The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe

Audi and BIG showed up at Art Basel Miami last week with what could be mistaken as the latest dance floor design, a huge LED surface which illuminates and tracks humans. The floor act as a large scale demonstration of “Urban Future,” . The concept is based on integrating driveless electric cars into advanced roadways that guide the vehicles, eliminating curbs, traffic lights and other types of space-gobbling infrastructure to hand the city back to pedestrians. — Inhabitat

Technologies, such as building information modeling and integrated-product delivery, have enabled architecture firms to design better buildings and deliver them more quickly and more efficiently. Yet in today's fiercely competitive global marketplace, efficiency and speed alone are not enough to guarantee market viability. The real differentiator is design—as an engine of innovation and a productive force for creating economic value. — Michael Speaks, archrecord.construction.com

Architect, engineer, and director of the SENSEable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carlo Ratti will focus on (you guessed it) the Senseable City—merging the digital and the physical realms by understanding how we sense and act on our built environment, and how the latter then responds to us. — blog.bmwguggenheimlab.org

For many Americans who bought more home than they could really afford in the giddy days before the crash, the big-house dream has become a nightmare in the ashes of foreclosure and regret.

So after all that, how does 84 square feet sound? — New York Times

Thomas Unterseher is on a mission to make South Dakota's small towns more attractive, and he's starting in the place he knows best: his hometown of Mobridge.

Like many small towns in the state, Mobridge has been on the decline for decades and is struggling to maintain its population. [...]

But since there's little money in the city budget to pay architects or designers to develop a long-term plan to pitch to residents, Unterseher is turning to an untapped resource: architecture students. — businessweek.com

Many architects, despite their progressive convictions, are allergic to politics, at least publicly. Dependent on developers and patrons of other persuasions, designers are often concerned that if they come off as firebrands, it could cost them work in the future. However, the [AIA NY] has been quietly raising its profile, politically, professionally and culturally, all in the interest of furthering its interests within the corridors of power. — New York Observer

In London's case the practicality of the architecture is a reaction to the economic rather than the political excesses of the recent past. The 2012 Games are shaping up, in fact, as one of the clearest signs yet that the architectural boom years of the last decade or so in the West have definitively ended. — latimes.com

New York has turned large swaths of Broadway over to bikes, benches and cafes. Los Angeles is going all-in on a plan to turn its car-addicted populace into rail commuters. And Minneapolis, the frostiest city of the Frost Belt, is creating a sophisticated citywide bike trail system that has made it the No. 1 city in the country for bicycling. — salon.com

Russia is to build an ultra-modern city on a frozen island deep inside the Arctic Circle - in the Kremlin's latest move to back its claim to vast oil and gas reserves under the polar ice cap.

Named Umka, after a popular Soviet polar bear cub cartoon hero, the initial 5,000 residents will live under a vast dome to protect themselves from temperatures sinking below minus 30C in winter. — dailymail.co.uk

The message of the 99% movement is even more fundamental -- that the 99% should have representative voice in the decisions made for this country. I feel aligned with their message and ours. We support their message and their tactics 100%. As designers, we should respect the rights of the 99% to gather in public spaces.

The five teams, which include a mix of architects, urban designers, landscape and other designers, are headed by the firms AECOM, Aedas Architects, James Corner Field Operations, and the Xavier Vendrell Studio, the only team headed by a Chicagoan. The fifth team, known as !melk, includes the large firm HOK. — featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com

Occupy Wall Street Protests is testing Public Spaces not meant as campgrounds. But when the public chooses to use its public space in ways it wasn’t intended to be used, who’s right? The public or the public space? — The Atlantic

This survey is not based solely on quality of life, number of trees or the cost of a month’s rent. Instead, we examine some cities that aim to be both smart and well managed, yet have an undeniably hip vibe. Our pick of cities that are, in a phrase, both great and good... — nytimes.com

... the proposed park would be underground, in a dank former trolley terminal under Delancey Street that is controlled by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Though its promoters call it the “Delancey Underground,” another nickname has already been coined: the Low Line. — nytimes.com