One of the many people to come out of the woodwork after the London riots is Adrian Wyatt. The chief executive of Quintain stated that “If they don’t respect where they live, they will trash it”. He goes on to say that town planning is of the utmost importance given the rise of the city; and guess what Quintain do. I’ll give you a clue, it’s town planning. He even manages to get a bit of marketing in at the end.

Town planning is often an area that gets overlooked when it comes to popular designs; yet it undoubtedly affects us all a lot more than the latest iPhone design. There have been accusations that the planning of towns is far too patriarchal as they’re designed by men for men. Hence, the inequalities apparent where male lavatorial facilities are the same size as those intended for the female of the species; despite males requiring less space for their business. They lose me when it comes to the design of bus shelter seats? I haven’t done the research but I’m fairly sure that they’re equally uncomfortable for either gender.

As well as breaking down the gender inequalities town planning also gives us the opportunity to break our dependence on fossil fuels. Though it seems unlikely Kristianstad in Sweden now generates its energy from potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines. Oh think of the glory days that beckon, whole villages running on bacon fat and pig intestines. Though if we were to capture and utilise the so called bio-gases that collect around landfill sites and so on we’d go some way to offsetting our carbon footprint. Plus considerable financial savings, by using bio-gas to heat their municipal buildings Kristianstad have saved roughly $3.8 million per year, though this is with the $144 million start-up cost.

However, thinking big and thinking ahead is always the best option. With the apocalypse nigh and sea waters rising it’s important that we build durable, eco-friendly housing that preferably floats. Which is where Remi Studio’s Ark comes in. This Russian based architectural agency has come up with a design for a floating building which is both sustainable and eco-friendly. It is self sufficient with the power to run off solar, wind, tidal energy among other things and a garden in the centre. They seem to have missed out on a possibility though, fill it with helium (hydrogens inert friend) and you could really float that sucker. You could even seal it up and take it into space. After all it’s got everything you need and if you need a bit more energy, well there’s plenty of room in that garden for a pig farm.

If you’ve got design you want completed before the Apocalypse then why not submit a brief on the Creative Services Exchange.