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An aerial view of an interstate.

The Interstates: Planned Violence And The Need For Truth And Reconciliation

It is time to reckon with America’s racist legacy of Interstate Highway planning and engineering.
A highway sign on Route 1 points the way to Soul City.

The Lost Plan for a Black Utopian Town

Soul City in North Carolina was designed to build Black wealth and address racial injustice. Then its opponents lined up.
Repairs being made at the site of a water main break
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What Early American Infrastructure Politics Can Teach the Biden Administration

Infrastructure plans are always political. The key is being inclusive and focusing on the public good.
Three panels of a graphic depicting Soul city. Images include two people walking in a street, people playing golf, and the inside of a mall

The Plan to Build a Capital for Black Capitalism

In 1969, an activist set out to build an African-American metropolis from scratch. What would have happened if Soul City had succeeded?
A large sports stadium surrounded by the city

Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium

As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
Drawings of houses

How Trees Made Us Human

More than iron, stone, or oil, wood explains human history.
A house and an american flag

A Disaster 100 Years in the Making

Covid-19 and climate change are drastically intensifying insecurity in New Orleans.
A parking lot taking up an entire city block in Downtown Denver, Colorado.

From Chaos to Order: A Brief Cultural History of the Parking Lot

How urban planners and suburban shoppers responded when “the storage of dead vehicles on roadways” became a nuisance to street users.
A race wall

A Nation of Walls

An artist-activist catalogues the physical remnants of 'segregation walls,' unassuming bits of racist infrastructure that hide in plain sight in neighborhoods.
Overhead image of suburban houses from Levittown, Pennsylvania

The Origins of Sprawl

On William Gibson, Sonic Youth, and the genesis of the American suburb.

Tearing Down Black America

Policing is not the only kind of state violence. City governments have demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.
A street in the 1940s with cars parked in front of a food market and a barber shop.

Planned Destruction

A brief history on land ownership, valuation and development in the City of Richmond and the maps used to destroy black communities.

The Depression-Era Book That Wanted to Cancel the Rent

“Modern Housing,” by Catherine Bauer, argued—as many activists do today—that a decent home should be seen as a public utility and a basic right.

Walt Disney's Empty Promise

For so many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself.

How Is a Disaster Made?

Studying Hurricane Katrina as a discrete event is studying a fiction.

Stymieing the People

A Review of "Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square."

Bowling For Suburbia

By adopting middle-class aesthetics, the bar-basement bowling alley became the "poor man's country club."

COVID-19 and the Color Line

Due to racist policies, Black Americans are dying of COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites, and nowhere more so than in St. Louis.

Street Privilege: New Histories of Parking and Urban Mobility

How the history of parking in America highlights its societal inequalities.

Your Favorite Park Is Probably Built on Dead Bodies

New York City is considering burying victims of Covid-19 in public parks, many of which were already built on top of burial grounds.

Reversing a River: How Chicago Flushed its Human Waste Downstream

In 1906, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Chicago to move forward with a spectacularly disgusting feat of modern engineering.

Here Come the Cul-de-Sacs

Satellite images dating back to 1975 allow researchers to map how millions of cul-de-sacs and dead-ends have proliferated in street networks worldwide.

When Memphis Fell for a Pyramid Scheme

The Great American Pyramid was supposed to give the Tennessee city an architectural landmark for the ages. Instead, it got a very large sporting goods store.

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains.

Racist Housing Practices From The 1930s Linked To Hotter Neighborhoods Today

A study of more than 100 cities shows neighborhoods subjected to discriminatory housing policies nearly a century ago are hotter today than other areas.

How New York City Found Clean Water

For nearly 200 years after the founding of New York, the city struggled to establish a clean source of fresh water.

The Midcentury Battle to Save America’s Cities from Crisis

Lizabeth Cohen on the poverty and prosperity of the American city.

The History of Cities Is About How We Get to Work

From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the technologies that allow people to commute in about 30 minutes have defined the shape of cities.

Unearthing the Complex Histories of Madison Parks

Creating the city's bucolic, natural landscapes required a good deal of displacement, technological intervention, and erasure.
Modern building on a grassy lawn

This Small Indiana Town is a Hotbed of Utopianism

New Harmony has attracted eccentric spiritual groups, social reformers, intellectuals, and artists.

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