Sustainable Urban Development
With cities expected to host about 70 percent of the world's population, sustainable urban development is key to making communities worldwide more resilient against the growing threat of climate change. Find out about the latest urban practices from across the world aiming to make our cities more sustainable and inclusive in these good-news stories from The Optimist Daily.
Spanish towns are responding to population decline by welcoming migrants
In November 2019, Ángel Márquez and his family abandoned their home in Venezuela’s Barinas province and joined the more than 4 million Venezuelans that have left their homelands due to the economic and humanitarian crises that plague the country. In search of a new home, the Márquez family Read More...
Solar-powered bridge arises in Genoa just 15 months after tragedy
Tragedy struck the Italian city of Genoa in 2018 when the city’s Morandi Bridge collapsed under heavy rain, taking 43 lives in the process. Now, after 15 months of almost non-stop work, a beautiful new bridge has now been completed by the firm of renowned architect Renzo Piano (RPBW). Though Read More...
Pittsburgh launches ‘guaranteed income’ program with Jack Dorsey donation
Last week, we wrote about “guaranteed income” and the support it's getting from mayors across America, who formed a network called Mayors for a Guaranteed Income. That group was launched by Stockton, Calif. Mayor Michael Tubbs, who launched his own guaranteed income program in 2018. But Read More...
America now has a stretch of highway paved with recycled plastic
A newly repaved stretch of highway in Oroville, California, looks like an ordinary road. But it’s the first highway in the country to be paved in part with recycled plastic—the equivalent of roughly 150,000 plastic bottles per mile of the three-lane road. The change in materials makes the Read More...
Trinity College to transform campus lawn into native wildflower garden
We recently shared a very popular article about replacing tradition lawns with a clover alternative. Trinity College Dublin is taking a page out of the alternative grass handbook and opting to turn their college green into a native flower garden to promote pollinator health and boost Read More...
Dutch city is preparing for climate change by replacing roads with trees
When it comes to sustainable urban development, there are a few things cities around the world can learn from the Netherlands. Take, for example, the Dutch city of Arnhem, which has recently undertaken the ambitious endeavor of greening up the city by replacing roads that are rarely used by its Read More...
Future of food: The world’s biggest rooftop urban farm is now bearing fruit
In the summer of 2019, we published a story about a rooftop urban farm being constructed in Paris that was set to be the biggest in the world. Now, nearly a year later, the world’s largest urban rooftop farm has started to bear fruit. Strawberries, to be precise: small, intensely flavored and Read More...
The case for relocating small businesses back to residential areas
If you walk around some 1920s-era neighborhoods, it’s not unusual to see a tiny grocery store inhabiting the street corner. This used to be normal in residential areas, but as cars became more widespread, businesses relocated to more centrally-located commercial centers such as malls. The Read More...
This is how trees make urban areas cooler
You might consider urban areas to be the epitome of cool, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, buildings, cars, pollution, and lack of soil, all contribute to an urban heat island effect, making cities considerably warmer than surrounding rural areas. Luckily, there is a Read More...
Mayors want guaranteed income programs to help us recover from Covid-19
In early 2019, we published a story about Stockton mayor Michael Tubbs, who implemented a guaranteed income program in his city to help residents meet their basic needs. We have been closely following the program ever since, with the preliminary results from October showing that the 125 recipients Read More...