[The] quintessential local issue of zoning squabbles ends up generating a national scarcity of elite college admissions slots, fueling zero-sum competition and ultimately reducing America’s ability to increase global “exports” of its best-in-class high-end higher education product. — The Washington Post

At its current rate of growth, Brooklyn is about to be more populous than the entire city of Chicago.

Saying “we need more housing” is a given, but no one agrees on where, how high, and for whom. And New York has been later to that discussion than San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles: While the city is building housing, technically, it is nowhere near enough to meet the needs of 144,000 new Kings County residents since 2010. — Curbed New York

Maurice Cox grew up in Brooklyn, a borough whose name has since become a global shorthand for gentrification. An urban designer, architectural educator, and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, in 2015 Cox became head of the planning department of Detroit, where he hopes to prevent the forces that have reshaped his childhood home from taking over the Motor City. [...] Cox is using design to catalyze growth that’s incremental and closely in line with the city’s strong sense of self. — Urban Omnibus

The hottest Airbnb deals are—surprise!—a little bit out of the way.

The home-and-room rental platform has revealed the top 17 neighborhoods whose bookings grew the most this year, based on 140 million arrivals at 3 million homes. Peppered throughout are terms like “off the usual tourist path” or “a tranquil outpost” and “though detached from city proper.” [...]

While smaller than many of Airbnb’s major markets, these neighborhoods could be in for even more growth in 2017. — qz.com

To most people, zoning and land-use regulations might conjure up little more than images of late-night City Council meetings full of gadflies and minutiae. But these laws go a long way toward determining some fundamental aspects of life: what American neighborhoods look like, who gets to live where and what schools their children attend.

And when zoning laws get out of hand, economists say, the damage to the American economy and society can be profound. — the New York Times

These days, you can find a Steve Pomerance in cities across the country — people who moved somewhere before it exploded and now worry that growth is killing the place they love.

But a growing body of economic literature suggests that anti-growth sentiment, when multiplied across countless unheralded local development battles, is a major factor in creating a stagnant and less equal American economy. — New York Times

In 2002, CINTRI, a branch of Canadian firm Cintec Environment Inc., was granted an exclusive 50-year contract to collect commercial and residential waste in Phnom Penh and keep the city’s main streets clean. The exact details of the company’s agreement with city hall have never been made public, but since the deal was inked, Phnom Penh’s population has swelled from just over one million to two million people. The population boom and its attendant urban sprawl seem to have caught CINTRI off-guard — nextcity.org

A new video by doctoral student and an associate professor at Arizona State University visualizes the expansion of LA's roads, starting in 1888 and running all the way up to 2010 [...]

Variations in color denote the age of the thoroughfares, with green being the oldest roads and red being newest. Watch as the map blooms with color in the fifties and the trend carries on through the eighties to the present. — la.curbed.com

[The American shopping mall] has its own traceable lineage, from the earliest planned shopping centers to the first regional hubs for shoppers traveling by car, to the novel post-war enclosed malls of Victor Gruen [...]

Malls, in short, have spread across the American landscape -- and defined it -- with remarkable success, adapting to our changing tastes along the way. — washingtonpost.com

They conceive of urban space as space owned by the public, not space for real estate development. — Dongwoo Yim, NK News

When Mr. Archer, 62, finds something intriguing (and it’s usually a very large something), he often builds a new wing around it.

His house, which he bought 30 years ago for $135,000, was once a 3,000-square-foot, two-story box. Now it is somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 square feet, with wings flying every which way, a pterodactyl of architectural detritus. — nytimes.com

As growth slows, China's huge investment in infrastructure is looking ever harder to sustain, leaving a string of ambitious projects - towns, shopping malls and even a theme park - empty and forlorn. — bbc.co.uk

Evidently an impressive transformation is taking place – creating a truly modern metropolis. However Mr Hopkinson alludes to an almost cancerous growth on the outskirts of the nation’s capital city, and states that new builds fail to represent Chinese culture and imagination. Building projects on the outskirts of the city are viewed on an individual basis, without context and appear to result in “grids of square buildings of equal height, in a square plot, with uniform facades”. — blogs.independent.co.uk