Cities are dense life centers offering a greater range of opportunities and services than those typically present in rural settings. While this offers a strong draw to people looking to take advantage of the wealth and income cities offer, organic growth of urban areas can decrease efficiency and home values when the settings become too complex and disorganized to remain inviting. Urban decay then leads to increases in crime and can be connected with shifts towards suburban settings, which in turn increase air pollution. It's a complex problem that has largely been met with middling results. Can new trends in urban planning help reclaim urban zones?

The World Health Organization forecasts that 60% of humans will live in a city by 2030 and the number will rise to 70% by 2050. Bigger, higher, denser - the characteristics of cities around the world involve a lot of words ending with '-er' - such as dirtier as air pollution increases along the population curve.

 Another IFTF artifact this week. This time offering a trade of DNA from your spit with an offer of free transportation with the purpose of identifying "toxins, the environment, even daily stressors."

It's an interesting idea and the trade of free for personal data keeps trending upwards. Just last week we read about Glow First, the non-profit arm of the Glow app where women can earn money towards fertility treatment by filling out ten months of fertility data.

How much data will we provide? How will it be stored? For how long? There are so many ways FREE can get us to give up details of our lives. Girls Gone Wild has proven how intimate details can be leveraged from a free T-shirt. So this view of the future doesn't beg questions about spit or transportation. Instead, I ask what it will take for us to become inoculated against so freely giving up our data/bodies/intimate details in return for the free of email/prizes/social media?

Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.

This was the content of a text message received by cell phone carrying protestors in Kiev by the Ukranian government. Using mobile technologies, the government was able to identify all of the phones in certain areas and target them with this warning. It's a message that lets the carrier of the phone know they, or the phone owner, has been identified by private records as participating in the protests - or at least being in the vicinity.

Back in November, I posted about Japanese Micro-apartments and how they might offer the feeling of space confinement on long-voyage space vessels. On a happier note, Spanish architecture firm Elii takes a tiny (620 square feet) living space and redesigns it to offer useful elements such as hidden storage, disappearing eating space and maximal sunlight penetration.