Tag: cities

It’s time to end the pernicious myth that giving money directly to panhandlers won’t help them.

An investment property is not a home. Neither are cities where most people can’t afford to live.

Annette Miller, a longtime resident of West Oakland’s Ghost Town neighborhood, has witnessed the dramatic transformation of the city as changes sweep the block she’s lived on for over 50 years.

The staff at Laney Tower take a close look at the past, present, and future of Oakland’s artistic community.

“You bang your head against the wall to try to get some nice buildings up, and what happens? Everybody comes after you.”

Gentrification is about displacement — but also about marketing and invisibility.

A loving, fascinating, melancholy, rollicking look at how technology and globalization are transforming urban spaces.

Essayist Lynell George muses on California and the two cities—Los Angeles and San Francisco—that own a part of her heart.

How women writers and artists, from Virginia Woolf to Sophie Calle, found inspiration and freedom by navigating cities on foot.

Throughout New York’s history, Times Square has served as a bellwether of the city’s current mood — as well as the perceptions of the city, both for those who live here and those who don’t. Once, Times Square was a high temple of glamour, the glowing heart of a go-go metropolis. Then it, like the […]

But at what point should cities make this decision to stop subsidizing for-profit development? And how do they know when enough is enough? That’s the question being asked in Kansas City and in cities around the nation as downtowns bounce back from years of abandonment only to find that developers still expect the aid they were receiving […]

As I described in the Making of Ferguson, the federal government maintained a policy of segregation in public housing nationwide for decades. This was as true in northeastern cities like New York as it was in border cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. In 1994, civil rights groups sued the Department of Housing and Urban […]

The city’s origins are clouded in rumour and speculation. Some describe it as a vanity project of Than Shwe, the former military leader of the country. Many believe the “audacious” name given to the city might reflect “illusions of grandeur or … perhaps another sign of [Than Shwe’s] possible dementia”, according to one 2006 US government […]

The true story of L.A.’s freeways, and a judge who changed everything.

Collectors Weekly: Who started the music industry’s billboard trend?

Landau: As far as I can tell, it was the Doors in 1967 for their debut album. I talked with Jac Holzman—the head of Elektra Records who signed the Doors—while writing my book. In 1967, he had just come out here from the East Coast and opened an office on La Cienega Boulevard, not far from Sunset Boulevard, and it occurred to him that billboards were being used for everything except promoting records and music. A lot of radio stations where popular disc jockeys worked were farther east on Sunset, and he knew they drove on the Strip, and that the entertainment industry in general was based there.

Four stories about the Berlin Wall, from its creation to the memories it has helped shape, to mark the 25th anniversary of its fall.

The hundreds of people who show up each week to party at Mister Sunday are out for a good time. What the carefree fun-seekers likely do not realize is that they are also a part of a powerful real-estate developer’s plan to remake Industry City—and the Sunset Park community in which it sits—into the Next […]

Let’s be honest: Humans never should have been allowed behind the wheel in the first place. There’s so much that can go wrong, so much room for negligence—it’s incredible to think that we managed human-controlled cars for as long as we did. Here’s a reading list covering the past, present and future of transportation.

In a new essay for Collectors Weekly, Hunter Oatman-Stanford and Peter Norton, author of Fighting Traffic, examine the history of the automobile in America, and how our perception of city streets changed: In 1924, recognizing the crisis on America’s streets, President Herbert Hoover launched the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety. Any organizations interested […]

Emily Perper is a word-writing human working at a small publishing company. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. Everyone is writing about leaving New York, it seems. But Isaac Fitzgerald just arrived in NYC, and some of the writers in the delightful anthology Goodbye To All That have returned. Of course, there […]

Why the sudden proliferation of “vibrant” communities in the United States? And what does it even mean? Is Rockford, Illinois, vibrant? Oh my god yes: according to a local news outlet, the city’s ‘Mayor’s Arts Award nominees make Rockford vibrant.’ The Quad Cities? Check: As their tourism website explains, the four hamlets are ‘a vibrant […]