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Azerbaijan

Parking is one of the significant city planning problems of Baku. The neighborhoods with high buildings usually lack parking lots and the cars pile up in the backyard of the residence buildings. Children in the neighborhood reclaim the streets! They want to play one more round of soccer, but the already existing limited and shrinking space for a playground is taken away by the cars coming in and out of the yard. Also, children playing in the “playground” of the residential buildings put parked vehicles in danger, and many incidents usually occur. You could see a grumpy person taking their head off of the window and shouting “go play your soccer somewhere else”. City design and the built environment around the residential neighborhoods should take everyone’s needs into account. Including kids who love to play games in the backyard of their apartments…

Georgia

Georgia

Vernacular extensions of modernist buildings have been created since the 1990s as an organic response to the new, “lawless” times after the fall of the Soviet Union. They increase the living space and are usually used as terraces, extra rooms, open refrigerators,It is said that a Russian journalist named them “kamikaze,” drawing a parallel between the romantic and suicidal character of such an endeavour and the typical ending of most Georgian family names “-adze.” This architecture also refers back to the local palimpsestic building technique, which since the Middle Ages has allowed new houses to be built on top of existing ones on the steep slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, thus not monumentalisation of the past but expanding on it for the future. Three residence from different flat which have extensions tell their stories, why they decide to build it and how they use this part of house. The facades of all these types of buildings look chaotic, but from the inside they are all ordered.

Tunisia

Russia

The earthquake-proof individual residential building "LOTOS" is a quickly erected, capital, fireproof and earthquake-proof house with a minimum consumption of such material as reinforced concrete, while ensuring a minimum construction cost. For this purpose, the flat walls of a large-panel house are replaced by thinner curvilinear ones, which have high rigidity and stability under the influence of seismic loads. In many regions of the world it is possible to solve the problem of providing the population with comfortable affordable housing by this method.

Democratic Republic of the Congo

The Bagyeli Pygmies live in social structures in the Congo Basin rainforest. But because of commercial and political interest in Cameroon more and more of the forest is lost and thus their natural habitat and livelyhood is marginalized. Concerned by this, Italian architect Arturo Vittori is building the Warka Village, that could be a model for reintegration into the forest. He only uses materials from the forest and created an architecture that is inspired by traditional Bagyeli traditions and the harmony with the forest and its people.