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Photo: David von Becker

Rethinking nature

Nature

Everything is green, natural and healthy. That is how many people wish their environment to be. However, large parts of the earth look quite different. Our cities are growing, forests are giving way to fields and industrial areas. How will we manage to meet our needs in the future without destroying nature even more? If we understand ourselves much more as part of nature, the preservation of the environment will play a greater role in our decisions. If we preserve and explore it, we will come up with new solutions – for challenges that affect us humans.

Raw
materialrush

New ingredients

Concrete made from vegetable waste, a fungus growing inside your computer and the new desk that used to be a fridge. This is how your world could look like in the future. Many things we use today...

Staying grounded

Can we have a future without mining? No, we still need ‘fresh’ sand, copper or lithium, also for the energy transition. But any extraction of raw materi-als has consequences, not only for the...

Circular Cities

Think for a moment about the nearest shopping street in your neighbourhood: Where can you get something repaired, buy recycled items or second-hand goods? Sure, there are some individual businesses...

Urban
jungle

Thinking space nature

Artificial Natural Worlds

People have been intervening in the water’s natural flows for a long time. In the future, cities, countryside and water are to merge again into a common habitat.

Thinking space nature

Green Cities

Green areas will be covered by concrete more and more, which is why we have to bring nature back to the city.

Thinking space nature

Bountiful harvests

Multi-storey vegetable gardens? New means of growing food in the cities are being explored. And, precise breeding methods could make food plants even more productive.

Thinking space nature

Growing building blocks

New housing is clearly needed. Scientists and architects are therefore developing climate-friendly production methods and sustainable building materials.

Thinking Space Nature

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Skyscrapers rising hundreds of metres into the sky, millions of glass pebbles forming an artificial beach, huge greenhouses covering the landscape – all over the globe, we’ve changed the face...

System
Tippers

Preserving what preserves us

Everything is connected to everything else. Countless different organisms exist in every ecosystem, where each individual species fulfils a specific task. The lives of all species are aligned with...

Nature in conflict

Railways, highways and waterways crisscross the landscape, air routes the sky above. We need transport networks to quickly move from A to B and to transport goods around the world in a short time....

On the go

It’s not only people who travel the world. Viruses, bacteria or other pathogens travel too – in goods containers or even inside our own bodies. Some have been known to humanity for a long time,...

Energy
catchers

Thinking space nature

Energy transition

Our appetite for energy seems to be insatiable. The use of coal, oil and gas is harmful to the environment and causes global warming. Nature, however, offers other possibilities.

Thinking Space Nature

The earth in a headlock

In recent years, it’s been one record high temperature after another. There have been periods of drought, hundred-year storms and floods the likes of which the world has never seen before. Merely...