Austin's Cemetery Master Plan is a revolutionary idea, but it shouldn’t be. How Austin’s Cemetery Master Plan preserves 160 acres of urban cemeteries

Jackson Lears reviews “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert Caro.

The revitalization of LA’s neglected riverfront has gone from social-justice crusade to money-soaked land grab. By Richard Kreitner. (Mar. 10)

Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about car-free cities. Need a primer? Catch up here. We must first remember that all cities were car-free little more than a century ago. Not all cities responded to the advent of automobiles with the same enthusiasm as the cities of the United States. In fact, some cities never did adopt the car. Venice was unwilling to destroy itself in order to build...

Chinese architecture will now officially be less weird. A statement from China's State Council Sunday, says new guidelines on urban planning will forbid the construction of "bizarre" and "odd-shaped" buildings that are devoid of character or cultural heritage. Instead, the directive calls for buildings that are "economic, green and beautiful." China's economic boom over the past several decades has coincided with a boom in the construction of unique...

Like many drinkers on the weekend, you might find yourself busting for a pee but conscious of doing it on the street. Fear no more, if you're in Australia.

An island off the coast of Montenegro used as a concentration camp during World War II is being turned into a luxury resort. Mamula, which has a 19th century Austro-Hungarian fortress used for enemies of Benito Mussolini’s forces, still has ruins of prison cells where thousands were held and more than 130 were killed or starved. Despite the site’s solemn history, the Montenegrin parliament approved a project from the Swiss-Egyptian company Orascom...

At the end of 2015, 34 community gardens in New York City were protected from destruction. Behind the formation of several of these gardens on vacant publicly-owned land was 596 Acres, a grassroots nonprofit using design and technology for greenspace advocacy.

Fusing height, light, density and greenery with regional vernacular architecture, this ambitious urban Sky Walk plan aims to turn the tops of downtown buildings into a extensive series of connected green-roof parks connected by aerial walkways.

The concrete ditch running through the city is a sad joke even in Los Angeles. A revitalization effort decades in the making is getting under way, but will it repeat the mistakes of the past?

Nowhere in America bulldozes derelict homes with Detroit’s ferocity, as the city that has become a byword for U.S. urban decay seeks to engineer a recovery by tearing itself down.

Former mayor of the world’s second-largest refugee camp, humanitarian Kilian Kleinschmidt notes “the average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation.” These places need to be recognized as what they are: “cities of tomorrow,” not the temporary spaces we like to imagine. “In the Middle East, we were building camps: storage facilities for people. But the refugees were building a city,” Kleinschmidt said in an interview.

A weeklong series of ideas for improving urban life. Whenever a new tower starts muscling its way toward the sky, it drains a bit more light from the streets and parks below, so walking along a sidewalk can sometimes feel like pacing the bottom of a deep well. But what if, even in the densest thickets of Manhattan, skyscrapers could be designed to shrink, or even bleach out, the shadows they cast? Imagine a structure that bends like a rubbery dancer...

For Jazley Trouser, a 25-year-old Home Depot worker who has endured her share of hard times, the opportunity to become a homeowner was too good to pass up. With a $1,000 bid on the city’s online auction site, Trouser bought a four-bedroom Tudor plundered by thieves. A $25,000 grant from a community bank covered her renovation costs. Now she owns the 1929 home, restored to its former glory, mortgage free.

The Burj Khalifa in Dubai currently holds the title of world's tallest building, but its architects are now looking to overtake it with a new project in Saudi Arabia. Known as the Jeddah Tower, or Kingdom Tower, the building will rise at least 3,280 feet when it's completed in 2018, making it the world's first to reach a full kilometer into the air. (The Burj Khalifa is 2,716 feet tall.) This week, the Saudi government announced that $2.2 billion in...

China has been building like crazy. Parallel to rapid, gargantuan urbanization -- 300 million Chinese people moved to the city from the country in the past 2 decades -- land development and construction has boomed. As Vaclav Smil has noted, from 2011 to 2013, 6.6 billion tons of concrete were used in China -- that’s about 2 billion tons more than were used in the United States over the entire 20th century. But as it turns out, even in China, 6.6 billion...

Jane Jacobs' worst fears are slowly being realized. Gentrification has created a "high-rent blight" on the city

These colorful homes are bulletproof, fireproof, and can withstand earthquakes. They also maintain a comfortable temperature, produce zero carbon emissions, and are powered by solar and methane gas from recycled waste. Plastic is everywhere. In fact, the environment is so riddled with it, researchers predict that 99% of all birds on this planet will have plastic in their gut by the year 2050.

Center stage for many historic protests and demonstrations, the National Mall has fallen on hard times.

“Gentrification, it turns out, usually stops at the schoolhouse door,” the reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones has argued.