Here’s my weekly urbanist reading list:

• Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: How city design can help save the planet.  An excerpt from Patrick Condon’s new book Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities: Design Strategies for the Post Carbon World. (The Tyee)

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  Cities for People—A Q&A With Architect Jan Gehl: His name doesn’t loom as large as Jane Jacobs, William H. Whyte or Andrés Duany, but no one has done more in the last decade to retrofit cities for cyclists and pedestrian than this Danish architect. (Fast Company)

• The Great American Streetcar Myth: A contrarian (yet believable) view on the decline and fall of the once prevalent street cars in American cities. (Market Urbanism)

• Social Networking for Safer Cycling: Biking through city streets as a lone cyclist is far different from biking among a pack of fellow commuters. An organized bike pool can help riders navigate streets, meet other cyclists and feel safer. (The City Fix)

• Cities as Interaction Machines: The everyday nature of interacting with strangers is a byproduct of urbanization, which has created a culture of dense populations with sparse interconnections. That density and sparseness of connections itself is part of what defines ‘the urban.’ (The Atlantic)