Los Angeles may be known for its celebrities, glitz and glam, but the city's mayor, Eric Garcetti, is focused on something decidedly less flashy: infrastructure. [...]

"We destroyed our public transit system from the '30s and '40s and '50s, and so we're in the process of rebuilding it," Garcetti says. "A bigger program than anywhere in the U.S., but a long way to go." — npr.org

What have we learned so far about how cities function — and how they don’t? What is the role of that most symbolic of city features, the skyscraper? And is it possible to “break” a city? Five experts offered their perspectives on the use of data to solve urban problems, the ways in which the skyscraper is venerated and misused, and their best guesses on what the cities of the future might look like. — nytimes.com

Indeed, at heart of our SUPE Platform lies a sincere wish to contribute to a broad conversation on urban political ecology that takes a broader experience of urbanization into account...We wish to participate in building a collaborative and supportive community open for conversation to all those interested in understanding the politics of urban ecologies and environments in a world of cities — Situated Ecologies

In the early 1970s, architecture critic Wolf Von Eckardt introduced the term in the pages of the Washington Post for the first time, according to an analysis by Rob Godspeed. Von Eckardt described gentrification as "the best thing that has happened to American cities since ditches were turned into sewers." — thepolisblog.org

Hope for Detroit would seem far-fetched if you had been on the "pornography of ruins" tour I have been going on for years, led by various residents over the years. But, it turns out that those tours were provided by folk who had lost their beloved city. I recently began to hang around with a younger crowd: Mark Nickita, for example, an architect and a maniacal optimist, and a serial small-scale entrepreneur who runs Archive DS, an architecture and urban design firm in downtown Detroit... — features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com

Form per our fragmented cultures can follow the function of materials proved to work through our fragmented physics and building sciences. We rely highly on statistics in building sciences. In interpreting culture and evolution of culture, we have little to no consensus. — toskovic.com

Atterwasch is tiny, its single street lined with sturdy brick and stone houses. The village has a single church whose bells peal out at noon each day, a small volunteer fire department, and a cemetery with a special section devoted to German soldiers who died nearby in the closing months of WWII.

Atterwasch may soon be gone.

Vattenfall, a Swedish energy company, hopes to relocate the village and its residents in order to strip-mine the ground underneath for lignite, or "brown coal." — news.nationalgeographic.com

Communities can transform underused areas of L.A.’s largest public asset—our 7,500 miles of city streets—into active, vibrant, and accessible public space with People St, a program of the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT). Eligible Community Partners can apply for approval to create projects that enhance the quality of life in this city. Three innovative types of projects are available: Plazas, Parklets, and Bicycle Corrals. — People St.

The low hipster homeownership rate of the past five years translates into a market of potentially millions of first-time homebuyers looking to find a home that matches their budget and fits into their hipster lifestyle. Real estate investors who want to tap into that trend should start with location: finding homes in communities with a heavy hipster demographic, and that are affordable for that demographic. — RealtyTrac

In a city with no addresses, it’s difficult for local authorities to tax property. And without tax revenues, it’s difficult to upgrade infrastructure and services in the slums [...]

To fix these problems, Ghana is on a national quest to name its city streets. [...]

Giving names to streets is only a means to an end. The real problem cities are trying to solve is service delivery. When properties have actual addresses and those addresses reside in databases, all kinds of things become possible. — Citiscope

According to Brash, the administration had a singular “grand urban vision”—one of New York as a competitive hub for international business deeply rooted in neoliberal ideals.With a radically different vision of the city than those of the working class, Professor Brash argued, many New Yorkers failed to fully benefit from the mayor’s projects and in many instances were left behind. — untappedcities.com

The Paris Métro, opened in 1900, extends over more than 200 kilometers of track, serving more than 300 individual stops. But there are 11 more stations that, though once built, now stand nearly abandoned. Many of these "ghost" or "phantom" stations shuttered after the occupation during WWII. [...]

Parisian mayoral candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet has a bold plan for these phantom stations ... these abandoned spaces should be reclaimed for the city's residents. — The Atlantic Cities

Though easy targets for fiscal hawks, public architecture that’s luxurious and dramatic — even excessive — should be ours as a right. — Jacobin