Anyone who’s spent time in a city in the summer knows that these bastions of blacktop get uncomfortably hot compared with the surrounding countryside. But even within a city’s bounds, some neighborhoods swelter more than others, and that can have a big effect on who’s most threatened by heatwaves. Which is why citizen…

Neil Tyson often conjectures that maybe aliens have concluded humans aren’t intelligent enough to contact. He’s probably referring to our capacity for war, but lawns may display our talent for fruitless carnage even better.

Growing up around Washington, D.C., it’s a relief to now live in a city laid out in a coherent fashion, with numbered streets increasing along a cardinal directional axis and being intersected at sensible right angles. Which is why it pains me to say that physics brings some bad news for my fellow gridded…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…