The television series Sex and the City debuted in 1998, the same year I began writing about architecture and cities for The Inquirer. Little did I guess back then that Carrie Bradshaw's glamorous gallivanting through the streets of Gotham signaled a major image update for America's cities, from lawless jungles to middle-class playgrounds. It's the city that's sexy now.

In April 2009, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter released a plan called Greenworks. It is his administration’s vision of how to make Philadelphia the greenest city in the nation. Many of the ideas in the Greenworks plan can be traced to The Next Great City Initiative that challenged citizens to help develop policies that would promote sustainable economic vitality. One of the major organizers of the Next Great City was Penn Future. We asked Christine Knapp to give us her take on Nutter’s first two years in office.

The Wiktionary defines the term urban legend as: "A widely circulated story that is untrue or apocryphal, often having elements of humor or horror." There is an urban legend that is in wide circulation these days and it goes something like "Soaring electric prices are looming in Pennsylvania. Electric retail competition has failed."

Looking deep into the geologic past, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have learned that along the Atlantic Coast, including New Jersey, sea level rose three times faster during the 20th century than it did during the previous 4,000 years.