Places Wire

The words we use to refer to streets, buildings, and public places make maps of meaning across the city.

The National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice estimates that the infection rate in the prison population is 3.7 times higher than the national rate. (Also see “Writing Through Prison Storms,” in Places.)

While the “15-minute city” model promotes neighborhood-level urban planning, Sweden is pursuing a hyper-local scheme to redesign every street in the nation. (Also see Michael K. Hayes’s essay on the 15-minute city from Places 2020 Summer Writing + Editorial Workshop.)

The pandemic has underscored the importance of public space in all its forms and heightened expectations of what such spaces should provide.

We cannot insist on “real change” in the United States by continuing to use the same methods, arguments, and failed political strategies that have brought us to this moment.

COVID-19 is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities in the American food system that have for too long gone unnoticed, from the weak links in the supply chain to the dangers of an industrially produced diet.

Because they seem to show the world how it “really is,” maps produce a powerful sense of trust and belief. But maps and data visualizations can never communicate a truth with no perspective at all.

We are living a story that is global and yet intensely local. Yet without dedicated reporting, it is often our immediate neighborhoods about which we know the least.

As countries and local governments begin cautious steps toward reopening the parts of society that have been shut down by the coronavirus outbreak, various types of barriers are going up in places where people interact regularly.

Too many urban advocates are using the coronavirus as an opportunity to accelerate their pre-pandemic agendas — agendas which ignore the issues that made COVID-19 more catastrophic than it should have been.

Aaron Glantz’s new book, Homewreckers, shows how middle-class homeownership was systematically turned into immiseration and corporate profits, facilitated at every stage by the federal government, in the Great Recession.

If the past 120 years of urban history are any indication, much of what we are hearing about the future of cities after the pandemic will turn out to be irrelevant or wrong.

Microphones on once-busy street corners and public parks have recorded the sound of the pandemic. (Also see “Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart,” in Places.)

As cities rush to adjust to what some are calling the “al fresco streets movement,” its significance of in the history of urban planning in the United States is being lost.

We must act now to support community resilience; invest in critical infrastructure, including open space; and address long-standing social disparities.

The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a more equal society. It’s time for a similar conversation about the academy.

The decision to crack down on parks rather than make more space available is of tremendous consequence—and not just to New Yorkers. It is a microcosm of America’s default to punitive rather than restorative justice.

The informal networks of architects that have mobilized to mass-produce simple yet lifesaving devices have charted a new course for humanitarian design.

The colonial genealogy of the contemporary nation-state border frames any politics of their opening.

Planners once dreamed of cities with vast empty plazas and quiet streets. Post-pandemic, might they do so again?

Systemic inequality has been around far longer than Covid-19, and its deep fault lines are ripe for exploitation by this new menace.

Young people have long thought of college as an investment in their future. Now that future is changing in ways they can’t apprehend.

Contributors chart how their homes, neighborhoods, cities and countries have transformed under social distancing and stay-at-home orders around the planet.

Brandi Thompson Summers’s new book examines how blackness has been commodified during the last two decades of gentrification in Washington, D. C., and how that transformation excludes Black people from the built environment.

The big will get bigger as mom-and-pops perish and shopping goes virtual. In the short term, our cities will become more boring. In the long term, they might just become interesting again. (Also see “Much Unseen Is Also Here,” featuring work by the same photographer, in Places.)

The poet and founder of Friends of the L.A. River has died at the age of 75. (For more on his river conservation work, see “Willful Waters,” in Places.)

Photojournalist Lucien Lung used webcams from Antarctica to Argentina to capture images of the global shutdown.

Pepsi and Coke were allowed to continue treating and bottling municipal water in Detroit, despite unpaid water bills, while mandatory shutoffs continue for consumers in the same situation.

Photographer Jamie Harmon took to the streets and asked his neighbors to stand for portraits as they shelter in place.

It’s difficult to grasp what kind of city the epidemic will leave behind. When will the city feel safe enough for people to return, visit, move here, and stay, or for the old to leave their apartments?

Images from photographers around the country show the horrifying number of people lining up to receive food assistance.

For public good or public consequence to become a specter that tails our moves, our decisions and our consumption could seem a killjoy, maybe even a kind of tyranny. It could also be a humane way to live.

If the populations crowding homeless shelters aren’t quickly and substantially thinned, there will be more coronavirus outbreaks, and more fatalities.

While state agents and security space are increasingly protected from impacts of ultraviolet radiation, the borderland public and public space beyond the limits of security space are routinely exposed. (Also see “Shade,” in Places.)

An urban agriculture movement aims to addressing food security issues in periods of crisis in the Egyptian city.

In an extract from their new book, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener look past the sun and surf to a radical fight for equality and justice.

Cities and activists are scrambling to prevent large scale outbreaks in homeless communities, particularly in encampments and shelters where social distancing is nearly impossible.

Dispatches from a class of six and seven year-olds, as they, their teachers, and their parents take part in a vast cyber-education experiment.

The Bay Area city has started to phase in what it is calling a “slow streets” initiative, to give residents more room to spread out safely during social distancing.

Nearly a month after announcing initial orders to enforce social distancing, the Bay Area appears to be emerging as a national model for the efficacy of early and aggressive action to prevent contagion.

American hierarchies, hundreds of years in the making, are not so easily overturned. And amid the great swath of indiscriminate death, some old distinctions persist.

Outbreaks have sparked riots and propelled public-health innovations, prefigured revolutions and redrawn maps.

These next weeks and months will be demanding in ways that are hard to fathom. But, with time, life will return to the city. Our city and your city.

During my first weeks in the city, there was a telephone strike. I didn’t know a single person. My best friend was the city, and I’d walk for hours a day.

A new CityLab project is crowdsourcing handmade maps of neighborhoods and communities transformed by coronavirus.

In a state where many people can no longer afford to live on their own, increasing numbers are finding creative ways to share the burden — as well as their bathrooms, chores, child care, and lives.

Immigrant field workers have been told to keep working despite stay-at-home directives, and given letters attesting to their critical role in feeding the country.

Los Angeles right now is how I imagined it to be, before I moved here. But I hadn’t imagined the harrowing reality that would make these clichés possible.

Real science fiction stories are implicitly progressive: the world starts out familiar, a new discovery or invention disrupts everything, and the world is forever changed.

Following in the footsteps of Dorothea Lange, Danna Singer has been making pictures of people staying long-term in motels, harrowed by their own bouts with the world’s troubles.

The 50 counties with the most cases accounted for more than one-third of the nation’s economic output and nearly one-third of its jobs, according to a new analysis conducted for The Atlantic by the Brookings Institution.