City scene in Oslo, Norway by Mariano Mantel licensed under Creative Commons.

Oslo’s ambitious plan to bring down emissions. Results of a case study for healthy cities. London’s newest subway has an engineering-first approach.

Oslo’s climate movement: Oslo has undertaken an ambitious climate budgeting process that city leaders hope will bring emissions down to 95% of 2009 levels by 2030. Because the city is smaller and operates more nimble than a national government, it’s likely to achieve the goal without the politics and rancor that usually accompany these discussions. (Nick Romeo | The New Yorker)

Measuring healthy sustainable cities: In 2016, The Lancet — the oldest and best known medical journal in the world — proposed a set of indicators to create healthy and sustainable communities. They recently released a 3.5 year case study looking at 25 cities in 19 countries assessing urban form and transportation impacts on physical activity using those previous benchmarks. (Global Observatory of Healthy and Sustainable Cities)

Architecture of the Elizabeth Line: The Elizabeth Line, London’s newest subway corridor in two decades, is opening this month after several years of delays and increased costs. Dezeen dives into the engineering-first approach of its creation and aesthetic finishes. (Nat Barker | Dezeen)

A changing Seattle: Jon Talton writes about all the change he’s seen since moving to Seattle in 2007. In the last 10 years alone, the city has added 128,000 new people in just 84 square miles. And in many of the neighborhoods, transportation has changed with light rail expanding across the city. (Jon Talton | Seattle Times)

The ethics of next-day delivery: Are next-day deliveries worth the strain on workers, street networks, and the environment? It’s a question more people should ask as online merchants try to quench the demands of customers. As people order more items, it gets harder to consolidate deliveries, creating more trips and more environmental impacts. (Luke Winkie | The Guardian)

Quote of the Week

“Settlements with higher populations and higher densities have greater energised crowding, and this in turn changes urban life in three primary ways. First, energised crowding leads to neighbourhood formation. With too many people in a city, people create communities on a smaller scale – neighbourhoods – and energised crowding then continues to operate within those smaller units. Second, energised crowding leads to economic growth and development. This growth in per-capita outputs creates the superlinear scaling patterns described above….Finally, energised crowding also brings negative effects: stress and anxiety on the individual level, and crime and poverty on the city level.”

Michael E Smith, professor of anthropology at Arizona State University, in Aeon Magazine, discussing how early cities thrived.

This week on the podcast, Minneapolis pastor Travis Norvell discusses his book “Church on the Move.”