'Mexico City’s water system goes against its own functional essence. The city is dehydrating itself. We’re mixing our water with poisonous waste and then pumping it out through a complex network of pipes. Just like what happens when a human is dehydrated, Mexico City has diarrhea.' — Elias Cattan — Quartz

Everyone loves the free samples, kitschy items, and affordable price points of SoCal grocer Trader Joe’s. The one thing that does spark ire about the chain is the small parking lots, which produce equal amounts of anxiety and horn abuse. But the website Strong Towns points out that TJ’s small footprints trickle down to cheaper prices for consumers. — Los Angeles Magazine

I’ve been asked to do a lot of direct-action things, but have been hesitating to commit to anything. I feel like I need a strategy for this next step so I don’t get mired in the social activism and lose track of the art and architecture. It doesn’t mean that activism isn’t important, but it is a slippery slope to start advocating all the time instead of using my unique lens to focus on these issues. — design.newcity.com

The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists. — New York Times

The Architecture Billings Index saw a dip into negative terrain for the first time in five months in January, but inched back up in February with a small increase in demand for design services... [AIA] reported the February ABI score was 50.3, up slightly from the mark of 49.6 in the previous month. This score reflects a minor increase in design services (any score above 50 indicates an increase in billings). The new projects inquiry index was 59.5, up from a reading of 55.3 the previous month. — aia.org

Rikers is built on a landfill. The ground underneath the facilities is unstable and the decomposing garbage emits poisonous methane gas. In addition to extreme heat and poor air quality, flooding and crumbling infrastructure pose a serious threat, especially when superstorms like Hurricane Sandy strike. As the violence and human rights violations worsen, so do the environmental circumstances surrounding Rikers. — Grist

A rising number of daredevil stunts such as scaling skyscrapers and parachuting from tall structures is being fuelled by competition for online acclaim, according to “urban explorers”, who warn more people are dying as a result.

The immense popularity of online videos of people climbing the world’s tallest buildings, including the London Shard, had turned urban exploration, which traditionally involves surreptitiously exploring the off-limits corners of towns and cities, into an extreme sport — the Guardian

An influential group of scientists led by James Hansen, the former NASA scientist often credited with having drawn the first major attention to climate change in 1988 congressional testimony, has published a dire climate study that suggests the impact of global warming will be quicker and more catastrophic than generally envisioned. — the Washington Post

The seven American cities that made the shortlist in the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Smart City Challenge are now deciding their strategies for winning the $40m prize fund...Transportation is the focus, so judges will be interested in self-driving and 'connected' cars, as well as 'smart streets' fitted with sensors. The aim will be to cut accidents, reduce pollution and increase commuter convenience. — Global Construction Review

Rapidly rising property prices and rents, combined with the loss of social housing through right to buy, have put councils under growing pressure to find new ways to help people off their housing lists.

In Lewisham one solution is a £4.3m scheme to provide 24 homes and 880 sq m of business space that can be picked up and moved at a later date, allowing the council to make use of vacant brownfield land while longer-term projects are finalised. — theguardian.com

As the number of people moving to cities continues to rise, with 66% of the global population expected to live in urban areas by 2050, it is critical to understand how urban living is affecting us — Urban Mind

[UCLA's team of interdisciplinary researchers'] plan would be to create a closed-loop process: capturing carbon from power plant smokestacks and using it to create a new building material — CO2NCRETE — that would be fabricated using 3D printers. [...]

“We can demonstrate a process where we take lime and combine it with carbon dioxide to produce a cement-like material ... We’re trying to develop a process solution, an integrated technology which goes right from CO2 to a finished product." — luskin.ucla.edu

The Shukhov Tower, a 1920s broadcast transmission tower in Moscow that is a landmark of modernist structural engineering, has been placed on the 2016 World Monuments Fund Watch list of endangered global cultural heritage sites.

Activists in Moscow organized two days of events over the weekend to observe the tower’s 94th birthday [...]

At a Kremlin meeting last December, Mr. Putin praised activists for rallying to save cultural heritage sites and dressed down officials for not doing enough. — nytimes.com

Nationwide, Airbnb lists about 173,000 units, equal to about 3.5% of the more than 5 million rooms rented out by traditional hotels — not enough to pose a serious threat to the hospitality industry, according to a study by CBRE's hotel research arm. [...]

The study goes on to say that Airbnb properties have started to pressure hotels to keep rates low in a handful of cities where home-sharing units are plentiful, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and [New York]. — latimes.com