China’s visible impact on urban development in Africa is substantial. One need only take a virtual bird’s-eye tour on Google Earth to catch a glimpse of some of the most impressive changes brought to Africa by Chinese constructors, developers and designers. Not far from the Angolan capital of Luanda lies arguably one of the most impressive examples: Kilamba New City. A massive housing development designed to accommodate 500,000 people [...]. — gowestproject.com

I asked myself the question: so what struck me about the process of thinking across boundaries and reimagining planning in the issues that we have been discussing in our celebration of DPU [The Bartlett Development Planning Unit]’s 60th anniversary in this conference. At the risk of simplifying a complex and dynamic set of discussions, I want to make six points. — thisbigcity.net

The city needs places of solace, calm, order and beauty – even prettiness. But prettiness and concealment are anaesthetic. The urban mind needs its regular confrontations with tangle, too, a bracing shock that places the world in perspective and informs us, without either warmth or rancour, that our lives are enmeshed in a vital mechanism. The city is a machine for teaching people to be city-dwellers: one made up of crushing cogs and steel. — aeon.co

In June, the “Innovation in Mobility Public Policy Summit,” sponsored by the Association for Commuter Transportation, Transportation Sustainability Research Center, Mobility Lab, Transit Center, and Shared-Use Mobility Center, brought together a range of participants to discuss these themes in Washington, DC. — urbanomnibus.net

The Municipal Art Society of New York has developed a new tool that shows where development could bring the most change across the city's five boroughs. This resource is a continuation of the group's "Accidental Skyline" initiative, an effort to curb the "as-of-right" development (which allows developers to bypass some regulatory hurdles) that has resulted in some of New York's tallest and skinniest new skyscrapers. — citylab.com

While searching for images of highway interchanges in urban areas, I came across these historic aerial photos of Detroit on a message board, showing how the city fabric has slowly eroded. It’s a remarkable record of a process that has scarred many other American cities. — usa.streetsblog.org

A new report from Reid Ewing and Shima Hamidi of the University of Utah, lead researchers on the aforementioned rankings, gets at that question. Ewing and Hamidi scored the largest 162 U.S. urbanized areas on the Sprawl Index — or, if you're feeling optimistic, the Compactness Index — for 2010. (Urbanized areas reflect development better than fixed metro area boundaries do.) Then they applied the index to the same cities in 2000 to show the change over time. — citylab.com

The latest draft of DDOT's citywide transportation plan, moveDC, calls for a massive expansion of transit and cycling facilities throughout the District, plus new tolls on car commuters. If it actually becomes the template for DC's transportation, the plan will be one of America's most progressive. — greatergreaterwashington.org

At a larger scale, the metropolitan regions of Paris and New York City both show significant pedestrian mode shares. New York City has a pedestrian mode share of 34% for all trips citywide ahead of car (33%) and transit (30%)[4] when the Ile-de-France region has a weekday pedestrian mode share of 32%, a car mode share of 43%, and a public transport one up to 21%[5].

[...] How do they support this large pedestrian population and decrease auto-dominance in public space? — pps.org

Election day means Gujarat is closed for business—except in Gift City.

Officially known as Gujarat Information Finance Tech City (hence, Gift), construction equipment is everywhere and dust is in the air. [...]

This is the type of development that Narendra Modi supporters hope will be a microcosm for the rest of India should he become prime minister. [...] Here’s a (very stylized) artist rendition of what the area will look look, according to the government brochure. — qz.com

Preserving the rich history of an iconic site while modernizing any aspect of its design is always a tricky feat. For MVRDV, one of their latest competition wins is redeveloping the urban plan of the historic Serp & Molot (Hammer & Sickle) Factory...In the two-stage competition, the winning team was chosen out of a shortlist with LDA Design (UK), Ateliers lion Associés (France), Mega Project (Russia), and De Architecten Cie. (Netherlands). — bustler.net

Our technology-first approach has failed the city of the future. So-called “smart cities,” powered by technology, carry the promise of responding to the great pressures of our time, such as urban population growth, climate instability, and fiscal uncertainty. But by focusing on the cutting-edge technologies themselves and relying on private companies to move forward, we have lost sight of what we even want our cities to achieve with all that tech. — wired.com