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CycLOUvia — creatively returning the streets to the people

Debra Lam's picture

CycLOUvia Street SceneBardstown Road is one of the busiest streets in Louisville, Kentucky. It is lined with restaurants, shops, and bars, and often filled with traffic. But this past Sunday for four hours, three miles of the road was closed to cars. Instead, pedestrians and cyclists hit the streets in a free, public event called CycLOUvia. CycLOUvia invited residents to “human-powered Bardstown Road,” advocating, “life at five miles per hour can be much more of a rush than speeding along at 35 miles per hour”. The event was part of Kentucky’s 2nd Sunday Open Streets (2S) initiative as a response to the state’s high obesity rates and designed to encourage communities to engage in more forms of physical activity in the urban space.

It’s Time to Scale Up - and Speed Up

Peter Head's picture

Prof Peter Head
Director, Arup and Executive Chairman, The Ecological Sequestration Trust

Ecological Sequestration Trust logoProf Peter Head will share his work with The Ecological Sequestration Trust through a monthly blog on sustainable cities. For more information on the Trust log on to http://www.ecosequestrust.org/

Earlier this month, I gave a presentation to the urban team at The World Bank about the work of our newly formed UK Charity, The Ecological Sequestration Trust.

I created the Charity in April 2011 because I could see, through the work of my brilliant global planning team in Arup that, while the path towards a low carbon resilient world was getting clearer, the overall rate of change is too slow to meet the required reduction of emissions and ecological footprint to create a more stable world for us to live in. We need to scale up - and speed up.

Improving Slums: Stories from Sao Paulo

Written by Fernando Serpone Bueno and Veridiana Sedeh, São Paulo

SÃO PAULO – Seventh largest among the world's metropolises and the linchpin of Brazil's booming economy, São Paulo presents a globally relevant case study of stepped-up efforts — but continued deep challenges — if cities are to correct the deep poverty and environmental perils of massive slum settlements.

Favela in BrazilClose to a third of São Paulo's 11 million people — in a metropolitan region of almost 20 million — live in slum-like conditions. There are some 1,600 favelas (private or public lands that began as squatter settlements), 1,100 "irregular" land subdivisions (developed without legally recognized land titles), and 1,900 cortiços (tenement houses, usually overcrowded and in precarious state of repair).