The retrofitting of suburbia

“We tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should somehow remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It’s time to let them grow up.”

Way up north, another kind of oil controversy

Not many people have heard of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, nor the Athabaskan Tar Sands. Not these days, anyway, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But in Fort Chipewyan, the ongoing effects of bitumen oil extraction continue as the top news of the day.

Urban planning in the Brazilian rainforest

A vast experiment in urban planning is underway in Brazil’s urban jungle metropolis of Manaus. At the center of the urban expansion is the construction of a 2.2-mile bridge that is to connect the city to industrial cities and towns across the Rio Negro—the largest left tributary of the Amazon.