As a global metropolis, Seoul, South Korea, is comparable to New York in many respects. Seoul has about 10 million people in a metropolitan region of roughly 24 million. Like 20th century New York, contemporary Seoul is built around its subway system, which has several hundred stations on more than a dozen lines and daily passenger traffic similar to that of New York City.

Although Seoul is an ancient city, it is new in its present form. In 1960, with a population of 2.5 million, Seoul was more like an overgrown village, with slums lining the Han river and few public services. It was still struggling to recover from the civil war that had torn the country apart.

Today, Seoul has skyscrapers, subways and sidewalks, with walkable streets and parks. Its first subway line opened in 1974. But the city's evolution has not been an unbroken one. It has stopped and started, repeatedly, as it has worked to conjure up the best image of itself.

In the last decade, Seoul has remade itself into a greener, more humane and more people-oriented place. The city has revamped and reorganized its subway and bus system, expanded sidewalks and plazas for pedestrians at the expense of cars, torn down a center-city freeway and implemented a bike-sharing system. It has its own version of congestion pricing.

On a recent visit to Seoul, I got a firsthand look at these changes. There are lessons here for New York and the tri-state region, not so much in copying Seoul, but in seeing what is possible and as a catalyst to examine our own plans for renewal and improvement.

The city's subway system is especially impressive. It offers efficiency and an attention to the passenger experience that is unusual for a system of this size and range. From the wave of an iPhone or Samsung smartphone across a turnstile to gain entry, to the numbered entrances in and out of the stations, to the glass doors across the platforms, to the frequency of the service and the cleanliness of the heavily used trains (and the bathrooms in the stations), the subway is state of the art.

The sense of ease starts when you enter the first turnstile and can pay by a half dozen methods, including credit card, smartphone, a tiny computer-equipped disc or a single-pay card. The system charges by distance, starting at about $1 for the first 10 kilometers, and an additional 10 cents for every five kilometers afterward. South Korea's per capita income still trails that of the U.S., and fares are correspondingly lower.

Once inside, signs in Korean and English guide riders throughout the system. On the platform, glass platform screening doors block noise and wind from passing trains. It's a stark contrast to the sense of stress found in a busy New York subway station as trains enter and exit stations.

Inside the trains, televisions show the next stations. There is universal Wi-Fi access on the trains and in stations. Off the train, exits from stations onto the street are numbered, with signs showing the way to them starting at platform level. This comes in handy when being given directions to a particular address or making plans to meet someone at an exit.

It's easy to say these changes are mostly because the Seoul system is new, and could start fresh. But most of these amenities were added on to the existing system. Lines didn't originally have platform screening doors. They were retrofitted, and paid for by long-term leases on the advertisements over the doors themselves. The "wave and pay" system was instituted as part of a major overhaul that required cooperation among the four separate institutions that run the subway and commuter rail lines, as well as the bus system, which has private operators.

As with New York, the history of Seoul's subway system is messy. The system expanded over successive decades, and at least four separate state-controlled companies were created to build and run different lines. This arrangement grew out of various political battles, including the nation's transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. The separate companies still exist, but were integrated into a common fare system that includes the bus network, itself run by subsidized private operators.

The city continues to experiment with different financing strategies. In the latest move, a private company, owned mostly by the Korean division of Paris-based Veolia, operates the new # 9 line. The line runs beautifully, but fares are higher and disputes have broken out between the city and the private company over when and how much it can raise fares.

New York City is already moving in the direction that Seoul and other cities such as London, Stockholm and Paris have taken, which might be called the people-centered metropolis. That Seoul has arguably advanced further along than New York gives ammunition to proponents of the idea that the humane metropolis is not just a passing fad, but a direction for global cities that is here for a very long time.

By the late 1970s, London and New York were cities that many believed were in terminal decline. Since then, both London and New York have experienced a remarkable renaissance. And both cities have much to learn from each other as they plan for their future.

At RPA's recent Regional Assembly, a panel discussion entitled "Building Around Transit" focused on what the U.S. Northeast could learn from London's extraordinary experience since 1980 in creating large urban development districts around transit investments. Participants included Martin Buck from the U.K.'s Crossrail, Peter James Heath from Atkins, a London-based infrastructure firm, Caren Franzini, CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and Emil Frankel of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an RPA board member. The panel was moderated by me and sponsored by the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry.

London's revival began 40 years ago when much of its East End and Docklands districts had yet to recover from wartime bombing and were suffering from the loss of shipping and manufacturing activities in the period of post-war deindustrialization.

Enter Margaret Thatcher and her environment secretary, Michael Heseltine, who created the Docklands Development Corporation and the Thames Gateway program, which laid out bold plans for the reclamation of the whole East Thames corridor stretching from Tower Bridge east for 30 miles into the Kent and Essex suburbs. Heseltine's vision was that if these areas, which included tens of thousands of acres of derelict former port and industrial lands, could be made accessible to the major population and employment centers of London, they could be pulled into the mainstream of the region's economy. He promoted the development of the Docklands Light Railway and the extension of the Jubilee underground line, which connected much of this forlorn area with the City of London, Britain's financial center. The Canary Wharf office district, developed by Toronto's Olympia and York and designed by New Haven-based Cesar Pelli and Associates, created a new financial district in Docklands.

More recently, other major transit projects have been completed or are being planned. The HS1 high-speed rail link from the Channel Tunnel to London was rerouted through the Thames Gateway corridor stretching more than 40 miles east from the capital. Stations are transforming former industrial sites into major redevelopment areas. In addition to the high-speed Eurostar trains from Paris and Brussels, and, soon, Deutsche Bahn HSR trains from Germany, HS1 carries frequent Javelin high-speed commuter trains from Southeast England into London. Dozens of communities that formerly had tenuous transit connections to Central London are now within a 45-minute commute.

One of those stations along the Thames corridor, in once-downtrodden Stratford, is also the site of London's Olympic Park for the 2012 Summer Games, which in turn is anchoring new housing, commercial buildings and the U.K.'s largest shopping mall, surrounding the Olympic Park. And HS1's London terminal is in St. Pancras International Station, a restored 19th century terminus that is now the center of its own revitalization district.

London also is rebuilding the Underground system and replacing the bus fleet, financed in part by Central London's congestion pricing system instituted in 2003. And it is now proceeding with construction of Crossrail, a 13-mile, $22 billion, 37-station transit link that will run across the entire urban core of London. Crossrail was funded partially with a special tax assessment on properties within zones that are expected to benefit from the new line. In a few places, property owners expecting to see significant increases in value have funded the construction of actual stations, in lieu of paying the special tax.

When completed, this project will bring an estimated 1.5 million additional workers within 45 minutes of central London. And despite its austerity budget, the U.K. is also proceeding with the HS2 High-speed rail link from London to Manchester, a project similar in scope to the proposed Northeast high-speed rail line between Boston and Washington.

We have much to learn from the U.K.'s experience. Development of Britain's second high-speed rail line will offer a guide on successful strategies — and potential pitfalls — as the U.S. looks to bring high-speed service to the Northeast. New York's three current megaprojects — East Side Access, Second Avenue Subway and the #7 subway line extension — have the potential to promote a transformation similar to London's in large areas of our own city and region. We now need to complete these projects and also find a way to expand trans-Hudson commuter capacity between New Jersey and New York. Doing so would add room for NJTransit trains as well as Amtrak regional and Acela service, and pave the way for future high-speed rail between Boston and Washington, with a revitalized Penn-Moynihan Station complex at its center.

By Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region.

For many decades, Tony Hiss has pioneered a type of writing that focuses on experience and perception. It's not about what we do or see, Hiss has told us, it's how we do and see, and how our environment affects those functions.

In his 1991 book, "The Experience of Place," Hiss focused on why some places feel right, and others don't. He went beyond the simple rules of good design, to explore the more subjective feeling of place. It was an ambitious and groundbreaking book.

His has continued along this path in his latest book, his thirteenth, "In Motion: The Experience of Travel," which will soon be released in a new paperback edition by Planners Press of the American Planning Association, with a forward by Robert D. Yaro, president of Regional Plan Association.

In this book, Hiss explores what he calls "Deep Travel," a state of heightened awareness, often stimulated by travel, that is simultaneously calming and invigorating, where you notice everything around you, from the people to buildings to animals to street furniture. It's the opposite of our normal state of mind, where we walk or drive from home to work without really seeing things around us. In "In Motion," Hiss seeks to identify what puts us in a state of "Deep Travel."

In this quest, Hiss wanders productively. In one chapter he meanders from the main street of Middlebury, Vermont, to the middle of the Millau Bridge in France, the tallest in the world. He conveys what it is like to experience this dramatic span, designed by Norman Foster, from a distance, a thrilling thing, and up close, both as a driver and a pedestrian, which is more problematic. He notes that views of the bridge are better than views from the bridge, and ponders what could change this.

Hiss takes us not only to physical places, but into the work of other writers and how they have handled travel. He leads us into the works of the Venetian Marco Polo, who in the 13th century described his journey to China in The Travels of Marco Polo, to the American Emily Hahn, who in the 20th century described the same country in China to Me.

If there were an award for subtlety in writing, Hiss would win it. A former staff writer for the New Yorker, Hiss also was co-author of RPA's Third Regional Plan, where he brought his fine-tuned awareness to the organization's reading of the region. "In Motion" offers a valuable pause, what Hiss might call "A Long Now" that prompts us to look around, and really see.

The crowded sprawl of São Paulo is very different than the bucolic charms of Stockholm. And Los Angeles, where car is king, is a world away from Singapore, where the government limits the number of vehicle registrations issued. Nevertheless, these cities have one thing in common: transit systems their residents depend on.

Last month in New York, 19 senior executives of those and eight other transit agencies representing nine countries and four continents got together to discuss the successes and challenges they shared. What they found was a surprising amount of common ground.

The three-day Transit Leadership Summit, organized by RPA and funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundations and C40, gave the chief executives of some of the biggest and most dynamic transit agencies from around the world the opportunity to meet each other in an intimate setting and off the record - a rare occasion in this day and age. (Several of these executives stayed on and spoke at RPA's annual conference, the Regional Assembly, held later that week.)

After three days of structured discussions and informal meals, a new network of peers emerged. And despite the very different urban, financial and political contexts in which the transit agencies operate, the common threads that weaved them together were unmistakable:

• The quality of the transit experience cannot be underestimated. A convenient, attractive and comfortable experience on the train or bus is key to allowing transit agencies to grow their customer base - as well as their revenue. This is not just about frequency and speed of service: it's about amenities (comfortable seats, wireless data communications), communicating effectively with customers, and branding. Many transit systems offer wi-fi or cellular in stations or tunnels, allowing passengers to make more productive use of their commuting time. Montreal and Santiago have succeeded in knitting together a disparate set of transit services into one unified network from the customer's perspective. Washington, D.C., and New York are looking to adopt a new fare-collection system that would allow customers to swipe with their credit cards or cell phones, as London is planning to do this summer on its buses. Mexico City, Stockholm and others highlight the environmental benefits of transit use, a branding strategy that improves the visibility of the system and builds the political case for supporting transit with tax revenue.
• It's difficult to raise fares everywhere. And yet, some cities are more successful at balancing the need for revenue with the desire to provide a service that is affordable to a range of users. In Hong Kong and Singapore, a formula is structured by an independent body every few years, with scheduled fare increases to reflect inflation and increases in labor costs, which helps to greatly cut down on annual political battles. Several cities, including Santiago, also have successfully designed fare systems that charge lower fares to those who need them. The emergence of "social fares" could be an important development for transit authorities, whose main form of revenue have always been considered regressive taxation.
• Except for a handful of cities, public-sector funding for new transit construction projects is becoming more limited. But there are a number of compelling alternative ways to pay for capital projects: value capture, either by having the transit agency engage directly in redevelopment (Hong Kong, Los Angeles) or by setting up a special taxing zone (New York City) around stations; public-private partnerships (Barcelona, London, São Paulo and others), and congestion pricing (London).

RPA hopes to organize two more such gatherings, one each in Asia and Europe, in the next two years, to foster continued communication among transit leaders.

Housing prices will continue to rise. There will be plenty of mortgage money available. Buyers will want bigger and better homes. Buying is better than renting. People will accept a long commute to live in a nice house.

These long-held beliefs about the housing market have been upended by America's economic doldrums and the bursting of the housing bubble, says Peter Reinhart, director of the Kislak Real Estate Institute at Monmouth University. Reinhart was one of a group of housing experts on a panel at RPA's Regional Assembly last month that looked at the changing housing market.

Driving the change is the evolution of America's demographic profile, as the most significant population cohort of the 20th century — the baby boom generation — moves into retirement. Boomers, born from 1946 to 1964, fueled demand for the prototypical single-family house in the suburbs during their child-rearing years, which came to dominate U.S. housing stock. The boomers are now reaching the period in their lives when they no longer need the large houses in which they raised their children.

Take two key types of households in the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut region: traditional families of a married couple with one or more kids, and single people living alone. From 1970 — 2010, the number of married-with-kids households dropped by almost a half million, from 2.2 million to 1.7 million, an analysis of census data shows. In the same period, the number of households composed of a single person living alone grew by more than one million, from 1.2 million to 2.2 million households in the tri-state region.

But an enormous overhang of family-oriented houses isn't inevitable, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at University of Southern California. That's because America's immigrants, for whom home ownership is a top priority, could drive a large portion of the market for homes that will come available as baby boomers downsize.

Home-ownership rates among immigrants have soared, Myers notes. Starting with immigrants arriving in the 1970s, homeownership rates rose by about 13% for each decade that they stayed in the country. For immigrants arriving in the 1970s, their homeownership rate was over 70% by 2000, just above the level of native-born Americans.

An "intergenerational partnership" of buyers and sellers — the boomers and the immigrants — would provide boomers with the return on the investment they are anticipating and the immigrants with the upward mobility they seek, he said.

Fatima Shama, commissioner of the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs in New York City, whose office tracks statistics on immigrants in New York City, confirmed that home ownership is a top priority for New York City's one million immigrant households. For many immigrants, home ownership is the sign of "making it" in America.

Even if a large market emerges for the existing homes in the U.S., it is clear there is a mismatch between the current housing stock and the growing demand for more apartments and condominiums, in mixed-use, walkable environments with amenities that appeal to millennials (born 1980 — 2000) and downsizing boomers alike.

But even in the densely developed New York metropolitan region, rental and multifamily housing is a tough sell with local zoning boards that tend to shun multifamily housing for fear it will bring school children with higher tax burdens. Bringing the New York region's housing supply up to speed with the region's housing demand faces the same fundamental paradox of regional planning: local control of land use regulations, requiring painstaking zoning reform on a municipality-by-municipality basis.

Kislak Institute's Reinhart, who spent the first 30 years of his career with Hovnanian Enterprises, New Jersey's largest housing developer, noted that developers will build whatever the market wants. The key questions are, will potential homeowners have the money to buy, and will zoning codes permit developers to build what people want?

• MTA Chairman Dreams of Eventually Extending 7 Line Down the West Side (NY1)
• NY Transit shies away from "revolution" (Reuters)
• Roll the 7 to Chelsea: MTA (New York Post)
• NY MTA Chief Lhota: 'Yes' To Extending 7 Train Extension, 'No' To Free Ferry (WNYC)
• New and Old MTA Chiefs on the Political Toxicity of Congestion Pricing (Capital New York)
• New York City's Complete Streets Are Built to Last (Streetsblog NYC)

The daylong program kicks off with a look at city-building in an age of economic uncertainty, technological innovation and intense global competition. Leading thinkers will tackle such hot topics as the redevelopment of the Javits Center site and Cornell's plans to build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island.

We'll examine the conflicts over street space among cars, pedestrians and cyclists, and hear from developers who have pursued ambitious projects even in tough economic times. (You can read more about both those topics in this week's Spotlight.)

Other Assembly sessions will look at new options in urban energy efficiency and the difficulty of meeting the nation's fast-evolving housing needs. And we'll round out the day with a cocktail reception and an opportunity to meet conference presenters and participants.

In advance of this year's Assembly, we've set up an online town hall where you can weigh in with your thoughts on how you would like to see the New York region change. Join the conversation at ideas.regionalassembly.org.

To see a complete description of panels and events, and to register, visit www.regionalassembly.org. We look forward to seeing you on April 27.

Last Sunday, an estimated 100,000 Los Angeles residents left their cars at home and took to the streets on bike, foot and rollerblades for the annual Ciclavia celebration. Similar to New York's Summer Streets Program, which closes Park Avenue and other thoroughfares each August, the festival aims to introduce people to benefits of bicycling and walking.

The crowd jibed with a city that has been moving away from its image as the mecca of American car culture. The city has installed more than 450 miles of new bike lanes, some as part of the planned 51-mile greenway along the Los Angeles River. To complement them, a new bike-sharing program is scheduled to open in December. At the national American Planning Association conference held in downtown Los Angeles last week, the city's work in this arena was one of the central topics.

That Los Angeles is embracing bike travel and infrastructure shows the extent of changes that are occurring within the U.S., and by reflection around the globe. New York City has been a leader in this area, among large cities in the U.S., for some time. But other cities are following suit. Washington, D.C., has a bike sharing program that has won over skeptics. And it's not just bicycling. It's the idea of "complete streets." New York State recently joined Connecticut, New Jersey and New York City in its adoption of policies to build streets that are safer and more welcoming to all users, by incorporating such features as separated bike lanes, new sidewalks and better road striping and signage.

But change is hard. Elected and appointed officials have to balance competing needs of cars, bicycles and pedestrians. Pilot programs and "lines and signs" improvements are easy to install, but also easy to dismantle under political pressure.

At the Regional Assembly on April 27, the workshop entitled Cars vs. Bicycles vs. Pedestrians: Can They Learn to Live Together? will bring together elected officials, planners, advocates and others to talk about the physical and cultural challenges of rethinking our streets. Moderated by RPA Board member Trent Lethco, the panelists will include "Gridlock" Sam Schwartz and Jon Orcutt from the NYC Department of Transportation as well as two rising political stars: Mayor Dawn Zimmer from Hoboken and Mayor Thomas Roach from White Plains.

All have grappled with the challenges of implementing complete streets policies. Hoboken's Mayor Zimmer, for example, has integrated car share with the city's parking policies, helping residents reduce dependence on private automobiles. Mayor Tom Roach in White Plains has connected the city's Metro North station with a bike lane, the first of an intended network of complete streets for bikers, pedestrians and drivers.

The streets workshop will be just one of the many panels at the Regional Assembly, but for those who care about these essential veins of our cities it promises to be one not to miss.

What makes a project great? Participants at the Regional Assembly this Friday will have an opportunity to explore this question with four major figures in development in the city and region: Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of the Real Estate Development Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation (as well as a partner at SHoP Architects); Douglas Durst, chairman of the Durst Organization; Fred Harris, recently appointed as executive vice president for development at the New York City Housing Authority; and Rosanne Haggerty, president of Community Solutions.

Chakrabarti will draw on his experiences as director of City Planning's Manhattan office and as Related Cos. executive responsible for Moynihan Station and for planning and design of Hudson Yards to discuss overcoming environmental and political obstacles to get ambitious projects built. His work at City Planning enabled development of the vibrant West Chelsea neighborhood that got the extraordinary High Line park built and reintegrated the World Trade Center site into the Lower Manhattan grid. Now he is looking forward to the future of Midtown East, stretching between Fifth and Third avenues and 40th and 57th streets. And it isn't just a New York question. As director of Columbia's Center for Urban Real Estate, Chakrabarti advocates for design-intelligent urban development to address global issues.

An environmental advocate, Durst fought his way through many bureaucratic thickets to build the nation's first sustainable skyscraper, 4 Times Square, and the first LEED Platinum high-rise office tower, the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park. He then broke more new ground by enticing Conde Nast set to set up shop at One World Trade Center, which — when previously known as the Freedom Tower — had been on track to becoming a depot for government offices. With a fashionable lead tenant, 1WTC is now seen as worthy of being New York City's tallest building. Durst is also the force behind Bjarke Ingels' thrilling green-roofed, skyscraper-perimeter-block-combo residential building about to break ground on Manhattan's West 57th Street.

Fred Harris recently brought his experience building more than 5,000 housing units at AvalonBay Communities to the New York City Housing Authority the nation's largest provider of affordable housing. He is responsible for planning the transformation of NYCHA's huge inventory of vacant land and available development rights into housing for a new generation of the city's work force — while preserving and upgrading existing public housing for current tenants. Harris will discuss the political, economic and social challenges of building public housing in the 21st century.

Common Ground founder Rosanne Haggerty is known for converting rundown hotels creating into supportive housing for the formerly homeless. With Community Solutions, she has gone national, designing new programs to prevent homelessness and integrate housing and services for vulnerable people. Community Solutions currently has twinned projects under way in Brownsville and Hartford — both combine physical and social interventions in a coherent way to build healthy communities in the most deprived and degraded areas of their cities.

It has become routine to ask why we can no longer seem to build the great projects, private and public, of the past — Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, Rockefeller Center. Yet great projects are being built, serving public and private, rich and poor, businesses and residents. This year's Regional Assembly offers the chance to hear from creators of some of the best of them.