Urban Edge

Insights, perspectives and stories about building better cities and better lives

Can a building’s design promote healthy lifestyles?

For more than a decade, developers competed to brand their buildings as “green,” betting that tenants would pay a premium for a structure with energy-efficient features that could save money and or garner positive PR.

Medical Centers Can Serve as a Catalyst for Cities

They have a lot to offer.

Q&A with Rose Gowen: How Brownsville is fighting public obesity and making a more vibrant city

Rose Gowen is a city commissioner and OB-GYN in Brownsville, a city of 180,000 that sits just north of the Texas-Mexico border. The greater Brownsville area has the highest poverty rate in the country – 35 percent – which has contributed to an obesity and diabetes epidemic. Gowen spoke with the Kinder Institute’s Ryan Holeywell about how the city is trying to combat a public health crisis. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Cities tap university expertise to cure urban ills

They’re trying to make “big data” more than a catch phrase.

Buses aren’t always convenient. Houston Metro plans to fix that.

Even though Kurt Luhrsen works for the Houston-area transit agency, he knows its bus system is less than ideal.

HISD opens massive school district data sets to researchers

Hundreds of professors across the country spend countless hours researching education, but few are likely to affect the way schools are actually run.

How to Make Sure Philanthropy Pays Off

Richard and Nancy Kinder endowed the Kinder Institute with a $15 million gift in 2010. It was part of a bigger strategy.

What Millennials Think of Homeownership (and why it matters)

Optimistic about their own economic futures, they're still leery of the housing market almost a decade after the real estate bubble burst.

Mapping a community one parking spot at a time

Maps are one way to represent how we understand a given space.

Urban inequality is not just about the concentration of poverty, but also the concentration of wealth

Urban inequality is not just about the concentration of poverty. It is also about the concentration of wealth. The renewed focus on wealth has received recent media attention – and rightfully so. But researchers need to take careful steps as they tell the story of wealth concentration in cities that are racially and ethnically diverse.