Places Wire

The 50 counties with the most cases accounted for more than one-third of the nation’s economic output and nearly one-third of its jobs, according to a new analysis conducted for The Atlantic by the Brookings Institution.

Some believe the pandemic is a once-in-a-generation chance to remake society and build a better future. Others fear it may only make existing injustices worse.

If we don’t debate a democratic response to pandemics now, we risk ceding leadership to tyrants, argues Mike Davis.

The Internet Archive has made its digital collection of 1.4 million books freely available until June 30th.

Between the fever and the anxiety, I thought to myself that the parameters of organized social behavior had changed forever and could no longer be modified, writes Paul B. Preciado.

During the Great Plague, the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded how the city emptied as he continued to work, socialize, and dream of assignations.

San Francisco showed the biggest drop in crime reports, which fell 42 percent during the week of March 16, when it became the first U.S. city to mandate sheltering in place.

Without a street address you have no access to credit or bank accounts, a pension or voting rights. But large parts of the world’s population still live off the map.

This is the silent spring. The planet has gone quiet, so quiet you can almost hear it whirling around the sun, feel its smallness, picture for once the loneliness and fleetingness of being alive.

The finding doesn’t mean those places didn’t suffer economically — they did, but on balance, the distancing measures appear to have reduced the pandemic’s economic toll.

John Barry, an expert on the earlier pandemic, speaks with The New Yorker’s David Remnick about the parallels between 1918 and 2020.

Will we have the courage to resist trying to restore the world we have lost, with its frenetic pace, its air travel and traffic jams, and its obsession with growth and production?

The mobilization of the volunteers who guarded buildings and conducted temperature checks relied on the local residents’ committees that oversee the urban governance.

Science writer David Quammen discusses the root causes underlying the current pandemic and explores the ways in which viruses are embedded in the same systems of ecology and evolutionary biology that we are.

The lessons that America draws from this experience are hard to predict, but one could envisage a future in which the country pivots, as it did after World War II, from isolationism to international cooperation.

Libraries have long served as unofficial day shelters for people experiencing homelessness or housing instability, as well as as a lifeline for low-income families. (Also see “Library as Infrastructure,” in Places.)

These images are haunted and haunting, like stills from movies about plagues and the apocalypse, but in some ways they are hopeful.

Our parks and public spaces have a long history serving us in times of crisis. But like so many other treasured aspects of urban life, parks are no longer working for us.

As the government considers stimulus going forward from this pause, it should see an opportunity to stimulate the growth of a cleaner, greener, more just economy.

If industrial capitalism depended upon the exploitation and control of nature, then surveillance capitalism depends instead upon the exploitation and control of human nature.

A series of experts share their predictions for how the current crisis might reshape community, technology, medicine, and politics when it is over.

In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.

What this is, rather, is a critical shift in the way we think about the human, the natural and the overlap between these.

This is an ecosystem that is deeply dysfunctional, if not on the point of collapse: About 90% of the millions of tons of plastic the world produces every year will eventually end up not recycled, but burned, buried, or dumped.

The takeover comes as California’s homelessness crisis and the escalating coronavirus outbreak have collided to create a catastrophe threatening thousands of lives.

The country showed that it is possible to contain the coronavirus without shutting down the economy, but experts are unsure whether its lessons can work abroad

Shared vulnerability is essential to family life—and to citizenship. It’s about accepting that you cannot opt out of an ecosystem.

A running series of brief dispatches by New York Review writers will document the coronavirus outbreak with regular updates from around the world.

Members of San Francisco’s fragile, critical human infrastructure are still at their posts. For the rest, there is a feeling that life has been displaced and consolidated.

The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us in our common humanity. The whole world is in the same boat. However frightened we may feel, we have never been less alone.

Scientists who have fought pandemics describe the harsh measures that will need to be taken to protect the United States from the fast-moving pathogen.

As these images show, the Earth and its people have long been prey to the invisible pathogens that bring their victims low with equal efficiency.

How a group of homeless mothers took on the housing crisis in Oakland.

There is an opportunity now to address three interlinked crises: the COVID19 pandemic and the resulting economic recession; the climate emergency; and extreme inequality.

What feels so disconcerting about this is not just that density normally brings urban perks that we can’t enjoy right now. Even more than that, density, in the right conditions, is good for us.

A portrait of Dilley, Texas, home of the largest immigration detention center in the United States.

On genre, activism, and spatial justice in a city made by fossil fuels. (Also see “Cisco Trash Map,” by the same author, and “Urban Crude,” on L.A.’s oil landscape, in Places).

Cities are epicenters of capital and creativity, designed to be occupied collectively. Pandemics are anti-urban, preying on our human desire for connection, argues Michael Kimmelman.

How deadly the Covid-19 outbreak will prove to be, no one can yet say, but the echoes of 1918 are growing louder by the hour.

Hundreds of thousands of single-family homes are now in the hands of giant companies — squeezing renters for revenue and putting the American dream even further out of reach.

The country has been incentivizing the responsible disposal of waste since it introduced free collections for recycling along with a fee for all other trash back in 1995.

For more than two decades after his asylum application was rejected, Sunny found a safe haven aboard the buses that zigzag across London at night.

Wikipedia has become one of the few places where we can meet to write a shared reality. But we know very little about who is writing the world’s encyclopedia.

Ota Tofu Company opened in Portland in 1911 and remains a testament to the city’s complicated cultural history, from early immigration to internment to modern multiculturalism.

Consider that its a working-class town that’s 33 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black, and 7 percent Asian, with high homelessness and large populations of undocumented immigrants, and one starts to understand why its people get overlooked.

In their sprawl and heterogeneity, and in their contrasts to other cities in their respective countries, the two megalopolises might be thought of as sibling cities.

The latest installment of Digital Frictions, curated by Places columnist Shannon Mattern, undertakes an idiosyncratic tour through the entanglement of infrastructures that govern our “logistics planet.”

Adapting to climate change and mitigating for its effects is fundamentally an infrastructure project. We can no longer afford to fail to produce or maintain our essential systems.

As the shipping industry that has defined the region’s identity changes, San Pedrans are wary, not necessarily of progress or of being left behind, but of being erased altogether.

Artist Tonika Johnson’s Folded Map Project depicts corresponding addresses on the north and south sides of the city.

Journalists spent three months talking to the residents of an encampment in Oakland to understand the human cost of the state’s homelessness crisis.

CityLab readers share stories about the maps that made a difference in their personal, professional, and public lives.

The great trick of online retail has been to get us to shop more and think less about how our purchases reach our homes.

The term “inner city” has never provided an accurate map of racialized urban poverty—what’s inner about a geography that drifts with the people it stigmatizes?

As a teenager in late 1980s and early 1990s, artist Nic Watts lived in Stroud Green, sketching local life from his roof.

Coöperatives, municipalities, and smaller, regional companies, like Peoples Rural Telephone Cooperative (P.R.T.C.) in Jackson County, Kentucky, are building the necessary infrastructure to deliver broadband to otherwise overlooked communities.

The M.T.A. subway map is a record of how graphic design, politics, and geography have shaped the city over the last forty years.

For electric passenger vehicles to become affordable for all, local, state, and federal policymakers need to knock down the barriers that the market does not address. (Also see “The Twilight of Autopia,” in Places.)