cities
-
Will Geary’s experimental TransitFlow tools help visualise the flow of buses and metros as colourful ant-like particles flowing across world cities
-
-
Columbus is the first major US city to give downtown workers free public transport passes regardless of who they work for, and whether they intend to use them. Can the programme change the mindset of this car-centric city?
-
They see themselves as progressive housing activists. Critics call them stooges for luxury developers. Meet the new band of millennials who are priced out of cities and shouting: ‘Yes in my back yard’
-
-
in pictures
-
The Gentle Author pieces together photographs from the archives of the Bishopsgate Institute – from Billingsgate and Covent Garden, to Clare and the Hay Market
-
From Seattle’s Space Needle to London’s old Post Office Tower, via Liverpool, Dallas and Jaipur, restaurants have rotated at the top of spaceship-like buildings since the 1960s
-
Students from New Taipei City collected samples from urban rivers, creeks and ports which they then froze in moulds and preserved in resin. ‘We hope when more people see this they can change their lifestyles,’ said one of the group
-
Instagrammer Roc Isern shows another side to Barcelona’s architecture by capturing the beautiful geometric shapes and patterns of the city’s buildings
-
His melting houses and floating building have earned the British sculptor a reputation as a master of urban illusion. As his first-ever permanent work, Six Pins and Half a Dozen Needles, debuts at Assembly London, he tells us how he walks the fine line between architecture and sculpture
-
Years before he found fame as a Magnum photographer, Elliott Erwitt was commissioned to document the city of Pittsburgh. Many of the images he took as a 22-year-old lay forgotten for decades, but have now been compiled in a book
-
The wetter the better. From sponge cities in China to ‘berms with benefits’ in New Jersey and floating container classrooms in the slums of Dhaka, we look at a range of projects that treat storm water as a resource rather than a hazard
-
With sensors and smartphones to make roads more flexible, Tilburg is addressing the question: how can a city become safer for less able residents?
-
Seoul’s ambitious Skygarden – which revives a disused elevated 1970s highway with 24,000 plants – is opening
-
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
-
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?
-
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
-
Photographer Elisabetta Zavoli spent years getting to know a famously standoffish community – who eventually granted her unprecedented access
-
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
-
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
-
Protesters parody tourism video by juxtaposing images of Lebanon’s beauty spots with the reality of the country’s garbage crisis
-
Jack Shenker reports on a new culture of secrecy and control in public spaces, where private security guards can remove you for protesting, taking photos ... or just looking scruffy
-
Labour leader among those voicing concern after Guardian revealed secretive world of privately owned public spaces in London
-
Public space is a right not a privilege; yet Britain is in the midst of the biggest sell-off of common space since the enclosures of the 17 th and 18 th century
-
Guardian Cities and the Greenspace Information for Greater London (GiGL), have created the first comprehensive map of pseudo-public spaces in the UK capital. We’re looking for your help to make it better
get involved
-
From lost buildings to transformed neighbourhoods, share your pictures and memories of the changing landscapes of cities with GuardianWitness
-
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
-
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
-
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?
-
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?
-
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
-
‘Bicycle madness’ once saw US bike sales outstrip cars, and spawned ambitious plans for 100,000 miles of cycle paths. Then the music stopped
-
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
-
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
-
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?
-
-
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
-
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
-
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?
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
most viewed
-
4
How supermarkets choose where to open … and where to close
This article is 2 years old -
10
Pant by numbers: the cities with the most dangerous air – listed
This article is 8 months old
It’s not about the black cabs What’s been missing from the TfL v Uber debate