Tales of the City

More than half of the world’s population is now urban, a famous factoid. City boosters tend to play fast and loose with this statistic, as if it represents the triumph of the city, and more than half of the world’s population now lives in a combination of Manhattan...

Playground Cities

On a recent visit to Charleston, a local complained to me that the city was in danger of becoming New Orleans, that is, a playground city. The tiny historic peninsula between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, whose resident population below the Crosstown Expressway is...

Singapore West

Most cities have a vertical business district surrounded by lower residential neighborhoods. Not Vancouver, British Columbia, which has relatively few office buildings but scores of densely packed, extremely slim high-rise apartments. It creates the appearance of an...

In Ghent

We’re in Ghent for a 10-day holiday. The old part of the city is crowded with bicycles, cars, trams and pedestrians. There don’t seem to be many rules. The trams have precedence, otherwise there is an uneasy but generally polite truce between everyone else. This is...

Montreal Madness

The quaintly-named Quartier des Spectacles is a 250-acre entertainment district in downtown Montreal, currently one of the largest urban redevelopment project in a North American City. Unlike 1960s urban renewal, the apparent centerpiece is not low-income housing or...

Suburbia

If you Google “suburbia” you will get, in this order, a film and a play by Eric Bogosian, a song by Pet Shop Boys, and another film, this one a 1983 Roger Corman production about suburban runaway teens. Further down are two dictionary definitions: “suburbanites...