LOS ANGELES — It’s barely 10 a.m. on an August day in Hollywood, and the heat is already becoming oppressive. The temperature’s only in the mid-80s, but in the direct sun it feels hotter—and it’s getting worse by the minute. Part of the reason is the ground. The black asphalt of this side street off Sunset Boulevard…
Few cities represent the remarkable 20th century trend of skyscraper-filled, obscenely dense cities better than Hong Kong. At its height, The Kowloon Walled City, which was demolished in 1993, was perhaps the most dystopian portrait of urban living. And according to photographer Andy Yeung, 21st-century Hong Kong…
Cities will grow alongside growing populations, turning the land in their wake into housing and infrastructure. And when that happens, we can goodbye to the food, a new study warns.
European cities like Paris are much, much older than American cities like New York, and that age difference has led to many interesting differences in the layout of each city. For example, the wealthy population of America often live in suburbs away from the city while in Europe, the rich live inside the city. Why is…
For the past sixteen months or so, it’s felt as though our planet has been shaking us by the shoulders, trying to wake us up to the fact that we’ve kicked the thermostat into overdrive. The good news is, America finally seems to be listening. According to a new report by the Department of Energy, wind and solar…
Rio’s water is vile—full of raw sewage and dead bodies—and later this week, humanity’s top athletes will plunge into this hellish stew for a jolly ol’ international sporting competition.
In the 80s and 90s, the 911 system in the US became overloaded with people calling to report things like wayward couches and double-parked cars—not emergencies, yet situations where city officials could help. In 1996, Baltimore successfully tested a system that diverted these requests to a separate number. In 1997,…
San Francisco needs help. It also needs to decide where to put bus stops for the hundreds of shuttle buses that creep through its streets, gathering wizened, under-caffeinated developers for their journeys to jolly Mountain View. A survey that asked for such logistical input provided some additional—and perhaps…
Where will the first Hyperloop be? So far there are plans to use the tubular transportation system to move passengers in Slovakia and freight in Switzerland. But a proposed application for the Hyperloop announced today could solve a transportation conundrum that has been challenging planners for centuries: Connecting…
Researchers at the University of Hamburg noticed that urban areas have higher populations of hedgehogs than rural areas, so they asked the question: what gives?
The investigation into a death that occurred while a Tesla Model S driver was using Autopilot has filled the internet with dystopian-sounding headlines. Self-driving car driver died for the first time after crash in Florida. Self-driving Tesla was involved in fatal crash. But this was not a “self-driving car” that…
You might have noticed an uptick of stories about the Bay Area’s homeless crisis in your social media feeds recently. Dozens of news organizations worked together to coordinate the publication of stories on homelessness today—all of which are mean to specifically focus on solutions for housing the region’s homeless…
Just the presence of streetlights can deter criminal behavior. A South Philadelphia neighborhood is trying something a little more innovative than that—using neon-lit murals to brighten the sidewalk and turn the area into a destination.
Cities are so trendy right now that every big tech company wants to build its own. Zappos did it in Downtown Vegas. Amazon is kind of doing it in a Seattle. Alphabet is probably doing it somewhere soon. And now Y Combinator wants in on the fun, too, with a plan to build some kind of alt-Silicon Valley... somewhere.
For three years I’ve been writing at least once a week about self-driving cars and I’ve recently noticed a shift in popular opinion. The wide-eyed optimism of seeing Google’s cute-as-a-button robot bopping unassisted around a parking lot has been replaced by some ambiguous, malicious, unknowable entity, a…
In 2012, Frank Gehry and Mark Zuckerberg posed for a series of photos that sealed their intertwined fates: Gehry, arguably the world’s most famous architect, would design a new campus for Zuckerberg, arguably the world’s most powerful not-lizard person. Surely with all this money and talent coalescing like a hunk of…
What would convince transit riders to pay attention to an oncoming train instead of Instagram? Apparently, a graphic depiction of certain dismemberment.
Over the weekend, my social media feeds were draped in neon orange as the world exuberantly shared the first photos of Christo’s latest work, The Floating Piers, a 1.8-mile walkway across an Italian lake. It is easily the artist’s most ambitious piece from an engineering perspective—and one that actually adds value to…
Anyone who’s used Waze is familiar with the navigation app’s insistence on making left turns on busy streets where there’s no signal to stop traffic. Waze actually has a name for these types of situations: “difficult intersections.” And a new feature will become the default setting on the app to help drivers avoid…
The world is urbanizing faster than ever, with over half of the planet’s population currently living in cities—more than any time in history. But when did this trend of “urbanization” start? It turns out its roots go back much farther than we thought.
