Early-1932, after seeing a photograph in the New York Times of the great Helen Keller at the top of the newly-opened Empire State Building, Dr. John Finley wrote to her and asked what she really "saw" from that height. Keller — famously both deaf and blind from a very early age — responded with the incredible letter seen below, within which lies one of the greatest, most evocative descriptions of the skyscraper and its surroundings ever to have been written.

A truly beautiful letter.

America doesn’t do big projects anymore — we’re too broke, no one can agree on our priorities, that era of bold thinking is over.

That canard has been repeated so many times that it’s now accepted as gospel. Except it’s not true. In cities in every region of the country, pie-in-the-sky ideas are moving from brainstorm to blueprint to groundbreaking — and 2012 will prove it.

The Visitors’ Centre derives from a modernist tradition of pavilion-building that channels the Glass Boxes of Mies and Johnson. It employs many syntactical elements- a raised plinth, deep roofs on both sides to provide shade; the overhead plane held up by slim shining supports used sparingly, a sheltered glass enclosure of indeterminate function. The architecture gains significance by not kowtowing to the visual fakery that is the bane of most buildings that come up in the vicinity of important older structures.

The benefits of living close to other people are evident even to hunter-gatherers. Though their societies have changed over the millennia, studying characteristics of present-day hunter-gatherers can let us peer into the past. That’s what was done by three anthropologists—Marcus Hamilton, Bruce Milne, and Robert Walker—and one ecologist—Jim Brown. In the process, they seem to have discovered a fundamental law that drives human agglomeration. Though their survey of 339 present-day hunter-gatherer societies doesn’t explicitly mention cities, it does show that as populations grow, people tend to live closer together—much closer together. For every doubling of population, the home ranges of hunter-gatherer groups increased by only 70 percent.

India’s Census 2011 shows that one in every three Indians now lives in an urban habitat and that the move towards towns and cities has happened mostly in south India, contiguously from Maharashtra to Tamil Nadu.

According to the latest census, 31.2% of the total population lives in urban centres compared with 27.8% in 2001 and 25.5% in 1991. Of the 1.21 billion population, 833 million live in rural India while the remaining 377 million reside in urban India.

The economic boom in Turkey that is driving urban renewal is also forcing many minorities and the poor from their homes. Now, some are fighting back with lawsuits.

I spoke to Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, and asked him about these surveys. “I’ve been to Copenhagen,” (Monocle’s Number 2) he tells me “and it’s cute. But frankly, on the second day, I was wondering what to do.” So, if the results aren’t to his liking, what does he suggest? “We need to ask, what makes a city great? If your idea of a great city is restful, orderly, clean, then that’s fine. You can go live in a gated community. These kinds of cities are what is called ‘productive resorts’. Descartes, writing about 17th-century Amsterdam, said that a great city should be ‘an inventory of the possible’. I like that description.”

As per estimates of the Committee set up by Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation under the Chairmanship of Dr. Pranob Sen, Principal Adviser, Planning Commission (former Secretary, Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation, and Chief Statistician, Government of India) the slum population in the country is expected to touch 93.06 million by 2011.

In their new book, Rooftop Gardens, authors Denise LeFrak Calicchio and Roberta Model Amon showcase more than two dozen of the best private outdoor spaces in New York City. Now, exclusively for Curbed NY, the authors have done the impossible: They've narrowed the list down to the five most unique secret spaces.

Besides making cities more affordable and architecturally interesting, tall buildings are greener than sprawl, and they foster social capital and creativity. Yet some urban planners and preservationists seem to have a misplaced fear of heights that yields damaging restrictions on how tall a building can be. From New York to Paris to Mumbai, there’s a powerful case for building up, not out.

Urbanscale is a practice committed to applying the toolkit and mindset of interaction design to the specific problems of cities. Through the design of products, services, interfaces and spatial interventions, our work aims to make cities easier to understand, more pleasant to use and more responsive to the desires of their inhabitants and other users.

Now this is dense.  Kowloon Walled City, a Chinese settlement in Hong Kong was at one time thought to be the most dense place on the planet.  A Japanese team was able to document the city in section before it was disassembled in 1993.

Dai Haifei, 24, a newly graduated architect, decided to make his own egg-style home after being unable to afford Beijing’s sky-high rental prices. The two-meter high house with two wheels underneath is made from sack bags on the outside wall, bamboo splints on the inside and wood chippings and grass seeds in between.

Where there should have been a touch of gentle amber showing through the membrane of their honey stomachs was instead a garish bright red. The honeycombs, too, were an alarming shade of Robitussin.

At the center of the debate is a proposed amendment to the city code which would allow residents to keep no more than four chickens in an enclosed backyard coop. Not allowed under the proposal: roosters, slaughtering of animals, or apartment-dwelling chickens.

...in Landgrab City, Grima, Johnson, and Esparza have created an accurate scale model of how much farmland it actually takes to feed the city of Shenzhen, rather than a 3D billboard for the benefits of urban agriculture along the lines of San Francisco City Hall’s Victory Garden. (In fact, seeing the sheer quantity of agricultural land required to fulfil the city’s dietary needs might somewhat dampen the spirits of those urban farmers who cherish idealistic visions of self-sufficiency.)