Content about Tools

A startup based in downtown Boston, BlockAvenue has divided up the U.S. into a small pieces, and then aggregated as much data as it can find to start telling stories about them.

As city dwellers become more comfortable taking on active roles in shaping their cities, it is just as important that they find a sense of privacy within their urban environment. Could our well-being be linked with the level of privacy that our cities offer? Are those living in cities happy with the level of privacy they receive?

A lot of American cities are looking a tad rusty these days – and they’re not just limited to the Rust Belt. Whether it was the collapse of a mill economy in the early 1900s, the slow decline of American manufacturing, or recent busts in the auto industry, towns everywhere know what it means to fade. Ironically, there are a handful of communities that have been spurred on to amazing stories of recovery by – and during – our most recent economic crisis. Here are the stories of three places that are rediscovering what makes them special, and abandoning the rust for a whole range of community riches.

Three “democracy startups” are setting the ball rolling for citizens to be highly savvy voters, receive balanced political perspectives, and take matters into their own hands as they run for political office.

Mobile technology is powerful; literally everyone seems to own a cell phone these days. When used in public settings, it has the potential to involve citizens in various stages of planning processes. A few projects have used mobile  tools to help enfold citizens into community planning at the pedestrian level.

You can hold public meetings and announce them in the newspaper, of course. And it doesn’t take much more work to post them on Facebook. Who knows? Maybe someone will even comment or give you a “Like.” If that pretty much sums up your city’s community engagement strategy, you’ve got a big problem…. And a big opportunity. 

Virtual worlds can be a valuable means to plan for the future.  For the city of Dubuque, Iowa, a web-based 3D “Virtual Dubuque” means that city planners can take advantage of this type of visualization to get feedback from citizens earlier in the process than ever before.

A new mobile discovery network, Trover, gives users the chance to introduce local explorers to hidden gems right outside their door. Trover is a free smartphone app, which is also accessible from its web site at Trover.com.  The app is designed for sharing discoveries, interesting things to see or do, in your city or a city you happen to be visiting, in order to help someone else enjoy the discovery just as you did. In other words, it’s a place exploration tool.

How can we understand the travel behaviors and mobility barriers experienced by low-income populations? The answer is both simple and complex at the same time, since it requires considering the entirety of individuals’ lives, not only their travel to and from their workplace. My research team and I gathered data from a relatively small sample of low income individuals through focus group interviews. We augmented the focus group data using additional detailed information provided by key individuals who participated in the preliminary discussions.

Hundreds of communities have trash pick-ups or recycling initiatives, tree planting and energy conservation. But just a handful are writing comprehensive sustainability plans or reinventing themselves as meccas of green economic development. Kaid Benfield writes frequently on the NRDC Switchboard blog about some of the best of the best, and here are a few more, along with the tools that have made them successful.

These days, communities with great ideas are utilizing technology to improve their neighborhoods. Crowdmap is one such pervasive platform that allows users to crowdsource information like citizen protests or crisis information (ie. natural disasters) and view it on a map and timeline.

There is a little-known struggle going on right now over how a new series of “top level domains” (TLDs) on the Internet shall be used by cities of the world. TLDs are the suffixes at the end of Web addresses, such as .com, .org and .edu. The international body that oversees TLDs is expected to announce a new series of TLDs in 2012 that would give cities their own TLDs (e.g. .nyc or .paris). The new TLDs could make it easier for people in the same metropolitan areas to find each other and interconnect on the Internet and in physical spaces.