How much more does it cost the public to build infrastructure and provide services for sprawling development compared to more compact neighborhoods? A lot more, according to this handy summary from the Canadian environmental think tank Sustainable Prosperity.

To create this graphic, the organization synthesized a study by the Halifax Regional Municipality [PDF] in Nova Scotia, and the research is worth a closer look. — streetsblog.org

Epic Games, the company best known for Gears of War, has a very different plan for this generation of video games — one that expands far beyond what games are typically assumed to be. [...]

In this future, or present if you ask Sweeney, lessons learned from one field, say an architect designing a virtual building, can be applied to games or film, and likewise. Sweeney believes the potential application of the engine across all fields increases exponentially as information is shared. — theverge.com

With all the cultural, sports and real-estate projects launched throughout the United Arab Emirates, there have been persistent protests about the working and living conditions [...] ”Serious concerns about workers’ rights have not been resolved”, claims the advocacy group, asking for a commitment for ”more serious protection” from these institutions and Saadiyat Island’s developers. [...] appears to have made a serious effort to address the concern expressed by Western museums and architects. — theartnewspaper.com

Michael Kimmelman’s column this week, about the debate over plans to demolish a midcentury Paul Rudolph building in Goshen, N.Y., makes the case for why it should be saved. It is only one example of his taking up a cause. As The Times’s architecture critic, he has not been shy about advocacy.

Here, he describes why he’s been outspoken in supporting this building, which doesn’t have the profile of other fights he has taken up. — nytimes.com

Seattle-based architect [Katrina Spade], originally from New England, has a vision that could radically reshape not just the death-care industry but the way we think about death itself.

She calls her plan the Urban Death Project, and it proposes a middle road between burial and cremation: compost. [...]

The centerpiece of the idea is an approximately three-story-high building in an urban center where people could bring their dead. — thestranger.com

For [Hyperloop Transportation Technologies], the Quay Valley test track is a way to test its idea of smaller hyperloop rings that could eventually connect to a bigger loop that runs along I-5. For Quay Valley and Hays, the test track is a wildly futuristic attraction [...]

It follows a narrative pulled from the world of consumer technology, rather than conventional urban planning. Quay Valley isn't really a place with people yet ... it's a collection of technologies that residents will use. — gizmodo.com

Many of the tallest structures in the world are not designed by starchitects, and you’ve likely never seen them [...] dozens of nearly anonymous towers around the United States, most in small rural communities, dwarf all but the tallest man-made structures in the world.

Take the KVLY-TV Tower in Blanchard, North Dakota, a township of 26 people north of Fargo. At 2,063 feet (628.8 meters), it’s the tallest structure in the western hemisphere and the fourth-tallest structure in the world. — Re:form

Built largely in secret and under decidedly unorthodox circumstances, the Whitney [Plantation] had been turned into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery — the first of its kind in the United States.

Located on land where slaves worked for more than a century, in a state where the sight of the Confederate flag is not uncommon, the results are both educational and visceral. — nytimes.com