New cities from scratch

Witold Rybczynski has a new Slate slideshow, this time looking at the edgy new cities being designed and built from scratch on the Persian Gulf. The NY Times has a slideshow on a new city in Inner Mongolia being designed by a mob of hot rising starchitects. As Rybczynski points out, building a designed city from scratch isn't a new idea. But, these cities are definitely going to be filled with new architectural ideas that aren't just straight out of the New Urbanist play book.