Places Wire

In Copenhagenize, Mikael Colville-Andersen argues for designing “life-sized cities” that place the bicycle at the center of the urban transportation.

Places columnist Shannon Mattern and host Jarrett Fuller discuss relationships between the built environment and the digital world, and how to connect theory and artifact.

Forcing the most in-demand places in the country to remain underpopulated denies ordinary people access to prosperous cities, and leaves a key driver of America’s economy under-utilized.

When it comes to the relationship between a critic or curator writing about photographers or photography, the results span the spectrum of exclusion, segregation and integration.

Some people are being left behind, not because the future is intolerant of them but because they are intolerant of this future.

The first piece of the Reading Viaduct rail park is due to open in June, but beyond its quarter-mile, the future remains uncertain.

In his expansive work, Geoffrey West sees the rapid growth of big cities and big data causing human activities to scale with time at super-exponential speeds.

Urban Sketchers is a worldwide group of more than 60,000 people, connected by social media, who create and share drawings of the places they visit.

A border wall would be devastating to life of all kinds on both sides of the already-threatened Rio Grande.

Housing advocates are concerned that the organization is moving away from its core mission of combatting housing discrimination.

In Racine County, neatly maintained homes and dream houses are being designated “blighted” to make way for Foxconn.

In cities like Jacksonville and St. Louis, maps of mortgage approvals and home values in black neighborhoods look the same as they did before the passage of the fifty-year-old landmark fair housing law.

A generation ago, Joel Garreau coined the term in his influential account of the ways that America was rebuilding itself at the end of the 20th century.

The same kind of shade and shelter that can be found in an aisle of books and an avenue of trees, and in the longevity of both, and the mere fact that both, if not butchered or burned, may outlive us.

Rockefeller’s New York State Urban Development Corporation was created to transform affordable housing, and its legacy sheds light on why it remains so hard to do so to this day.

In small-town America, housing complexes are crumbling, and local authorities lack the resources to replace what’s being lost.

The reorganization will wreck the U.S. territory’s ability to produce credible data about itself, including updated estimates of the death toll from Hurricane Maria.

Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier documents how Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination affected the physical structures of Memphis, Chicago, and Baltimore from the air.

For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future.

A new study has mined court records across the country to measure how widespread the problem has become.

Daniel Wakin’s book, The Man with the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block, uncovers the story of of seven buildings between 105th and 106th Streets.

A stagnant population, slow employment market, and more than 135,000 homes classed as underwater are causing the city to lag.

From the nineteen-seventies until her death last AugustGottfried combed streets, parks, subways, and night clubs, in search of the shock of recognition one sometimes finds in perfect strangers.

The city’s ambitious public library program is working to radically change the form and function of its library spaces. (Also see “Library as Infrastructure,” in Places.)

It is an ever-widening surveillance zone that turns borderland citizens into guardians of the state.

The U.S. is sorting and segregating faster than ever, and so the gravity of what gentrification is has only grown weightier.

If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.

We must acknowledge that the economic system and political structures that perpetuated poverty then are still in force now.

With Waymo’s estimate that their fleet of 20,000 self-driving Jaguar cars alone will be capable of doing a million trips each day in 2020, its time to really think about how this will transform our cities.

The oldest suburb in L.A. has long been the landing spot for a succession of immigrants, but in the age of Trump, residents are losing many of the toeholds they once relied upon to start new lives.

As New York struggles to save its public housing, San Francisco is transferring almost all of its units to private management, and Chicago is moving to give tenants rental-subsidy vouchers.

Today we see many European cities as models for the benefits of urban density, but a look at the map of some key examples reveals a more complex, ambivalent picture of how they came to be.

The policy shift will roll back the Obama administration’s attempts to reverse decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation in federally subsidized housing and development projects.

The long-neglected waterway has gone from being seen as a liability to an amenity, but new investment is raising questions about who stands to benefit from its revitalization.

Writers and public figures in each of the 50 states — plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories — present local snapshots of the new American narrative.

Bjarke Ingels’s $660 million Amager Bakke building combines a ski slope and restaurant with a cutting-edge waste-to-energy plant, and could redefine what we mean by urban sustainability.

The community that the social network is building has many precedents in American history, quite a few of them cautionary tales about what happens when a powerful corporation takes control of civic life.

Arthur Crestani’s images in Bad City Dreams contrast the glossy ideal sold by developers with the urban reality of Gurgaon: a city built almost entirely by private companies, with no public space.

People living on the streets of Oakland, L.A., and Seattle reveal the tents, tarps, and makeshift buildings that make do as a place to live.

Serenbe is a 1,000-acre intentional community southwest of Atlanta that aims to perfectly balance the urban and the rural.

According to a new report by Environment Texas, the state’s industries are routinely violating environmental laws by dumping waste into its rivers and bays, often without consequence.

Returning to Arkansas after a decade in New York, Frederick McKindra is documenting his impressions of its landscapes in order to understand what “the South” means.

Despite approving billions in funds to fight the problem, Los Angeles has seen its homeless population continue to grow.

In suburbs and towns across the country, women are fueling an American political transformation that most media outlets are systematically missing, or at least misreading.

The legislation would allow more home building along transit routes to reduce gas-guzzling commutes, but groups that broadly support the goal — including the Sierra Club — have denounced the method.

Preserving sites with the most shameful or contested histories is critical for building democracy. (Also see “Forgetting Guantánamo, Again,” in Places.)

If urban centers represent humanity’s domination over whatever in nature might cause us hurt or harm or discomfort, the presence of wildness in the city is nature’s resistance.

The state’s unique geography, politics, and activist culture have combined with a poorly distributed economic boom to create a uniquely dire situation.