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.
Ikea’s new Vienna location features vertical forests and public transportation access
Last week we shared a story about how Ikea is moving towards becoming climate positive by 2030. This week we feature the plans for their new Vienna store, which will look a lot different than any Ikea before. In fact, the new urban shopping destination will feature vertical forests and no parking Read More...
The tiny English city wants to show small cities that going car-free is possible
Until a few years ago, the small city of Ghent in Belgium struggled with traffic and smog in its city center. Then, in 2017, the city adopted a new traffic plan to limit non-essential cars from its center and used a tactical urbanism approach to make the change cheaply, adding planters and simple Read More...
Blueground designs flexible housing for mobile young professionals
More and more new professionals are opting for a much more mobile lifestyle than their parents before them. The housing market is transforming to meet the needs of the new generation defying the traditional model of moving to an area, finding a job, and settling down for the long haul. Alex Read More...
A post-industrial space in Pittsburg is finding a new purpose as an urban park
What do you do with 626 acres of old mining land? When the city of Pittsburgh was faced with the decision in 2016, they decided to turn the large space into an extensive urban open space. After acquiring the land from a developer for $5 million, the city made a plan to spend the next decade Read More...
Earth-friendly material filters pollutants out of stormwater
While it’s often overlooked, stormwater has great potential to solve the problem of strained water supplies in urban areas. One of the main reasons why this resource has gone mostly untapped is because stormwater picks up toxic chemicals as it runs through streets and gutters. Now that may no Read More...
London to start heating homes using ‘waste heat’ from the city’s underground
If you frequently commute via the metro, you’ve probably noticed the hot gusts of air that tend to blow out of train tunnels. In London, a new project seeks to harness the heat from the underground metro in order to heat homes in the north of the city during the colder months of the year. The Read More...
Instead of corrosive salt, researchers are using grape skins to de-ice roads
Sodium chloride (aka salt) is an important ingredient for helping get around in the winter. Spread on roads, it lowers the freezing point of ice, making it melt faster and making roads safer. The problem with using salt on roads But all that salt can also be harmful—not only is it corrosive Read More...
To prevent algorithmic bias, NYC has created a position to oversee ethics in AI
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken a major step forward in ensuring that the city’s AI systems are fair and bias-free after creating a position dedicated entirely to overseeing the ethics of AI and other algorithms. AI systems are based on data, but the problem is bad data can contain Read More...
Mexico’s 3D-printed neighborhood for impoverished families is coming to life
On May 13th of this year, the top story of the Optimist Daily was about a nonprofit called New Story that had plans to build the world’s first 3D-printed neighborhood for poor people in Latin America. Well, we’re excited to tell you that the first homes of this neighborhood have been Read More...
This startup is building post-disaster housing using a giant assembly line
After two of the worst fires in California’s history tore through the state in the last three years, a housing startup by the name of FactoryOS knew it had to do something. The homes of thousands were incinerated by the flames of the fire, and the people who used to live in those homes were still Read More...