Asia-Pacific

South Korea's new president has proposed the engineering and construction of a huge cross-country canal -- a plan he hopes will revive much of the country's depressed villages and offer an attractive venue for tourists and shipping companies.

As commuters face delays and frustrations with aging infrastructure, the government in Auckland, New Zealand has announced plans to invest more than $1 billion in its regional rail system.

Young people in New Zealand aren't taking up careers in planning, which is causing problems for many cities, and has developers upset about slow processing times.

A woman in Russia returned home form vacation recently to an empty plot of land. Her home was mistakenly demolished as developers readied a site for new construction.

The Pentagon and an international consortium are investigating the feasibility of 'beaming back' solar energy from a network of space-based satellites and Pacific island-based antennae that could begin operating as early as 2012.

Vice Magazine presents this photo essay on a cemetery in Manila that is heavily populated with both the living and the dead. More than 10,000 families make this graveyard their home.

Smaller cities in rural areas of Japan are being gutted out, as big box centers continue to sprout up outside cities.

Many Japanese cities are in decline, and people there are counting on the new prime minister to put a stop to it.

A vortex of winds has concentrated garbage and plastic flotsam into a huge island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- an unintentionally man-made mass that is growing at a rapid pace.

Road designers in Japan have created a system of specialized grooves on highway pavement that produce melodies when cars drive over them at certain speeds.

This post from Salon shows a video of a train that travels right through a market in Bangkok.

Rapid building and public works projects are destroying much of the natural environment in Japan, a country that lays 25 to 30 times more concrete than the U.S.

A $7 billion new town is being planned in Vietnam, across the Red River from capital city Hanoi. And though the creation of thousands of new houses is welcomed, many are concerned about development along the sensitive riverfront.

Japan's population is aging, and could drop by more than one-quarter of its size within 50 years. Many are calling on the government to plan for the diminishing population, and for how it will affect many of the country's cities and suburbs.

Japan's leech invasion may be an unintended consequence of successful reforestation efforts combined with rural population declines.

In New Zealand, its not so much people, but methane-producing livestock that's the problem. A revived government proposal would tax farmers for their animal's gas emissions.

The landfill on the island of Pulau Semakau is designed to store the waste from the city-state of Singapore while preserving the ecological health of the surrounding environment.

Tokyo is rapidly developing -- and redeveloping. One of the unique characteristics about the city is the temporal nature of its buildings and spaces, which are often replaced after very short lives with new visions of the city's future.

Birth rates have been steadily declining in many Asian countries -- a trend some are attributing partly to rapid industrialization and urbanization.

The governments of North and South Korea have agreed on plans to create a cross-border train route -- the first such rail crossing in more than 50 years.