This week’s things to know:

A Tiny Twist on Street Design: The One-Minute City (Bloomberg)

The "15 minute city" concept was introduced last year as a strategic objective for making neighborhoods more healthy, equitable, and fiscally resilient. Sweden is taking the concept even further with its Street Moves initiative is empowering residents to rethink the design of their local streets at a hyperlocal, personal level. The effort acknowledges that the doorstep just outside a person's home is the first place they interact with their city, community, and neighborhood. The program aims to transform every street in the nation by 2030. -Kevin

The Anti-growth Alliance That Fueled Urban Gentrification (The Atlantic)

COVID-19 has rocked the way we view our cities, and in this article Jacob Anbinder explores how COVID has exposed flaws in the way we look at urban housing. The piece is a good background on anti-growth dynamics in cities and how it has brought together environmentalists, homeowners, advocates for tenant protections, and historic preservationists. These anti-growth dynamics led to high housing costs (due to a lack of supply) and contributed to issues such as gentrification and unaffordability. As COVID negates the benefit of proximity that cities provide, remote workers have moved out of cities, vacancies have increased, and rents dropped. I'm eager to see if these dynamics lead to a comeback in smaller cities like the one I live in, or force bigger cities to change some of the factors that lead to high housing costs. -Tim

2021: Time to get serious about climate (City Observatory)

We’ve been talking about this as a society and species for long enough, perhaps it is time for us all to take control of what we can for ourselves and learn as much as we can about what is happening around us. Read more about four big takeaways to know going into this year as well as details with regard to personal and commercial polluters that need our attention. -Ryan

Report: Rural Counties' Being Reclassified as Urban Can Mask Their Successes (Daily Yonder)

Health. Traffic congestion. Pedestrian fatalities. Equity. Climate change. What's one thing that can make impactful progress against all of these? Check out this article to learn how sidewalks are a key part of the solution to building resilient, safe, and healthy communities and neighborhoods. -Bhargava

These Cities Tried to Tackle Disinvestment. Here Are Lessons From What Happened (Proppublica)

I love to read "lessons learned" type pieces that take deep-dives into what cities are doing to better understand and address various issues. This piece highlights some ProPublica research on how a few cities have made efforts to revive commerce in neglected or declining neighborhoods and expands on what worked and what didn't. The work focuses on larger cities, but there are some good takeaways in here for cities of any size. -Kevin

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