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

Barcelona won a global urban innovation contest sponsored by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies. It's winning project is to create a network of support for elderly residents.

Some places have lanes for bicycles, others for motorcycles, but there's a place in mainland China that boasts a different type of lane altogether: one for phone addicts glued to their screens. According to a Chinese publication, the cellphone lane above was spotted along a place called Foreigner Street in Chongqing city, one of the five major cities in the country.

S-Oil launched the HERE campaign. The idea is to use balloons to help car drivers finding empty parking spaces quickly. Simple, yet so smart.

Thought it might seem counterintuitive, city governments have much to gain by letting riders off the hook

Two hundred years ago, just 3 percent of the world's population lived in cities. Today, cities hold more than half of all people on Earth. The number of urban residents is growing by nearly 60 million every year, a trend driven by rapid industrialization, rural-urban migration, and globalization. If this pace continues, by 2050 over 70 percent of people will call cities home.

Faced with a shortage of land, officials in Lanzhou City, in China's Gansu province, embarked on a project in 2012 to bulldoze more than 700 mountains. Now, almost two years in, a group of Chinese scientists have questioned the undertaking. They criticized the "largest mountain-moving project in Chinese history" in a June 4 article published in the science journal Nature.

In Houston, taking the bus is a measure of last resort. But that might not be the case for long

Cities that float on water could offer an alternative to destroying the earth's valuable countryside according to architecture studio AT Design Office, who has developed a concept for an ocean metropolis.

This spring work will begin to move Sweden's northernmost town two miles to the east. Over the next 20 years, 20,000 people will move into new homes, built around a new town centre, as a mine gradually swallows the old community. It's a vast and hugely complicated undertaking.

The families of Detroit’s Brightmoor area are delighted that the day is finally approaching when bulldozers will arrive to level more of their neighbourhood. After that, their community’s future will be like the cleared landscape – a blank canvas.

"Vancouverism" is synonymous with tower-podium architecture, green space, and breathtaking views. But the city's development process is sometimes overlooked.