Urban planning

Pittsburgh skyline at night

Why we can’t quit cities

Infrastructure

A historian’s ode to the resilient city, warts and all.

Hong Seo-yoon says travel is a great way to bring down barriers between people with disabilities and the nondisabled.

Bringing down barriers for travelers with disabilities in Korea

Lifestyle & Belief
A woman works out with apartment buildings behind her

How single women are driving gentrification in Hong Kong and elsewhere

Special Guest: Niall Kirkwood

Arts, Culture & Media

Panhandling For Reparations

Arts, Culture & Media
Cities that work for the 21st century

Cities: The intersection of people and place

Culture

Some urban planners say the buzz around “smart cities” is an opportunity to think both enthusiastically and cautiously about the future of development. But while it’s the latest trend in urban planning, the fundamental building blocks of cities haven’t changed.

Frankfurt skyline

The greatest cities in America have these traits in common

Development

And author and a linguist take a single-engine plane throughout the United States. What they find are 11 signs a city will succeed.

Autonomous car

Fleets of autonomous cars may one day end the hassles of urban parking

Technology

We’ve all been there: heading to the mall or the theater or dinner, and it ends up taking longer to find a parking space than it did to get there in the first place. This isn’t just frustrating; it turns out all these cars driving in circles are bad for the climate, and bad for the air we breathe.

Maria Jaakkola at a screening of her video about Boston's Emerald Necklace

A Finnish landscape architect tries to connect the broken pieces of Boston’s Emerald Necklace

Environment

Finnish landscape architect and visual artist Maria Jaakkola couldn’t wait to get to Boston to see its famed Emerald Necklace, a system of interconnected city parks designed in the 19th century by the great Frederick Law Olmsted. But when she got there she was dismayed to see the state it was in. So she made a film to try and change things.

Boston complete streets

Cities like Boston are redesigning their streets for the people who use them

Lifestyle

After World War II, planners built roads with wide lanes and high speed limits to accommodate trucks carrying goods. But these wide, fast roads were unfriendly to pedestrians and cyclists. Now a concept called “Complete Streets” aims to change this approach and push cities to redesign streets with people in mind.