development

clean water

In other parts of the world, low-cost, easily implemented water purification methods may be the key to battling waterborne illness. Read on to find out what is being done to increase access to clean water around the world.[read more]

Why are we always developing or researching sustainable and alternative energies? What’s missing? Is it funding? Some sort of academic, cultural, or political understanding? Or are we waiting for an unknown and unknowable new technology to appear? Perhaps we aren’t waiting for anything; change, after all, is difficult. What’s past is...[read more]

  I’m fond of saying that the best-conceived plan for managing growth and development in North America is the Places to Grow framework adopted by the province of Ontario, Canada.  Constructed pursuant to enabling legislation adopted by the province in 2005, Places to Grow addresses the future of a New Hampshire-sized region...[read more]

Can you use social media to better engage your community? Even in construction?[read more]

The Lorax, Dr. Seuss' fictional account of unchecked urban development gone bad, is as relevant today as it was when it originally appeared in print and on television during the 1970s. This post illustrates several of the tragically unlearned lessons of that whimsically-told, yet nonetheless urgently serious cautionary tale.[read more]

"Driven by desire, participatory design is a 'collective bricolage' in which individuals (clients, users, designers) are able to interrogate the heterogeneity of a situation, to acknowledge their own position and then go beyond it, to open it up to new meanings, new possibilities, to 'collage their own collage onto other collages,' in...[read more]

Not quite the same as all our problems here in South Africa, although driving through Johannesburg the last three days its has distinct similarities to American suburbia – and just as empty and pointless! "From UC Berkeley, a seminar series entitled “Infilling California: Tools and Strategies for Infill Development“, sponsored by the...[read more]

On the 25th July 2011 the draft National Planning Policy Framework was published by Government. After the release of the Natural Environment White Paper in June this year conservation organisations have been highly anticipating the publication of the Framework, which represents the next step in terms of implementing the declarations of...[read more]

At the Atlantic magazine’s “Future of the City” forum, Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and panelists explored how place impacts energy use and climate change. Panelists discussed the future of urban transportation, including technologies and strategies that will define next generation approaches, as well...[read more]

NIMBY opposition to smart growth is standing in the way of environmental progress, writes Josh Harkinson in Mother Jones.  As an example, he cites a proposed development in Alameda County, California, that would have added some 4,000 homes, none taller than three stories, on the 1,500-acre site of an abandoned naval air base...[read more]

"In nature, organisms and species coexist in an ecosystem, where each species has its own place or niche in the system. The environment contains a limited number and amount of resources, and the various species must compete for access to those resources, where successive adaptations in one group put pressure on another group to catch up...[read more]

`The estimated functions show that HSR accessibility has at most a minor effect on house prices" in Taiwan. [Andersson et al., 2010] Examination of local land uses around international high-speed rail stations suggests that were it not for commuter traffic, the effects on land use will not necessarily be localized near the station,...[read more]