Cyclovia
Cyclovia is an institutionalised event in Bogota where each Sunday and public holiday over 100 km of roadway are closed to car traffic for seven hours to create a ciclovia (“cycling way”) for cyclists, skaters, runners and walkers. On some Sundays, as many as a million and a half people, or about 20% of Bogota, use Ciclovia to relax, excercise, and connect with others. By promoting the use of roads as public [...]
Restoration of Cheonggyecheon River
How can urban cities be renovated to provide opportunities for their residents to reconnect to nature? Cheonggyecheon river restoration project in Seoul replaced a highway with urban green spaces and a highly engineered river. The project opened in 2005 and has become popular place for people to visit in Seoul. The restoration of the Cheonggyecheon aimed to provide people with access to nature in the city as well as to revitalise downtown Seoul's culture and [...]
Bogota’s CicloRuta
How can government investments in infrastructure projects help trigger good sustainable change? How can we overcome our lock-in to fossil-fuel intensive transport systems? Bogotá is the largest city of Colombia with a population of 7 million. Since the 1990s it has undergone a transformation from being know for its drug violence to its sustainability initiatives, many which have focussed on public transportation as a key for social inclusion. One of these initiatives was [...]
Indian Bend Wash – Resilient Safe Fail Urban Green Infrastructure
How can infrastructure protect urban areas from extreme weather, while providing other benefits when weather is non-extreme? Indian Bend Wash in Scottsdale Arizona is a 17 km greenbelt that runs through the Phoenix metropolitan area in the SouthWest United States. It is "green infrastructure" designed to provide both flood protection and recreation. Indian Bend Wash is a historic floodplain, which was urbanized in the 20th century. In the late 1960s, development in the floodplain [...]
Gardening the Sahel
by Lea Billen & Deborah Goffner Can multiplying small-scale “re-greening” in the form of women-run communal fruit and vegetable gardens make a difference for local populations in the Sahel? The Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel Initiative (GGW) is a Pan-African project consisting of a contiguous series of landscape-scale interventions designed to cross the African continent with the goal of improving environmental and human well-being in the [...]
