High-rise buildings and apartments are crowding small alleyways and residential areas, investors ignoring the huge pressure they are putting on already weak infrastructure. [...]

Hai, a resident of Thanh Xuan District, said locals are most worried about the danger of fire [...]

High-rise developments also put a huge strain on local power and water supplies, struggling sewage systems and storm-water drainage, creating more hazards for neighbouring residents. — vietnamnet.vn

Just north of Newark, New Jersey, the Pulaski Skyway became the country’s first so-called “superhighway” — a 3.5-mile raised roadway running over the top of some of the most heavily industrialized property in the country. [...]

In infrastructure terms, the Pulaski is what’s called “functionally obsolete,” meaning it doesn’t meet modern design standards —and the money being spent to fix it up won’t change that. — marketplace.org

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

The Four Level, or Stack as it’s sometimes known, was the first interchange of its kind when it fully opened in 1953. [...]

It may seem a cliche to simply associate LA with its freeways, but the connection between the infrastructure and the city’s image is strong. It’s not just about driving, it’s about a new form of urban living in the postwar era [...]

“LA kind of emerged at the forefront of that development and it became recognised as a freeway metropolis” — theguardian.com

Driverless pods, gliding above city streets using a network of elevated guideways. This is SkyTran -- but is it the future? SkyTran wants to do away with train schedules and central stations to develop a grid system above the ground with multiple "off ramps" acting as stations where users can board pre-booked pods – a cab service for the skies. Call for SkyTran on your smart phone and a computer-controlled, magnetically levitating pod arrives. It will whisk you across the city... — CNN

There aren’t many architects you would believe could hold back seas and save the world from being drowned by Biblical floods. But when you meet Bjarke Ingels, anything seems eminently possible. [...]

If New York has to build 10 miles of flood defences to protect the city from another Hurricane Sandy, why not conceive the barrier as a brand new waterfront park? Climate security as leisure amenity. You can almost hear the standing ovation and all-American whooping in the background. — theguardian.com

If there’s anything positive to emerge from the current mess, it’s that local advocates like Cary Moon, who warned against building the tunnel in the first place, are commanding attention again. Moon recently took to the pages of the local alt-weekly, the Stranger, to argue that in light of the tunnel project’s spectacular, slow-motion meltdown, the city should explore other options. — streetsblog.org

California's bullet-train agency will officially start construction in Fresno this week on the first 29-mile segment of the system, a symbol of the significant progress the $68-billion project has made against persistent political and legal opposition. [...]

But the milestone marked by Tuesday's groundbreaking ceremony also will serve as a reminder of the enormous financial, technical and political risks still faced by the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco project. — latimes.com

Ancient Egypt endured plagues of locusts. Seattle has its tunnel, which over the last year has featured a series of setbacks and fiascos that, depending on one’s outlook, can be the setup for a punch line, or an eye-rolling narrative of put-upon endurance.

In the latest blow, project engineers said this week that 30 or more buildings in the historic Pioneer Square area [...] had unexpectedly settled, possibly because of water pumping related to the project. — nytimes.com

The architect today is no ‘fountainhead.’ It is rather sad to watch today’s ‘starchitects’, designing their weird-looking signature buildings. These seem now always to be either museums or condos for billionaires. The brand-name architect just build useless luxury housing for the 1% and their trinkets. The actual design of the world is now in the hands of other people. — Public Seminar Commons

Are you in a hurry to catch your flight and still need to find a parking place? Meet Ray, a shiny robot that parks your car at Düsseldorf Airport in Germany.

Ray makes sure you don’t have to park miles away from the terminal, eliminating the hassle of finding a parking place. Just drop off your car within a few meters from the check-in area [...]. When you come back from a holiday or business trip, the robot will make sure your car is ready to go when you walk out of the airport. — popupcity.net

The massive Beltline and an impressive grid of protected lanes that will connect the trail system to key urban destinations are poised to remake transportation in the city that anchors the country's ninth-largest metro area. [...]

As the video above shows, Atlanta's embrace of active space is part of a psychic shift in a city that's shaking off its old Sprawlville USA image with a combination of bike, transit and affordable housing infrastructure. — peopleforbikes.org

A new engineering report assessing the damage caused to the Amtrak-owned Hudson River and East River tunnels in New York City by Superstorm Sandy in October 2012 recommends a phased process of maintenance works, which will require taking individual tunnel tubes out of service for extended periods. — railjournal.com

Today, on China’s southern coast, the integration of the Greater Pearl River Delta (PRD) is turning fiction into fact (sans the harsh lawman), with 11 cities linking to create an urban area of 21,100 square miles (55,000 sq km) and a population of up to 80 million.

The nine cities of the PRD, plus the special administrative zones of Hong Kong and Macau, are becoming increasingly linked by a series of bridges, tunnels, roads, and high-speed rail networks. — urbanland.uli.org