In Brooklyn, historically black Bedford-Stuyvesant has been experiencing rapid gentrification: “As a new order has emerged, the ghosts of the previous one are everywhere, but their echoes are getting smaller, snuffed out by the tides.”
cities
Posted inArts & Culture, Business & Tech, History, Nonfiction, Quotes
‘London Was, But Is No More’
A loving, fascinating, melancholy, rollicking look at how technology and globalization are transforming urban spaces.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last London
“And now it feels, in the addiction and vertigo of the digital revolution, as if this ancient organism is wheezing, drawing its final breaths. We were never more than an extension of the geology of the Thames Valley.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
‘Because California Moves Through You’
Essayist Lynell George muses on California and the two cities—Los Angeles and San Francisco—that own a part of her heart.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction, Story
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
How women writers and artists, from Virginia Woolf to Sophie Calle, found inspiration and freedom by navigating cities on foot.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books, Nonfiction
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London
How women writers and artists, from Virginia Woolf to Sophie Calle, found inspiration and freedom by navigating cities on foot.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Most Listable City
Alex Gordon surveys 150 years of writing about Pittsburgh and whether or not this type of boosterish frivolity helps the city’s residents — specifically people of color
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
New York’s Times Square as a Mirror of the City Itself
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why Are Cities Still Subsidizing For-Profit Development?
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 […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘A Century of Public Policy Designed to Segregate and Impoverish its Black Population’
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 […]