Our colleague Joe Cortright has been working in Copenhagen where they hope to emulate our CityVitals work.  Joe emailed us from there:

"The irony of course is that the cities work spectacularly well, and the
economies are functioning at a much higher standard, with much less
inequality and poverty than in the US.  Except for space--living space
and parking space--the standard of living is now plainly much higher
here than in the US.

"Copenhagen has a superb new metro system that gets you from the airport
to downtown in less  than 15 minutes, with trains arriving every 3-4
minutes.  Its all automated too--no drivers.  Small, but fast and
frequent trains.  I used to think Portland was bike friendly, but we
can't hold a candle to this place.  Even the 60-something director of
the development agency, a former minister of finance for the nation,
says he bikes to work about half the time.  This same fellow told me
about his son who is an architect, working on retrofitting central city
housing (designed for the elderly) for families with small children. 
They would be awesome partners for Kids in Cities.

"In Paris now.  Wow!  I've been here a dozen times before, but I still
feel like I died and went to urban heaven.  The scale and the vibrance
of street life are just unbeatable.  I'm renting an apartment for the
weekend that I found on Craigslist.fr, from a nice young professional
couple.  Its in a kind of funky residential/commercial neighborhood, so
I feel like a real parisian.  It would be a great place to just hang out
and work if there weren't so many distractions."

Our latest report with Joe, "City Success:  Theories of Urban Success" is due this week.

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