Kansas City, a place long known for jazz and barbecue, now wants to be known as one of the most futuristic cities in America. Last week, the city announced plans to install free public Wi-Fi covering 50 blocks of its downtown, 125 "smart" streetlights that automatically dim when no one is underneath them, and a new, glossy $100 million streetcar. The city is hoping that, with the help from some bold-faced partners like Sprint and Cisco, the initiative will boost...

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...

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.

In 1981, a young writer named David Brodsly described the Los Angeles freeway as one of the city's indispensible metaphors, “one of the few parts capable of standing for the whole.” He argued that the freeway had expanded “the realm of the accessible” for drivers in Southern California — that it was a powerfully democratic force, in essence — and lent “a new clarity” to a vast metropolitan region that newcomers had long found illegible and tough to grasp.

The mayor of New Jersey's capital city wants to sell vacant properties for as little as $1 to those who pledge to fix them up. The concept is among several announced Tuesday by Trenton Mayor Eric Jackson to try to deal with the estimated 6,300 vacant properties in the city. That is nearly one-fourth of the properties in the city, something that officials believe is a major...

A private company is snapping up 150 acres on the Motor City's East End - property where more than 1,000 homes once formed a gritty neighborhood - and turning it into what is being billed as the world's largest urban farm. Hantz Woodlands plans to start by planting trees, but hopes to raise crops and even livestock in the future, right in the midst of the once-proud city.