The NY Times points us to the German suburb of Vauban, a thoughtfully designed community where an astonishing 70% of its 5,500 residents live without owning cars. Completed in 2006, the one square mile neighborhood is comprised of multi-family row houses designed to be more energy-efficient with local businesses interspersed throughout in an attempt to seamlessly integrate the residential and commercial districts. Automobiles are allowed along the town’s main thoroughfare that connects to the train station as well as on certain secondary streets, but those that want to own vehicles are required to purchase garage spaces located at the edge of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With all the talk about developing greener technologies and alternative sources of energy to curb our consumption and clean up the environment, are we ignoring the simplest solution – walking more? Worldchanging asks us to reframe our current thinking and consider the time tested notion of “muscle power” to not only positively impact the health of our planet, but that of its cities and people as well. Their discussion references findings from two older studies – 2003 and 2005 respectively – that offer some stunning statistics, prompting us to wonder why this “radical” idea doesn’t warrant further research, let alone enter [...]