How China Can Leverage High-Speed Rail for Compact Urban Development
Zhengzhou, China HSR Station
Many large Chinese cities have developed around transport corridors. Hangzhou and Suzhou, for example, grew wealthy from their position on the Grand Canal, which connected northern and southern China. Today, the country’s high-speed rail (HSR) system is proving to be ...
Friday Fun: From Stadiums to Public Parks, the Impacts of Space for Sports in Cities
Beijing basketball courts
There are countless ways to analyze—and visualize—sports. For instance, there’s a wide spectrum of where and how sports are played in cities around the world. Professional sports typically take place in expensive stadiums, which are expected to draw crowds of ...
Urbanizing India: A Closer Look
Connect Karo 2015, New Delhi
From April 15 to 16, 2015 in New Delhi, city and transport leaders from around the world came together for the third annual edition of WRI India’s CONNECTKaro conference. This year’s theme of Smart Cities for Sustainable Development and focused on ...
How Food Waste Costs Our Cities Millions
Food waste in Seoul, South Korea
It would take farm land the size of Mexico just to grow the amount of food that humans produce, but do not eat, every year. More food goes uneaten at the consumption phase of the supply chain—in places like homes, ...
Upcoming Habitat III Conference Offers Opportunity for Leaders to Set a New Urban Agenda
Habitat III Opening Day
In 1950, fewer than 800 million people lived in urban areas. Today that number is almost 5 billion, and is expected to surpass 6 billion by 2045, according to the UN World Urbanization Prospects. Urban growth—and its related challenges of ...
Greening bus fleets requires a range of strategies
By using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GPC) to determine the sources of the city’s emissions, Rio de Janeiro was able to set realistic targets to reducing transport emissions. Photo by EMBARQ Brasil/Flickr.
In 2012 alone, Latin America saw 131,000 preventable air pollution-related deaths. To reduce emissions and improve air quality, it’s essential that public transit fleets—like buses—become more fuel-efficient. Adopting cleaner fuels—like natural gas or low-sulfur diesel—and upgrading to technologies that produce ...
Friday Fun: The daily life of informal settlements in a series of striking new videos
Dhaka Information Settlements
As a filmmaker, writer, and editor, Cassim Shepard is particularly attentive to the many complex ways that rapid global urbanization is affecting people at a very fundamental level—what they see, feel, and do in daily city life. Commissioned by Design ...
Four lessons from Beijing and Shanghai show how China’s cities can curb car congestion
Beijing TDM
A century of car-centric urban development has left our cities polluted, congested and searching for sustainable solutions. Transport Demand Management (TDM) strategies can provide these solutions by combining public policy and private sector innovation to reverse over-reliance on private cars. ...
Why we need solutions at scale to solve today’s urban challenges
2015 ICLEI World Congress in Seoul, South Korea
Editor’s note April 14, 2015: This article was updated to include a reference to the Bus Rapid Transit Centre of Excellence.  The world has never been more urban than it is now, and this trend isn’t expected to slow down ...
China’s clean air challenge: Public unrest forges the path ahead
China's Clean Air Challenge
This is the second installment of the China’s Clean Air Challenge series, exclusive to TheCityFix. This series examines the increasing social, environmental, and economic impacts of serious air quality issues in Chinese cities, and investigates the source of emissions and ...