So you'd think they have a little compassion for an outsider who tried to give the statue his own fashion makeover. But nope, the shining-gold effigy that artist Petro Wodkins recently swapped for the Manneken was taken into police custody, and Wodkins himself is being pursued across Europe by legions of pike-bearing grenadiers thirsting for his head on a platter (well, not really).

Wodkins is a Russian performer who's on a mission from God to revolutionize the global art-scene. Apparently God told him that he should craft a little model of himself urinating, and then put it on a fake pedestal to obscure the real peeing boy. Why? As Wodkins explains:

Let's face it. Belgium is a boring little country. And Brussels is a boring city. Filled with boring tourists.

In the center of Brussels there is a horrible little statue. A small pissing boy. Where the tourists gather.

What would happen if we changed the horrible little statue for something beautiful?

Like a statue of Petro. Would the tourists even notice?

What I first came across this bit of street art, I thought that Wodkins himself had painted his body gold and then climbed in front of the statute, which would have been bold. Sadly this was not the case, although he did give the artwork an air of verisimilitude with a tube dribbling water from the effigy's nether regions.

Have a look at "PISSING PETRO," as the artist calls his intervention. You'll find better pictures of it at his website, which may or may not be NSFW depending on your boss' tolerance for metallic private parts:

Top photo courtesy of Niels Mickers on Flickr

"The Unlikely Ascent of Palestine’s Green Architects," Joseph Dana, Next City

Amid a stalled peace progress and an increasingly hopeless political atmosphere, a growing number of young Palestinians are betting that they can design their way into a better future. In Ramallah, the de-facto Palestinian capital, young designers are making furniture out of trash in hopes of reducing landfill waste while increasing their country’s self-reliance. In East Jerusalem, Jews and Palestinians are working together to provide basic services to a Jerusalem neighborhood that ended up on the wrong side of the Israeli separation barriers. In villages across the region, people are working to preserve and reintroduce life to traditional Arab villages, even as the country begins its first stab at a planned California-style development. Middle-East based journalist Joseph Dana talks to these proactive architects and designers to find out how Palestine’s unlikely sustainability movement came into being — and where it is likely to go.

Children participate in a fancy dress competition in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. (Krishnendu Halder/Reuters)

"Dividing Lines: The Battle Over Hyderabad's Metro," Mark Bergen, The Caravan

NINE YEARS SINCE IT WAS FIRST ANNOUNCED, the Hyderabad metro remains marred by controversy over its design, execution, funding and cost. It is also far from complete. To hear Kapoor speak on their campus, Akshay and his friend had crossed the crowded old city, where the metro’s three proposed lines will some day cross. From there, their bus route had taken them on one of the lonely roads of suburban Hyderabad, through a rocky, sparsely populated landscape shaped by nature and Chandrababu Naidu. More than a decade ago, the then-chief minister of Andhra Pradesh had conceived of a metro for the fast-growing state capital that would carry 2.5 million commuters per day by 2025 and be the most modern transit system in the world. His vision has had a troubled journey since.

"Tough Laws Do Little to Slow Calif. Gun Rush," Scott Detrow, KQED

California has some of the toughest gun laws in the United States. They don’t appear to be stopping people from purchasing firearms.

Despite 10-day waiting periods, expansive background checks, a limit on one handgun purchase every 30 days and a broad “assault weapons” ban, California experienced a 180 percent increase in attempted gun purchases over the last decade.

Illegal immigrants walk out of a restaurant. (Eric Thayer/Reuters)

"Rust-Belt Reaches for Immigrant Tide," Mark Peters and Jack Nicas, Wall Street Journal

Worries over immigrants potentially taking jobs from native-born Americans run high in parts of the nation, but some U.S. cities are taking a different view: Wooing immigrants can reverse long-term declines in population.

Cities, mostly in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic states, are betting that attracting foreign-born residents can spur business creation and revive neighborhoods. Steps vary from proclamations welcoming immigrants, to adding staff focused on attracting newcomers and translating government websites, to efforts to connect international students with local companies.

"Why Is China Stealing Cities, Towns, and Buildings?" Ryan O'Hanlon, Pacific Standard

Hallstatt, Austria, is in China. So is the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, Christ the Redeemer, and a soon-to-be-completed Manhattan. There are others, too, and it’s all part of this weird (at least to us Westerners, or this one Westerner who is writing this) proliferation of what are being called “copy towns.” They’re villages and buildings and cities in China that are being constructed as replicas of non-Chinese places from around the world—and people are living in them. Hallstatt, China, has an artificial lake, and they imported doves to make it more Hallstatt-like.

But a 7-million-pound building, dating from 1898, in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains? That's what is floating 40 feet in the air in Provo, Utah, at the behest of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints.

When the Provo Tabernacle caught fire in 2010, much of the inside was ruined, but large parts of the facade remained standing. To reconstruct the building as a Mormon temple, engineers had to suspend the facade on stilts while digging out the ground around it to create room for a basement and a solid structural foundation.

Top image via MormonNewsroom.

HT: Colossal.

In many ways, where you live is a significant determinant of your health, influencing whether you have opportunities for exercise, or sources of healthy food, or access to health care. It makes sense to wonder: Would all of that fried food (and the allure of a fast and affordable dinner at the end of a hectic day) eventually come to impact your health, too?

We'll pause here to emphasize that the following research proves no causal connection between burger proximity and body weight. But a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health does find some strong correlations: African-American adults in Houston who live closer to fast food restaurants were found to have higher Body Mass Indexes. And the link was particularly strong for lower-income people.

Researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center studied about 1,400 adults from a local Methodist church, most of them female and well-educated, and referenced their home addresses against the proximity and density of nearby fast food restaurants. The study controlled for other factors that might impact BMI, like gender, age, education, employment status, and time spent watching TV. The researchers then measured the density of restaurants within half a mile, one mile, two miles and five miles of a person's home. Within a two-mile radius, the data suggested that the higher the fast-food density, the higher the BMI (the five-mile radius, not surprisingly, showed no relationship).

Conversely, each additional mile a subject lived from the nearest fast food restaurant was associated with a drop in BMI of 2.4 percent. As the researchers write:

This study does not mean that whites or Hispanics or other groups may not also experience a link between fast food proximity and Body Mass Index. Rather, the study focused specifically on a sample of the black community given nationwide racial disparities in obesity rates and related health complications. Previous research also suggests that fast food restaurants cluster in higher densities in black communities than predominantly white ones, and that minorities may be more likely to consume fast food when it's available to them.

These latest findings among low-income people are particularly noteworthy: For them, fast food may be the best option available. As the researchers hypothesize:

Top image: Andrei Zarubaika/Shutterstock

Thanks to a group called Robin Hood of Keene, some 4,000 Keene drivers have avoided parking tickets entirely for at least four years. That's because the Merry Men are always a step ahead of the meter maid with a few quarters, leaving only a small note: "Your meter expired; however, we saved you from the king's tariffs, Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Please consider paying it forward."

Parking enforcers of Keene have not found the Merry Men so merry. In a lawsuit filed by the City of Keene against six members of the group, the city alleges that the parking meter vigilantes "regularly, repeatedly and intentionally taunted, interfered with, harassed and intimidated" the city's employees, even touching them. One parking enforcement officer alleged in an affidavit he was called "bitch," "coward," and a "murderer of brown babies," in reference to his military service. Another claims to have suffered heart palpitations as a result of similar harassment. 

The city is seeking an injunction to keep the Robin Hood crew at least 50 feet away from its on-duty parking officers; James Cleaveland, a Robin Hooder blogging at libertarian blog Free Keene, says the suit is "ridiculous."  

"Most importantly, according to the job description for a city of Keene parking enforcer," Cleaveland writes, "'This position requires a person' to 'relate with the general public' and 'Endure verbal and mental abuse when confronted with the hostile views and opinions of the public and other individuals often encountered in an antagonistic environment.'

See? They had it coming!

Top image: Flickr/Mechanikat.

As our own John Metcalfe reported, this "bizarre" series of storms brought "madly shifting winds" and at least 10 tornadoes to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Below, some scenes of the aftermath.

A trailer blown into a home on Lindsay Lane in Cleburne rests on a car after a tornado touch down in Cleburne, Texas. (Richard Rodriguez/Reuters)

A stop sign lies among debris May 16 after tornados swept through the town of Granbury, Texas. (Richard Rodriguez/Reuters)

Rescue workers comb through debris May 16 after tornados swept through the town of Granbury, Texas. (Richard Rodriguez/Reuters)

An aerial view shows the damage after tornados swept through Hood County, Texas. (Brandon Wade/Reuters)

But there are urgent questions about how this for-profit enterprise will displace the ordinary New Yorkers who currently use the park in huge numbers. How much should cities should be willing to give up when it comes to encouraging private investment? Is it worth trading away the core of a neighborhood’s vital park?

The plan for the stadium, which I first wrote about late last year, is now apparently riding on money from Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Mahyan, the billionaire deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and scion of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. Mansour’s investment group owns the Manchester City team in England, and is said to be willing to pony up $100 million for rights to an expansion team. The stadium for the franchise would be privately financed to the tune of $340 million, but it would be built on 13 acres of public parkland smack-dab in the middle of one of the city’s most heavily used parks. The stadium site is “at the heart of public space in a park that has already been chopped up for private use,” according to Holly Leicht, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. Her group came out in opposition to the plan earlier this week.

Bloomberg has pooh-poohed every concern that members of the public and the media have brought up. It has become almost a cartoonish manifestation of the mayor’s now legendary disregard and disdain for criticism, well chronicled by Capital New York, among other local publications.

The mayor’s much-touted PlaNYC "for a greener, greater New York" has as one of its goals that every New Yorker should live within a 10-minute walk of a park. But when it comes to Flushing Meadows, a 1,255-acre facility that suffers from lack of maintenance and yet is hugely popular with the low-income immigrant population of the surrounding neighborhoods, the mayor is dismissive. From an article in the New York Post:

"It’s not irreplaceable," the mayor said of the 13 acres in Flushing Meadows that soccer promoters are trying to acquire for a 25,000-seat stadium.

"In fact, there’s an old airport, Flushing Airport, which is going to be turned into a park. So the total parkland would be the same," added the mayor.

But that proposed fix has drawn strong criticism from Flushing Meadows advocates. The Flushing Airport site is in College Point, a mostly white neighborhood that has little public transit access and is effectively worlds away from the working-class immigrant neighborhoods that surround Flushing Meadows.

Leicht told me that her group had conducted an experiment to see just how far the College Point location is from the neighborhoods that now use Flushing Meadows as their backyard. From the heart of the Corona neighborhood, she said, it takes about 10 minutes to walk to the edge of Flushing Meadows, and about 25 minutes to get to the proposed stadium site. Walking to the College Point site more than three miles away, she said, takes at least an hour and 15 minutes, through a bleak industrial area and a maze of highway ramps. In other words, no one will do it. And even if they did, the site is on a wetland that floods frequently.

Javier Valdes, co-executive director of Make the Road New York, issued a statement on the College Point proposal through a group called the Fairness Coalition of Queens: “What the Mayor said is outrageous. His plan to force working class people of color to rent their park away to a billionaire for $1 a year in exchange for parkland in a wealthier, white neighborhood is insulting. It's out of touch and it's unjust. We are calling on all elected officials in New York City to denounce this."

Leicht wrote an op-ed detailing New Yorkers for Parks’ opposition to the plan:

Building a stadium on this site will alter not just the site itself, but the nature of the park altogether. The footprint of the arena would be up to 13 acres, but the directly affected acreage, as defined by MLS’s proposed circulation roads and pathways, would be at least double that. …

It’s important to recognize who would be most negatively affected by this proposed project. This section of the park is predominantly used by residents of the surrounding park-starved communities of Flushing, Corona, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights – low- and middle-income neighborhoods that fall well below the city’s standard of 2.5 acres of open space per 1000 residents.  Nearly 23 percent of the people living in these neighborhoods are 18 or younger. Childhood obesity in Corona, on the park’s western edge, is 51 percent, the highest in the city. 

Leicht says her group thinks that the city should reopen the search for a different location, as the potential loss to the public would be too great if construction went forward on the Flushing Meadows site. But the league has said the alternatives are all cost-prohibitive.

MLS gave a statement to Capital New York expressing its position:

"M.L.S. has committed to replacing the parkland acre for acre and making significant investments in the park beyond the fields," M.L.S. spokeswoman Risa Heller said in a statement. "The dialogue with the City, electeds and community leaders regarding those commitments will continue throughout the approvals process."

On thing everyone agrees on is that Flushing Meadows–Corona is in rough shape. That’s in large part because it is understaffed, with only 18 full-time workers paid by the city to maintain its vast expanse. Central Park is about two-thirds the size, but has nearly 300 people on staff, almost all of whom are paid for by the Central Park Conservancy.

You might think that the major sports powers that already run major stadium facilities within Flushing Meadows — the New York Mets and the United States Tennis Association, sponsor of the U.S. Open — would have to contribute to the upkeep of the park. You would be wrong. It’s not surprising that community advocates are skeptical that this time would be different, especially since the construction of the stadium would wipe out the very space that needs improvement.

Opposition to the MLS plan has been getting more vocal. Architecture critic Justin Davidson wrote an eloquent piece in New York magazine in which he declared, “…parkland is different. It is the opposite of real estate, an abiding corrective to a rapacious market.”

But will this be the proof that parkland isn’t different at all? That if you have enough money, you really can buy anything in New York? Even the scarce recreational space of the working class?

Mansour’s deep-pocketed involvement in the deal is pressing that issue. One elected official has questioned whether the city should be dealing with a leader of a nation with a spotty human rights record that’s been called out just in the last few months by the U.S. State Department.

That may be a worthy concern. But the way this deal is being handled, we might need to get our own house in order before worrying about someone else’s.

Top Image: Soccer fields that would be affected by the proposed stadium construction. (Courtesy of New Yorkers for Parks)

That's what the entire city of Toronto is wondering this morning, after three reporters -- Gawker's John Cook and the Toronto Star's Robyn Doolittle and Kevin Donovan -- claim to have watched a video of the portly, controversial mayor of North America's fourth-largest city lighting up and inhaling from what appears to be a crack cocaine pipe. 

The only response from Ford himself, so far, is that the situation is "ridiculous." We agree. Ford's lawyer, Dennis Harris, told Radio-Canada that the mayor denies the allegations. Other politicians are taking a wait-and-see approach. "He's a bad mayor because he makes bad decisions," councilman Adam Vaughan told the CBC.

Donovan and Doolittle have been investigating substance abuse allegations against Ford for several months, and say they watched the video three times in the back of a car. Here is their report from the Star, with details compiled from notes each of them took separately:

It appears to show Ford in a room, sitting in a chair, wearing a white shirt, top buttons open, inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. Ford is incoherent, trading jibes with an off-camera speaker who goads the clearly impaired mayor by raising topics including Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau and the Don Bosco high school football team Ford coaches.

“I’m f---ing right-wing,” Ford appears to mutter at one point. “Everyone expects me to be right-wing. I’m just supposed to be this great.…” and his voice trails off. At another point he is heard calling Trudeau a “fag.” Later in the 90-second video he is asked about the football team and he appears to say (though he is mumbling), “they are just f---ing minorities.”

The video, Donovan says, ends with Ford looking at the camera and saying, "That thing better not be recording."

The people who screened the video for the journalists have been pretty up front that they want to sell it for six figures. (Gawker's Cook says he heard that an unnamed Canadian news organization -- possibly the Star? -- had offered $40,000 and been rejected.) Cook called various American media outlets trying to raise the money for its purchase, but when word reached Toronto City Hall that said video was circulating, Cook went public with a screenshot, a story, and the headline: For Sale: A Video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford Smoking Crack.

So, is it real? All three reporters say that the figure in the video is, beyond doubt, Mayor Rob Ford.

As anyone who reads this site regularly knows, Ford has a history of odd behavior. In February, the Star reported that he was asked to leave a gala dinner after appearing intoxicated and acting inappropriately, a story that Ford called "an outright lie." He likes to read while driving, and earlier this week ducked out of a community meeting to slap refrigerator magnets on parked cars. He was nearly removed from office last fall for procedural misconduct stemming from trouble with campaign contributions. His policies, including the removal of a prominent Toronto bike lane, have made few friends among urban planners, and his dealings with the media have been explosive. 

Here's what Ford tweeted earlier this morning:

The long weekend is here! Catch a ferry to Toronto Island Park for a scenic picnic. Details here: toronto.ca/parks/island/f… #LongWknd #Topoli

— Mayor Rob Ford (@TOMayorFord) May 17, 2013

Whoops! And while we wait to see if anyone decides to shell out for the video, here's another good one of Mayor Ford hiking the ol' pigskin:

Top image: Toronto Mayor Rob Ford speaks to the media as he leaves his home in Toronto, May 17, 2013. (REUTERS/Mark Blinch)

LOUISVILLE, Ky.—The most important economic sector in Louisville is one you may never have heard of: logistics. What is logistics? It started out simply as shipping when United Parcel Service opened a hub at the Louisville International Airport in 1980, and then made Louisville the site of its worldwide air hub in 2002. But as other companies relocated to the area to take advantage of UPS's distribution network, the sector has branched out to include a wide range of industries that provide services or products—and want to deliver them fast.

"What UPS did was brilliant, and we've benefited from their scouting," says Bob Marino, CEO of the e-commerce company CafePress, which moved its headquarters from Silicon Valley to Louisville in 2012. In its search for a worldwide hub, UPS determined that two-thirds of U.S. cities were less than 24 hours from Louisville by ground, and three-fourths of domestic cities could be reached within a two-hour flight. It didn't hurt that Louisville had a good but not terribly busy airport, and few regulations regarding noise that would impact overnight flights. And the local workforce was relatively cheap, with plenty of college students willing to take on part-time or third-shift work. 

Now UPS employs more than 20,000 workers in Louisville and has invested $2 billion in two expansions of the airport and its facilities. The result is a massive 5.2 million-square-foot facility—and a magnet for other companies. 

"Getting UPS Worldport here has had a long-lasting and profound impact on our economy," says Ted Smith, Louisville's director of economic growth and innovation. "You can see that in the number of companies that continue to move here to be near that distribution center." He estimates that more than 140 other employers have relocated to Louisville in order to take advantage of UPS Worldport, bringing approximately 10,000 jobs to the area. 

Some of those companies are obvious—big online retailers like Amazon and Zappos (now owned by Amazon) have giant fulfillment centers in nearby Shepherdsville, and the location lets them promise next-day or two-day delivery to customers. Cheggs.com, an online textbook-rental service, keeps its inventory in a Shepherdsville warehouse as well, and can ship books to students within 24 hours.

Other companies are newer to the logistics world. Several fine-food distributors operate out of Louisville, giving area chefs access to some of the world's freshest sushi ingredients that touch down at the airport en route to the East Coast. Geek Squad, which provides computer repairs, built a 165,000-square-foot site called "Geek Squad City" in Louisville to make the process of receiving, fixing, and shipping devices more efficient. Toshiba went one step further, contracting with UPS to repair its laptops. Technicians perform the work onsite at Worldport and return the computers without the need for anything to leave UPS grounds.

Even biotech firms are coming to Louisville to take advantage of the location. The city's newest import is the Belgian company Eurofins, which does biological-tissue sequencing. The equipment required for that work is extremely expensive, so rather than establishing labs in several major markets, Eurofins decided to set up a U.S. base near UPS so that the company can obtain tissue samples quickly, sequence them, and get data packets out to hospitals across the country. 

The dream of city leaders is that more companies will do what CafePress has and locate their entire operation in Louisville. Inside the company's sprawling facility on the southwest side of the city, production workers print customized t-shirts, mugs, and other items as a catwalk above them leads to several corporate offices. The company is moving its customer service operation in-house, which will bring on 50 new employees, and another 400 full-time workers are supplemented during the holiday season by as many as 700 temporary workers. The move from CafePress's old headquarters in San Mateo, California, has allowed the company to integrate all of its departments, says CEO Marino. But it's also improved quality of life. "Louisville," he says, "is the place where I want to live until I die."

Top image: United Parcel Service aircrafts are being loaded with air containers full of packages bound for their final destination at the UPS Worldport All Points International Hub during the peak delivery day in Louisville, Kentucky. (John Sommers II/Reuters)

"At some point, I just began folding the prints, folding way the sky, folding away the sides, until I basically had an image that looked like a supermarket bar code," Wolf says. "I somehow had the feeling this was the right way of doing it, this was the gut decision."

This was the best way to capture life amid extreme density, in a compact city of 7 million people jammed full of 80-story apartments and infinitely replicated facades. Wolf's own 300 square-foot studio looks out on such patterns of stacked homes, with maybe 10,000 other units in view. Collectively, they form a kind of geometric art that appears in Wolf's tightly cropped photos as simultaneously stunning and claustrophobic. The images have recently been reprinted in the book Architecture of Density. Each photo produces the disorienting sense that these buildings could stretch into the sky forever.

"I realized it was a very effective way of communicating density exactly for those reasons: You had no idea how big these buildings actually could be because there were no real references," Wolf says. Most of the images are cropped near the tops of buildings, although they look like they could continue for another 30 floors. "It’s an illusion which I’m creating," Wolf says. "It gives you an idea of an unlimited scale."

The images invite a kind of ambivalent reaction: They make dense city living look almost inhumane – as if people were living amid computer chips – despite the implied mass of humanity behind all these windows. At the same time, these photos capture endearing glimpses of private lives seen through all that geometry.

"The primary statement is about life in cities, it’s about the living conditions in mega cities," Wolf says. "But on the other hand, if you look at these photographs at a distance, at 10 or 15 feet, they look very beautiful, they have a beautiful aesthetic. They could almost be like op art, with very geometric patterns. But when you go closer, you realize each one is an apartment, each one is inhabited by a human being – you see that from the curtains, and from the objects which people hang out to dry."

That very geometric beauty has made these images popular among collectors at the blown-up scale of a living room wall ("The irony," Wolf says, "is most of these collectors have 5,000 or 10,000 square-foot apartments").

In a parallel project, Wolf has also photographed the interiors of people living within 100 square-foot apartments. And some 80 percent of those residents told Wolf they were happy with their homes. The reason? The sense of community, density's greatest benefit.

"The important lesson to be learned is that it’s not space which is important for humans," Wolf says. "It's your neighbors."

All images courtsey of Michael Wolf.

"I felt very, very enthusiastic about diner preservation, since they're cornerstones of Americana," says Perlman. "I think the last remaining diners in New York City deserve landmark status."

The 30-year-old Perlman, a lifelong Queens resident, says he dedicated himself to historic buildings back in 2005, when he saw a construction crew demolishing the old Trylon Theater — a movie house that dated back to the 1939 Worlds Fair — in his native Forest Hills. "Witnessing that jack-hammered pretty much awakened the dormant preservationist within me," he says. Afterward Perlman established the Rego-Forest Preservation Council, which he still chairs, and a career was born.

Perlman says his foray into diner preservation began in early 2007 when he read that the Moondance — a celebrated Depression-era joint located near the Holland Tunnel — was slated for closure and destruction. Since the new developers had no intention of incorporating the diner into their plans, Perlman bought some time to try to find a buyer who could relocate the entire establishment. He did, and in August of 2007, the Moondance left SoHo in the hands of its new owners, en route for Wyoming.

"It doesn't occur daily — witnessing a diner 'to go,' " says Perlman. "It was a bittersweet moment in New York City history. People were happy it was being saved physically, but it was sad, too."

A few months later Perlman learned that the Cheyenne Diner, just west of Penn Station, was headed for a similar fate. Once again he convinced the new landowner to give him some time to find the old place a good home. After a plan fell through to take the Cheyenne just across the East River into the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, Perlman found a pair of investors from Birmingham, Alabama, who brought it south (in two pieces) in late 2009.

The Cheyenne Diner. Images courtesy of Flickr user Tiffany Terry

Perlman is a genuine diner savant — capable of describing a particular establishment down to, say, the frosted windows or the original manufacturer. He's partial to freestanding diners, especially converted railroad dining cars, dating back to a boom period between the 1930s and the 1960s. He reserves his preservationist instincts for "distinctive" diners with key period features: an Art Deco style, a clever stainless steel configuration, wrap-around windows, and of course a glowing neon sign.

"I wouldn't try to preserve a diner that's like a box devoid of character," he says.

Not all of Perlman's efforts have ended in a storybook fashion. For starters, he would prefer that vintage New York City diners remain in their hometown. The Cheyenne Diner, which is supposed to become the centerpiece of a blast-from-the-past type entertainment village, has yet to be restored in its new location. Perlman's name has been attached to several other diner preservation attempts in recent years — among them the Forum Diner, in Paramus, New Jersey, and the Empire Diner in Chelsea — but success has been elusive.

Still, Perlman vows to keep fighting for a space at the counter. His most recent project is finding the rightful owner of an old diner structure at 357 West Street that's reportedly been called the Terminal Diner, the Lunchbox Diner, and the Lost Diner at various times in its existence. The inside has been ransacked, as recent pictures from Untapped Cities attest, but the building itself still holds promise in Perlman's eyes.

He also says he's willing to expand his mission beyond the New York metro area if some old diner out there needs him. "If the diner is brought to my attention and other people feel very enthusiastic about it, and if it's a great example of architecture, I'm open to the possibility," he says.

"I consider them alternate public institutions."

Top image courtesy of Flickr user Mitch Altman.

The King has "instructed" that Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's fast-growing capital city, build its new six-line Metro system in just four years. To compare: it took New York's MTA four years to renovate one station.

For Riyadh's biggest station, a three-way interchange in the city's financial district, the King has chosen this airy hub designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. Its facade is designed to let in light while keeping out the harsh desert sun, while the overall shape is meant to recall wind-blown sand dunes.

We note that there's a bare-haired woman ascending the escalator in this last rendering -- a gesture of subversion from the architect's studio? Either way, King Abdullah seems to like what he sees.

All images courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects.

The latest instance of heroic cop-duck action comes from Portland, Oregon, a city known for its everything-bird obsessiveness. This Mother's Day, Officer Mark James clocked a speeder doing 52 mph in a 35 zone and zoomed off in pursuit. He must've been an eagle-eyed fighter pilot before picking up a badge, because somehow he noticed on the gloomy asphalt ahead a fluffy, ankle-high movement. Duuuucks!

"It was pretty good vision on his part to even see them in the road, with the gray weather we had that day," says Sgt. Pete Simpson, a spokesman for the Portland Police Bureau.

Officer James stopped his cruiser right there on Northwest Bridge Avenue and guided the ducks – a mother and her waddling progeny – onto the grassy shoulder. He did so despite there being "no regulation about stopping for ducks," says Simpson, and also risking a chewing-out from the Chief. Which wouldn't happen, actually, because he seems to love ducks, too.

"I think the chief would definitely side with officer," says the spokesman. "While traffic enforcement is important to save lives, running over a mama duck and her ducklings is not going to fare well for the agency."

Would this story have turned out differently if the officer was motoring down upon a family of smelly skunks? Or, say, a frothing-rabid possum?

Nope. "It wouldn't be all right to drive over animals," says Simpson. "We would discourage the intentional ramming of any fauna in the neighborhoods."

As it happens, this isn't the first time Portland's finest have interrupted their normal duties to pluck a hapless animal from doom's snapping maw. When a juvenile red-tailed hawk fell from its building perch in 2011, an officer was there to scoop it from the sidewalk and take it to the animal clinic. And this May, cops rescued a three-foot-long snake slithering around downtown that "looked scared."

Sometimes this animal love can cause problems. Last year, the Audubon Society of Portland reported getting "way too many" ducks "dumped at their door," according to this TV news spot. If you skip ahead to 0:35, you'll find yet another cop going beyond the call of duty to save ducks, this time in Ohio:

Top photo courtesy of thieury on Shutterstock

In fact, ask the new Google Maps to spit out directions to a coffee shop or a friend's house just a few blocks away, and it will assume, by default, that you want to walk there.

But the real game-changer in the new application has less to do with the aesthetic experience of using it, or the sheer power of its continuous toggling between 2D maps, real-life photos and satellite imagery. Google promises with this new product to build a customizable map for everyone, something that will be infinitely, constantly evolving according to your tastes and your clicks and your search history. As Google preens on its Lat/Long blog:

What if we told you that during your lifetime, Google could create millions of custom maps...each one just for you? 

In the past, such a notion would have been unbelievable: a map was just a map, and you got the same one for New York City, whether you were searching for the Empire State Building or the coffee shop down the street. What if, instead, you had a map that’s unique to you, always adapting to the task you want to perform right this minute?

Customization is seemingly the future of everything (soon, we'll get customizable mobile coupons for nearby stores as we walk down the street, and customizable gluten-free tablet menus in restaurants, and customizable homes that know how cool we like it on a summer day). But, in some contexts, customization also comes at a cost. An algorithm that knows you too well does a terrible job of telling you things you don't already know.

This was the premise behind Eli Pariser's "filter bubble," which put a name to that weird experience we've all had in the Internet age of Googling for information only to receive a suspiciously circumscribed set of results. If you're a conspiracy wing-nut, for instance, the Internet is quite likely to serve up links and stories and message boards that reinforce your wing-nut point of view because search engines and advertisers learn about you as you move through cyber space, adjusting and narrowing your path as you go. In the process, tons of stuff gets shoved outside of your blinders.

Customizable maps now raise the possibility of the filter bubble in our physical lives. Google is touting "a mapping experience that helps you find places you never would have thought to search for." But it will do this using what it knows from your search history, the recommendations of your Google+ friends, or the expertise of review sites like Zagat. The more you use the map, Google says, the more helpful it will become, and in a way Google is acknowledging and embracing the inherent subjectivity of all maps.

But doesn't this really mean that you'll find "places you never would have thought to search for" that are remarkably similar to the places you've already been?

We already know that the inequality of information online is rendering some real-world people and places virtually invisible. Will customizable maps further exacerbate this new twist on inequality? Google is obviously betting on the strategy because plenty of people like to get salon recommendations from their friends, or because a lot of us want to know where Zagat thinks we can find the best burrito in town. The trick is this: Can customizable maps leverage personalized recommendations without concealing from view businesses and people and restaurants that would broaden our experience of the places where we live and travel?

Imagine if you could ask Google to construct you a map based not on your own profile, but customized by, say, the preferences of people your parents' age, or the Chinese-language search results of unrelated people looking for dim sum. The greatest asset of our cities is their diversity. Can we build customizable maps that remember that, even as they try to steer us toward places where they suspect we'd be happy?

That's a nice way of saying: This is where your toilet flushes when it rains. Our sewer systems, poorly prepared to deal with the effects of even moderate rainstorms, dump billions of gallons of raw sewage into lakes, rivers and oceans each year. Superstorm Sandy alone caused more than 10.9 billion gallons of sewage to flow untreated into the East Coast ecosystem.

At the heart of this problem is a piece of antiquated infrastructure called the combined sewer, which funnels both waste-water and storm-water towards treatment plants in the same stream. During heavy rainfall, storm drains and sewage treatment plants can't handle the increased (if diluted) volume of sewage, and so into the river it goes. It's called "combined sewer overflow" (CSO):

Courtesy US EPA, via Wikipedia.

The EPA has required a number of cities -- there are 772 U.S. cities with combined sewers, in total -- to regulate CSO, at a cost of billions. This policy is likely responsible for your rising utility bill. Cash-strapped mayors have struggled to meet federally imposed goals.

Solutions are expensive. The back-end fix is an expansion of waste-water treatment plants, though this additional capacity lies unused during all but the most intense storms. Alternately, and at even higher cost, a city can take preventative measures by segregating disposal systems for sewage and storm-water. Environmentalists insist that sooner or later, cities will have to reduce run-off by turning impermeable surfaces from roofs to parking lots into green infrastructure, stopping the problem before it starts rather than making endless revisions to existing infrastructure.

Most money in most cities, though, goes to expanding storage capacity. Chicago has already spent $3 billion on the "Deep Tunnel," which remains decades from completion. D.C. is building a series of Metro-sized tunnels, which will cost hundreds of millions. Austin, Boston, Cleveland, Houston, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, and San Francisco have all undertaken similar projects.

But cities are also learning to make the most of what they have. It no longer suffices for sewers to be mere conduits. They must be storage tanks themselves.

Enter the inflatable dam. When activated, these giant sewer balloons turn roiling trunk lines into holding pens, rivers into lakes. They save raw sewage for a sunny day.

U.S. cities have installed dozens of these devices over the past decade. Made of industrial grade rubber and anchored to a cement base, the dam inflates on command to restrict sewer flow, like a plug in a giant drain. When the rain has passed, it deflates and allows CSO to flow slowly to the treatment plant.

The concept of using sewers for storage is nothing new. Many are equipped with hefty metal sluice gates that can perform the same function, and smaller tunnels can use pinch valves to adjust the flow.

But with federal grant money running low and EPA restrictions as strict as ever, inflatable dams are becoming more popular, especially in the biggest tunnels. Between 2002 and 2005, Detroit installed over a dozen of them. In Philadelphia's Main Relief sewer, a circular tunnel whose diameter is 13.5 feet, an inflatable dam completed in 2006 can hold back 6.2 million gallons of CSO during a storm, reducing overflow volume by 70 percent [PDF]. Two inflatable dams built in the Brooklyn sewers last year hold back 4 million gallons, and will save an estimated 100 million gallons of sewage per year from entering the New York Harbor. (See this diagram for details.)

If the prospect of sewage bubbling back up under your house alarms you, you're not alone. After a series of summer thunderstorms flooded sections of Washington, D.C.'s Bloomingdale neighborhood last year, there were concerns that D.C.'s inflatable dam was causing the sewer to back up through manholes and drains.

It was not the case: Water authorities in D.C. actually adjust the dam's capacity based on the slope of the sewer, so that even the lowest lying drains see no overflow. With sophisticated networks of sensors, managers at treatment plants perform a delicate balancing act: save as much sewage from the river as possible while ensuring that it never appears on the street.

The technology itself is not so new. Inflatable dams have been around for more than half a century, initially developed to stall flash floods in Southern California and allow rainwater to seep into aquifers. But aside from a few landmark, outdoor projects, like the Adam T. Bower Memorial Dam, which spans the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, or the Balgstuw bij Ramspol in the Netherlands, their use has remained largely restricted to Japan.

That is changing as U.S. cities begin to deal with more frequent flooding from climate change, and search for handy technology to divert water. The next frontier will be rail tunnels: New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority sustained nearly $5 billion in damage due to flooding from Superstorm Sandy. Parts of New York City were isolated for weeks.

On Thursday, the MTA inflated a plug in a tunnel at the South Ferry station. Fourteen feet in diameter and 30 feet long, this giant contraption and others like it may be expected to protect the network's longest tunnels from water damage. Plugs, like inflatable dams, would use a simple air barrier to hold back millions of gallons of fluid. Reckoned to cost $400,000 a piece, they are something of a bargain.

Top image courtesy of Dyrhoff.

Bike Score places neighborhoods and cities into four categories based on a 100-point score (ranked on bike lanes, hills, destinations and road connectivity, and bike commuting mode share): Biker's Paradise (90-10), Very Bikeable (70-89), Bikeable (50-69), and Somewhat Bikeable (0-49). The data here cover more than 7,000 neighborhoods across the United States. The table below shows America's 25 most bikeable neighborhoods.

Data courtesy of Walk Score

More than eight in 10 neighborhoods across the United States fall into the two least bikeable categories. And more than half of them — 3500 plus — are concentrated in very bottom category. Conversely, just 3.2 percent of the neighborhoods make the top-ranked category, Biker's Paradise, while another 14.6 percent can be considered Very Bikeable.

That's something mayors, transportation planners, and all of us need to think about on this Bike to Work Day.

Top image: Commuters park their bikes before taking advantage of a free breakfast provided for cyclists. (Tim Wimborne/Reuters)

Not only can the Sunshine State boast of being America's most dangerous state for pedestrians, it is also, as Tampa's 10 News investigators discovered, the home of a cagey maneuver to lower the duration of yellow lights.

Why would Florida want to do that? Drivers running red lights means more accidents and deaths!

It also means more money from fines. As Noah Pransky writes on Florida Today:

"While yellow light times were reduced by mere fractions of a second, research indicates a half-second reduction in the interval can double the number of RLC citations -- and the revenue they create... Red light cameras generated more than $100 million in revenue last year in approximately 70 Florida communities, with 52.5 percent of the revenue going to the state. The rest is divided by cities, counties, and the camera companies. In 2013, the cameras are on pace to generate $120 million."

In 2011, the Florida Department of Transportation struck a "whichever is greater" clause from the state's traffic light regulations, freeing most local governments to shorten their own yellow light durations. In some cases, the yellow light got shorter by as much as a full second.

Top image: Shutterstock/Mike Flippo.

Here's what the report really says: Among 161 samples of pool filter backwash, which tends to be more contaminated than pool water, researchers found P. aeruginosa in 59 percent and E. coli in 58 percent of the samples. The former can be introduced through factors including dirt, kickboards, skin, or fecal matter. The presence of E. coli, the report notes, "indicates that swimmers frequently introduced fecal material into pools," which can come from traces on swimmers or an accident in the pool.

E. coli was just as likely in indoor and outdoor pools, but was significantly more likely in municipal pools versus membership and club pools. The table below shows this breakdown by type of pool.

The test only determined if the microbes were in the sample, not if they were infectious. The pools in the study were also a convenience sample, according to the report, and "study findings cannot be generalized to pools in metro-Atlanta or beyond." Also, it noted that there were no illnesses reported from swimming pools in the state that year.

But the CDC says the presence of these microbes is a problem, and likely a widespread one. The report notes:

Since 1978, the incidence of recreational water illness (RWI) outbreaks of acute gastrointestinal illness has substantially increased, driving the marked increase in incidence of RWI outbreaks overall. A major contributing factor is poor swimmer hygiene (i.e., diarrheal incidents) in the implicated pools.

It advocates proper pool maintenance as well, but the moral of the report? Shower before swimming, take bathroom breaks, and wash your hands after using the bathroom. Also, duh, don't drink pool water.

Top image: Denise Fortado/Shutterstock.com

Up in the silence of space, a U.S. government satellite watched the monster system as it moved over north Texas. The GOES-East spacecraft captured the above image around 7:45 p.m. – 21 minutes before the storm dropped a large twister on Granbury, which is located 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth. Here's a closer look:

The tornado reportedly measured as wide as a mile and had no trouble making splinters of what it touched in the community of roughly 8,000 souls. Violent winds ripped roofs off of houses and peppered the region with hail the size of golfballs and baseballs. Some homes were reduced to bald slates of concrete, like this Granbury property :

NWS/Dallas/Fort Worth

"Where do you hide if you're living here?" said a local man staring at one such empty foundation, according to the Dallas Morning News' account of the disaster. "How do you take cover there. There's nothing. There's no hiding. This tornado was a monster."

Top image courtesy of NOAA

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KFC, founded in 1930 in southeast Kentucky, is one of those distinctly American exports that enjoy enormous popularity overseas. It's a Christmas delicacy in Japan, and franchises for the fast food restaurant are rapidly proliferating throughout the Middle East.

The brand's selection of chicken and hearty sides is so popular, in fact, that Palestinians living on the Gaza Strip, where imported goods and travel remain restricted by its neighbors Egypt and Israel, are willing to pay a team of smugglers to run KFC orders through underground tunnels, usually waiting four or more hours to see their orders fulfilled. The premium for the illicit chicken runs high: according to The New York Times, a 12 piece bucket of chicken bought for $11.50 in Egypt currently goes for $27 in Gaza City. (In the U.S., the same item costs between $16.49 and $20.49, depending on location.)

The Times explains the complicated logistics of delivering cross-border KFC food:

For fast-food delivery, it is anything but fast: it took more than four hours for the KFC meals to arrive here on a recent afternoon from the franchise where they were cooked in El Arish, Egypt, a journey that involved two taxis, an international border, a smuggling tunnel and a young entrepreneur coordinating it all from a small shop here called Yamama — Arabic for pigeon.

Prices may soon fall, though. A West Bank businessman told the Times that "he had been authorized to open a [KFC] restaurant in Gaza and was working out the details" with KFC's franchising division. In the meantime, you may fulfill your sudden craving for Popcorn Chicken here. Savor it.

This post originally appeared on The Atlantic Wire.

But this week, the city unveiled a thoroughly conventional new attraction -- a life-sized "Barbie Dreamhouse," covering about 1,400 square meters. Among other things, visitors can try on clothes (natch); tour her living room and kitchen; and take lunch on the edge of a giant fountain in the shape of a high-heeled show. Everything is, obviously, very, very pink.

The house is just steps from Berlin's Alexanderplatz shopping district. It is the second such amusement park -- the first is in Florida.

Its owners tell NBC:

"It provides a completely new insight into the living interior and lifestyle of the most famous doll in the world,” said Christoph Rahofer, of marketing company EMS which obtained the rights to the attraction from US manufacturer Mattel.

At its opening events, protesters gathered outside claiming the house offered nothing more than a “cliché of the female role in society."

Below, a couple more photos, courtesy of Reuters photographer Fabrizio Bensch.

Economists in fact have long theorized that the first scenario may be true, that people experience something called the "wealth effect" when assets that we already own (our homes, or stocks) increase in value. In theory, this makes us wealthier – or at least makes us feel wealthier – and as a result, we feel more comfortable going out and spending money (although the extent of the effect may vary). Based on this theory, economists often look to the housing market for signs about the outlook for other kinds of consumption, too.

A new study suggests, however, that we may have this relationship wrong. Researchers looking at 90,000 Danish households between 1985 and 2001 (a period that spans both ups and downs in the local housing market) found little statistical support for the theory when it was applied to actual people. Homeowners, particularly aged 45 and older, didn't appear to increase their consumption significantly as housing values went up (although some younger households did take out consumption loans based on their housing equity after a 1992 reform enabled them to). As the researchers write in The Economic Journal:

Controlling for factors related to competing explanations, we find little evidence of a housing wealth effect on consumption: unexpected innovations to house prices are uncorrelated with changes in total expenditure at the household level.

Admittedly, this study was conducted in Denmark prior to the most recent worldwide recession. It's also possible that whatever patterns homeowners exhibited pre-2007 may have changed during an economic collapse tied directly to the housing market. If homeowners ever had great confidence in the implied wealth of rising home values, more of them may now realize how quickly such value can disappear.

Top image: Andresr/Shutterstock

A young woman named Tashawnee Guarriello is busy getting the yard ready for recess, which is going to start any moment. She draws a chalk circle in one area, puts some hula hoops down in another, sets up a few plastic cones and gets out several balls. This simple assortment of equipment — along with a loud whistle, her voice, and a staggering amount of energy and good cheer — are all that she will use to lead hundreds of elementary school students in play over the next two hours.

Guarriello, who is known to the kids of P.S. 309 as Coach G, is one of hundreds of coaches working in schools around the country as part of Playworks.

Founded in 1996 by educator Jill Vialet, the program is designed to make recess a happy, productive part of the school day in low-income inner-city schools.

Vialet, who is 48, came up with the idea when she was working in San Francisco Bay Area schools where she observed that recess wasn’t what she remembered from her childhood years. Kids were fighting and being excluded, and they didn’t seem to be having much fun. “The play really looked different from what I remembered,” says Vialet. “I have a really high tolerance for chaos, but there is good chaos and bad chaos, and this chaos made me uneasy. It made the kids uneasy, too. I was thinking on an empathic level, if I was a kid, I wouldn’t want it to be like this.”

School administrators told her that the upset resulting from recess often spilled over into the rest of the school day, taking time away from instruction and making it harder for kids to learn.

So Vialet started to develop a simple play program focused on a few structured games and on building the social skills of kids who came from tough neighborhoods, sometimes from families where stability was not a given. Full-time paid coaches help to create an environment where sharing and cooperation are the highest values, rather than winning, and where bullying is not tolerated. Students from the older grades are enlisted as "junior coaches," gaining leadership experience and modeling good behavior for their peers.

Playworks, based in Oakland, California, started small and local. But it has grown to operate in 360 schools in 22 cities, serving 270,000 students in the most recent school year and employing hundreds of coaches. Schools are selected based on student need — at least 50 percent must receive free or reduced price lunch (at P.S. 309, it's more than 85 percent). The program is dedicated to the idea that having a healthy, safe place to play at recess can make a child’s school experience better throughout the day.

A recent randomized controlled study by Mathematica Policy Research and the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University backs up what principals and teachers have been observing about Playworks since its inception. A better recess does make a difference. The study reported that in Playworks schools there was less bullying, a greater feeling of safety among students, more vigorous physical activity, and less time lost transitioning from recess to classroom learning.

This kind of data is helpful when it comes to convincing schools and funders of the importance of high-quality recess, says Vialet. “We struggle to get people to take this issue seriously,” she says. “It can be hard to convince people that recess has the gravitas that merits this kind of investment. I sometimes joke that if we called ourselves ‘instructional time recovery agents’ it would be easier.”

But more and more administrators are getting it these days. The principal at P.S. 309, Nicole Perry, says she has seen a real difference since Playworks came to her school last year. There is much less fighting than there used to be, and students are releasing their immense volumes of energy in a productive way, without getting involved in fights. “When they do go into the classroom after recess, they’re not bringing that baggage with them,” she says. For her, it’s been a huge help in creating the kind of school environment where kids can learn and grow. “There’s lots of instability in this neighborhood,” Perry says. “There’s a lack of community. A lot of the kids have low self-esteem. We want to be a place where kids can confide in adults in the school community and look to us for comfort and guidance."

All of the junior coaches on the playground helping Coach G tell me that recess is very different than it used to be. “People used to get hit in the face with balls and hurt,” says one fifth-grade girl. “That doesn’t happen anymore.”

Not that there’s any shortage of normal grade-school exuberance when the kids get out onto the playground. They come out in an orderly line under Coach G’s guidance, but within seconds of being told they can start playing, the kids are running around screaming as loud as they can. But this is what Vialet would call a good kind of chaos.

"It allows them to relieve some of the energy that builds up during the school day," says Coach G, who grew up in Bed-Stuy herself before attending Spelman College in Atlanta. "They engage with each other in a positive way, doing what they love to do, which is play."

Everywhere you look, you see kids peacefully resolving conflicts among themselves. They settle ties with a quick game of rock, paper, scissors. The junior coaches are collecting high fives.

And no one gets left out, not even me. A junior coach sees me standing on the sidelines, comes up to me, and kindly urges me to join a game called wall ball.

I am immediately skunked by a fifth-grader who uses his best move on me. The kids won’t let me get discouraged, though. "Let her try again, and don’t zigzag this time," one girl says.

Then she gives me a high five.

Top image: Coach G (Tashawnee Guarriello) with her junior coach helpers.

Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest official snapshot of how states nationwide make use of renewable power, from industrial-scale generation to rooftop solar panels, and reveals an incredible gulf between leaders like Washington, California, and Oregon, and states like Rhode Island and Mississippi that use hardly any.

The gap is partly explained by the relative size of states’ energy markets, but not entirely: Washington uses less power overall than New York, for example, but far outstrips it on renewables (the exact proportions won’t be available until EIA releases total state consumption figures later this month). Still, the actual availability of resources—how much sun shines or wind blows—is far less important than the marching orders passed down from statehouses to electric utilities, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“Without some carrot or stick, there’s little reason to pick [renewables] up” in many states, he says; even given the quickly falling price of clean energy technology, natural gas made cheap by fracking is still an attractive option for many utilities.

More than half of the 29 states that require utilities to purchase renewable power are currently considering legislation to pare back those mandates, in many cases pushed by (surprise, suprise) the American Legislative Exchange Council. "We’re opposed to these mandates, and 2013 will be the most active year ever in terms of efforts to repeal them," ALEC energy task force director Todd Wynn recently told Bloomberg.

But so far the tide seems to be turning against that campaign: This week the Minnesota legislature will consider two versions of a bill passed by the House and Senate that would require utilities to get 1-4 percent of their power from solar by 2025 (solar made up less than one percent of Minnesota’s renewable power in 2011); last month North Carolina, the same state that outlawed talking about sea level rise, surprised green energy advocates by voting down a proposal to ax the state’s renewable mandates, followed a few days later by a vote in Colorado to increase rural communities’ access to renewables. But challenges remain ahead in some of the very states that already rank relatively low for renewables consumption, including Connecticut, Missouri, and Ohio.

Karin Wadsack, director of a Northern Arizona University-based project to monitor these legislative battles, says the time is now for states to start mixing in more clean energy.

"If you have all these utilities sticking with gas, coal, and nuclear, then you create a situation where 20 years from now they aren’t prepared to deal with the increased climate risk," she says. "Electricity is a huge piece of the climate puzzle, so [utilities] need to be learning what to do with renewables."

There’s always the option that Congress could set a renewables standard on the national level—a group of senators took a failed stab at one in 2010 only a few months after Republicans killed the infamous cap-and-trade bill. But don’t hold your breath, Wadsack says: “I don’t know that I would call it a pipe dream. But I wouldn’t see it happening in our current set of national priorities.”

So what can thirsty cities do to secure a watery future? Well the first step may be getting in touch with local farmers. A new study [PDF] led by Brian Richter of the Nature Conservancy suggests that the key to replenishing city water supplies is forming urban-rural partnerships designed to decrease regional consumption:

A major conclusion is that considerable untapped potential exists for cities to form partnerships with agricultural water users to reduce water consumption on farms, thereby freeing up additional water supply for urban use while potentially reducing the water-related costs of farming, as well as farming’s vulnerability to water shortages.

Agricultural irrigation accounts for the vast majority of water consumption — in the area of 90 percent, according to Richter and company. At the same time, city residents certainly contribute to the situation, since they're the ones consuming most (perhaps two-thirds) of the food produced in the countryside. A shared problem deserves a shared solution, write the researchers.

"This is a reality that governments and cities must come to grips with immediately," they write.

Previous attempts to mitigate the problem have fallen short. Richter and team evaluated the histories of several water-starved cities, such as Phoenix, and found similar patterns of depletion. First local supplies are exhausted, then water is imported from other basins, then recycling and desalination programs are employed.

Over the long-term this unsustainable cycle has dangerous ecological and economic impacts. Taking water from other basins only spreads the problem, and implementing recycling or desalination programs is incredibly expensive. The more we rely on such efforts, the higher our water bills. A far more cost-effective solution, argue the researchers, would be to conserve whatever local supply still exists.

That's where urban-rural partnerships come in. There are a number of ways farmers can reduce the amount of water they use for agriculture; writing at National Geographic, Richter mentions changing crop types or eliminating "low-value" farming, to name just a couple. But the cost of these efforts is so great, and the payoff so far away, that farmers are unlikely to implement them on their own. If cities provided farmers with funding (or incentives or compensation) to change their ways, both sides could ultimately enhance their water supplies.

So while the responsibility goes both ways, according to Richter and company, so does the reward. With an effective water partnership, farmers would spend less on irrigation, and cities, in turn, would save money on the cost of farm goods. Meanwhile, of course, both sides preserve water supplies for the future. The researchers estimate that even a 15 to 20 percent decrease in agricultural water consumption could free up as much water as cities and industries use today.

That's not to say there aren't significant hurdles to such partnerships. For starters, some farmers might be hesitant to work with cities on the problem, for fear of losing control of their supplies. Some policymakers believe that the onus of conservation investment is on the farmers, not the cities, since agriculture is so heavily subsidized. Last, starting new partnerships might punish forward-thinking farmers who already employ conservation techniques.

But Richter and company point out that some cities have already had urban-rural success. Take a water transfer agreement reached by San Diego and its regional irrigation district back in 1998 — the largest rural-urban transfer in U.S. history. Under the terms of the deal, San Diego compensated regional farmers for agricultural water conservation, with the free water being transferred to a canal running into the city. By 2020 the arrangement will provide nearly 40 percent of San Diego's water supply:

"While formidable challenges exist, we believe that the benefits of urban–rural partnerships will be well worth the effort," the researchers conclude.

Images and figures via B. D. Richter, et al. (2013). Tapped out: how can cities secure their water future? Water Policy, 15(3), 335-363. doi:10.2166/wp.2013.105