On a plot of soil in Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, a bomb sat in plain view. Four large tubes painted fire engine red stood wired ...
On May 28, protesters occupied a central green space in Istanbul to stop bulldozers from razing it to the ground. The demolition is ...
Artists and bohemians have been flocking to Berlin since the wall came down in 1989. Affordable rents and vacant spaces ...
As co-founder and publisher of the online magazine Shareable, Neal Gorenflo aims to bring the “sharing economy” into the ...
This year marks the centennial of one of the most devestating weather-related disasters ever experienced in the United States ...
First adopted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to engage residents in generating solutions to severely unequal living conditions ...
Studying at a cafe recently, I noticed that most of the people around me were sitting alone in front of computers. Others had come to ...
San Agustín, a parish in Caracas, Venezuela, is known for open plots of land where the hillside is too steep for habitation. A group of ...
Cities around the world are struggling with unemployment, troubled school systems, violence and environmental ...
New links from Ali Madad on urban hacking as quality management, cartographic escapism, self-portraits atop skyscrapers, open states ...
On Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of people will gather in Tunis for the World Social Forum (WSF). They plan to discuss ...
Paris is on the verge of a massive transportation upgrade, largely for the benefit of its long-neglected suburbs. The Boulevard ...
Photographer and filmmaker Eve Morgenstern has been travelling throughout the United States documenting abandoned homes ...
The Casablanca art world has been up in arms since the Feb. 15 print edition of Al Ittihad announced that the city government ...
Although the Bay Bridge opened six months before the Golden Gate Bridge, it is widely considered the lesser of the two. The ...
“The central message that emerges from urban political ecology is a decidedly political one. To the extent that cities are produced ...
Locally owned shops were once cornerstones for products, services, employment and social networks in urban neighborhoods ...
The city of Pontevedra in northwest Spain has become a leader in walker-friendly urban policy over the past 15 years. In light of its ...
The city of Chandigarh was conceived by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, as capital of ...
Alcorcón, a quiet suburb of Madrid, is poised to begin transforming into “EuroVegas” by the end of the year. The controversial project ...
Ali Madad’s latest collection of links, on “dissatisfaction city,” Warsaw’s “new old town,” smart citizens, smart parking and ...
“Underbanked” is a bit of a buzzword in the financial services industry, but it rarely finds its way into popular culture. Different ...
In the early 1990s, Alberto Boido started taking pictures of graffiti in the streets of Milan. He now returns, twenty years later, to ...
As Hurricane Sandy moved up the East Coast, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered an evacuation of all New York City flood zones ...
For those who see America as a land of justice for all, I recommend visiting the Delray neighborhood in Detroit. Its boarded-up ...
The city of Brasilia took shape on a relatively isolated plot of open land in 1956, becoming the capital of Brazil in 1960. The city was ...
“Esto no es un solar” (this is not a lot) is a participatory design project reanimating abandoned lots in Zaragoza, Spain ...
In part five of our series on urban typography, we turn our attention to the universal problem of complicated parking signs. With their ...
Over the past three years, photographer and filmmaker Eve Morgenstern has been working for the U.S. Federal Reserve to ...
Of all the factors that contribute to urban livability — including public health, education and infrastructure — policy is often focused ...
New American Noise is a collection of short films that document emerging music scenes in six cities — from bounce beats for ...
Despite a lifelong commitment to modernist architecture, Edward Durell Stone is often associated with the movement away ...
“One vast reservoir of common wealth is the metropolis itself. The formation of modern cities, as urban and architectural historians explain ...
I’m sure you don’t have to be reminded that your time as mayor of the greatest city in the world is coming to an end. You’ve formed your ...
“The cities, bound together by railroads and waterways, are organisms which have lived through centuries. Dig beneath them and ...
Partizaning, an artist-activist collective based in Russia, recently teamed up with the Strelka Institute of Design to organize a series ...
Links from Ali Madad on “Decasia,” the economic future of British cities, the next chapter of Paju Bookcity, wicked pictures ...
El Raval, a neighborhood in Barcelona’s central Ciutat Vella district, has a long history of immigration, deindustrialization ...
It is common in Greece to refer to the city of Heraklion as chaotic, perhaps due to its crowded streets and uncontrolled expansion ...
As Spain’s unemployment rate climbs above 25 percent and its social welfare system is meticulously dismantled, around 500 ...
Buenos Aires is one of the largest and wealthiest cities in Latin America. Before Argentina’s reduction of the public sector in the ...
Petr Ivanov is carrying out ambitious research in his Moscow neighborhood. He and a group of young volunteers have combined Web ...
The Street Museum of Art has curated an outdoor exhibit called “Beyond Banksy: Not Another Gift Shop” in London’s Shoreditch ...
On January 9, Google celebrated the 150th anniversary of the London Underground with a doodle spin-off of the system’s ...
The transit blogosphere has been ablaze all week over the opening of Beijing’s four new subway lines, giving China the longest ...
Many things catch my attention when I visit a city: people, buildings, monuments, gardens and parks, grand boulevards and small ...
Quilian Riano is the founding principal of DSGN AGNC (Design Agency), a research and design practice that operates through critical ...
When I was younger, I spent many hours browsing through my grandparents’ encyclopedia to discover things I didn’t know existed ...
“The enormous financial gains that are being made by those fortunate enough to benefit from neo-liberal economic policies come with ...
Last month, Katherine Boo won the National Book Award for “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” a chronicle of life in an Indian slum ...
Women and men throughout India have been taking to the streets to express outrage at the savage gang rape and torture of a ...
From the torn-up boardwalk of Atlantic City to New York’s water-logged subway system, cities are paying the price of Hurricane Sandy ...
In evaluating the progress and potential of the Baan Mankong (Collective Housing) Programme in Bangkok, a clear theme has emerged ...
It’s the time of year again when we take stock of the old and pledge to be better in the new. Since our goal at Polis is to foster dialogue and ...
Since the late 19th century, the word “tenderloin” has been used to describe a “district of a city largely devoted to vice.” Apparently, the ...
In Sao Paulo, Brazil, a defiant synthesis of aesthetics and ethics has developed around the practice of Pixação. With roots in hip-hop ...
Urban farming has existed in one form or another since cities first came into existence. More recently, people have been ...
Radya is a Russian street artist known for work that makes strong political statements with striking ingenuity. He and his collaborators ...
Building upon the widespread influence of music, innovative programs around the world are empowering youth to work together, stay ...
“The tradition of craft in archaeology has been brutally squandered; as the de-skilling and devaluation of archaeologists continues ...
Links from Ali Madad on strong towns, prototyping innovation, a laconic history of the world, augmented reality playgrounds ...
“We should get used to the fact that all knowledge must be seen in context: not only when looking at its origin, but even when ...
People living in extreme poverty tend to be innovative and provident by necessity, finding ways to survive with available resources ...
Mexico City is a giant laboratory of urban morphology. Its 20 million residents live in neighborhoods based on a wide ...
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As part of the Polis “Three Questions” series, we interviewed Michael Murphy, executive director and co-founder of MASS Design Group ...
The Number One First Street building in Manchester, England, sits forlornly in a landscape of parking lots, wedged between two ...
Providence is not a large town. You can walk from end to end in an hour (even though most people choose to drive) and it’s ...
Emily Goldman is a preservationist and doctoral student in historic preservation at Cornell University. After completing her ...
New media artist Yuichiro Tamura’s “Nightless” is a short film that takes place in Google Street View. The story is told through images, first ...
Amenities are easily taken for granted if they’re a common presence: temperature control, motorized transport, running water ...
Links from Ali Madad on digital memories, a lost map on the tramway in Istanbul, how not to rank U.S. cities, laser-cut street maps, the broken ...
One of the principal challenges of global urbanization is the improvement of living conditions in slums, or communities with ...
A few weeks back, I posted an article to Facebook about conflicts between the small, uber-wealthy city of Piedmont, Calif., and the much larger ...
High-speed rail is generally regarded as the pinnacle of attractive and green transportation. But all too often, it makes train travel more ...
“The methods of modern science then serve to simplify and reframe reality in standard categories. ... Those who manipulate these ...
In the walls and ramparts surrounding nineteenth-century Beirut were seven fortified gates, or portals. The number was ...
San Agustín Radio, also known as Radio Perola, is a community station where people meet, listen, cry, learn, share jokes and hold discussions ...
Boom and Leisure is a design events platform that collaborates with forward-thinking organizations to spread the word about ...
On any given day in Berkeley, Calif., you may encounter art on wheels. These transportation tableaus include trucks, vans, shuttles and ...
As a recent transplant to the San Francisco Bay Area, I’m still amazed by how many community garden projects exist in the city ...
Eric Darton has spent his life chronicling the history and culture of his birthplace, New York City. He is the author of “Divided We ...
“I propose to construct a normative ideal of city life as an alternative to both the ideal of community and the liberal individualism ...
On Oct. 25, University College London announced that it had gained permission to proceed with a £1 billion plan to build ...
“The house does not simply precede what it domesticates. The house itself is an effect of suppression. The classical figure of the ...
Bustling. Vibrant. Dynamic. These are just a few adjectives that describe Hanoi’s “36 Streets” — or Ancient Quarter — an area that has ...
New links from Ali Madad on urban typography, the VICE Guide to Syria, Charles Mary Kubricht’s adaptation proposal, assessing ...
In the foreword to his 1929 book, “The City of To-Morrow and its Planning,” architect Le Corbusier recalls a conversation ...
“Anyone claiming to be an expert is selling something. I brandish my ignorance like a crucifix at vampires.” Aaron Brady ...
The Millennium Alliance promises to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in India, but it is unclear whether its driving force is ...
“In science, almost all experiments happen in controlled laboratory settings, so that if an experiment fails — as they often do ...
Manila is one of the most dense and rapidly growing cities in the world. The metropolitan area hosts over 11 million people in 16 ...
Teolinda Bolívar, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of Venezuela, has been working in the neighborhoods of ...
In my mind, archives used to evoke images of tweed jackets and aging papers in sterile government rooms. But as I’m now ...
Igor Moukhin is an ingenious photographer of life in cities, especially the parts that don’t appear in branding campaigns. His work reveals ...
Every few months, the gravity of New York City sucks me in and pounds my feet madly to the pavement until I escape, exhausted ...
Did you know that 660 million Indians have no access to sanitary facilities for relieving themselves? A staggering 2.5 billion ...
“[D]oing may be directed so as to take up into its own content all which thought suggests, and so as to result in securely tested knowledge ...
“You can still feel Detroit techno as soon as you are in the vicinity. Detroit techno is part of Detroit’s nature. It’s part of the Motor ...
For years, architects and urban planners have worked on ideas to reduce poverty. These ideas are presented to a client — usually a ...
In a previous post, I wrote about how graphic representation can mobilize a polemic on urbanism based on alternative visions ...
Denver hasn’t featured very prominently on Polis over the years — a fact that would surprise few people in Denver. The city is not ...
More than half the world’s urban population lives in small cities and towns. Most are in developing countries where local governments ...
As part of the Polis “Three Questions” series, we present an interview with Cassim Shepard, editor of Urban Omnibus, Adjunct ...
Links from Ali Madad on the Bassin de l’Arsenal, designers of the signs that guide us, children in the city of play, the arrest of Trenton ...
Urban environments interact with the style of each inhabitant in fascinating ways, at times showing the humanity of those ...
A week and a half after Sandy, The Rockaways still lacked power and services. The peninsula, just south of John F. Kennedy ...
Having recently moved to Manchester, the paradigmatic post-industrial city in northwest England, I’ve been wandering ...
Ben Berkowitz is co-founder of SeeClickFix, a website and software application that allows users to upload pictures of infrastructure ...
Bay Area graffiti artist Jurne has been creating large public art throughout North America and Europe since the late 1990s. “Portrait of ...
On Nov. 1, Planners Network U.K. (PNUK) released a draft of what they hope will become a manifesto for progressive urban planning in ...
Hurricane Sandy did not wound Harrisburg like it did Manhattan or the Jersey Shore. With the record rainfall steadily approaching a ...
Archstoyanie is a creative festival that takes place each year in the village of Nicola-Lenivets (Nicola-Lazybones) on Russia’s Ugra ...
“In rejecting the need of mediators and the dominant paradigm which holds that the people cannot govern themselves or change ...
Macarao is a district along the periphery of Caracas, home to over 50,000 people within roughly 10 square kilometers. Dramatic ...
In parts of Manhattan lucky enough to avoid flooding and power outages during Superstorm Sandy, things started getting back to ...
“The degree to which the contemporary world may be said to be ‘urban’ is not fully or accurately measured by the proportion of the total ...
Stores across New York City were packed Sunday as residents stocked up on water, batteries and canned goods to weather Hurricane Sandy ...
Nested within San Francisco’s affluent Hayes Valley neighborhood, Richardson Apartments is an unconventional affordable housing ...
Nine months after the Egyptian revolution last year, the Stockholm-based Färgfabriken Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture ...
In writing about cities, I often recall a course I took with Nathaniel Baum-Snow (thanks!), which drew upon “Lectures in Urban Economics” ...
“Just as economic pressure from the base ... is able to modify the production of surplus value, so pressure grounded in spatial practice is alone ...
To many Casablanca is a city of myth, spies and dark cafes. For the Moroccan government it is the future financial and business hub of North ...
“New York City is being optimised to run like a motherboard ... It’s being smoothed into the performance characteristics of a microchip ...
During the rush-hour crush, New York’s subway stations are as lonely as they are crowded. I recently caught some quiet moments in the ...
Ground Up is a new interdisciplinary journal on landscape issues, run by landscape architecture students in the College of Environmental ...
Last week, we wrote about the finale event of stillspotting nyc, a two-year project that explored noise and silence in the city through a series ...
Uneven development, as described by Neil Smith, takes a dynamic form in Bangkok. Thailand’s capital is a mix of affluent ...
When David van der Leer moved to New York, he was shocked by how loud it was. A search for stillness inspired him, in his role as an ...
Building on previous research exploring design for social sustainability, the British developer Berkeley Group recently commissioned ...
As part of the Polis “Three Questions” series, in which we present the same three questions to a range of people doing impressive work ...
According to the United Nations Environment Programme, buildings account for approximately 40 percent of worldwide energy use and are ...
About a month ago, I noticed curious activities in an abandoned lot in my new neighborhood in West Oakland. From behind the graffitied ...
A new book, “Architecture & Design versus Consumerism: How Design Activism Confronts Growth,” explores the “meaning gap” between ...
Last weekend, local magazines invited Londoners to have free “fun in the shadow of demolition.” The fun was part of Elefest, a creative ...
California’s High Speed Rail is one of the nation’s most important — and controversial — urban projects in recent memory. Some hail ...
“In this empire, the art of cartography was taken to such a peak of perfection that the map of a single province took up an entire province ...
“Surreptitiously, reliance on institutional process has replaced dependence on personal good will. The world has lost its humane dimension ...
New collection of links from Ali Madad on Tokyo Jungle and the urban-based animal-survival genre, living and working in cities, Amitai ...
Dakar sits in a crosswind, both literally and figuratively. Senegal’s capital has neither geographical isolation to shelter it, nor size ...
Cities around the world are constantly sparking new questions: How can we ensure adequate housing for all? How can we live more ...
Since 1985, the United Nations has designated the first Monday of October as World Habitat Day. The idea is to reflect on the state of ...
What if we had to move away from Earth? When conflicts and climate change grow unmanageable perhaps we can go to Mars? But could we ...
If we were to gather the people throughout history who have changed the way cities are perceived today, Neil Smith would be ...
Nutsford Vale is a 33-acre community woodland in Gorton, a densely populated low-income area located three miles from the center of ...
Last week, I attended a gallery opening for an exhibit tracing the history of American landscape photography at the Rhode Island School ...
Over the past two months, Partizaning — an art-based urban activist group — collaborated on 8 public workshops with experts from diverse ...
An ethereal image of a man appeared on a wall on the corner of the street, face blurred and floating off the ground. Like a spectral ...
About a month ago, there was a flurry of articles about plans for a women-only city in Saudi Arabia. The Guardian was among the first to ...
Peeking at the work of Léon Krier is like jumping into a rabbit hole that leads to a surreal city of magical proportions, strange ...
Wedged between the Seine River and the Canal Saint-Denis is a spit of land where different visions of contemporary Paris come together ...
Links from Ali Madad on chance alignments, vintage makeovers, political stances in architecture and design, #13O ...
The Vår Frälsares church tower stretches up, surrounded only by sky, creating a sense of calmness in a residential neighborhood ...
Of the 20 wealthiest neighborhoods in India, as many as 18 are in Mumbai. On the other hand, according to the 2010 census, 62 percent ...
Sarah McDaniel Dyer touched a lighter’s flame to a piece of paper, a referral to a specialist who could treat the rare genetic disorder ...
We’re putting on a conference about dredge. Dredging is the mechanized uplift of soil, silt, sand and sediment from rivers and ...
In describing the triumphs and travails of cities and urban culture, we often turn to photography. This is even more so with the ...
It is unusual to come across a town website with menu items like “struggles (successes),” “social democracy” and “utopia.” But there ...
“Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns ...
If some American city built a modern castle complex, accessible only by drawbridge, this city could serve as host to all its nation’s ...
A recent visit to the Berkeley Recycling Center sparked reflections on the tensions between the idea and practice of sustainability. The center ...
“Deep in the West, where the sun is gathering dust,” bellows Herbert Grönemeyer in an ode to his home town, Bochum, “things are ...
After a 40-year delay, Louis I. Kahn’s design for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is finally being realized. In the Fall of 2011 ...
São Paulo, South America’s largest city and most prominent economic hub, is known for its extreme social disparities. When ...
Ruth Green is the daughter of a preacher and a one-time homeowner. She never expected to be homeless at age 54. This is the story of her ...
One of the fundamental issues in American urbanism is the changing geography of poverty. American cities are famous around the ...
This summer, the Danish Architecture Centre in Copenhagen introduced the brilliant idea of guided tours, enhancing their exhibitions ...
Business and government leaders in a growing number of cities are recognizing that investment in smarter, greener technologies can ...
In 2007, the “Grand Park” residential complex was completed along the border of the now-defunct Frunze Central Aerodrome ...
Links from Ali Madad on violence in Baltimore, installations by Hong Seon Jang, the game of urban renewal, ecstasies of parking ...
“There are two ways one can read dust: the generic and the specific. In the first, dust is the stuff of history, marking a present ...
While wandering along Barcelona’s streets earlier this year, I stumbled upon the Barcelona Photographic Archive exposition on ...
If you wander around Providence and pay close attention to tarnished street signs, dusty corners and dilapidated doors, you can occasionally ...
“A democracy of the multitude is imaginable and possible only because we all share and participate in the common. By ‘the common’ we ...
Recent visits to the George Eastman House and the Susan B. Anthony House left me troubled. The museums were far from ...
In 1932, Frank Lloyd Wright introduced a utopian vision of a democratic society in a manifesto titled “The Disappearing ...
Location-based technology is not known for its accuracy. At times we can be logged as being in a different place than our actual location ...
Although Nairobi is one of the most dynamic business and institutional centers in sub-Saharan Africa, it is also home to more than 200 ...
Cities across the United States are becoming hotbeds for mobile-food entrepreneurs benefiting from an online social networking ...
On Monday I traveled 1,000 km (a megameter?) round-trip for a meeting. It could not have been a simpler and more relaxing experience ...
The second annual Urbanism Week at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture will take place this Sept. 24-28. Last year more than 200 ...
“Among the conditions necessary for democracy is that people acknowledge those from different social groups as cocitizens, i.e., as people ...
This summer, the sounds of Swedish music festival Way Out West brought record numbers of visitors to Gothenburg’s Slottskogen park ...
Links from Ali Madad on unlivable cities, objects of derision, the new great divide in the Middle East, numbers by Robert Indiana and ...
“How We Can Eat Our Landscapes,” a TED Talk by Pam Warhurst of Incredible Edible Todmorden, illuminates the process behind a ...
Ask anyone where the center of Providence is and they’ll point you to Kennedy Plaza. It is a natural center, located in a river valley ...
“Our cities have become key arenas in a primarily market-driven globalization process, a process that primarily unfolds in ...
In 2007, Spain had 551 houses for every 1,000 inhabitants, more than France (508) and Germany (485), according to data published ...
Amidst the sprawl and scenery along the Bronx River, there is a collection of visual narratives on the past, present and future of the area. For ...
In Africa’s rapidly growing cities, the pace of development has left few safe play areas for children. The Mmofra foundation ...
A visit to the landscape architecture studio at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design reveals a wall filled with pedagogical graffiti ...
Seward is a town of close to 3,000 people on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Formally established in 1903, it has remained due to its location ...
In a recent post covering open source architecture I expressed my enthusiasm for a future generation of D.I.Y. computer-savvy ...
Refreshed by a much-needed hiatus, I had every intention of coming back to Polis with stories of bizarre postmodern French housing ...
Summertime in the northern hemisphere has prompted a resurgence of media coverage on climate change, with particularly ...
The mayor of Mogadishu, Mohammed Nor, known as Tarzan for the way he used to flee the police as a street orphan, likes to ...
Is it possible to develop a conveniently walkable city of single-unit homes with private yards? I can think of neighborhoods like this, but if ...
“The Yard,” a strangely captivating photo-essay by Marcin Wichary, offers a behind-the-scenes (and at times behind-the-wheel) glimpse of ...
Open source design — whether for entire cities, particular neighborhoods or individual houses — is becoming increasingly popular and ...
If you drink a mojito in Havana, there’s a chance that the mint it contains came from the Alamar nursery on the outskirts of the city. The ...
A new collection of links from Ali Madad on Occupy’s first anniversary, perilous propagation, Japanese gas-tank art, saving Aleppo, and ...
Last week, after four months living in the Bay Area, I returned to the apartment in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood that I called home ...
Last Sunday I woke up in Boston with a marvelously unusual prospect: a day with nothing to do. I decided to hit the pavement ...
“Imagine if we could make designing and printing your house as easily as shopping on amazon — and put it into the public domain ...
Neil Griess is an artist living and working in Omaha, Nebraska. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of ...
“The city in waiting is the domain of multiple speeds: la ville a vitesses multiples. Yet the time space compressions of the inner city ...
Countless books and exhibitions address early Soviet architecture, but the residential buildings most often included don’t adequately ...
The Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) is not content with the status quo when it comes to built environment professionals ...
Those familiar with the great historic cities of Israel may know of Safed, a lovely mountaintop town overlooking the Sea of Galilee. It is ...
“You can start looking at what’s on the map, what is not on the map. What is missing? How is it packaged? How is it framed? How is it ...
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is the foundation of international human rights law, inspiring a rich body of legally binding ...
If you peer over the wall as you exit the BART train car at the West Oakland elevated station in Oakland, California, you’d notice a ...
In the boisterous metropolis, spaces for stillness and reflection are highly sought-after gems. In nineteenth-century New York, one ...
My recent trip to New York City coincided with the first ever visit of a Catalonian human tower building team to the U.S. Hailing from ...
When I tell people that I am moving to Las Vegas for the next two years, reactions are entertaining to say the least. They range from attempts ...
Has the thought of taking art from a public event ever crossed your mind? During a recent exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum ...
Photographer Hank O’Neal, aka XCIA, has been documenting New York City street art for 40 years. Also an author, music producer ...
In 1927, the Times reported that more than three thousand people had spent the night sleeping on the sand at Coney Island in order to escape ...
“Early in 1922, concertgoers in Moscow were notified of a concert to be performed ‘without a conductor.’ When they arrived at the ...
Elena Ovsyannikova of MosKonstruct shares a fascinating and very troubling story about the only building designed by El Lissitzky in ...
“The hallmark of declining cities is that they have too much housing and infrastructure relative to the strength of their economies. With all ...
In a recent post, Min Li Chan referred to Tim De Chant’s blog Per Square Mile, which depicts income inequality from space. This is ...
Urban imagination in the Americas revolves around two paradigms: the growing city and the declining city. The growing city symbolizes ...
When we speak of urban heritage, the goal is often preservation — to keep what is already there. But an art initiative in Brussels has ...
It is my hope that we are only in the infancy of the “social design” movement — a time when genuine social engagement remains a ...
“The idea of a city made of monuments takes us to the figure of Palladio. In that day and age, with a class of monied bourgeois beginning to ...
Stillspotting nyc is a two-year multidisciplinary project that takes the Guggenheim Museum’s Architecture and Urban Studies ...
What makes a city a leader in sustainable development? Cities such as Portland, Ore. and San Francisco, Calif. are repeatedly ...
The longstanding rivalry between Madrid and Barcelona has found a new outlet in recent months. Each is vying to become home to ...
In the early 1950s a group of architects found inspiration in Casablanca’s slums, transforming an area at the city’s margins into a ...
Does it make sense to teach about sidewalk design in a war-torn city? Last May I returned to Kabul for the first time in four years ...
Italian street artists Sten and Lex have been experimenting and expanding the stencil-poster technique, which the pair lovingly ...
There’s a dirty little secret about driving: Nobody likes it. Most people are not able to admit it, for they are unaware that congestion, the ...
Links from Ali Madad on Dalí in New York, data visualization of drone strikes, the psychoanalysis of ruins, urban economics and ‘Unclear ...
“T]he built environment should provide its users with an essentially democratic setting, enriching their opportunities by maximising ...
Last holiday season, while awaiting my flight in a Cincinnati airport, I saw a soldier in line to get a seating assignment. There was nothing ...
After spending the past seven months studying urban housing, I’ve drafted the following list of design variables that shape perceptions ...
In a recent conversation on Polis, urban geographer Matthew Gandy touched on the multiple registers of urban governance ...
Last week, presidents, parliamentarians, mayors, U.N. representatives and civil society leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to debate ...
Tim De Chant, in his blog Per Square Mile, considers income inequality from space by contrasting Google Earth images of ...
The photo above is of Praça Cantão in Communidade da Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro. The buildings were repainted by artists ...
New links from Ali Madad, including Conflict Kitchen, the return of Occupy, yuppies on bikeshares, defense against facial ...
Pop Up Rockwell is a green street-improvement project based on rapid design prototyping. For a week in April, an underused stretch of ...
For architects, employing an ethic of care involves reflexive practice with value placed on process, empathy and everyday life. This ...
In a book called “Dharavi: Documenting Informalities” a group of artists from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm document ...
Hong Kong is one of the highest-density cities in the world. In between high-rise buildings, public space is limited and strictly regulated. In ...
The Cassano d’Adda Garden Map is exactly what it sounds like. I recreated the small municipality of Cassano d’Adda, part of the mosaic of ...
As the world’s urban population grows rapidly, there is a risk of weakening our healthy ties to non-urban nature. This has a particularly ...
From July 4-12, Interactive City will hold a summer school at the Strelka Institute titled “Interactive Moscow: Spatial Theories ...
In a recent piece for The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger contemplates whether her hometown, Alexandria, Va., really counts as a ...
At least 2,000 residents of Brussels took to the streets last Sunday to demand more room for pedestrians and cyclists in the city center ...
One of the latest arrivals in Routledge’s Advances in Ethnography series is “City, Street and Citizen: The Measure of the Ordinary ...
Self-care is a sign of knowing oneself. Caring for others, therefore, means getting close to them, knowing and understanding them. Caring ...
Berlin continues to expand its influence in the global arts community, increasingly establishing itself as the creative capital of Europe ...
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stockholm musicians and artists organized many popular festivals in Gärdet, a large field in the city ...
Having always lived in cities, and moving frequently, gardening never quite seemed possible. But I’ve been struck by the ...
When Spain’s 15-M movement took over plazas in hundreds of cities across the country in May 2011, mainstream media coverage was ...
Our shadow is always with us, but how often do we pay attention to it? Joe Pease’s short film “Peter Brings the Shadow to Life” turns ...
As the London Olympics draw nearer — and raise controversy on issues ranging from transit to securitization — Munich is celebrating 40 ...
Twenty-three years ago today — on June 4, 1989 — hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators were assaulted in and around ...
People who say they hate Boston probably haven’t been to Castle Island. Getting there is hard: You can either drive, bike, take the ...
“Chill and relax, I’m back in effect. Yes I’m Erick Sermon, with a brand new cassette. Yes I’m spoiled rich like top soil, still loyal, still ...
“Public Places - Urban Spaces” — a recently updated textbook on urban design and planning — includes a review of six place-making ...
Peter Halley describes his geometric paintings of the past thirty years as “engaged in a play of relationships between ‘prisons’ and ‘cells’ ...
“A metropolitan area can take care of a great many more people by only a very slight expansion of its radius. ... if there is to be ...
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Urban migration isn’t just for humans. It turns out that in London, foxes are also drawn to the density of urban life. With access to ...
The Occupy movement in Moscow is a response to very different political conditions than those of Occupy movements in other parts of the world ...
A rectangular cloth finds many uses in Indian cities. It becomes a woman’s sari, a man’s dhoti or lungi (sarong) or a turban. It is also ...
The latest collection of links from Ali Madad on making cities smarter than their bankers, the art of placemaking, musical trendsetting cities ...
During my visit to Havana a month ago, several taxi drivers eagerly pointed out the “Tribuna Anti-Imperialista” (Anti-Imperialist ...
Photographer Mike Sinclair’s scenes of fairs, rodeos and other attractions shift the viewer’s gaze from the spectacle to everyday ...
In the words of its most passionate biographer Peter Ackroyd, London is never silent. Even in its hushed hours, the city “teems” with the ...
A walk through Wynwood, a neighborhood north of downtown Miami, brings an encounter with two-dimensional fangy creatures that ...
The next time you stop in front of a red light at a bustling intersection, consider the remarkable state of traffic signs. Ubiquitous across ...
TarcioV is an artist based in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. He rarely discusses his life and work, but agreed to a brief interview as part of the ...
In recent years, the Internet and social networking sites have brought new meaning to the notion of sharing. Much is given away ...
Failure is a touchy subject when it comes to development aid. Donors are afraid of letting taxpayers and philanthropists know that ...
Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel Aviv, and Jack Bennett, deputy manager of Skolkovo City, represent different strategies aimed at emulating the ...
Last month, we invited you to share the “best” and “worst” examples of media coverage of cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America — the so ...
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Last Thursday, geographer and social theorist David Harvey discussed the “Urbanization of Class Struggle” at the London School of ...
Recently I’ve noticed that London embraces urban farming in a way I haven’t seen in other cities. Last month, I attended the Oxford ...
Art has accompanied Rebeca Silva through life since infancy. As a child she lived in Itabuna, a town in the interior of Bahia, Brazil. Her ...
To the newcomer, Amman seems like the tranquil eye of a cyclone. In this hilly city of 2.8 million people, the king and his family smile ...
Award-winning Canadian filmmaker Shannon Walsh has teamed up with South African director and writer Arya Laloo to coordinate her ...
The term “participation” is thrown around a lot in urban planning and international development circles. In the past decade, there has been a ...
In the stop-motion animation “Big Bang Big Boom,” Italian street artist Blu marks, bends, and transforms large-scale wall paintings ...
In a 1977 interview published in the catalogue for the “In Matta-Clark” exhibition in Antwerp, Gordon Matta-Clark gave the following ...
In the 1960s and 1970s, a universalistic approach to social policy – under which the entire population is eligible for social benefits ...
Launched in 2004, the Prison Design Boycott is an initiative led by Architects / Designers / Planners for Social Responsibility ...
Determining and achieving optimal housing density has proven elusive despite the efforts of many illustrious urban theorists ...
Ali Madad’s latest collection of links, on music inspired by Mega-City One, the unfinished grid, “Witness to War in Lebanon,” comparing ...
Growing up in California, May Day was always a vestigial holiday of sorts. It was the height of the Reagan era, and what few media outlets ...
“If we extend Goethe’s metaphor [‘I call architecture frozen music’] beyond architecture, we might say that urbanism is ‘frozen ...
Thousands of Malaysians took to the streets last weekend, calling for electoral reforms at Bersih 3.0 rallies in Kuala Lumpur and other ...
Alex Ron, author of “Quito: Una Ciudad de Grafitis” and “Historias de Aerosol,” collects graffiti messages to recreate the social ...
Artist Giacomo Costa creates cityscapes that are as unconventional as the life he leads. Born in Florence in 1970, he studied violin ...
Many parks are designed to provide a sense of escape from the city through separation from the bustle of street life. On the other hand ...
Located at the southern tip of Borneo in Indonesia, Banjarmasin is the self-proclaimed “City of 1,000 Rivers.” With a population ...
A city’s compactness is a compromise. On one side, a city can be spread-out — giving the advantages of cheap construction costs and ...
When an artwork is shown, it no longer belongs only to the artist. And when it is placed in public space, a co-authoring process unfolds ...
In the last decade, China’s fast-paced urbanization and construction boom has made a visible impact on its urban and rural ...
“The architecture review has a basic form, one that is still valid despite changes in publishing — especially the parameters brought on ...
Assorted links from Ali Madad, featuring Alessandro Bavari, Google Maps loosing ground, alien anthropology, Galloping Gertie, the ...
New York is a city of opinionated typography — clear, bold, with a point of view. Amidst the vibrant urban cacophony, a keen eye ...
Perhaps it is no surprise that a city so fundamental to our collective urban imagination should be so rich in brilliant exposés of ...
Zhongdian, known as “Shangri-La,” is a predominantly Tibetan county in China’s northern Yunnan Province. The Tibetan ...
Since 2008, Ecuador has adopted institutional reforms that challenge conventional definitions of human development. The process ...
“In the late 1970s, a group of people living in the east London borough of Hackney began building a structure on a derelict lot in their ...
The U.K.-based Young Foundation recently published research highlighting the successes and failures of neighborhood ...
Maps offer a compelling view of trends that influence the social life of cities. A set of carefully crafted maps by Pietro Calogero reveals a ...
In 2008, a major Mumbai newspaper published an article on the redevelopment of Dharavi, a vast informal settlement in the heart of ...
There is a hidden rhythm on the ground we walk on. With each step, a melody of patterns is slowly created. Framed within a center tile, Johan ...
Poverty and inequality make for captivating drama. For centuries, novelists, academics, development professionals and others have ...
After a £500-million redevelopment, the new Western Concourse of London’s King’s Cross Station is now in use. The project, which ...
“[P]eople are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party ...
As the study of relations between organisms and their environments, ecology seems to address nearly anything and everything. It is often ...
Ali Madad’s latest collection of links, including Geoff Dyer’s Zona City transit line posters, revolutionary posters in Syria, Lester Beall ...
The New York Times’ Room for Debate series is often frustratingly pithy and incomplete when it comes to urban issues — witness their ...
Today, participatory democracy is an ingredient in most international development programs and projects. City governments around the ...
Matthew Gandy is an urbanist and academic who writes and teaches about cities, landscapes and nature. He directed the Urban Laboratory ...
I walked through the bustling gullies of old Delhi, from Chandni Chowk to Jama Masjid and then to Ballimaran. This area was part of the ...
A group of students from the Moscow Architectural Institute recently completed an “inventory” of the Russian capital using ...
Recently, internationally acclaimed architect Joshua Prince-Ramus guest lectured on “slow architecture” at The New School of ...
Partizaning, a new social art strategy encouraging people to get involved in improving their cities by promoting art for social change, marks ...
Livia Corona, a photographer from Ensenada in Baja California, spent four years exploring former Mexican President Vicente Fox’s...
City dwelling is often conditioned by memories. Walking through a familiar city, we see things that newcomers don’t. Remembering ...
During the first weeks of 2009, a new initiative started to take shape in the design office MAS Studio: an initiative to share the most ...
Jiang Jun, editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine, gave a talk on Chinese housing at the SCOR Social Housing - Housing the Social ...
Ali Madad shares links on financing suburban architecture, Lewis Mumford as art critic, data-driven journalism, a tour of ...
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water (1935) is among the most renowned architectural icons of the 20th century. In this post I consider ...
I observed the one year anniversary of Japan’s devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident on March 11 in Semipalatinsk in ...
One would be hard-pressed to find a more jarring juxtaposition to the new exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream ...
Born to a Dutch mother and Turkish father, photographer Ahmet Polat is a visual storyteller who documents the lives of ...
Since Nov. 25, 2011, coinciding with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, the Municipality of ...
Wandering the streets of Hong Kong, you’d be hard-pressed to find public seating on the sidewalks, especially when you’re ...
“‘India lives in its villages,’ a saying attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, has long characterized the Indian mindset. That India also lives in its ...
In response to a post on the Cube Houses in Rotterdam a few months ago, a reader commented that they reminded her of ...
Like most post-industrial cities around the world, Barcelona has spent well over a decade planning how to reshape its industrial heartland. In ...
Alex Lee’s “Tokyo Slo-Mode” presents a striking urban aesthetic through the swaying movements of commuters and other inhabitants ...
Last January, five Spanish artists spent almost two weeks living with a family in Vila Brasilândia, a favela on the outskirts of São ...
The “Flock House” was conceived by Mary Mattingly, an artist that crosses boundaries between performance, sculpture, architecture ...
While driving through Kenya’s vibrant landscapes this winter, I was fascinated by the unexpected colors in the towns and villages ...
Jason Miller is a young photographer who practices his craft in the San Francisco Bay Area. His photography offers a visual catalogue ...
The latest online discoveries from Ali Madad, including a 1937 map of segregated Durham, Filip Dujardin’s impossible architectural ...
In the informal settlements of Nairobi, basic infrastructure provision remains a major issue. Generally speaking, neither the government ...
“Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and ...
Last year, in a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio confronted the effects ...
Ever since I became interested in urban development in Brazil, I have used the Instituto Pólis as a comprehensive and reliable ...
The Internet is being used in exciting ways toward participatory research on cities. Beyond facilitating collaboration between academics ...
In the fall of 2008, the Norwegian studio TYIN Tegnestue Architects traveled to Noh Bo — a small village on the Thai-Burmese border ...
Bangalore, the “Silicon Valley of India,” is located in southern India. One of India’s fastest growing cities, it is more than 10 times the size ...
“WARNING: All the urban prescriptions that follow are for public use, able to be used in all their strategic and legal development by ...
For more than 20 years, since Macedonia became independent from Yugoslavia and replaced a socialist system with a capitalist one, the ...
“The contemporary city is a complex field that changes and evolves in advance of the discipline. Landscape and ecology, understood ...
This is the site in the center of Moscow where Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin recently decided to build a park. Each dot ...
“Where I Am Now” is the debut LP of Chicago-based DJ and music producer Area (a.k.a. m50). A dark and driven blend ...
“As a relational process of composition, assemblage signals the emergence, labour and sociomateriality of the city, and the ways ...
What are the design lessons of the Occupy movement? In this interview, UC Berkeley Landscape Architecture students Robert ...
Links from Ali Madad on an old theater over a Bodega, semeiotic Dubai, pierce and pop architecture, pay-phone libraries and ...
John Lancaster is a veteran foreign correspondent and magazine journalist with deep experience in South Asia and the Middle East ...
Cities may be seen as systems that, at their best, foster symbiotic interactions and equitable transactions that efficiently distribute ...
The Marin County Civic Center in the city of San Rafael, Calif., is a striking sight. At once stunning and curious, it was the hyper-modern ...
It’s Carnival time. This is when millions leave their worries behind and go with the flow of the world’s largest collective parties. Brazil’s ...
During my first visit to Bombay Underground, a community library, bookshop and exhibition space in Mumbai’s trendy Bandra ...
“We need to view the fragility of the planet and its resources as an opportunity for speculative design innovations rather than as a ...
An exhibition recently opened at the Barcelona Photographic Archive that uses photography as a tool to understand urban change through ...
“Love at (and for) the Food Truck” is a conversation with Tiffany Pham, third-generation owner of the Momogoose ...
The 2011 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture, which started in December, is in its final week at ...
Political events and public protests are often held in large communal spaces such as town squares and plazas. But what do these places ...
On Feb. 9, the Architectural Association in London held a symposium on urban informality titled “Design as Political Engagement” ...
The latest assortment of featured links from Ali Madad, including “Raise the Crime Rate,” “An Interview with Mike Gibbons on Public ...
For many of us, it is difficult to imagine Afghanistan without thinking of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, ethnic divisions and ...
My support for the Occupy movement has changed. I still find it inspiring that people around the world are prioritizing democracy ...
In a post on modeling open source cities, Polis featured a video about “Crowdsourced Moscow 2012: A Public Space Game” by Andrei ...
“The Hundred Story House” is a new public art project that I built with Julia Marchesi. I met Julia around this time last year. She ...
Since November 2009, I have been involved in a United Nations international development cooperation program in Ecuador aimed at ...
City life, though chaotic, is often one replete with rules — whether explicit laws or implicit norms about where to walk, how to drive, and ...
This week, the first solo show in Sweden of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opened at the art center Magasin 3. The exhibition focused on ...
The Kubuswoningen, or cube houses, in Rotterdam were designed by Piet Blom in the mid-1980s. Their distinctive shape — a cube ...
In 2001, after four decades of authoritarian rule, Indonesia underwent one of the most ambitious decentralization programs attempted ...
Sheela Patel and Jockin Arputham — two of the world’s most respected voices on housing and urban poverty — recently addressed ...
Is it possible to assign a monetary value to public green space in cities? Alex Lo recently published an assessment of methods based on choice ...
Marc Yankus’s sleepy-eyed portraits of the city “as it sinks into slumber” or “rouses itself to face a new day” are beautiful images of an ...
Zines were supposed to have been doomed by the Internet, with deathblows from blogs and a final thrashing from tweets and tumblrs ...
Ali Madad’s latest assortment of featured links, including “The Turgot Map of Paris,” “Train to Always,” “Homeless Signs,” “Island of ...
“How many maps, in the descriptive or geographical sense, might be needed to deal exhaustively with a given space, to code ...
In riveting scenes from Wim Wenders’s 2012 Oscar-nominated 3-D dance film, “Pina,” dancers for the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina ...
Brazil has become known for innovative urban initiatives, including the noted 2001 Statute of the City, which aimed to affirm the social ...
“I want projects in the Biennale to look seriously at the spaces made by buildings: the political, social, and public realms of which ...
Since my arrival in Quito two years ago, one of my most exciting discoveries has been Oswaldo Guayasamín. This iconic Latin American ...
It has been nearly four months since we breathed a huge sigh of relief. After more than a year of meetings, informal conversations ...
Last week marked the second anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The devastation — more than 315,000 people dead, 1.5 million ...
There is no question that architecture and planning have been crucial components of conflicts taking place in cities. But ...
Ali Madad presents his latest assortment of online serendipity, from visualizing slumlords to Libera’s ‘Lego’ Concentration Camp ...
There used to be direct physical and visual access to the Sasaki Garden in New York City’s Washington Square Village, but New York ...
“In a dusty office of the municipal buildings in K-West ward in northwest Mumbai there is a detailed map of the Paris water supply ...
Wandering through satellite images captured by Google Earth, artist Marco Cadioli uncovered manmade landscapes resembling ...
On the red dirt roads of southern Kenya, a few hours from Malindi, kids chase and hail streams of Jeeps and Land Rovers hauling ...
Last Wednesday, the Institute of Development Studies in the U.K. released a short film exploring how the British media depict ...
UC Berkeley sociologists Claude Fischer and Michael Burawoy went tête-à-tête in an incisive debate at the peak of the Occupy fervor last ...
Rosalie Genevro’s article “Starrett City: A Home of One’s Own — With Party Walls” traces the history of a beloved modernist housing ...
The American Internet is atwitter after Microsoft announced last week that it had patented a mobile application technology giving ...
While we’ve previously mused on the agency of mapping in reconfiguring information vital to the production of the urban realm, the ...
Escalators are usually associated with the internal workings of multi-level buildings. On notable occasions, moving staircases appear ...
More than three years after the beginning of the global economic crisis, Spain continues to fall without a visible end. One of the most ...
With the new year under way, many events on architecture, planning and urbanism await. As traveling abroad takes a bit of planning ...
Now that the holidays are over, you may be looking forward to your next vacation. Consider a trip to one of the “10 Best Ethical ...
