Time to Rethink the Skyscraper
The climate crisis has us questioning where people live, work, and how they get between the two. We’ve known for decades that low density sub-urban living is horrible for the…
urban planning
Kids Love Living in Cities
Urban places are already good places since they are more environmentally friendly than sub-urban places and have fantastic access to culture. Research in Toronto has revealed that children love cities…
This Parking Space Technique Holds 10 Times More Vehicles
There’s a fiction that cars are needed in cities and we should provide parts of our limited land in urban centres so one person can leave their car. This fiction…
How to Build People Focussed Communities
The Sustainable City Show · Ep 3: Creating Car-Free Communities | In Conversation With Eckart Wurzner & Chris Shears A sustainable world is a walkable city. Over at the Sustainable…
Hamburg Builds for a Future of Higher Seas
Hamburg’s transition from being seen as only an industrial port to a thriving cultural hub is well underway and part of that transition is to ensure the city can survive…
SF’s Busiest Street Removed Cars and Traffic Improved
Market Street in San Fransico connects many communities within the city, yet using it to navigate from place to another was a slog. Until they got rid of cars last…
Milan’s Massive Mobility Mission
The Cambio project in Milan aims to get more people on two wheels while also improving the cityscape. Milan once had a reputation as an industrial city clogged with traffic,…
Spreading the Movement Against Sprawl
Where you live matters. Who chooses in what type of building you can choose to live in matters too. Undoubtedly most people want to live in walkable communities, yet in…
Why 30 km/h is Best for Every City
People move through cities in whatever mode of transportation gets them from point A to point B efficiently. Car focussed developments restrained people’s freedoms by focussing only one form of…
We can Save 200,000 Lives a Year Replacing Car Commutes with Bicycles
A simple modification to our cities can save a lot of lives: add more and better bicycling infrastructure. Researchers looked into quantifying how many lives we can save by replacing…
Paris, the City of Bike Lights
When I visited Paris long ago it was a traffic clogged mess, with lovely architecture. Parisians have had enough of bad traffic and decided to solve their mobility challenges by…
Cities of the Future Act as Sponges
When it rains cities should hold all the water. In the 20th century that idea would have been laughed out of the room; today, we know better. Urban water management…
Make Believe Ideas and the City
The mayor of Toronto, like other 20th century mayors, believes in mystical solutions to urban problems. In the 21st century smart mayors are shedding the myths and make-believe thinking around…
To Revive Main Streets Let’s Make them People Focussed Instead of Business Focussed
Since the proliferation of big box stores and malls small cities have been struggling to keep their downtowns engaging and profitable for businesses. What if we rethought our downtowns to…
A Real Smart City Lacks Smart Technology
A few years ago Silicon Valley mega corps thought all cities should be made “smart” by tracking all citizen data. There was a concentrated effort by Google to violate privacy…
How Cities Deal with More Intense Heat Waves
Global warming is bringing more intense heat waves to our urban environments which means cities will need to adapt to the new temperatures. Indeed, regular readers will recognize a lot…
It’s Time to Destroy Highways to Build Cities
People make cities an interesting place to be. It’s the people that produce culture and economic prosperity, yet many cities have highways going right through them. These highways make the…
The Suburbs Are Bad, Here’s How to Make Them Good
We need to change the way we build and live if we’re going to avert catastrophic climate change, and it’s time we think about the biggest carbon offender: the suburbs.…
Ending the Gender Gap in Transportation
There is a gender gap in our cities and it’s all thanks to car-centric design. Everybody knows that cars destroy urban centers and cause a lot of harm to public…