Over at Mediaite, Mark Lamster has an insightful post on how the world’s architecture landscape has fundamentally changed in the last ten years.

Any discussion of this topic usually starts with the U.S., a former infrastructure leader that  has seen its fair share of decline, neglect, and disaster in the past decade.

From the World Trade Center to New Orleans post-Katrina, more than one major American city has seen a sharp and violent mutation in urban design and structure. Then there’s the nationwide effects of the mortgage crisis, which Lamster describes with the following:

The home has been the locus and symbol of American prosperity for decades, the ostensible lynchpin of our dreams for both emotional contentment and fiscal well-being.

But the shelter and security promised by architecture have proven to be, for many Americans, an illusion. The exploitation of our desires, whether fraudulent or merely irresponsible, triggered economic collapse. The toll that overbuilding has taken on our environment and our communities has been enormous.

Internationally, the changes have been less destruction and more revolution, with brand new powerhouses like China and India seeing seriously remarkable growth in urban planning, highways, and more as their economies boom, their populations shift into the middle class, and new metropolitan areas spring. From the astonishing metamorphosis of Beijing to the massive outsourcing influx that single-handedly built a labor market in Mumbai, the emerging superpowers have been pumping billions into new housing, roads, urban centers, and yes, high-speed rail. And let’s not forget Dubai, which Lamster describes with the following: