Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré (TED Talk: How to build with clay ... and community) designs with both people and sustainability in mind. Raised in Burkina Faso, though he’s now based in Berlin, Kéré is always keen to include community-oriented spaces that invite people to sit down and engage in thoughtful conversation. The central nature of ...

Diébédo Francis Kéré grew up in a small village in Gando, Burkina Faso, before heading to Germany to study architecture. And as a student there, he came up with a very ambitious project. “I wanted to open up better opportunities to other kids in Gando. I wanted to use my skills to build a school. But how do you do that when you’re still a...

Around the world, cities are growing at an exceptionally fast clip. As the oft-quoted statistic goes, by 2030, 6 out of every 10 people on the planet will live in a city. So how do we make sure our urban areas are filled with beauty, complexity and possibility rather than simply with overcrowding? TED is pleased to announce TEDCity2.0, a one-...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A map to guide conservation. After almost eight years of airborne laser-guided imaging spectroscopy, Greg Asner has finally mapped all 300,000 square miles of the Peruvian Amazon. Highlighting forest types that are reasonably safe and those which are ...

Anna Rosling-Rönnlund collects photographs of everyday objects from the richest to the poorest households. Even a toothbrush, she says, can reveal a world of inequalities. Imagine if the world lived along a single street, with the richest households on one end, the poorest on the other -- and every door flung open to the public. That’s the visi...

By Courtney E. Martin and John Cary Curating the program for TEDCity2.0 -- a one-day conference about the future of cities that takes place, gulp, today -- was a true honor for us. The two of us come at cities from very different angles. John is trained as an architect, but has spent his career building the public interest design moveme...

Cities are a constellation of dreams -- dreams that are constantly dying and being born. Cities are living things, with character and distinct personalities. Africa’s cities teem with these dreams. Who gets to decide which ones live, and which ones die? To become an architect, Christian Benimana had to go far away from home. There were no...

The stage is set. The lights are on. The audience of more than 600 people who have traveled from all over the world to be inspired is ready. And ready or not, the speakers are thrust onto the stage, one by one. This is the first session of TEDGlobal 2017, themed “a new map,” a phrase that suggests that in these first talks, we will catch ...

Anyone in the room here today, at the glossy Times Center in Times Square, has been affected by the imagination and tenacity of Janette Sadik-Khan. It was her vision that created the much-loved pedestrian zones on Broadway and the cool new CitiBikes. In 2008, when Sadik-Khan took the job as New York's traffic commissioner, she saw how hard i...

Environmental engineer Francis de los Reyes works with cutting-edge microbiological techniques to create solutions in the fields of environmental biotechnology and engineering. But his big passion, both professionally and personally, is finding ways to improve the plight of the world’s 2.5 billion people living without adequate sanitation. In ...