Posts tagged with 'urban expansion'
Before sunrise in Bogotá’s southern hills, the day’s first passengers are already on the move. By 4 a.m., a fleet of aging SUVs, locally known as carritos, begin climbing the steep, unpaved streets of Ciudad Bolívar. They weave through neighborhoods ...
Well-located housing — integrated with mass transit, public services and climate-resilient design — is an instrument of urban productivity, not an add-on to urban planning. In Bogotá, this integration is becoming central to how the city responds to accelerating climate ...
There’s a growing housing crisis that’s impossible to ignore. Consider the stats: Nearly 3 billion people lack access to housing that is both safe and connected to basic services like energy, water and sanitation. Around 40% of the world’s population lives in ...
With about 464 millimeters of rainfall per year — less than half the global average — South Africa is one of the driest countries in the world. Its semi-arid climate, uneven rainfall distribution and persistent droughts leave the country facing chronic water ...
Despite accounting for less than 3% of global terrestrial area, cities have had an outsized impact on our approach to planetary boundaries, affecting biodiversity and consumption of materials and energy. Studies show that cities have become responsible for 78% of carbon emissions, ...
Cities are not just places where people live—they are interconnected networks of people, services and economic activity. A city is a system of systems, bringing together transportation, energy, buildings, water, waste management and more. Transforming these interconnected systems is vital ...
Cutting Across Siloes, Catalyzing Transformative Change: WRI India’s Deep Dive Approach in Bengaluru
Bengaluru is one of the world’s fastest growing metropolitan economies. A favored destination for investors and talent alike, this leading innovation hub is one of the largest technology clusters worldwide and home to 400 Fortune 500 companies. However, the planning ...
In the Wadala neighborhood of Mumbai, representatives from Kigali, Durban and Mauritius filed into a low, yellow-walled room. They took their seats in rows equipped with desktop computers. Ordinarily, these desks would be filled with the staff responsible for tracking real-time ...
Remote sensing has revolutionized how we measure and understand the Earth. We can now track deforestation across the globe, predict end-of-season crop yields and identify wildfires in near real-time. But exploration into its possibilities for urban areas has only just begun. ...
EDITOR’S NOTE: Sustainable Food Production for a Resilient Rosario won the 2020-2021 Prize for Cities on June 29, 2021. Learn more here. (June 29, 2021) City life can be deeply unfair. This was true before the COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how ...
Among cities with the highest rates of outward expansion are coastal cities that are extremely vulnerable to flooding from sea level rise and storm surges. Map by Resource Watch Urban expansion and sea level rise are combining to increase the ...
The narrative about global inequality and poverty often focuses on rural areas in the global south, with a heavy emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. But the reality is that poverty is becoming more concentrated in cities across the ...
Last week, I had the pleasure of participating in a day-long roundtable discussion with the five finalists for the WRI Ross Prize Cities, organized by WRI at the Ford Foundation in New York City. The roundtable followed the first-ever award ...
Imagine Lagos, Nigeria, a city of 22 million. What was once a small coastal town just a few decades ago has exploded into a sprawling megacity spanning 452 square miles. Its rapid growth has stretched the city’s services impossibly thin: ...
Affordable housing is a crisis that only seems to deepen. Some 1.2 billion people in cities lack access to affordable, secure housing – a number that’s projected to grow to 1.6 billion people by 2025. Cities in the global south, ...
