Places Wire

As the vote on rent control approaches, tenants across California report that they have been harassed, served with eviction notices, and forced to pay more rent.

Durham, North Carolina is enjoying a headline-grabbing renaissance that also includes deliberate efforts to reclaim the commons for all its residents.

In Boom Town, Sam Anderson chronicles the history of Oklahoma City, beginning with its foundig in the Land Run of 1889.

Behind the darkened windows, there’s a deeper story about money and land, with implications for the future of cities and the rest of the United States.

The diversity of life found in a Seattle backyard defies the fact that the loss of natural space to urban sprawl endangers plants and animals across the globe.

Melissa and Chris Brunlett’s new book looks at five Dutch cities as blueprints for creating an accessible urban cycling culture.

The public engagement that Janet Delaney’s pictures bring to life was both the high point of an old era and the starting point of a new one.

The channel port city of Dunkirk is a month into a project that makes it the biggest European city to offer free public transport, and residents have been taking full advantage.

Durango used to provide camping areas for homeless people, but its growing tourist industry has prompted the town to close these spaces and criminalize homeless camping and sleeping.

In Slab City, architect Charlie Hailey and photographer Donovan Wiley explore a community of squatters, artists, and migrants deep in the heart of California’s Colorado Desert.

In Climate Leviathan, Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright explore the political dimensions of climate change and the future world order that might emerge.

In Walkable City Rules, Jeff Speck presents a series of approaches for making the aspiration of human-centered cities a reality.

The 300 block of Hyde Street in San Francisco received 2,227 complaints about street and sidewalk cleanliness over the past decade, more than any other.

Numerous thinkers on space and place — from Robert Macfarlane to Jane Jacobs to Rem Koolhaas — have explored what desire lines tell us about how people engage with their environments.

City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet, by Karen C. Seto and Meredith Reba, allows us to see features from the health of vegetation to heat distribution to building materials in cities around the world.

The city’s postwar pedestrian walkways proved unpopular, but now they are being reimagined for the twenty-first century. (Also see “The Multilevel Metropolis,” in Places.)

Allison talks with Jarrett Walker about the expanding definition of design and the relationship between design and policy.

Cities and advocates are hoping that the research will help crack open the persistent problem of neighborhood disadvantage.

The model is gaining momentum as an avenue for tackling income inequality, growing wealth and stabilizing neighborhood-based businesses in cities across the country.

The Mall has a crucial role to play as the city and the region attempt to reorient themselves toward the lakefront, tourism, and recreation and away from their industrial past.

Pinellas County has had the highest per-capita cyclist death rate for the past decade among the four counties in the Tampa Bay metro area, which has the highest fatality rate of any major metro area in the U.S.

Nearly half of all residents of U.S. cities live in these neighborhoods, where income and home value hover around the median and diversity is high, but many are at risk of falling into decline.

Hurricane Florence is the latest storm to show how the industry’s under-investment in resiliency and willful ignorance of the risks of climate change is unsustainable.

Charles Johnstone used one of the last batches of the toxic chemicals and paper that make cibachrome images to seek out empty places across the five boroughs.

William T. Vollmann’s Carbon Ideologies, a single work published in two parts, No Immediate Danger and No Good Alternative, offers no comfort to its readers.

In The Last London, Iain Sinclair reflects on his alienation from a city that has become an island within an island, “open for business only if your business is business.”

Housing prices in North Las Vegas are rising so fast that many communities are no longer affordable.

This three-part documentary series follows a group of residents struggling to rebuild after the devastation of Hurricanes Irma and Maria.

The economic and social gaps among cities are growing as dramatic as the gaps between urban and rural areas.

Almost 700 families have become homeless in the city so far this year, providing a jolting reminder about wide inequality in a country with a booming economy and a reputation for social justice.

In Cape Town,one of the most unequal cities on Earth, water scarcity and the threat of “Day Zero” has brought the division between the haves and the have-nots to the center of discourse.

The Mow to Own program in St Louis and LandCare scheme in Philadelphia are innovative examples of how cities are dealing with the problem of hyper-vacancy.

Urging urban leaders to go it alone celebrates a deep dysfunction in federalism — and normalizes a self-destructive shift in politics.

New York City’s streetscape has been transformed — visually and economically — by the staggering numbers of vacant storefronts now dotting its most popular retail corridors.

Runaway development is now well-recognized to be at the heart of the city’s flooding problems, but residents and officials remain at a crossroads for how to move forward.

Access to parks across the city is being increasingly restricted by corporate events such as music festivals.

The city grid, which once served to organize the development of private real estate by providing access to land parcels, could be transformed to dedicate the streets to pedestrians instead.

Once cars arrived, nearly every U.S. transit agency slashed service to cut costs, instead of improving service to stay competitive.

Daniel Kariko’s Speculative World documents the unfinished real estate developments around the state left behind in 2008 and 2009 using aerial photography.

For nearly a decade, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has been fighting in court to keep the public off a piece of beach that abuts his property on the Pacific coast.

Six Magnum photographers documented regions around the world where indigenous communities are battling governments and commercial interests to remain on their ancestral lands.

It’s time we rethink how we organize the cities outside our front doors with as much intention as we do our homes.

A year after the devastating flood, the nation’s fourth-largest city is still struggling to find the funds to rebuild and reengineer and, crucially, keep another such catastrophe at bay.

Decade after decade, observers have alternately wonder at the latest clique of young, middle-class white people that have chosen to live in a less privileged urban neighborhood.

As homelessness rises in Los Angeles, business owners are controversially blocking off public spaces to prevent people congregating outside.

Then-and-now maps reveal just how comprehensive and integrated the transport networks were in cities around the country before the rise of the private vehicle.

The neighborhood promises to be a benign evolution of the modern city, yet the question of how Alphabet will collect, share, and analyze the data it gathers from its buildings and streets remains. (Also see “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019, in Places.)

Two new books argue that today’s poor are treated as presumptive lawbreakers and trapped within a social panopticon that permits and encourages their constant observation.

As more Americans around the country are pushed to living in their cars, cities including Santa Barbara, California, and Kirkland, Washington, are trying new safe park programs.

A livable world achieved through incremental changes may have been possible in the 1980s, but it’s a fantasy now. The best approach today requires not hope, but courage.

Recent research on crime rates in Philadelphia points toward a new approach to crime prevention, focussed on the restoration of abandoned spaces.