Sharon Zukin had come to Greenwich Village and the Shrine of St. Jane not as a pilgrim but to wax sardonic.

Ms. Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor, stared at the modest red-brick town house on Hudson Street that once was home to Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” celebrated the joyous hodgepodge of New York’s neighborhoods: the working-class tailor and the artist, the Italian grocer and the writer, living cheek by jowl.

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Merging complex systems science and ecology, resilience scientists have broken new ground on understanding—and preserving—natural ecosystems. Now, as more and more people move into urban hubs, they are bringing this novel science to the city.

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At the newly unveiled Web site Shape Vancouver 2050, users are given a digital model of the Vancouver skyline, the ability to extrude buildings upwards, and a visual gauge of the resulting effects on the city’s downtown. As the user drags the digital towers higher and population density increases, meters at the bottom of the screen go up too—energy saved, carbon use curbed, dollars added to the city coffers.

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Skyscrapers, then, are the physical embodiment of “irrational exuberance” in the markets. The rule is that if there’s enough money sloshing around to pay for one, then don’t be surprised if, by the time the purple ribbon’s cut, the scissors have to be on hire purchase.

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Lower Manhattan, specifically Greenwich South, which is bordered by the Financial District, the World Trade Center site, Battery Park, and Battery Park City. This urban plan to reinvigorate the neighborhood is based on five overarching principles to improve connectivity and resident and business retention. From this plan emerged a 10-team charrette to develop specific building strategies and a list of action items to jump-start redevelopment.

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Advanced community design models are emerging to provide some of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, climate-disrupting emissions and traffic congestion, while also offering affordable, high-quality lifestyles.

Envision living in a community that offers an abundance of local shopping, services and entertainment. The community is focused on a mobility center well connected to the region with transit and vanpools. The need to drive to work and other destinations is minimized. When you do drive, it is in an electric vehicle charged at your house or a fast charge station located in the mobility center park-and-ride.

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A few hours after the public launch of the Active Design Guidelines here in New York, President Obama gave his first State of the Union Address. In an aside which drew the evening’s loudest applause, the President took a moment to acknowledge the First Lady’s new public health campaign to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity. Was it coincidence that the city chose this date to launch the guidelines? Probably not. Just as other municipalities and regions in this country have looked to New York in the past for answers on issues of zoning and historic preservation, for example, New York City is poised to lead in this new initiative as well. And as the debate about how to provide better, more efficient healthcare continues, perhaps designers here in New York City have an answer; a prescription that requires no doctor and no insurance coverage – just a livable, efficient, sustainable city.

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A few weeks ago in San Francisco, a number of urban farmers opened a gate in a chain-link fence at Laguna Street, between Oak and Fell Streets, and entered an overgrown lot that has been unused for nearly two decades. The farmers brought with them steaming piles of mulch, which they cast over the edge of the ramps formerly used by cars to enter and exit the elevated Central Freeway spur above Octavia Street, arranging the soil in rows for planting vegetables and filler crops.

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Over the past couple of years, coworking has been gaining momentum and attention. It is bringing a new and more flexible way of working to cities by helping people to take advantage of the benefits of interaction and collaboration. Breakout! is taking coworking a step further - pushing people to think entirely outside of the office “box”, and using all of the spaces a city has to offer to do work. By using the city as the office, Breakout! brings work back to the streets – to the places where work, play and leisure have happened for centuries.

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What If an Entire City Could Be Housed Under One Roof? It seemed until recently that Dubai was going to continue forever its quest to build taller, faster, better buildings. But the Matrix Gateway Complex, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, while certainly no small project, seems to take a different tack. “I appreciate the sort of restraint of this, the notion of making a kind of interior world that might have potential for a new kind of experience. It’s not simply about making some sort of icon on the skyline,” said juror Stan Allen. The massive 180-meter (590-foot) cube is built on an 18-meter (59-foot) supergrid, with steel frame structures clustered around, and hung from, five vertical cores. Accessible via a roadway that passes through the center of the building, a helipad, and a boat dock, the cube has a hotel with conference facilities, retail and office space, residences, a museum, a school, and a prayer hall—all of the major elements of a small city.

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