The Future of Jakarta: Urbanization Reaches a Breaking Point
Since 2000, the world’s second-largest megacity, Jakarta, has seen its population swell by a staggering 34 percent. Though the city proper is home to just 10 million, the urban zone … Continue reading
Climate Change as a Catalyst for Transformative Sustainability in Cities
This policy brief examines the power of exploring synergies between responding to climate change and other development priorities in cities: in other words, can decision makers devise response strategies that … Continue reading
Nourishing livelihoods: the food vendors sustaining Nairobi’s slums
Food vendors play a key role in nourishing their fellow residents in informal settlements, offering ready access to fruit, vegetables, snacks, and cooked foods. But unlike food vendors in markets … Continue reading
Structure and agency: The seeds of sustainability for 21st century cities
Merely critiquing cities’ unsustainable throughputs is not enough, and mistaking them as parasites is even worse because it usually precipitates highly ineffective solutions (e.g., making cities less city-like). We must … Continue reading
How the City Almost Came Back
The Story of Migration’s Recessionary Bubble – When we look at the last few years of migration, we should see it as a bubble. It was never going to last … Continue reading
The problem with smart cities – India
By 15 December, 85 cities out of the total 98 included under the Smart Cities Mission had submitted their respective Smart City Plans to the ministry of urban development. Hopefully, … Continue reading
The rising metropolitan sensibility
Expansive ideas of collaboration throughout metropolitan areas appear to be spreading in the run-up toHabitat III Two major conferences in late 2015 — one in Canada, the other in Latin America … Continue reading
The Urban Planner’s Guide to a Post-COP21 World
The UN roadmap for cities …is essentially a playbook for cities with four primary objectives. The first goal is to increase the number of cities and regions implementing action plans. … Continue reading
Energy Access and Urban Poverty
The great majority of people without access to modern energy services are rural and, rightly, much of the discussion on energy access focuses on how to reach them. However, despite … Continue reading
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