Health & Nutrition

people and cities

Initiatives like these are fine examples of how friendly interactions in urban spaces, however simple they may be, can be very beneficial in making the experience of living in a city more inviting and welcoming.[read more]

urban air quality

Air pollution needs to be dealt with in a more holistic manner, wherein major contributors, like industries, power plants, and vehicles are addressed together. No one policy is sufficient to deal with this multi-faceted problem.[read more]

green roof in Kabul

Upon identifying the specifics of climate change, we can create relevant methods within our communities to internalize these specifics and to develop strategic, pro-active responses to contend with the harsh reality of climate change.[read more]

Josh O'Conner is a Senior Editor for the Urban Times an online magazine. He's a planner by trade and an advocate for community-oriented urbanism. When he's off the clock, Josh STILL likes urban planning. But he also fills his time with small-scale agriculture, ecology, and sociology. He does all that with his wife and daughters in...[read more]

urban green revolution

With global carbon dioxide levels at a historic high, something major needs to happen if we are to get anything close to a sustainable use of the planet’s resources. Could a ‘green revolution’ in cities be the solution?[read more]

get the children outside!

If children are the future, we seem to be very short-sighted when it comes to urban design. Very little, if any at all, of the current discourse on the type of cities we should be building truly considers whether these cities will be child friendly.[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]

better bike lanes

Inspired by the European and Canadian model, bike sharing programs are now spreading across the States, set to transform American cities, with their number growing 50% this year compared with 2012.[read more]

after the tsunami

Indonesia is prone to natural disasters. But today the country is better prepared. Why? Because of the lessons it learned in responding to a series of disasters that pummeled it between 2004 and 2010.[read more]

quality of life in Boston

For the past several years, the Boston Foundation has been collecting data on key indicators of the health of the city’s economic, social, and natural environment.[read more]

boulevards in Paris

The boulevards laid out by Baron Haussmann were lined with trees which were heavily pruned every year, a maintenance regime which kept these trees in perpetual adolescence and allowed them to exist with much smaller soil volumes.[read more]

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]