City links: Light rail arrives in Ethiopia, billboards react to your emotions and Nashville campaigns against cars in this week’s best city stories

The best city stories from around the web this week explore sub-Saharan Africa’s first light rail system in Ethiopia’s capital, Chicago’s financial instability, eerily interactive city billboards and the Nashville residents trying to get their city to ditch cars.

We’d love to hear your responses to these stories, and any others you’ve read recently, both on Guardian Cities and elsewhere. Just share your thoughts in the comments below.



Light rail comes to Addis Ababa

The 32km light-rail project that had been under construction in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, finally opened earlier this month, becoming sub-Saharan Africa’s first light-rail system. As M&G Africa reports, citizens queued up to use it on its first day.

The system, which will expand next month to total 39 stations across the city, is expected to carry 15,000 people per hour in one direction. The much-anticipated infrastructure project was built over three years by a Chinese company after the Ethiopian government secured 85% of funding from the Export-Import Bank of China. Meanwhile, a much-delayed light-rail system in Lagos is still under construction.

Broke Chicago

On the surface, Chicago appears to be booming. Businesses are thriving, new construction projects dot the skyline and public infrastructure projects are proliferating, such as the newly enhanced Riverwalk.

Despite all this, as Aaron M Renn explains in City Journal, “the Windy City is a fiscal basket case”. Chicago has debts to pay, and huge holes in budgets; its future looks rocky. “Chicago’s troubles are a lesson in what happens to cities and states when they ignore financial realities,” Renn writes. “People have been saying ‘The bills are coming due’ in Chicago for a long time – and now it’s finally true.”



Billboards get personal

The day has finally come. As if online adverts digitally placing your name on products wasn’t enough, now London has adverts that aim to be able to read your emotions and respond accordingly. As Andrew McStay in CityMetric explains:

Advertising giant M&C Saatchi is currently testing advertising billboards with hidden Microsoft Kinect cameras that read viewers’ emotions and react according to whether a person’s facial expression is happy, sad or neutral. The test adverts – which feature a fictitious coffee brand named Bahio – have already appeared on Oxford Street and Clapham Common in London.

This manifestation of “empathic media” is a strange mix of interactive cityscape and the increasing power of the commercialised urban fabric. The smart city might want us to engage more, but it also wants us to spend more. Coming soon to a street near you.

Vancouver in disguise



Every Frame a Painting, a film blog, shares an amusing video that highlights how, although the “chameleon” city of Vancouver is used as a stand-in for almost every other city in North America (as well as others further afield), it never plays itself. Editor Tony Zhou explains:

Perhaps no other city has been as thoroughly hidden from modern filmmaking as Vancouver, my hometown. Today, it’s the third-biggest film production city in North America, behind Los Angeles and New York. And yet for all the movies and TV shows that are shot there, we hardly ever see the city itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vancouver Never Plays Itself by Every Frame a Painting

Car-free in Nashville



World Car-free Day took place on 22 September. A neighbourhood association in the US city of Nashville wanted to take it one step further and ditch cars for the entire week. “The developers keep telling us this is a walkable neighbourhood … We wanted to test that concept,” a resident explained in The Nashville Business Journal. The neighbourhood group hopes their “Don’t Car Campaign” will spread across the city, influencing other areas to do the same. Meanwhie, CityMetric ask whether one-off car-free days and events like this can really help change transport habits in cities permanently.