On the Missouri river's engineering. "I’ve said elsewhere that I think the Army Corps is an exceptionally peculiar organization, probably the country’s most radically avant-garde landscape practice, but rarely recognized for that, as it is the scale, agency, and organizational intricacy of the Corps’ work, not its formal properties, which render it so radical."

On the new US air traffic control infrastructure, imaginatively named NextGen. "Leighton Quon, project manager of NextGen Systems Analysis, Integration, and Evaluation at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., answers eight questions about what NASA is doing to help improve air transportation for all of us in the future."

Kaid Benfield, quoting Presidential archives: "[Eisenhower] went on to say that the matter of running Interstate routes through the congested parts of the cities was entirely against his original concept and wishes; that he never anticipated that the program would turn out this way . . . and that he was certainly not aware of any concept of using the program to build up an extensive intra-city route network as part of the program he sponsored."

The character of the landscape out east, beyond the M25, is extraordinary. Just half an hour's train ride from the city, you are in deeply unfamiliar territory. It is a stretched landscape, with a feeling of insufficient building to cover the endless, flat land of the flood plain.

"Venture deep inside the new skyway of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and it becomes clear that the bridge’s engineers have planned for the long term." A good read, and it's worth going to the interactive feature part too.

Matthew Engel: "This is the sixth in my irregular series on British Institutions. After I finished the fifth, I noticed that the themes were becoming familiar: [...] the glory days were over; it was a fight to maintain popularity and relevance; and money was getting ever tighter." "But London Underground is different. It is more expansive and confident now than at any time in memory. How on earth has this happened?" Nice photographs too.

"That prized garage space or curbside spot you’ve been yearning for may be costing you—and the city—in ways you never realized. A journey into the world of parking, where meter maids are under siege, everybody’s on the take, and the tickets keep on coming." A great article explaining some of the reasons why city planning there has led to Los Angeles being quite so car-centric.

Tom Vanderbilt on a new kind of intersection that's being used a lot for new roads in the US, where drivers apparently have a morbid fear of having to either stop, or wait for more than a single phase change. Still, it's interesting.

From the archives (via Tom Taylor), diamond geezer on taking down the pylons around the Olympic site in Stratford.

Flash Bristow's guide to the changes in British pylon design over the last eighty years or so. This was the best bit of another Jonathan Glancey Guardian piece: http://gu.com/p/2p972/

From a couple of years ago, Stephen Spender's poem The Pylons quoted in a piece by Jonathan Glancey.

The BBC, starting from a false premise (that pylons aren't pretty already) and going down a complete blind alley (some unbuilt, anthropomorphic, and awful designs) before revealing a couple of interesting nuggets (like the name of the chap who designed the UK's current pylons). Still, overall worth a read.

"The primary activity of WHC is the sponsorship of tours of New York and New Jersey's working waterfront – places that are normally hidden from the eyes of most area residents and visitors."

Subtitled "The future of urban transportation looks a lot like the past", this Tom Vanderbilt piece is well worth reading.

"At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit." A companion piece to Utopian London, of sorts.

"Mumbai's muddled streets are too packed to walk through, so India's commercial capital has come up with a solution. Uplift the masses—not in some fuzzy metaphysical way, but on "skywalks" made of steel." I can't remember if this is the article I read last year, but it's a good summary.

"In response to this overcrowding, the city is building more than 50 elevated walkways, dubbed “skywalks”" A good roundup of links and coverage, not just of Mumbai's skywalks, but similar things elsewhere (including Winnipeg and Cinncinnati).

"Once I arrived in the city, I became fascinated by its new system of Skywalks, 36 elevated walkways that are basically extended exits from the urban railroad stations. The city planners’ position was that commuters wanted to be able bypass the swarm of taxis and hawkers that surround the station exits, and have the Skywalks deposit them several kilometers away which would more equally distribute the amount of exiting pedestrians."

"Bus shelters were once boringly functional affairs." Then advertising got involved.

Subtitled "Why London Needs to Stop Nobblin' the GOBLIN", this (long) post looks at the container ports in the south east of England, their rail links, and in particular, what the Mayor of London should be doing with the orbital railways in the city to support the new container terminal on the Thames.

"Why are trains in south London more affected by snow than those elsewhere?" Short answer: the third rail ices over, which makes it stop working. Overhead cables (used north of the river) aren't affected, while the DLR's third rail connects underneath (not above) the rail, so that's OK too. It's good to see the article note that the old Southern Railway actually converted away from overhead to third rail in the 1920s.

"Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates." If it hadn't have been for this book, I'd never have realised there were still steam networks (naturally, NYC's is the largest, but apparently Paris has one also).

"At the Energy Center’s two downtown plants, we produce steam and pipe it to approximately 170 customer buildings for space heating, domestic hot water, air conditioning and industrial process use." Either the network, or its proximity to water pipes, probably explains the occasional sight of steam venting downtown. Shame the full-size map is only a PDF.

owenhatherley: anyway - I've finished this http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2010/11/flyovers.html

"These are the absolute busiest hubs, and it takes a rich and populous city or country to support one. Not by accident, fully half of these airports are in the United States."

Mmm, motorways, I love you. (Which is odd, really, as I don't drive, and don't really like cars.)

Hugh Pearman on Drax, the UK's biggest power station - coal fired, of course. "Drax and its kin had better go on working, and let's hope we don't forget how to push the buttons and pull the levers. Otherwise all our screens will fade to black"

"AppDrop is simply a remote installation of the App Engine SDK, with the user authentication and identification modified to use a local silo instead of Google Accounts" On github. So much for lockin?

Good lord, what will the crazy colonists try next?

The stranding of the Napoli has focussed people's minds on container shipping. Overdue, really; most people don't understand the vast infrastructure that supports them.