Short 'product lives' and disposable packaging result in premature disposal of valuable resources. Industrialisation, mass production and global supply chains have resulted in a disconnect between people, places, materials and design. Upcycling is reuse of discarded materials which results in an increase in 'value'. We discuss the potential for creative upcycling to reconnect people with materials and establish cultures and communities of making. The reaction of the public to creative reuse is explored by creating a café structure made entirely from recycled materials, and this provides the starting point to consider the contexts in which upcycling occurs, the motivations for (and barriers to) reuse and upcycling, the potential benefits of upcycling in the context of affluent Western 'consumer' societies, and the scope for designers to imbue objects with the potential for creative reuse. We argue that designing to enable creative upcycling allows the future lives of objects to be contingent on context and culture, rather than being prescribed by the designer, with potential for widespread social, economic and environmental benefits.

A sustainable and secure food supply within a low-carbon and resilient infrastructure is encapsulated in several of The United Nations' 17 sustainable development goals. The integration of urban agriculture in buildings can offer improved efficiencies; in recognition of this, the first south European example of a fully integrated rooftop greenhouse (iRTG) was designed and incorporated into the ICTA-ICP building by the Autonomous University of Barcelona. This design seeks to interchange heat, CO2 and rainwater between the building and its rooftop greenhouse. Average air temperatures for 2015 in the iRTG were 16.5°C (winter) and 25.79°C (summer), making the iRTG an ideal growing environment. Using detailed thermophysical fabric properties, 2015 site-specific weather data, exact control strategies and dynamic soil temperatures, the iRTG was modelled in EnergyPlus to assess the performance of an equivalent 'freestanding' greenhouse. The validated result shows that the thermal interchange between the iRTG and the ICTA-ICP building has considerable moderating effects on the iRTG's indoor climate; since average hourly temperatures in an equivalent freestanding greenhouse would have been 4.1°C colder in winter and 4.4°C warmer in summer under the 2015 climatic conditions. The simulation results demonstrate that the iRTG case study recycled 43.78 MWh of thermal energy (or 341.93 kWh/m 2 /yr) from the main building in 2015. Assuming 100% energy conversion efficiency, compared to freestanding greenhouses heated with oil, gas or biomass systems, the iRTG delivered an equivalent carbon savings of 113.8, 82.4 or 5.5 kg.CO2(eq)/m 2 /yr, respectively, and economic savings of 19.63,15.88 or 17.33 €/m 2 /yr, respectively. Under 1 similar climatic conditions, this symbiosis between buildings and urban agriculture makes an iRTG an efficient resource-management model and supports the promotion of a new typology or concept of buildings with a nexus or symbiosis between energy efficiency and food production.

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