For several decades now, cities in the United States have wished for a “24/7″ downtown, a place where people live as well as work, and keep the streets busy, interesting, and safe at all times of day. This is what urbanist Jane Jacobs preached in the 1960s, and it has long since become the accepted goal of urban planners. Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon

I’m normally sceptical about including teens in the design process - see the hoardings in East Greenwich with stock teenagers proclaiming their love for multi-coloured buildings for every reason you’ll ever need - but here’s an intelligent and well-researched approach.

As the medical sociologist Aaron Antonovsky said, “We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence.”

England (and perhaps the world) could do with a few more water fountains, and a few less police helicopters.

“There was a time when Columbia really turned its back on where it was located,” Bollinger says. “I wanted to take exactly the opposite approach.”

As I rise, I peer down into the neighborhoods backed up against this oddball thoroughfare. Signs of life abound: laundry and untended plants on balconies, second-floor diners in a blue-lit modernist pizza restaurant, the haunting evensong of a mosque. There’s an offering of incense outside the door to the travelators’ maintenance room, hard by a bar spilling hulking, balding gweilos into the street.

Lived properly–and I will come shortly to the dangers of not living the life properly–what happens with a high-velocity life is that some of the strictures of reality begin to fade away. It is not that the hassles and problems of ordinary travel disappear. What is really disappearing is the sense of connectedness to anything other than what you can take with you when you travel.