Tag: "infrastructure"
Highway Deconstruction & Quality of Life
The City Fix highlights an interesting approach to improving the quality of urban life: The famed U.S. intellectual Lewis Mumford once said, “Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.” The recently released report on freeway removal from by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and EMBARQ (the producer [...]
How the Internet Transforms Cities (& Could Save them $Billions)
Fast Company reports on how the Internet and associated “smart infrastructure” are making a profound change in US cities–transforming them from inert structures to “virtual organisms:” With a little help from what’s called the Internet of Things, engineers are transforming cities from passive conduits for water into dynamic systems that store and manage it like [...]
Looking for Something Else to Worry About?
Let’s see, there’s global warming, the global recession, the capture of one of America’s great political parties by a handful of zealots. . . Anything else we should be worrying about? Oh yes, our electric grid! The Economist‘s Babbage blog has a bleak overview of where things stand, how deregulation was a very mixed blessing [...]
Youngstown: the struggle to shrink to prosperity
As DC.StreetsBlog reports, about 10 years ago, Youngstown, Ohio created a community plan designed to help the city cope with a massive downsizing of its economy and population: The city would start by tearing down the abandoned houses that depressed neighboring property values and acted as magnets for crime. Their hope was that some neighborhoods [...]
Look Who’s Investing in Future Prosperity
As you might expect, it’s China, according to the New York Times: Just as building the interstate highway system in the United States a half-century ago made modern commerce more feasible on a national scale, China’s ambitious rail rollout is helping to integrate the economy of this sprawling, populous nation. In China’s case, it is [...]
