[URBAN NOTE] Five city links: St. Louis, Port Moody, Liverpool, Rio de Janeiro,

[rfmcdonald]

• CityLab notes what I think is a perfectly sensible plan in St. Louis, Missouri, to fuse city and county into one unit to allow for better regional governance.


• A project in Port Moody aiming to let people get condos through a rent-to-own scheme is massively oversubscribed. Global News reports.


• This essay in the Guardian notes the extent to which austerity in the United Kingdom has hit northern cities like Liverpool particularly badly.


• CityLab notes the influence of architect Oscar Niemeyer on the urban landscapes of Brazil, particularly but not only in Rio de Janeiro.


• Guardian Cities looks at the impressive scope of the plan to turn the Sichuan city of Chengdu into a garden city. What of the human cost of this transformation?