We say that people “throw their hat in the ring” when they run for election. But what if, instead of an election, we just selected a hat at random and its owner won the office? Election lottery is an old idea that’s becoming new again as a way to repair our civics.
Worldwide, we now have so many devices connected to the internet that we nearly ran out of internet addresses for all of them.
Once it was not unusual for a community to have shared land that everyone owned and everyone could benefit from.
Urbanization continues, but urban can’t mean completely paved and mechanized. For protection, sustainability, and happiness, we must align our cities with the natural systems where we build. We need to be consciously designing, funding, and distributing nature in our cities. Urban trees, and nature more broadly, need to be treated as critical infrastructure for cities.Continue reading
Consultants at McKinsey estimate that countries globally can save $1 trillion annually by digitizing government. Yes, Trillion-With-A-T. Those savings could go a long way towards funding needs such as education, health, transportation, and infrastructure. What companies are tapping into this huge opportunity?
Research by Raj Chetty of Stanford University shows that designing healthy communities can increase life expectancy, especially for low-income populations. What features can you design into healthy communities for people earning incomes in the bottom quartile?
One benefit of a strong brand is that customers will pay more or go out of their way for their preferred brand of product or service. How else do you explain basic items like sunglasses priced at more than $1,000? In marketing the social good, is branding public transportation the answer to getting drivers off...Continue reading
More and more of us live in cities, which essentially means we live in neighborhoods. A neighborhood may seem either something that’s always been or something that happened spontaneously. In reality, there’s a spectrum of approaches to neighborhood design, from the “organic” to the highly planned.
Earth already has a majority urban population. According to urban planner Peter Calthorpe, by 2050 our planet’s urban population will double. That means providing social goods and services to billions more city dwellers. How we accommodate that urban growth will say a lot about who we are and want to be. We can choose to...Continue reading
As U.S. cities grow more gridlocked and Millennials adopt mobility services like Uber out of desperation, transit becomes a crucial social good. Without the ability to easily move people and goods, cities become paralyzed. We need a way of designing better transportation systems.