Livability Live

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of blog posts that shares links to stories and ideas that are driving and shaping the dialogue on livability.

• The Atlantic Cities covers a city progam in Los Angeles to distribute make your own park kits to community groups who want to transform a metered parking spot in their neighborhood into pop-up park. Using the pre-approved designs from the kit, groups can turn a metered parking spot into a parklet for one year.

• Partners Trustee Peter Harkness wrote an article at Governing about how cities serve as centers of innovation and problem solving throughout the world and are increasingly international in their leadership in a time when national governments often are not.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report last week, titled Health Disparities and Inequalities Report - United States, 2013, examining the key factors that affect health across the population and lead to health disparities throughout the United States. The report is the second of a series looking at health disparities and inequalities, the first of which was published in 2011 (click here to download the 2011 report). The CDC looks at health disparities across a range of groups, including racial, ethnic, sex, geographic, and socioeconomic. In the pursuit of health equity, the CDC works with its partners to both identify and address the factors that propagate health disparities across these groups with the ultimate aim of improving the health of all.