It’s every parent’s night­mare: ear­lier last week, an 8-year-old boy went miss­ing after tak­ing a wrong turn on his first walk home alone from day camp in a Brook­lyn neigh­bor­hood. A mere seven blocks, with his mother wait­ing halfway — but he never made it. A mas­sive two-day search ended in the heart-wrenching and shock­ing dis­cov­ery of Leiby Kletzky’s dis­mem­bered body in a neigh­bor­hood man’s apart­ment — sev­eral blocks away in the same neigh­bor­hood. The deci­sive break in this dis­turb­ing case came from secu­rity cam­era footage which caught the final move­ments of Leiby, which led to the even­tual iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and cap­ture of his killer.

In the wake of the mur­der, local politi­cians now want to give New York City busi­nesses tax breaks to encour­age them to install more sur­veil­lance cam­eras, osten­si­bly under leg­is­la­tion called “Leiby’s Ini­tia­tive.”

But will this actu­ally pre­vent future kid­nap­pings? Taken at face value, this mea­sure might seem to make sense, espe­cially in our society’s cul­ture of fear, obses­sion with ‘safety’ and litigation.

Read the rest on Parenta­bles.

At first glance, Kate MccGwire’s feather sculp­tures seem to be frozen in the fren­zied cli­max of some kind of per­pet­ual move­ment. The mys­te­ri­ous feath­ered forms writhe and undu­late, seem­ingly with­out end at times, cre­at­ing a real visual and tex­tural feast for the senses. But MccGwire’s method­ol­ogy for these grace­ful sculp­tures begins with reuse. In fact, the London-based artist uses recy­cled feath­ers from all sorts of birds — pigeon, crow, duck, mag­pie, pheas­ant — gath­ered from a wide net­work of pigeon rac­ers and farm­ers who actu­ally send her feath­ers in the thou­sands by mail.

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Here on Tree­Hug­ger we’ve already seen min­i­mal­ist hotels made out of giant sec­tions of con­crete tub­ing. But who would have known con­crete tub­ing could be actu­ally made to look invit­ing, much less for trav­ellers look­ing to stay in one of Mexico’s more pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tions? Located less than an hour away from Mex­ico City, Tepoztlan’sTubo­ho­tel is an afford­able hotel that uses recy­cled con­crete tub­ing for its rooms, a strat­egy employed by design­ers T3arc to build a hotel quickly and cheaply, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the area’s spec­tac­u­lar views.

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It’s the Tree­Hug­ger mantra of “less is more”: we find the smaller but effi­cient spaces of micro­houses fas­ci­nat­ing and irre­sistable, espe­cially when they’re afford­able, well-designed or even DIY-friendly. More often than not, you find homes in orthog­o­nal, angu­lar shapes — but is this form truly effi­cient? Swedish designer Torsten Ottesjö’sHus.Ett (that’s Swedish for “House One”) is a propo­si­tion to that ques­tion. Sit­u­ated like a min­i­mal but grace­ful, sweep­ing ges­ture in a wooded area in Swe­den, it delib­er­ately dis­tin­guishes itself from other more cube-like microhouses.

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Hong Kong as a city and as an expe­ri­ence never ceases to amaze me. Though the stereo­typ­i­cal image of Hong Kong as a glit­ter­ing, pol­luted ultra-modern metrop­o­lis still stands, it’s sur­pris­ing to dis­cover that even just a half-hour ferry ride away from the main island, pock­ets of quiet rural liv­ing and rel­a­tively unde­vel­oped beaches still exist.

The same can be said for Michael Leung, who is appar­ently Hong Kong’s first urban bee­keeper. Leung is also the founder and cre­ative direc­tor of HK (Hong Kong) Honey, an orga­ni­za­tion that links local bee­keep­ers with city dwellers by pro­vid­ing locally pro­duced honey prod­ucts. But the organization’s ulti­mate goal is to also help sus­tain declin­ing bee pop­u­la­tions, while rais­ing aware­ness by keep­ing a vital rela­tion­ship between peo­ple and bees alive.

Read the rest and see the video on Tree­Hug­ger.

Here’s a great con­cept for a hotel: con­vert an old, unused vac­uum fac­tory space into a bud­get bou­tique hotel — and even bet­ter, use refur­bished mobile campers for rooms. That’s what Berlin’s new and attrac­tive Hüt­ten­palast (that’s Ger­man for “hut palace”) is doing in the beau­ti­ful old work­ers’ quar­ter of Neukölln: allow­ing guests to expe­ri­ence the cozy camp­ing feel­ing, with­out the bugs and in the mid­dle of a vibrant city. But it’s hardly ‘rough­ing it’ in the soli­tary sense — the car­a­vans are beau­ti­fully remod­elled, bath­rooms are “lux­u­ri­ous” and guests can social­ize with each other — but with­out the row­di­ness usu­ally asso­ci­ated with cheap hostels.

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We’ve seen pre­fab saunas, house­boat saunas and secret saunas, so what about mobile saunas? Czech design team H3T Archi­tects put together this sweet lit­tle sweat-pod that can be towed any­where you please by tan­dem bike. Enveloped in translu­cent pan­els, the Bike Sauna allows users to park it in var­i­ous locales, trans­form­ing any spot into a relax­ing haven. But don’t let its small appear­ance throw you off, appar­ently it can seat up to six peo­ple (granted, in prob­a­bly some­what close quar­ters). But inside there’s every­thing that makes it cozy, like a real wood-fired stove.

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