Financial Times

As the world continues to urbanize and megacities continue to grow, cities are increasingly "unrecognizable," no longer necessarily, say, places of political power. David Pillings repots on this and other issues challenging the traditional city.

The Milan apartment building will feature a tree on each balcony, at only 5% of the construction costs. Christopher Woodward takes us deeper into the project and others in the "living architecture" movement.

Officials in Russia are hoping to create their own version of Silicon Valley by luring tech companies to the Skolkovo innovation hub.

Edwin Heathcote of the Financial Times says that lists of the "Best Cities" often fail because they select cities that are the most "livable", ignoring what makes cities "lovable".

Kiran Stacy looks at some of the challenges facing what is intended to be the world's first carbon-neutral city.

"With cities worldwide busy repurposing their industrial districts and docklands as upmarket housing and waterfront retail centres, the suburbs need to find a new competitive edge," writes Sarah Murray.

Robert Wright describes the policy shift already underway in planning for cities of the future. He reports that "as energy becomes more expensive, cities will have to be much more compact, easier to navigate by bike and on foot."

"Officials argue that the main problem with Cairo is not that it is too big, but that three-quarters of its inhabitants are concentrated in a 20km radius from the center," reports Heba Saleh

As Asian economic prowess powers the continent's businesses toward prosperity, governments need to find a way to accommodate the 2 billion extra people that will inhabit its major cities by the middle of the century.

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.

As Shanghai aims to bring people together through spectacle, Edwin Heathcote examines the concept behind the festival and questions its relevancy.

Vancouver lost its Triple A credit rating after being forced to bail out its Olympic Athletes Village when the hedge fund that had backed it went under -- just one of the unpredicted events that made this a Recession Olympics.

Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron have designed a new parking garage for Miami that attempt to engage the public with a shockingly open-air design.

The Highway Act of 1956 that resulted in the construction of America's Interstate Highway system has gathered a lot of praise recently as a model economy-boosting public works project. But based on the problems it's caused, that praise should stop.

As Liverpool ends its year as the European Union's "Capital of Culture", the city is vastly different and better than it was just a year ago, according to this column.

The Financial Times analyzes the effects of the falling price of oil on energy markets and concludes that the short term economic gain for oil consumers will come back to bite them as investments in alternative fuels will cease as will conservation.

This audio slideshow from Financial Times looks at the severe shortage of clean water in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and what some activists are trying to do to provide clean water for the dwellers of the city's illegal slums.

Looking into a future gone increasingly urban, the professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has made a list of the ten cities or urban areas that will be the richest in 2020.