The best city stories we’ve collected from around the web this week take us from Vietnam to Kaszakhstan to Tunisia as they explore a bizarre new design for a housing development, cycle-friendly urban living, the threat of rising sea levels and abandoned palaces. We’d love to hear your responses to these stories: share your thoughts in the comments below.

Astana takes to the slopes

Kazakhstan’s strange capital of Astana might just be getting even more unusual. As reported by CNN, a planned apartment block in the city will be crowned with nothing less than a ski slope – just in case you want a little bit of winter sports when you get home after work. With its very cold and often snowy winters, Astana certainly has a ski-friendly climate, but most slopes are a long drive away from the city. The 21-storey apartment block Slalom House, though, will have a 326m artificial slope descending from its roof.

Vietnam’s ‘walking and cycling’ city

The sign welcoming you to the Vietnamese city of Hoi An sets the scene: it reads “walking and cycling town”. Copenhagenize take us inside the city with a gallery of pictures showing what a pedestrian and cyclist’s paradise it is. Bicycles remain a dominant form of transport; even the canal ferry boats are loaded up with bikes as cycling locals travel across the city. Anyone fancy a holiday?

Miami under water

Hal Wanless, the chairman of the University of Miami’s geological-sciences department, believes that due to rising sea levels, much of the south Florida region may have less than half a century left before it’s under water. Could Miami’s time really be up? Elizabeth Kolbert, writing in the New Yorker, describes her time following Wanless around Miami observing the flooding that is already taking place, and how it is impacting daily life.

To cope with its recurrent flooding, Miami Beach has already spent something like a hundred million dollars. It is planning on spending several hundred million more. Such efforts are, in Wanless’s view, so much money down the drain. Sooner or later – and probably sooner – the city will have too much water to deal with.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yana Kibyakova walks through a flooded street in Miami. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Tunisia’s ghost city

The city of Hammamet, in Tunisia, used to be one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country. Since the Jasmine Revolution five years ago, however, it lies empty, with almost all of the 45 hotels in its tourist area closed and many buildings abandoned. Included among these is one of Ben Ali’s palaces, derelict and sitting overlooking the sea. Laura-Maï Gaveriaux visits its remains for True Africa, with a gallery of beautiful images.

The value of public space

In the Daily Maverick, Judith February argues the case for Johannesburg and Cape Town to have better, more inclusive public spaces to facilitate community interaction:

South African cities, for an array of reasons to do with the past and present have failed to grasp quite how fundamental cities and their development are in creating those spaces for interaction between ordinary people in a society with such high levels of inequality. Sharing public space is the great leveller, after all.

In Cape Town, the city authorities tried to develop one of its most diverse public spaces – the Sea Point promenade – into shopping centres and garages, but local residents rose up and protested the plans as part of the “seafront for all” campaign. Examples like this, February explains, shows that the public already understand the value of truly inclusive public space for a better city, but the authorities have some catching up to do.

