Human Interest

Last Thursday, France passed legislation that new commercial buildings are required to have green roofs.

In order to decrease the environmental impact of new construction, new buildings in commercial zones must have either rooftop plants or solar panels. These rooftop gardens not only insulate the building with their thermal mass, but they also filter water and help prevent excess runoff and storm water overflows.

France is not the first government to legislate green roofs. In 2009, The City of Toronto began requiring some new buildings to include rooftop planting in their design, and in Switzerland, all buildings must have a green roof if they have a suitable pitch...

With only 20 percent of the population, the world’s 300 largest metropolitan economies account for nearly half of global economic output. Through our new Global MetroMonitor report and interactive, users can understand the individual trajectories of the world’s large metropolitan economies and gain new insights into sources of growth that national or regional assessments tend to obscure.

These cities that are doing the best at embracing the future are focusing on improving technology, equality, sharing, civic participation, and more.

Over the past several years, the idea of the being "smart" has emerged as a key mechanism for cities to find innovative solutions to the challenges that they are facing. Increased demand for infrastructure, housing, transportation, jobs, energy, food and water are all straining city governments and infrastructure, as people around the world flock to urban centers in hopes of a better life and more opportunity. For many years, the push to create smarter cities was led by technology companies looking for uses (and buyers) for their products. But in recent years, cities have begun to think more holistically about what being a smart city could mean, and have innovated new ways to modernize how a city serves its citizens.

A complete lack of natural resources is prompting the urban island city-state of Singapore to generate its own green infrastructure. Its rapidly growing population, which is one-and-a-half times that of the city of Los Angeles but spread across an area half the size, is another driver. And while the green push is most visible in the walls and bays of vegetation that garnish its stock of high-rise apartments and offices, its impact is far deeper. That’s thanks in part to a government-led sustainable-building certification program that aims to green 80 percent of the city-state’s existing building stock by 2030...

The warmer conditions cities create make plant-eating pests thrive.

The growth of these cities will create a host of environmental and health problems.

By 2210, the global population is expected to grow from just more than 7 billion to 11.3 billion — with 87 percent of the population living in urban areas, according to a new working paper by researchers from NYU’s Marron Institute.

Most of these individuals will be in what’s now the developing world — creating a host of environmental and health problems.

If projections are correct, these new urban dwellers will require the world’s existing cities to expand six-fold to accommodate triple the residents, Richard Florida wrote in The Atlantic. Plus, the world will need 500 new “megacities” of 10 million or more, he wrote.

As a part of its EMBARQ Sustainable Urban Mobility initiative, the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities has created a global reference guide called Cities Safer by Design “to help cities save lives from traffic fatalities through improved street design and smart urban development."

To walk in our cities is more than just a simple act of transport. Walking represents an appropriation of urban space for daily life. It means being an active part of the urban environment by learning, understanding and shaping the city on a personal level. Walking is one of the most democratic and equitable ways of getting around, but it’s also one of the ways most linked to factors outside an individual’s control, like social or physical abilities and the presence of infrastructure to walk comfortably and safely.

These are the factors that define walkability, which refers to how safe, convenient, and efficient it is to walk in an urban environment. Walkability has a direct impact on urban residents’ mobility, as the term is often used to communicate how likely the average person is to choose walking over other modes of transport in a given area...

Despite an admittedly strong preference for the automobile, Los Angeles and other forward-thinking cities are now re-allocating public (and private) land away from the car so that people can use the space for other purposes. 

The automobile remains the best transportation option in all but a few U.S. cities. However, we can strike a better balance with how we use the precious resource of space in our cities. By dedicating so much land to traveling comfortably and quickly by car, we miss out on using that land to create interesting places to travel to. While some communities may still require copious amounts of parking and travel lanes, others are developing different neighborhood priorities, like green space, local business presence, or better biking and walking infrastructure. We need to plan for flexibility, for the accommodation of what we cannot yet imagine.

People that commute by car spend an inordinate amount of time staring at taillights. There’s no way they’re getting around that traffic in front of them. But what about bike commuters? This group of Latvian cyclists recently created a powerful demonstration of the large footprint created by cars that carry just one occupant.

The four cyclists strapped on fragile frameworks shaped like cars, then hopped into the local traffic in Riga to show how much room they would occupy on their daily commute. The difference communicates loud and clear: if these cyclists were actually in cars, they would seriously add to congestion.

Here comes Charlanta the Gargantua.

This collection of media resources focuses on the liveability of places, particularly cities. But what makes one place...

Sydney and Melbourne have cemented their place on a list of the world's most expensive cities in which to live.