CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Last year shopping mall giant Westfield floated a proposal for a 49-story tower in Century City, part of a master plan to reinvent one of the great prototypical edge cities.

Not long ago, when California's economy was booming and concerns about rising seas were mounting, California tapped into its environmentalist traditions to pass popular laws that promised to lead the nation in greenhouse gas mitigation. While there are no sure signs that the global climate has cooled, the same cannot be said for the state's support of anti-climate change legislation. 

Say George Clooney went to Nobu last night and ran into Diddy in the valet line, where they discussed their mutual affinity for Kiton suiting. How do we know? Photographs, of course. Why do we care? Not sure, but USC Planning Professor Elizabeth Currid has taken a stab at it. 

This month more Census forms will arrive in California mailboxes than in those of any other state. And, while anxieties about response rates and undercounts persist nationwide, it is likely that California will fill out and submit more of them than will any other state. In its rawest state, the resulting data will give planners their most fundamental piece of data - the sheer number of people the state must accommodate. >>read more

The hottest web meme of the past two days -- in urbanist circles at least (I shudder to think of what the hottest overall meme is) -- is the chart of the most photographed cities and landmarks in the world.  Last year a team of Cornell researchers assumed the guise of part Web trawlers and part econometricians and, with the help of photo-analysis software, identified every photo on the Flickr photo-sharing site that could recognizably be associated with a city.  It ranked the top twenty-five cities and then the top seven most commonly photographed subjects in each. 

In planning, as with anything else, the progress does not arrive merely with the flow of time. The enthusiasm and ideas that swept over these pages in the first decade of this century -- smart growth, downtown revitalization, AB 32, SB 375, and all the rest -- are now met with delay, deferral, and, in some cases, bankruptcy.

California has a yet another seismic threat to prepare for, thanks to a set of new maps that depict a ferocious line of water that may, if earth moves in just the wrong way, someday surge inland along the state's coastline. Experts are saying that these new maps should be used to plan for emergency evacuations, not changes in land use planning. In at least one case, however, the Coastal Commission is already considering policies that would take tsunamis into account when approving developments.