This week’s collection of city stories from around the web takes us from Paris to Jeddah via Seattle, exploring ambitious public infrastructure projects, second cities, inspiring libraries and a colourful map of the building heights in London. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories, and any others you’ve read recently: share your thoughts in the comments below.

The Grand Paris Express

As part of the “Grand Paris” strategy to better connect the French capital’s banlieues with its centre and manage the city more inclusively, work is underway on “the most ambitious new subway project in the Western world,” according to the Atlantic. The Grand Paris Express will expand the century-old Métro system to include four new lines, 68 stations and more than 120 miles of track.

The expansion, which has been costed at approximately €26bn, is expected to increase the metro’s ridership by almost 40%. It’s also hoped that the project will reduce Paris’s traffic problems and improve connections – both physically and socially – between the suburban banlieues and the central area within the Boulevard Périphérique ring road. Travel between different banlieues – which currently sometimes requires going into central Paris and back out again – should also be made easier.

“Not even one in five of the region’s residents live inside the French capital’s boundaries,” Grabar writes. “The region’s transportation system hasn’t caught up to this reality.” While metro stations abound within Paris, the communities beyond the Boulevard Périphérique are poorly served by either the Métro or RER rail network.

The project is due to be completed by 2030.

Seattle’s freeway-topping park

New York’s High Line may have made popular the idea of transforming a disused elevated railway or highway into a public park, but what about highways still in use? A proposal in Seattle envisages putting a two-mile-long, 45-acre linear park on top of the city’s Interstate 5 freeway. Writing in Next City, Jen Kinney describes the Seattle CAP proposal – so named to reflect the fact it is “capping” the freeway – as “a High Line for an existing transit corridor, a central park for a city with few grand public gathering places”.

Currently, the Interstate 5 freeway is a “steep, noisy canyon that divides some of the city’s fastest developing neighbourhoods”. The man behind the new proposal, Chris Patano of Patano Studio Architecture, wants to use the park to knit Seattle back together, as well as reduce noise and air pollution, manage stormwater and create some affordable housing.

It’s not Seattle’s first highway-capping park, though. Located to the south of the CAP proposal is the 5.5-acre Freeway Park, recognised by the Cultural Landscape Foundation as the first ever park built over a highway.

Books from the wreckage

Inside the basement of a house in the war-torn Damascus suburb of Daraya, you will find a makeshift community library, home to 15,000 books. Run by rebel fighters in the Syrian capital, the Fajr (Dawn) library – named the city’s “first-ever free library” by Buzzfeed – consists of books salvaged from the wreckage of local homes, schools, and hospitals that have been destroyed. The library is open daily – apart from when it has to close due to bombings – and even during power outages, books are read by candlelight.

“With all the destruction, we need to hold on to our culture,” explains Ahmad Mujahid, one of the main library organisers. Ahmad and a group of roughly 40 people, many of whom were college students who abandoned their studies because of the war, started collecting books from destroyed buildings and slowly put the library together for the benefit of the local community.

Mapping London’s building heights

Quite simply, it does what it says on the tin. This colourful interactive map of London – produced by Emu Analytics – maps the heights of buildings in the UK capital. The dots of red and orange show where the highest structures in the city are, while the blue areas show the location of the lowest-rise buildings.

Building heights map of London. Photograph: Emu Analytics

Exploring Jeddah

Writing in Roads and Kingdoms, Adam Baron visits Saudi Arabia’s “second city”, Jeddah. A long-standing centre of commerce originating as a port city, Jeddah’s population has grown from roughly 150,000 to more than three million over the past century. Baron explores the differences between the “cacophonously cosmopolitan nature” of Jeddah and its slick urban counterpart, the country’s capital Riyadh. “Jeddah felt like a meeting place between west, east and far east,” Baron explains, “a place of intermingling between the four corners of the Islamic world straddling – psychologically, though not geographically – the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.”

Milwaukee evictions

Millions of Americans are evicted from their homes every year. In Milwaukee, a city of fewer than 105,000 renter households, landlords legally evict roughly 16,000 adults and children each year. Writing in the New Yorker, Matthew Desmond explains that nearly half of the forced moves of renting families in Milwaukee are “informal evictions,” which, “like many rentals, involve no paperwork, and take place in the shadow of the law.”

Alongside meeting some of the people experiencing this forced ejection from their homes in Wisconsin’s largest city, Desmond paints a bleak picture of eviction as a thriving urban business. “There are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. Some moving companies specialize in evictions, their crews working all day long, five days a week.”

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