Society

Inside the unique London community built by residents to defy housing discrimination

21 minutes

From manners to mud – two women recall coming of age in Victorian London

10 minutes

Here’s to the aquapolis

Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city

Tom Blass

Living closer together

Urban density was once seen as a sign of unhealthiness and poverty. But today it is necessary to make cities sustainable

Max Holleran

The haunted city

The city, for all its mechanical speed, artificial light and industrialisation, is the most uncanny of human habitats

Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel

Energised crowding

To understand why early cities thrived, look not to the temples of kings but to their subjects’ bustling neighbourhoods

Michael E Smith

Walk like a Roman in this digital reconstruction of the ancient city

9 minutes

Uncovering Sparta

Mythological home of Helen, war-making polis of Leonidas and now a modest municipality: the city is a palimpsest

Daphne D. Martin

How we became weekly

The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it

David Henkin

Cities that grow themselves

They are spreading like branching plants across the globe. Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic potential?

Josh Berson

Seeking authenticity in a Chinatown built for tourists and Hollywood movies

23 minutes

The city as an emergent life form, with architecture as the skeleton and roads as veins

19 minutes

A city but not upon a hill

Entangled with, yet critical of, colonial oppression and the evils of slavery, the true history of Boston can now be told

Mark Peterson

New York’s 300-year-old trash becomes treasure in the hands of an urban archaeologist

23 minutes

The harms of gentrification

The exclusion of poorer people from their own neighbourhoods is not just a social problem but a philosophical one

Daniel Putnam

Sociology’s race problem

Urban ethnographers do more harm than good in speaking for Black communities. They see only suffering, not diversity or joy

Robyn Autry