Posts in the 'Urban Development' category
Capital City, a (hypothetical) seaside metropolis, has a growing population. However, much of its infrastructure was built 100 years ago and is straining from deferred maintenance, unable to meet the city’s future needs. To make matters worse, Capital City has ...
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been told to stay at home, stay close to our neighborhoods and try to enjoy being outside. But what if there is no park nearby? What if your home is tiny with no outdoor ...
Between the 1918 flu pandemic and the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, our ability to understand the effects of infectious diseases has increased exponentially. Networked personal devices and automated sensors are now ubiquitous, not to mention communications technologies like the internet that ...
As the world reels from the COVID-19 pandemic, investment packages are taking shape to provide relief and recovery. Cities from New York to Nairobi are not only on the frontlines of the health and economic impacts, but they provide immense ...
Inequality is shaping how people are experiencing COVID-19 in cities to a startling degree. The vulnerability of the urban poor is striking everywhere, but the divide is more visible in some places than others. This is where I live on ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a disruptive new normal for everyone through shelter-in-place orders and social distancing guidelines. But for the billions of urban poor, these guidelines aren’t just burdensome; they’re essentially impossible. Social distancing is a critically important response ...
The impacts of the global COVID-19 pandemic are still being understood, but it does seem clear that this crisis will make a mark on cities, physically and socially, that will echo for generations. How we plan our cities has always ...
Mérida, a city in Mexico’s lush Yucatán Peninsula, is home to 2.3 million trees, which cover more than 20% of the metropolitan area. Mérida’s officials know that these trees provide benefits to the residents, but until recently they didn’t know how ...
The Trillion Trees Initiative has garnered support from business and political leaders around the world. U.S. President Trump highlighted the initiative as the cornerstone of his plan to protect the environment, a rare shift for an administration that has moved to withdraw ...
Teenage activist Greta Thunberg has attracted global renown with her message to the world’s leaders that they must act now to address climate change. Time Magazine recently recognized her as the 2019 Person of the Year. But Thunberg’s recognition is ...
“Cities are special,” Luis Bettencourt says in an interview for the Cities Research Seminar Series, but they may only be beginning to tap into their full potential. We need to think about cities more as “collective systems that have their ...
In the urban neighborhood known as Kosovo Village in Nairobi, Kenya, 95% of residents defecate in communal or shared facilities where untreated human waste drains directly into a nearby river. During a storm, fetid and polluted waters flood the riverbanks, ...
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 14 years ago, hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs, homes and possessions. But some people were hit harder than others. Nearly two-thirds of jobs lost after the hurricane were lost by women, and ...
Many cities, particularly in the global South, have large areas of informal settlements ‒ poor neighborhoods that grew organically, but which often lack structurally sound buildings and services like running water, sanitation and waste management. The traditional approach to upgrading ...
Innovation in cities has alleviated poverty, reduced wasteful resource consumption and achieved incredible economic outcomes. It’s part of the secret sauce that has led to the primacy of cities in today’s world, with urban areas accounting for 67% of global ...
