Woa, cool to see my home city as the thumbnail/headline image and main part of the article! I knew it was high on the list of sustainable cities but wasn’t aware it had been number one for several years!
The apartment building I currently live in, originally built as a flophouse/dosshouse in the 60s, was completely renovated during the past few years with a major focus on sustainability.
Old materials from it were used to make furniture for the public areas in and around the house and for art pieces on the outside walls and inside the lobby/entryway.
We have smaller laundry rooms on all 4 floors and also a larger one on the ground floor, all have special machines that reuse water and filter out microplastics. We can see how much water is saved and scan a QR code on each one to get more info on how much stuff they’ve filtered out.
We also have water and electricity meters easily visible in each apartment. A baseline usage of water and electricity for the size of each apartment is included in the rent, and the less we use the less rent we pay. Every 3 months the savings are calculated and added to the rent. I’ve saved over $100 some months through it. Of course we pay more if we use more.
The building and apartments are also part of something they call a “digital playground” for testing new technologies and stuff for possible further use everywhere else. There’s a huge screen in the lobby with all kinds of information like weather, times for the nearest tram and bus stops, the building’s lesser climate impact compared to “normal” buildings of similar size and more.
A bike room with a workshop, tools and lockboxes with chargers for bike batteries.
Our mailboxes send notifications to our phones when we get mail, we can book times in the laundry room and also request things from the landlord via the web and a phone app.
There are cooled lockboxes for grocery delivery so we don’t have to be home when it’s delivered, which means they can deliver to more people at once and save on trips. Of course the basics like solar cells on the roof, sustainable materials used for everything and so on.
There is also a public area with a kitchen, sofas, TV, gaming consoles and pool table. We have weekly events there like baking, painting and crafts, movie nights etc. We can also rent stuff like sewing machines, tools and grills for use in the yard. And there are biweekly meetings for how everything is going and to suggest changes and new ideas. All plants in and around the house are native to this area.
There’s more that I’m forgetting right now, and surely things I’m not aware of yet. It’s a cool place to live, and surprisingly cheap! I live in a 1 bedroom apt. with a full kitchen that’s 32 square metres (about 350 sq ft) and pay $450 a month (before savings from electricity and water use) and that includes everything.
You could do an AMA about this stuff (probably the best suited community is !urbanism ), it’s really interesting to know how it was setup and all the costs and idk how you take common decision and who owns the building and so on
I would never have thought of Glasgow as a green city. Its been a while, but last time I was there, they had horrendous old diesel buses and lots of traffic through the city centre. Maybe that’s changed?
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