Feargus O'Sullivan

Does Paris risk being “frozen in formaldehyde”?  The French capital’s strict historic building preservation has come under fire this month, after a major revamp of a Parisian landmark was shot down by the courts. The vast Samaritaine department store, looming over the Pont Neuf since 1869, has been shut for an extreme makeover since 2005, one that planned to replace three of its sandstone outer walls with an opaque glass shell. The rebuild’s lovers saw this proposed veil as “undulating, diaphanous.” For its haters, however, it was just a “giant shower curtain.” Demolition began and three facades came down, but this month the revamp’s opponents secured a court order blocking the changes (too late?). So now Paris neither has a sparkling new building, nor an old building clad in well-weathered sandstone.

City map geeks should approach Londonmapper with caution. Before you get halfway through this new London mapping site, launched last weekend, the bulk of your morning might be gone.  Dubbed “a social atlas of London” by its makers, geographers Danny Dorling and Benjamin Hennig, Londonmapper aims to “provide comprehensive insights into the state of poverty and inequality in the [British] capital,” according to its own mission statement. ­As a resource for understanding London, it’s invaluable, letting users chart anything from health problems to knife crime using data gleaned each year since the millennium. The site is also just a great place for the plain curious, showing you where London’s atheists live, how the city’s binge drinkers are distributed, and where to find its hedgehogs, as well as wonkish delights like this citywide age distribution gif.

The Uber Wars have officially arrived across Europe’s cities. As the ride-sharing app (or, as is the preferred parlance these days, “transportation network company”) has rolled out across the continent, its parent company has become embroiled in a complicated mesh of courtroom battles and public inquiries, with smartphone-enabled ride-hailing locked in a multi-city showdown with existing taxi services. In France, Europe’s Uber wars have crossed over into actual violence, and this week even got a homophobic mini-scandal as a side order.

If Paris were on sale, it could be yours for $956 billion. That, at least, is the price tag suggested by French historian Patrice de Moncan’s new book Que Vaut Paris? (How Much Is Paris Worth?), published in France this month. Written together with the head of the French National Real Estate Federation, Gilles Ricour de Bourgies, the book tallies up the total value of all property within Paris intra-muros, the historic core of the city’s metropolitan area.

Pity the average London plutocrat searching for a decent home. Britain’s premier city may attract the super-wealthy like wasps to a sugar bowl, but from now on residents of many of London’s most expensive neighborhoods will more or less be banned from expanding their houses.

Non-Europeans seeking a fast-track route to EU residency now have a new option—buying cheap Southern European property. As of this year, Portugal is offering super-speedy residency applications to anyone who buys a property over €500,000 ($658,150). Cyprus is offering the same deal with a €300,000 ($394,890) threshold. Both these countries are being undercut by Greece, however, which is giving speedy residency to buyers of any property from just €250,000 ($329,075) and gave out its first property-tied residency to a Chinese man Aug. 8.

Looking out over my friend Anne-Fay’s garden fence, we agreed the building work on the house opposite couldn’t possibly be for a family home. The back garden was now almost totally covered with a large brick shack, its still soft mortar beaten into streaks by the rain. The small, pitched-roofed Victorian building behind – what British people call a two-up, two-down due to its room layout – had been turned into a six-up, two down, squared off into a top-heavy, Lego-like mess with extra rooms on the upper floors. Housed in a poor neighborhood of Newham near the Olympic Park, where rents have risen 39 percent since last year despite house prices stagnating, it seems likely that my friend’s neighborhood is now succumbing to London’s latest housing scandal, a craze for quasi-legal backyard building.

Could modern Spain’s era of monumental urban projects finally be over? After a decades-long spurt of massive, influential development plans, Spain’s cities are now littered with half-built grand schemes that never happened. Madrid is currently missing a planned convention center (still a hole in the ground), a grandiosely titled arts center called the Coliseum of the Three Cultures (still two empty lots), a new stadium to replace one razed in 2006 and the long-promised, almost traffic-free Paseo Del Arte, a parkland promenade linking the city’s main museums.