A Space That Is Not the Battlefield The dust is settling on Shura City, yet not a single brick has been laid. Since this proposal for a drone-proof city emerged, its creator, Asher Kohn, has attracted unexpected attention based on sharply divergent reactions. I spoke with Asher and Hiba Ali — the visual artist who created a virtual model of the city — as they developed plans for Shura’s interior spaces. The original proposal ...

Walking Through London’s East End London’s East End needs little introduction. Though nestled between the largest financial hubs in Europe, it has ...

Community Engagement in Mexico City An innovative urban development program is activating positive change in low-income neighborhoods across Mexico City ...

To Replenish a Sense of Wonder In a radio interview with Eleanor Wachtel of Writers & Company, Gail Jones reflects upon urban experience and its ...

A Tramway Arrives in Casablanca As Morocco’s largest city and business center, Casablanca suffers from infernal traffic congestion, related air pollution and ...

Isolation to Eviction on the Nile Greater Cairo, which includes the city of Giza, is spatially fragmented and heavily oriented toward private transit. Low-income residents ...

Myanmar’s Instant Capital In 2007, Siddharth Varadarajan described the city of Naypyidaw (Abode of Kings) as “the ultimate insurance against regime ...

Gentrification at 50 According to recent literature, the word “gentrification” appeared fifty years ago in 1964. It describes a historical shift after ...

Replacing Industry with Green Housing Hammarby Sjöstad is a large residential development in Stockholm with an innovative urban design and sustainability ...

Democratic Commissioning Most people wouldn’t call public-service commissioning exciting, if they even know it exists. Commissioning is the ...

Elizabeth Blackmar on Public Space “The scholars’ contest over whether ‘the commons’ would be understood as a historical set of social relations, as a metaphor ...

Territory and Transgression Stuart Elden, professor of political theory and geography at Warwick and one of the editors of the journal Environment and ...

Data Collection in the Moscow Metro In the words of John Holland, “the city is a pattern in time.” Yet actions within its boundaries leave traces. Whether ...

Demolition and the Right to Place There is no small irony in the fact that the most notable achievement of affordable housing policy in the United States over ...

David Madden on World Expo 2010 “The global-urban problematic, from this perspective, is above all a question of efficiency and proper management, where ...

Corruption and Cities Creative, inclusive and just. Safe, healthy and green. Adaptive, resilient and sustainable. Urbanists frequently articulate these ...

Mark Purcell on ‘Chains of Equivalence’ ”Each retains their difference. However, they are able to act in concert around an agenda of equivalence. That is, they see ...

A False Rendering of the New Banlieue Virtually everywhere you go in the Parisian banlieue, you will find large signs drawing attention to “urban renovation” ...

Agitation in the Global City In 2012, Trenton Oldfield threw himself into the River Thames to protest elitism in Britain. Oldfield intentionally timed his ...

Placing Vendors on the Map Some urban treasures are hidden in plain sight. The documentary film “On the Map” shows how MIT professor Annette Kim and ...

Tubist Trompe-l’Oeil My first encounter with Tubism was at a house party with a large poster of the London Underground hanging in the living ...

Secret Gardens of Greater Paris I imagine that most people, when confronted with the end of a two-year sojourn in the City of Lights, would make plans to visit ...

Community Aesthetics in Heliópolis Heliópolis is known as one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in São Paulo, with 120,000 people living in an area of ...

Reversing the Panopticon The infamous Panopticon, conceived by Jeremy Bentham and thoroughly analyzed by Michel Foucault, is emblematic of ...

Moscow’s Protected Landscapes My home town, Moscow, has earned a reputation for abandoned industrial zones, flashy business districts and traffic jams. Visitors ...

Informal Resilience William Hunter is an architect, urban designer and teaching fellow at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) ...

Contested Space, Contested Identity In cities around the world, public space is an essential platform for voicing calls for change. Whether Madrid’s Puerta del Sol ...

Conflict Over Natural Resources When thinking of conflicts over natural resources, we tend to think of rural resources: oil in South Sudan, deforestation in Bolivia ...