If the downtown of tomorrow looks like most of the redevelopment projects being planned for it today, it will end up a monumental bore. But downtown could be made lively and exciting—and it's not hard to find out how.
Streets are made for talking: so that's what we did - Bridges For Communities
We’ve been trying something new at Bridges. Popping up on high streets and town centres in Bristol to talk to people about community life and the issues that are impacting […]
Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle
The jobs gap is also a jobs map: Places that succeed have a critical mass of creativity.
Rethinking the Smart City: Democratizing Urban Technology - RLS-NYC
Following the celebration of the “creative city” (as described by Richard Florida), the “smart city” has become the new flavor of the month—and a brand. It makes clever use of resources, and it attracts money, corporate power, and private industries. Offering us cheap, effective solutions to social and political problems, the smart city is functional, […]
The 'Digital Town Square' Problem
Privately owned public spaces like Twitter are often viewed as “public town squares.” But it's unclear exactly how private companies' influence on the so-called public spaces they control affects actual civic outcomes.
A City in Common: A Framework to Orchestrate Large-scale Citizen Engagement around Urban Issues
As part of the Digital Library's transition to Open Access, new features for researchers are available in the Premium Edition. Click here to learn more.
The Future Worth Building Is Human
AI built for autonomy crowds people out, making us passive observers of what’s coming. We’re building toward a different future.
A City for Children — Oakland Public Library
A City for Children — Gutman, Marta, — American cities are constantly being built and rebuilt, resulting in ever-changing skylines and neighborhoods. While the dynamic urban landscapes of New York, Boston, and Chicago have been widely studied, there is much to be gleaned from West Coast cities, especially in California, where the migration boom at the end of the nineteenth century permanently changed the urban fabric of these newly diverse, plural metropolises. In A City for Children Marta Gutman focuses on the use and reuse of everyday buildings in Oakland, California, to make the city a better place for children. She introduces us to the women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. Often without the financial means to build from scratch, women did not tend to conceive of urban land as a blank slate to be wiped clean for development. Gutman shows how, over and over, women instead turned private houses and even a saloon in Oakland into orphanages, kindergartens, settlement houses, and day care centers, and in the process built the charitable landscape--a network of places that was critical for the betterment of children, families, and public life. The industrial landscape of Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequality and racial prejudice, is not a neutral backdrop in Gutman's story but an active player. Spanning one hundred years of history, A City for Children provides a compelling model for building urban institutions, and it demonstrates that children, women, charity, and reform, along with incremental construction, renovations, alterations, additions, and repurposed structures, are central to the understanding of modern cities.
Charlotte de Witte | Tomorrowland 2022 - WE3 Mainstage
Welcome to Gas City
What is Gas City, you ask? It is Gas Town, but torn apart and rewritten from the ground up as an SDK for building your own dark factories…
Welcome to Gas City
What is Gas City, you ask? It is Gas Town, but torn apart and rewritten from the ground up as an SDK for building your own dark factories…
Computational Public Space
The 15-minute city isn’t a conspiracy: it’s already here
Conspiracy theorists have the plot wrong but the symptom right: economic hardship is already limiting how far people can go
Urban America Reconsidered by David L. Imbroscio | Paperback | Cornell University Press
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina laid bare the tragedy of American cities. What the storm revealed about the social conditions in New Orleans shocked many Americans. Even more shocking is how widespread these conditions are throughout much of urban...
Thrilled to share that our project @roundabout.town (give them a follow!) will be powering new, healthy digital public spaces in Chicago! This is part of chicago.com, a partnership with Chicago Public Media, which is the @chicago.suntimes.com and @wbez.org. niemanlab.org/2026/08/can-public-media-buil…
Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try
www.niemanlab.org