A monthly roundup of the news, dispatches, and marginalia that caught our eye.

In this month’s issue of the Queue, the staff reads up on the grand opening of Dilworth Plaza in Philadelphia by OLIN, wonders at the possibilities of a man-made leaf, and gets down with Greenpeace and Reggie Watts on climate change.

CATCHING UP WITH…

• Dilworth Plaza’s makeover by OLIN (“Follow the Lines,” LAM, January 2014) opens on September 4 in Philadelphia with new transit access, a fountain (and in winter, an ice rink), art, and Cuban food in what had been a desolate sunken plaza.

• Harsh contentions arise in a current forensic audit on Great Park, designed by Ken Smith in Irvine, California (General Design Honor Award, LAM, August 2009). According to the L.A. Times, the audit finds that more than $200 million has been spent on the project, yet the park has little to show for it.

• After the collapse of an earlier plan, the San Francisco Chronicle’s John King reports, the Presidio Trust in San Francisco will release new design concepts on September 4 to generate a fresh public debate on the future of Crissy Field (“At the Presidio, a Field of Schemes,” October 22, 2013).

FIELD STUDIES

• Dezeen reports on Julian Melchiorri, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in the UK, who thinks he’s got long-distance space travel figured out with his new invention—the world’s supposedly first photosynthetic material that absorbs water and carbon dioxide to create oxygen.

• Looking at climate change and rising sea levels, the township of Choiseul Bay, 6.6 feet above sea level in the Solomon Islands, is moving to where it will be a little less wet in the future.

• Brad Buchanan is a rancher. He’s also an architect and Denver’s new head city planner.

• Think pedestrian crosswalk time limits are too short? Planners in Singapore thought so, too, which is why they recently expanded their Green Man Plus program, a system that allows the elderly and disabled to activate extra time for street crossing with the use of a special card.

OUT AND ABOUT

• LANDSCAPE 2014, an annual trade event with seminars and a product expo not unlike our own ASLA Annual Meeting, but for the British landscape industry, will take place September 23 and 24 in London.

• Lines and Nodes, a symposium and film festival that will take on media, infrastructure, and aesthetics, will take place September 19–21 in New York.

• The heretofore unthinkable L.A. River Boat Race will take place on August 30, and the last kayak trips of the summer are filling up with the approaching September 14 season’s end.

DISTRACT ME FROM MY DEADLINE DEPT.

• You’ve seen London from the skyline, but have you seen it from the treetops?

• Reggie Watts raps for the future of our planet for Greenpeace.

• If you can’t find this bus stop in Baltimore, then you’re not looking hard enough.

• World’s first “unstealable” bike calls to mind claims made by a certain “unsinkable” ship.