Places Wire

The key differences are not so much between the city versus the country, but among regional cultures that can be traced back to the nation’s colonization.

Nowhere in the world, not even in North Korea, is the population monitored as strictly as it is in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

Four short films featuring an activist, a filmmaker, a farmer, and a politician, each fighting to bring their town back from the brink.

Stockton is courting millions of dollars from private investors to fill the gaps left after bankruptcy forced the city to drastically cut services.

Behind the drive to make cities like London and New York “clean and safe” lie profound questions about access, inclusion, and behavior, and just who these places are for.

The redevelopment of the city’s Uptown neighborhood is being heralded as a pedestrian-centered, mixed use idyll, but questions remain about its affordability.

The “Opportunity Zones” created by the Trump administration’s tax bill are meant to help the heartland thrive and make the country more equal.

California’s 2017 sanctuary laws were both championed for protecting hardworking undocumented immigrants and lambasted for sheltering violent criminals. In reality, they do neither.

The impact of the heat island in terms of warming the city of Phoenix is almost an order of magnitude greater than climate change, greater than global or regional warming.

Nearly every major American city has segregated or outright banned manufactured housing, yet they are often the only forms of new housing available for low-income households.

Millennials are rediscovering the charms of the suburbs as they are pushed away from exorbitant city prices and find themselves finally able to afford their first houses.

Largely absent from decisions about small vehicles — at least the public-facing ones — are how cities plan to quickly and dramatically reconfigure their streets beyond the dominance of the car.

America devotes far too many of its precious resources to parking. This is especially troubling given that driving is in decline, argues Richard Florida.

The movement to declare London a national park city in 2019 is gaining momentum, but it’s worth taking the time to ponder the wisdom of aligning the term “national park” with a city.

Animals are changing their behavior in cities – and evolving in dramatic and surprising ways.

In Alaska, Blockbuster captured the imagination of its residents long after the company ceased operations around the rest of the country, but the last remaining stores are finally facing closure.

In The Space Barons, Christian Davenport explores the narcissistic aspirations of the billionaires behind the revival of space exploration.

The policies, first developed in the 1970s, remain one of the main tools cities have for maintaining neighborhood diversity and keeping high-opportunity areas affordable.

Barry Gfeller made an astonishing 50,000 images of buildings across 44 states and six Canadian provinces between 1977 and 1996.

Michelle Groskopf has brought the tradition of New York street photography to Los Angeles in her candid photos of pedestrians and amblers all over the city.

In a traffic-choked city, closing streets, rerouting drivers and building plazas sends a message that driving culture is not the predominant street culture.

The residents of Lowndes County, many of whom do not have adequate sanitation, are part of the 18 million Americans that the U.N. has reported are living in “extreme poverty.”

Palms came to the city to create an image, but as many die off, the next generation must better perform the work of urban trees to provide shade, reduce heat, clean the air, and prevent erosion.

The Sorted Library in Brooklyn celebrates the discovery process of browsing shelves and not necessarily finding what you thought you were looking for. (Also see “Library as Infrastructure,” in Places.)

The saga of the development that was once supposed to be his legacy foreshadows the president’s path to the White House. (Also see “Post Trump,” in Places.)

In a region where segregated neighborhoods are developing and displacing at breakneck pace, Germantown has maintained its diversity and support for residents for all income levels.

Silicon Valley sees truth as an engineering challenge, rather than the quest or trial that John Milton knew was essential to the preservation of democratic society.

The Gateway project might be the most vivid current illustration of America’s literally crumbling infrastructure — and of the dysfunctional zero-sum politics that often stymies efforts to fix it.

While the Trump administration’s actions represent a marked departure from other recent immigration policies, they are not new: too often, elected leaders have failed democracy’s basic principles.

The plans for the rebirth of the city’s Ford site combine cutting-edge energy technologies and affordable housing within a walkable urban village.

A commitment to safer streets is a commitment to the public good; it puts the needs of the collective above the convenience of the individual.

An animated excerpt from Thomas Campanella’s essay, “Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of American Planning.”

All along the Northeast corridor, seaside towns enacted policies or stealthily adopted practices aimed at limiting access to public beaches, segregating shorelines by class and race.

After years of hard work by local enthusiasts, Camp Nelson in Mississippi may soon be turned into a monument commemorating African American history.

The new president of the New York City Transit Authority must face down the skepticism of long-suffering locals in order to overhaul not only the service but also the perception of the system.

The former textile hub of Greenville, South Carolina, has managed to attract a growing number of young businesses to its revitalizing downtown.

In The Empty House Next Door, Alan Mallach challenges cities to reimagine vacant properties as pocket parks and urban farms, making a permanent commitment to sustainable infrastructure.

A truly smart city runs on data and algorithms rather than civic decisions made by humans. So, who owns all the data, and whose laws apply? (Also see “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019,” in Places.)

So-called megadeals are becoming increasingly common as states line up to hand cash to big corporations in return for the promise of jobs. But the benefits are increasingly being questioned.

A day spent working for Amazon Flex, the company’s last-mile delivery program, shows some of the practical shortcomings of replacing workers with regular people.

Little vehicles could significantly erode private car and ride-hail use, and play a key role in helping cities achieve the environmental and road safety goals that currently seem unattainable.

Today, its meanings range from anti-oligarchy to racially coded just-folks nationalism, cross-cut by race, gender, and migration in ways that earlier generations found much too easy to minimize.

A team of librarians have produced Torn Apart / Separados, which visualizes the U.S.’s vast apparatus of immigration enforcement and broadly maps the shelters housing children.

Longtime residents, former housing officials and historians discuss often overlooked aspects of New York City housing authority’s eight-decade tenure.

Are America’s cities turning into dystopian technocapitalist hellscapes in which corporations operate every essential service and pull every civic string?

A new book argues that there is a counter-narrative to the popular story of urban revitalization in cities like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Baltimore, and Detroit.

The displacement of working-class and low-income Latino families in the shadow of Facebook’s behemoth campus offers a stark illustration of California’s housing crisis and expanding income inequality.

Attention around affordable housing has focused on cities, but most Americans live in suburbs, where the need can be just as acute, but the dynamics of the issue are distinct.

Local governments may legislate the use of plastic straws, but they can’t do a thing about the vast system that’s attached to the straw, which created first disposable products, then companies, and finally people.