Scandinavia’s premiere design festival 3 Days of Design began with a quartet of Danish brands—Anker & Co., Kvadrat, Erik Jørgensen, and Montana—11 years ago. In editions since, its hundreds of brands and twice as many events take over Copenhagen, spilling out of the Scandi city’s storefronts, showrooms, museums, and restaurants. This year, most events are open to the public and are set to take place June 18–20.Join NowAD PRO members enjoy exclusive benefits. Get a year of unlimited access for $25 $20 per month.ArrowNew to the event? Or thrilled to return to one of the world’s most inspiring design locations? AD PRO’s got you covered, with all the must-sees and should-do’s at 3 Days of Design 2025, as well as hot tips on where to rest and restore amidst the buzzy fair.What to know about 3 Days of DesignAll events are free, but visitors are encouraged to download the 3DD app and register via a QR ticket system for more seamless access to all the fun. Getting from event to event is also a breeze: Copenhagen is one of the world’s most bike-friendly cities—and it’s quite walkable too. (Check the fair’s Design Walks program for specially coordinated tours.) For further jaunts, the city’s metro system allows for easy transfers between districts—although taking a boat from neighborhood to neighborhood is an even better way to see the sights.Where to eat, drink, and stayThe UNESCO World Capital of Architecture is the living heart of Scandi chic, so you might as well stay at a historic MCM landmark: Arne Jacobsen’s 1956 SAS Royal, said to be the world’s first design hotel and refreshed in 2018 by Space Copenhagen as the Radisson Collection Royal Hotel, Copenhagen. Meanwhile, Swedish architect Gert Wingårdh’s Nobis Hotel is an elegant respite just off of Tivoli Gardens, and the freshly renovated Villa Copenhagen emits quintessential Danish ease within the city’s former Central Post & Telegraph Head Office.For cozier surrounds, check into Hotel Sanders, an antique-layered retreat by Brit firm Lind + Almond. Or for a bit more future-focused, try the houseboat hotel Kaj, floating just minutes from the Opera House.Foodwise, start your day with the city’s beloved bakeri culture. Brave the crowds for an early-morning cardamom bun at the landmark Juno the Bakery and the crisp kouign-amann at Andersen & Milland. Come lunchtime, score a sandwich at Lille, which slices up a revelatory rye bread fit for a picnic Smørrebrød feast on the water, or stop by Selma, where the menu changes with the season. Then top off your evening with a glass or two at natural-wine hot spot Pompette.Design happenings not to missOut and aboutMikkel Karstad, pictured, will be chefing it up in the Kvadrat showroom (Pakhus 48, Klubiensvej 22) throughout 3 Days. Photography courtesy of KvadratOne of Heather Chontos’s new rugs for Layered, which will be showcasing at Copenghagen’s Kismet Café. Photography courtesy of LayeredThe 3 Days of Design 2025 design festival celebrations will begin on June 16, at Frama’s chic Bar Vitrine aperitivo. The following evening Copenhagen-based label Louise Roe will preview new products, including a wall lamp, blown-glass vase, and stone table, at an alfresco cocktail party in its courtyard. On June 18, 3 Days of Design officially kicks off at the Vipp Garage HQ, where the studio will unveil a guesthouse installation and line of limited-edition products, both designed in collaboration with AD100 Studio KO. From there, make like a local and take a quick bicycle ride to Louis Poulsen’s showroom for a special light installation by Danish fashion designer Henrik Vibskov. That evening, Kvadrat and Vitra’s joint launch party at the former’s showroom in Nordhavn will fete new textile launches, including an attractive, high-performance acoustic curtain. Afterwards, stop by Audo House—the private residence, concept shop, restaurant, and garden, all decorated by furniture company Audo—to see it freshly renovated at the hands of local talent Norm Architects. The house is open June 18 through 20—and Audo is hosting an evening soirée there on June 19. Meanwhile, Swedish brand Svenskt Tenn’s 3 Days of Design debut at a private apartment in Christianshavn will also be a must-see, especially for Josef Frank aficionados.

With Caregiving & Creativity in mind, we speak with YARA + DAVINA, the socially engaged artist duo reimagining what it means to be mothers and makers – challenging outdated narratives, embracin...

5 June, 2025 In this series, Clare Dowdy speaks with design studios that are 30+ years old, to find out some of the secrets behind their longevity. Michael Johnson set up his London-based brand consultancy Johnson Banks in 1992. From Duolingo to Pink Floyd, Cancer Research UK to the Royal Astronomical Society, the studio works with “people who want to do big things.” He sat down with Clare Dowdy to discuss what he’s learned over the past 33 years. Michael Johnson How did Johnson Banks come about? My 20s were very turbulent: eight jobs in eight years, a lot of different countries, different cities, learning on the job. My last job – at Smith & Milton – was relatively settled, I was kind of running a corporate design department. I had a client there, Tom Banks. After I left, he also left his role at Legal & General with the projects I had been working on, and we used that as a basis for the company. That was 1992, the back end of a recession. For a couple of years, everything was fine. Then we started having “creative differences.” And the pressures of running a tiny design company are substantial. So we parted ways in 1995, but I kept the name. Johnson Banks’ symbol for the V&A’s William Morris show At that time, we weren’t really in the branding world. For a decade, we were very distracted by getting on the graphic design map, trying to win D&AD awards, doing lovely stamp projects. And then we started to get some cultural projects: the V&A and the British Council. I started to think, OK, now we’re beginning to show what we can do. When and why did you start thinking seriously about your strategy offering? When we started to get into the branding arena, I knew we were underpowered in terms of the strategic thinking. I may have thought that I could do it, but it takes a bit to persuade clients when you’re 35, with hair almost down to your knees. If you’re up against important-looking people who can field a few grey hairs, you’re going to lose that pitch. So we partnered with strategic companies like management consultancy Circus, and followed that model for much of the 2000s. That led to the Shelter rebrand, and a few other quite big branding projects followed. Johnson Banks’ visual identity for Shelter Eventually we realised that we could do the strategy ourselves. I had sometimes been a little frustrated by the work that my strategic partners – naming no names – were doing. It sounds a bit mean, but sometimes I would get this 90-page PowerPoint document from them, and I’d put it on my designers’ desks, and their faces would go blank. I think that 20 years ago, there was still a bit of the idea that you’ve paid £100,000, so here’s your huge document. We slowly realised that if we were in control of the process, and were involved all the way through, then that jump out of the verbal brand to the visual brand could be much better managed. How did you rethink your strategy offer? The penny dropped in the mid-2000s when we worked with Save The Children. At the time, and I don’t think they’d mind me saying this, Save The Children were a bit of a basket case. They were associated with WI fairs and cake baking, and they had a royal as their patron – they were nothing like what they are now. I realised we needed to work out what they stood for before we did any design. I did this huge chart, and stuck it on a wall at the client’s office. And I said, it strikes me that there are strategic choices that you have got to make as a comms team about where you want to take the Save the Children brand. Johnson Banks’ poster for Save the Children That was an incredibly productive meeting, and also it helped us realise that before we got anywhere near the design, we needed to sort this out. I know that sounds like really basic stuff now. I didn’t trust my instinct for a decade or so, but in that Save the Children meeting, a light bulb went on for me. Once you’d worked out how to do strategy in-house why didn’t you scale up? A lot of companies would have done that. That’s how companies grow, and can end up quite quickly at 60 people. We have nearly always been around six to eight people. Because I could bridge that gap between the verbal and the visual, it meant we didn’t need to add people. And I’ve discovered over the last 25 years, that with a really good account director, Katherine Heaton, and me, and a design team, there is a heck of a lot that we can do. So we stayed small and partnered with filmmakers, animators, cultural specialists. Post-pandemic, a lot of people have adopted that hub and spoke model – we did it 20 years ago. Probably twice a year we’ll lose a pitch because of our scale. But conversely, with some clients you can sell in the fact that they’ll always deal with Michael Johnson. They’re not going to be handed down the chain, because there is no chain. Johnson Banks’ logos for Jodrell Bank Alongside this direct contact with you, what’s your main selling point? It seems to be that we think pretty hard about stuff. We almost never jump into design. A lot of thought goes into what we do, sometimes way too much. Sometimes our projects are incredibly difficult, gargantuan, intertwined and really hard to unpick. That’s a slightly poisoned chalice, because then people go, gosh, well, if they could unpick that, then they could unpick our Gordian knot. For example, we’re working on a major London university brand at the moment that has over 60,000 staff and students, 11 faculties, and hundreds of centres and institutes and departments, and we’re trying to navigate a way through. How did you work out what you wanted to specialise in? Sometimes you can get sucked into something that you just don’t want to be doing. By the end of the 1990s, Johnson Banks had got a reputation for doing annual reports. Part of me quite liked doing them because there was an interplay between words and pictures. And we were getting senior level access to clients, which makes you feel a bit better, because you’re having an interface with chief executives. But then I was thinking, hang on, we’re in danger of getting stuck here, because of course, they’re cyclical. And the death of the annual report – and the death of print – was coming over the horizon, with the internet. Johnson Banks’ Annual Report for Polygram (1995) Since then, my interests have changed. I do not have any interest any more in doing awful blue chips or terrible fintechs. I want to apply all the comms and the branding that I’ve learned to people who could really use it – not-for-profit, culture, education, philanthropy. You know, doing good. How did you build up this not-for-profit work? You lean into the referrals you’ll inevitably get within silos where you want to be referred. I learned this from Mary Lewis of Lewis Moberly. We were pretty close in the 1990s and she always said that referral business is the best business. Over 85% of our clients are not-for-profit – most design companies have a 20-80 split between non-profits and commercial clients. I never liked that ratio, what you might cruelly call ‘the Robin Hood principle’ – we are going to steal from our luxury car account and give to the charity. We did do a bit of that for a while. We did an airline in 2009/10 at the same time we were doing charities. I would justify that with the Robin Hood principle, but I just felt more and more uncomfortable with that. Johnson Banks’ campaign visuals for Cancer Research UK As our percentages went up and up in not-for-profit, eventually I said, look, we should just tell people this is who we are, and this is what we do. It was obvious anyway, so let’s be explicit about it. A few people said we were crazy, that we’d never get any work. But the reverse has been the case. We’re on our sixth environmental project. If you say this is what we want to do, and this is what we will do for you, then I think, funnily enough, clients find that very helpful. How did you build up to bigger projects? Let’s take education. We’ve done three or four really interesting campaigns for universities and now we’re in the position where we can do university rebrands, and have won a top 10 global university. But it has taken 15 years of education work to get to that point. I may not have thought that it would take quite so long to persuade people that we could do their identity. But education is a very conservative sector, and moves slowly, like museums and galleries. If you’re small, you can afford for a sector to move slowly, whereas bigger agencies need a pipeline. I’ve watched dozens of companies get to this critical point where they’ve grown and grown and then they’ve just fallen off the cliff because they’ve been feeding the monster. To help with that, agencies often add a new business person. No-one ever talks about this, but a new business person costs around £50,000. The rule of thumb, in my world at least, is that you have to take that salary and triple it with turnover to pay that salary. So you need £150,000 worth of projects to pay for the new business person before you’ve made a penny. So to make a profit, the new business person has to bring in over £200,000 of work. And if this person can do it, which is not guaranteed, then the company has to scale. It’s so easy to get caught on a treadmill. What else has helped you stay in business so long? We’ve always led with the thought behind the idea, not the way it looked. Because I was always much more interested in the idea behind something, I think that has helped us not get sucked into the visual, to use the type face du jour, the colour that everyone else is using. And it’s understandable, because graphic designers want to do stuff that their peers really like. But paradoxically the trick, in my opinion, is to try and zag away from the trends. Create a new trend yourself. Johnson Banks’ globe symbol for the COP 26 climate conference Design disciplines in this article Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next Neville Brody on clients, education, and his unexpected OBE Graphic Design 30 Jan, 2025

The transformation of Hangzhou’s old steelworks into a park is a tribute to China’s industrial past in a city of the future The congressional hearing about Chinese AI engine DeepSeek held in the US this April has propelled Hangzhou, the heart of China’s new digital economy, to the headlines. With companies such as DeepSeek, Unitree and Alibaba – whose payment app allowed me to get on the metro without needing to buy a ticket – headquartered in Hangzhou, China’s future in AI, robotics and automation is emanating from this city. Getting off the metro in the suburban area of Gongshu, the sun was shining on an old steelworks, overgrown with vines and flowers now that it is being transformed by Jiakun Architects and TLS Landscape Architecture into the Grand Canal Steelworks Park. The unfolding trade war might help to accelerate China’s journey into an automated future, leaving the world of factories behind, yet this new public space shows an impulse to commemorate the country’s economic history, and the forces that have shaped its contemporary built environment. Starting in Hangzhou and travelling more than 1,700km to Beijing, the Grand Canal is an engineering project built 2,500 years ago to connect the different regions of eastern China. The country’s geography means rivers flow from west to east: from higher elevations, culminating in the Himalayas, to the basin that is the country’s eastern seaboard. Historically, it was difficult to transport goods from mercantile centres in the south, including Hangzhou and Suzhou, to the political centre in Beijing up north. As a civil engineering project, the Grand Canal rivals the Great Wall, but if the Great Wall aims to protect China from the outside, the Grand Canal articulates Chinese commerce from the inside. The historic waterway has been an important conduit of economic and cultural exchange, enabling the movement of people and goods such as grain, silk, wine, salt and gravel across the country. It became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2014. The state‑owned enterprise collective was founded, and the physical facility of Hangzhou steelworks built, in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward, when China strove for self‑sufficiency, and wended its way through the country’s economic trajectory: first the economic chaos of the 1960s, then the reforms and opening up in the 1980s. Steel remains an important industry today in China, home to more than half of the world’s production, but the listing of the Grand Canal enabled city leaders to move production to a new site and decommission the Hangzhou steelworks. External mandates, including entry into the World Trade Organization, the Beijing Olympics and UNESCO listings, have been instrumentalised in the country to pursue a range of internal interests, particularly economical and real estate ones.  In 2016, the factory was shut down in 150 days, in what the company describes as a ‘heroic’ effort, and the site attracted tourists of industrial ruins. In the competition brief, Hangzhou planners asked for ‘as much of the existing blast furnaces and buildings’ as possible to be preserved. When I arrived in China in 2008, Chinese cities were notorious for heritage demolition, but today urban planners and architects increasingly work to preserve historical buildings. Just like several industrial sites in Beijing and Shanghai have been transformed into major public and cultural spaces in the past decade, in the Yangtze River Delta – of which Hangzhou is a major hub – several industrial sites along the Grand Canal’s course are being given a new lease of life. Today, the three blast furnaces of Hangzhou steelworks remain, with the silhouettes of their smokestacks easily recognisable from a distance. The project preserves as much as possible of the aesthetics of a steel mill with none of the danger or dust, ready to welcome instead new community facilities and cultural programmes in a vast and restored piece of landscape. Situated in a former working‑class district that has been gentrifying and welcoming young families, the new park is becoming a popular venue for music festivals, flower viewing in springtime and year‑round picnics – when I visited, parents were teaching their children to ride a bicycle, and students from Zhejiang University, about a kilometre from the park, were having lunch on the grass. New programmes accommodated in the old coke oven and steel mills will include a series of exhibition halls and spaces welcoming a wide range of cultural and artistic workshops as well as events – the project’s first phase has just completed but tenant organisations have not yet moved in, and works are ongoing to the north of the park. On the day of my visit, a student art exhibition was on display near one of the furnaces, with works made from detritus from the site, including old packing containers. The rehabilitated buildings also provide a range of commercial units, where cafés, restaurants, shops, a bookshop, ice cream shop and a gym have already opened their doors to visitors.  Several structures were deemed structurally unsafe and required demolition, such as the old iron casting building. The architects proposed to partially reconstruct it on its original footprint; the much more open structure, built with reclaimed bricks, now houses a semi‑outdoor garden. Material choices evoke the site’s industrial past: weathered steel, exposed concrete and large expanses of glazing dominate the landscape. The widespread use of red, including in an elevated walkway that traverses the park – at times vaguely reminiscent of a Japanese torii gate in the space below – gives a warm and reassuring earthiness to the otherwise industrial colour palette. Elements selected by the designers underwent sanitisation and detoxification before being reused. The landscaping includes old machinery parts and boulders; recuperated steel panels are for instance inlaid into the paving while pipes for pouring molten steel have been turned into a fountain. The train tracks that once transported material continue to run through the site, providing paths in between the new patches of vegetation, planted with local grasses as well as Japanese maples, camphors and persimmon trees. As Jiawen Chen from TLS describes it, the aesthetic feels ‘wild, but not weedy or abandoned’. The landscape architects’ inspiration came from the site itself after the steelworks’ closure, she explains, once vegetation had begun to reclaim it. Contaminated soil was replaced with clean local soil – at a depth between 0.5 and 1.5 metres, in line with Chinese regulations. The removed soil was sent to specialised facilities for purification, while severely contaminated layers were sealed with concrete. TLS proposed phytoremediation (using plants to detoxify soil) in selected areas of the site ‘as a symbolic and educational gesture’, Chen explains, but ‘the client preferred to be cautious’. From the eastern end of the park, hiking trails lead to the mountain and its Buddhist temples. The old steel mill’s grounds fade seamlessly into the hills. Standing in what it is still a construction site, a sign suggests there will soon be a rowing centre here.  While Jiakun Architects and TLS have prioritised making the site palatable as a public space, the project also brings to life a history that many are likely to have forgotten. Throughout, the park incorporates different elements of China’s economic history, including the life of the Grand Canal and the industrial era. There is, for example, a Maoist steelworker painted on the mural of one of the cafés, as well as historical photographs and drawings of the steelworks peppering the site, framed and hung on the walls. The ambition might be in part to pay homage to steelworkers, but it is hard to imagine them visiting. Gongshu, like the other suburbs of Hangzhou, has seen rapid increases in its property prices.  The steelworks were built during the Maoist era, a time of ‘battling with earth, battling with heaven, battling with humanity’, to borrow Mao’s own words. Ordinary people melted down pots and pans to surpass the UK in steel production, and industry was seen as a sharp break from a traditional Chinese way of life, in which humans aspire to live in harmony with their environment. The priorities of the government today are more conservative, seeking to create a garden city to attract engineers and their families. Hangzhou has long represented the balmy and sophisticated life of China’s south, a land of rice and fish. To the west of the city, not far from the old steelworks, are the ecologically protected Xixi wetlands, and Hangzhou’s urban planning exemplifies the Chinese principle of 天人合一, or nature and humankind as one.  Today, Hangzhou is only 45 minutes from Shanghai by high‑speed train. The two cities feel like extensions of one another, an urban region of 100 million people. The creation of the Grand Canal Steelworks Park reflects the move away from heavy industry that Chinese cities such as Hangzhou are currently making, shifting towards a supposedly cleaner knowledge‑driven economy. Yet the preservation of the steelworks epitomises the sentimental attitude towards the site’s history and acts as a reminder that today’s middle classes are the children of yesterday’s steelworkers, drinking coffee and playing with their own children in grassy lawns next to shuttered blast furnaces.  The park’s second phase is already nearing completion, and the competition for the nearby Grand Canal Museum was won by Herzog & de Meuron in 2020 – the building is under construction, and should open at the end of this year. It is a district rich in history, but the city is resolutely turned towards the future.  2025-06-02 Reuben J Brown Share AR May 2025CircularityBuy Now

The ways roads are used, with ever larger and heavier vehicles, have dramatic consequences on the environment – and electric cars are not the answer Today, there is an average of 37 tonnes of road per inhabitant of the planet. The weight of the road network alone accounts for a third of all construction worldwide, and has grown exponentially in the 20th century. There is 10 times more bitumen, in mass, than there are living animals. Yet growth in the mass of roads does not automatically correspond to population growth, or translate into increased length of road networks. In wealthier countries, the number of metres of road per inhabitant has actually fallen over the last century. In the United States, for instance, between 1905 and 2015 the length of the network increased by a factor of 1.75 and the population by a factor of 3.8, compared with 21 for the mass of roads. Roads have become wider and, above all, much thicker. To understand the evolution of these parameters, and their environmental impact, it is helpful to trace the different stages in the life of the motorway.  Until the early 20th century, roads were used for various modes of transport, including horses, bicycles, pedestrians and trams; as a result of the construction of railways, road traffic even declined in some European countries in the 19th century. The main novelty brought by the motorway was that they would be reserved for motorised traffic. In several languages, the word itself – autostrada, autobahn, autoroute or motorway – speaks of this exclusivity.  Roman roads varied from simple corduroy roads, made by placing logs perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area, to paved roads, as this engraving from Jean Rondelet’s 19th‑century Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir shows. Using deep roadbeds of tamped rubble as an underlying layer to ensure that they kept dry, major roads were often stone-paved, metalled, cambered for drainage and flanked by footpaths, bridleways and drainage ditches Like any major piece of infrastructure, motorways became the subject of ideological discourse, long before any shovel hit the ground; politicians underlined their role in the service of the nation, how they would contribute to progress, development, the economy, modernity and even civilisation. The inauguration ceremony for the construction of the first autostrada took place in March 1923, presided over by Italy’s prime minister Benito Mussolini. The second major motorway programme was announced by the Nazi government in 1933, with a national network planned to be around 7,000 kilometres long. In his 2017 book Driving Modernity: Technology, Experts, Politics, and Fascist Motorways, 1922–1943, historian Massimo Moraglio shows how both programmes were used as propaganda tools by the regimes, most notably at the international road congresses in Milan in 1926 and Munich in 1934. In the European postwar era, the notion of the ‘civilising’ effect of roads persevered. In 1962, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then‑secretary of state for finances and later president of France, argued that expanded motorways would bring ‘progress, activity and life’. This discourse soon butted up against the realities of how motorways affected individuals and communities. In his 2011 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D Norton explores the history of resistance to the imposition of motorised traffic in North American cities. Until the 1920s, there was a perception that cars were dangerous newcomers, and that other street and road uses – especially walking – were more legitimate. Cars were associated with speed and danger; restrictions on motorists, especially speed limits, were routine.  Built between 1962 and 1970, the Westway was London’s first urban motorway, elevated above the city to use less land. Construction workers are seen stressing the longitudinal soffit cables inside the box section of the deck units to achieve the bearing capacity necessary to carry the weight of traffic Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy To gain domination over cities, motor vehicles had to win priority over other street uses. Rather than restricting the flow of vehicles to minimise the risk of road accidents, a specific infrastructure was dedicated to them: both inner‑city roads and motorways. Cutting through the landscape, the motorway had, by definition, to be inaccessible by any other means of transport than motorised vehicle. To guarantee the fluidity of traffic, the construction of imposing bridges, tunnels and interchanges is necessary, particularly at junctions with other roads, railways or canals. This prioritisation of one type of user inevitably impacts journeys for others; as space is fragmented, short journeys are lengthened for those trying to navigate space by foot or bicycle.  Enabling cars to drive at around 110–140km/h on motorways, as modern motorways do, directly impacts their design, with major environmental effects: the gradient has to be gentle (4 per cent), the curves long (1.5km in radius) and the lanes wide, to allow vehicles to overtake each other safely. As much terrain around the world is not naturally suited to these requirements, the earthworks are considerable: in France, the construction of a metre of highway requires moving some 100m3 of earth, and when the soil is soft, full of clay or peat, it is made firmer with hydraulic lime and cement before the highway’s first sub‑layers are laid. This material cost reinforces the criticisms levelled in the 1960s, by the likes of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, at urban planning that prioritised the personal motor vehicle. When roads are widened to accommodate more traffic, buildings are sliced and demolished, as happened in Dhaka’s Bhasantek Road in 2021 Credit: Dhaka Tribune Once built, the motorway is never inert. Motorway projects today generally anticipate future expansion (from 2×2 to 2×3 to 2×4 lanes), and include a large median strip of 12m between the lanes, with a view to adding new ones. Increases in speed and vehicle sizes have also translated into wider lanes, from 2.5m in 1945 to 3.5m today. The average contemporary motorway footprint is therefore 100 square metres per linear metre. Indeed, although the construction of a road is supposed to reduce congestion, it also generates new traffic and, therefore, new congestion. This is the principle of ‘induced traffic’: the provision of extra road capacity results in a greater volume of traffic. The Katy Freeway in Texas famously illustrates this dynamic. Built as a regular six‑lane highway in the 1960s, it was called the second worst bottleneck in the nation by 2004, wasting 25 million hours a year of commuter time. In 2011, the state of Texas invested US$2.8 billion to fix this problem, widening the road to a staggering total of 26 lanes. By 2014, the morning and afternoon traffic had both increased again. The vicious circle based on the induced traffic has been empirically demonstrated in most countries: traffic has continued to increase and congestion remains unresolved, leading to ever-increasing emissions. In the EU, transport is the only sector where greenhouse gas emissions have increased in the past three decades, rising 33.5 per cent between 1990 and 2019. Transport accounts for around a fifth of global CO₂ emissions today, with three quarters of this figure linked to road transport. Houston’s Katy Freeway is one of the world’s widest motorways, with 26 lanes. Its last expansion, in 2008, was initially hailed as a success, but within five years, peak travel times were longer than before the expansion – a direct illustration of the principle of induced traffic Credit: Smiley N Pool / Houston Chronicle / Getty Like other large transport infrastructures such as ports and airports, motorways are designed for the largest and heaviest vehicles. Engineers, road administrations and politicians have known since the 1950s that one truck represents millions of cars: the impact of a vehicle on the roadway is exponential to its weight – an online ‘road damage calculator’ allows you to compare the damage done by different types of vehicles to the road. Over the years, heavier and heavier trucks have been authorised to operate on roads: from 8‑tonne trucks in 1945 to 44 tonnes nowadays. The European Parliament adopted a revised directive on 12 March 2024 authorising mega‑trucks to travel on European roads; they can measure up to 25 metres and weigh up to 60 tonnes, compared with the previous limits of 18.75 metres and 44 tonnes. This is a political and economic choice with considerable material effects: thickness, rigidity of sub‑bases and consolidation of soil and subsoil with lime and cement. Altogether, motorways are 10 times thicker than large roads from the late 19th century. In France, it takes an average of 30 tonnes of sand and aggregate to build one linear metre of motorway, 100 times more than cement and bitumen.  The material history of road networks is a history of quarrying and environmental damage. The traces of roads can also be seen in rivers emptied of their sediment, the notches of quarries in the hills and the furrows of dredgers extracting sand from the seabed. This material extraction, arguably the most significant in human history, has dramatic ecological consequences for rivers, groundwater tables, the rise of sea levels and saltwater in farmlands, as well as biodiversity. As sand is ubiquitous and very cheap, the history of roads is also the history of a local extractivism and environmental conflicts around the world.  Shoving and rutting is the bulging and rippling of the pavement surface. Once built, roads require extensive maintenance – the heavier the vehicles, the quicker the damage. From pothole repair to the full resurfacing of a road, maintenance contributes to keeping road users safe Credit: Yakov Oskanov / Alamy Once roads are built and extended, they need to be maintained to support the circulation of lorries and, by extension, commodities. This stage is becoming increasingly important as rail freight, which used to be important in countries such as France and the UK, is declining, accounting for no more than 10 per cent of the transport of commodities. Engineers might judge that a motorway is destined to last 20 years or so, but this prognosis will be significantly reduced with heavy traffic. The same applies to the thousands of motorway bridges: in the UK, nearly half of the 9,000 highway bridges are in poor condition; in France, 7 per cent of the 12,000 bridges are in danger of collapsing, as did Genoa’s Morandi bridge in 2018. If only light vehicles drove on it, this infrastructure would last much longer. This puts into perspective governments’ insistence on ‘greening’ the transport sector by targeting CO2 emissions alone, typically by promoting the use of electric vehicles (EVs). Public policies prioritising EVs do nothing to change the mass of roads or the issue of their maintenance – even if lorries were to run on clean air, massive quarrying would still be necessary. A similar argument plays out with regard to canals and ports, which have been constantly widened and deepened for decades to accommodate ever-larger oil tankers or container ships. The simple operation of these infrastructures, dimensioned for the circulation of commodities and not humans, requires permanent dredging of large volumes. The environmental problem of large transport infrastructure goes beyond the type of energy used: it is, at its root, free and globalised trade. ‘The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing’ As both a material and ideological object, the motorway fixes certain political choices in the landscape. Millions of kilometres of road continue to be asphalted, widened and thickened around the world to favour cars and lorries. In France, more than 80 per cent of today’s sand and aggregate extraction is used for civil engineering works – the rest goes to buildings. Even if no more buildings, roads or other infrastructures were to be built, phenomenal quantities of sand and aggregates would still need to be extracted in order to maintain existing road networks. The material life cycle of motorways is relentless: constructing, maintaining, widening, thickening, repairing, adding new structures such as wildlife crossings, more maintaining.  Rising traffic levels are always deemed positive by governments for a country’s economy and development. As Christopher Wells shows in his 2014 book Car Country: An Environmental History, car use becomes necessary in an environment where everything has been planned for the car, from the location of public services and supermarkets to residential and office areas. Similarly, when an entire economy is based on globalised trade and just‑in‑time logistics (to the point that many service economies could not produce their own personal protective equipment in the midst of a pandemic), the lorry and the container ship become vital.  The final stage in the life of a piece of motorway infrastructure is dismantling. Like the other stages, this one is not a natural outcome but the fruit of political choices – which should be democratic – regarding how we wish to use existing roads. Dismantling, which is essential if we are to put an end to the global extractivism of sand and aggregates, does not mean destruction: if bicycles and pedestrians were to use them instead, maintenance would be minimal. This final stage requires a paradigm shift away from the eternal adaptation to increasing traffic. Replacing cars and lorries with public transport and rail freight would be a first step. But above all, a different political and spatial organisation of economic activities is necessary, and ultimately, an end to globalised, just-in-time trade and logistics. In 1978, a row of cars parked at a shopping centre in Connecticut was buried under a thick layer of gooey asphalt. The Ghost Parking Lot, one of the first projects by James Wines’ practice SITE, became a playground for skateboarders until it was removed in 2003. Images of this lumpy landscape serve as allegories of the damage caused by reliance on the automobile Credit: Project by SITE Lead image: Some road damage is beyond repair, as when a landslide caused a large chunk of the Gothenburg–Oslo motorway to collapse in 2023. Such dramatic events remind us of both the fragility of these seemingly robust infrastructures, and the damage that extensive construction does to the planet. Credit: Hanna Brunlöf Windell / TT / Shutterstock 2025-06-03 Reuben J Brown Share

As the Nintendo Switch 2 launches, these are our hopes and dreams for the console Image credit: Nintendo Feature by GamesIndustry.biz Staff Contributor Published on June 5, 2025 With the Nintendo Switch 2 launching today, it closes out a rocky pre-launch period of tariffs, fiery price discussions around software and hardware, and some retailers cancelling pre-orders. Much of that will feel like a distant memory once the hotly-anticipated console is in players' hands, and they're trying out the first new Mario Kart game in more than 11 years. There's always something special about Nintendo hardware. Even with the Wii U, the console manufacturer's biggest dud in recent memory, that was still the case. While the Switch 2 is firmly an evolution of 2017's Switch and not anything bolder in terms of input or form factor, Nintendo's unbelievable run of great software over the past eight years looks set to continue. The downside for consumers, of course, is that they will be paying much more for some of those titles than they did on the last console. Below, to celebrate its launch day, the GamesIndustry.biz team shares its realistic hopes and dreams for the years to come on Switch 2. A fresh take on exclusive IP Nintendo has already demonstrated that it's willing to switch it up in terms of new takes on its iconic franchises, with the destructible levels of Donkey Kong Bananza and the open roads of Mario Kart World. But I have an appetite to see the same approach taken with continuations of beloved franchises like The Legend of Zelda, 3D Mario, and Pokémon. While Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are getting enhanced versions and the newest Pokémon Legends title launches this fall, Nintendo has the opportunity to revitalise some of its beloved IP with boosted hardware and fan interest. Not only that, but it could flip the script entirely and debut a brand new franchise unrelated to anything that’s come before it – something that would become intertwined with the Switch 2 and inspire a new generation of players and developers. – Sophie McEvoy The end of bad Switch ports While games like Doom and The Witcher 3 demonstrated that miracles were possible with the Nintendo Switch's limited hardware capabilities, numerous ports from more powerful platforms fell short. From the notoriously rough visual downgrade of Batman: Arkham Knight to the choppy port of WWE 2K 2018, sometimes visually intensive games have made their way to the console with a whiff of 'buyer beware' about them. In some cases, like the Kingdom Hearts games, 'cloud' versions bypassed trying to run natively on the hardware altogether, which was a compromise too far for many players. That's a trend the Switch 2, with its out-of-the-gates impressive ports of Cyberpunk 2077 and Civ 7, could really do without. Inevitably, we will reach a point with the next Xbox and PlayStation consoles where the disparity with the Switch 2 becomes too great, and we could potentially see a similar downslide in ports. But hopefully the quality level reached with this first wave of releases sets a high standard for what's to come. Users' tolerance for lower quality multiplatform releases has been tested too much during the latter years of the Switch's lifecycle. – Samuel Roberts Switch 2 is at the heart of indie games Image credit: ConcernedApe The early years of the Switch were a honeymoon period for indie games, causing a gold rush of publishers and developers getting their back catalogues on the platform. As the eShop became swamped with shovelware, while Nintendo did little to improve discoverability (until very recently), Steam quickly became the de facto home for indie games again. There's still nothing like playing an indie game on Switch. The portability remains a cut above other devices with a similar form factor, like the Steam Deck. While Nintendo shows it values smaller games with its Indie World showcases, there's still a disconnect between the intent of those presentations and how easily indie games are actually discovered on Switch. Using the eShop to celebrate good taste in games should be a goal of Nintendo's during this generation. A golden age of indies comparable to the original Switch launch seems unlikely – the moment has probably passed on that. But more consistent curation would have a massive amount of value. – Samuel Roberts Nintendo shows that the mouse has the magic The unveiling of the Switch showed that Nintendo learned a lot of lessons from the Wii U, itself a failed follow-up to the Wii: the company didn't rock the boat. It's the same form factor you know from the original Switch, with a clear '2' in the name. All its more novel secondary features – like the Joy-Con's mouse controls – are not at the centre of the marketing messaging like the Wii Remote or DS touchscreen were for those consoles. This was wise in a few practical ways. It means there are no interface-based headaches in porting a game onto the console, paving the way for (theoretically) good third-party support. Consumers, developers, and publishers know what they're getting. Still, it means the console is going to feel largely familiar as an experience. The hope, then, is that deeper into the generation, Nintendo and other developers find new and interesting things to do with the mouse. Competitive wheelchair basketball game Drag x Drive is Nintendo's first attempt at this, but the drab art style doesn't inspire much confidence. Previous breakthrough exclusives like Arms and Splatoon felt like a much bigger deal. – Samuel Roberts More than just a console As a handheld device, the Switch ended up being more than just a games console. Subscription-based services like Crunchyroll and InkyPen provide access to anime, comics, and manga, while the YouTube app lets players watch a (albeit limited) selection of movies and shows. With the improvements in screen resolution, the Switch 2 would benefit from integrating more streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon Prime. Sure, you can use these apps on phones and laptops, but it would be convenient to have everything on one device – particularly a handheld console that's a popular traveling companion. And with social connectivity being a major selling point of the new console with GameChat, there's an opportunity to host streaming parties of shows and films on top of playing games. – Sophie McEvoy The GameCube library isn't left to fester on Nintendo Switch Online On day one, Nintendo Switch Online's Expansion Pack brings GameCube games to Switch 2 players: The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, and Soulcalibur 2. More will be coming, but if Nintendo's previous form with its classic console libraries are anything to go by, it will be a glacial wait. I hope I'm proven wrong. Possibly complicating matters is that some key GameCube titles have already been ported to Switch, like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Pikmin 1 and 2, and Metroid Prime. The console's best game, Resident Evil 4, has been widely available for years on other platforms. The best case scenario here, then, is that Nintendo brings some more unusual or unexpected games to the service – the coming inclusion of Chibi-Robo, a cult GameCube game that's been hard to get hold for many years, is a strong indicator that the company is thinking outside the more obvious Mario and Zelda games. Rogue Squadron 2: Rogue Leader, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes would be on my personal wishlist. And maybe Starfox Adventures, too, just to hear everyone complain about it again. – Samuel Roberts A new take on Zelda in time for the movie This one is pretty much guaranteed. After reinventing the Zelda series with the open world games Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, both of which celebrated player freedom and ingenuity, it will be fascinating to see what tack the team behind these games take next. "I think [TOTK] is – to use a bit of a term – an apotheosis, or the final form of that version of The Legend of Zelda," said producer Eiji Aonuma in a 2023 interview with Game Informer. "In that regard, I don't think that we'll be making a direct sequel to a world such as that that we've created." My prediction: in the same way Super Mario Wonder gave players a fresh spin on a classic Mario 2D platformer experience following 2023's (terrible, if you ask me) Super Mario Bros. movie, I could see a similar tack taken with 2027's live-action Zelda movie. A game that seems superficially familiar, but is bursting with new ideas, would bridge the gap between veteran Nintendo players and newbies. – Samuel Roberts

Following the breakout success of ‘Your Friends and Neighbors’, which stars Jon Hamm and wrapped its first season last week, Apple has extended its deal with showrunner Jonathan Tropper, Deadline reports. more…

Think you know which AI beat a human champion in the game of Go? Or which company developed the Transformer architecture that powers many modern language models? This is your moment to shine — and score two tickets for the price of one ($200 value).

Microsoft Rus LLC, one of four subsidiaries in Russia, is closing shop.