In Washington, D.C.—a city that is half African American–just 3 percent of Capital Bikeshare's users are black. Can advocates and city planners change that?

Tony Hsieh, the charismatic CEO of Zappos.com, is turning the downtrodden, recession-hit heart of Las Vegas into an entrepreneurial playground.

One of the things that eventually becomes obvious to an American urban dweller residing in a European city is the lack of diversity. As a New Yorker in Rome, it’s particularly obvious. Rome is full

If trees had houses too, would we pay them more mind? Would we give them the same respect we (presumably) give our human neighbors? That’s the provocative question at the heart of this project by Vo Trong Nghia Architects. The Vietnamese firm has an office in Ho Chi Minh City, where rapid urbanization—the country’s urban areas are growing at 3.4 percent a year—has led to a quick decline in urban greenery. Compared to megacities in China, that rate isn’t stunning, but it’s especially...

Imagine your city’s mayor has just called you up and tasked you with creating and running a new department of city government. You can do whatever you want, really, but it’s got to be new, innovative, interdisciplinary – like nothing ever attempted before. Now imagine your city is the 6th largest on the planet, home to 21 million souls and a notorious array of health, poverty, and public safety problems.

It’s pouring rain. You’re running late. You desperately want to take a cab to the office. But, of course, there are none to be found. Happens all the time, right? Right, says science — or, to be specific, a new and exhaustive economic analysis of New York City taxi rides and Central Park meteorological data.

Residents here know Margel Nikoleta as the last beggar in town. On a recent weekday, she set up camp on Arendal's main square to ask passersby for money. Some greeted her warmly and dropped a few coins in her paper cup. Today, the way Nikoleta supports herself is illegal. This week, Arendal's municipality became one of the first in Norway to introduce a modern-day ban on begging.

A small Georgia city has voted to ban an Islamic group from renting a retail space to open a temporary mosque in the city, even after the landlord agreed to the deal. The City Council of Kennesaw, a city of about 30,000 people in north Georgia, ultimately voted down the Muslim group’s request 4-1.

Mines are a vital part of many regional economies, bringing jobs and wealth into the area for as long as they are minerals to extract. But once they are gone, the large area they took up becomes a toxic wasteland, and the surrounding population often leaves for greener pastures. This is a particular problem in Armenia, which is a key producer of molybdenum, an ore found in many alloys and chemical compounds. Many currently active mines will eventually become unsustainable to continue...

The Autobahn 7, Germany's longest highway, runs straight through Hamburg. Over the years, it's grown more and more congested, now carrying about 152,000 cars and trucks per day. To deal with the increasing traffic, the city is turning to a pretty conventional solution: widening virtually the entire stretch of the highway that runs through the city. But to deal with the noise — and the way that the highway has severed neighborhoods that were connected before it was built in the 1980s...

Despite the emergence of highways, shopping malls, frighteningly deep pits and even moats around them, the tenacious owners of these older structures refused to give in to developers, remaining in their increasingly incongruous homes. In China, they’re referred to as ‘nail houses,’ like stubborn nails in wood that can’t be pounded down; American developers call them ‘spikes.’ Most of them are ultimately demolished, but some stand like strange little monuments to the past.

A West Hollywood law requiring all single-stall restrooms in businesses and public places to be gender-neutral will go into effect this week. The law, which will have no impact on multiple-stall restrooms, mandates that any facility designed for use by no more than one person not be restricted to a specific sex or gender identity by signage, design or installation of fixtures.

About 500 subway riders in Stockholm have an ingenious scheme to avoid paying fares. The group calls itself Planka.nu (rough translation: "dodge the fare now"), and they’ve banded together because getting caught free-riding comes with a steep $120 penalty. Here's how it works: Each member pays about $12 in monthly dues—which beats paying for a $35 weekly pass—and the resulting pool of cash more than covers any fines members incur.

Rotting theaters and schools. Feral houses overgrown with green vines. Former auto plants coated with char and graffiti. Aerial views of the Detroit city limits dividing tidy rows of houses in the suburbs from abandoned lots in the city. There’s a reason that photos like these go viral on the Internet. The physical devastation of Detroit must be seen to be believed. But it’s hard to grasp the prevailing narrative that Detroit is a lost cause when you meet the people in it.

Proposed by a landscape architect from Edmonton, Alberta, this 7-mile urban project may not be as far fetched as it first sounds – in many regards it is simply a linear extension of an ice skating rink or more pragmatic variant of for-fun skateways found in Holland and Russia.

Not the sexiest title for a blog post, I know. But as we’ve inhabited a variety of workplaces—including a garage in Menlo Park, a farmhouse in Denmark and an entire New York city block—we’ve learned something about what makes an office space great. And we’re excited to put that into practice, starting here at our home in Mountain View.

A new service in a Portuguese city not only provides commuters with free Internet connections but it also helps collect data that makes the municipality run more efficiently.

Explore 10 clever examples of urban art and recycled installations across the world, combining social commentary with environmental stewardship.

The Egyptian government has announced plans to build a new capital to the east of the present one, Cairo. Housing Minister Mostafa Madbouly said the project would cost $45bn (£30bn) and take five to seven years to complete. He said the aim was to ease congestion and overpopulation in Cairo over the next 40 years. The announcement was made at an investment conference that aims to revive the Egyptian economy.