When Ritt Bjerregaard became lord mayor of the city of Copenhagen in 2006, she was astonished to discover how many working days were lost when civic employees fell ill, and how much it cost — roughly €100 million, or $140 million, a year.
It wasn't invented to save men or to serve as a civic barrier against the ills unleashed by the end of an era.
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, jokes made fun of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's attempts to reorder the country's economic and civic life, like his ill-fated anti-vodka campaign in the mid-1980s.
And because he grew up in suburban Birmingham, Mich., he can use words like "corny" and "goofy" and "dream" and "legacy" in front of New York's most leather-skinned civic leaders without making anyone ill.
She lived and worked amongst the crime, civic corruption, prostitution, sweatshops, and other ills of the community.
He was the founder and leader of "Lesser Seattle," a parody of Greater Seattle, Inc., which advocated several schemes for Seattle's civic improvement and development that Watson considered ill-advised.
There she began a campaign to keep open the Civic Theatre, which was adversely affected by the Great Depression, but became seriously ill.
A few months ago he was arrested for his part in a symbolic protest at Tonic, the ill-fated Lower East Side club; he was largely making a point about the need for civic support of experimental art.
With strongly sculpted spaces and a keen awareness of their civic role, the buildings raise the bar for facilities of their kind – which too often end up as ill-considered boxes.
His plan was to cure one of Manhattan's oldest civic ills the difficulty of finding a public rest room by applying one of the coolest new tools on the Internet: Google Maps.
