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A Wonderfully Clear Explanation of How Road Diets Work ERIC JAFFE   AUG 21, 2015 Planner Jeff Speck leads a video tour of four different street redesigns. SHARE TWEET Jeff Speck: Four Road Diets  from  Cupola Media  on  Vimeo . A  road diet  is a great way for cities to reclaim some of the excess street space they’ve dedicated to cars—generally preserving traffic flows while  improving safety  and  expanding mobility  to other modes. But just as food dieters have Atkins, South Beach, vegan, and any number of options, road diets come in many flavors, too. Urban planner and  Walkable City  author  Jeff Speck , in collaboration with graphic artist  Spencer Boomhower , takes us on a tour of four types of street diets in a deliciously clear  new video series . Here’s a taste. Three lanes to two ( Jeff Speck  /  Spencer Boomhower ) In this case we have three traffic lanes flank...

Students at the Bioblitz at Brooklyn Bridge Park   Christina Tobitsch The Case for Citizen Science on Coastal Waters JESSICA LEIGH HESTER   NOV 3, 2016 Classroom initiatives in New York and Miami prepare students for a changing world—and they’re good for the environment, too. SHARE TWEET On a rainy day in mid-September, a group of college kids in shiny yellow rainboots and ponchos crouch in the water of New York City’s East River. Others troop by with damp clipboards, plastic hand lenses dangling around their necks. Over the course of 24 hours, nearly 500 sophomores from CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College canvass Brooklyn Bridge Park, tallying up the biodiversity along the shoreline. It’s a tricky task: Some critters, like bees and moths, have sought cover from the drizzle. “I found a yellow jacket on a muffin,” one student offers. “I’m counting it,” another shrugs, tucking rain-slicked hair behind her ear. Related Story Why Cities Have to Care About ...

Amirah Mitchell, 14, harvests beets on a suburban Boston farm.  Brian Snyder/Reuters Envisioning Nature-Rich Cities MIMI KIRK   JUN 13, 2017 Author Richard Louv invites us to imagine a future filled with urban parks, greenery, and gardens. SHARE TWEET Homes destroyed by mudslides, villages flattened by hurricanes, glaciers melting into the sea, land cracked by drought: Such images of the effects of climate change fill social media feeds and television screens. These images may  spur awareness and prompt declines in fossil fuel use , but they don’t encourage us to envisage a hopeful, green future. Writer Richard Louv wants us to focus on this more optimistic vision. While such a view involves fighting climate change by using more-sustainable energy sources, Louv invites us to go further by imagining a “nature-rich” future. “If you only talk about energy efficiency, the conversation stops at solar panels,” he says. “‘Nature-rich’ conjures up the images ...

Cows graze next to burned Amazon rainforest in 2013 near the city of Novo Progresso, Brazil.   Nacho Doce/Reuters The Earth Lost 10 Percent of Its Wilderness in Only 2 Decades JOHN METCALFE   SEP 8, 2016 The rate at which pristine areas are being destroyed is “catastrophic,” say scientists. SHARE TWEET Picture a plain the size of India made of grass, exposed dirt, and the smoking remnants of vegetation. That’s what humanity has gifted the world since the early 1990s thanks to logging, mining, energy exploration, development, and other agents of  landscape destruction . The planet lost roughly 1.2 million square miles of wilderness over this period, equivalent to one-tenth of its total stock, according to a new study in  Current Biology .  Calling the pace of land-clearing “catastrophic,” researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and elsewhere identify the Amazon and Central Africa as major targets of denudement. The former has suffe...

A young visitor at the New York Botanical Garden's Everett Children’s Adventure Garden.   Photo courtesy of The New York Botanical Garden Creating the Next Generation of Urban Conservationists TERESA MATHEW   AUG 11, 2017 There’s a few things kids can do to influence how adults view biodiversity, according to a new study. SHARE TWEET If you want city kids to care about the environment, have them collect it. According to a new report from researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University, childhood experience with nature is the most important factor in predicting whether children will grow up to appreciate it. And the most impactful kind of childhood experience is active engagement with plants and animals. Researchers Tetsuro Hosaka, Koun Sugimoto, and Shinya Numata surveyed 1,030 adult residents in Tokyo and its neighboring prefectures. The survey recorded the frequency of respondents’ participation in different nature-related activities   before age 12, a...

David Pérez (DPC), Wikimedia Commons, License cc-by-sa-4.0 The Women Replacing Spain's Franco-Era Street Names FEARGUS O'SULLIVAN   NOV 23, 2016 Cities are finally getting rid of streets that honor fascist figures, and they’re addressing a gender imbalance at the same time. SHARE TWEET General Francisco Franco is out — and Rosa Parks might be in. That’s the  current trend  in Spain, where several city governments are using laws designed to remove symbols of  Franco’s dictatorship  as a way to correct the gender imbalance among street names around the country. Though Franco died in 1975, many streets and squares still bear his and his associates’ names, surviving under a policy of forgiving and forgetting the crimes committed during his rule. Now, they’re finally being swept away, and a clutch of major cities are using the opportunity to commemorate more women, who currently lend their names to just 5 percent of Spain’s streets. The changes m...

Argentina has proposed new laws against sidewalk catcalls toward women (above, Aixa Rizzo, whose YouTube video on her own street harassment went viral).   AP / Natacha Pisarenko Buenos Aires Wants to Outlaw Street Harassment of Women JORDANA TIMERMAN   JUN 11, 2015 Officials in Argentina, and beyond, are finally taking catcalls more seriously. SHARE TWEET The sidewalks of Buenos Aires are a veritable gantlet of wolf-whistles for pretty much any woman who dares to wander them in anything more form fitting than a muumuu. Rare is the woman who doesn’t brave a catcall or two while running to catch the bus. Not to mention comments on your clothing, what feelings your legs might inspire, and what specifically your “admirer” would like to do to you if you paused. Buenos Aires has a love-hate relationship with  piropos —a sort of combination pick-up line and compliment—frequently hurled by men at female passersby. Whether the comments are a colorful custom to...