Northstowe, the major new town planned for the north west of Cambridge, reached a significant milestone as the planning application was submitted for a first phase of 1,500 new homes and related facilities.

Over the next 20 years Northstowe will provide up to 10,000 new homes as well as new schools, employment areas, a town centre and other community services on the old RAF Oakington Barracks site and surrounding land of approximately 480ha. The project will make an important contribution to the economic growth of the Cambridge area.

World’s richest artist Damien Hirst, best known for preserved sharks and diamond-encrusted skulls and having his assistants make all his artwork, apparently owns an obscene amount of land in Ilfracombe parish, Devon, England. And he wants to use it to build a development of 500 "eco-homes."

Curators: Liu Yuyang, Li Xiangning, Harry den Hartog

EXHIBITION: 16 February - 23 April, 2012, Kowloon Park, Hong Kong

FORUM: 18 February, 2012, 10:30am-12pm, Heritage Discovery Center in Kowloon Park, Hong Kong

The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has created an important online resource for professionals and citizens interested in improving America’s metro regions, cities and neighborhoods. It looks very promising to me, especially as a sort of living compendium of best practices.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told the Arab League he will not resume peace talks without an Israeli settlement freeze.

Abbas is under international pressure to resume low-level border talks that began last month. However, his comments in Cairo on Sunday seemed to close the door to further negotiations because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected a settlement freeze, as well as a demand to accept Israel’s pre-1967 war frontier as the basis for a border with a future Palestine.

Mars, a leading chocolate manufacturer, will set up a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Economic City (KAEC) at a total cost of $210 million.

Catherine Rampell, a business reporter, interviews David Barboza, a foreign correspondent, about working conditions in Chinese electronics factories and the role of U.S. companies.

At the edge of India’s greatest slum, Shaikh Mobin’s decrepit shanty is cleaved like a wedding cake, four layers high and sliced down the middle. The missing half has been demolished. What remains appears ready for demolition, too, with temporary walls and a rickety corrugated roof.

Transportation expert Norman Garrick reports on the amazingly effective transit system of Zurich, Switzerland. Garrick says the system is one of the factors that makes Zurich one of the most livable cities in the world.

In its time and place, the ancient city of Dura-Europos had much in common with today’s most cosmopolitan urban landscapes. Religious, linguistic and cultural diversity characterized much of the city’s life for more than 500 years, starting at the outset of the third century B.C. in what is now Syria.

A fishing village of about 20,000 people in southern China is in open revolt against the local government a day after it announced the death in police custody of a villager who had led protests over an alleged land grab, according to residents.

For years, Christmas shoppers have deserted Aberystwyth in their droves for larger towns and cities with a better range of high street stores. But there is optimism a planned multi-million pound development could help rejuvenate the struggling town centre.

They once bustled to the soundtrack of thousands of soldiers working towards establishing security in a war zone. But U.S. military bases in Iraq are fast becoming ghost towns as America continues to withdraw virtually all of its troops by December 31.

What would you do if you could start a city from scratch? Claude Lewenz has dedicated his life to creating the perfect blueprint for a "VillageTown", combining the correct scale to create communities that care with a scale that makes economic sense for a fulfilling life. Managing Editor Tim Halbur talks with Lewenz about his vision.

The long-predicted crash has arrived with a vengeance in China’s original ghost city"Ordos is the first of a number of these ghost cities that will see similar magnitude price declines," says Gillem Tulloch of Asianomics.

Three years ago, this coastal area fit perfectly into the dictionary definition for "wasteland." Its soil was too salty to grow crops. It was polluted enough to scare away potential residents. Sometimes the few fishermen who lived here saw investors driving in, but they quickly turned around and left, leaving nothing behind except dust.

The last few years have been an era of flux for both the town and the Baniaks. Nowa Huta, or "New Steelworks", was built from scratch in 1949 by the new communist government. It was to house the 30,000 workers at the factory from which the town takes its name; for decades, Nowa Huta, a place of vast grey housing blocks and wide, wide roads, was considered an icon of socialist town-planning, an up-yours to nearby religious, academic Kraków.

While sipping a French rosé on the rooftop dining deck of a discount department store, I come face-to-face with the future.

"A commonly held perception is that explosive rural to urban migration is the primary cause for the state of India’s cities. This is not borne out by evidence," says ’Urban India 2011- Evidence’

Confronting climate change and poverty, a new crop of city farmers comes of age in Africa

With the government claiming self-build is the answer to Britain’s housing crisis, we look at how they do it in the Netherlands – and whether it would work here

When Pruitt-Igoe was constructed in the mid-1950s, it was hailed as a triumph over the American slum. But it became exactly that in a matter of years. The infamous St. Louis housing project succumbed to the wrecking ball only 16 years after its completion, its destruction a massive symbol of the death of urban renewal philosophies.

Ministers should allow new towns to be built on Green Belt land around the edge of cities to deal with Britain’s housing crisis, a think-tank with close links to David Cameron recommends today.