"Reduce mosquito-borne disease."
Boston had largely not seen many mosquito borne diseases in almost 50 years until recent decades. They had succeeded in eliminating the bugs, but they had also sterilized the city. Parks had been drained of any ponds, swamps backfilled and streams put in culverts.
Bringing back green spaces, restoring natural flowing streams and replanting water fronts with native plants brought back the beauty of the city, but it also brought back the bugs.
Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good.
http://diseasemaps.usgs.gov/wnv_ma_mosquito.html
“The Morning Briefing” is SmartPlanet’s daily roundup of must-reads from the web. This morning we’re reading about urban planning.
1.) Using urban planning to reduce mosquito-borne disease. More than 5,000 Australians are struck down with mosquito-borne disease every year, mostly caused by the Ross River or Barmah Forest viruses.
2.) Urban regeneration: Long-term solutions in a flattened economy. While large urban regeneration initiatives can offer opportunities for businesses, there is still much work to be done to ensure that companies take full advantage over the longer term.
3.) A FREE city –- Idealistic or feasible urban planning? A new prototype, dubbed ‘FREE City,’ by Fernando Romero Enterprise, puts a highly innovative -– and some would say utopic –- spin on modern city planning.
4.) Tampa has bright future ahead with urban planning. A plan unveiled Tuesday by Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn has hopes to transform Tampa into a “vibrant, livable and sustainable community” with its “Center City” redesigned and revitalized.
5.) Could Twitter help urban planners improve transport networks? As far as data analysis is concerned, Twitter is primarily used for retrospective tracking of sentiment and other social data, but could geolocated Tweets be used to plan for the future?
Bonus: Plans for London’s second Tech City to set up in Croydon
Image credit: Tanya Hart
