All the city news you can use. By Jeff Wood - May 8th, 2021 05:55 pm //end headline wrapper ?>Electric car charging station. (CC0 Public Domain)
Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.
Barcelona installs solar pavement: Barcelona has installed Spain’s first photovoltaic pavement in a move aimed to create power close to where its most needed and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. These first panels will generate roughly the same energy it takes to power three households annually. Due to Barcelona’s high population density, it would be tough to power the whole city, but it could make city dwellers more energy efficient. (
Political infrastructure battles are nothing new. The industry booming so much it can’t keep up. Why some Black neighborhoods are struggling.
The infrastructure fight is about the future of America: Today’s partisan debate about the meaning of infrastructure is not just about what gets built where, but about what kind of country the US will be in the future. This echoes the debates of roughly 200 years ago, which evoked the same fear of change and loss of status-quo power that many had when they fought against canal and rail construction in the 1820s. (Joshua Zeitz | Politico)
Lumber is booming: Lumber prices have skyrocketed in the past year, thanks to soaring demand from the housing market and bored pandemic DIYers. But the industry never saw it coming as it has been shrinking for the last 12 post-recession years, and people thought the pandemic would make it worse. The lack of inventory has turned lumber into a precious commodity and spurred memes and TikToks about the high