Concrete Futures

Concrete is the most used material on earth after water, and the one we are most embarrassed by. It built the welfare state and it warms the planet. It holds up our homes and it gets the blame for everything that went wrong inside them.

This issue does not ask whether we should love it or hate it. It asks what we do with the hundreds of millions of cubic metres already standing: the slabs, the car parks, the plazas nobody sits on. Demolition is the expensive answer we keep choosing. The cheaper answers are harder, slower and far more interesting.

We spent a year with engineers who take buildings apart panel by panel, with residents who fought to keep an estate everyone else called ugly, and with a city clerk who wants every new building to arrive with a carbon bill. Read slowly. The future is already poured.

— Lieke Jansen