polis: a collective blog about cities worldwide
The dust is settling on Shura City, yet not a single brick has been laid. Since this proposal for a drone-proof city emerged, its creator, Asher Kohn, has attracted unexpected attention based on sharply divergent reactions. I spoke with Asher and Hiba Ali — the visual artist who created a virtual model of the city — as they developed plans for Shura’s interior spaces. The original proposal ...
London’s East End needs little introduction. Though nestled between the largest financial hubs in Europe, it has ...
An innovative urban development program is activating positive change in low-income neighborhoods across Mexico City ...
In a radio interview with Eleanor Wachtel of Writers & Company, Gail Jones reflects upon urban experience and its ...
As Morocco’s largest city and business center, Casablanca suffers from infernal traffic congestion, related air pollution and ...
Greater Cairo, which includes the city of Giza, is spatially fragmented and heavily oriented toward private transit. Low-income residents ...
In 2007, Siddharth Varadarajan described the city of Naypyidaw (Abode of Kings) as “the ultimate insurance against regime ...
According to recent literature, the word “gentrification” appeared fifty years ago in 1964. It describes a historical shift after ...
Hammarby Sjöstad is a large residential development in Stockholm with an innovative urban design and sustainability ...
Most people wouldn’t call public-service commissioning exciting, if they even know it exists. Commissioning is the ...
“The scholars’ contest over whether ‘the commons’ would be understood as a historical set of social relations, as a metaphor ...
Stuart Elden, professor of political theory and geography at Warwick and one of the editors of the journal Environment and ...
In the words of John Holland, “the city is a pattern in time.” Yet actions within its boundaries leave traces. Whether ...
There is no small irony in the fact that the most notable achievement of affordable housing policy in the United States over ...
“The global-urban problematic, from this perspective, is above all a question of efficiency and proper management, where ...
Creative, inclusive and just. Safe, healthy and green. Adaptive, resilient and sustainable. Urbanists frequently articulate these ...
”Each retains their difference. However, they are able to act in concert around an agenda of equivalence. That is, they see ...
Virtually everywhere you go in the Parisian banlieue, you will find large signs drawing attention to “urban renovation” ...
In 2012, Trenton Oldfield threw himself into the River Thames to protest elitism in Britain. Oldfield intentionally timed his ...
Some urban treasures are hidden in plain sight. The documentary film “On the Map” shows how MIT professor Annette Kim and ...
My first encounter with Tubism was at a house party with a large poster of the London Underground hanging in the living ...
I imagine that most people, when confronted with the end of a two-year sojourn in the City of Lights, would make plans to visit ...
Heliópolis is known as one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in São Paulo, with 120,000 people living in an area of ...
The infamous Panopticon, conceived by Jeremy Bentham and thoroughly analyzed by Michel Foucault, is emblematic of ...
My home town, Moscow, has earned a reputation for abandoned industrial zones, flashy business districts and traffic jams. Visitors ...
William Hunter is an architect, urban designer and teaching fellow at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) ...
In cities around the world, public space is an essential platform for voicing calls for change. Whether Madrid’s Puerta del Sol ...
When thinking of conflicts over natural resources, we tend to think of rural resources: oil in South Sudan, deforestation in Bolivia ...
The occupation of Gezi may be over for the moment, but the ongoing impact of what has transpired and continues to transpire ...