cities

Watch a city grow from a tiny sprout in this beautiful video

"Lilium Urbanus" envisions the city as a botanical, flowering from seed to sprout to village to metropolis. Its creators, Anca Risca and Joji Tsuruga, told Scientific American that their daily observation of urban growth in their home city of New York inspired the comparison: We embraced the idea of urban growth and saw it as something […]

Trying to make China's planned cities livable

Two brothers, an architect and a developer, team up to make new Chinese cities more people-friendly, easing the transition from rural to urban living.

How to tell if your city is going places

Here's a handy infographic, from the Project for Public Spaces, to help you distinguish cities that are going places from cities that are going nowhere. What's your retail shopping like? Transportation? Public spaces? (Or publc spaces; even handy infographics sometimes have typos, and this one coulda been a lot worse.) 

Help MIT evaluate people's attitudes about cities

MIT's Media Lab has developed a website called Place Pulse that evaluates your perception of cities and neighborhoods. You choose which of two images from Google Street View looks more unique, or more upper-class, or safer, and Place Pulse collates everyone's votes in a way that will hopefully be useful for urban planning. And for […]

Let's make urban revitalization greener, greater, and more inclusive

Improving the environment, economy, and social equity in distressed neighborhoods is possible if the right players are involved.

Wall Street Journal uses infrastructure as excuse to tell Tea Party to shove it

If you thought the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal couldn't possibly become any more backward or retrograde, the good news is, you're right! Today, the editors of the only newspaper opinion section to occasionally defeat Fox News in terms of sheer mendacity finally turned the corner and found a reason to break with the Tea Party notion that government should just go away already, so the country can turn into Somalia or Pakistan as quickly as possible.

The surprisingly powerful op-ed, written by Ed Rendell (Democrat, former governor of Pennsylvania) and Scott Smith (Republican mayor of Mesa, Ariz.), advances the notion that transportation is the one thing our government should be spending money on, even in this economic climate.

Alex Steffen on carbon-free cities [VIDEO]

I hope that everyone will watch this short, excellent presentation on the promise of sustainable cities from Alex Steffen, proprietor of the late, lamented Worldchanging and all-around smart dude.

No vacancy: Empty lots are full of promise

Vacant lots are the scourge of cities around the world, but they offer acres of unfulfilled potential for urban renewal.

How cities can get carbon down to zero

Seattle looks at an ambitious scenario involving changes in travel modes, more energy-efficient buildings, and shifts to alternative energy sources.