Places Wire

The urban fabric of the country’s new military capital, Naypyidaw, is the product of political as much as architectural design.

Places author Yolanta C. Siu joins Colin Marshall and Kurt Achin to discuss the development of Mullae in Seoul — the topic of her recent article,  “Collective Dust” — on Koreascape. 

Over 5 years in the mid-1980s, the City of New York photographed every property in the five boroughs. Organized into street-view maps, these images offer glimpses of the streetscape 30 years ago.

The real threat of computers isn’t their future superintelligence: it’s that they might remain just as ordinary and impotent as they are today, and yet overtake us anyway. (Also see “A City Is Not a Computer,” in Places.)

After Harvey, the city is faced with the emissions released by its damaged and disrupted petrochemical plants. (Also see “The Things They Piled,” in Places.)

Resilience is about seizing an opportunity to move into a state of greater adaptability and preparedness — not just going back to the status quo.

Increasing summer temperatures have been a boon to the cooling industry in India, but the accompanying rise in emissions from air conditioners demands more sustainable solutions.

The lived realities of public goods reflect the ways in which we construct, perpetuate, and institutionalize economic and racial inequalities today.

Five visions in five cities of how designers can reclaim and repurpose our ever-present roadways with accessibility and mobility in mind.

Nation-states came late to history, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest they won’t make it to the end of the century.

Local groups are organizing to improve transit and walkability in Laramie with the hope of bringing a new generation of investment into the region.

Mexican-American preservationists are pioneering an approach that values people as much as buildings in the newly designated UNESCO World Heritage site.

The Alabama town’s attempt to secede from its school district has much to tell us about the fragile progress of racial integration in America.

Permanent relocation is the third rail of disaster planning. But in flood-prone coastal Louisiana, towns have started to ask a question Texans may face soon: When should we all just leave?

Small towns across Japan are on the verge of collapse. Whether they can do so gracefully has consequences for societies around the globe.

A long-harbored conservative dream — the “dismantling of the administrative state” — is taking place under Secretary Ben Carson.

In Brandon Harris’s new memoir, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, gentrification is not just a historical or social phenomenon; it can also be a moral failing.

Little has been written about the people of color who live and work amid the rising tide of white nationalism in rural red states.

Rising housing costs are pushing working-class people to move out of richer states and into cheaper ones, reversing familiar patterns of migration and income convergence.

Advocates for pedestrians and cyclists must change the narrative created by the auto industry in the 1920s that roads are for cars alone.

Tent City, the controversial outdoor jail opened in Phoenix in 1993 by America’s ‘toughest sheriff’  is finally closing.

Locals displaced by tourism in Argentina’s southernmost city are fighting to hold on to the land that they believe is rightfully theirs.

Perhaps the forgotten idea that cooling the air was sinful was not entirely wrong.

Public memory isn’t simply history. It is a public recitation, often written onto the landscape, about what we revere and what we regret about who we are and what we come from.

Malls and office complexes continue to spring up in the world’s hottest city, built by migrants often working illegally in soaring temperatures. How long can it continue?

All over the country, people are fighting hate by standing up to promote tolerance and inclusion.

The Iowa co-op in Beijing’s Caochangdi art district has fallen victim to the government’s plans for urban renewal. (Also see “Art Village: A Year in Caochangdi,” in Places.)

Migrants ride the 2,000 mile-long relic of the Soviet Union from Tajikistan, the poorest Central Asian state, in search of work.

The conversation about how to fix our cities is mostly being conducted by very white, very loud men.

There is a sense of civic participation in the self-display captured in Jamel Shabazz’s New York City street photography.

In Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, residents are organizing to ensure that the next round of urban renewal benefits them.

The attack in Charlottesville was a threat to an amenity that is both scarce and necessary for democracy.

Subterranean cartographers are bringing to light the dark, tangled truths of the infrastructure networks buried under the city’s streets.

Many of the 7,600 refugees trying to adapt to life in Serbia had hoped to live elsewhere in the E.U., before the borders started shutting.

An unlikely coalition of Trump voters, lefty activists, and indigenous people is trying to stop the construction of a power line in New Hampshire.

The small black city is fighting the momentum to be absorbed into neighboring Pittsburgh by preserving its own distinct interests.

Stories of gentrification are by definition stories of change, and yet scholars have had a surprisingly hard time figuring out who gets displaced, and how.

The merchants of Haight-Ashbury advertised a summer of free food, free lodging, and free love. What they got instead was a civic nightmare.

Beyond the city’s busy downtown, the troublesome legacy of deindustrialization comes into view.

A fifth of New York City’s bananas arrive every week through Red Hook Terminal and make their way through a historic network of small businesses to its remaining fruit stands.

San Francisco’s United Nations Plaza has never quite become the public space that its designer intended.

American journalist Hannah Dreier documented the destruction of democracy in what was once one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

Despite its boots-and-hat veneer, Prine­ville, Oregon, is a primary driver of America’s next great boom industry.

The conflict between federal and local policies for illegal immigrants is becoming an acute problem in places that have come to depend on them.

Decades after the technology made much of the Sun Belt livable, it has now become standard nearly everywhere.

From Denver to Minneapolis, cities are putting our fractious federal government to shame.

The land-value tax, a long-forgotten idea by the political economist Henry George, is making a comeback in Arden, Delaware.

John Lanchester’s essay on the influence of Google, Facebook, and Amazon is well worth a look behind the LRB’s paywall.

Fast food did not just find its way to low-income neighborhoods. It was brought there by the federal government.

A new exhibition of photographs accompanying his forthcoming book, Blind Spot, records Cole’s travels from Mexico City to Nairobi to Auckland.

As urban neighborhoods are remade around the needs of new, wealthier residents, the onetime staple of city blocks is becoming a relic.

New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, and the rising tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom.

In Saguache County, Colorado, only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband. They are part of the 23 million Americans still lacking the service that has become standard for most.

Whether the story of the aftermath of the London Games is one of success or failure is still very much in question. (Also see “The Displacement Decathlon,” in Places.)

For an increasing number of people in America, the difference between living indoors and living on the street is an injury, an accident, a family emergency, a bad season, a month’s salary.

A new exhibition showcasing photographs of Latino enclaves from Spanish Harlem to East Los Angeles from the 1950s asks us to consider how we view places that we do not know.

Jeremiah Moss’s “Vanishing New York” and Tamara Shopsin’s “Arbitrary Stupid Goal” look at what gentrification means for the city.