Posts in the 'Guest Contributor' category
Mayors from Latin America, Africa and Asia will be welcoming more than 90% of the new urban inhabitants in the next decade. Governing these ballooning cities is a continuing challenge, not just in terms of urban design and revitalization, but ...
Since COP27 wound down late last year (November 6-18), much of the post event commentary has centered on the fact that as observed by The Conversation, the gathering “failed to go beyond the 2021 Glasgow climate pact’s promise to phase down ...
A picture is worth a thousand words, and dozens of photographers from diverse backgrounds captured scenes portraying their visions of a desirable and more sustainable city at COP27. Submissions to the Transformative Urban Coalitions photo competition were made by people ...
Let’s not forget what we learned during 2020 about the fragility of our food supply chains: the prevailing, globalized model is as fragile as a spider web. It can shatter into dangling threads in times of crisis, such as a pandemic ...
At COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, world leaders will focus on the seemingly overwhelming task of fast-tracking the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions while lessoning our dependence on fossil fuels. Two days later, Urban Transitions 2022 gets underway in Sitges, ...
Congestion pricing is one of the most common-sense tools to curbing traffic, reducing tailpipe emissions and creating a more efficient transportation system that gets people where they need to go. It’s also extremely politically contentious, especially in cities in the ...
Since its inception in 2020, the focus of Daring Cities has been to catalyze and accelerate local climate emergency action. And certainly, with well over 2,000 jurisdictions from around the world having formally declared a climate emergency, there is no shortage of ...
Think big. Think bold. Think mission to the moon! That’s the goal of the European Commission’s EU Mission program, which aims to package together funding, research and policy changes to deliver “concrete results” on ambitious goals by 2030. These goals ...
To achieve more equitable, resilient, low-carbon societies, cities need big changes to critical infrastructure and systems. But ample research shows they can’t raise the investment needed for those big changes on their own. Municipalities depend on higher levels of government ...
In 2015, the chairman of a Kampala administrative zone about 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the city’s downtown addressed a hand-written note to the chairman of a minibus taxi association. He humbly requested the group of drivers expand its services ...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), composed of hundreds of the world’s leading scientists, puts considerable weight on urban climate action in developing pathways towards sustainable futures. The 6th Assessment Report of the IPCC recognizes that urban areas present ...
ICLEI has long recommended that cities take integrated climate action, tackling both mitigation – lowering greenhouse gas emissions to prevent future climate change – and adaptation – preparing to cope with the climate change of today – in a holistic ...
I recently had the pleasure of re-visiting Curitiba, Brazil, thanks to an invitation from the Smart Cities Expo. I made my first pilgrimage in 2000, when Bogotá was implementing its bus rapid transit system, Transmilenio, and returned twice after that. ...
The sheer volume of data collected globally has grown exponentially. But particularly in developing and emerging countries, major gaps in availability, quality and usability of data lead to a lack of significant resources necessary to face complex urban challenges. The ...
As the pandemic has changed the way we get around and purchase goods, the world is considering how to make transport more efficient and sustainable. We’ve seen increasing efforts to expand electric mobility, as governments formulate policies to stimulate adoption ...
