United States, California

As America's metropolitan areas meld into "megaregions", officials and policymakers will need to figure out how to deal with their shared and growing infrastructure problems. Consider the ball rolling.

In his new book Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World, Jeb Brugmann proposes a new way of thinking about citybuilding. Planetizen Correspondent Michael Dudley has this review.

Robert Puentes argues that a new federal interagency partnership, debuted before the Senate this week, could provide the federal leadership necessary for a unified vision of transportation, housing, and environmental policy designed to tackle our interrelated economic, energy, and climate challenges.

As the population rises, underused and empty spaces are going to fill in. How well the transition works depends on shifts in demographics and infrastructure, as well as architecture. A studio of UCLA architecture students were asked to plot that transition. But before they could be architects, they had to be planners.