After weeks of brinkmanship, it’s finally happened: On Friday the Catalan Parliament voted in favor of Catalonia declaring independence from the rest of Spain, with a view to breaking off as a sovereign republic.The vote, which delivered 70 votes for independence against 10 again … | Continue reading
What do you give the city that has everything? Not content to rest on its laurels as a perceived capital of all things classy and cultured, Paris taking to the streets with one of life’s simpler luxuries: sparkling water.Since 2010, the city has possessed a small network of fount … | Continue reading
Opioid antidote? As President Trump now officially declares the opioid epidemic a national emergency, several U.S. cities are exploring a controversial fix that’s already popular in Europe and Canada: supervised-consumption facilities, which allow addicts to inject their opiates … | Continue reading
While out with friends in Los Angeles last Spring, Cody Woods found himself sharing what he learned about ways to avoid contracting HIV. A few weeks earlier, he had been immersed in another discussion on Facebook about sexually transmitted diseases, this time correcting something … | Continue reading
If you stand outside the Clarendon Metro stop in Arlington, Va., and ask Google for transit directions to Washington Dulles International Airport, you’ll be told to go east to reach the airport that sits some 20 miles to the west.The suggested route will get you where you need to … | Continue reading
(Lea Bertucci)A hollowed-out mountain brimming with rapacious microorganisms that digest electronic waste. An iceberg from Antarctica chilling in a Persian Gulf port, providing cool, clean drinking water to the populace.These are some of the dreamlike projects in “Geostories,” a … | Continue reading
It’s become perhaps the most widely accepted truism in urban development and economic policy circles: NIMBY zoning and overly restrictive land-use policies and building codes keep housing prices high, making superstar cities like New York and San Francisco less affordable. Plus, … | Continue reading
As President Donald Trump pledges to roll back Obama-era protections from deportation, lawmakers are working to provide a new legal pathway to citizenship for the group of undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. They hope to reimagine and reintroduce the proposed … | Continue reading
Is $100,000 “average”? Though a majority of Americans now identify as "middle class"—the highest proportion since 2003—there's growing debate over what exactly that phrase means today. While a $59,000 annual income falls smack dab in the middle in countrywide stats, in some place … | Continue reading
Last winter, teams of researchers in three U.S. cities donned goggles, gloves, and respirators, tore into bags of other people’s household garbage, and then pawed though the contents. Separating slimy banana peels from clumps of coffee grounds was dirty work, but it had a laudabl … | Continue reading
When the Reagan administration slashed federal funding for affordable housing in the 1980s, the privatization of low-income housing took off. One result: A significant increase in the country’s number of trailer parks. Today, mobile homes remain the largest segment of non-subsidi … | Continue reading
Dunkirk is a shrinking, suburban city on the northern coast of France. It’s a car town, where public buses are a mode of last resort: They represent only five percent of trips.But when Patrice Vergriete ran for mayor in 2014, he envisioned something different: a sustainable city … | Continue reading
If you’re looking to experience some of the worst of Washington, D.C.’s notorious traffic, stumble over to Connecticut Avenue, just south of Dupont Circle, at around 2 a.m. on a weekend.As the clubs let out, Ubers, Lyfts, and taxis double and triple park along both sides of the t … | Continue reading
When visiting Sullivan’s Island off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, a few years ago, designer Walter Hood came across an interesting pattern or tapestry of some sort in a small museum there. As he looked closer, he realized that it wasn’t a pattern: It was the outlines o … | Continue reading
Vampire stories are constantly being updated to fit the times: they fight off school bullies in Let the Right One In and play baseball in Twilight. And a new film from Italian artist Andrea Mastrovito, NYsferatu: Symphony of a Century, modernizes a distinctive part of the vampire … | Continue reading
By the diagnosis of the writer and thinker Eric Liu, protests are one way a city’s immune system tells the body politic that it is sick.“Protests about monuments are not just protests about monuments,” Liu said Tuesday in remarks at CityLab Paris. “They are a plea to be included … | Continue reading
The elusive killer: As President Trump prepares to declare a national emergency over the opioid epidemic, the law enforcement community is racing to curb the spread of fentanyl, the potent synthetic drug that’s increasingly to blame for fatal overdoses across the country. Looking … | Continue reading
On a sunny June afternoon in Chandler, Arizona, more than a dozen police and emergency vehicles paced up and down a mostly empty street, with their sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing. All eyes, though, were on the handful of self-driving cars that shared the road. Some … | Continue reading
People usually look to Yelp to find a decent pizza place, scope out a hairdresser, or read impassioned customer reviews of yarn stores. Now, Yelp is promising to provide a different service: help aspiring entrepreneurs decide where to open small businesses. The company’s “Local E … | Continue reading
July 22, 2011, still stands as the bloodiest day in Norway’s history since World War II. Twin attacks that day, first a bomb in Oslo and then, two hours later, a gun massacre on the island of Utøya, claimed 77 lives. Anders Behring Breivik, the gunman responsible for both attacks … | Continue reading
The indicator species of gentrification are many—pop-up farmer’s markets, a front yard with a Little Free Library, thousand-dollar baby strollers. Among the most telling—certainly the most visible to a flâneur at twilight—are Edison-style incandescent light bulbs. Reproduction re … | Continue reading
Lagos. New York City. Washington, D.C. Baltimore. Paris.These are some of the grand metropolises that have collectively served as homes to writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And yet, the two do not identify as urbanists.“We have to be careful not to romanticiz … | Continue reading
The urban revival of the past two decades has led to a striking contradiction. As high-tech talent and industry have moved back to many cities, increasing their economic output and lowering unemployment rates, these cities have become increasingly unequal. Now a new study documen … | Continue reading
Plummeting supply: A Freddie Mac report finds that the number of affordable apartments fell by more than 60 percent over the past six years for households making less than 50 percent of the area median income. The Washington Post reports:“We have a rapidly diminishing supply of a … | Continue reading
The fifth CityLab summit is happening now in Paris. Hosted by the Aspen Institute, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, it’s a global annual meeting of city leaders and experts in urbanism and city planning, economics, education, art, architecture, public-sector innovation … | Continue reading
Los Angeles has become an unlikely leader in the world of public transportation. Thanks to a sales tax approved by an overwhelming majority in 2016, new rail and rapid bus lines are set to unspool through the Westside, South L.A., East Hollywood, and the Valley.It’s a transit bui … | Continue reading
Could devolving more power to Britain’s cities and regions help to stem a tide of political disaffection? Earlier this year, the U.K. took significant steps to grant more direct control to its regions by giving six metro areas—including Manchester and Liverpool—their first ever d … | Continue reading
This holiday season in Alpharetta, Georgia, there’s a Santa Claus coming to town who’s so popular that meetings to visit him were sold out by October.That’s essentially by design: The high-budget, tech-savvy Santa display is a crowd-pleasing attraction for a multi-million dollar, … | Continue reading
Can less populated cities on the outskirts of larger metropolitan areas be too small to succeed? Are urban municipalities with fewer than 100,000 people vestiges of a bygone era? Should small “inner-ring” cities even exist? These questions are being posed with greater frequency a … | Continue reading
The fifth CityLab Summit is happening now in Paris. Hosted by the Aspen Institute, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, it’s a global annual meeting of city leaders and experts in urbanism and city planning, economics, education, art, architecture, public-sector innovation … | Continue reading
Wreaking havoc in dense, urban areas—open cafés and markets, tourist hotspots, and public transit—has long been the modus operandi of terrorists. The tactics, however, are evolving. Vehicles have now become the new weapon of choice—and cities like Barcelona, London, and Nice in E … | Continue reading
Public health campaigns in cities have long focused on changing individual behaviors: Don’t smoke. Use a condom. Don’t drink and drive.But public health leaders from around the world are starting to acknowledge that the scope of their work must extend to underlying factors that c … | Continue reading
AmazonOffice of Economic Developmentc/o Site Manager Golden2121 7th Ave Seattle, WA 98121Dear Amazon:Thank you in advance for considering my application to serve as host for Amazon’s second world headquarters. In this age of economic transformation, it is truly exciting to see a … | Continue reading
The fifth CityLab summit is happening now in Paris. Hosted by the Aspen Institute, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, it’s a global annual meeting of city leaders and experts in urbanism and city planning, economics, education, art, architecture, public-sector innovation … | Continue reading
In her inaugural speech as the head of the Royal College of General Practitioners recently, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard chose to focus her remarks on loneliness.“GPs see patients, many of whom are widowed, who have multiple health problems,” she said. “But often their main pro … | Continue reading
In 1940, 92 percent of kids in America could grow up to do better than their parents, economically-speaking. Today, that’s just 50 percent. The American Dream, in other words, comes down to a coin toss. This issue, it turns out, really comes down to the neighborhood inequalities. … | Continue reading
When Cecile Lazartigues-Chartier first visited Montreal, Quebec, it was not love at first sight. She and her husband, expecting their first child, were keen to leave Paris for somewhere “a little quieter,” so they spent three dark, cold weeks in Montreal. “It was not beautiful an … | Continue reading
In the eye of the storm: In Catalonia's drive for independence—which the Spanish government now says it will take emergency measures to halt—there is no place with more at stake than the city of Barcelona, with its global, cosmopolitan outlook running counter to a movement that m … | Continue reading
A recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, D.C., think tank, heralded some remarkably good news. Researchers Isaac Shapiro and Danilo Trisi found that the U.S. child poverty rate hit a record low in 2016, at 15.6 percent—nearly half what it was … | Continue reading
Japan’s national elections did not quite live up to the expectations of Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike. In late September, when she formed an upstart national political party, the Party of Hope, to challenge the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party, it looked as though she was posit … | Continue reading
The Netherlands is well known for its international atmosphere, but not all new arrivals are welcome. Take, for instance, the red swamp crayfish. No one is happy to welcome it to The Hague.Crayfish were first sighted there in the early 1980s, but the issue went relatively unnotic … | Continue reading
At the opening plenary of an international gathering of city leaders, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo singled out one nation’s leader. It was not her own.“The retreat by Donald Trump from the Paris climate accord is a catastrophe, a major error,” she told James Fallows, the Atlantic cor … | Continue reading
Key panels and discussions from Monday’s itinerary are being streamed, live, below. View the full itinerary. | Continue reading
Since dramatic police violence broke out at the start of October over a referendum to Catalonian independence, both Spain’s national and Catalonia’s autonomous regional governments have been teetering on the edge of radical action.Spain has threatened to temporarily strip the Cat … | Continue reading
We’ve read all about the top contenders for Amazon HQ2 and the long-shots; the hopeful small cities and the smug, orange-hued, big ones. We know the good, the bad, and the ugly of what those cities are willing to do to secure the mega-deal—even faced with the possibility that Ama … | Continue reading
Last month, after six months of construction, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority reopened the first of three rehabbed Brooklyn stations. It had new USB charging stations, large-screen digital maps, countdown clocks, and even a new mosaic.But what really caught strap … | Continue reading
If you’re looking for well-funded women’s health clinics and sexually transmitted disease prevention, don’t go to Jacksonville. The Florida city scored at the very bottom of a new report by the National Institute for Reproductive Health, which ranked America’s 40 most populous ci … | Continue reading
The last time President Donald Trump spoke to the nation about his administration’s plan for infrastructure spending, he ended up defending the honor of violent white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. Since then, the proposed $1 trillion bill appears to have slipped on h … | Continue reading