Read the best articles about cities from around the internet, or watch the most insightful urban videos from platforms like Youtube, Vimeo or leading publishers like CityLab, The Atlantic, Vice and many more.
A building on Zurich’s most exclusive shopping street has been converted into a blockchain-powered investment following its CHF130 million ($134 million) sale. It is the latest attempt to unlock the value of bricks and mortar using digitally-coded tokens.
There’s no concrete definition of a smart city, but high-tech versions promise to use cameras and sensors to monitor everyone and everything, from bins to bridges, and use the resulting data to help the city run smoothly. But what if we ditched the data and embraced ancient technology instead?
Technology may be reshaping how we engage with urban spaces, but does it risk sucking the life out of them in the process? We explore some of the creative projects that are making our cities more playful.
Li Yang grew up in what he thought was a boring town. It was called 404, like the error code, and sat a couple hours from the nearest city, in the sun-beaten Gobi Desert of western China. It was once part of a massive nuclear weapons base in the People’s Republic of China.
A story that goes back to the 1820s, when that part of New York was largely open countryside. Among them was a predominantly black community. It became known as Seneca Village. And when Irish and German immigrants moved in, it became a rare example at the time of an integrated neighborhood.
On July 5th, 2016, Sean Wang moved across the country to work and live in New York City for one year. This is a personal documentary of his year, chronicled by voicemails left by his mom.
German photographer David Altrath unveils the majestic underground tunnels and their stunning architectural and artistic detail that feature in Stockholm’s underground in his latest series, simply titled Metro.
Dollar-discount stores get the blame for “food deserts”—neighborhoods without supermarkets. It’s claimed, these stores drive out supermarkets with their low prices and saturate poor neighborhoods with junk food. But are dollar stores really to blame for bad diets?
Kentucky’s plan to bring broadband to remote parts of the state has sputtered and its future looks increasingly bleak. State leaders told rural residents it would create better business opportunities. But instead, they keep getting left behind.
After three years of severe drought, Cape Town was at risk of becoming one of the first cities in the world to run out of municipal water. Nicholas Sloane has a fix for a country struggling with its supply.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, a notorious Hollywood satanist was linked to a plot to murder the third Kennedy brother, uncovered documents show. For Kennedy, the LaVey case was just another bizarre subplot in a life full of them, the cost of being a Kennedy and leading a public life.
Toyota revealed plans to build a prototype “city” of the future on a 175-acre site at the base of Mt. Fuji in Japan. Called the Woven City, it will be a fully connected ecosystem powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
By the late 1960s, Georgia Power had started planning to build the Robert W. Scherer Power Plant. Over a decade later, in 1982, its first unit opened in Juliette. Now, residents worry it’s contaminating their water.
Nearly 2,000 drones took to the night sky and illuminated the Huangpu River in Shanghai to welcome in the new year. At around midnight, the drones gathered to form a running man. It moved forward, showing the changes and achievements Shanghai has made in the past 40 years.
It was a huge success: Parking spots are now bike lanes, transit is fast and easy, and the streets (and local businesses) are full of people. Several other cities are also working to reduce car use, such as Madrid, which limits access to the city center for anyone other than the people who live there.
The High Line and its imitators are examples of “landscape urbanism,” a growing design movement that places green space in collision with old infrastructure. Rehabilitation projects follow a familiar playbook, aestheticizing the labor of the past even as they support a gentrified future.
Commissioned by The Getty Museum to the painter, draftsman, photographer, and bookmaker, Ed Ruscha. Utilizing The Getty Research Institute’s preservation and digitization of over a million images from Ed’s Streets of Los Angeles photo series, and excerpts from Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road.”
Architecture studio Rombout Frieling Lab and Research Institutes of Sweden have created the Station of Being as a prototype bus stop. The bus stop in Umeå, Sweden, was designed to improve the waiting conditions for passengers using public transport in cold weather conditions within the Arctic region.
In cities like New York, Paris, Rotterdam, and soon San Francisco, car-free streets are emerging amid a growing movement. Cities have limited space, and how it is allocated is tremendously important for people. The denser a place, the dearer each square foot is. Yet all over the world, cities were retrofitted to accommodate cars.
Salesforce Park, in downtown San Francisco, sits atop the Salesforce Transit Center. It is a lush, five-and-a-half-acre rooftop arcadia of rolling meadows and meticulously landscaped, climatically harmonious, drought-tolerant flora. San Francisco’s newest public space reflects Big Tech’s influence—and a city’s anxieties.
Once a cornerstone of American consumerism, shopping malls are now mostly ghost towns. In a new episode of The Atlantic’s Idea File, staff writers Jim and Deb Fallows explore the phenomenon of the dead mall, and its emerging afterlife.
Copenhagen has already earned its reputation as Europe’s capital of style and sustainability. Now the city is embarking on some of the world’s most ambitious architecture projects in a bid to become the greenest on earth.
ICON, the 3D-printing construction company, has partnered with Mobile Loaves & Fishes (MLF) to build 3D-printed homes in Austin. The only neighborhood of its kind in the nation, Community First! Village provides affordable, permanent housing and a supportive community for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness.
Detroit is grappling with both devastating poverty and a hot real estate market. But Rev. Faith Fowler of the nonprofit Cass Community Social Services sees a way to remedy both: Develop tiny houses, and create a rent-to-own financing mechanism to help impoverished Detroiters become owners of those homes.
In the ‘food deserts’ of Memphis, Tennessee, dominated by fast food outlets and convenience stores, locals lack what seems a basic human right in the richer half of the city: a supermarket. With a big gap in life expectancy, are these Americans doomed to die younger than their neighbours – or can they fight for their right to nutrition?
Kinshasa is now bigger than Paris. Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen are forming an epic, 40 million-person super city. Over the past 30 years, the scale of population change is hard to grasp. How do you even visualize 10 million people?
The man known as the Taxi King arrived at his 2014 holiday party in a $384,000 Ferrari, wearing a custom Italian suit. Five years later, that man, Evgeny A. Freidman, stood in a mostly empty courtroom in Albany, N.Y., as a judge sentenced him to probation for tax fraud.
I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here—a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.
In 1979, responding to complaints from riders that the subway map was difficult to use, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority hired the Manhattan design firm Michael Hertz and Associates to create a new map. The M.T.A. subway map is a record of how graphic design, politics and geography have shaped the city over the last 40 years.
One of the most important economic stories of the past couple of decades is the rise of economic inequality in the United States and around the world. Since 1980, economists say, wage growth for the highest-paid workers has been roughly triple that for the lowest paid. In some cities, the disparity is wider.
The New York Times visualized the damaging, tiny particles that wreak havoc on human health. From the Bay Area to New Delhi, see how the world’s worst pollution compares with your local air. The particles are too small for the eye to see but in high concentrations, they cast a haze in the sky.
Last month, Bastrop, Texas, adopted a new building code, known as Bastrop Building Block, which radically alters how the city will approach development. The new flexible system was designed to address three interrelated issues hitting municipalities across the county: population growth, aging infrastructure, and outdated development patterns.
In the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq War, Saddam Hussein became obsessed with the Babylonian ruler Nebuchadnezzar. Saddam saw himself as a modern reincarnation of Nebuchadnezzar, and to prove it, he spent millions building a massive reconstruction of Babylon.
When LAX offered me the opportunity to work with its TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) teams, I couldn’t say no. From dead bodies in the security line to a cobra in a Pringles can, you wouldn’t believe the crazy things that happen at America’s busiest airport of origin.
During the late 1960s many believed revolutionary social and political change was imminent, and Jacques Cousteau was no exception. Soon there would be “undersea parliaments and new nations,” he wrote; “poets, architects, and painters would be needed to give expression” to this “new world.”
The number of international tourist arrivals has been increasing more or less exponentially since the mid-20th century, and totaled about 1.4 billion in 2018. Europe has seen the biggest share, but the Asia-Pacific region is growing fast.
To mark the release of his latest book, ‘Tokyo-Yokosuka 1976-1983’, Greg Girard has shared a collection of largely unseen images offering a nostalgic glimpse of the Japanese capital before it exploded into the hyper-modern metropolis we know today.
When the Eiffel Tower opened in 1889 to much wonder and acclaim, designer Gustave Eiffel soaked up the praise, but as if that wasn’t enough, it was soon revealed that he had built himself a small apartment near the top of the world wonder.
The shopping mall would have been inconceivable without air conditioning, as would the deep-plan and glass-walled office block, as would computer servers. The expansion of tract housing in postwar suburban America relied on affordable domestic air conditioning units.
Kanna-machi is living on borrowed time. It’s set to be among the first municipal victims of Japan’s demographic trajectory. The phenomenon is called shoushikoureika—the combined effects of an aging population, anemic birthrate, and surging demand for social services.
