Places Wire

Rising temperatures means that work is increasingly extending later or even beginning at sunset, but the night is not the respite from the heat that it once was. (Also see “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” in Places.)

Now that China is turning away the world’s recyclable waste, Australia wants to ban export of the materials and increase domestic processing.

Nothing endangers American public space in 2019 as much as mass shootings, says Yale sociologist Vida Bajc.

A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America.

Temperatures on a scorching summer day can vary as much as 20 degrees across different parts of the same city, with poor or minority neighborhoods often bearing the brunt of that heat. (Also see “Shade,” in Places.)

In the short term, gentrification makes neighborhoods more, not less, economically diverse and more racially integrated. Maintaining diversity, not preservation, should be the goal.

The case for slower cities is gaining traction in places where the rise of micromobility, the promise of autonomous vehicles, and the already-here problem of road congestion have converged.

For hundreds of years, families in Mauritania have been maintaining libraries of old Arabo-Berber books.

Detroit’s Eastern Market has lately become a destination, but for business owners, maintaining affordability and accessibility for all is crucial.

Deciding the future of the I-81 viaduct means reckoning with the legacies of transportation development that contributed to segregation, poverty, and urban decay. (Also see “Nicetown,” in Places.)

The program to bus homeless people out of the city has undoubtedly saved lives. But, for others, the program has led them right back where they started.

As the city courts more family-friendly tourism, its entertainment workers — musicians, strippers, bartenders, waiters — feel that they are effectively being zoned and regulated out of the city. (Also see “Impossible City: New Orleans,” in Places.)

Canal living has become a popular option for affordable housing in the city, but its rising popularity has driven up costs and boaters fear they are being pushed out by restrictive new developments.

An experimental program giving families not only vouchers but also low-cost support services to obtain housing helped the system to work more effectively as a bridge to opportunity.

The arrival of wild boar in town squares and city parks across Europe is forcing us to confront a new reality: we are bumping up against the limits of urbanization.

In America today, there are more cars than drivers. Yet our investment in these vehicles has yielded dubious returns.

The average population density of a vast metropolitan area does little to capture the many different ways that we might want to structure our cities and neighborhoods.

The supply chain for many of the two million merchants that use the company’s platform as their storefront depends on the clearance aisles of box stores and dying chains around the country.

Frustrated with the city’s failure to address homelessness, business owners are installing planters, fences, and even prickly planting to dissuade people from camping on the sidewalks outside.

Alex Espinosa’s new book explores the space of cruising and how it opens up, invades, and ruptures the larger environs.

The city’s reputation as a hub where artists and creative types can rent inexpensively and still afford to do as they please is eroding. (Also see “The Accidental Planners,” in Places.)

It’s no secret that public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency on the automobile.

The cities being built today are conceived by private multinational corporations as gilt-edged tax-exempt gated communities. (Also see “The Anti-Cairo,” in Places.)

Empty land has a different meaning depending on which side of the economic divide you stand, and it is increasingly concentrated in areas that are losing jobs, investment, and economic opportunity.

Ruskin, Florida (as well as several other now-defunct communities) represent the apotheosis of a now-neglected socialist history of American Ruskinphilia.

The gentrification of the borough has been blamed on the disregard and greed of white people, but for Harlem historian Michael Henry Adams, the truth is much more complex.

Efforts are underway to popularize “U-turns”, when someone returns to their hometown, and “I-turns”, for those who move to the country from a city, to address rapid rural depopulation.

By helping to catalyze one of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods, it turns out that graffiti can ruin a neighborhood — just not the way that New York City expected.

The “Right to Repair” movement rejects the primacy of disposable culture and proprietary technology, and new legislation could help. (Also see “Maintenance and Care,” in Places.)

The dream of a house with a yard on every lot means that townhomes, duplexes, and apartments are effectively banned in many neighborhoods.

When a book about suburbia contains a chapter called “The Anarchists Who Took the Commuter Train,” you know it is going to be an interesting read, writes Dan Wood. (Read more in Hurley’s article, “Housing Is Everybody’s Problem,” in Places.)

The latest episode of Nice Try! looks at the stories of Levittown and Concord Park, and features Places author Amanda Kolson Hurley. (For more, read her article on Concord Park and its visionary developer, Morris Milgram.)

A small team are tackling the legal and political structures behind the unregulated real estate and centuries of inequality that have contributed to blight in the city.

New research from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning has sparked advocates and some elected officials in Massachusetts to call for a statewide low-income fare program.

A new series of articles delves into the movements driving social justice in housing around the country, including opposition to the financialization of housing and support for rent control.

Without attention to social justice, the technologies that are disrupting how we buy, sell, and rent property stand to reinforce the biases that have long generated discrimination and exclusion.

n his new book, Chris Arnade lays bare what life is like for the marginalized poor that are being forgotten around the country.

The unanimous support of San Francisco’s Historic Preservation Commission to name the Castro a cultural district should prompt us to acknowledge the diverse places that queer people call home in cities around the country. (Also see “The Association of (Gay) Suburban People,” in Places.)

Declining demand means that water is sitting for longer in infrastructure systems that are getting older. The implications for public health are concerning. (Also see “Wearing the Lead Glasses,” in Places.)

A wave of curious visitors are making pilgrimages to the site of the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history.

In Colorado Springs, businesses are suing the military for perfluorinated compounds which they argue have dangerously contaminated water sources. (Also see “The Mustard Gas in Sherwood Forest,” in Places.)

Urban-rural polarization is not unique to the United States, but across the country, the conflict is particularly acute, and has become entrenched, hostile, and far-reaching in its consequences.

In a new book, Genevieve Carpio draws on the history of contested claims to mobility in the twentieth century to argue that lowriders are subversive agents of a technological counterculture.

A shadow economy of state road crews and “community work crews” subsidize local governments across the state by working in maintenance, construction, trash collection, and sewage treatment.

Connecticut has more separate — and unequal — housing than nearly any other state in the country. This separation is by design.

The author and photographer discuss Human Archipelago, their collaborative project on migration and displacement.

Real engagement with your environment also means noticing things that are not necessarily charming at all.

Debjani Bhattacharyya’s Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta and Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World explore the city’s complex history from the Raj to Modi.

The question of how do to deal with the noise of densification is facing cities worldwide, but its uneven distribution is another concern.

After avoiding disaster through a combination of water conservation, efficiency measures (and a little luck), the city offers a largely hopeful precedent for others facing threat from environmental extremes.