“Leisure is the ideal of life.” This alluring ideology promoted by the municipality of Amsterdam as central to the lifestyle of the ‘Dam city dwellers, draws nearly 16 million tourists to the Netherlands each year. While...

On August 13, 1961, during the height of the Cold War, the East German government built a wall to keep residents of East Berlin from defecting to West Berlin. This so-called ‘antifascist protection wall,’ as it was calle...

Safety is one of the defining elements of a city’s quality of life. It is often measured by metrics of crime rate, number of reported homicides, acts of vandalism and other violent incidents which objectively quantify an...

When you search the Top 100 urban planning and development, architecture, or built environment books on Amazon you may notice the abundance of male voices, male authors. This book list is meant for men and women alike - ...

When I graduated from the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture in Rabat, Morocco, we were a class of 73 students, 68 young women, and 14 young men. That’s right, more than 75% of this group of freshly graduated architects were...

Oxford Dictionary defines “airport” as, “a complex of runways and buildings for the take-off, landing, and maintenance of civil aircraft, with facilities for passengers.” People have now been traveling by air for just ov...

President Ronald Reagan once famously proclaimed: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Reagan was referring to the Berlin Wall, which physically and ideologically divided Germany from 1961 until 1989 due to the Cold War...

Holidays are for family, friends, good food, getaways and postponed reading in our favorite nooks. At The Global Grid, the holidays have always been the occasion to review and update our books-to-read (or re-read) list. ...

In an era of city competition and globalization, cities around the world are competing with one another to "go global." Cities are significant production points of specialized financial and manufacturing services that ma...

To preserve or to build anew? The significance of preserving historic structures and places is often debated, typically falling into arguments related to aesthetics, budgets, cultural identity, economic development, and ...

Five years ago, the city of Syracuse, New York jumped on the green design bandwagon by developing a Sustainability Plan meant to reduce energy consumption while preserving and protecting the environment. According to thi...

The annual Greenbuild International Conference and Expo has been hosted by the U.S. Green Building Council since 2002, drawing together professionals from across the green building industry. The event includes an expo sh...