Excerpt from Prosperity Comes in Cycles by Rick Pruetz Bicycle trails are good for business. They attract restaurants, brewpubs and retail shops catering to those who walk or...
Category - Ecocity Snapshots
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 27 – Ghent, Belgium: City of Smart Citizens
Ghent, a city of 260,000 people, lies 35 miles west of Brussels, where two rivers merge and flow toward the North Sea. Ghent takes pride in being named the world’s first Commons...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 26 – Lisbon, Portugal: City of Neighborhoods
Lisbon, Portugal’s ancient capital, aims to reshape the city for people, not cars. This guiding principle grounds Lisbon’s award-winning master plan, which is steadily greening...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 25 – Horst aan de Maas, Netherlands: Enterprising by Nature
Horst aan de Maas lies in the Province of Limburg roughly 85 miles southeast of Amsterdam. Since 2001, 16 separate communities have merged to form the consolidated municipality...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 24: Cornella de Llobregat, Spain – Feel, Commit, Transform
Cornella de Llobregat, is a city of 86,000 people located six miles west of downtown Barcelona. The city gets part of its name from the Llobregat River which forms portions of its...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 23: Vaxjo, Sweden – Walking the greenest-city talk
In 2007, a TV documentary produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation judged Vaxjo, Sweden to be the greenest city in Europe. Vaxjo adopted that title as its brand and made...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 22: Leuven, Belgium: Water-friendly city
The Dyle River winds though the City of Leuven and flows into three other rivers, eventually reaching the major seaport of Antwerp and the North Sea. Once important to trade and...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 21: Galway, Ireland: Greening the Emerald Isle
Galway, population 80,000, lies on the west coast of Ireland on Galway Bay, an inlet of the Atlantic Ocean, at the mouth of the Corrib River. It is recognized internationally as a...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 1: Europe’s Greenest Places
Cities are key to our planet’s future. Over half of us now live in cities and an estimated 70 percent of the world’s total population will be urban by 2050 — over six...
Ecocity Snapshots, Chapter 20 – Heidelberg, Germany: Higher degrees of sustainability
Heidelberg is famous for its prestigious university, historic monuments and cultural achievements. But this city of 150,000 people in south-western Germany also won the European...