Stories for "cities"
Shanghai. New York. Tehran. Tokyo. Today, dozens of cities worldwide are each home to many millions of people. But those masses of humanity might not exist in such tight quarters if not for John Snow. (No, not that Jon Snow. This John Snow.) Snow was a 19th-century English doctor who’s credited with proving that cholera, […]
Imagine a city skyline — a jagged line of peaks, drops and plateaus — all filled with rooftop farms. This is the dream of Roman Gaus, CEO of UrbanFarmers, which aims to turn city roof space into a place to grow fresh food and even raise fish. Gaus has contributed an essay to the new […]
Do city people really like to share more? Emily Badger of The Atlantic Cities suggests a new and fascinating phenomenon in urban areas — that city dwellers are moving toward a culture of shared ownership of everything from cars to power tools. Badger shares this thought in an essay from the new TED Book City […]
In the 1950s, 3 out of every 10 people on the planet lived in a city. Today, that ratio has nearly doubled — and the United Nations projects that by 2050, nearly 7 in 10 people will live in urban settings. Our population is gravitating towards cities, and this shift is creating amazing opportunities as […]
TED Senior Fellow alumna Gabriella Gomez-Mont made a suprise appearance at TED2013 with some incredible news – she’s just been appointed chief of Laboratory for the City (Laboratorio para la Ciudad), a creative think tank for Mexico City that aims to make it not only the most vibrant and sexy city in the world, but an experimental lab […]
Saskia Sassen thinks deeply about the world’s cities, and she’s on the TED stage to share some of her provocative theories about how we should think about urbanizing technology, that pervasive force that has impacted so much of the way in which we live and work. She starts by pointing out an amazing fact: there […]
Moving images and hidden systems — Session 2 moved into the world of the unexplored. Listen for an exploration into the secrets of cities, find out how the elusive giant squid was caught on film and hear a case for the virtue of ignorance. The speakers who appeared this session. Click their name to read […]
The world’s cities are on pace to balloon from 3.6 billion inhabitants today to more than 6 billion by midcentury. As a result, we face both a dire emergency and a tremendous opportunity. At their best, our modern cities are hubs of human connection, fountains of creativity and exemplars of green living. Yet at the […]
In the next 30 years, two-thirds of our planet’s population will live in cities. Have you ever tried to envision the cities of the future? Cities are enlivened by people, and people enable change. So today, we are launching our redesigned website TheCity2.org, a gathering place for all urban denizens to share stories, videos, ideas […]
Mexico City is home to nearly 9 million people. The 8th largest city economy in the world, Mexico City is bursting with energy, vibrancy and color. But at the same time, it is also facing a health crisis. Diabetes has crept up to become the leading cause of preventable death in Mexico — with about […]
According to the United Nations, by the year of 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. So what will the city of the future look like? These are some of the questions that dominate our conception of “The City 2.0”: How will we transport ourselves? Where will we grow our […]
Big cities across the globe will soon be getting much, much bigger. As architect Kent Larson shares in this future-focused talk from TEDxBoston, 90 percent of the world’s population growth is expected to happen in cities. But while newly established cities tend to sprawl to accommodate growth, Larson envisions that the metropolises of the future […]
Happy birthday John Snow, father of modern epidemiology: A Q&A with Steven Johnson
