We wrote about DIYcity back in late October shortly after its launch. During its roughly six month life span, the budding online project has successfully created a forum for a global community of users to discuss ways that technologies can be utilized to make their respective cities run more efficiently and move towards a more sustainable model. Over that time, creator John Geraci has noticed one overarching challenge begin to emerge, an issue he identifies in a recent post by asking the question, “Can we, collectively, come up with a complete set of tools that ordinary people everywhere can plug into [...]

In Richard Florida’s recent piece for the Atlantic, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” he foresees a more concentrated population centered around cities, leading to the further expansion of mega-regions – systems of multiple cities and their surrounding suburbs – based on their ability to offer higher paying jobs and attract the best talent. Florida views this shift as not only inevitable – loss of jobs forcing people to move where they can find work – but necessary. This geographic clustering he argues, will speed the kind of innovation required to remake our economy into a more resilient and adaptable [...]

The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) recently launched a new initiative designed to address the design and management of cities across the UK.  The Sustainable Cities initiative gathers data from two years of research by a team of 30 experts and the English Core Cities group.  The goal to make cities low carbon has grown to a massive project addressing affordable housing, energy security and job generation.  The group has identified climate change as a direct challenge to the efficency of managing a town or city and have created this initiative as a framework of priorities for [...]