Is Better Transportation the Ticket to Diversifying Our National Parks?

Poor neighborhoods in the United States lack quality play spaces for children, also known as play deserts. An organization is enabling communities across the nation to build their own playground.

Great minds from Plato to Piaget have recognized the importance of play in healthy child development, but with bullying becoming more prevalent on school playgrounds and increased pressure to maximize school hours to boost performance on standardized tests, schools are struggling to implement meaningful recess. Playworks and other similar non-profit groups provide coaching for adults on how to help structure children's playtime to be healthy, productive, and enjoyable, while allowing children to explore on their own and develop positive relationships.

Overall, Cambodia is a relatively poor country whose residents don't own much. Norwegian hotel owners in the city of Krong Siem Reap urge their Cambodian staff to be more in charge of making their own decisions by making them co-owners of the hotel, an act that forced them to have more confidence and critical thinking skills.

Bus service for people who live outside major cities is either nonexistent or might as well be. But some communities are helping bring mobility to non-drivers with bus service they can really use. This article looks at a variety of places in which public transportation is highly popular and efficient—from Germany to Seattle.

New York City suffered from fires that erupted in overcrowded, run-down apartments. Then the city sleuthed through residential records and found that landlords who foreclosed let their properties fall apart and ignored safety-code violations. Greater Toronto wants to expand upon New York City’s method by using transportation surveys, census data and computer data to build transit lines.

A Dallas urban neighborhood was dilapidated with abandoned storefronts and offered no vitality for pedestrians. A group of artists and community members created Build a Better Block, in which local artisans and small businesses took over a vacant block and transformed it for a limited time to encourage the ingredients for more permanent urban renewal.

Bus service for people who live outside major cities is either nonexistent or might as well be. But some communities are helping bring mobility to non-drivers with bus service they can really use.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, necessity has bred an interesting kind of financial invention for the New York MTA: the world’s first “catastrophe” bond - a reinsurance for the insurer - designed to protect public transportation infrastructure, specifically against storm surge. These bonds privatize risk for public gain, creating a kind of tool that may protect economic development against all kinds of natural and man-made disasters around the world.

Cities tend to be dangerous and difficult places to live for older residents. A private public partnership in New York is catering to seniors through small changes in the city such as para-transit options and seniors-only hours at public establishments.

Despite strong evidence that school-based physical activity improves children’s cognitive skills, concentration, and behavior, schools under pressure to produce quantitative results and decrease bullying have drastically cut back on recess in recent years. An Oakland-based nonprofit organization called Playworks is working to make healthy play accessible for more children and show schools how productive recess can be to the whole academic world.