"It is easy to become sentimental about the Fulton Fish Market as you tour it in its final weeks, in its 184th year. Arrive at daybreak, when the sky is turning pink beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, and you have found a forgotten city. Salesmen with gaff hooks engraved with their nicknames hoist silver fish over their shoulders, shouting orders. Journeymen cart boxes through clouds of their own frozen breath. Hire-by-night laborers huddle around bonfires, looking for warmth and work.

On June 10, said George Maroulis, Fulton's market manager, this will all be a memory like pushcarts on Hester Street. By then the hawkers and squawkers will leave their home by the harbor for the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx and a squeaky-clean box of a building, as long as the Empire State Building is tall. There, arrows on the floor will direct a fleet of new battery-operated forklifts past neat vendor stalls flanking a central corridor, with sinks, floor drains and other instruments of government-regulated food safety. A bland Costco to Fulton's choreographed chaos."

Once called "one of the most lifeless and uninteresting" downtowns in America, St. Louis is using more than $2.5 billion for 125 projects to reinvigorate the area.

An artist plans to sow seeds of revitalization at a blighted 32-acre plot between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights in Los Angeles.

Risk-taking pays off for Mexico City's young architects as they strive to beautify blighted urban areas with bold designs.

"With its choking traffic and pollution, little public investment, and no coordinated planning, Mexico City seems an unlikely model for urban development. Yet this sprawling hub of 18.5 million people is home to some of the world's most innovative architecture.

It's precisely the challenges of building within such a congested city that have spawned a new model for architecture firms, as documented in an exhibition in New York, "Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices," at the Center for Architecture until May 7."

"Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families."

Along the Harlem River near Yankee Stadium, the wholesale merchants of the Bronx Terminal Market still throw open their vast warehouse-like shops every morning before dawn, welcoming a stream of customers who come from as far as Detroit and Toronto to shop there...

"The traffic-choked heart of Paris is to become a car-free oasis under a radical scheme drawn up by Bertrand Delanoe, the city's flamboyant Socialist Mayor.

By 2012 - when Paris hopes to stage the Olympic Games - only residents, buses, delivery vans and emergency vehicles will be allowed inside a three square-mile zone of the Right Bank, from the Bastille to the Concorde square."

What do you think about this proposal for a car-free Paris - will it work, is it a good idea? What other cities should consider this type of plan to alleviate traffic congestion?

The Sierra Club's National Sustainable Consumption Committee has produced a 15 minute educational and entertaining cartoon about sustainable food.

You can view the short cartoon at http://www.truecostoffood.org/ (click on 'see the movie') - watch it and let everyone know what you think (about the cartoon or Sustainable Food in general!)

"Usually, members of the public don't have much say in what the Tennessee Department of Transportation does to the road they live on. But as a member of the 17-member resource team working with TDOT on changes to state Route 126, Tom Carroll has that chance.

"It's certainly different from the way things have been done in the past," he said. "Historically, TDOT has come in, looked at the highway and told the public 'this is what we're going to do.' But now they are listening to the public and asking the public what they want to reserve in terms of community environment and historical sites along the route."

...Garnering public input on projects is a pilot program at TDOT called Context Sensitive Solutions. Although there are several CSS projects taking place throughout the state, Route 126 is the only one to use public input from the beginning."

This Brookings Institution report outlines a step-by-step process to create walkable, lively and economically vibrant downtowns.

"New York has long lagged behind such cities as Paris, London, and Tokyo in its reputation for cutting edge architecture. Recently, though, it has had its internationally recognized triumphs, such as Yashio Taniguchi's expansion of the Museum of Modern Art and Richard Meier's shiny new condominiums in Chelsea. While private developers and wealthy cultural institutions are busy molding the city's skyline, the Department of City Planning has begun helping to bring some of that high design to the streets below.

As part of an initiative to step up the quality of urban design, the city agency is hiring high-profile, trend-savvy architects who are in effect acting as urban planners, in the first widespread planning effort since the 1960s that includes a comprehensive rezoning effort, several large-scale building projects, and architectural competitions."

Vancouver's Granville Market faces a declining share of area food sales.

"Once the highest-grossing retail space per square foot in North America, the Granville Island market saw just a 1.1-per-cent increase in sales last year -- less than the rate of inflation -- while retail food sales provincewide rose 9.8 per cent, Granville Island director Lino Siracusa told tenants at the meeting."

The health of the residents of low-income neighborhoods in Oakland California has been in decline, in part due to a lack of access to fresh produce. Leroy Musgrave, a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, drives 120 miles every Saturday to sell his produce in these under-served communities.

"He sees his mission as part nutrition counselor, part purveyor of the fresh, organic produce that's hard to come by in an area with only one grocery store and an abundance of fast-food restaurants and convenience stores.

"I've seen the African-American people's health declining," the 58-year-old farmer said. "It's not having access to healthy food, to a good lifestyle."

Catch-22 for the idyllic colonial in a cul-de-sac with no sidewalks: you may find yourself stuck behind the wheel and acquiring a spare tire.

NYTimes Article attributes a residential boom in downtown Detroit to the development of Campus Martius, a new city park for which PPS worked with the city to create the vision and program.

A new study finds that the amount of green space available in a city affects how likely people are to walk or bicycle as a means of transportation.

"Because engaging in moderate physical activity such as walking or bicycling can improve health outcomes, understanding strategies that increase these behaviors has become a public health priority," says Amy Zlot, an epidemiologist with the Oregon Department of Human Services, writing in the current American Journal of Health Promotion...

[The authors] suggest that studies like theirs might help in the planning of "livable communities" by multidisciplinary teams of urban planners, architects, transportation experts, developers, policy makers, park administrators and environmentalists."