EngagingCities

Cities are engines of consumption and opportunity but at the same time they face – and create! – countless challenges: inequality, unaffordability, pollution, waste and more.

Here are seven very urban innovations to inspire you in 2019. How can you make urban lives easier, cheaper, cleaner or just better?!

How can we build inclusive, people-centered smart cities? Whether they are Wi-Fi kiosks, urban sensors, fiber networks, or built-from-scratch “smart” neighborhoods, new urban technology deployments are under the microscope. Despite the potential of these projects to drive innovation and economic growth, they are often met with mixed reception and a myriad of justifiable questions.

Public transit is good for kids. Here are the ways taking the tube or riding the bus boost the cognitive development of young children.

Planetizen's annual list of top books covers subjects in all varieties of planning: urban planning, community planning, environmental planning, and more.

From job shifts to reclaimed parking-lot acreage to the end of traffic tickets. How will cities and their residents gain, or lose, once AVs hit the mainstream?

Ashley Hanson and Mary Welcome—both traveling artists working in rural places—team up to articulate their work as a practice of neighboring, in order to show how mutual exchange, compassion, and care can shift the narrative of artistic success.

Last month, more than 150 Code for America Brigade members from across the country gathered in Charlotte, NC for our annual Brigade Congress. What is Brigade Congress, you may ask? Brigade Congress is a gathering of leaders in the civic tech community.

The fastest way to reveal a nation’s priorities is to take a look at its budget. Where money is allocated, improvements and expansions are made; where costs are cut, institutions and policies wither. 

In an era marked by stark inequalities, there is an urgency, and opportunity, for local and regional leaders to advance place-led development that produces better economic outcomes for more people in more places.

Through many months, probably even years, our office kitchen lived in a state of abject squalor. In the fridge, cartons of milk congealed into blue cottage cheese. Humous grew a layer of thick, ric

To plan for the transition to automated vehicles, cities and county governments should develop building and zoning codes that not only accommodate adaptable parking but encourage it by design. This can include amending building codes to require infrastructure that makes transforming garages into inhabitable buildings possible. As automated vehicles begin to enter the marketplace, cities should consider incentives and other programs to begin the conversion of ground level parking to commercial uses.

November 3, 2018 Instead of reliving the rage that put me in a Looney Tunes cartoon depiction of steam coming out of my ears reading the misguided missives of PoliSci majors who have never cast a vote, or disaffected youth choosing to step off vs step up for the 2018 Midterms, I’m going to ditch rhetoric …

Smart cities have long been discussed as conceptual ideas for how cities should be and what they could do. Rarely is the concept broken down into something that provides substantive meaning to the average city-dweller. Indeed ‘smartness’ for many, is far removed from their everyday life, rather just a hidden network of sensors and connectors.

The upcoming 2018 NCDD conference in Denver seeks to “catalyze the catalysts” by asking how we can work together to broaden the use and amplify the impacts of dialogue and deliberation efforts locally and globally.

In a city changing under our feet, holding onto the past can be an existential endeavor. But what gets preserved? Historical buildings associated with minorities are less likely to get landmarked—so some are working to set the record straight. [...]Rea

While federal and state governments take a back seat, cities are driving the regulation of autonomous vehicles.

“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.” —Fred Rogers

I envision a blended “future of work” that includes automation and augmentation — with the latter in the form of “decision support” tools that speed up and improve human performance, rather than compete with it. Computers are good at computing, surfacing potential decisions – and humans are good at context, or understanding the situational environment. When these two attributes are combined, it results in good judgement.

The City Observatory is a study of modern-day cities and urban development practices.

Plus, Philadelphia selects internal innovation grant recipients; The New York Times maps every building in America; and the Durham, N.C., iTeam looks to use human-centered design to improve city forms.

A small town in Mexico was down to be one of the country’s first smart cities – but residents saw it as an attempt to westernise and leave tradition behind

Lessons from the Dutch, where the number of bikes exceeds the number of people.

An excerpt from Jeff Speck’s Walkable City Rules, a step-by-step guide to fixing America’s cities and towns.

Ecosystems are dynamic networks that emerge through connections between many actors. Civic tech and data ecosystems are shaped by interactions between local actors who use or create data and technology to improve civic life, specifically government services and other policies and programs that affect low-income residents. To better support and leverage local connections, ecosystem mapping is a process that allows people to visualize their network and understand how each organization in the community contributed or could contribute to common goals.