I finally got Samuel Herbert on the phone at 7:30 a.m., two days before Thanksgiving.“We’re really busy right now” he told me, his voice hoarse. There was a lot of racket in the background. “Could I call you back on Friday?”Not possible: I needed to know about turduckens right no … | Continue reading
London had been fielding serious plans to construct a green link across the river Thames for five years before ultimately cancelling the project last spring. Now, it’s apparently Paris’s turn and the French capital is going a step further—it wants three of them.New plans for car- … | Continue reading
The mafia was an unlikely victim of Brooklyn’s gentrification.Hipster coffee shops and Edison string lights aren’t the whole reason South Brooklyn’s mob scene has faded away, but the arrival of upscale businesses and yuppies was a contributing factor, according to Frank DiMatteo, … | Continue reading
If you walk down just about any residential alley in Vancouver, you’re bound to run across one of the city’s thousands of accessory dwelling units (ADUs), known locally as “laneway” or “lane” houses. These little houses range from about 600 square feet to 1,000 square feet. They’ … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, Urban Institute researcher Rolf Pendall and several co-authors issued a report on industry and labor for the states that surround the Great Lakes—Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Their conclusion: Though the region has long been syno … | Continue reading
Uber cover-up: In the latest of its cascade of 2017 disasters, the ride-hailing giant disclosed yesterday that hackers had stolen 57 million driver and rider accounts—a breach the company concealed for more than a year after paying a $100,000 ransom. For Uber’s new chief executiv … | Continue reading
There is no holiday more American than Thanksgiving—and perhaps none with origins so shrouded in comforting myths.The story is simple enough. In 1620 a group of English Protestant dissenters known as Pilgrims arrived in what’s now Massachusetts to establish a settlement they call … | Continue reading
This Thanksgiving weekend is predicted to be the busiest on the road since 2005, a sign of a recovering economy and a reality drivers will have to grin and bear. Following its annual holiday tradition, Google has compiled a series of interactive maps and charts pointing travelers … | Continue reading
On Thursday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the EV maker’s latest marvel: a fully electric heavy-duty semi truck that can travel 400 miles within 30 minutes of charging, Musk says, with the same hauling capabilities as a typical 18-wheeler. The sleek rig also boasts the company’s s … | Continue reading
On November 18, New Orleans voters decided to elect city council member LaToya Cantrell over former municipal judge Desiree Charbonnet to succeed Mitch Landrieu as mayor. The two candidates were the last standing from a crowded October 14 primary, assuring New Orleans that its ne … | Continue reading
A year ago this month, the first humanitarian center for refugees opened its doors in Paris. With 400 beds, the Centre de Premier Acceuil, or Initial Welcome Center, was designed to offer emergency shelter, showers, and nourishment to those in need for 5 to 10 days. During this t … | Continue reading
On a chilly Saturday evening in a suburb just outside Washington, D.C., a crowd of kids were furiously pedaling away on a dozen bikes bolted to the base of a 35-foot Christmas tree display. We were just minutes from Silver Spring’s annual tree-lighting ceremony at the downtown pl … | Continue reading
Last night, a coin toss in Brussels brought the post-Brexit future that bit closer. After months of jockeying and promotion, ministers from the E.U. 27 met to decide the future home of two key agencies currently housed in London, the European Banking Authority and the European Me … | Continue reading
Sanctuary showdown: In the latest saga of a battle some experts predict may wind up in the Supreme Court, a federal judge yesterday issued a permanent block to the White House’s order to withhold funding from sanctuary cities that don’t comply with federal immigration authorities … | Continue reading
For a growing chorus of techno-optimists and even urbanists, driverless cars are the solution to everything from traffic congestion to high housing prices. By providing an easy, flexible, hands-free commute, during which people can watch videos, talk, or get work done, they will … | Continue reading
While California is often regarded as one large, liberal utopia, the Golden State does not always shine when it comes to racial equity, according to the Advancement Project, a civil rights group. The group has created Race Counts, an interactive web tool that analyzes the unequal … | Continue reading
When it comes to life in the city, perhaps no cartoon has dreamed as big as Hey Arnold! While the rest of Nickelodeon’s ‘90s lineup dwelled in suburbia, here was a football-headed fourth grader who lived in a crowded boarding house under a freeway overpass, who could just climb u … | Continue reading
Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is one of the biggest cities in Africa, with an estimated population larger than London and a skyline that peers over the wide, snaking Congo River. But if a traveler wants to go from there to Lagos, Nigeria’s commerc … | Continue reading
Sandwiched between Fort Worth and Dallas, the Texas city of Arlington would seem an obvious candidate for commuter rail or rapid buses. Yet voters have turned down transit bond measures three times since 1979, preferring to fund stadium revamps instead. Until a few years ago, Arl … | Continue reading
Looking back from Britain’s current chaotic state, the 2012 Summer Olympics seems like a golden era. Bringing the world’s attention to a run-down part on the city’s east side, the London Games succeeded in promoting a vision of the city and its country that was efficient, self-co … | Continue reading
A sign across from a quiet Beirut park advertises a taxi service: “For everyone, everywhere,” the sign reads in French. “Day and night,” it says in Arabic on the other side of the sign. Two sheets of printer paper are taped up on a wall nearby. One advertises an apartment for ren … | Continue reading
Local news, famously, is dying. Small-market papers are disappearing in droves across the U.S., “news deserts” threaten to absorb vast tracts of the Midwest and Rust Belt, and journalism itself seems to be retreating to a few big-market strongholds.However, we appear be entering … | Continue reading
Two years ago, Scott Doyon saw the chance to organize a kind of concert that was unheard of in the Atlanta metro area. It was a remarkably homey concert for a city, defined primarily by its venue: front porches.Doyon, a spiky-haired former musician, thought maybe 25 bands would s … | Continue reading
Election win: New Orleans is now poised to have its first female mayor in the city’s 300-year history—and also the first Big Easy “outsider” to hold the post since the 1960s. City council member LaToya Cantrell, who won Saturday’s election in a landslide, first gained a political … | Continue reading
There’s been a fight at Marrero Middle School. Two sixth graders traded insults during football practice, someone threw a punch, and soon enough they were on the ground with a ring of students egging them on.A few years ago, a fight like this might have ended with someone being s … | Continue reading
Suicide is one of the top 10 causes of death in the U.S. In the next 20 years, it’s expected to cause more than 2 million deaths per year worldwide, ranking 14th in the world as a cause of death.There are many factors known to affect an individual’s risk for suicide. For example, … | Continue reading
An army of masked men and women take to the streets equipped with high-performance gear and gadgets capable of reading hazardous weather conditions. Though they may sound like a band of superheroes, they’re not. They’re the running community of New Delhi—one of the world’s most p … | Continue reading
New York City’s parks are green oases amid glass, concrete, and steel. But though they feel transportive, they’re often not far away from the city’s edge—and particularly those parts of the city’s silhouette that are bordered by waves. Roughly half of the land managed by the NYC … | Continue reading
In June, I wrote what was essentially an ode to the building where I rented the first “room of my own.” In this massive D.C. apartment complex—(the largest under one roof in the city!)—worlds collided. The mix of different ethnicities, genders, classes, and ages may not have mean … | Continue reading
When I was growing up in Irmo, South Carolina, in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time taking long, aimless drives. Most often, I’d head across the dam into Lexington, then follow U.S. 1 past haciendas and taquerias and strips malls full of insurance companies and antique store … | Continue reading
HQ2 transparency: For all the hype over Amazon’s HQ2 bids, so far there’s not a lot of public information out there on what exactly the 238 cities are offering. Enter Muckrock, an investigative reporting nonprofit that’s working to crowdsource “the nitty-gritty details of every b … | Continue reading
Imagine you’re about to take a road trip that you’ve been planning for months, to one of the most iconic places in the West: Utah’s Zion National Park, home to towering sandstone cliffs and lush, hanging gardens suspended between the canyon’s fortress walls.As you drive toward th … | Continue reading
English retiree John Davies has been smitten with maps his whole life. “I was drawing maps of my house as a toddler,” he said. Though his career in software didn’t allow regular forays into cartography, he would visit map shops on his travels.On a business trip to Riga, Latvia’s … | Continue reading
It’s after 2 a.m., and I’ve been awake for several minutes listening to the bark of a dog on the street. The windows of my second-floor apartment are open to let in Madrid’s crisp autumn air. I’m waiting for the dog to stop so I can go back to sleep. But the barking continues, so … | Continue reading
MIAMI—When Hurricane Irma sprinted toward Miami-Dade County, Jeff Ransom couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t just worried about gusts shattering windows, or sheets of rain drowning the highway—that’s far from unusual near his home in Broward County, where extreme weather verges on routine, … | Continue reading
Anyone who thinks public housing is only for the truly desperate should visit Zurich. In Switzerland’s largest city, housing specifically built to rent out at cost has become so popular with people of all classes that it’s actually… well, too popular.In a city of 400,000 people, … | Continue reading
The Providence Gamelin House opened its doors in Seattle in 2005. It was built to offer safe, affordable housing for low-income seniors in Seattle’s Rainier Vista neighborhood. To occupy any of the facility’s 77 units, residents must be ages 62 and older and earn below 50 percent … | Continue reading
The Flixbus I took from Berlin to Hamburg last month showed up about fifteen minutes late. My seat didn’t recline. The wifi was spotty. The bathroom, reasonably clean. In other words, at 18 euros, the three-hour ride was just fine—a step up from what intercity buses have historic … | Continue reading
We’ve long heard about America’s digital divide, but the nation is facing a parallel and deepening digitalization divide, too. According to a new Brookings Institution study, this digitalization divide is reflected in the increasingly uneven spread of high-paying digital jobs acr … | Continue reading
The retail apocalypse has left empty shells of department stores scattered across the American landscape. It’s been especially hard for Sears, the once mighty retailer that now appears to be on its deathbed. But while the ghosts of the chain’s big-box stores haunt suburban and ex … | Continue reading
The vandals certainly chose their date carefully. In the run-up to November 9th, the 69th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms, vandals in the Britz neighborhood of southern Berlin prized away 16 so-called Stolpersteine (literally “stumbling blocks”), brass cobblestones comme … | Continue reading
This month, CityLab visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger dives into the promises of Niagara Falls, New York’s Chemical Age and the destruction it has left behind.Further Reading:“Why has the EPA Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots.” (The New York … | Continue reading
AULNAY-SOUS-BOIS—I cross the street at Boulevard Marc Chagall—not far from where the Grand Paris Express metro stop is set to open—and cut through a small garden. Chants of “No justice, no peace!” are wafting below the din of the traffic.In a knot of modernist public housing comp … | Continue reading
Second-term slowdown? Bill de Blasio entered the New York City mayor’s office in 2013 as a “dyed-in-the wool liberal who wasn’t afraid to take on the city’s wealthy class,” promising a sweep of progressive changes. Four years later, Governing looks at his second-term agenda and m … | Continue reading
Most architects would be satisfied to be remembered as the standard-bearer of a new style. In the case of Michael Graves (1934-2015), that style was Postmodernism, which he introduced to the world in the form of a be-swagged, multicolored building in Portland, Oregon, in 1982. Po … | Continue reading
A grove of five or six mature trees, some of them rising more than 50 feet into the air, once grew on a lot abutting our East Boston yard. In the summer, they shaded the cluster of five townhouses that wrapped around the grove. In the winter, we’d stare into the mix of evergreen … | Continue reading
On Wednesday morning, citizens of Maryland’s largest city awoke to true novelty: the first issue of brand-new alternative weekly newspaper—in print.The Baltimore Beat is looking to replace the City Paper, which published its last issue on November 1, after a 40-year run. The hard … | Continue reading
Jacksonville’s Northside region was covered with swampland before the 1950s. The floodplain was home to some bait and tackle shops, commercial fisheries, and luxury waterfront homes, but all that changed as the fledgling city grew.Builders constructed middle-class white suburbs i … | Continue reading