Apparently Coventry is building a tram line at less than a fifth of the per mile cost of the Edinburgh tram, and with a construction time of *eight weeks* rather than six years. The trick is the use of battery-powered trams and shallow prefabricated tracks. A potential breakthrough? capx.co/coventrys-tram-build…

Recently finished in Le Plessis-Robinson near Paris. This is a social housing renewal scheme, replacing decayed postwar blocks with mixed-tenure and mixed-use development at much higher densities.

Like most European cities, Valencia was built on a river, vital for freight transport until the invention of railways. In the 1950s, fed up with flooding, the Valencians redirected the river around the city and turned the original river bed into an enormous linear park.

Dublin's garden squares illustrate an important principle in the economics of placemaking. Although parks are, in themselves, a pure cost to developers, they raised the value of the surrounding houses so much that developers laid them out anyway. The key condition for this was unified land ownership: landowners will sacrifice land for public goods if they own enough surrounding land that this benefits them. Fragmented land ownership is more likely to generate 'race to the bottom' effects. In understanding the economics of placemaking, the unity of land ownership is one of your core tools.