Just two years ago [...] Australia’s previous government created the Major Cities Unit which outlined key long-term priorities for urban productivity and sustainability. Highly regarded by academia, as well as infrastructure, planning and property councils, the Unit showed promise for strategic city alignment, including investment into high-speed rail.

Today, all investment into the Unit has been withdrawn and momentum towards a national urban strategy has come to a halt. — thisbigcity.net

Architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, Blair Kamin, writes about China's building boom in his story, "Designed in Chicago, made in China." [...]

"Chinese developers lack the expertise to do great skyscrapers," he says. "During the Cultural Revolution their architectural profession was decimated. It really became more about purely engineering. So if you're a Chinese developer, you go to Chicago." — Public Radio International

Sjors de Vries is a Dutch urban planner and founder of RUIMTEVOLK (‘Space People’), a leading online discussion platform about planning and urbanism in the Netherlands. We spoke with him about the current state of planning in the Netherlands, the best ways to upscale cute and small initiatives to make them serious improvements to the city, about the power of online media in city-making and the role of their platform. — popupcity.net

In city after city, U.S. transit advocates face a similar problem: What to do with bad, or at least less-than-perfect, public transportation proposals? Big transit projects don’t come around every day, and rejecting a proposal, perhaps one with support in high places, in the hopes that something better will come along can leave you with nothing. — nextcity.org

Britain’s decades-long planning “chaos” has left London a city of great individual buildings, such as the Gherkin and the Shard, standing in a sea of “woeful” architecture, the Government’s design czar said today.

Marylebone-based architect Sir Terry Farrell called for a “revolution” in the planning system, to end the culture of Nimbyism and put the creation of well designed places to live, work and shop at the heart of policymaking. — London Evening Standard

"try to become at least acquainted with your neighbors, observe and see how things are done and kind of try to fit in...I think with gentrification it doesn't necessarily work that way because we are talking about by definition, people from a different background coming into the neighborhood" — Marketplace - Money

Latino Placemaking goes beyond creating great public spaces. It also includes cultural identity, which is shaped by needs, desires, and imagination. The Latino quest for cultural identity parallels the African-American Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, which has its genesis in protests – many of which were carried out in public spaces. — pps.org

“Oslo is a small city where everyone knows one another,” says landscape architect and project leader for Levende Oslo (Lively Oslo), Yngvar Hegrenes. Norway’s capital city on the Olso fjord recently commissioned a Public Space-Public Life (PSPL) survey that took over two years to complete, despite the city’s compact size. Hegrenes is responsible for commissioning the survey, stating that Oslo was interested in taking a fresh look at their city center with input from knowledgeable outside sources — gehlcitiesforpeople.dk

During a lecture given at Kansas City Design Week earlier in the year, Gullivar Shepard of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) called the St. Louis Arch Ground project, known as CityArchRiver 2015, one of the most challenging projects he has been involved in. — thisbigcity.net

In a world where we are increasingly given the chance to customise our output, how do you orchestrate a planet where a Gangnam ringtone collides with the sound of a 1970s camera shutter from a smartphone, in a tube station resonating with Vivaldi to deter loitering, while the guy next to you shout-announces to some remotely interested party that he is "About to get on the tube! I said The! Tube! ... "? What is the future sound of cities? — theguardian.com

Great cities don’t rest on the laurels of their great public spaces. They make them greater. That’s what Chicago is doing here, despite the objections of naysayers who argued during the recession that the project was an unnecessary and unaffordable extravagance.

But recessions come and go. We only cheat ourselves if we use downturns as an excuse to lower our sights and not build a better future. Now the future and better times are here. — chicagotribune.com

This is not how most people think of Mr. Bloomberg, who recently stepped down after 12 years as mayor and who is the city’s richest resident. Under his leadership, New York became a land of wealth and plenty, at least for some – in Midtown Manhattan, glassy new high-rises contain the third homes of Russian billionaires; downtown, tourists order $38 steak frites at Balthazar and walk the High Line, an innovative park built with donations from the rich. — theglobeandmail.com

The lean urbanism concept, he says, is like a software patch, or a workaround – ultimately a guide or a tip sheet to navigate the complicated, and often very expensive, maze of working in the built environment in the U.S. “It’s about knowing that with certain building types, under a certain threshold, you don’t need an elevator. Or a sprinkler system. A lot of developers know that, and we want to daylight that. We want to present that thematically.” — theatlanticcities.com

Imagine close to the entire population of the U.S. picking up and moving somewhere else.

That’s the scale of China’s urbanization campaign: 250 million farmers moving to the city over the next 15 years. [...]

In Southwest China, the city of Chongqing is being used as a test case for transitioning rural Chinese to change their residency status to urban residents. The government is persuading millions of farmers there to move to the city. — marketplace.org