This week’s best city stories from around the web explore Silicon Valley’s newest sustainability project, an app which automatically sprays potholes you cycle over, the “missing” Guatemala City neighbourhood and Indianapolis’ growing pains with a new electric car share scheme.

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.

Go green

Vallco Shopping Mall in Silicon Valley, is yet another “dying” shopping mall in the US. As Adele Peters writes in Fast Co Exist: “Half the stores are empty, the food court is abandoned, and people leave Yelp reviews talking about their fear of zombie ambushes in the eerie corridors.”

So – you guessed it – it’s being redeveloped. Situated right by the Apple headquarters, the project is no doubt hoping to attract the young tech crowd to new shops and restaurants. But luckily, having extensively consulted the local community, the developers are creating a bit more of a public (and environmental) benefit: the world’s largest green roof, open for people to use as a park. In an area dominated by car use, the sustainable design also promises a walkable, cycle-friendly neighbourhood with integrated public transport. The plans await approval by the city of Cupertino next year.

Zoning out

Guatemala City is divided into 25 different zones, or districts. But one of them - zone 20 - doesn’t actually exist. Writing in the LA Times, Marisa Gerber talks to the writer Juan Pensamiento, for whom the city’s famous “missing zone” became an obsession from a young age:



He remembers the day in first grade when his teacher taught the class about the city’s zones. She counted all the way to 19 and then bounced to 21. Pensamiento and his friends looked at one another, puzzled, and asked her why there wasn’t a 20. “I have no idea,” she said. “There just isn’t.”

Pensamiento wrote a book all about the different zones of the city (chapter 20 is, of course, missing), continuing to ask people about the elusive zone – but no one had an answer. Until, that is, one day an explanation came in: when Guatemala City’s urban engineer Raúl Aguilar Batres designed the spiral that gave shape to the city, the place he picked for zone 20 lay beyond the city limits, so it got skipped over.

Spray paint it better

A designer in Berlin, tired of the dangerous potholes he came across while cycling, has developed a system in which an app, linked up to a spray paint can, senses road disturbances and colourfully marks the problems as you cycle over them.

“Auto-Complain works with a phone’s accelerometer to identify bumps in the road,” Ben Schiller explains in Fast Co Exist. “When users ride over the obstacle, the app maps the location, then sends a signal to an onboard paint gun that sprays a mark on the road.” The system also generates a PDF that’s sent automatically to a city road department at the end of the ride and the complaints are viewable on an online, interactive map. The designer, Florian Born, believes it could be useful to use on dedicated bike lanes which are meant to be free from problems and hopes to release it to the public next February. And in case you were wondering – the paint is chalk-based and temporary.



Indianapolis electric car share

As we explored recently, Indianapolis has been trying to develop innovative regeneration approaches to combat gentrification. But this month, the city welcomed a new approach to public transport in the form of an electric car share scheme, albeit with noticeable growing pains. As Carol Matlack writes in Bloomberg:

Local business owners have groused about recharging stands taking up parking space outside their establishments, while disgruntled taxpayers complain about the expenditure of public funds on a project run by a French company. Some city council members, angry that the mayor didn’t seek their approval for the outlay, have even threatened to have [the electric] cars towed off the streets.

Car hotel

CityLab tells the story of two “hotels for automobiles” that were created in New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when America “was going wild for cars”. With increasing traffic congestion in the city, the structures were an architectural response to the problem of how to accommodate cars in densely built-up areas before huge underground car parks became the norm.

An original diagram of one of the structures, 24 stories tall, shows a sort of futuristic car park presented as a temple to the automobile. People would drive their car on to an elevator, get out and press the relevant button, and the car would be automatically taken up to the correct floor and stored. However, the “auto-scrapers” closed after two years when the company behind them went bust.