George Haugh

The increase in outdoor music festivals, guerrilla gardening, temporary restaurants, cinemas and pop-up shops are all examples of "a growing appetite for transforming our apparently prosaic, profit-led landscape into something else."

Joshua Hammer describes his visit to the financially straitened emirate where he found "deserted highways, empty hotel rooms, miles of unsold residential and office space."

At a time when families across the country are facing fewer choices for fun, ambitious park projects like those in St. Louis, Detroit and Houston are "bringing urban centers back to life," according to JoAnn Greco.

Belinda Lanks details architect Frank Ruchala's scheme to bring general stores back into America's residential areas. He believes "a general store could work just as well in a (suburban) subdivision as it did in small villages a hundred years ago."

Richard Florida plots the geography of class on a map of Toronto to show the deep economic divisions at work in an almost "completely post industrial," city.