Places Wire

The newly-installed right-wing government and an emerging crop of dystopian fiction writers both reflect the country’s struggle between progress and socioeconomic torpor.

In rural Greene County, Pennsylvania, a local environmental activist is fighting to prepare her community for life beyond mining.

As more districts splinter along lines of race and income, judicial processes meant to protect the fair distribution of educational resources are failing.

In the U.K. — and in the U.S. — public goods like affordable housing have been neglected to dangerous degrees.

After decriminalizing the practice earlier this year, the city must learn from the mistakes that led it to be outlawed in the 1990s.

The West Calumet Public Housing Complex was evacuated last May after it was found to have been built on one of the most toxic Superfund sites. (Also see “The Things They Piled,” in Places.)

America’s failure to address the explosion in drug abuse is part of a larger story in which incremental problems, from deteriorating infrastructure to declining schools, are allowed to fester.

Harsh sentences and a graying population have made the U.K.’s prisons its largest provider of residential care for elderly men.

The city is experimenting with mobile laundries and a tiny home village to try to improve conditions for its rising number of rough sleepers. (Also see “Tent City, America,” in Places.)

Behind all the theater of ‘Tech Week,’ Trump’s budget makes deeper cuts to research and development than any White House in modern history.

The iconic images that adorned Casa Aztlán, a former Latino community center in Pilsen, have been removed as part of its conversion into luxury apartments.

The president’s budget calls for sharp reductions in funding for programs that shelter the poor and combat homelessness, but preserves a subsidy that is paid directly to private landlords.

95-degree days are expected to multiply this century, even if countries take moderate climate action.

Journalist Jorge Caraballo Cordovez’s project, “East Boston, Nuestra Casa,” uses postcards to inform locals about displacement, tenants’ rights, and legal resources.

The immigrant neighborhood in Brooklyn persevered after 9/11, but can it survive in the age of Trump?

The unincorporated community of Columbia, Maryland, turns 50 this week, and the poster child of the post-war New Town movement is changing.

Recent figures released by the county show that the number shot up by 63% in the past year, a staggering rise in a county that saw its overall homeless population increase by 23%.

The five rowhouses that Douglass built on South Dallas Street in Baltimore in 1892 are still inhabited today.

After pseudonymously blogging about the loss of the city’s mom-and-pop shops for the past ten years, Griffin Hansbury is emerging as an activist for the resistance he has sparked.

Brooklyn’s electricity microgrid allows neighbors to exchange solar power using smart meters and a phone app.

Willow Lung-Amam discusses her new book, Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia, on the influence of Asian immigrants in Freemont, California.

The immigration court in Louisiana is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to fast-track deportation cases.

The budget would deal crippling blows to the arts and humanities institutions and organizations that have helped to foster better understanding of global affairs and cultures.

For almost two centuries, the humble mail system was a hotbed of new ideas, integrating new technologies and adapting to changing environments to deliver post ever more quickly and cheaply.

Hear Otis Sanford discussing his new book, From Boss Crump to King Willie: How Race Changed Memphis Politics. (Also see “Memphis Burning, in Places.)

The inaugural exhibition, opening on June 17, will explore capitalism and its intersections with race, class, and the environment in the United States.

In St. James, a dense industrial zone in the heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor, residents are fighting the effects of chemical plants, pipelines and laissez-faire policies.

In Washington D.C., the erasure of African-American culture and history by the real estate industry is being replaced with “black branding.”

The project is at the heart of the ambitious urban renewal scheme that aims to transform the city best known for its income inequality, sprawl, and inadequate infrastructure.

On the eve of Britain’s shock election on June 8, a tour of the country’s former industrial north compares its social and political tensions to those behind Trump’s America.

Critical investment is needed in basic infrastructure to help the millions of poor and working-class Americans who have limited access to public transportation, broadband and even clean water.

By failing to value homes accurately, Cook County’s property tax system has been overburdening the poor and giving breaks to the rich.

Trump’s infrastructure plan, the darling of his campaign, the cynosure of his inaugural address and and the sparkling gem of his first speech to Congress, is a shallow farce.

The future vision for Philadelphia’s Eastwick neighborhood is being shaped around the demands of climate change and community-driven development.

The country’s rapid urbanization is spurring the development of a new wave of megacities, including Amaravati, in Andhra Pradesh.

New census data suggests that the back-to-the-city trend may be slowing, with city growth dipping below suburban growth in 2015-16.

West Virginia has the highest overdose death rate in the country. Locals are fighting to save their neighbors — and their towns — from destruction.

Cities need to respond to the ‘bright flight’ fueled by rising costs that is driving young people to cheaper regional centers.

The city once known for its heavy pollution has been transformed around green medical complexes, research universities and tech offices.

A coalition of artists, activists, residents, and architects are working to redevelop an abandoned railroad warehouse into a community-owned neighborhood hub.

With more than 55,000 people living in shelters and on the streets at this year’s count, the humanitarian crisis has reached record levels. (Also see “Tent City, America,” in Places.)

Fifteen years after The Wire, while some parts of the city are thriving, others have gone into reverse. (Also see “The Third Rail,” in Places.)

There are just 30 available units for every 100 low-income families in Polk County, and the number in need is growing.

Since the 1990s, sparsely populated counties have replaced large cities as America’s most troubled areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being, and the decline is accelerating.

How the city prevailed over the Reagan administration’s local anti-apartheid ordinances may have important lessons for cities trying to resist Trump today.

The gleaming skyscrapers and massive shopping malls of the ambitious new developments rising from Mauritius to Nigeria are available only to a small segment of Africa’s vast population.

The small town of Clarkston in America’s Deep South has re-homed over 40,000 refugees over the past 25 years.

The 250-year-old Ratzner map gives a unique window into what the city was like on the eve of the Revolution.

In a zero marginal cost society, machines and computer algorithms would replace virtually all human effort in the production of goods and services.

The arrival of several art galleries in East Los Angeles has sparked fears of displacement and gentrification among community activists.

Few of the Baltimore residents complaining that their landlord does not maintain their homes, humiliates late-payers, and often sues leavers know that he is the president’s son-in-law.

Artists and affordable housing advocates in New Orleans are challenging the use of common development language, from ‘auction’ and ‘blight’ to ‘gentrification’ and ‘property’ itself.

Seattle, where ideal habitats abound and the birds figure in local iconography, may be the corvid capital of the world.

Examining the closure of General Motors plant in Wisconsin, Janesville by Amy Goldstein is the newest addition to our growing literature of post-industrial decline.

As jobs have moved back to cities around the country, millions of square feet of office inventory has become obsolete, leaving locals with fewer opportunities and longer commutes.

In Cairo, Illinois, two dilapidated developments are slated for demolition, leaving the residents with nowhere else to go.

The city’s re-greening program aims to double the number of trees and increase park space by two-thirds to tackle the heat island effect and poor air quality in its built-up center.

Many of the Philadelphia’s “middle markets,” caught between rich and poor, are all at once poised to thrive and at risk of failing.