Some of the city stories we enjoyed elsewhere this week.

  • Designer Dan Roosegaarde, of glowing tree streetlights fame, has used glow-in-the-dark paint on a stretch of highway in the Netherlands to create road markings. Unlike cats’ eyes, the markings don’t rely on reflecting light, making them safer for cyclists and easier to follow for cars. Once the markings have been tested in the Netherlands, they may be rolled out in other countries, including the UK. 

This video shows them in action:

  • This piece at How We Get To Next, the site accompanying the science and futurism TV series of the same name, follows the attempt of one Londoner to turn the city into a National Park. This may sound bonkers, but Daniel Raven-Ellison argues that London is actually one of the greenest urban areas in the world, and should be recognised as such. Here’s one of his promotional graphics, which shows London’s land categorised by use:

Raven-Ellison told the site: 

There’s a sense that somehow the wild has to be pristine to be valued. But if you’re an individual flower, or pigeon or fox, you’re no less wild. There are just fewer of you, and you’ve learned to be in a city better than maybe other things. But that doesn’t make you any less valuable.

  • CityLab has taken an unusually economics-based approach to their Halloween coverage in the form of this piece on Halloween pop-up stores. The stores, which appear one day in August stuffed with masks and capes, then disappear just as suddenly on 1 November, have suffered as the economy’s improved and as rents have inched upwards. To save on overheads, some now operate from giant tents in shopping centre car parks:

That Halloween pumpkin tent might look silly. (I would say “delightful.”) But more of them could be a telltale heart—no, sign—of a slow but steady economic rebound. And what could be less scary than a robust national retail sector?

  • And finally, forget skeletons and pumpkins – it’s  UN World Cities Day. The Guardian is marking the major international holiday by hosting 12 minute pitches of city ideas from all over the world. Meanwhile, we’re mostly unwrapping gritty urban gifts and cracking open the port.