Taxes go up, taxes go down (sometimes). Does it ever seems to make a real difference on the ground in your neighborhood? The typical temptation is to strive to cut costs and then reduce spending. What if instead of cutting spending we changed spending to create virtuous circles of savings and improvements?
Worldwide, we now have so many devices connected to the internet that we nearly ran out of internet addresses for all of them.
Heavy rains and flood waters flow across the impervious surfaces of roads and parking lots. That flow pushes pollution on those surfaces–plastic bottles, cigarette butts, motor oil–into stormwater management systems. That pollution then dumps into lakes and streams. This system is how so much plastic ends up in our oceans.
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
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.
Government, along with public and social sector marketers, should serve citizens not customers.
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
According to U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 47 percent of fatal traffic accidents in the U.S. occur in urban areas, resulting in nearly 15,000 deaths per year. That’s more than 40 people dying each day on urban roadways. If there was a data-driven design for transportation infrastructure that saved lives, shouldn’t we implement it?...Continue reading
Critics of government spending claim that building quality infrastructure for the social good is not affordable. Focus on utility and low cost, they say. No need for grand stone building with imposing facades. Their concerns touch on two core marketing topics, design and pricing.
In their recent report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave US infrastructure a grade of D+. ASCE also said bad infrastructure costs U.S. households $9 per day in higher prices, poor service, repairs, and wasted time. For just $3 per day, they say we could fix the problem. Those numbers sound small,...Continue reading