Europe

"Football Carnivals" are on the rise in Germany, where the community viewing buzz from the 2006 World Cup has hung around and revived itself for the current European Championship.

The second-smallest country in the world (after the Vatican) has plans to expand its territory by building more land on stilts in an idea inspired by oil rigs.

The US has never encouraged cycling as a practical mode of travel, and as a result, biking to work is a rare and hazardous activity, with four times the fatality rate of some European countries. A Rutgers University study shows how that can change.

GPS from cellphones is enabling exciting research into human behavior, but European studies show that our behavior is rarely exciting.

A senior care facility in Germany teamed with the local transit agency to install a fake bus stop near the home to stem occupant disappearances after Alzheimer's patients repeatedly wandered off site to catch buses at real stops.

What can leaders of a particularly hilly city do to encourage cycling? Well, they can try making it easier to ride a bike.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy's call for 'audacious' plans for a Paris of the future has been answered by some of the world's top architects and designers, but some wonder how any of the plans can work within the constraints of the existing city.

Household sewage is currently fueling cars in Sweden, and has for years. But Swedish industry has given up on the idea, investing in ethanol-based gasoline.

With dramatically increasing fuel costs, European consumers formerly amenable to "green" taxes are turning against them, leading to fears that ambitious emission-control policies may not be achievable.

Offshore drilling company StatoilHydro is finding a new way to get energy at sea- with large-scale wind turbines.

Thick congestion has politicians in Budapest looking at ways to improve mobility -- mainly by encouraging bicycle use.

To make North American cities more bicycle friendly, planners should look to Stockholm, Sweden and Freiburg, Germany -- two European cities were bikes and cars happily co-exist on the street.

Flemish nationalists in small-town Belgium are hoping to keep immigrants out by requiring that all schoolchildren speak Flemish -- an attack on the droves of French-speaking immigrants that have descended on the country.

One country stands out in Europe in surpassing the greenhouse gas emission reductions required by the Kyoto Protocol - Sweden. While it used several environmental technologies to achieve those reductions, experts give credit to its carbon tax.

Harald Bodenschatz calls for a radical shift in the urban planning discourse when he claims for a revitalization not only of the downtown, but of the district centers and of suburbia itself, which should be made denser and more valuable.

Streetfilms looks at the livable streets movement in Paris and a twice-weekly "critical mass" over roller skaters that often brings crowds of thousands.

Party organizers in Prague have set up a monthly party that takes place on one of the city's streetcars as it drives through town.

Responding to the growing backslash against cell phone chatter, the city of Graz, Austria has banned cell phone use on its public transit system.

A massive dam project in Turkey that would flood historic areas and displace 50,000 people is losing international support, as officials in Germany threaten to pull out of the project -- often called a smaller version of China's Three Gorges Dam.

The German city of Bremen has lessons to teach North American cities about sustainable transportation, according to this article from The Toronto Star.