Racial Balance Shifts as 'White Flight' Subsides [Real Player] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92744947&ft=1&f=1015 How Willie Kathryn Suggs Changed the Harlem Real-Estate Market http://nymag.com/realestate/features/48328/ In Thousands of Images, a Photographer Builds a History in Harlem [Free registration may be...

How have cities grown over time? Answers to this important question are provided in visual form via the Lincoln Land Institute's Atlas of Urban Expansion. This resource "provides the geographic and quantitative dimensions of urban expansion and its key attributes in cities the world over." Visitors to the site should start their own exploration by looking at "Making Room for a Planet of Cities," a...

As many cities have begin to grapple with their vast areas of brownfields that dot the urban landscape, the federal government has begun to step in and provide various financial assistance in order to assist with the redevelopment of abandoned, idled and underused industrial and commercial facilities. This website, provided by the U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development, provides...

Why Bigger Cities Are Greener Cities http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-greener/863/ The Economic Productivity of Urban Areas: Disentangling General Scale Effects from Local Exceptionability http://www.santafe.edu/media/workingpapers/11-09-046.pdf Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/casa SENSEable City...

Are we in the age of the smart city? Will everyday existence be transformed by big data and its broad scale application to a range of public services and other central issues? This thoughtful set of meditations was released in June 2014 by scholars at the Wilson Center's Urban Sustainability Laboratory. The cities profiled in this report are New York, Ahmedabad, Sao Paulo, and Beijing, and...

As a lecturer at Northwestern University, Pamela Bannos has found herself researching all sorts of topics over the years, and she recently found herself intrigued with the history of the former Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park. Her basic interest in this project was to detail how this cemetery eventually became Lincoln Park over the course of the 19th century. Drawing on a range of...

As part of the Lincoln Land Institute's Working Paper series, Professor Tim Chapin of Florida State University has composed this 28-page work that addresses both the costs and benefits (economic and otherwise) of sports facilities. As many urban areas continue to compete for a variety of large-scale economic development projects, this paper will be of great general interest. As Professor Chapin...

Started in 1998, Metropolis Magazine offers a compelling look at the broad world of design, including the fields of architecture, planning, preservation, and crafts. As the website indicates, "Subjects range from the sprawling urban environment to intimate living spaces to small objects of everyday use." What is inviting about this particular site is the amount of publicly-available material that...

Are you curious to learn more about cities? You'd do well to make a beeline for the Places Wire site, which offers a cornucopia of material on urban parks, public policy, architecture, planning, and other topics. In sum total, the site is a "curated feed of news and commentary on architecture, landscape and urbanism." The site has partnered with 20 different organizations to provide new content on...

Given the heated discussion and debate surrounding the future redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, it is no surprise that there is a great deal of interest in public places, along with much dissent about what makes an effective and meaningful public place. Drawing on the work of the late William H. Whyte (whose seminal book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces is still read today), the...