Places Wire

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable.

A combination of community organizing and policy changes in the state’s coastal regions offers a blueprint for weather-sustainable housing.

In the same month the state decided to stop giving free bottled water to Flint, it effectively began giving away millions of gallons to Nestlé.

Driving from Chicago to Texas, a writer decides to stop at every Buc-ee’s she passes, and discovers the meaning of truly liminal spaces.

A new exhibition brings together representations from Manhattan’s earliest days as the hub of a new Dutch colony to a lighthearted depiction of the city in the 22nd century.

To be permanent and stationary requires a community to stand its ground against the will of nature. For the Yup’ik, a warming climate is making it impossible.

Fade-in shots from the Yangon Time Machine project show how Myanmar’s former capital has developed, from Churchill Road to the Sule Pagoda.(Also see “History of the Present: Yangon,” in Places.)

Climate disaster is threatening the colonias that line the low-lying floodplains of the Rio Grande, where tens of thousands still get by without clean water, street lights, paved roads or public transport.

If city population growth isn’t keeping pace with suburbs, it’s not because Americans are desirous of suburban living, but rather because we have a shortage of cities.

Trees provide essential shade and can even lower the surrounding air temperature by up to 10 degrees thanks to water evaporation from their leaves, but the city’s canopy has shrunk since 2000.

Rather than repairing struggling systems like the New York Subway, writer Peter Wayner suggests that it is time to replace them altogether with subterranean highways of autonomous cars.

Squatters turned an abandoned schoolhouse into a thriving arts center. Then it was sold to a developer, who evicted the tenants. Nearly two decades later, the building remains vacant.

The Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou stitches together a multitude of subways scenes in concentric squares in her collage video Underground Circuit.

Since 1342, the goal of the charge of loitering has always been to keep anyone perceived to be “out of place” away.

As the coal-fired power plants abandon ship, family and community are the only things left in Adams County, Ohio.

Committed locals are determined to stay put in the rapidly changing neighborhood, as the long neglect following the Great Recession is replaced with a flood of new money.

The city’s rent-controlled apartments are at the center of the crisis that has swelled the ranks of the homeless and threatens to squeeze all but the affluent from ever-wider swaths of the city.

When one hears Beethoven by loudspeaker on the Burger King sidewalk, the melody feels less like a summons to the sublime than an ugly reminder to “move along.”

There is a rebirth of civic thinking underway in the community-centered recovery stewarded by Maurice Cox’s planning department.

The mayor is redefining how the city adopts new technologies to ensure that it serves its citizens, rather than the other way around.

The cities with the highest growth rates on the latest list from the U.S. census — including Irvine, California, and Henderson, Nevada — are mostly suburban; Seattle, Washington, is the exception.

In the CEO society, what we are witnessing is the transfer of responsibility for public goods and services from democratic institutions to the wealthy, to be administered by an executive class.

Attorney Jesse McCoy II, raised in public housing, is working with students at Duke University on a new initiative to break the cycle of poverty and eviction in Durham County.

Clarissa Bonet uses her smartphone to capture interactions between people, light and architecture, then returns to recreate the images using models.

The city’s housing court system, created to shelter tenants from dangerous conditions, has instead become a tool to wrest a most precious civic commodity — affordable housing — out of regulation and into the free market.

The Walton Family Foundation is behind part of the bicycle infrastructure that is spreading around Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville.

City Council member Kshama Sawant’s push to tax Amazon and other big businesses to pay for affordable housing and tackle the city’s acute homelessness problem is dividing locals.

Los Angeles has long been an open-air museum of aerospace history, but the new wave of private space investment in Southern California is reawakening the city’s past. (Also see “Surface to Unlimited,” in Places.)

Over the last 16 years, CNN has identified at least 564 deaths of people crossing illegally in the border region not recorded in the Border Patrol’s official tally of 5,984. (Also see “Documenting the Undocumented,” in Places.)

In this issue, anthropologists, geographers, photographers, media scholars, sociologists, ecologists, and historians explore points of constriction in global flows of people, goods, and data.

Redlining continues to touch almost every facet of daily life, including health, education, wealth and policing, for urban minorities in the U.S.

The Natalie Gubb Commons development, reserved for households with incomes up to 50 percent of the local median, attracted 6,580 applicants for its 95 apartments in three weeks last fall.

A writer joins a street cleaning team to work off his parking fines and gains a new perspective upon the sharply divided city.

Economists tend to focus on the story of comparative advantage: where industries succeed because they are well matched to local resources. But comparative disadvantages can also prompt innovation.

The NYC subway has been operating at the edge of its capacity for disruptions, so small delays have a disproportionate impact.

Cities around the country are continuing to see concrete take the place of greenery, despite growing knowledge of the benefits of urban trees.

A darkly humorous look at the ironies of the city’s homelessness and housing crises.

Too many cities are ignoring what is arguably the cheapest and most flexible general-purpose transit option, which happens to be available already: the bus.

According to the advocacy group No More Deaths, thousands of water bottles left for migrants are vandalized in the Sonoran Desert. (Also see “Documenting the Undocumented,” in Places.)

A proposal for a state-sponsored high-speed broadband network in Michigan would provide the impetus to extend the infrastructure to remote places without access to existing services.

In the remote border region, China is turning highland villages into industrial hubs along the route of its ambitious railway project, which will span Southeast Asia from Kunming to Singapore.

Places columnist Shannon Mattern talks about her latest book, Code+Clay, Data+Dirt: 5,000 Years of Urban Media, and her recent article, “Mapping’s Intelligent Agents.”

In Ulysses, Manhattan Transfer, and Berlin Alexanderplatz, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Alfred Döblin fashioned eternal text-cities in which the reader may witness, wander, get lost.

In “Building and Dwelling, Richard Sennett considers how urban design shapes the ways in which we relate to one another, and argues that “encounters with resistance” are crucial.

The revitalization of the Melbourne’s inner city came at the cost of the cheap accommodation that sheltered its homeless population in the supposedly hollow center of the maligned “doughnut city.”

In 1943, three cities were constructed at record speed in Tennessee, New Mexico, and Washington – but left off all maps in order to conceal their extraordinary purpose.

The first residents have moved into Babcock Ranch, a suburb with its own solar farm, as well as self-driving shuttles and the latest green technologies.

The small towns of rural Kansas are cut off from the rest of the world by miles and miles of grain, casualties of a farming system that has less and less use for living, breathing farmers.

While Houston got the press (and most of the funds), the storm first hit coastal towns like Port Aransas and Rockport, where communities are rebuilding has forced communities to confront housing crises.