The Architects' Journal recently published an article pitting five competing views of teaching sustainability against one another. The opinions come from a range of backgrounds, including engineers, tutors and landscape architects, and discuss how architecture students should be taught to design in a sustainable way - or if they should be taught this at all.

The competing opinions are telling in the issues that they highlight, demonstrating how complex the issue of sustainability has become, and how it fits into the wider context of architectural education.

Read the different reactions to the issue of sustainability in education after the break

A recent profile in Architectural Record highlights the career of Peter Wynne Rees, the chief planner of the City of London: the famous 'square mile' which contains the major financial district of Greater London, as well as some of its great tourist attractions, such as St Paul's Cathedral.

The profile focuses on the new crop of skyscrapers which Rees has ushered in in his 27 years as chief planner, something which has been contentious for preservationists. When he came to the job in 1985, the City of London had just one skyscraper: Tower 42, built in 1980. With the success of the Gherkin in the early 2000s, the surrounding area has seen many more high profile skyscrapers, such as the Heron Tower, 122 Leadenhall Street (The Cheesegrater) and 20 Fenchurch Street (The Walkie-Talkie).

After a government report earlier this month found that the London Olympics had brought a £10-billion-boost to the UK's economy - effectively breaking even with the initial investment after just one year - the architectural community has begun to question whether the built legacy of the games will be worthwhile in the long run.

Guardian critic Olly Wainwright is scathing about the Olympic park, particularly the developments at the edge of the site: "At every junction of this roaring A-road sprouts a steroidal tower, each clad in ever more lurid colours, transforming the street into a gauntlet of competing ambitions. Looming over adjacent council estates, these brash totems are a monument to Olympian greed... Strip away all the festive colours, though, and you'll find that these are actually mean-minded silos of tightly packed one-bedroom flats, mostly sold overseas for buy-to-let."

Find out more about Wainwright's investigations, and other opinions of the Olympic legacy, after the break.

This discussion on Quora, entitled "which is the most well planned city in the world?" certainly got us thinking; not only because of the interesting and diverse answers to the question, but also because of the different reasons which were used to support these answers.

Currently the most popular answer seems to be Zurich, on account of its excellent (and obsessively punctual) public transport, organized waste disposal and numerous public drinking fountains. Other cities which are commended for their public transport and cleanliness are Singapore and Seoul. But other contributors seem to have a very different idea of what makes a well-planned city - read on to find out more.

The New London Awards, which recognize the best projects in London - both recently completed and on the drawing-board - were held at London's Guildhall on the 12th of July. Richard Rogers took the top prize of "New Londoner of the Year" in recognition of his life-long commitment to raising the quality of urbanism in the UK capital. The award coincides with his 80th birthday and a major retrospective at the Royal Academy.

See all the winners of the 17 different awards after the break.

+ 4

"I have a lot of big plans for the gallery, but every idea is an experiment; I don't necessarily want to enforce what it will be, but rather find out what it wants to be." This is how Thomas Ermacora described his vision of the Lime Wharf Gallery, a largely hidden series of spaces squeezed between Vyner Street and Regents Canal in the middle of Hackney's burgeoning creative quarter.

Ermacora hopes the gallery will become an "accelerator of change through culture", bringing arts, technology and social enterprise together for projects which generate optimism for the future. All of these traits made Lime Wharf Gallery the perfect space to present "Future Fitting." This evening of talks, orchestrated by Ermacora and Lucy Bullivant (editor of the new webzine Urbanista), focused on urban design that has the foresight and flexibility to deal with the needs of the future.

Read about the ideas presented at the Future Fitting event after the break...

The Southbank Centre and Feilden Clegg Bradley have taken their designs back to the drawing board, deciding to delay their planning application in order to resolve the mounting issues surrounding the proposal.

The designs to update the brutalist cultural centre have divided people from the start; however, the tide of opinion seems to have definitively shifted away from the design due to a sustained campaign by skateboarders (who make use of the undercroft) and now criticism from the neighboring National Theatre and the UK design council CABE.

Read more about the controversy surrounding the Southbank Centre after the break...

To mark the occasion of World Refugee Day on June 20th, the IKEA Foundation announced an important new collaboration with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Refugee Housing Unit to design a new type of shelter which will replace the outdated tents currently in use in refugee camps worldwide.

As you'd expect from IKEA, the result is a flat-packed, modular design (ideal for cheaply transporting to refugee camps) that can be assembled in 4 hours. Though it is expected to cost about twice as much, it will last much longer than the tents, which must be replaced roughly every six months - a particularly important improvement, as the average family stays in a refugee camp for 12 years.

The design also carries a number of other advantages, such as increased space and privacy, better temperature control and enough solar energy to power a light in the evening. The design is currently being tested in Ethiopia before being deployed worldwide, however, this is not the end of IKEA's collaboration with UNHCR. These shelters are just the first part of a long-term collaboration which will hopefully provide healthcare and education - and ultimately a better quality of life for the world's refugees.

More coverage of architecture's involvement in refugee aid, after the break.