Urbanization22
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A Faustian Choice: Population and Environment
Population growth is a key contributor to the pressures pushing at our planetary boundaries. In Rio+20 discussions, implications of population growth have become shrouded in platitudes. It is important that discussions on planetary limits clearly lay out possible strategies that can alleviate these pressures.
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Goals for Rio: A Path to Sustainability
In an article published in The Lancet, Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs outlines his own ideas for sustainable development goals, and how how these goals can build on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN’s set of targets that aim to reduce extreme poverty and boost social well-being in many other ways by 2015.
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Brownfields: Untold Stories, Unrealized Value
Across the country, in distressed urban centers, hundreds of thousands of industrial sites have been left lying fallow. These properties, known as brownfields, embody the story of America’s twentieth-century industrial might and bear the mark of that period’s unenlightened practices. Their closing and subsequent abandonment culminated in the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs, the creation…
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Making Sanitary Pads to Help Keep Girls in School
MCI is lucky enough to work with two amazing Ethiopian women from the region of Tigrai, in the north of the country where the Millennium City of Mekelle is located. Both women have gone abroad to become talented professionals and both have resolved to transform the lives of women and young girls in their native…
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Architecture and Urban Design Students Present Innovative Upgrading Plans for a Millennium City
Graduate students in architecture and urban design recently presented their findings and design work issuing out of a collaboration between the Urban Design Lab (UDL) and MCI in the Millennium City of Kumasi, Ghana. At the city’s invitation, and with MCI’s facilitation, the UDL came to Kumasi in early February, to devise solutions to revitalize…
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Regional Partnership Promotes Trade and Investment in Three Sub-Saharan Cities
MCI’s Regional Partnership to Promote Trade and Investment in Sub-Saharan Africa held its regional meeting May 7-9, in Mekelle, Ethiopia, where delegations from the three participating Millennium Cities were able to hold extended, frank discussions with their colleagues and with private sector investors, who did not hesitate to describe precisely what it is that local…
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From Sendai to Rio: A Call for Action
The people living on the northeast coast of Japan had learned to expect large earthquakes. But despite being one of the best-prepared nations, they were caught off-guard by the force of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami that devastated their coastline and led to the meltdown of reactors at the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
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A Trip Along the High Line
The Highline, a park built on an old rail line on the lower West Side of New York City, pays homage to the area’s industrial past while providing locals and tourists alike with a place for repose.
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Making Connections and Celebrating Literacy, City to City
Across sub-Saharan Africa, where MCI is working to help selected secondary cities attain the Millennium Development Goals, more than 150 million adults, or 38% of the adult population, lack basic literacy skills. Fortunately, a number of organizations are working hard to change this. LitWorld, a NY-based NGO dedicated to improving global literacy and a long-time…
