Excellent transportation, telecommunications and utilities helped Vancouver, British Columbia take the top spot in The Economist's ranking of the world's most livable cities; not a single U.S. city makes the top 10.
Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai, India, may appear at first to be a squalid concentration of misery. It is also the prosperous home of some 5,000 single-room factories and tens of thousands of entrepreneurs.
The ideologically-loaded debate over what kind of history can be permitted at the former World Trade Center site has put an end to the proposed International Freedom Center.
Famous for its oil wealth and the "prosperity cheques" being handed out to every resident, the Canadian Province of Alberta is actually a classic example of rapacious growth, dangerously poor planning and poor performance on social development indicators.
New Orleans can learn from Curitiba, Brazil, which turned its fortunes around with an innovative public transit system and by treating the poor with dignity.
