“It is easy to become sentimental about the Fulton Fish Market as you tour it in its final weeks, in its 184th year. Arrive at daybreak, when the sky is turning pink beyond the Brooklyn Bridge, and you have found a forgotten city. Salesmen with gaff hooks engraved with their nicknames hoist silver fish over their shoulders, shouting orders. Journeymen cart boxes through clouds of their own frozen breath. Hire-by-night laborers huddle around bonfires, looking for warmth and work.

On June 10, said George Maroulis, Fulton’s market manager, this will all be a memory like pushcarts on Hester Street. By then the hawkers and squawkers will leave their home by the harbor for the Hunts Point Market in the Bronx and a squeaky-clean box of a building, as long as the Empire State Building is tall. There, arrows on the floor will direct a fleet of new battery-operated forklifts past neat vendor stalls flanking a central corridor, with sinks, floor drains and other instruments of government-regulated food safety. A bland Costco to Fulton’s choreographed chaos.”

Once called “one of the most lifeless and uninteresting” downtowns in America, St. Louis is using more than $2.5 billion for 125 projects to reinvigorate the area.

An artist plans to sow seeds of revitalization at a blighted 32-acre plot between Chinatown and Lincoln Heights in Los Angeles.

Risk-taking pays off for Mexico City’s young architects as they strive to beautify blighted urban areas with bold designs.

“With its choking traffic and pollution, little public investment, and no coordinated planning, Mexico City seems an unlikely model for urban development. Yet this sprawling hub of 18.5 million people is home to some of the world’s most innovative architecture.

It’s precisely the challenges of building within such a congested city that have spawned a new model for architecture firms, as documented in an exhibition in New York, “Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices,” at the Center for Architecture until May 7.”

“Officials say that the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - dense vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and mass transit that makes a car unnecessary - are driving out children by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families.”

Along the Harlem River near Yankee Stadium, the wholesale merchants of the Bronx Terminal Market still throw open their vast warehouse-like shops every morning before dawn, welcoming a stream of customers who come from as far as Detroit and Toronto to shop there…

Article reports that “revitalized downtowns in major cities are still too expensive for families with children.

“The traffic-choked heart of Paris is to become a car-free oasis under a radical scheme drawn up by Bertrand Delanoe, the city’s flamboyant Socialist Mayor.

By 2012 - when Paris hopes to stage the Olympic Games - only residents, buses, delivery vans and emergency vehicles will be allowed inside a three square-mile zone of the Right Bank, from the Bastille to the Concorde square.”

What do you think about this proposal for a car-free Paris - will it work, is it a good idea? What other cities should consider this type of plan to alleviate traffic congestion?

The Sierra Club’s National Sustainable Consumption Committee has produced a 15 minute educational and entertaining cartoon about sustainable food.

You can view the short cartoon at http://www.truecostoffood.org/ (click on ’see the movie’) - watch it and let everyone know what you think (about the cartoon or Sustainable Food in general!)

“Usually, members of the public don’t have much say in what the Tennessee Department of Transportation does to the road they live on. But as a member of the 17-member resource team working with TDOT on changes to state Route 126, Tom Carroll has that chance.

“It’s certainly different from the way things have been done in the past,” he said. “Historically, TDOT has come in, looked at the highway and told the public ‘this is what we’re going to do.’ But now they are listening to the public and asking the public what they want to reserve in terms of community environment and historical sites along the route.”

…Garnering public input on projects is a pilot program at TDOT called Context Sensitive Solutions. Although there are several CSS projects taking place throughout the state, Route 126 is the only one to use public input from the beginning.”