For [Oklahoma City] is one of the nation’s most spread-out urban environments, covering 620 square miles, which means its 600,000 residents rely on cars [...]

[Mayor Mick Cornett] began to look afresh at the culture and infrastructure of his city, realising how the extent of reliance on cars had alienated human beings from enjoying and using their own urban environments. [...]

[Cornett] wanted to remake his huge metropolis by remoulding it around people in place of cars. — mosaicscience.com

The same is happening in other UK cities, which have decided that signal junctions are better for traffic flow and safer for cyclists. [...]

After a century of resistance, US cities are finally learning to love the roundabout – the Bronx just got its first – believing them to be safer and better for traffic flow. [...]

“Traffic lights are so fascist and dictatorial, telling you when to stop and go,” says Beresford. “Roundabouts are quintessentially English and democratic in their etiquette.” — theguardian.com

As a new exhibition at the Barbican in London shows, by the mid 1950s [Charles and Ray Eames] were producing films and multimedia presentations that are as much part of their formal and intellectual legacy as their furniture or the glass-walled Eames house itself. [...]

the Eameses never conceived of the hundred or so films they made as movies per se, or even as experimental films. “They’re just attempts to get across an idea,” Charles claimed — theguardian.com

Marina City residents support landmark designation because it would help upgrade the complex's concrete exterior through the city's "Adopt a Landmark" zoning provision [...]

The measure lets developers build more floor space in return for funding improvements to official city landmarks.

Landmark status would allow the Commission on Chicago Landmarks to regulate changes to the exterior of Marina City — chicagotribune.com

With Frick and her book [Remaking the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge] as guide, CityLab tracked bridge expenses over time to get some sense of how the project that Herbert Hoover once called “the greatest bridge yet constructed in the world” became yet another example of a major public works project in which the cost ended outrageously higher than it began—and some ideas for what to do about it. — CityLab

Developers have released design plans for the housing element of the Moscow ZiL industrial zone redevelopment.

According to RBK Realty magazine, nine architecture firms from Russia, the USA and the Netherlands will be working on housing in the redevelopment of the former automobile factory, located in the south of Moscow. [...]

The building presented by Dutch agency Neutelings Riedijk Architecten consists of 10 towers, each with a golden glass and steel facade. — calvertjournal.com

This is important for Africa, where despite high urbanisation rates the development focus has been primarily rural. Consider Ghana. The country’s urban population has grown from four million in 1984 to more than 14 million today. Fifty one percent of Ghanaians now live in cities. While urbanisation rates vary across Africa, Ghana reflects an overall global trend towards a predominantly urban future.

Ghana demonstrates how cities can be highly productive in Africa. — qz.com

boring environments can generate stress, impulsivity, lowered levels of positive affect, and risky behaviour. [...]

based on well-understood principles of neuroplasticity and on what is known of the effects of deprivation and enrichment in other more extreme settings ... there is every reason to believe that these sterile, homogeneous environments are exerting a measurable effect on our behaviour [...]

Given this, the prudent design of city streets and buildings is a matter of public health. — aeon.co

Dubai, the city of superlatives, is set to get a new tower on Sheikh Zayed Road that will have an artificial beach and a rainforest-like landscape development on top of the tower's podium. [...]

The project consists of two towers, 47 storeys high with a combined five-storey podium and two basement levels, that will house the facilities. [...]

Kieferle & Partner is the architect. — emirates247.com

In Bentonville, Arkansas, a house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for a New Jersey couple more than 60 years ago has been painstakingly reassembled, board by board and pane by pane, overlooking the clear waters of the Crystal Spring. When it opens to the public next month on the lushly wooded 120-acre campus of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, it will be the first Wright house in Arkansas—a delicately preserved later example of the so-called Usonian homes [...]. — curbed.com

The future of urban roads may be one where motorists, pedestrians and cyclists act as one. Spaces where these usually segregated members of the population live -- or move -- by the same rules. Most importantly, these rules would be social, not formal, to befit the increasingly popular trend of 'shared space'.

"Shared space breaks the principle of segregation," says Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a street designer who [...] brought these spaces to the U.K., which now hosts more than any other country. — cnn.com

Milton Keynes is currently the host city for a set of driverless car trials funded indirectly by the U.K. government — the most ambitious testing yet staged in the world.

If all goes as planned, by 2018, Milton Keynes’ downtown will be served by an on-demand, publicly run system of 30 to 40 driverless two-seater pod cars, which will allow residents to travel between any two points in the city’s downtown without navigating or reacting to obstacles themselves. — nextcity.org