Stephanie G. Mathis Cities have always been laboratories of innovation. They’ve also been hotbeds for crime and inequality. There are architectural marvels, ruins, and everything in between. In our series Emerging Cities, we examine how urban areas from Paraguay and Iran are changing.
People power: how communities can save the environment
The re-opening of Seoul’s Cheonggye Stream, once covered by an old highway, is a good example of the type of initiative cities can take. Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters
Community action is crucial to the environmental movement. It can range from citizens sitting on boards of energy companies to neighborhoods funding local wind farms.
A German steel region is given a modern, mindful makeover.
Phoenix Lake is Dortmund’s coolest, newest quarter. It was once a brownfield and polluted waterway surrounded by an abandoned steel mill.
The former industrial area in Germany’s heart is slowly reinventing itself for the 21st Century. It offers urban planning lessons to help reinvent rust belts from Detroit to New York State and beyond.
The dark side of free trade is revealed in the Paraguayan bank heist
After the robbery, Prose gur’s headquarters. Francisco Espinosa/Reuters
Ciudad del Este was constructed to allow goods to be sold without the need for state interference. Recent brazen bank robberies show that crime is the other side of free trade.
Has the Brazilian slum upgrade ended?
Brazil’s favelas may be famous, but its ambitious efforts are also well-known. It has been working to provide roads, electricity, water, and land rights in its informal urban settlements. Teflon/Flickr CC BY
Brazil has been working to improve the conditions of its poorest neighborhoods for decades: building roads, drainage systems, lighting, and better housing. Budget cuts will end Brazil’s ambitious slum upgrading efforts?
Six futuristic utopian cities that reimagine the life on Earth
Alan Marshall, Author supplied, Author.
Eco-friendliness can only make cities sustainable, as they may house 80% of humanity in the next Century.
Iran destroys modernist buildings to erase a more Western history.
View of Tehran with its mixture of traditional and contemporary design. Jorn Eriksson/Flick, CC BY-ND, CC BY-ND
Iran’s mid-century American and Italian structures, which were built at a time of global cosmopolitanism in Tehran, will soon be reduced to concrete blocks, beams, and dust.
