Urban Regeneration

A grassroots online campaign has already raised more than $50,000 to build a statue of the science fiction character RoboCop in Detroit. The effort's organizers call it an art project with the goal of urban regeneration.

Monocle magazine interviews James Corner, the landscape architect responsible for New York's lauded high line and recent winner of Cooper Hewitt Award for best landscape architect.

"More cities in the developed world shrank than grew in the last three decades. More than 40 of those cities were in the United States, according to City Mayors, an urban affairs think tank," writes Gordon Young.

The "Bilbao Effect" is the apotheosis of the notion that a struggling post industrial city can be regenerated through set-piece art and design. But Frank Gehry, the architect of the Guggenheim, suspects the gallery was only part of a larger gestalt.

This series from the BBC looks at how the UK's cities have changed over the last few decades, and what the lasting impact is of the billions spent for community redevelopment.