Author at work

If you would like to have an advanced  taste for some of the content, approach  and the general voice of the book, you may want to consider clicking to  http://worldstreets.wordpress.com/tag/equity-book which calls up a selection of articles and comments which are now in process for the final. Please understand that at this point most of these pieces are still  incomplete working drafts, and not surprisingly they are of uneven quality up to now. That is part of the challenge.

In the meantime, you may note when you call them up they are presented to you simply with the latest postings on top. Which of course is not the order in which they are being treated in the book now in process. Still, they should give you a good feel for where we are going with this, we think important, book.

 

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The Equity Initiative

The goal of this open collaborative project and crowd sourcing exercise, which spans the period January 2012 to December 2013, is to organize, hold and report on a series of public dialogues in a certain number of host cities and government groups on different continents, meeting with and seeking out  the views of a broad cross-section  of people, groups and interests who are ready to brainstorm on  the concept of equity as a potential base for a new transport paradigm and  strategy for the city.

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Equity: A muddled discussion awaiting its first theory

Nothing is more attractive to me than a muddled discussion awaiting its first theory.

- E. O. Wilson, Biophilia, Harvard University Press, 1984

And if ever there were a "muddled discussion" in the domain of public policy, just about everything we have heard and seen over the last decades under the heading  of "sustainable development" and "sustainable transportation" has to be placed firmly in this category.  Hopes, rhetoric and promises have run higher than high, while concrete achievements and realities have been tragically few and far between.  We are grievously losing the war of sustainability on just about every front you can imagine.  Something has to be very wrong, something fundamental, something structural and something which apparently is not getting the attention it requires.

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Can you judge a city by its street furniture?

Street furniture.  Put it like that and it sounds a bit banal, like a detail. A choice that may or may not seem to be of much important.  Not really "necessary" and perhaps even an unaffordabel luxury for a city at a time of limited budgets. But good street furniture -- and even more great street furniture -- is a sign of a city that cares. A public space, public comfort  project that anyone can use without having to pay a dime.  And with it we suddenly are moving into a new social space.

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Announcing World Streets Editions

Announcing World Streets Editions (The Plan)

World Streets Editions is at present a start-up project under study whose purpose is to work with international authors with high expertise in their fields and publish  highly readable and affordable pocket books on the topics of sustainable transport, sustainable cities and sustainable lives.  To this extent it will generally reflect the scope and values found over these last years in World Streets. We are also looking at publishing children's books and possibly other media dealing with these topics in imaginative ways.

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