cities
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How Chicago became the city of green shoulders
What started as a simple beautification project -- flower planters, parkways, and whatnot -- eventually led Chicago to take on the larger challenge of green building. A leading architect describes how leadership from the mayor's office, key changes in the city's building permit program, and cooperation from developers made it happen.
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Friday music blogging: Arcade Fire
You can bet an artist is grappling with questions of place and home and belonging when she belts out a line like, "Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small / that we can never get away from the sprawl ... Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / And there's no end in sight."
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22 cities that are smart about energy
Several cities around the country are finding ways to get smart about energy, at the same time saving money and pumping up their eco cred.
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Walk Score team unveils Transit Score and two more apps
First there was Walk Score, the web tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. Today the same developers release Transit Score, an app that ranks how well-served a location is by buses and rail lines.
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Urban guerrillas 'fix' São Paulo streets during World Cup
Bicycling and pedestrian activists in São Paulo, Brazil, engage in do-it-yourself street painting. What better time than when the entire country is watching TV?
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Colorado Springs goes dark, Lexington goes bright
Dickens begins his novel with the famous line “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Were he writing today about the two American cities -- Lexington, Mass. and Colorado Springs, Colo. -- he might say, “It was the brightest of towns, it was the dimmest of towns.” In this case, bright and dim refer quite literally to light levels, but also to the decision making of two very different sets of civic leaders.
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Be more like Manhattan to save the earth, and don’t go halfway
The greenest place to live is a dense city like New York, David Owen argues in his book Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability. We chat about urban vs. rural living and pitfalls of "decorative transit" and "density light."
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Colorado: Denver mayor and guv candidate talks bike-sharing, light rail, and coal
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper took Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood on a bike ride last week to show off B-cycle, the city's new bike-sharing program. He talks to Grist about urban mobility and his campaign for governor.
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Money magazine’s ‘Best Place to Live’ isn’t much of a place
Eden Prairie, Minn., gets top billing for its low unemployment rate (5.1 percent), and it seems like a very pleasant place -- except not quite.