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With colleagues at the University of Cambridge, I worked on a web game called urbangems.org. In it, you are shown 10 pairs of urban scenes of London, and for each pair you need to choose which one you consider to be more beautiful, quiet and happy. Based on user votes, one is able to rank all urban scenes by beauty, quiet and happiness. Those scenes have been studied at Yahoo Labs, image processing tools that extract colour histograms. The amount of greenery is associated with all three peaceful qualities: green is often found in scenes considered to be beautiful, quiet and happy. We then ran more sophisticated image analysis tools that extracted patches from our urban scenes and found that red-brick houses and public gardens also make people happy.

On the other hand, cars were the visual elements most strongly associated with sadness. In rich countries, car ownership is becoming unfashionable, and car-sharing and short-term hiring is becoming more popular. Self-driving cars such as those being prototyped by Google will be more common and will be likely to be ordered via the kind of mobile apps similar to the ones we use for ordering taxis nowadays. This will result into optimised traffic flows, fewer cars, and more space for alternative modes of transportation and for people on foot.

Cities will experience transformations similar to those New York has experienced since 2007. During these few years, new pedestrian plazas and hundreds of miles of bike lanes were created in the five boroughs, creating spaces for public art installations and recreation. And it’s proved popular with local businesses too, boosting the local economy in areas where cyclists are freer to travel.

three-time national champion as a college football coach -- will now lead the Jacksonville Jaguars, the team announced Thursday.

"Urban Meyer is who we want and need, a leader, winner and champion who demands excellence and produces results

Meyer had a 187-32 record during head coaching stints at Ohio State, Florida, Utah and Bowling Green.

Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces have a higher incidence of psychological problems than people living near parks and that city dwellers who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.

how a visit to a park or other green space might alter mood has been unclear. Does experiencing nature actually change our brains in some way that affects our emotional health?

found that volunteers who walked briefly through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier afterward than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic.

The Pandemic and the Future City

Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.

In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video

Urban airports like Boston’s Logan thought they had silenced noise issues with quieter planes. Now complaints pour in from suburbs 10 to 15 miles away because new navigation routes have created relentless noise for some homeowners. Photo: Alamy By Scott McCartney Scott McCartney The Wall Street Journal BiographyScott McCartney @MiddleSeat Scott.McCartney@wsj.com March 7, 2018 8:39 a.m. ET 146 COMMENTS saveSB107507240220

It turns out engines aren’t the major culprit anymore. New airplanes are much quieter. It’s the “whoosh” that big airplanes make racing through the air.

Computer models suggest slowing departures by 30 knots—about 35 miles an hour—would reduce noise on the ground significantly.

It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008

Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.

Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.

Simply walking through a sketchy-looking neighborhood can make you feel more paranoid and lower your trust in others

In a study published in the journal PeerJ, student volunteers who spent less than an hour in a more dangerous neighborhood showed significant changes in some of their social perceptions.

The researchers’ goal was to investigate the relationship between lower income neighborhoods and reduced trust and poor mental health.

Across China, cultural traditions like the Lei family’s music are under threat. Rapid urbanization means village life, the bedrock of Chinese culture, is rapidly disappearing, and with it, traditions and history.

By 2010, that figure had dropped to 2.6 million, a loss of about 300 villages a day

In the past few years, the shift has accelerated as governments have pushed urbanization, often leaving villagers with no choice but to move.

raised a camera atop a 16-foot tripod to film down into Bryant Park

They hit record, then milled about nearby pretending they had nothing to do with the rig, as it semi-surreptitiously filmed the comings and goings of hundreds of New Yorkers.

groundbreaking granular studies of the city’s public spaces, spending hours filming and photographing and taking notes about how people behave in public

A walk in the park may soothe the mind and, in the process, change the workings of our brains in ways that improve our mental health, according to an interesting new study

Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces have a higher incidence of psychological problems than people living near parks and that city dwellers who visit natural environments have lower levels of stress hormones immediately afterward than people who have not recently been outside.

Mr. Bratman and his collaborators decided to closely scrutinize what effect a walk might have on a person’s tendency to brood.

Gallup polling firm has surveyed people in 150 countries and territories on, among other things, their daily emotional experience. Their survey asks five questions, meant to gauge whether the respondent felt significant positive or negative emotions the day prior to the survey.

The more times that people answer "yes" to questions such as "Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?", the more emotional they're deemed to be.

Singapore is the least emotional country in the world

The World Health Organization reports that suicide rates have increased 60 percent over the past 50 years, most strikingly in the developing world, and that by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world.

n 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of antidepressant use in the United States rose by 400 percent between 1988 and 2008.

there is reason to believe that mental illness is indeed increasing around the world, if only because urbanization is increasing. By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities.

Trees can lower summer daytime temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a recent study.

A study published last year by the US Forest Service found that we lost 36 million trees annually from urban and rural communities over a five-year period. That’s a 1% drop from 2009 to 2014.

“cities will become warmer, more polluted and generally more unhealthy for inhabitants,”

After a string of deaths, some heart-stopping plunges in the stock market and an emergency rate cut by the Federal Reserve, there is reason to be concerned about the ultimate economic impact of the coronavirus in the United States.

Advanced economies like the United States are hardly immune to these effects. To the contrary, a broad outbreak of the disease in them could be even worse for their economies than in China. That is because face-to-face service industries — the kind of businesses that go into a tailspin when fearful people withdraw from one another — tend to dominate economies in high-income countries more than they do in China.

If people stay home from school, stop traveling and don’t go to sporting events, the gym or the dentist, the economic consequence would be worse

Washing your hands frequently, with plenty of water and soap, is one of the simplest and most effective measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Yet due to a lack of water supply and indoor plumbing, three-quarters of households in the developing world won't be able to follow this advice, Tim Wainwright of the nonprofit WaterAid told The Guardian, because they lack some place to wash with soap and water. How will they cope when the pandemic escalates and there is no clean water to help stop contagion?

The pandemic may be raging in Europe and the US, but it is spreading across Asia, Africa and Latin America, from where it may yet return to strike the Northern Hemisphere again. This pandemic is a global threat, and it will not be defeated until our most vulnerable communities are safe. One of the crucial ways of keeping them safe is to ensure they have access to safe water and sanitation; never has the sixth UN Sustainable Development Goal, which aims to ensure just this by 2030, been more vital for saving and protecting lives.

Two years ago, Cape Town in South Africa came perilously close to "Day Zero" -- the day its 3.7 million residents would run out of water. Strict water rationing has been the order of the day ever since. Water scarcity increases the burden on the poorest of the poor -- women who must walk for miles to find water and carry it back to their homes. And, of course, water scarcity makes the challenge of delivering clean water and sanitation much more complex.

“Demographics are destiny.”It is a phrase, often attributed to the French philosopher Auguste Comte, that suggests much of the future is preordained by the very simple trend lines of populations. Want to understand how the power dynamic between the United States and China will change over the next 20 years? An economist would tell you to look at the demographics of both countries. (China’s economy is likely to overtake the U.S. economy by 2028, but remain smaller on a per capita basis.)

Predicting the future may be a fool’s errand. But using demographic data to assess the opportunities and challenges of the next two decades is something that business and political leaders don’t do enough. We’re all too swept up in the here and now, the next quarter and the next year.

More people around the world had more disposable income and increasingly chose to live closer to cities with greater access to airports. That, married with the human condition that people like to be around other people, makes forecasting certain elements of the future almost mathematical.

I can, however, describe what I, as prime minister of Australia, did to curb gun violence following a horrific massacre 17 years ago in the hope that it will contribute constructively to the debate in the United States.

Our challenges were different from America’s. Australia is an even more intensely urban society, with close to 60 percent of our people living in large cities. Our gun lobby isn’t as powerful or well-financed as the National Rifle Association in the United States. Australia, correctly in my view, does not have a Bill of Rights, so our legislatures have more say than America’s over many issues of individual rights, and our courts have less control. Also, we have no constitutional right to bear arms. (After all, the British granted us nationhood peacefully; the United States had to fight for it.)

Given our decentralized system of government, I could reduce the number of dangerous firearms only by persuading the states to enact uniform laws totally prohibiting the ownership, possession and sale of all automatic and semiautomatic weapons while the national government banned the importation of such weapons.

If you already live in the heartland, the message is to stay. If you come from the heartland and have left, the message is to return. But what if you’re one of the tens of millions of people who can’t stay in or go home to the heartland because your home — your roots — are in the BosWash corridor of the Northeast or the urbanized areas of the West Coast? …

is this even possible in a place where paying my mortgage and other bills requires that my wife and I — like my equally striving neighbors — devote ourselves to high-stress work during nearly every waking hour of our days? If I were independently wealthy, perhaps the good life that Dreher describes would be a possibility in the Philadelphia suburbs. But alas…

[M]aybe the lesson is that the good life is not possible in the Philadelphia suburbs, or any place where in order to keep your head above water, your job has to own you and your wife, and it keeps you from building relationships.

Scientists have been stealing ideas from animals for years.

One industrial “nose job” later, the bullet train is far quieter and goes 10% faster on 15% less fuel.

There are countless examples of similar “biomimicry.” The velcro on your coat is based on those aggravating burrs that cling to your jeans after a hike. Scientists are developing painless hypodermic needles modeled on mosquito mouths that get your blood out without your even noticing.