Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle.

But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets. — npr.org

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

From pedestrian bridges to city centre waterslides, sculpture parks to public pianos, here are some of the smartest and wackiest crowdfunded projects for urban improvement — theguardian.com

Sjors de Vries is a Dutch urban planner and founder of RUIMTEVOLK (‘Space People’), a leading online discussion platform about planning and urbanism in the Netherlands. We spoke with him about the current state of planning in the Netherlands, the best ways to upscale cute and small initiatives to make them serious improvements to the city, about the power of online media in city-making and the role of their platform. — popupcity.net

Imagine close to the entire population of the U.S. picking up and moving somewhere else.

That’s the scale of China’s urbanization campaign: 250 million farmers moving to the city over the next 15 years. [...]

In Southwest China, the city of Chongqing is being used as a test case for transitioning rural Chinese to change their residency status to urban residents. The government is persuading millions of farmers there to move to the city. — marketplace.org

In 2013, we picture cities a little differently, with demography and photography. Cities live in Instagram, in patterns of light from space, in blueprints and visualizations and—most like Canaletto’s civic landscapes—on Google Street View.

Now, an artist in London has done some creative, comparative history, pairing Canaletto’s Venice and London with contemporary depictions, as glimpsed by the Google van. — theatlantic.com

Referencing the utopian visions of 1960’s architecture practice Archigram, Walking City is a slowly evolving video sculpture. The language of materials and patterns seen in radical architecture transform as the nomadic city walks endlessly, adapting to the environments she encounters. — universaleverything.com

Building Trust International recently announced the winners for their international PLAYscapes Design Competition. As the name states, PLAYscapes challenged participants to propose their ideas to transform neglected city spaces into interactive places of fun for local communities. More than 500 entrants participated, with many of their projects highlighting the use of sustainable materials and the importance of redevelopment and adaptive reuse in their local cityscapes. — bustler.net

The winners of the tur(i)ntogreen international design competition were recently announced in Turin, Italy. Organized by the Research and Documentation Center in Technology, Architecture and City in Developing Countries at the Politecnico di Torino, the competition had invited university students [...] to develop new multidisciplinary solutions for a sustainable and inclusive city reflecting on new forms of urban management and regeneration through agro - housing and urban - farming models. — bustler.net

If you happen to be in the South of France this March, make sure to attend MIPIM’s first edition of the Innovation Forum in Cannes, March 12-15th, where MVRDV and Delft-based innitiative The Why Factory (T?F) present the exhibition, Porous City – Open the Tower. The event is part of their ongoing research on the design of skyscrapers and the potential of porosity as a European approach to urban density. — bustler.net

Last fall, the international research project and design ideas competition, "Transiting Cities - Low Carbon Futures," had invited designers and academic institutions from various fields to envision new, innovative and alternative cities of the near future by defining opportunities for transition into low carbon, prosperous, and vibrant communities.

One of the finalist entries [...] is the concept "Networked Ecologies: Rethinking Remediation" by Arizona-based team Studio One. — bustler.net

Last month, we published the winners of the international ideas competition POST+CAPITALIST CITY, #1Shop. Today we are presenting the two winning projects of the competition's second edition, POST+CAPITALIST CITY, 2#Work, which called for proposals that re-imagine the concept of work, the way we produce, and a city with another system of working culture. — bustler.net

It's not that I'm disappointed in New York, not at all. I love walking Manhattan's grid system, but now that I've seen Armelle Caron's bottom-up version of Istanbul, all those crooked, lopsided, curvaceous streets, going off in so many directions, I can't help wondering, what would it be like to wander there? Would I be constantly lost? Would every turn be an adventure?

Suddenly I can't help it. I want to go. — npr.org

According to its architect Eric Kuhne, head designer at the multinational firm CivicArts, Bluewater is "a city rather than a retail destination". — Guardian