Tokyo's nighttime entertainment district of Roppongi is swapping strip bars for Shogun relics and dancers for designers as a 370 billion yen ($3 billion) project brings in luxury shops, a new museum and a design center. Bloomberg View full entry

Uptown built as if it were going to conquer Chicago, but spent most of the following century battling a hangover. Today, it remains the place where florid ambition and cold reality collide. Read all about it, and see the pictures here:REPEAT View full entry

Irony of ironies...George Orwell, the prolific English writer and anti-authoritarian, well..."within 200 yards of the flat, there are 32 CCTV cameras, scanning every move." Read | via View full entry

Seeking new solutions to New York’s vexingly high poverty rates, the city is moving ahead with a bold antipoverty experiment that will pay poor families up to $5,000 a year to meet targets like exemplary school attendance, going for medical checkups or holding down a full-time job. NYT View full entry

Residents of a Gaza community flooded by deadly untreaded sewage due to grossly overloded infrastructure failure that was long coming. Some blame sanctions on Hamas/Palestinian people. bbc, nyt and haaretz with public comments. View full entry

An entire new capital city has been "unveiled" in Burma. It is "being built on a vast and extravagant scale in hundreds of square kilometres of tropical scrubland." It's also fascist. BBC. View full entry

An international blog by Artiom about the recent proposal + building frenzy in Almaty. Almaty Development Blog..via View full entry

The year 2007 marks a shift to an urban era, an era in which more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. This fact is making many headlines. But what are its implications? How will this impact the Futures of Cities? Over a century ago, the Danish journalist and photographer... View full entry

Coherence, not competition, is the key. TimesOnline View full entry

Here's a short film promoting "The World's Most Exclusive Waterside Address" designed by Foster and Partners. View full entry

The UNEP has put together an Atlas of Our Changing Environment. Witness dramatic change / destruction in a short 25 years. View full entry

With a quietly approved plan by the City Council last week, Los Angeles decided to sell the air above the Downtown Convention Center for 20$ per sq. ft., so developers can build higher and denser towers elsewhere in the area. Some say projected 200MIL income is peanuts. latimes View full entry

Silicon Valley goes green: "Out of the ashes of the Internet bust, many technology veterans have regrouped and found a new mission in alternative energy: developing wind power, solar panels, ethanol plants and hydrogen-powered cars." NYTimes. View full entry

When John Alger, a farmer, visits his property 30 miles southwest of Miami, he sees endless rows of corn. But his mind is on another kind of line. NYT View full entry

The Theme-Parking, Megachurching, Franchising, Exurbing, McMansioning of America: How Walt Disney Changed Everything: Walt Disney's utopian dream forever changed Orlando, Florida, and laid the blueprint for the new American metropolis... NG | via View full entry