ountrThe green belt has always been an unhappy mash-up – a patchwork of leftover land, neither urban nor rural. But the idea of limiting the city is essential, both for energising the space within and freeing the natural world beyond. Words by Phineas Harper

As the Covid-19 pandemic turns seething metropoles into virtual ghost-towns, what might the post-lockdown city look like?

At next month’s conference, architects and urbanists will discuss how the profession should help shape the cities of the future

Forty years ago, poverty, crime and de-industrialisation nearly killed off the West’s major cities. Today, an abundance of cash threatens to do a similar thing

Xintiandi, home to a two-week design festival at this year’s Design Shanghai, laid the ground for a new wave of developments that mix retail, cafes and public space

The architect talks to Peter Smisek about how transport will shape the cities of the future, and why total connectivity might not be as desirable as it sounds

The architecture and urbanism festival calls for an end to the relentless churn of construction and challenges our thinking about city-making, but does it offer solutions for the future of its host city, asks Debika Ray?

Ahead of the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture next week, the event’s co-curator, Alfredo Brillembourg of architecture practice Urban Think Tank, explains the continuing significance of China

Dytopian visions of our urban future ignore the progress being made by well-designed and well-managed cities in tackling social and environmental problems, argues the director of LSE Cities Ricky Burdett

We spoke to the Design Museum curator ahead of an exhibition, opening today, that looks at the lifestyles, motives and attitudes of cyclists in Britain

An unlikely government agency, involving a Belgian design studio and a Rotterdam research institute, is hoping to restore order to Tirana after decades of architectural anarchy

Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich
5 September 2015

From Bogota to Bristol, policymakers and community groups are devising creative ways to break the stranglehold that cars have over city roads, says Peter Murray

RIBA, London
9 July – 27 September 2015

An unflinching exhibition uncovers how the city’s architects collaborated in a frenzy of Nazi urban planning, writes Laura Snoad

Polish duo Maciej Chmara and Ania Rosinke moved to Austria as students, stayed “by coincidence” and have made their home in Vienna. But their work, with its sense of community and DIY aesthetic, explores the restlessness, impermanence and inhospitability of life in modern cities

In Mexico City, Gabriella Gomez-Mont’s team is reimagining the megalopolis, with the help of video-game developers, robot designers and the city’s many informal communities. Icon met her at the Future Everything conference in Manchester

Sukhdev Sandhu welcomes an exploration of how sound shapes – and is shaped by – the urban landscape, from the Heathrow flightpath to Eddie Van Halen's backyard

An exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York presents a whimsical view of the forces driving change in a diverse range of global cities

The designer's films offer a glimpse into a nightmarish sci-fi future in which every surface, appliance and inch of peripheral vision fizzes with data – an onslaught that might be just a couple of years away. Designers, he says, must shape this world – or be shaped by it