Jennifer and Andrew Greenberg didn’t fall in love at first sight with the 1950s ranch house they just bought in Portland, Ore. But they did feel that way about the neighborhood. They saw people out walking and noticed how close the house was to coffee shops and wooded paths. So they chose the home that needed more work over a comparably priced but more upscale option in another area. “When it came down to it, we weren’t willing to compromise on walkability,” says Ms. Greenberg, a 37-year-old event planner.

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In the past 10 years, the mechanics of gentrification have become so predictable and codified that the once-messy process of urban renewal is now as tidy and rule-based as a game of Risk or Mouse Trap. Which helps explain why the Toronto-based artist collective Atmosphere Industries debuted Gentrification: The Game! at the Come Out & Play Festival in Brooklyn, N.Y., last month.

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Maybe Richard Florida has promoted the wrong creative class. In his model, artists beget coffee bars that make formerly dreary neighborhoods attractive to real estate developers, who lure lawyers and accountants into luxury loft buildings with names like “the Shoe Factory.” Maybe there’s another model, one that sucks a little of the class bias out of the formula and privileges artisans over artists, blue-collar jobs over white-collar ones. Give enough people who are passionate about making things the stability to invest in equipment and hire workers, and you might slow, or even reverse, the death spiral.

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House buyers are being urged to head for the hills - if they have enough money.

While most people looking for a home are swayed by the number of bedrooms or whether the children will get into the local school, a study reveals they should be looking at the first line of the address.

Researchers have worked out the average price of Britain’s 858,000 residential streets, and sorted them according to their names.

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If You Lived Here, You’d Be Urban By Now: The case against a “walkable urbanism” that is neither walkable nor urban.

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In May last year, as he was strolling down a sidestreet in the heart of Paris’s Latin Quarter, Alexandre de Nuñez spotted a sign on the front of a building near the white dome of the Panthéon. “For rent,” it said, with one provision: “For bookshop.”

Officially inaugurated this week by mayor Bertrand Delanoë, the Franco-Argentinian’s cosy new El Salon del Libro is one of a cluster of librairies opening in the city’s historic district of erudition, where students mill around the Sorbonne and lecturers recline in the Luxembourg gardens.

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Welcome to one of the busiest roads in London. I’m standing beside three lanes of heavy traffic and the cars are hurtling past – but that’s tremendous, because it means the drivers are too busy to notice me.

Mel Antonen and his 3-year-old son, Emmett, were walking in Lincoln Park on Capitol Hill one morning when a chocolate Labrador puppy named Wilson jumped at the toddler and wouldn’t go away — even after Antonen lifted his boy out of the dog’s reach, yelling at the owner, “Get him off! Get him off!”

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“Are you moving poor people out of their houses?” a Detroit woman asks Jay Williams, mayor of Youngstown, at a recent symposium at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Williams was speaking about Youngstown 2010, a citywide plan adopted in 2005 that focuses on making Youngstown, a city east of Akron near the Pennsylvania border, relevant and alive. Youngstown’s population is shrinking, and downsizing, right-sizing, or whatever you want to call it, is a major component of the plan. The question of how to relocate people is huge. The thought of closing neighborhoods, cutting services and moving the widow Mrs. Jones out of the house she raised her children in touches a nerve.

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Imagine living in a Tesco house, sending your child to a Tesco school, swimming in a Tesco pool and, of course, shopping at the local Tesco superstore. According to the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), the government’s adviser on architecture and design, this collective monopoly is not an imaginary dystopia. “Tesco Towns” on this model are already being planned across the UK, from Inverness in Scotland to Seaton in Devon.

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