Already Tzu-Chi "Big Love" villages are going up - complete with streets paved in terracotta brick and lined with trees and flowers.

CNN: The Human Touch

Backing onto railway tracks, the brick-lined bar's communal tables are usually lined with plaid-shirted hipsters and diehard ale fans working their way through a menu of around 25 mostly regional microbrews.

BBC: Drinking in Vancouver��s historic Gastown district

In place of the kosher butchers, fish-fryers, boot-makers, furriers and tailors who lined Brick Lane itself a century ago, and the weavers and cheese-makers of Huguenot days, there are now sari centres, halal restaurants and vendors of exotic produce.

ECONOMIST: The many mansions in one east London house of God

We got into his black Audi sedan and climbed a road up into the hills, where we turned onto a rutted muddy track lined with cornfields and brick farmhouses.

NEWYORKER: Boss Rail

Its booths are boxed in by brick walls, and the terrace is lined with Parisian style wicker chairs set in a garden in a lovely corner of the fashionable Condesa neighborhood.

FORBES: Mexico City: Inside Latin America's Hottest City

Homes with floor-to-ceiling windows and skylights are joining the brick row houses and Victorians that have long lined the city's streets.

WSJ: Washington, D.C.: The New Boomtown

This classic brick colonial is in a desirable neighborhood on a tree-lined street in Memphis.

FORBES: What's On The Market For $600,000?

The old town of mud-brick houses linked by labyrinthine alleys is disappearing, eaten up by broad avenues lined by high-rise buildings.

ECONOMIST: Xinjiang

It took two years, 284 pounds of flour and all the ingenuity of her husband, Paul, who lined her stove with quarry tiles and, to produce the necessary burst of steam, dropped a brick into a pan of hot water at the bottom of the oven.

ECONOMIST: Julia Child, cookery teacher, died on August 13th, aged 91