City links: An unusual Berlin property map, Rotterdam’s floating forest and the fate of Delhi’s metro all feature in this week’s roundup of the best urban stories

This week’s stories range from a map tool that lets Berlin renters see if their landlord is illegally overcharging them to plans for Singapore’s new non-High Line and the role of sound in architecture. We’d love to read about your favourites too: share them in the comments below.

Berlin rents map

A new interactive, created by by property portal Immobilienscout24, uses Berlin’s U-Bahn and S-Bahn networks to map the average rent of one-bedroom apartments across the city, stop by stop. Helpful if you’re searching out those more affordable pockets in a city which, though celebrated for its housing affordability, is rapidly changing.

As Feargus O’Sullivan explains in CityLab, with the help of an interactive form, the map tool also allows Berlin’s renters to find out if their landlords are illegally overcharging them – as it is now an offence to charge too much rent in the German capital. The new “rental price brake” law, introduced last summer, fixes an average rent per square metre in each neighbourhood, and makes it illegal for landlords to charge more than 10% above that rate.

The map also reveals how affordability in different Berlin neighbourhoods has changed over the years:

It shows that in the 25 years since German reunification, Berlin’s wealth has gone on a long march eastwards. Historically, the richest parts of the city were in Berlin’s far west, in villa districts abutting forests and a beautiful string of lakes. Nowadays, these neighbourhoods are increasingly looking like a pretty good deal ... It’s right in the centre of East Berlin, meanwhile, that rents have truly shot up.

Drivers on the Delhi metro

Last month, the Delhi government announced a radical plan to curb dangerous pollution levels in the city: banning private cars with odd- and even-numbered licence plates on alternate days. The plan was soon reduced to a fortnight-long experiment, with exemptions, over the first two weeks of 2016, but it has now gone ahead and could be repeated if successful.

As Shelly Walia in Quartz reports, the experiment means that many of the city’s two million car owners have been forced to use alternative modes of transport on the days they are not able to drive: auto-rickshaws, buses, or the Delhi Metro.

Many believed the city’s metro system wouldn’t be able to cope with this sudden influx of additional commuters – but so far, Walia says, it’s a different story. While the trains and stations have become busier, the network seems to be functioning well as a result of trains arriving every minute (instead of every two) during rush hours – meaning there are 3,192 total trips every day compared to the usual 2,827. The question remains, of course, what will happen after this fortnight experiment is over – to air pollution levels and to commuter habits.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Passengers on the metro in Delhi on the first day of the ‘odd-even’ car ban experiment. Photograph: Bi Xiaoyang/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Sound in architecture

In an immersive multimedia feature, the New York Times considers the role of sound in architecture and urban space. Taking us from the New York Public Library to a subway station to the High Line, Michael Kimmelman explores how design shapes sound, and sound shapes experience – and says both architects and users don’t think about the sonic environment enough. “We don’t talk nearly enough about how sound in these buildings, and in all the other spaces we design, make us feel.”

Rotterdam plans a floating forest

In an attempt to become a greener city within limited space, a group of Dutch designers and entrepreneurs from Rotterdam is planning to create the city’s first “bobbing forest” in March 2016: a collection of 20 trees that float in the Rijnhaven harbour basin. Pop-Up City shows us what it might look like.

Traversing Cairo’s ring road

“It’s not only a highway, but the main road which people use for getting around in Cairo,” says Rio Saito of the Egyptian capital’s ring road. “It runs more than 70 kilometres in a circle, surrounding Cairo like a huge wall.” Fascinated by the mammoth road both as a piece of urban infrastructure and a place of dangerous human crossings, Japanese-born photographer Saito decided to capture the scene and take a series of portraits exploring this space of transition. Uncube magazine shares a gallery of his photographs alongside an interview.

Singapore’s Rail Corridor: it’s no High Line

Another week, another High Line – or not, as the people behind Singapore’s newest urban infrastructure project insist, following media attention that likened it to New York’s famous elevated park. Although the project’s vision involves a chain of community spaces along a disused railway corridor through the middle of the city, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority is at pains to stress – as Mashable reports – that the project does not bear similarity to New York’s transformed elevated railway: “It is factually inaccurate to say the Rail Corridor will become an elevated park .... or even an emulation of the High Line.”

If it goes ahead, the Rail Corridor promises to deliver improved landscape design and leisure features such as rock climbing walls and urban farms. But several groups of activists have been campaigning to keep the corridor in its current state, due to its popularity as a green walking route.

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook and join the discussion