Avoiding close-up, full-frontal or backview portraiture, Mr Gursky catches people as constituent dots or ciphers in an encompassing landscape or in the urban mass.

ECONOMIST: New German photography

What was once an unusual sight not too long ago in American cities is now part of the urban landscape.

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Finally, American builders should learn from the design overviews used in much European urban planning, but extend their minds to reflect the sophistication of landscape thinking.

BBC: Martha Schwartz

The urban landscape depicted by Paul Theroux in his classic 1986 novel O-Zone, where the rich live in artificial "green" enclaves protected by private corporate armies from the environmentally devastated areas surrounding them that are populated by the rest, will soon move from fiction to fact.

BBC: NEWS | In Depth | Viewpoints: The urban world in 2050

Netatmo allows users to contribute to its Urban Weather Program, creating a wider network for weather data monitoring and pooling to help meteorologists, environmental activists, scientists and people living in urban environments gain a better understanding of the city climate landscape.

FORBES: Monitor Weather, Tropical Storms, Indoor Air Quality On Your iPad iPhone With Netatmo

The chain has inserted itself into the American urban landscape more quickly and craftily than any retail company in history, and has forever changed Western-branding strategies.

FORBES: A Big Winner in a Down Day

But over the past decade the urban landscape has been punctuated here and there with arresting -- and, in some cases, almost bizarre -- buildings.

CNN: AFTER THE BANG