Times Square, the iconic plaza of New York City, was suffering from its own popularity.

When people refer to slum upgrading, most community members hear “slum removal.”

Self-proclaimed “stealth health” leader Brian Wansink describes the Smarter Lunch Rooms initiative as “choice architecture.”

Toomas Trapido, a member of the Estonian parliament, sat down with Rainer Nõlvak, an information technology entrepreneur and then-chairman of the Estonian Fund for Nature, to discuss collaborating on environmental projects.

Water shapes a community. In many cases it defines it. The Trau Kod Dam at the Balang Commune reservoir is no different.

In July of 2006, researcher and consultant Mari Gallagher published a groundbreaking report, Examining the Impact of Food Deserts on Public Health in Chicago, in which she coined the term “food desert.”

Cary Fowler collects seeds. “Most people don’t think about this, but our agricultural crops are on the frontlines of climate change and will be the first to be affected,” says Fowler, president of the Global Diversity Crop Trust.

The earth’s oil supply dries up, world climates spin out of control, and the human race struggles for survival.

Khayelitsha, a township of Cape Town, South Africa, was established in 1985 during the apartheid era.

Cool has a new meaning for suit-wearing Japanese businessmen. Tradition dictates formal attire and darker suits have been the norm, even during hot, humid summers.

Graffiti has long been an artistic form of expression for the masses to vent their political frustrations and personal longings.

About 827 million people live in slums worldwide. Yet investments focused on water sanitation and infrastructure do little to mark a visual change in the community.

Together, these technologies are opening the door to to a new approach to urban planning. Call it crowd-sourced urban planning.

Some assumed public-works officials had placed them there for tree maintenance, but others soon discovered their true purpose. Stenciled on the structures in a militaristic style was the Web address of an organization calling itself Heavy Trash

The Iron Curtain was a political, economic, ideological, physical, and cultural divide that separated Eastern and Western Europe throughout the cold war.

Starting in the 1960s political instability led to the rise of paramilitary groups and armed conflict throughout Colombia.

Designed and researched by the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a New York-based nonprofit, City Without a Ghetto examined the urban-renewal programs of the ’50s and ’60s and their effects on the American city.

For Patrick Rhodes, who founded Project Locus, a nonprofit dedicated to bringing design to underserved neighborhoods, a simple act of kindness would become the catalyst for providing temporary shelter for hundreds of homeless throughout Baltimore.

For decades population experts and urban planners have warned of overcrowding in the world’s major cities.

Many community design centers are eager to engage in design/build projects in their cities, but often land is either too costly or too far from the population the center is mandated to reach.

Politics and religion have combined to create a sensitive patchwork of divided territories in Israel’s West Bank.

In 1997 a group of humanitarian aid agencies collaborated to create a set of standards for disaster response, aiming to improve quality and enhance accountability.

The Housing for Health project began when an interdisciplinary team realized that health services alone were not improving the welfare of some 3,000 aboriginal peoples living in remote communities in central Australia.

Throughout the ages, mankind was concerned with keeping the darkness at bay through fire, lamps and electrical lights.

Land mines are like anonymous terrorists, killing or maiming one person, usually an innocent civilian or de-miner, every 22 minutes.

In 1997 architect Dr. Tom Corsellis, whose background included field work with aid organizations such as CARE and UNHCR, teamed with a group of researchers to rethink the way emergency shelter was designed and implemented.

According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over half of the students in the United States walked to school in 1969.

The United States leads the world in the number of people incarcerated. During the 1990s a movement began to address the issues that lead to high recidivism rates.

In this article, excerpted from “Curitiba: Story of a City,” writer Bill McKibben reflects on how Lerner’s small but targeted changes have made the city an international model of people-friendly planning and design.