Back to the Future
Why aren't there monorails in numerous American cities? Wayne Curtis explored that question by visiting Las Vegas in 2005, shortly after Sin City opened its single-track effort at mass transit. More »
Why aren't there monorails in numerous American cities? Wayne Curtis explored that question by visiting Las Vegas in 2005, shortly after Sin City opened its single-track effort at mass transit. More »
After Hurricane Katrina, a handful of small, independent developers began building new houses. "As with jazz, gumbo, and some remarkable cocktails, this style illustrates the city's talent for crafting extraordinary things from the ordinary stuff it has at hand," Wayne Curtis writes. More »
Descending from the mountain, a visitor to Juneau can walk all the way back to his or her downtown hotel in plenty of time to shower for the cocktail hour. But cleaning up isn't strictly necessary: the Alaskan capital is, after all, a frontier city. More »
Comparing housing prices in Los Angeles and Dallas, Virginia Postrel finds that Angelenos pay a premium for the right to build on their land. The result: houses that cost roughly $300,000 more than their equivalent in Texas. More »
In this 1899 piece, Jacob Riis, one of the most famed muckraking journalists in American history, explained how tenement living pushed urban youth toward lives of crime. More »
In 1964, Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason series, weighed in on a puzzling crime. More »
On a 1992 trip to Portland, Oregon, Philip Langdon tries to discover how the "courteous, well-kept city of 453,000" became "a paragon of healthy urban development." More »
In an effort to fight poverty, officials in Memphis and many other American cities demolished big public housing projects. But dispersing the residents brought crime into formerly safe areas. More »
Chicago is the finest architectural city in the United States, Benjamin Schwarz writes. But the story includes a rueful note. More »
Even if vouchers don't improve schools, they will almost certainly improve neighborhoods More »
In 2005, Bernard-Henri Levi explained why L.A. was "the prototype of a city with a poorly developed language, the prototype of unintelligible, illegible discourse." More »
Wayne Curtis visits a Columbus, Ohio, supper club where thatched dining huts and an 80-foot-high tiki goddess spur him to ponder what kinds of buildings deserve preservation for posterity More »
A 1906 article wonders whether the capital of the New World will ever compare to the capital of France More »
This influential March 1982 piece has been credited with reversing the lengthy crime epidemic that plagued New York City. More »
Part 8: Richard Florida argues that Americans need to get over their obsession with real estate More in the series »
The rise of megaregions, the decline of home ownership, the shift away from a car culture - these are among the nation's responses to today's economic turmoil. Adapted from Richard Florida's new book, The Great Reset. More »
The future of train travel, with The Atlantic's Derek Thompson
