ibmsocialbiz:

A team of IBMers and Social Media Week are working together on a kind of grassroots, crowdsourced research. Share your views on Social Commerce and help us scan and analyze the collective intelligence of the Social Media Week global community.

Answer Today’s Social Commerce Scan | Question 2. Global/Local:

What would make commerce smarter via social media in Beirut? Berlin? Bogota? Buenos Aires? Chicago? Glasgow? Tell us what it means for you in your Social Media Week city: Los Angeles, Milan, Moscow, Rio, Sao Paulo or Vancouver.

About the Scan

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel aims to encourage urban agriculture - chicagotribune.com

Urban farmers were delighted Tuesday when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a proposed ordinance that could make growing and selling fresh produce in Chicago much easier.

In December, some of the biggest local names in urban agriculture had protested a previous proposal that they felt would stunt the growth of city gardens with cumbersome rules on plot size, high-end fencing and produce sales in residential areas.

Erika Allen, head of seven nonprofit Growing Power farms in Chicago, predicted at the time that her group’s work “would be over” if the zoning ordinance passed.

But Tuesday morning, Emanuel chose Allen’s new Iron Street Farm in Bridgeport to present his proposed ordinance — one that marks a turnaround on almost every thorny issue in the last proposal.

“We’ve been working really hard to see this happen,” said Allen, who served on the mayor’s transition team. “I think it’s just a new administration and a changing of the guard. Former Mayor (Richard) Daley was supportive, but there was a lot of opposition coming out of (the zoning department) that was very much entrenched in ‘this is the way it we do it.’”

Which cities can best adapt to climate change? | Grist

Cross-posted from Cool Green Science.

Earlier this month, 35 mayors from major cities around the world convened for the Resilient Cities 2011 Conference and released a declaration [PDF] that highlighted the recent rise in natural disasters and the imperative for cities to increase their resiliency and ability to adapt to climate change.

But what does it mean for a city to be “resilient” to climate change? Which cities are most resilient — and what makes a city vulnerable?

Grist recently ran a slideshow featuring “the top 10 climate ready U.S. cities” — which was basically a measure of steps those cities were taking to reduce carbon emissions. What that piece didn’t address is how vulnerable or resilient a city is to climate change based on the city’s environmental context. For instance: What’s a city’s risk for climate-related disasters? Is its water supply sustainable?

I haven’t seen such a ranking — so I constructed my own simple one, based on readily available and relevant information. (You can peek at the results below.) I first factored that cities’ biggest concerns from climate change include disruptions to water supplies, increased risk of natural disasters (e.g., floods and hurricanes), and the heat itself: In addition to causing general discomfort, heat is already the biggest weather-related source of mortality.

thegreenurbanist:

In 2009, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) placed automatic bike counting equipment at many locations around the city. It uses pneumatic tubes to count the number of bicyclists (excludes cars) at that point in the street – it counts ALL trips, and cannot distinguish between people going to work or going to school.

The size of the blue dot indicates the bicycle mode share for that count location. Mode share calculated by adding bikes and cars and dividing by bikes.

Get the data

• View the map, at GeoCommons
• View the raw data, at Google Fusion Tables (filter data; export as CSV or KML files)
• Download the raw data as CSV (load into Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice, Apple Numbers)
• Read the report from CDOT (PDF)

poptech:

Great infographic that compares stats of the five biggest US subway systems.