Last week, residents of more than 30 U.S. cities voted to elect their top leader. Whether four-term veterans like Cleveland’s Frank Jackson or first-time politicians like Helena’s Wilmot Collins, U.S. mayors are now more than ever on the front lines of major global and societal c … | Continue reading
A giant city crawls across the land like an insect. Airships drop cultural attractions onto unsuspecting villages. A hovercraft expands into an inflatable settlement. These visions, sparked by sci-fi novels and comic books, belonged to the collective Archigram, which existed from … | Continue reading
Rental restrictions: Facing glaring housing shortages, a number of large cities are now more aggressively regulating the operations of Airbnb and other short-term rental operators. This week Paris has required Airbnb hosts in the city center to cap rentals at 120 days per year. M … | Continue reading
New York City has always been trash, if you ask a sour-grapes city like Boston or Chicago. If you ask New Yorkers, they may well tell you the same thing. But it’s not necessarily an insult.The fact is, the city has a rich history when it comes to things thrown away. From the 17th … | Continue reading
A few months ago, over-the-road truck driver Gary Mars pulled into a rest stop in Oklahoma, just across the Arkansas border. Sitting in the cab of his truck, he watched a car pull up; five teenage girls who looked around 16 years old got out and sat at a picnic table using their … | Continue reading
Welcome to the first edition of MapLab, a newsletter exploring how maps illuminate the world around us. Here there will be many, friendly dragons: featurettes on newsworthy mapping efforts, fascinating cartographers, snippets of history, eye-popping data visuals, and intriguing m … | Continue reading
San Jose is blessed with fantastic weather, beautiful natural surroundings, proximity to the world’s most successful companies, and perhaps the most urban, walkable environment of any Bay Area community south of San Francisco. Home to more than 1 million people, it is the third-l … | Continue reading
On Election night 2016, as Donald Trump’s path to the presidency became ever more assured, the service-locating website Yelp detected an unusual spike in searches: Users were looking for immigration lawyers. At 11 p.m. Eastern time, the search term was used twice as many times as … | Continue reading
“From my cold, dead hands”: With the self-driving car revolution predicted to arrive within the next two decades, we may be facing “the next great battleground of America’s culture wars,” The Week writes. Picking up on the prediction from former General Motors VP Bob Lutz that “h … | Continue reading
Wilmer Catalan-Ramirez has been awaiting deportation at the McHenry County Jail since seven Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents entered his home in March, and forcefully arrested him—fracturing one of his arms. Catalan-Ramirez, a father of U.S. citizen children, was … | Continue reading
New York’s subway system is getting a gender-inclusive upgrade.The city’s Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA) recently instructed its staff to replace the phrase “ladies and gentleman” in all announcements with gender-inclusive language, like “passengers,” “riders,” or “everyo … | Continue reading
The possibility of tourists ruining Venice has been widely discussed. But what if Venice is exacting its revenge?Over the past few weeks, news of scams against visitors to the city have been ricocheting around the European press, with complaints that tourists’ naïveté and limited … | Continue reading
In many ways, Essen is the envy of cities trying to move past their industrial days. Once the steel and coal center of Germany, Essen’s economic success in the early 20th century was evident in the dust blanketing the city and sulfur filling the air with the constant stench of ro … | Continue reading
Mere blocks from the tourists swarming Pike Place Market, Stacy Lenny pointed out the tradecraft of some of her drug-dealing clients: “There’s Todd with a wheelchair—that’s good camo for a drug hustle,” she said, nodding toward one man sitting on the corner and dealing crack out … | Continue reading
For those monitoring the headlines, the Age of Morality can hardly seem a likely title historians will use for our current period. But look closer—in your neighborhood, workplace, or school—and you’ll (hopefully) find countless honest exchanges resting upon mutual trust. “We are … | Continue reading
The $20 billion company WeWork is best known for renting sleek co-working spaces to entrepreneurs and freelancers in cities across the globe, but in the past two years it has branched out into furnished apartments (WeLive) and a gym/spa (Rise by We). These forays into other facet … | Continue reading
Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have finally found something they can agree on: selling off the Thompson Center, a state office building in downtown Chicago, to a buyer who will presumably demolish it. Their rare alliance, however, has galvanized the … | Continue reading
Taking on Big Pharm: Two years ago, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood became the first state attorney to sue a prescription drugmaker for its role in the opioid crisis. In the time since, more than 100 states, cities, and counties have pursued similar lawsuits—a trend many se … | Continue reading
On October 23, Senator Cory Booker, one of the members of Congress most capable of harnessing bipartisan cooperation, introduced the Environmental Justice Act of 2017, which was devoid of one Republican sponsor. If passed, the bill would force the federal government to strengthen … | Continue reading
Visit the High Line this fall and you’ll see a bright tangle of tubes weaving through the brambles at the northern terminus of New York City’s elevated rail park. Like an inscrutable children’s field-day game, it radiates tentacles of Playskool yellow, orange, red, blue, and gree … | Continue reading
Nashville Mayor Megan Barry announced a massive transit overhaul for the city earlier this month—one of the boldest municipal projects in recent memory, and easily the biggest in Nashville history. The $5.2 billion plan would introduce 26 miles of inlight rail across four new lin … | Continue reading
When Richard Hambleton died late last month, he was hailed as a founding father of street art, the man who’d made the world safe for Banksy. From a PR standpoint, his exit couldn’t have been better timed. After years lost to illness and addiction, over the past decade he’d reemer … | Continue reading
Next summer, cities across the U.S. have a birthday to celebrate. In August 2018, the nation’s very first experiment in bikeshare turns 10 years old. While the network itself, SmartBike D.C., didn’t last that long, it led promptly to the launch of the most robust bikeshare networ … | Continue reading
The area under the Freedom Parkway overpass in Atlanta used to be an open dirt and concrete area just off a dilapidated train track, weeds snaking through cracked wooden sleepers. Like many other parts of this famously sprawling city, it was for many years a little-used negative … | Continue reading
Lovers of both social housing and 20th-century architecture have been fretting about the fate of East London’s Robin Hood Gardens for years. A public housing project and Brutalist icon completed in 1972, the estate (as projects are called in the U.K.) has been run-down and facing … | Continue reading
On a fall foliage-filled Saturday before Election Day 2017, sixteen people got together in a suburban church basement just outside Washington, D.C. to hash out their political differences for seven hours. They started at 10 a.m.; they had a lot of ground to cover.“In my house, we … | Continue reading
São Paulo’s traffic is horrendous. But if you’re rich enough, you can avoid it. With the world’s largest fleet of private choppers, a reported 1,300 helicopter flights lift off daily, ferrying an ultra-wealthy handful around this megacity of 12 million—the lucky few that can affo … | Continue reading
It’s not just the economic gap between the rich and poor that has grown wider: America has seen an overlapping, and even more troubling, gap in desperation across class as well as racial and ethnic lines. Much has been made of America’s deepening opioid crisis, especially among r … | Continue reading
It’s peaceful at 6 a.m. on Monrovia’s Miami Beach. Against a pinky-yellow sky, the only sounds are waves crashing onto the shore, birds squawking awake, and the clawing of Skippee’s rake, running ridges through the patch of sand that separates the foamy coastline from his beachfr … | Continue reading
The history of subway systems is one long string of attempts to improve the way riders pay fares. First there were tickets, then tokens. Magnetic swipe cards sped things up in their day, and tap-in payment cards came along to make things faster still. And now, in Moscow, all you … | Continue reading
Preservationists are fighting to save the decades-old federal Historic Tax Credit program, which was eliminated from the tax reform bill introduced in the House of Representatives on November 2. The program offers a 20 percent tax credit to developers who restore historic buildin … | Continue reading
Grassroots fix: To explain the great crime decline that's swept across nearly ever major American city over the last 25 years, new research points to the pivotal but unsung role that community nonprofits have played—through grassroots efforts like building playgrounds and employi … | Continue reading
Geothermal power is heating up around the world. It accounts for a quarter of Iceland’s total electricity production. On Long Island, National Grid and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority kicked off a pilot program last month, using geothermal energy to p … | Continue reading
It’s the shape of a swoopy modern streetcar, but it’s got rubber-shod wheels of a bus. Also, there’s no driver—it’s automated like a tram. The “trackless train” is sort of a jackalope of public transportation.Or maybe it’s more like a donkey than a truly mythical creature; unlike … | Continue reading
The last time the mayor of Seattle was a woman was in 1926. When Bertha Knight Landes ran, local papers assured voters that she was “plain” and “unassuming,” that she went to church, that she was not a “chattering woman” or perhaps worse, that she was not a “new woman” either. Wh … | Continue reading
Embattled Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill, born Robert Williams, is officially state property again, having been sentenced to up to four years in prison for violating his probation. His offenses: a failed drug test for the painkiller Percocet, popping wheelies on his dirt bike in N … | Continue reading
The Census estimates that children in America will be majority minority by 2020, with the overall population becoming majority minority in about 25 years. “No other advanced, populous country will see such diversity,”notes demographer Joel Kotkin.One might hope that a nation that … | Continue reading
Finally, it’s happening. After years of discussion, London’s Oxford Street is being pedestrianized. A key London axis known for its huge popularity as a place to shop—and its equally huge pollution problem—Oxford Street has endured for years as a notorious fume trap because it’s … | Continue reading
The 2001 horror movie Session 9, set in the abandoned Danvers State Mental Hospital in Danvers, Massachusetts, tells the story of five workers who become caught up in the history of a patient who once lived there. The terrifying, murderous past becomes the equally terrifying and … | Continue reading
Votes counted: Some highlights from Election Day across U.S. cities:Charlotte, North Carolina, has elected its first black female mayor, Democratic councilwoman Vi Lyles.It looks like Seattle’s first female mayor will be former U.S. attorney Jenny Durkan, who by first counts hold … | Continue reading
Seven years ago, Jeanette Taylor moved from the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville three miles south to Woodlawn. Her Bronzeville unit was going to be rehabbed, the rent tripling. She needed a more affordable neighborhood.Now Taylor fears her family may be uprooted ag … | Continue reading
Pedestrians and cyclists are notoriously difficult for transportation planners to count and map. This is beginning to change, though—not because of some quantum leap in surveys or sensors, but because of fitness-themed social media.Last week, Strava, a social network for athletes … | Continue reading
If one city proves the importance of a good airport, it might be the European capital with two, three, or four of them, depending on how you count. This is Berlin, where the tumultuous 20th century scattered a trail of three flughaefen from east to west.Technically, Berlin has on … | Continue reading
Suree Barnes needed to get out of Garland, Texas. There were bugs in her home, rowdy neighbors living across the street, and she was worried about the quality of her older daughter’s school.Barnes, 37, had initially wanted to move to Garland from Richardson, Texas, because it was … | Continue reading
This story was produced in collaboration with WNYC.Even as the last presidential election ignited a wave of activism across the country, with droves of scientists and other non-politicians vowing to run for office, the September primaries in New York City showed that politics is … | Continue reading
The knowledge, talent, and ideas that power urban economies do not emerge out of thin air: They are shaped and organized by great research universities. Universities have long played a role in educating people and contributing to a more civilized, tolerant, and democratic society … | Continue reading
Election Day: While the Virginia and New Jersey governor races hog national headlines, Politico rounds up 15 other high-impact election issues to watch today, including the St. Petersburg mayor race Obama got involved in, the most expensive ballot measure in Ohio’s history (over … | Continue reading
Bryan Sutton knows exactly what to say when he goes knocking door-to-door in Cambridge, Massachusetts: “I’m Bryan Sutton, a first-time candidate for city council. I'm an engineer, and I'm trying to get money out of politics.”Sutton has a degree in astrophysics and works largely i … | Continue reading