Próspera was supposed to be a privatized, Silicon Valley-funded paradise—but it’s a hard sell for the neighbors.

Growth has slowed to a trickle in parts of Manchuria—but some young people are finding new careers online.

If researchers can figure out how pigeons and rats evolve to thrive in hostile city habitats, it could help other beasts—including us—adapt to climate change.

How order collapsed in an American city.

Sarajevo, Chicago, and the memory of cities old and new.

The homeless population of New York City is higher than it’s been in decades. Nobody seems to notice.

A man wakes up to find his city changing its physical properties.

"The soft blob nature of everything was making him drowsy. He sat down on what appeared to be a concrete staircase. It felt as soft as it looked. He let himself doze off, the vague swirl of drab color around him giving way to darkness."

Careers, relationships, infidelities, and anxiety envelop the friendship of two New York women.

"Ellen should have mentioned his kiss right at the time — the next day, or on their weekend upstate. But even thinking about it had felt disloyal, an insult to Abby’s judgment, looks, her soul. When Abby phoned, barely able to announce that Marcus had slept over, what else could Ellen say but that she was happy for her? If Ellen said something now, that, and her reasons for it, would upset Abby more than Ellen’s years of saying nothing, or Marcus’ long-ago — and always after drinking — indiscretion."

Jane Jacobs has a somewhat ambiguous legacy—or at least one that's contested by different factions in the present-day debate over cities and urbanism—but to me her most important idea is encapsulated in the title and spirit of this piece. It's old and, I think, utterly prescient about what successive waves of planning fads miss. The purpose of urban space is for people to use it. A great place is a place where people want to be.

-M. Yglesias

On Astana, the grandiose new capital that Kazakhstan built on the site of a remote Tsarist fort, and its striving young inhabitants.

On the rise of the modern city – and the rise of missing persons.

The first entry in the City by City project, on a Baltimore funeral:

My homeboy is interred at a cemetery with a swan lake where we used to take our girls at night because it was a park with a lake and it was just over the line and in the county.