One of the most unusual and amazing architectural designs for an Apple store will reportedly appear in Aix en Provence (France), featuring a nearly all-glass structure enabled by new technology developed by Apple’s glass suppliers



Don't walk into it.

[Link to Nearly Transparent Store Planned For France]

These neighbourhoods are hives of building activity. The houses here have long passed the hutment stage and are now as pucca as your own homes, albeit in constrained conditions. Unlike most flat owners (this means you), these homes occupy a plot on the ground and rise to a height that will not get them in trouble with the BMC. They are built in RCC and brick masonry, finished with ceramic tiles, both inside and outside, are clean and largely maintenance-free. They have electricity and piped water running to their kitchens and toilets. This is clearly seen by the miles of running pipes over ground, on both sides of the streets. The roads outside their homes are paved with interlocking tiles, just like any other part of the city.

Despite this, the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) chooses to name these localities as ‘difficult’ areas, and damn them to the eternal hell of rehabilitation.



Managing cities is often more about understanding how people that live in them use the spaces where they work and live rather than imposing an outsider view of how cities should be.

[Link to FirstPost.Mumbai]

“Smart” cities herald a new age where information technology, not roads, buildings or bridges, will form the core infrastructure. A network of sensors, cameras, wireless devices, data centres and powerful analytics will enable the government to provide more efficient services, maintain a low carbon footprint and create an entrepreneurial environment for its citizens. Given the potential for such intelligent governance, cities with digital infrastructures are called “smart” cities. Today, there are over 125 smart city projects of varying sizes all over the world, including new cities like Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in the UAE, and existing cities like Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro.

[Link to Is Your City Smart Enough?]

Two factors are exacerbating the flooding risk to the city: global sea level rise and subsidence. In short, sea is rising and the city is sinking. Like other cities built on river deltas, the sediment beneath the city is compacting over time. In a natural setting, this compaction would be offset by the deposition of fresh sediment at the surface, but the rivers feeding the lagoon were diverted in the 1500s. As a result, the land surface is sinking, and the salt marshes are suffering for it.



I won't spoil on how exactly water is being used solve Venice's water problem.

[Link to Under pressure: raising Venice above water (using... water?)]

Unfortunately the system in most cities in India is broken, and most notably so in Chennai. The government-mandated meter is never switched on, and the passenger has to negotiate the fare upfront before boarding. Residents of the city consider the system to be highly overpriced, and a significant section doesn’t even venture to travel by it. In Bangalore and Mumbai, rickshaws refuse to ply to areas from where they are unlikely to get onward passengers, and in a number of cities, it is rumoured that the number of autos on the road far exceeds the number of licenses issued.



Reforming any form of dispersed and piecemeal transportation utilities is a gargantuan task in India.

[Link to A Fair Auto Fare]

America doesn’t do big projects anymore — we’re too broke, no one can agree on our priorities, that era of bold thinking is over.

That canard has been repeated so many times that it’s now accepted as gospel. Except it’s not true. In cities in every region of the country, pie-in-the-sky ideas are moving from brainstorm to blueprint to groundbreaking — and 2012 will prove it.

[Link to The Bold Urban Future Starts Now]

The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. If the change produces too much congestion, then a great deal of time, money, and additional analysis must go toward the project's consideration.

[Link to The Transportation Planning Rule Every City Should Reform]

This survey is not based solely on quality of life, number of trees or the cost of a month’s rent. Instead, we examine some cities that aim to be both smart and well managed, yet have an undeniably hip vibe. Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good:

[Link to Hip Cities That Think About How They Work]

For a city starved of public spaces, the Oval Maidan is an exemplar of barriers destroying urbanity. In order, presumably, to preserve the grounds from the depredations of undesirables, the Oval is fenced off with railings that put you in mind of a penitentiary no matter which side you are on. Inside, a few cricket pitches are tended to for a filtered few to use. The narrow ‘public’ path joining the Art Deco to the Neo-Gothic stretch only emphasises the impression of one being out of place.



On how open public spaces are ruined by enclosing them.

[Link to What makes Shivaji Park more accessible than Oval Maidan]

The portion of American families living in middle-income neighborhoods has declined significantly since 1970, according to a new study, as rising income inequality left a growing share of families in neighborhoods that are mostly low-income or mostly affluent.



Decline of heterogeneity. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

[Link to Middle-Class Areas Shrink as Income Gap Grows]