Friday Fun: How 2 Street Festivals Are Giving Back to the Local Community
Mumbai Street Festival Ganesh Chaturthi
After last week’s Fourth of July celebrations here in Washington DC, summer has truly arrived. Throughout the season, the capital of the US features a spectacular lineup of street festivals in its public squares. From the Fourth of July celebrations ...
The Challenges of Bringing TOD to Brazilian Cities
Biking down the street in Mexico City
Nossa Cidade (“Our City”), from TheCityFix Brasil, explores critical questions for building more sustainable cities. Every month features a new theme. Leaning on the expertise of researchers and specialists in WRI’s sustainable urban mobility team in Brazil, the series will feature in ...
Be a Hummingbird: It’s Time for Concerted Local Action on Climate Change
Be a Hummingbird: It’s Time for Concerted Local Action on Climate Change
The World Summit Climate & Territories (#WSCT) gathered 800 local decision makers in Lyon, France, July 1-2, 2015. In the lead up to COP21 (the 21st Conference of the Parties)—one of the most important climate meetings of the year—mayors and ...
How City Partnerships and a $1 Billion Global Cities Package Could Unlock $17 Trillion in Economic Growth
New Climate Economy Bike Cities
Climate-smart actions—such as investing in public transport and building efficiency—could generate $17 trillion dollars in net savings for cities by 2050 and cut annual greenhouse gas emissions by more than the annual emissions of Japan and Russia combined. Furthermore, with ...
The Next Gold Rush, Excess Capacity, and the Advent of a “Peers Inc” World
Crowds in metro station
From the breakdown of conventional ways of creating and sharing wealth to rising temperatures and increasingly extreme weather events, linear models of development are no longer providing an answer to the pressing challenges that the world is facing. At least, ...
Friday Fun: Cities Celebrating National Birthdays across the Globe
Washington, DC Fireworks
Tomorrow is the 4th of July, and here in Washington DC we’re celebrating our national Independence Day with barbecues, parades, and fireworks. Each year, the federal holiday commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, marking the birth ...
Why Africa Needs to Look to Its Cities to End Hunger
St. Lucia, South Africa Food Market
Last year, the African Union—an assembly of 54 African nations—formally committed to ending hunger in Africa by 2025. This is incredibly ambitious, considering one out of every four people in sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished. The majority of the 800 million ...
How Affordable Housing and TOD Are Coming Together in Brazil
Minha Casa Minha Vida Housing
Nossa Cidade (“Our City”), from TheCityFix Brasil, explores critical questions for building more sustainable cities. Every month features a new theme. Leaning on the expertise of researchers and specialists in WRI’s sustainable urban mobility team in Brazil, the series will feature in ...
Compact, Connected, and Coordinated: A Vision for India's Smart Cities
New services are venturing to transform the way the auto-rickshaw sector is managed in Chennai, India - to the benefit of users. Photo by Mattheui Aubry/Flickr.
Last Thursday could be a turning point in the history of India’s urbanization: the Modi government has unveiled its ambitious Smart City project, which aims to build 100 smart cities across the country. Additionally, the AMRUT program will aim to ...
To Subsidize or Not to Subsidize Public Transport: That Is the Question
TransMilenio BRT in Bogotá, Colombia. Photo by Mariana Gil/EMBARQ Brazil.
Subsidizing users’ fares for public transport may sound like a great idea, and often there are good economic reasons for doing so. In all industrialized and many developing countries, urban transport systems are subsidized with public funds in order to ...