Places Wire

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.)

A look at Baltimore shows how Amazon may now reach into Americans’ daily existence in more ways than any corporation in history.

Just ten power brokers — a mix of technology behemoths, commercial and residential developers and one private university — own about $59.2 billion in taxable property.

Federal law requires companies to restore land after extraction, but companies have lobbied the the state for lower standards — meaning that thousands of acres are potentially contaminated.

South Central is a radically horizontal post-industrial landscape where buildings rarely exceed two or three stories and pedestrians find little shelter from the sun. (Also see “Shade,” in Places.)

The bodega is a social network, a community message board, a hub of intertwined exchange circuits — all compressed into 2000 square feet.

Right now, on protected lands in Arizona, construction crews are pumping water from the desert to build the president’s border wall.

Thomas Campanella’s new book explores the history of what he calls the “deep south” of the borough. (Also see “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” in Places.)

According to data from the city, 1,311 permitted block parties took place this year between June 1 and September 1, with 721 in Brooklyn alone.

A new study estimates that the citywide plan to limit cars and capture nearly 70 percent of street space for bikes and pedestrians could save 667 lives per year.

A new investigation found that Amazon escapes responsibility for its role in traffic accidents even though the company keeps a tight grip on how third-party delivery drivers do their jobs.

Paul Romer, the recipient of the 2018 Nobel prize for economics, argues that the coming century will need more “Burning Man urbanization.” (Also see “Burning Man and the Metropolis,” in Places.)

Railroads actually changed everything, driving the expansion and development of Western cities, blazing the path for telegraphs and phone lines, and giving rise to standardized time zones.

Places columnist Shannon Mattern introduces a new series for Urban Omnibus exploring the points of abrasion in the “so-called smart city.”

A series of mages taken over eighty years provides a look at the city’s shifting architecture that emerges with the sun and disappears by nightfall.

In this slideshow, Jessica Christian shares a selection of the candid photographs that she has been making as she travels around the city’s transit network.

Places contributor Nick Sowers will be presenting his work on sound at Burning Man and Black Rock City at this year’s event, titled “Collective City.” (Also see “Soundscapes: Burning Man.”)

Cities including Osaka, Japan, Berne, Switzerland, and Copenhagen, Denmark, offer lessons in making density and nature work together to help build community.

The multiplying risks of extreme heat are just beginning to be understood, even in places like Phoenix, one of the hottest big cities in America (Also see Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” in Places.)

Street photographer Phil Penman is driven to document the city’s ever-changing streets in all their rat-infested, garbage-piled glory.

The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets.

Housing insecurity in the nation’s richest cities is far worse than government statistics claim.

Instead of giving up on recycling, we should all use less, re-use what we can and treat our waste like the waste industry sees it: as a resource.

Infrastructure and inequality are intertwined in American cities, and Interstates including Atlanta’s I-20 were designed as dividing lines. (Also see “Nicetown,” in Places.)

Bronx-born photographer Alvin Baltrop documented gay life in the 1970s at the piers lining Manhattan’s west side. (See “Unbuilding Gender,” in Places, for some of Baltrop’s work.)

Oakland-based transit policymaker Warren Logan is finding ways to bring government to communities to find solutions together to the region’s transportation issues.

Places columnist Shannon Mattern is among the speakers at this year’s festival, which takes place on September 28.

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.