wheat are forms created by nature; they are materials that return to the soil. There's no waste in either the shape itself, or in its actual existence.

Silver Prize: Trash pack for outdoors by Ken Sugimoto/Eri Sugimoto (USA) A trash bag that easily stands up by itself. By taking advantage of the triangular pack that originated in Sweden and has been used for years for serving milk for school lunches in Japan, we were able to achieve a sense of stability, while the tendency to worry about the actual contents of the bag has been lessened. Can be put to good use when camping, on a picnic, or with other outdoor activities.

Bronze Prize: Tachia mat by Jung-Chen Hung/Chia-en-Lu (Taiwan) Tachia is a beautiful island famous for its straw mat, which is made from a specific variety of rush hand-weaved by people in the village.  "Tachia Mat" is redesigned from the ordinary Tachia straw mat, makes it into a fitted bed sheet that covers the mattress entirely, instead of the traditional one-piece type that simply sits on top of the bed. Comparing to the machine made mats, the material of "Tachia Mat" is much more flexible and foldable since it's handmade.

Bronze Prize: Grandpa's nail hook by Masashi Watanabe (Japan) My grandfather nonchalantly pounded nails into posts and hung various things on them. So that things didn't fall off these nails, he unconsciously pounded them in at an angle. To me, these felt like the most rational sort of hook you could get. While a simple nail would have sufficed, I made a few alterations. It struck me that if you could secure a nail at a set angle and length every time, then you could have beautiful hooks anywhere you could pound a nail in.

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