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Courtesy of Lucy Nieto @ Flickr A small colonial village in the heart of Mexico, San Miguel Allende has for decades opened its doors to a legion of American expats. While climate and serene life style were likely a factor for the first few, the large proportion of English speaking inhabitants has accelerated the process. In their article “The 20 cities of 2020” Stefan Linssen and Christopher Sindik present a method for evaluating the cities taking sustainability to the next level and creating specific plans that will have them improve their overall status as a Global Sustainability Center by the year 2020. While the article mentions the variety of factors that were considered, it is not clear what the evaluation methodology or how the scores were assigned, but there are plenty of notes about the various initiatives underway to make these cities worthy of their inclusion in this ranking. Here is the list of the top 10 as ranked by their average score in 2020. London – 9.3 With such favorable prospects on any one of these cities, it may be worth investing a little time scouting them to become more intimate with their rhythm of life. Wilderness? Only 10% of the land area is remote – more than 48 hours from a large city A recent study by the Global Enrironment Monitoring unit of the European Commission has produced a very interesting visualization of how accessible areas around the world are. Representing in brighter yellow colours those areas that are just a few hours away from a major city and darker red colours those that can only be reached after days of travelling, the map clearly conveys the simple fact that there are very few regions in the world that are truly isolated. Produced by GEM As I start to structure the notion of a slurb, one element to consider is how far away would you be willing to travel. Most tourists will assume a half-day for their journeys, a couple of hours getting to the airport and waiting for a flight, four to eight hours on a plane and maybe another hour getting to the final destination. The end point will usually be another major city or tourist destination with decent road infrastructure. But knowing that there are very few places in the world that are more than a couple of days away [...] Courtesy NCinDC @ Flickr From the description provided by the photographer: The Owl’s Nest, also known as the Crounse House, at 3031 Gates Road NW in the Van Ness neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. From the District of Columbia Office of Planning: One of the several ideas that have been developing over the last couple of [...] Courtesy of SantiMB @ Flickr Ronda has been the source of inspiration for writers like Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles. Maybe each one of us ought to find our little “muse” town and make arrangements for sporadic creative bursts and go back to our cities recharged and ready to put in motion those great ideas. |
 Global Culture Blog by Juan Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. |
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