[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: Socialist Modernism, capping highways, desert cities, Amazon, Google

[rfmcdonald]

• Guardian Cities introduces readers to the Socialist Moderism Instagram account, part of a project by Romania's Bureau for Art and Urban Research to preserve records of Eastern Bloc architecture.


• Brian Martucci at Oxy writes about how many American communities are capping their highways, burying them underground, and in so doing restoring neighbourhoods split by mid-20th century construction.


• This beautiful long-form essay at Lithub by Saritha Ramakrishna, looking at her childhood in Phoenix, imagines what futures will be available to the United States' desert cities in the foreseeable future.


• Matt Taylor at VICE notes that non-rich people face being driven out of major cities and that initiatives like wooing Amazon will only make things worse.


• Via the Map Room Blog, I found Jack Nicas' New York Times article noting how Google Maps is not only renaming old neighbourhoods and creating new ones, but that these labels now stick.