Members of the public health community and those from the world of urban planning have teamed up to create the Active Living By Design program, and by extension, this fine website. With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and an academic home at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health, the program was created “to increase physical activity through...

Written by Christopher Walker of the Urban Institute, this 69-page report takes a critical look at the ways in which community development corporations (which generally are nonprofit, community-controlled real estate development organizations) have assisted in the revitalization of poor communities around the United States. Funded by the National Community Development Initiative, Walker's analysis...

This report, written by Christopher Walker and Mark Weinheimer and published by the Urban Institute, demonstrates that since its inception in 1991, the National Community Development Initiative (NCDI) has had a significant impact on community development corporations (CDCs) in 23 large American cities. The 136-page report provides an overview of the NCDI and CDCs, an assessment of NCDI-funded...

Readers interested in learning how to build healthier, more resilient communities will likely find Community Tool Box to be a valuable resource. Visitors will find numerous options for "practical, step-by-step guidance in community-building skills," such as assessing community needs and resources, developing a strategic plan, building a community's leadership capacity, and more. In the menu under...

The New Urbanist movement in architecture and town planning began in the United States as an effort to alleviate the pattern of urban and suburban sprawl that was a common element of post-World War II development around the country. The first place new visitors will want to start is by reading the charter statement of the group, along with a brief history of the organization, which was begun in...

The Humanitarian Engineering program at the Colorado School of Mines trains students to "co-create just and sustainable solutions for communities." As the site explains, too often engineers design projects without listening closely to what communities, especially poor communities, really want. The program educates students toward a number of outcomes, including collaborative identification of...

The mission of the Humanity Development Library is to make practical information from many sources available at the lowest possible cost to the user. Originally created as a set of CD-ROMs and now on the Web, the library provides a gateway to the publications of a whole host of international human development and educational organizations, from the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU) to the...

As part of the Lincoln Land Institute's Working Paper series, Professor Tim Chapin of Florida State University has composed this 28-page work that addresses both the costs and benefits (economic and otherwise) of sports facilities. As many urban areas continue to compete for a variety of large-scale economic development projects, this paper will be of great general interest. As Professor Chapin...

The mission of the Humanity Development Library is to make practical information from many sources available at the lowest possible cost to the user. Originally created as a set of CD-ROMs and now on the Web, the library provides a gateway to the publications of a whole host of international human development and educational organizations, from the Asian Cultural Centre for UNESCO (ACCU) to the...

The Office of University Partnerships, founded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1994, is designed "to encourage and expand the efforts of higher education that are striving to make a difference in their communities through funding opportunities." Their online presence includes a number of helpful documents for persons interested in these relationships, including a recently...