Recent efforts to fix the housing market — including Thursday’s $26 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks — have focused purely on the financial aspects of the slump. A permanent solution, however, must go further than money to address issues that have been at the core of the crisis but have been wholly ignored: design and urban planning.

As many of our cities and older inner-ring suburbs are being renovated and revitalized, the great challenge of our time -- far bigger than urban renewal was in decades past -- is to remake our many shoddily-built, far-off exurbs into denser, more- connected, more livable communities. Some of them -- the ones that were built as much to keep the building boom going as because people needed to live in them -- might be fated to shrink back into small towns or disappear altogether.

For his new project, Romer set up a nonprofit organization dedicated to convincing governments across the developing world that they should cede a portion of their territory to an external authority in order to create a “charter city” in which new rules would make it attractive for skilled immigrants, unskilled migrants and businesses to come and settle.

This radical idea is slowly catching on. Honduras is poised to be the first country in the world to host a charter city after its Congress approved a constitutional amendment enabling such a plan in January.

In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world’s most respected corporations.

Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.

In 1811, John Randel created a proposed street grid of Manhattan. Compare his map, along with other historic information, to modern-day Manhattan.

A group called Forum for the Future has partnered with companies like Vodafone and GM to consider what the future might imply for transportation and urban living, and they've created four conceptual videos exploring different ideas of how things might turn out.

But whatever the genuine threats to urban prosperity, human contact is more important than ever in the age of information technology, and people will continue to seek places where they can share ideas, make transactions, and pursue their dreams. There’s nowhere better to do these things than big cities.

Your mission: Solve real-world business, environmental and logistical problems. Learn how technology can revolutionize these industries. Explore ways to accelerate process change, integrate with trading partners, and control costs with a flexible IT infrastructure.

An interactive film by Chris Milk featuring "We Used To Wait" by Arcade Fire

Hamburg's new quarter is one of the largest urban development projects underway in the world today. But will it be successful? City planners are hoping that their application of an academic field known as environmental psychology will do the trick.

Cairo has become so crowded, congested and polluted that the Egyptian government has undertaken a construction project that might have given the Pharaohs pause: building two megacities outside Cairo from scratch. By 2020, planners expect the new satellite cities to house at least a quarter of Cairo’s 20 million residents and many of the government agencies that now have headquarters in the city.

Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs isn’t as much about suburbanism versus urbanism, or cars versus bicycles, as it is a question of “What now?” The album’s vision of suburbia may not exactly be an ideal place to live – not in the 1980’s and certainly not upon returning to it today.  But the narrator of the album does return, nostalgic for his wasted hours of youth and fearful of what may remain for his children.  If suburbia is no longer necessarily the dream, what is to be made of those communities we built in the 70s?

Being a relatively new city that has grown drastically over recent decades and is entrenched in modern planning practices, we can clearly see and experience “beliefs made physical” and its effects. These can be felt at all levels of the built environment - from the location and style of individual buildings (such as City Hall) to large-scale urban patterns.

This graphic speaks to the latter, compiling several census-based maps, graphs, and tables to explicitly show the direct ties between specific  policies, neighbourhood densities and population distribution.