Sarkozy's plan, in the words of the UK Guardian is

not to reshape Paris, but rather to extend its inherent beauty to its outskirts, les banlieues – a web of small villages, some terribly grand and chic (Neuilly, Versailles, Saint Mandé, Vincennes, Saint Germain-en-Laye), others modest and provincial-looking (Montreuil, Pantin, Malakoff, Montrouge, Saint Gervais) and others still, socially ravaged and architecturally dehumanised (La Courneuve, Clichy-sous-bois). And also to link them.

The various architects invited to present solutions to the brief this week approached the issue in different ways, but we find ourselves drawn to Antoine Grumbach's idea to create the "Grand Paris" along the banks of the Seine... but maybe that's just because we love his nightvision-image of how everything would look.

Architects reveal plans to redesign Paris [Guardian Unlimited]

[SFIst]

Today the New York Times has an interesting report on a form of urban design whose popularity is growing in India: the walled mini-city, with its own schools and power generators, surrounded by slums full of people who work as servants. While these mini-cities are like the "gated communities" you see in the west, what sets them apart is the degree of autonomy they have from their environs — they are literally running off a different electrical grid, and are designed so that nobody ever has to leave. [NYT]

As you can see above, the city of Los Angeles would look a lot less ugly and disheartening if you could just wipe this traffic jam (photographed by The Infamous Gdub) out of existence and bring the city's formerly glorious cable car system back to life. If you ever want to see the LA cable car system of yore, it makes many exciting appearances in Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last!.

Right now, the city of Baltimore is considering upgrading its mass transit to include aerial gondolas, a system of elevated trams on cables with a tiny carbon footprint. They would initially service mostly the convention center and waterfront areas, but could branch out all over the city. Apparently gondola-makers have recently seen a spike in requests for mass transit systems, and even New York City is considering an aerial gondola to take commuters from Manhattan to Governor's Island and on to Brooklyn. Here is what the proposed gondolas might look like on a typical Baltimore city street (original photo from Zaloudek.net).

Seattle has a long and tragic history with monorails, once believed to be the public transit of the future. Just recently, the city voted to expand its tiny, largely-decorative monorail system, built for the World's Fair back in the 1960s. But urban planners have been trying to make Seattle a monorail city since 1910, when a Seattle monorail was first proposed (and shelved). We have yet to see whether the city will act on this latest vote for the monorail, but this is what you might see in downtown Seattle (original photo by GiSuser) if the system started ferrying commuters.

Although Melbourne has one of the most extensive electronic tram systems in the world, it might have been much bigger if early-twentieth century plans to expand it hadn't been derailed. If you look at images of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, you'll see a peaceful city full of trams and horses, but no traffic jams. Here's what Melbourne might look like today if the automobile had never taken over, and the city had become a haven for trams.

If you've ever visited San Francisco, you know that the downtown area is dominated by a wide street called Market (original photo by Hyku). What you probably don't know is that Market is actually a gushing river that early city planners decided to bury underground just to make everything nicer for carriages — and, later, cars. If we'd built San Francisco to cooperate with the region's actual geography, downtown San Francisco might have a system of canals like the ones in Venice (original photo by Minnaert). People could boat to work instead of burning gas in their cars.

Photoshoppage on all images by Stephanie Fox.

Here's a close-up of the massive drill head. This is one of those moments when it is perfectly appropriate to exclaim: "DUDE!" You may also slap your head, or the head of the person next to you. Photos by Sebastian Willnow/AFP/Getty Images.

One of the things that's most interesting about the Bike 2015 Plan is that it calls for the city to intervene in bike safety and maintenance. It also lays out plans for several studies showing what optimal layouts for bike-friendly city streets would be, as well as what kinds of signs work best to protect bikers from zooming cars (known among bikers as "death machines"). Possibly most interesting are the ample links to bike-friendly strategies in other cities, which gives you a sense of how common it is these days for cities to plan with bicycles in mind. Now all Chicago needs is more funding to implement its plan, which is posted online in easily-browsed chunks. Check it out.

Bike 2015 Plan [via FutureScanner]