Yesterday, the city of Los Angeles installed its first ever parking-protected bike lanes. They’re on Reseda Boulevard in Northridge, part of the mayor’s Great Streets Initiative. As of this morning, the project is roughly one-quarter complete. The new protected lanes, also known as cycletracks, are mostly complete on the west side of Reseda Blvd from Plummer Street to Prairie Street. The full one-mile protected lanes will go from Plummer to Parthenia Street. — LA Streets Blog

...Fernando Casado and Paula García, the founders of the Towards the Human City project, [are] travelling the world to find how cities are trying to be more people-oriented...Trends like smart cities make us believe that large structures are needed to change urban spaces, yet there are countless examples of transformative bottom-up initiatives that have come from a simple idea and flourished without public money. It is this citizen-led type of urbanism that they hope to highlight and champion. — The Guardian

When I speak with a student about nightlife they have something different in mind than a 65-year old town planning manager. In the municipalities, finding contacts is difficult - often nobody feels responsible or capable of speaking. That should change. — DW.de

Architectural historian Diane Favro of [UCLA], has employed advanced modeling software to reconstruct the city of Rome in its entirety over the period of the rule of Augustus Caesar, from 44 B.C. to A.D. 14. According to legend, Augustus boasted, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble”... She found that only a small proportion of the buildings in Augustan Rome were converted from brick to marble, and that they would have been difficult to see from ground level. — archaeology.org

“This corridor of shame that I call Van Ness and Market is just a spectacular example of failed urban planning.” [...]

“In the built environment, as one writer puts it, all our warts and our glories are there,” says Paul Groth, an architectural historian at UC Berkeley. “You can tell how we’re treating our fellow humans in the built environment. It really is an autobiography.”

So, what does Groth think our current architecture says?

“Greed.” — KQED

Al describes CityCenter as the product of “the Bilbao effect: the notion that buildings designed by celebrity architects bring in tourists, and in particular a higher-end type of visitor”. MGM’s version was to bring in name-brand architects such as Daniel Libeskind, Helmut Jahn and Norman Foster [...].

“It goes against the casino design convention,” Al says, “by having towers that let in natural light and meet the street the way buildings do in other cities” – with retail spaces, not gaming. — theguardian.com

Big, brash, and full of energy, Moscow is a city that knows how to make an impression. But for all its attractions — world-class museums, clubs and rapidly transforming food scene, to name a few — its downsides are impossible to ignore. [...]

This week, The Calvert Journal considers Moscow’s prospects, consulting experts at the Moscow Urban Forum, looking in detail at two projects in the pipeline — VDNKh and Zaryadye Park — and checking out some neighbourhoods that are already going places. — calvertjournal.com

This map shows the difference in living costs around the world using figures from the world's largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. The Consumer Price Index, used to determine the difference in the living costs between countries takes into account the prices of groceries, transportation, restaurants and utilities.

The CPI in the infographic is a relative indicator of a country's living costs compared to New York. — MoveHub

In the past two years, Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology has published a special issue devoted to “urban metabolism for the urban century” and a paper on “an urban metabolism approach to Los Angeles.”

Clearly, certain precincts of academia are abuzz about this concept. And if still another recent paper — “Mainstreaming Urban Metabolism” — has any sway, the term could become as familiar in urban circles as “resilience” and “Vision Zero.” But what exactly does it mean? — nextcity.org

“Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities” is, at least nominally, about urbanism and architecture. [...]

The problems, not the solutions, presented in “Uneven Growth” are very real. Before Gadanho and his teams of architects, planners, and researchers can suggest productive solutions, they would do well to acknowledge that their fellow practitioners hold responsibility for the very state of urban affairs they seek to remedy. — blouinartinfo.com

MoMA began its "Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities" initiative last year aiming to advance international discussion on disproportionate urban development and its potential consequences. To address this issue, six interdisciplinary teams spent 14 months in workshops designing proposals that investigate new architectural possibilities for six metropolises. Each case study will be exhibited to the public at MoMA starting on November 22. — bustler.net

Calling the cost of housing one of Los Angeles’ biggest challenges, Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday announced a goal for 100,000 new homes in the city by 2021.

In a speech to business leaders at UCLA, the mayor outlined a plan to increase funding for affordable housing, subsidize development around transit stations and cut the red tape that many developers say drives up the cost of building in the city. — LA Times

The weeks and months of billable hours and protracted talks can translate to an economic lift for a host city catering to out-of-town investors and their lawyers and support staff, making municipalities worldwide eager to woo bickering parties [...] International locales like London and Paris traditionally have been favored — as well as centers of commerce like Hong Kong and Singapore for Asian disputes — but parties can agree to settle matters elsewhere. — NY Times

The American Community Survey is a massive annual effort by the Census Bureau to measure various aspects of American life. Among many other things, respondents are asked if they speak a language other than English at home, and if so, what language is spoken. Using this data, as explained in more detail at the bottom of this post, Business Insider was able to map out New York City's most popular non-English languages. — Business Insider