A city that is connected -- in all senses of the word -- is a good city. The finalists of the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge offered numerous solutions in how Downtown Dallas can be linked to the Trinity River.

To guarantee a variety of ideas for Dallas' future development, the competition invited submissions in a Professional Stream and an Open Stream. Three Professional and 4 Open entries won. — bustler.net

As Jersey City has cast off its stigma as a back-office-and-apartment haven of cheap rents and cheaper-looking buildings, more and more professionals and families are calling “Chilltown” and “JC” home. They’re ditching the suburbs of their parents, but also the stratospheric prices and stuffy attitudes of Manhattan and, increasingly, Brooklyn.

The so-called sixth borough has finally become a destination in its own right [...]. — nydailynews.com

Before the path arrived, Indianapolis didn’t have a mainstream bike scene — just streets designed to improve traffic flow. Now, children and the elderly have joined the spandex swarms of longtime cycling enthusiasts...

The public art along the trail accentuates the path’s role as a sculptor of the city’s evolving identity. For example, Donna Sink’s “Moving Forward” is a series of seven stained-glass-hued eco-friendly bus shelters covered in lines from poems by local writers. — mobile.nytimes.com

Ordos fell away beneath us: a wide, sweeping wasteland of empty towers and silent, disused streets. ...The odd car moved slowly along the main road, where it looped around the centre of Kangbashi to cross the Ordos bridge, and out towards Dongsheng – but for the most part, from this height, Kangbashi looked like a model city; its radical architecture reduced to novelty ornaments, its unfinished towers scattered like broken bricks across a sandpit. — Business Insider

The commercialisation of the urban landscape has resulted in the privatisation of public space. As city centres have become tributes to consumption, private interests have permeated these spaces. They have become awash with pseudo-public consumer spaces which belong to corporations rather than the citizenry. Although these places hold the semblance of being “public”, they are owned by corporate interests and are therefore under private control and not accountable to the public. — New Left Project

Your assignment is to come up with an idea so revolutionary that it could be considered an important advance in industrial design.

Students at Rice University in Houston accomplished that with plans for a floating city that is being considered by one of the world's largest oil companies. Last year, the students won the inaugural Odebrecht Award for a radical design of man-made floating islands where as many as 25,000 oil workers and their families could live. — npr.org

Wendy Holm, the Boston Latin teacher who has incorporated Urban Plan into her economics courses, said it combines basic concepts she has taught her students with something very close to a real-world context.

“One of the goals that the Urban Land Institute has is that kids come out of this experience and through it have this broader view, then, of this kind of experience and take it into their adult life,” said Holm. — bostonglobe.com

The long and varied history of waste and its removal in New York from the 18th century onwards is the subject of Elizabeth Royte’s 2005 book Garbage Land and of the Urban Omnibus City of Systems video she narrates. In the video, Royte describes how her research into where exactly her trash was going after she threw it out has led her to become a more ecological citizen, with “a systems view” of our interconnected processes of manufacturing, transportation, disposal and re-use. — Urban Omnibus

Rio de Janeiro is set to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games and there are two starkly different visions of what that will mean for the "marvelous city," as it is known[...]

"Instead of creating a space of conviviality, a space of shared culture, of community, of conversation, you are going to have this very isolated element where after 5 o'clock in the afternoon, it's going to be dead. You are creating banks, parking lots, Trump towers," Gaffney said. "It's been rezoned for 50-story buildings." — npr.org

Over the next few years, two professional sports teams are in a position to radically reshape much of the fringe of Atlanta's downtown core. [...]

Neither stadium deal has been the public relations coup that Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed surely hoped for. [...]

There's an inherent messiness to these dual, competing narratives – one of downtown reinvestment, the other a triumph of the suburbs. — theatlanticcities.com

So it is that nearly a third of the interstate system consists of stretches through our cities, in the form of loops, spurs and freeways. So it is that American motorists drive nearly twice as many miles on urban interstates as they do the lengthier rural legs. So it is that every metropolis in the country has reorganized itself around these roads, and that they've shaped where we live and work, how we shop, what we eat, and how we pass our time. — theatlanticcities.com

“I’m a man with a vision and the ability to turn my dream into reality,” said Mr. Xu, — NYT