Police drag away a tent from a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Irvine on May 15, 2024.
Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Framing dissent and poverty as a menace to public order can threaten fundamental rights, particularly when it’s used to justify the deployment of predictive technology.
New Zealand tends to focus on big infrastructural projects such as tunnels or light rail to change cities. But there are cheaper ways to add public spaces to urban design.
Interstate 5 near downtown San Diego, US.
Abraham Barrera|Unsplash
From lit-up orbs to bland office blocks, cities are full of buildings that people do or do not like. What really shapes how they live – for better or for worse – is urban planning.
People walk under a light projection at a shopping mall in Beijing.
(Photo by Jade Gao / AFPJade Gao/AFP via Getty Images)
China has a lot of vacant retail space, including many underused shopping malls. An urban policy scholar describes how the Chinese are rethinking what the mall is for.
Women are most likely to feel unsafe in their cities or towns, but planning authorities have rarely listened to them. Here’s what we can do to change that.
Diasporic placemaking is often a story of connections and hidden stories. It is also a complicated story about who owns public spaces and who decides who gets to use it.
Ramadan is a time for prayer, charity and kindness to others. Having it celebrated in such a public way is empowering for Muslim communities across the country and beyond.
A systematic review of thousands of studies around the world has found many aspects of our cities affect loneliness. But people’s relationship with their environment is complex and highly individual.
The Hoddle Grid that dictates the flow of vehicles and people in central Melbourne has had its day. It can be remade to reduce the dominance of cars and create a liveable city for the 21st century.
Yi-Fu Tuan at work in his office at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1998.
(Jeff Miller)
Yi-Fu Tuan, who died in August 2022, was considered the father of humanistic geography. His scholarship on our sense of space and place can tell us a great deal about the challenges we face today.
Members of the Forward Marching Band perform at a HONK! Festival in Somerville, Massachusetts, on Oct. 7, 2017.
Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Organizers across the US are finding innovative grassroots strategies for helping people thrive. Many of these ventures emphasize working together as part of communities and collective systems.
When the pandemic hit, green space was there for us at a time when others weren’t or couldn’t be. Urban greening might be the solution to the ‘lonelygenic environment’ that our cities have created.
We only feel free to use spaces that we can identify with.
Vagengeim | Shutterstock
Smart street furniture can do a lot of things at once. Some of these functions offer the public clear benefits, but the data collection and surveillance capabilities raise a number of concerns.
It’s back: Rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles on June 15, 2021.
Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
The pandemic offered a tantalizing look at city life with fewer cars in the picture. But with traffic rebounding, there’s limited time to lock in policies that make streets more people-friendly.
Roadsides have long been reserved for parking cars, but the pandemic led to many experiments with other ways of using scarce and valuable public space. We can put it to better and more flexible uses.
NSW is developing a comprehensive new planning policy with the goal of creating healthy places. A new study finds those people who work as placemakers want these goals embedded in laws and budgets.
Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C.
Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
COVID-19 has underscored the value of parks and public spaces. A new survey shows that US mayors have gotten the message, but post-pandemic plans for public spaces remain largely undefined.