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Climate Buildings

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  • Karen Luken: A one-woman waste management authority

    Grist is proud to present the Change Gang — profiles of people who are leading change on the ground toward a more sustainable society and a greener planet. Some we’ve written about before; some are new to our pages. Some you’ll have heard of; most you probably won’t. Know someone we should add to the […]

    Andrew Leonard Buildings

  • Germany is building a park on top of a highway

    Germany's A7 Autobahn is like a highway on steroids. The 500-mile, six-lane road runs the length of the country and handles 150,000 bat-out-of-hell drivers a day. That might improve life for traffic fetishists or people who regularly need to get from Denmark to Austria at 100 miles per hour, but people who live alongside the […]

    Jess Zimmerman Buildings

  • Has dense living gotten too dense?

    Thinkers like Ed Glaeser, whose ideas have been discussed frequently on Grist, assert that density is an unalloyed good, and even Manhattan isn't dense enough. But there is another strand of thought about cities, which is that they are neither green nor sustainable, and it's exemplified by everyone's favorite foul-mouthed catastrophist, James Howard Kunstler. In […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • Adorable video defends public transportation

    Here's a sweet 30-second plea for the improvement of the public transportation used by 35 million Americans every day. Because there should be many tens or hundreds of millions more of them, but at the rate we’re going now, that’s not looking likely. Eighty-four percent of transit systems have raised rates or cut service. Is […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • How transit and smart growth are saving Cleveland

    Cleveland is one of those ailing American cities constantly held up as an example of the country's decline. But The New York Times has taken a look at a revitalization plan the city's been working on and found that, in one uptown area at least, the city is actually growing. And the drivers of that […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings
  • suburban tract homes
    suburban tract homes

    How Baby Boomers doomed the exurbs

    Homes and strip malls in America's outer-ring suburbs, which contained most of the country's most expensive homes in the 1990s, are now worth less than what it cost to build them. And the land beneath them is worth effectively zero, says Brookings Institution senior fellow Christopher B. Leinberger, in a powerful op-ed arguing that the […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • New use for green roof: grazing reindeer

    "Santa Claus" (real name: Dave Kavanaugh, entomologist) has brought his reindeer to the green roof of the California Academy of Sciences. Between now and January 16, they'll be grazing its gentle slopes and fertilizing them with bon bons, because everyone knows that reindeer shit delicious Christmas treats.

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • California’s high-speed rail gets $1 billion

    California is going to have high-speed rail. Despite grumblings about the cost, Gov. Jerry Brown supports it, and now the project, which will link San Francisco and Los Angeles, is getting close to $1 billion from the Department of Transportation. The department came up with this chunk of change and more after other governors (Florida's […]

    Sarah Laskow Buildings

  • ‘Mountain tsunamis’ are a thing; threaten Himalayas

    The kingdom of Bhutan, famous for maximizing "Gross National Happiness" rather than GDP, is sitting under a gigantic time bomb of water that could burst at any moment, flooding its villages and putting a major damper on all that good cheer. Bhutan has 2,674 glacial lakes, 24 of which are considered unstable. When the ice […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings

  • Turning vacant lots into parks reduces violent crime

    A new study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology analyzes a 10-year project in Philadelphia to turn abandoned lots into public parks. As it turns out, the project hasn’t just eliminated eyesores — it’s also reduced crime. Gun-related assaults, vandalism ,and criminal mischief all dropped off significantly in the reclaimed spaces. The researchers theorize […]

    Christopher Mims Buildings