In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.

Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.

But no one will ever call it home. — CNN

Cities can’t win. When they do well, people resent them as citadels of inequality; when they do badly, they are cesspools of hopelessness. In the seventies and eighties, the seemingly permanent urban crisis became the verdict that American civilization had passed on itself. Forty years later, cities mostly thrive, crime has been in vertiginous decline, the young cluster together in old neighborhoods [...] —and so big cities turn into hateful centers of self-absorbed privilege. — newyorker.com

“My growing interest in how cultural districts can shape cities led me to this new, exciting opportunity in New York City.” — New Cities Foundation, NY Times

Binational urbanism has the potential to become one of the most interesting forms of life in the twenty-first century. — Bernd Upmeyer

Across the continent, Chinese companies are building highways, railways, sports stadiums, mass housing complexes, and sometimes entire cities.

But China isn’t just providing the manpower to fuel quickly urbanizing African cities. It is exporting its own version of urbanization, creating cities and economic zones that look remarkably similar to Chinese ones. — qz.com

For decades, China’s government has tried to limit the size of Beijing, the capital, through draconian residency permits. Now, the government has embarked on an ambitious plan to make Beijing the center of a new supercity of 130 million people.

The planned megalopolis, a metropolitan area that would be about six times the size of New York’s, is meant to revamp northern China’s economy and become a laboratory for modern urban growth. — nytimes.com

But thanks to increased interest from buyers and less resistance from village governments, developers are constructing more new-urbanism-style homes in the burbs. “Millennials and boomers are demanding it,” explains Drew Williams-Clark, principal planner at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. — chicagomag.com

A new typology of XL-architecture is emerging in Istanbul, negating the urban context. These ‘Citadels-on-Steroids’ rapidly encroach on the city’s urban fabric. [...]

This might very well be the future of all cities. As city walls and state boundaries erode under late capitalism, the walls are only rebuilt at a smaller scale to maintain immunity from the chaos outside. — failedarchitecture.com

It's insane. Each city in the North is too small to fight against that. We can only drag some of that investment northwards if we work together — BBC News - Magazine

The slum, of course, is the hottest button in urbanism. Beneath the cliché that half the world’s population lives in cities — and that urban populations will double by 2050 — is the fact that only bottom-up informal settlements, or slums, can absorb several billion new residents in the timeframe. [...]

URBZ is notable in that it offers a third way at looking at Dharavi — as both a failure and a better path to success than stillborn smart cities or other attempts at top-down instant urbanism. — nextcity.org

If ongoing discussions with the United States and others prove successful, sanctions affecting the Iranian economy will likely be lifted, exposing the country to a forceful wave of globalization. But the shift from isolation to inclusion has already begun to transform Tehran. [...]

It’s a city that, at this moment, is intensely influenced by international relations, shaping itself into a burgeoning urban hub. — citylab.com

Here is a constant refrain: Why is so much new building junk? [...]

The truth is that architects don’t have that much power. Architects don’t design most buildings; they are designed by developers or contractors working from cookie-cutter plans. Perhaps an architect signs off. [...] In any number of ways—our building codes, our housing policies, our preservation statutes—we systemically encourage bad building. — artsblog.dallasnews.com

municipal infrastructure is being expanded to include living creatures. In many ways, of course, this is simply the contemporary urbanization of a practice that goes back millennia. However, the ensuing juxtapositions – of 21st-century landscapes and cities being maintained not by high-tech machines or by specialty equipment but by neo-medieval groups of trained animals – can be quite jarring. Animal labour is once more becoming an explicit component of the modern metropolis — newscientist.com

To prepare our cities for the emergence and growth of transnational lifestyles we need to invent new urban and architectural forms that are adapted to these new ways of life. This is what the French sociologist and assistant Mayor of Paris, Jean-Louis Missika, emphasized in an exclusive interview with MONU entitled “Liberté, Digitalité, Créativité” on the topic of “Transnational Urbanism”.

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, April 2015) — http://www.monu-magazine.com/news.htm