cities
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For decades, Chicago has struggled to shake off its reputation for gun violence. Adam Gabbatt visits the city’s south side to understand why
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George A Hormel introduced ‘the meat of many uses’ in July 1937, and the smell of slaughtered pigs still pervades this Minnesota city
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Austin, Nashville and New Orleans have thrived on the success of vibrant music scenes. But as rents rise and noise complaints become more common, do they risk ruining what made them famous in the first place?
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in pictures
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Pioneering aviator and co-founder of Swissair, Walter Mittelholzer, was an avid aerial photographer. A new book documents his obsession with the Middle East, and African cities from Cairo to Casablanca
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From stunning skylines to architectural marvels, here are some of the entries for the magazine’s 2017 competition
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The bike-unfriendly reputation of Lebanon’s capital is transforming, as the Chain Effect collective enlists locals of all ages to become pro-cycling graffiti artists
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Photographer Benny Lam has documented the suffocating living conditions in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats, recording the lives of these hidden communities
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Since time immemorial, men in cities around the world have shirked the laws of public transit etiquette – and advertising campaigns have fought back
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Over the years a large population of grey herons have made an unlikely home in urban Amsterdam. Julie Hrudova documents how the birds integrate into city life
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Seoul’s ambitious Skygarden – which revives a disused elevated 1970s highway with 24,000 plants – is opening
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The bikes designed by Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde would suck in polluted air, using positive ionisation to purify it, before releasing it back into the atmosphere
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Somalia’s capital is buzzing: estate agents thrive and it recently hosted a TedX conference. But Mogadishu is facing a fresh challenge as drought forces half a million people to seek aid. Jason Burke visits a growing camp on the outskirts
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The announcement that new megacity Xiongan will be built near Beijing is the latest attempt to take pressure off China’s biggest metropolises. Can it work?
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Once known as the City of Lakes, urban sprawl has destroyed 85% of Bangalore’s fresh water and pollution has ruined much of the rest. Can Lakshmi and her mother find clean water today?
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Suresh Kumar Sharma is an auto-rickshaw driver in Delhi, a city with some of the world’s dirtiest air – and where many locals don’t know how unhealthy the pollution really is
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Photographer Elisabetta Zavoli spent years getting to know a famously standoffish community – who eventually granted her unprecedented access
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As the hajj begins once again, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater has revealed unprecedented changes to the holy city – from flashy new hotels to the loss of priceless neighbourhoods
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How We Live Now: In Tokyo, commutes are so long, and apartments so small, that some people sleep in internet cafes – which offer showers, meals, clothes and everything you might need for a substitute home
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Protesters parody tourism video by juxtaposing images of Lebanon’s beauty spots with the reality of the country’s garbage crisis
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In the heart of Malaysia’s towering capital lies tiny Kampong Bharu. But its markets are being razed and its residents evicted
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How do you improve a neighbourhood without causing land prices to rise? Residents along a polluted waterway in San Juan set up a community land trust to help save their homes, as well as the environment
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get involved
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From lost buildings to transformed neighbourhoods, share your pictures and memories of the changing landscapes of cities with GuardianWitness
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Readers shared their experiences of living in cities affected by air pollution – from the curse of the ‘Delhi chest’ in India’s capital to celebrating blue sky in Shanghai
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From Hefei to Honghu, readers across China share their stories about how their cities are changing – and what the county’s rapid urbanisation means for them
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A city’s skyline can be its defining feature – from Sydney’s Opera House to New York’s skyscrapers – but can you identify places based on their skylines alone?
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Driverless cars appear unstoppable – except of course you can simply walk in front of one and force it to brake. Could this conundrum eventually mean a return to a dystopian world of segregated urban highways?
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When Oslo decided to be the first European city to ban cars from its centre, businesses protested. So the city did the next best thing: it banned parking
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‘Bicycle madness’ once saw US bike sales outstrip cars, and spawned ambitious plans for 100,000 miles of cycle paths. Then the music stopped
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Mapping company Bike Citizens has trawled its database of city cycle infrastructure to create these ‘naked’ cycle maps. Blue lines = protected bike lanes; grey lines = painted lanes. Can you identify the cities?
live weeks
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Mountains have been flattened and villages bulldozed to build Lanzhou New Area in China’s wild west. Four years ago Tom Phillips met empty streets and an eerie hush, but now he finds this improbable desert mirage finally filling up
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Forget Venice. The fastest-sinking city is the Indonesian capital, parts of which are dropping at 25cm a year. Can an outlandish plan for a giant seawall and luxury waterworld city in the shape of a mythical bird save Jakarta from drowning?
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From the 4,600-year-old pyramid of Zoser to the under-construction one kilometre-high Kingdom Tower – via the first London semi, Beijing’s old stock exchange and LA’s stacked freeway interchange – these 50 structures tell unique stories of our urban history
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The foundation of al-Mansur’s ‘Round City’ in 762 was a glorious milestone in the history of urban design. It developed into the cultural centre of the world
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With its mathematical layout and earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China, Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world when London was a place of ‘thievery and murder’. So why is nothing left?
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When city planning supremo Robert Moses proposed a road through Greenwich Village in 1955, he met opposition from one particularly feisty local resident: Jane Jacobs. It was the start of a decades-long struggle for swaths of New York
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Civil rights activist Floyd McKissick dreamed of a southern utopia where the racially integrated community would be planned and managed by African Americans. Although the city was never completed, some traces remain
you may have missed
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The Pearl River Delta has witnessed the most rapid urban expansion in human history – a predominantly agricultural region transformed into the world’s largest continuous city. By revisiting the sites of rare archive images of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Macau from the 1940s through 1990s, our photographers have documented this staggering change
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The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities
Oliver WainwrightAffordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East -
Underneath the streets of the capital lies a hidden labyrinth of Victorian sewers. We’re going down 20 metres and back 150 years
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Exclusive Sadiq Khan tells the Guardian he will carry out ‘the most thorough research on this matter ever undertaken’ amid widespread concern over rising housing costs and gentrification
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