sustainable cities

Dead as a dodo?

If we allow the nature of our cities to be valued in terms of the marketplace rather than its integral necessity to our collective health and well-being, there is nothing to prevent it from going the way of the Dodo.[read more]

Show notes from this episode are available at Urbanism Speakeasy. [read more]

The World Resources Institute, led by its sustainable transport center, EMBARQ, and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) established a partnership today that will further their mutual goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from urban transportation. The partnership focuses on scaling up solutions and enhancing C40 cities transport efforts related to sustainable urban planning, bus rapid transit systems, and non-motorized transit initiatives.[read more]

After joining the European Union back in 2007, the word “sustainability” started to be heard more frequently in Romania. New opportunities for people to explore and learn from Western countries were suddenly opened. The five biggest cities in the country are taking very different steps to reduce energy consumption, increase urban regeneration and encourage non-automobile mobility.[read more]

people via Shutterstock

Here at This Big City our focus has predominantly been on the human aspect of sustainable cities since we started publishing back in 2009, and this year we finally dedicated a category to ‘People’ and their contribution to sustainable cities. Here’s five of our favourite posts from this category in 2012:[read more]

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan intends to dig a new canal between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. This giant feat of engineering, currently on track for completion in 2023, will produce a giant pile of dirt, carved out from the mainland of the country — around 1 billion square meters (10.76 billion square feet) of...[read more]

Warren Karlenzig at TEDx MissionTEDx Mission recently invited me to speak at their San Francisco event on how cities are using collective intelligence approaches to address climate change and climate change adaptation. Crowdsourcing and savvy planning are producing healthier quality of life and more resilient urban economies. The talk...[read more]

Resilient cities need infrastructure that lasts and planning teams that are willing to step up to the plate. Designing structures that can sustain decades of use requires forethought beyond the basic combination of blocks, steel and glass. Just like sidewalks and street corners, city buildings have the power to connect people to one another.[read more]

Ericsson have released an interesting new infographic which looks at the role of technology in creating sustainable cities as global population hits an expected 9 billion in 2050. The ‘rapid deployment of broadband networks’ is obviously something of interest to a multinational tech company, but this infographic also looks at the...[read more]

Last week The Atlantic hosted its 4th annual Green Intelligence Forum on sustainable cities, assembling a rich buffet of experts and moderators. The Forum made clear the complexity of the sustainable cities movement but also its necessity, what with millions migrating to urban areas amid scarcer resources. Demand is soaring on many fronts for safe, healthy, livable places, and smarter urbanization is looking less like a trend than an inevitability. Five things I took away from the conversations:[read more]

“Sustainability in America’s Cities: Creating the Green Metropolis,” edited by Matthew Slavin, founder and Principal of Sustaingrϋp, is a collection of case studies that chart the progress of sustainable urban development in eight cities across the United States. The case studies explain how these cities have applied...[read more]

We could blame it on our competitive nature, but it is widely known that we enjoy hearing about how the places and things that we love hold up against the places and things of "others." We are surrounded by rankings in almost every field of life: schools and universities compete for the highest spots in national and international league...[read more]