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Brynjolfsson and McAfee have a list of 19 proposals that they support - which range from massive investment in education, infrastructure and basic research, to lowering barriers to business creation, eliminating the mortgage interest deduction and changing copyright and patent law to encourage new (as opposed to protecting old) innovations.

There is growing evidence showing that place impacts people's health on multiple scales. From obesity and chronic disease to depression, social isolation, and increased exposure to environmental toxins and pollutants, the world faces very different health challenges today than it has in the past, and many of these challenges are directly related to how our public spaces are designed and operated.

Some may be surprised to hear PPS echoing a version of the modernist mantra "form ever follows function" (see principle 9), but it's important for us to remember what that phrase is really all about. When it was first coined by Louis Sullivan, it was a humanist idea: that the form of a building should serve first and foremost the human uses that animate it. But over time, as Jane Jacobs observed, the idea of function underwent a "drift from humanism to gimmickry."

At the Placemaking Leadership Forum this fall, more than 450 dedicated public space practitioners and policymakers came together to chart the future of the placemaking movement. The second day of the event was structured around ten major issues that converge in public space, which we at PPS refer to as "transformative agendas."

If we want a high-growth society with broadly shared prosperity, and if we want to avoid dislocations like the one we have just gone through, we need to change our theory of action foundationally. We need to stop thinking about the economy as a perfect, self-correcting machine and start thinking of it as a garden.

"In a new report, I reinforce what the goal of economic development should be, as summarized by decades of academic literature: to put a region on a path to higher growth by improving the productivity of firms and people in ways that leads to better incomes and living standards for all."

Ours is a movement that understands the urgency of slowness, that believes small is the new big, that asserts that we are inextricably connected to each other, the food we eat and the ecology we move through, and that moves through us.

The C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group (C40) is a network of large and engaged cities from around the world committed to implementing meaningful and sustainable climate-related actions locally that will help address climate change globally. Our organization's global field staff works with city governments, supported by our technical experts across a range of program areas.

During a panel discussion at The Economist's World in 2012 festival, former U.S. Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, Morgan Stanley CFO Ruth Porat and Brookings Institute fellow Eswar Prasad agreed that 2012 would be the year that defines the path that the U.S., European Union and emerging economies for the next decade.

We face an entangled communications challenge. Becoming a sustainable city is less a technological issue than one of mindset, understanding and behavioural. Too many people still believe there is no problem. How can this be overcome? Do we approach it by engendering fear, cajoling, or persuasion? By providing evidence of the threats or examples of good practices? Do we jolt people into focus by ascending graphs of problems or imagery of iconic events like Katrina or Superstorm Sandy? It is best to show how the shift is doable and already happening and that those at the forefront have a better life economically and socially. The image of the sustainable city needs to feel as emotionally satisfying as the lure of consumer culture.

There may be something inevitable about the structural changes that have made American manufacturing less central to our economy, but there is nothing inevitable about the waste, pain and human despair in cities that have accompanied that change. There are policy alternatives that can soften such transitions in ways that preserve wealth and promote equality. Just four hours from Detroit, Pittsburgh, too, grappled with white flight. But it more rapidly shifted its economy from one dependent on steel and coal to one that emphasizes education, health care and legal and financial services.

E.F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful) offered timeless advice about how to boost our communities, "Perhaps we cannot raise the wind. But each of us can put up the sail, so that when the wind comes we can catch it." Here's a handy list of ways you can capture the breeze in the place you call home. And we're sure you'll discover more ideas of your own.

The focus was on creating "cities for life" - that is, on promoting equitable development in the urban environments in which a majority of the world's citizens already live, and in which two thirds will reside by the year 2050.

The problem is that we use these powers in historically/culturally path dependent ways so the tensions become more acute. The rationalism of the nation-state as a system-hierarchy is good when talking to other states (treaty writing as per Kyoto or the Treaty of Rome), or when universal rules are needed (eg tax collection) but bad at the particular (eg helping troubled families). Passion-populism is critical for mobilisation but can also be corrosive as it fails to offer any real solutions (see UKIP et al). Creative-civic power is good at adapting resources, institutions, and policies to particular needs or ambitions but it is bad at universal welfare and justice. It can also be just as failure prone as passion politics and hierarchy (it's hard and complex to confront particular, local and personal challenges).

More detailed video on mapping system for Healthy City is an information + action resource that unites community voices, rigorous research and innovative technologies to solve the root causes of social inequity.

We are a public policy change organization rooted in the civil rights movement. We engineer large-scale systems change to remedy inequality, expand opportunity and open paths to upward mobility. Our goal is that members of all communities have the safety, opportunity and health they need to thrive.

WHO is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. It is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends.

A healthy city is one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and developing to their maximum potential.

Video mapping system for Healthy City an information + action resource that unites community voices, rigorous research and innovative technologies to solve the root causes of social inequity.

Healthy City is an information + action resource that unites community voices, rigorous research and innovative technologies to solve the root causes of social inequity.