On the then-new phenomenon of dead downtowns.

Boomtown San Francisco, as seen from the Google Bus.

The mysteries and dreams of life and rural living.

Parking garages, prisons, freeways and the world of stuff we’re not supposed to look at.

How architecture has made Los Angeles a bank robber’s paradise.

How the foreclosure crisis ignited a new form of activism in Chicago’s vacant homes.

On the development of South Korea’s New Songdo and Cisco’s plans to build smart cities which will “offer cities as a service, bundling urban necessities – water, power, traffic, telephony – into a single, Internet-enabled utility, taking a little extra off the top of every resident’s bill.” The demand for such cities is enormous:

China doesn't need cool, green, smart cities. It needs cities, period -- 500 New Songdos at the very least. One hundred of those will each house a million or more transplanted peasants. In fact, while humanity has been building cities for 9,000 years, that was apparently just a warm-up for the next 40. As of now, we're officially an urban species. More than half of us -- 3.3 billion people -- live in a city. Our numbers are projected to nearly double by 2050, adding roughly a New Songdo a day; the United Nations predicts the vast majority will flood smaller cities in Africa and Asia.