Demographics

public transit

Friends told me I could easily get a house. But I didn’t want to increase my carbon footprint by moving into a bigger house just because I could afford it. And I was not going to drive to school everyday to study Sustainability.[read more]

affordable housing

San Francisco voters passed Proposition C, establishing a city-wide affordable housing fund on the enormous margin of 31 percent. And it couldn’t have come at a better time.[read more]

talking limits of Arctic resilience

The Arctic is in the spotlight like never before. Yet most discussions of the Arctic fail to consider how changes in climate, ecosystems, economics, and society interact.[read more]

solar-powered water pump

Can solar power help eradicate extreme poverty in the developing world? As we’ve shown a number of times, many social entrepreneurs think so, and are investing their time and money in a variety of technologies.[read more]

Braddock, outside Pittsburgh

When the numbers go down, the assumption is brain drain. The problem is lack of brain gain. But locals won’t hear of it despite the preponderance of data stating the contrary.[read more]

2013 Index

Ever wondered where you need to live in order to be considered unusual if you don’t ride to work? To have urban planners fighting over how to make the city as friendly a place as possible for you, the cyclist?[read more]

Rust Belt foodies

Talent leaving Chicago would skip over the Rust Belt and land in a coastal metro. Over the last decade, that pattern has changed as native daughters and sons returned home after cutting their teeth in a Big City.[read more]

Jaime Lerner

The architect and urban planner Jaime Lerner – former Mayor of Curitiba for three terms and former Governor of Paraná for two terms – regards large urban center problems with a unique point of view.[read more]

Manhattan’s street grid is potentially the most powerful city building tool ever created. It has forced all new growth to integrate itself into the rest of the city, linking new into the old.[read more]

biking in India

Mysore, a historic city in southern India, is home to numerous palaces and ancient monuments. Mysore’s mixture of local commuters, tourists, students, and visiting business professionals, makes Mysore an ideal environment for biking.[read more]

Cuban medical exports

Talent is the new oil. Really, talent is the new gasoline or diesel fuel. People are the raw material, refined through education. Better to export a value added product than be a banana republic.[read more]

The third coast

For a global city such as Chicago, brain drain isn’t an existential threat. What makes a city great are the outsiders who move there. Many people who are important look at a city as a place to try out new ideas.[read more]