Drug overdose deaths, once rare, are now the leading cause of accidental death in the U.S., surpassing peak annual deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents, guns and HIV infection.As a former public health official, clinician and researcher, I’ve been engaged in efforts to contro … | Continue reading
Uneven comeback: In Puerto Rico, semblances of normal life—schools, leisure, cocktails—are returning now, two weeks after Hurricane Maria. At least that’s the case in and around the capital city of San Juan, where President Trump spent his visit this week. Had he traveled deeper … | Continue reading
Plenty of retirees still dream of retiring to a sun-soaked southern locale—witness the still-vigorous growth of cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and Fort Myers, Florida. But the vast majority of older Americans—more than 70 percent of those over 50, according to a 2014 AARP survey—p … | Continue reading
Alongside the Clean Power Plan, which the Trump administration proposes to destroy, a key pillar of President Obama’s U.S. climate policy was a regulatory commitment to making cars more fuel efficient. In 2012, the Obama administration predicted that gradually ratcheting up CAFE … | Continue reading
Every weekday, Chad Rosen drives from his farm in rural New Castle, Kentucky, a 200-year-old town with fewer than 1,000 residents and five Baptist churches, to a squat manufacturing facility east of downtown Louisville. The 40-minute drive crosses Kentucky’s major red-blue divide … | Continue reading
Details have emerged about some of the more wacky stunts cities are pursuing to woo Amazon’s second headquarters (give a cactus as a gift; create an Amazon “war room”), but mayors have thus far kept the most consequential details of their bids for HQ2 a closely guarded secret.To … | Continue reading
What can lighting do for a community? For some fascinating answers, just look at the results of one pilot research project in Cartagena, Colombia.Concentrating on the Caribbean city’s extremely busy Getsemaní neighborhood, the project, a collaboration spearheaded by Arup’s lighti … | Continue reading
Of the 10 million vehicles General Motors sold worldwide last year, only a fraction—about 14,000—were powered solely by electricity. The rest were fueled by gas and diesel, with tailpipes that pumped carbon emissions into the air. Now, the automaker is making a commitment to comp … | Continue reading
“Crisis of our time”: In the 1960s, when U.S. cities exploded into riots, we saw a coordinated government response—a national commission on civil disorder resulting in the landmark Kerner Report. So why is it taking us so long to treat today’s mass shootings as a systemic crisis, … | Continue reading
Right now, the millions of victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands are focused on finding water, food, electricity, and working cellular phone service. But soon many will will be looking for another service in spades: lawyers.More than 30 residents of U. … | Continue reading
The man suspected of firing down into an outdoor music festival on the Las Vegas Strip on Sunday night, killing at least 59 people and injuring 527, managed to haul at least 23 firearms—plus ammunition, gun stands, scopes, and other accessories—into his hotel room on the 32nd flo … | Continue reading
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Blade Runner 2049 opens in American theaters this week, 35 years after the original version first came out. The first Blade Runner eventually became a cult classic and, according to author and urban theorist Mike Davis, L.A.’s “dystopic alter ego.” It helped fuel two decades of c … | Continue reading
Trees have proved to aid mental health, decrease obesity and other health risks, and just generally make people happier. But they are often thought of as a luxury rather than a vital component of healthcare or urban infrastructure. In a new report, The Nature Conservancy, a conse … | Continue reading
“We are dying. And you’re killing us with inefficiency,” said Carmen Yulín Cruz, mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico’s capital and largest city. In front of the cameras, she heavily criticized Washington’s insufficient efforts and late response in providing assistance after the island … | Continue reading
The shocking violence in Barcelona on Sunday makes the politics behind Catalonia’s separatist movement even harder to parse. Helmeted police in riot gear disrupted polling places, beat citizens attempting to vote, and left an incredible 893 people injured—all in the name of halti … | Continue reading
“Soft target”: Though Las Vegas had seen attempts at mass violence before, and beefed up security in recent years, the essential nature of Sin City—with so many tourists, resorts, and venues squeezed in together—has also seemed its greatest vulnerability to attacks. Calling Sunda … | Continue reading
In Aztec times the tamemes—bearers—would wait at the edge of the markets on the edge of Tenochtitlan, waiting for customers. There were no beasts of burden to carry loads in pre-Hispanic Mexico and humans were the best and only option. Several transport revolutions later this occ … | Continue reading
On Sunday night, Stephen Paddock opened fire on a crowd of festival goers in Las Vegas, killing at least 59 and injuring hundreds of others. The event has been named the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.The maps below chronicle each mass shooting that has occurr … | Continue reading
On Monday, Americans woke up to the worst mass shooting in modern history.The night before, a white man—whom police have since identified as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock—opened gunfire from his room high up in the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas onto a crowd of concert-goers belo … | Continue reading
You don’t have to dig deep to find out what can go wrong with open data initiatives. Just look back to 2014, when the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission released hundreds of millions of records on taxi trips in the city, with data anonymized to protect identifiable detai … | Continue reading
This month, CityLab visual storyteller Ariel Aberg-Riger shares the ugly and oft-overlooked story behind the construction of Central Park. | Continue reading
As President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un trade personal barbs and threats of annihilation (and Trump prepares to visit the Korean peninsula in November), South Koreans are famously greeting the potential of war with a shrug. The same seems to be the case acro … | Continue reading
The ability to summon a ride from a phone can open pathways that never before existed. At least on paper.That’s one insight drawn from MobilityScore, a map tool from TransitScreen, a company that develops dashboards for transportation data. MobilityScore aggregates data on differ … | Continue reading
Each contestant at the Miss Subways Pageant, held last week in Brooklyn, made a case for what the subway means to them. “This is about that feeling when it’s 3 a.m. and you feel like you’re going to vomit and you want any train to come and take you anywhere,” began one contestant … | Continue reading
Letting go is hard.But here I am, going 65 miles an hour on the busy Capital Beltway around Washington, D.C., in an $84,000 Cadillac. The automaker’s rep assures me that it is, in fact, safe to take my hands off the steering wheel, and my foot off the pedal. The car, a 2018 CT6 s … | Continue reading
Puerto Rico’s voice: Brushing off criticisms from President Donald Trump, San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz has become the most visible communicator of Puerto Rico’s challenges in the aftermath of hurricanes Irma and Maria, establishing herself as a “no-nonsense leader with a tale … | Continue reading
On a street in Mexico City's Colonia Juarez, in an area bounded by muffler shops on one end and a craft beer garden/gourmet food court on the other, there exists a tiny altar. Inside is the figure of a woman, about 12 inches tall, her hands clasped in supplication.Blessed mother, … | Continue reading
Few issues in urban tech today are as controversial as the impact of short-term rental startups like AirBnB and VRBO on neighborhood housing. The battle lines are clear: Do these startups help residents earn much-needed extra dollars on the side, or are they so constricting housi … | Continue reading
Jean‑Louis Missika, deputy mayor of Paris, believes that the City on the Seine must undergo a transformation. I talked to Missika, who is in charge of Paris’s urban planning and architecture, about his passion project, Réinventer Paris (Reinvent Paris). The competition asks urban … | Continue reading
In a four-day operation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) rounded up almost 500 individuals in many so-called sanctuary cities—local jurisdictions that choose to limit their involvement in federal immigration enforcement. Philadelphia experienced the highest number of ar … | Continue reading
Revelations that Russian government-associated companies reportedly used Facebook and Twitter to both promote groups like Black Lives Matter and stoke fear of them have enraged policymakers. Sources told CNN that Russian-backed accounts with names like “Blacktivist” posted update … | Continue reading
It was the U.S. Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after an officer killed Michael Brown in 2014 that “awakened” the federal government and much of the general public to the burden of municipal fines and fees, issued for everything from traffic … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, Hatoon Al-Fassi, a Saudi academic who teaches at Qatar University, told CityLab that for over a quarter of a century, Saudi women activists fighting for the right to drive had heard the occasional rumor that they would be granted licenses. Though the rumors had … | Continue reading
A few weeks after the city of Detroit began charging riders a few bucks per ride on its brand-new downtown streetcar, ridership dropped 40 percent, according to the Detroit Free Press. Sadly, few observers were surprised.“The streetcar doesn’t even connect directly to the city’s … | Continue reading
If you don’t follow British architecture closely, you may not know the name of the 2017 recipient of Britain’s most prestigious lifetime architectural achievement gong, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal. Yesterday, the Royal Institute of British Architects awarded the medal to Neave Brow … | Continue reading
Cracking down: In an operation targeting sanctuary cities, ICE has arrested nearly 500 immigrants across the country over the past few days, the most in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Denver. The New York Times reports:The operation came amid an escalating conflict between these … | Continue reading
The lines at Plaza del Sol, a mall just outside San Juan in Puerto Rico, must have stretched around the building. For hours on end, crowds of people gathered around a minor technological miracle: two working cell phones, and a power outlet to keep them charged.The phones were bor … | Continue reading
In 1788, John Adams wrote that the House of Representatives should be an “exact portrait” of the people as a whole. But as district boundaries are increasingly manipulated via partisan gerrymandering, that portrait starts to look like it was painted during Picasso’s cubist phase. … | Continue reading
After the exhibition “Never Built Los Angeles”—an exploration of the city’s most compelling unrealized proposals—wrapped up in 2013, Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin decided it was time to give another city the same treatment.“The next city would have to be a hub of talented builders a … | Continue reading
Over the past several days, opponents of President Trump’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico zeroed in on his unwillingness to lift the Jones Act, a 1920 maritime law that regulates U.S. shipping. After some hurried Googling of the Wilson Administration, the medi … | Continue reading
Amid deepening inequality in America’s cities, there have been increasingly urgent calls for economic growth to be more inclusive. There’s also growing recognition that with President Donald Trump in office and Republicans in charge of Congress and many states, this is an area wh … | Continue reading
Until its direction was reversed in 1900, the Chicago River was such a receptacle for effluent and filth that it poisoned Chicagoans’ beloved Lake Michigan (from which they drew their drinking water). Then it was channelized and entombed in concrete. The river has long been the c … | Continue reading
If anything good comes out of the current arms race between North American cities to land Amazon’s second headquarters, it might be a disruption of one of the more intractable subjects of public discourse: mass transportation.Direct access to rail, train, subway and bus routes wa … | Continue reading
Power play: Major U.S. cities are paying attention to London’s hardball move of rejecting Uber’s license renewal, wondering if this a turning point for the company that’s built a reputation for defying local governments. Wired writes of Uber’s new conciliatory tone:It’s a departu … | Continue reading
Maintaining cycling infrastructure is a matter of course in the Netherlands, a country boasting 35,000 kilometers of bicycle paths. Still, the Dutch province of Friesland managed to make waves when it re-paved a bicycle highway last fall.A 1-kilometer stretch of the bike roadway … | Continue reading
Seconds after a powerful earthquake struck Mexico City on September 19, the mobile phone network was down. Stoplights ceased to function as electricity failed, and the city’s streets had turned into one vast traffic jam. In a few frantic minutes, millions of people were driven ou … | Continue reading
Imagine, if you can, a city starkly divided by class, living in constant fear of terrorism. An out-of-town pop star is the official cultural ambassador, and climate change leaves much of the city underwater. Such is life in Neo Yokio, the setting of Netflix’s new anime show by th … | Continue reading