Word: sprawl
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Everyone is created to walk," says Mayor Hindman. "But we have designed our streets to create barriers to an obvious, efficient activity." Columbia is not alone. Throughout most of the U.S., suburban sprawl has created a nation that has been supersized beyond walking distance. Homes tend to be far removed from shopping; compact, walkable downtowns are rare; traffic is fast and dangerous to pedestrians; and even sidewalks aren't to be taken for granted. Researchers will tell you that most Americans will not walk anyplace that's more than a quarter-mile away. In a recent poll, 44% of people...
...serious effort to examine that connection got under way at a meeting convened in 1997 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To get people in different disciplines to start thinking about an obesity-sprawl connection, the CDC brought together city planners, architects, researchers, transportation engineers and even criminal-justice experts. (Why criminal-justice experts? Because safer streets are more walkable. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle.) That meeting was a catalyst for the rise of the active-living movement, which got a major boost two years later when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation...
Spring has finally come to Cambridge. The air smells of lilac; flip-flops slap the brick sidewalks. Hemlines go up. Seersucker and madras glow prematurely, like early gladiolus. We are 19, or 20, or 21. During the day, we sprawl on patches of grass to sunbathe and complain about how much work we have to do, our voices floating to each other, languid, in the warm air. At night, music and laughter from formals drift from house courtyards out over the river...
...very model of the oracular modern architect, given to panoramic pronouncements on modernity ("If space junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet"). His highest goal is to restore possibilities for human interaction of whatever kind. Congestion and sprawl he sees as advantages. The posthuman megalopolises of the 21st century--Tokyo, Atlanta, Shanghai--are just so many jumbo opportunities. On the other hand, he is sick to death of skyscrapers, which he considers vertical cylinders that isolate people instead of putting them into circulation with one another...
Like Madagascar's rain forests, the country's National Forest Seed Bank (SNGF) in Antananarivo looks to be losing the battle against human encroachment. Engulfed by the capital's urban sprawl, the SNGF's small, scruffy patch of land has row upon row of seedlings, some of them species facing extinction in the wild. They seem too delicate to make it through the furious tropical storms common in the island's November-to-April rainy season. But SNGF director Guy Rakotondranony insists they will survive - they have to. The seedlings are "our hope for the future," he says, "our ecological...