Health & Nutrition

Green Lunch!

Her name is Cynthia Neftin, and she is the owner of Oxnard, California-based Café Nefola, whose motto is “healthy, local, fresh and natural.” An additional tag line – “from fat to fit, this is it” – leaves no doubt as to the restaurant’s orientation.[read more]

Bike Accessibility

Promoting bicycle ridership has become a widespread mission across many regions, and in California’s East Bay, the East Bay Bicycle Coalition has grown to be the primary advocacy group to make bicycling more feasible and safer.[read more]

Dutch City Biking

On the 4th March 2013, Andrew Gilligan, the Mayor of London's Cycling Commissioner, stated that "it took 40 years to turn Amsterdam in to Amsterdam". But it will take even longer to turn London in to a cycling nirvana.[read more]

Urban Wildlife

There are a lot of reasons that we should support urban biodiversity. On the utilitarian side, these organisms provide ecosystem services like photosynthesis, decomposition, control of pests, and the processing of air and water pollution.[read more]

Biking in Miami

Though ranked among the least bike-friendly cities in the country, Miami is improving. Improvements are enhancing some of the country’s most dangerous areas for riders and walkers.[read more]

Water Purification Costs

An inexpensive new material made of clay and papaya seeds removes harmful metals from water and could lower the cost of providing clean water to millions of people in the developing world.[read more]

Increasing Biking in New Orleans

 

This past May 2013, New Orleans received a Bronze Bicycle Friendly Community award from the League of American Bicyclists. Undoubtedly, the award was well deserved. New Orleans now has almost 2% of its population commuting by bike.[read more]

Improving Public Spaces

Food trucks are all the rage these days. Go-To tools for urban designers, aspiring restaurateurs and festival planners, they are seen as a relatively quick and easy way to activate spaces.[read more]

how cities shape us

Have we designed our communities in such a way that we are contributing to the obesity epidemic and other health problems? This infographic illustrates some of the findings from a recent Pew Research study.[read more]

The 21st Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU 21) was held in Salt Lake City last week. In between sessions, John Simmerman sat down with Urbanism Speakeasy to chat about his efforts to make communities more active. He has an interesting background, coming from a health and wellness line of work. You can hear more about his work at...[read more]

Cities with enough density can promote creativity and resource efficiency at the same time: a win-win solution to both economy and ecology, obtained, counter-intuitively, in town.[read more]

pocket parks

 

It is no secret that successful cities are also green cities. This includes tree-lined boulevards, large regional or central parks, and smaller, neighborhood-scale pocket parks.[read more]