We can begin where we live, because our neighbors and neighborhoods shape us in ways that are invisible but invigorating.
Urbanism
Editor: Sophie Gonick
Past Editor: Max Holleran
Emergency Urbanism
Housing-justice movements ask: How can unhoused people be considered trespassers on state-owned land?
The Violence of Urban Vacancy
Houses without people, people without homes: New York has invested in empty storefronts and empty districts, even as most New Yorkers suffer.
Can the Crowd Speak?
Occupy Wall Street’s great achievement was to briefly create a community that prefigured a robust democratic culture.
The Vulnerable Foundations of India’s Urbanism
In Delhi—a city of 17 million people—7.2 million residents already qualified for food aid before the pandemic. After, the numbers skyrocketed.
Rage and Uprising
A politics of rage does not equate emotions with irrationality or impulsive behavior, but can affirm equality, claim agency, and ask for justice.
Defund the Police and Refund the Communities
The dueling crises of the pandemic and police brutality have brought many problems to the surface of our society and made them impossible to continue to ignore.
Preexisting Conditions: What 2020 Reveals about Our Urban Future
Crisis Cities brings together some of the world’s leading social scientists and humanists to grapple with the 2020 crises of our cities.
Against Walled Worlds: Remembering Michael Sorkin, 1948–2020
Could architecture and design transform a place like Gaza, and do so with justice? One of Sorkin’s last projects tackled exactly those questions.
The Police: Gentrification’s Shock Troops
In Detroit today, politicians promise that real estate development—coupled with police violence—will guarantee the city’s spiritual redemption.
Public Housing and the Right to the City
Not simply a roof over one’s head, public housing nurtures its inhabitants’ demands for an even greater stake in the life of the metropolis.
Can Smart Cities Be Equitable Cities?
Tech does not arrive in a city to save it. Instead, tech’s financial success depends on dismissing and exploiting existing disparities.
The Secluded Self: Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” @100
Why did Americans start distrusting small towns? The answer is one book, in which a woman moves from the city—and loses her freedom.
What Would a Feminist City Look Like? Talking with Leslie Kern
“What we build and how we build influences the kinds of families and relationships that we can have or can even imagine.”
It’s the Geography, Stupid! Planetary Urbanization Revealed
Covid-19 spread so rapidly because urbanization is now planetary: connecting disparate territories through flows of goods and people.
The Criminal’s City
In a recent French novel, an ordinary woman inadvertently becomes a drug kingpin—and does so by learning to see anew Paris’s urban landscape.
Urban Renewal and Its Discontents
Unless inequality and segregation are broken, wealthy white communities can always abandon everyone else.
The False Hopes of Homeownership
The American Dream of private home ownership has fueled a system that preys on Black people for profit.
Silicon Valley Is Not a Place
Silicon Valley has no mystical powers. It gets away with being thought of as apolitical simply because few have called its bluff.
Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.