World Resources Institute

Earth Day At 50 Years Old: 5 Ways To Honor The Legacy & Change The…

5 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

Fifty years ago, 20 million Americans (10% of the U.S. population at the time) took to the streets at the first Earth Day to demand a better future. Outraged by polluted air and water, by oil spills and the destruction of nature, these people’s actions changed policies and politics, and sparked the emergence of the modern environmental movement. Within months, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was created and the Clean Air Act was passed into law with bipartisan support.

Too Many Cities Are Growing Out Rather Than Up — 3 Reasons That’s A Problem

6 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

Imagine Lagos, Nigeria, a city of 22 million. What was once a small coastal town just a few decades ago has exploded into a sprawling megacity spanning 452 square miles. Its rapid growth has stretched the city’s services impossibly thin: Less than 10 percent of people live in homes with sewer connections; less than 20 percent have access to tap water. Many houses are in slums and informal settlements at the city’s periphery. Now picture Lagos twice as big.

Urban Transformations: In Medellín, Metrocable Connects People In More Ways Than One

6 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

Medellín, Colombia used to be the murder capital of the world. With the explosion of the global drug trade in the 1980s, crime burgeoned, plunging the city into a state of lawlessness. Slum communities, stacked up along the perilous slopes of the surrounding Aburrá Valley, were on the front lines of the violence and mayhem.But today, Medellín is transformed.

Urban Transformations: In Pune, India, Waste Pickers Go from Trash to Treasure

6 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

Pinky Sonawane spent her childhood gathering garbage on the streets of Pune, India. She’d join her mother in pulling plastic bottles, cans, and cardboard from roadside dumpsters, selling the materials to scrap traders for income. With no organized waste-collection system in the city of 4 million people, there was plenty of waste for her to pick—it filled bins, littered streets and piled up in mountainous heaps in dumps. But Sonawane and others like her were often treated like the garbage they collected.

Urban Transformations: In Durban, Informal Workers Design Marketplaces Instead of Getting Displaced by Them

6 years ago World Resources Institute 0 Comments

The story of how Warwick Junction bucked the global trend of replacing informal markets with malls and shopping centers is a testament to the compromise, conflict, and resourcefulness of a small set of actors – informal workers, local officials and the small non-profit Asiye eTafuleni (Zulu for “bring it to the table”). It is a story of social healing and the enduring contradictions of a modern African city.