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San Francisco's policies encourage the design and development of 'Better Streets,' sometimes referred to as 'Complete Streets,' that work for all users. The San Francisco Better Streets Plan, adopted in December 2010, states: Better Streets are designed and built to strike a balance between all users regardless of physical abilities or mode of travel. A Better Street attends to the needs of people first, considering pedestrians, bicyclists, transit, street trees, stormwater management, utilities, and livability as well as vehicular circulation and parking.

This toolkit can help planners, public health professionals, and the general public include health in the community planning process. Developed in partnership between the American Planning Association's Planning and Community Health Research Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Healthy Community Design Initiative, the toolkit is composed of four elements that work together to achieve this goal:

Democracy made Athens a dynamic, creative force 2500 years ago. Even then, however, democracy was fragile, sometimes stupid, and short-lived. Plato held it in low esteem and Aristotle likened it to "mob rule." Why, then, do we want to create 21st Century Agoras. What we want to create are communities energized by vibrant participative democracy. In our Information Age as old hierarchies prove dysfunctional, it is imperative that human communities have flexible ways to tap their wisdom and power. We do not believe that unstructured discussion on the Athenian model is adequate for dealing with the complexities of the Information Age. It was not adequate even for the simpler (by an order of magnitude as determined by a metric called Situational Complexity Index) situations of that bygone age. The Information Age challenges us to make participative democracy a liberating force in the world today. Research and proven methodology, aided by networked computing, has resolved at least one basic dilemma of democracy:   How can we hear perspectives of all the stakeholders, make collective sense of them, and reach decisions and act on pressing issues? The approach that overcomes this dilemma and multiple other hindrances to dialogic democracy is called the Structured Dialogic Design (SDD). The Agoras Institute convenes these dialogues as Co-Laboratories of Democracy. This process is a fusion of the theory of Generic Design Science and the consultative practice of Interactive Management, both developed over the last 30 years by Dr. John Warfield and our founder, Aleco Christakis.

The Un-School of Disruptive Design is an experimental knowledge lab in New York City. We curate brain-activating events, classes, fellowship programs and knowledge transfer experiences. Our lab encourages people from diverse professional backgrounds to reorient the way they perceive and act in the world, learning how to maximize their capacity to influence and affect positive social and environmental change.  

We help communities make better decisions through the understanding of data and design.

We're doers, storytellers, problem solvers, and community builders on a mission to design change. If you've got superpowered skills and shared passion, we'd love to meet you.

"We need to ratchet up from targeted innovation and apply design-thinking principles to one of the biggest social issues of our time: global poverty itself. "

Soulful Cities is a coalition of innovators, urban designers and social equity pioneers fostering cultural development in newly urbanized areas.

These principles were initially derived by Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist by training, for groups that were attempting to manage common-pool resources. The fact that groups possessing these design features were capable of managing their own affairs was so new against the background of received economic wisdom that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009. The design principles were later generalized by David Sloan Wilson, Ostrom, and Michael Cox in two respects. First, they follow from the basic evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species. Second, because of their theoretical generality, they apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources. That is why they provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy groups, which is the objective of PROSOCIAL." (http://alanhonick.com/prosocial/)

Andrew Millison has obeen designing, building, and teaching about Permaculture since he took his first course in 1996. He began teaching Permaculture at the college level in 2001 and has been an instructor at Oregon State University in the Horticulture Department since 2009. Andrew currently teaches the Permaculture Design Course at OSU both on campus and online.

The Collective Action Toolkit (CAT) is a package of resources and activities that enable groups of people anywhere to organize, build trust, and collaboratively create solutions for problems impacting their community. The toolkit provides a dynamic framework that integrates knowledge and action to solve challenges. Designed to harness the benefits of group action and the power of open sharing, the activities draw on each participant's strengths and perspectives as the group works to accomplish a common goal.

The Street Plans Collaborative is an urban planning, design, and research-advocacy firm. We strive to create high-quality public spaces, and believe that the key to reversing the harmfulmn effects of suburban sprawl is to promote compact, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. We thrive on working with our clients, partners, and other likeminded organizations to improve the quality and function of the built environment. We seek to increase the effectiveness of multi-modal transportation as a means to creating more competitive and sustainable 21st century towns and cities.

Designers, programmers, data scientists, and artists alike are invited to take up the challenge: merge and compare mobility data sets from three cities-San Francisco, Geneva, and Zurich-and draw meaningful insights. Winning projects will showcase the power of open governmental data and facilitate the knowledge exchange between cities. Juried prizes include round-trip airfare to one of the participating cities and funding from Fusepool, the European / Swiss Datapool, for developing the project into an app.

URBN DSGN is a collaboration between professionals and community leaders, doers and thinkers, and every day citizens. We function in pursuit of better cities.

New Urban Mechanics is a network of civic innovation offices. Across the network, we explore how new technology, designs and policies can strengthen the partnership between residents and government and significantly improve opportunity and experiences for all.

The MIT Senseable City Laboratory aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Director Carlo Ratti founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004 within the City Design and Development group at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, as well as in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. The Lab's mission states...See More

Urban Imprint demystifies how interactions between the built environment and human activity impact economic, social and ecological value. Working with planning and real estate industry professionals, Urban Imprint then leverages that know-how to develop evidence-based sustainable planning, design, and development solutions.

Project for Public Spaces (PPS) is a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. Our pioneering Placemaking approach helps citizens transform their public spaces into vital places that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation and serve common needs.

Facebook for Project for Public Spaces (PPS) a nonprofit planning, design and educational organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. Our pioneering Placemaking approach helps citizens transform their public spaces into vital places that highlight local assets, spur rejuvenation and serve common needs.

Completed the online course