Nijmegen, 2018 European Green Capital, fights climate change with renewable energy, compact development and a transportation system that puts bicycles in the driver’s seat...
Category - Columns
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 9: Essen, Germany: Greening brownfields
Essen lies at the heart of the Ruhr Valley, at one time one of the world’s largest concentrations of the coal and steel industries. Since the mid-20th Century, this city of...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 8: Ljubljana, Slovenia: River as centerpiece
Ljubljana, home to 283,000 people, is the capital of Slovenia, the mountainous republic surrounded by Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. After years of car-centric planning in...
Global Cooling by 2050
Definitely possible if highly improbable. But what would it take? The scientists are not thinking like that because they watch trends and know people are hardly likely to do what...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 7: Bristol, United Kingdom: Incubating change
Bristol describes itself as a “Laboratory for Change”. In awarding the 2015 title of European Green Capital to this city of 441,000 in South West England, the judges highlighted...
Car Free Journey: Atlanta, Georgia
Beginning with this issue, we will be expanding our coverage of cities featured in Car Free Journey. We always include information to help visitors who don’t want to drive. But...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 6: Copenhagen, Denmark: Good cycle karma
To “Copenhagenize” means to design cities for bikes rather than cars. Not surprisingly, Copenhagen sits atop the Copenhagenize Index, an international measure of a city’s bike...
When Autonomous Cars Take Flight – Beware of dumb artificial intelligence
“‘I love the idea of being able to go into my back yard and hop into my flying car,’ said Brad Templeton, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has served as a consultant on Google’s...
Ecocity Standards, Indicators and Performance Benchmarks
The Ecocity Standards describe 18 conditions of an ecocity (www.ecocitystandards.org). Indicators are used to measure the condition being described within each standard and...
New approaches to ecocities: The Cleveland Model
Cleveland, Ohio is not the first city that comes to my mind when I hear the word “ecocity”. Where are the natural armatures, the glass high rises gleaming with sunlight, the self...