For a transit system that’s supposed to be the lifeblood of Washington, D.C., WMATA’s Metrorail is more often than not a source of frustration. Between service cuts and track work—and fires, and fare hikes, and unexplained delays (you name it)—it’s tempting for commuters to give … | Continue reading
Garcetti’s potential: The U.S. has never had a president who came straight from city hall, but many see L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti as a potential candidate to break that trend (or attempt to, at least). Garcetti has been coy so far about any such ambitions, but he did mention earli … | Continue reading
I am a car-less person living in St. Louis, Missouri. I was car-less in 2014 during the numerous police shootings and protests that are now referred to as simply “Ferguson.” I am car-less now during the protests sparked by the acquittal of Jason Stockley, a former St. Louis polic … | Continue reading
I was sitting at home in New York City reading my Wall Street Journal when I came across an article about Terra Botanicals Gin, a high-end boutique libation from a company called Cardinal Spirits in Bloomington, Indiana. After Googling the name, I found the gin was also recently … | Continue reading
Travel Like You Live Here is a series in which wonky locals show CityLab around their home turf.Ryan Dennis knows Houston. She is the public art director of Project Row Houses, an arts nonprofit that has acted as a hub for urban art and architecture projects in the city. It's bas … | Continue reading
The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its list of 2017 fellows—24 people from all walks of life who will receive $625,000 “genius” grants, as they’re often called. CityLab is running a series of short conversations with several of the winners.Rami Nashashibi is a community … | Continue reading
Over the past 18 months, a crime scandal has been rocking Berlin. It’s one that so far has required the work of 23 officials, necessitated a court appearance, and, this week, provoked protests from a politician on the floor of Berlin’s Senate. It’s the unusual nature of the crime … | Continue reading
Away from the main exhibit of the Chicago Architecture Biennial—the country’s biggest architecture festival, on show through January—there are a half-dozen smaller “anchor” shows, hosted by neighborhood arts organizations far from downtown. These reveal a different side to Chicag … | Continue reading
The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its list of 2017 fellows—24 people from all walks of life who will receive $625,000 “genius” grants, as they’re often called. CityLab is running a series of short conversations with several of the winners. Trevor Paglen received his Mac … | Continue reading
Fewer Americans are moving than ever before. The share of Americans who moved fell 11 percent last year, the lowest level since the Census started collecting such data back in 1948. Then, more than a fifth of Americans (20.2 percent) moved. But this much-publicized record low obs … | Continue reading
The MacArthur Foundation announced Wednesday its list of 2017 fellows—24 people from all walks of life who will receive $625,000 “genius” grants, as they’re often called. As Kriston Capps reported yesterday, this fresh batch of recipients has a healthy sampling of people who shap … | Continue reading
Blurred lines: Once upon a time there were distinct markers between urban and suburban—i.e. “cities are dangerous,” big-box shopping is in the ‘burbs. But more and more now, economist Tyler Cowen writes in Bloomberg, those boundaries are becoming indistinguishable:One way to stud … | Continue reading
Ride-hailing: enemy or friend of public transportation? Climate change combatant or urban traffic snarler?Years of emerging research has yielded a murky mix of answers to those questions since Uber hit the road in 2009. At various points, the main ride-hailing companies have alte … | Continue reading
Renewal schemes, brought on by familiar scourges of 20th-century urban life—deindustrialization, racial discord, and a sprawling push away from downtown—gashed a thousand tears in the fabric of Newburgh, New York.This small, dense city of approximately 28,000—roughly 65 miles nor … | Continue reading
Almost three weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island is in a grim state. Fewer than 15 percent of residents have power, and much of the island has no clean drinking water. Delivery of food and other necessities, especially to remote areas, has been hampered by a v … | Continue reading
The Climate Just Alliance has declared Wednesday “A National Day of Action,” on behalf of Puerto Rico, which was nearly devastated by Hurricane Maria last month. Millions of people are still without power and have limited access to food, water, and many have even lost their homes … | Continue reading
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation just announced its 2017 class of MacArthur Fellows—popularly (though unofficially) known as “genius grants.” (The MacArthur Foundation pointedly avoids the g-word.) Work in any field except elected office is eligible. Writers, mat … | Continue reading
It started with a few states, whose rural areas experienced the ravage of the opioid epidemic, and sought to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable with lawsuits. Now, the movement is spreading: New states are filing suits over the opioid crisis at a rapid clip. But so are cit … | Continue reading
When Rob Ford became Toronto’s mayor in 2010, pundits explained that the rise of the brash populist—who believed that bike lanes and light rail lines amounted to a “war on the car”—was the revenge of the suburbs on the cosmopolitan city. “Ford Nation is made up of thousands and t … | Continue reading
No more bike rental shops, no more ticket agencies, no more fancy cheese—and absolutely no more Nutella. That’s the upshot of new rules approved in Amsterdam last week intended to halt the tourist takeover of its city center. Concerned that the urban core is losing its livability … | Continue reading
“Where humans meet wild forests”: In a primal view, the wildfires ravaging communities in northern California represent the chaos that can unspool in those liminal spaces “between the wilds and the built,” Wired writes—the type of disaster that humans can’t fully harness:A fire’s … | Continue reading
Living in a more densely built area significantly lowers your risk of obesity. Such is the unavoidable conclusion of a new survey of British cities that compares obesity rates with housing density. The study, carried out by specialists at the universities of Oxford and Hong Kong, … | Continue reading
For rural Americans who don’t have access to cars, basics like grocery shopping and doctor’s appointments can turn into an arduous struggle. With few transit options at low densities, the expense and hassle of finding an alternative ride can mean important appointments simply get … | Continue reading
Almost a decade has passed since trend forecasters foretold the death of the conventional retail store.In some arenas, their predictions of mobile commerce and on-demand logistics have come true. Online and in urban places, platform businesses are nipping at the heels of slower-m … | Continue reading
Dalton, Georgia, has long been known as the “carpet capital of the world.” In the early 2000s, Dalton produced almost half of the world’s carpet. Walking down the city’s carpet row—a stretch of carpet mills that spans a portion of Interstate 75—you could see miles of carpet mills … | Continue reading
The concept of the slum emerged when industrial capitalism hit its stride in the late 19th century. Derived from Cockney street slang, the word was soon taken up by reformers and moralists of the Victorian period, a loaded descriptor of the densely populated and poorly serviced n … | Continue reading
This September, Danbury, Connecticut’s mayor and Frisco, Texas’s, mayor both released videos asking a charming, robotic personal assistant variations of the same question: “Alexa, where should Amazon HQ2 go?” To Danbury’s Mayor, Alexa says, obediently, “Danbury, Connecticut.” To … | Continue reading
“The war on coal is over”: For a local look at the EPA’s decision to revoke the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, see Pennsylvania—where the coal industry is praising the move, but environmental leaders fear threats to the state’s ongoing goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 33 p … | Continue reading
“Hell is other people,” famously wrote the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre at the close of his 1943 play No Exit. While for Sartre this was a philosophically sophisticated point, in America today it has become simply the way we increasingly treat people at the margins of o … | Continue reading
The Black in Design conference at Harvard University this past weekend featured presentations from some of the top names in design and social activism, including Hamza Walker, Walter Hood, Sharon Sutton, and DeRay Mckesson. Not bad for a student-led movement that began less than … | Continue reading
What does global warming sound like?For The ClimateMusic Project, a San Francisco coalition of musicians and scientists who pen compositions based on climate data, things kick off during the Industrial Revolution with a molassesy, bass-and-piano-heavy groove that might induce a n … | Continue reading
Hurricane Harvey inflicted an estimated $100 billion in damage on the Houston area in August and September, a catastrophe that some urban-planning pundits interpreted as a kind of cosmic comeuppance for the city’s decades of untrammeled sprawl. Since 2010, 7,000 units were built … | Continue reading
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump—like his opponent Hillary Clinton—spoke glowingly about infrastructure spending, alluding to Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and Dwight Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System as examples of how spending on roa … | Continue reading
In 2013, the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine published a report showing that Americans die earlier and experience poorer health than residents of other high-income countries, such as Australia, Finland, and Japan. Though such international comparisons are … | Continue reading
Since its opening in 1988, the Tenement Museum has explored the lives of immigrants who lived in the 97 Orchard St tenements on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. But the original building was condemned in 1935, which constrained the stories that this site-specific museum could tell. I … | Continue reading
In the race to make the U.S. a nation of smart cities, there’s no shortage of big ideas. Cities want to attach sensors to everything—streetlights, bridges, garbage trucks—and use the data they collect to predict things like potholes and traffic. They want their buildings to talk … | Continue reading
For years, the sound of rain on the roof of their New Orleans home filled Becky Lloyd and Christopher Renz with dread. Sometimes they’d need to get up in the middle of the night to move their car to higher ground. After a heavy rain, they would lay planks of wood to bridge the ei … | Continue reading
Weeks after Hurricane Maria swept through Puerto Rico, the vast majority of the island is still in the dark.Rebooting the grid will be an ongoing task—but many experts say that the end game should be something other than just reinvigorating the existing infrastructure. Turning to … | Continue reading
The recent flashpoints in conflicts over monuments and public art have usually been Confederate generals or problematic founding fathers. In Philadelphia, protesters have found another target: Frank Rizzo, the law-and-order mayor who presided over the city in the 1970s. A ten-foo … | Continue reading
The telecommunications ecosystem has come a long way from land lines and fax machines. The field is now crowded with a schmorgasbord of options, from WhatsApp to Facetime to Skype to email. In Smarter, Faster, Greener Venkat Sumantran, Charles Fine, and David Gonsalvez envision a … | Continue reading
Grisly stats: To illustrate the stark reality of gun violence in American cities, The New York Times compares the one-day death toll from the mass shooting in Las Vegas with how many days it took for guns to claim the same number of lives in other cities. In Baltimore, those 58 g … | Continue reading
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Congress passed one disaster recovery package with a special mission in mind. The bill was designed specifically to encourage developers to rebuild or create new affordable rental housing in the Gulf Coast. The plan worked: The 2005 act spur … | Continue reading
Two years ago, a TV show about a rapper becoming mayor of a mid-sized Northern California city would have been salacious stuff. But today, when it happens on ABC’s new sitcom “The Mayor,” we see a squeaky clean, idealistic counterpoint to the daily circus of national politics. T … | Continue reading
The hulking concrete building just off the I-95 in New Haven commands the attention of anyone who passes by it. That’s how Dick Lee wanted it.As mayor from 1954 to 1970, Lee presided over the Connecticut city’s nearly unmatched embrace of urban renewal and modern architecture. Wh … | Continue reading
The Great Recession has been reshaping America into a renter nation. And increasingly, highly paid, highly educated households are making room for themselves in it.That’s according to a new report by the NYU Furman Center, which examines rental housing trends between 2006 and 201 … | Continue reading
For years, we’ve known that Londoners have long been breathing bad air. Thanks to a report released yesterday looking at airborne particulate levels, we now know exactly how many residents are suffering. The answer? Nearly the entire population.According to the latest London Atmo … | Continue reading
The recent complaints that the lack of gender diversity in the tech industry is much ado about nothing are off the mark, and in more ways than one. The disadvantages of women in this sector are well documented, and no amount of foaming about free speech can obscure that. However, … | Continue reading
Visitors to Lake Erie should be forgiven if they believe they’ve stumbled upon a vast, fetid swamp. A huge portion of the lake has turned gooey green, thanks to a thick carpet of algae that’s been expanding since mid-July.Here’s a satellite shot of the infestation from last week … | Continue reading