Places Wire

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.

Alabama’s low land values and extreme poverty has made it a magnet for landfills, with waste hauled in from across the country for as little as $1 a ton.

New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Austin, and Boston have pioneered Zero Waste programs, but all are falling short of their ambitious plans to improve recycling, reduce waste, and cut emissions.

A few miles north of San Francisco, a community of roughly one hundred people live in abandoned boats as “anchor-outs” in Richardson Bay, off the coast of Sausalito.

The rules that have governed the design of the country’s built environment since 1947 have created neighborhoods that make walking inconvenient and public transit unviable.

Two Cleveland suburbs, Shaker and Parma — one racially mixed, one homogenous — offer a reference point for the cultural fissure that opened up in the Democratic party after the 2016 election.

A new report shows how a three-year initiative to invest in parks, libraries, trails, and other civic assets in Akron, Chicago, Detroit, and Memphis has shifted perceptions of nearby neighborhoods.

Beginning in the 1820s and continuing through the 1960s, waves of idealists established alternative suburbs outside of Eastern U.S. cities. (Also see “Housing Is Everybody’s Problem,” by the same author, in Places.)

Congestion charging could change not just traffic, but also how we think about the infrastructure cars require in the United States.

We need more than inspiration from the heroic struggles of the past. We must also heed lessons learned from disastrous failures and incomplete victories.

Campaigners from New York to Toronto and Berlin are fighting back against the attempts by companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon to take over huge sections of their cities.

California housing politics has made for strange bedfellows, with people from some of the country’s richest suburbs fighting alongside rent-strained neighborhoods to oppose Scott Weiner’s SB 50.

The Five Keys Charter School put a classroom on wheels and parked it in the poorest neighborhoods of San Francisco.

The recent books by Eric Klinenberg and Susan Orleans and Frederick Wiseman’s film, Ex Libris, mark the growing interest in the power and the possibilities of public libraries. (Also see columnist Shannon Mattern‘s essays on libraries, in Places.)

What does it mean when Silicon Valley serves as landlord, utility provider, urban developer, (unelected) city official, and employer, all rolled into one?

The city is set to hold a referendum to decide whether to seize 200,000 homes from landlords and turn them into social housing.

The seduction of a massive infusion of cash and digital technology to propel an industrial moonscape to the vanguard of digital urbanism has been intoxicating for Toronto’s political elite. (Also see “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019” and “A City Is Not a Computer” in Places.)