The European Court of Justice said Google must remove links in search results when requested by individuals, such as the Spanish man who brought a case against the search engine in order to remove links to a 1998 newspaper article about the sale of property to settle his debts. The court said that the “initially lawful processing of accurate data” could, over time, become “inadequate,” “irrelevant,” or “excessive” in the eyes of the people who feature in the material. — qz.com

One problem with our obsession with gentrification as the end-all of urban equity issues is that it discourages us from talking about other important things happening in our cities. In some instances, gentrification has become such a dominating narrative that it has completely erased broader trends that we really ought to be concerned about.

Case in point: Brooklyn is getting poorer. — danielkayhertz.com

“I never heard anybody say it was ugly or weird, I had reached universal beauty and Rosario Murillo sadistically destroyed that beauty. How sad and senseless.” - Glen Small — The Nicaragua Dispatch

A special construction material keeps concrete whiter than white. — CNN

Most discourse on “smart” and “sentient” cities, if it addresses people at all, focuses on them as sources of data feeding the algorithms. Rarely do we consider the point of engagement — how people interface with, and experience, the city’s operating system. — Places Journal

His writing has a patient, deliberate quality that is rare at a moment when the dominant medium of architectural discourse is Twitter. Perhaps this is why Mr. Rybczynski, despite himself, is suddenly all the rage. — nytimes.com

in retrospect, the second fair can be seen as the last un-self-conscious public celebration of automotive culture — NYT

Lewis Mumford wrote that, in a city, “time becomes visible.” Not, it would appear, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where a city board has just decided that a rather discreet and understated modern house might need to be torn down because it damages the ambience of a historic district, which is to say it destroys the illusion that the neighborhood is a place in which time has stopped. — Vanity Fair

Several factors contributed to the library’s decision: a study that showed the cost of renovating the 42d Street building to be more than expected (the project had originally been estimated at about $300 million); a change in city government; and input from the public, several trustees said. (Four lawsuits have been filed against the project.) — nytimes.com

We were participating in a little experiment trying to answer the question, “How does the brain respond to the city?” The headsets were recording second-by-second readings of our brain waves via Bluetooth to an app on the iPod. The resulting gigabyte of data, gathered from about 50 participants, will be aggregated into a visualization to be presented May 13 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn. It’s part of the Van Alen Institute’s multiyear “Elsewhere: Escape and the Urban Landscape” project. — theatlanticcities.com

Ai’s studio, called 258 Fake, has become China’s equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Factory. And Ai himself has increasingly taken on Warholian overtones: there is now little distinction between Ai the artist who creates artworks, and Ai the dissident who gets beaten by the cops. (In 2009, police pummelled his face, causing a cerebral haemorrhage.) Both are merged in an ongoing performance in which the man has become the art, and the art is the man. — aeon.co

Brazil’s burgeoning middle class have an important place in the country’s slums. This finding is part of a survey released by the newly created Instituto Data Favela which established that, in 2013, 65% of the country’s slum-dwellers belonged to the middle class. In 2003, this proportion was 33%. [...]

“But we are not only interested in the middle class,” he argues, “We want to benefit all community residents through sustainable and comprehensive development, achieved through economic avenues.” — thisbigcity.net

Mark your calendars! Some popular architects will be speaking in the upcoming "Innovators" talk series at the Museum of the City of New York, starting tomorrow May 6 at 6:30 p.m...

Accompanying the current "Palaces for the People" exhibition, each talk will explore the influence of the Guastavino Company, led by a Catalan father-son team whose architecture, construction, and design practices helped shape NYC's built landscape. — bustler.net