video
Art
The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art
15 minutes
video
Cities
Inside the unique London community built by residents to defy housing discrimination
21 minutes
video
History
From manners to mud – two women recall coming of age in Victorian London
10 minutes
essay
The environment
Here’s to the aquapolis
Unkempt, beguiling and lacking conventional geometry, wetlands bring a roguish, raffish wildness to the city
Tom Blass
essay
Illness and disease
Are they the canaries?
People with multiple chemical sensitivity seem to be allergic to the world. What, if anything, can medicine do for them?
Xi Chen
essay
Cities
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
essay
Cities
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
video
Mood and emotion
A century of letters captures the emotions of life in a new city, far from home
21 minutes
essay
Cities
Energised crowding
To understand why early cities thrived, look not to the temples of kings but to their subjects’ bustling neighbourhoods
Michael E Smith
video
The ancient world
Walk like a Roman in this digital reconstruction of the ancient city
9 minutes
video
Travel
A postcard from Mumbai, where there’s poetry in getting from A to B
5 minutes
essay
The ancient world
Uncovering Sparta
Mythological home of Helen, war-making polis of Leonidas and now a modest municipality: the city is a palimpsest
Daphne D. Martin
essay
Economic history
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
essay
Cities
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
video
Race and ethnicity
Seeking authenticity in a Chinatown built for tourists and Hollywood movies
23 minutes
essay
Architecture
Heritage at sea
Must we simply accept the loss of beloved buildings and cities to the floods and rising seas of the climate crisis?
Thijs Weststeijn
video
Architecture
A whirlwind tour of Hong Kong’s high-rises is an awesome meditation on urbanity
9 minutes
video
Subcultures
What do tropical fish make of the strange creatures who love them so?
14 minutes
video
Cities
The city as an emergent life form, with architecture as the skeleton and roads as veins
19 minutes
essay
Cities
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
video
Archaeology
New York’s 300-year-old trash becomes treasure in the hands of an urban archaeologist
23 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How an augmented reality app transformed London into an immersive art gallery
6 minutes
essay
Cities
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
essay
Race and ethnicity
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