World Streets 2012 – Focus Programs (Review draft)

If you wish to review and comment the latest working draft for our 2012 program, please click here.

Musing: What do you get if you use an iPad to access World Streets?

An iPad is not a PC, for a number of reasons. Always on, always near, always open, it provides the user with an entirely different and far more personal 21st century interface with the Internet and its extensions.  So for this reason we  decided to give a bit of attention to seeing how it might be useful to retrofit World Streets so that it provides a friendlier and more creative source for those deciding to come in via iPad or similar tablet technology. We shall look into this more analytically in the coming weeks; however for this weekend day let us simply invite you to point your iPad to us and tell us what you think.

Readers’ Choice. “Top Twenty”, 2011

When we post an article in World Streets, as we do on most weekday mornings, we are always extremely careful about our selection of topic and the manner in which we present it for our busy readers. But once the day’s feature has its hours of front page glory and takes its place in our ever-expanding database, which at this point consists of more than a thousand original pieces by more than a hundred no less original collaborators worldwide, it often comes as a surprise to us which postings turn out to get most attention from our readers. Which article is going to have several thousands of readers, and which just a trickle? Fortunately, life in the twenty-first century being what it is, we are able to track readership and are now able to share with you this listing of the “top twenty” articles consulted here over 2011. To me this listing is nothing if not surprising, but let me get out of the way here so you can go at it yourself.

Getting the most out of World Streets: Stocks and flows

As they put it in Economics 101 what you find here under this double-barrelled name functions both as a flow and as a stock. The “flow” component is basically the articles that appear here each week day on average, plus the abundant collection of related social media and discussion fora which variously stream in to and out of the flow.

The “stock” is a considerable base of resources which have been collected here through the extensive international work of the New Mobility Agenda in our assigned field over more than a decade. In the present website you will see them listed for the most part in your left-hand column, and since they are both extensive and useful it seems like a useful idea to explain it briefly. Let’s take it from the top.

Whence Social Media on World Streets

If anyone knows where this whole business of balancing what just might be highly useful linking with the constraints imposed by a seriously time-challenged 24 hour day, I hope they will let the editor of this journal know. True there is a great deal that is out there, and every bit of it is in constant kaleidoscopic evolution. My first temptation is to stick to what I know works, and give the rest a pass. But another part of my brain tells me that this could be a big mistake.

Putting Social Media to work on World Streets (Part II)

World Streets Social Media/Networking Game Plan in Brief (Working notes)
Target: Let’s see if and how we can best select and apply a batch of hopefully synergistic available social media tools to extend readership, content and support for World Streets in 2011.

Our approach/Exec. Summary: Do it as well as we can/Inspect feedback/Adjust as we go along/Invite creative articles from colleagues working directly with these tools/Share all this with our readers.

Reposting exceptional contributions to World Streets

World Streets has from the beginning been defined and run as an open collaborative venture. In addition to its considerable original content, the journal welcomes suggestions  concerning outstanding recent articles and reports appearing in other sources, which in their view our readers would do well to know more about.  After internal review  and selection, we occasionally get in touch with the author or publisher of the selected piece and ask for permission to reprint. All such articles follow the same routines for preparation and publication:

2011 Work Plan: First we have to pay for it

Paris. Thursday, 25 November 2010

Subject: Heavy traffic on the way to sustainable cities and sustainable lives . . .

Dear friends and colleagues,

With the harvest now safely in the granary, the livestock firmly locked in the barn, the muskets loaded and plenty of wood chopped to see us through a long and surely hard winter, it is time to cook up a big meal and invite everyone within shouting distance to come to celebrate that we all have somehow made it through one more year and have at least a fair shot at the one to come.

So on this special day for Americans, wearing my hat as founding editor of World Streets I decided this morning to pick up pen and write a short note to you (and approximately one thousan d f riends and colleagues in cities and countries literally all over the world) to see if they, you that is, might have some ideas as to how this thing we call World Streets can now organize to deal with the challenges and the opportunities of the year ahead. For, as you will see in our and other pages, there are surely plenty of both.

Eric Britton – Founding editor

Trained as a development economist, Francis Eric Knight Britton is founding editor of World Streets and managing director of EcoPlan International, an independent advisory network providing strategic counsel for government,  business and civil society on policy and decision issues involving complex systems, social-technical change and sustainable development.

His latest work has focused on the subject of economy, efficiency and equity in city transport and helping governments to ask the right questions and find practical solutions to urban transportation issues.   Over 2012 and 2013 he is test driving his new book, The Third Transportation Revolution: A Tale of Cities, Indolence, Complexity and. . .  Equity, in conferences with cities, government agencies, suppliers and critical audiences in cities around the world.