Via Singularity Hub and The Stranger Slog.

• Detroit homes sell for $1 amid mortgage and car industry crisis from The Guardian. Just read Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis and seeing former giant Detroit still in a slumber is more than a little heartbreaking.
• Bellevue planning director will retire after 30 years of guiding city’s growth from The Bellevue Reporter. Even though I’m not my hometown’s biggest fan, I’ve become increasingly impressed with its planners tactful ability to reconcile Bellevue’s expansion with aesthetically pleasing and sustainable means (evading some of the uniformity/homogeneity aspects of New Urbanism *shudder*). Since taking Urban History II, I’ve definitely learned to appreciate Bellevue’s long history of systematic urban planning — for a generic postwar suburb, Bellevue become a fairly exceptional edge city. Of particular interest was this quote, a la Ebenezer Howard’s garden city movement: “Terry was an early advocate of Bellevue’s ‘city in a park’ concept.” (No wonder there are so many parks and greenbelts everywhere!) Bravo to Bellevue’s veteran director of planning and community development Matt Terry!
• And finally, absolutely inspiring work from Mark Changizi at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: Ego City: Cities Organized Like Human Brains from RPI is probably the greatest thing I’ve stumbled upon in months — it’s a straight-up link between brains and cities and just pure hope.

Is happiness at the convergence of the experiencing and remembering selves?