Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds — typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead — corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.
Popularity: 42% [?]
Urban regeneration has seen entire districts pass into the hands of private companies – and their security guards.
Popularity: 25% [?]
British Ministers are considering making motorists legally responsible for accidents involving cyclists or pedestrians, even if they are not at fault. Government advisers are pushing for changes in the civil law that will make the most powerful vehicle involved in a collision automatically liable for insurance and compensation purposes.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Harvard Park has been a no-man’s land after dark for decades. Its location, at the borders of rival gang turf, has made it more a demilitarized zone than public space since the inception of this city’s oldest and most entrenched street gangs. So there was a giddy excitement among the thousand or so South Los Angeles neighbors who came last week to celebrate the park’s inclusion in Summer Night Lights, a program designed to combat gang violence by keeping lights on until midnight in some of the city’s roughest parks.
Popularity: 37% [?]
Residents of a German village can turn on a street light like they would a reading lamp: whenever they need to.
Dörentrup, located 320 kilometres west of Berlin, has adopted an energy-saving program that lets someone use a cellphone to turn on a street light by dialling the code number found on the lamppost.
Popularity: 38% [?]
You’ve heard all the reasons before: We drive too much. We eat too much meat and processed food. We spend too much time with plugged-in devices—computers, TVs, air conditioners.
But what problem are we talking about—climate change, or the worldwide rise in obesity?
Popularity: 30% [?]
The words “air pollution” may sound archaic or inflated. There is a sense that air has gotten dramatically cleaner and is not as worrisome a problem as some other environmental issues. Air rarely makes national news anymore, unless it’s about dirty air in another country, or unless there is speculation that a brown cloud is creeping over from China, dirtying the air in California – a theory that has yet to be proven. More accurately, America is dirtying its own air in cities from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh.
Popularity: 25% [?]
First, they took away the cops parked at key intersections and replaced them with with mounted, overhead cameras. This idea didn’t start in my city, Seattle, but when it turned out to be a revenue-generator, even if it reduced safety, City Hall took to it with a vengeance.
Popularity: 49% [?]
In an effort to save money, a village in central Germany has opted to turn off its street lights. But residents have no need to be in the dark: Using a mobile phone and code, they can order lighting for up to 15 minutes.
Popularity: 26% [?]
Elderly people who live below the poverty line and perceive their neighborhoods to be dangerous are more likely to have a mobility disability. Researchers suggest that even perceiving one’s neighborhood as unsafe can ‘get into the body’ and, ultimately, prove hazardous for elder health.
Popularity: 18% [?]