Cities
The Neighborhood Flags Project
For GOOD 019: The Neighborhoods Issue, we asked a few talented designers, artists, and illustrators to create flags celebrating their...
Cities
A Promise Worth Keeping: Can the Harlem Children's Zone Work Anywhere?
By most accounts, the Harlem Children’s Zone has been a slam dunk. But now that the model is expanding to 20 other cities, it’s worth asking:...
Cities
The GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods: Get on Community Access Television
No offense to preachers and underground rappers everywhere, but imagine if public access television was also peppered with shows by people with...
Cities
The GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods: Get a Stop Sign or Crosswalk Put In
Walkable streets are what make neighborhoods work—this much we know. Of course, not all of us are so lucky as to have them where we live. If a...
Cities
The GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods: Be a Good Regular
Used to be, you would show up at the bar on the corner a couple of times a week, order the usual, and everyone would know your name. But with...
Cities
The GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods: Create a Neighborhood Clubhouse
From 2004 to 2007, the artists Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell ran a store in their Oakland, California, neighborhood that sold nothing....
Cities
The GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods: Go Local 2.0
If the web of the 2000s was social, the web of this next decade will be civic. Every time you “like” something on Facebook, you’re voting....
Cities
The GOOD Guide to Better Neighborhoods: Join a New-and-Improved Commune
That 1960s experiment is back—but the rules have changed. To ease the awkwardness, here are some dos and don’ts for modern-day communal...
Cities
Squat in a Foreclosed Home
One of the more interesting stories coming out of the housing crisis was the people squatting in foreclosed houses. Through a certain lens,...
Cities
Get a Billboard Taken Down (or at Least Complain About One)
If you don’t happen to live in one of the states where billboards are illegal (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont), you probably live, work, or...
Cities
Picture Show: Crowdsourcing the World's Greatest Imaginary Neighborhood
Imagining the ideal street What if all your favorite places from around the world—that taco stand on the Mexican border, that hat store in...
Cities
Share Your Yard (or Get Your Neighbors to Share Theirs)
More space, lower bills, and enough pooled cash to install that solar-powered hot tub—there are a lot of practical reasons to share yards with...
Cities
Meet Your Neighbors Without Seeming like a Crazy Person
Just because delivering a Jell-O mold to welcome a newcomer to the block is creepy doesn’t mean you’re destined to live a lonely, anonymous...
Cities
Project: Help Us Create Neighbor Day
Admit it: Your neighborhood isn’t like Mister Rogers’s. You don’t know the name of your postal carrier or beat cop, or even the person who...
Cities
Neighborhoods of the World: San Ángel and East London
We asked our friends from Afar—a new magazine devoted to experiential travel—to help us explore great neighborhoods all over the world. Where’s...
Cities
Agriculture is the New Golf: Rethinking Suburban Communities
There is new movement to plan suburban communities around farms instead of golf courses. Can it catch on? It has often been observed that...
Cities
The Great Desprawling Experiment
Can Tyson Corner show the country how to fix its suburbs? “A textbook case of suburban sprawl”—that’s what local officials call the northern...
Cities
The LION's Share: Don't Just Buy Local, Invest
Don’t just buy local, invest local: One town’s plan to buy stock in their own community. We’ve all been told to buy locally, but when it comes...
