Worldcrunch
While billionaire Jeff Bezos turns Venice into a vanity set, the Prado museum in Madrid is currently featuring a major exposition of legendary Venetian painter Paolo Veronese. What was true in the Renaissance is almost true today: Art, power and decadence intertwine in the city that learned to live from its own sinking.
Spain’s coastline is shrinking, caught in a relentless battle between rising seas, legal disputes and private interests. Thousands of homes now stand precariously close to the waves, some awaiting demolition, others clinging to legal loopholes. As nature advances, the struggle for land — and survival — intensifies.
As digital facades and minimalist design dominate the urban landscape, architect Florent Auclair argues for the revival of ornamentation as a cultural language that connects buildings to their time, their place, and the people who live among them.
Architecture is a form of soft power, a symbolic language through which Gulf states tell stories about themselves to the world and to their own citizens — and ultimately, to exercise control.
Nothing in cities and spaces is random. Bathroom lines, street names, and the maps we use every day also tell a story of inequality. Feminist geography seeks to make visible what is often overlooked and proposes a more equitable way of inhabiting space.
Among the many cuts by the Milei government was a program that paid people to clear trash from their own neighborhoods. Now, both garbage and health fears are piling up.
In 1998, urban historian Mike Davis published Ecology of Fear, exploring the consequences of Los Angeles urban development on the increase of natural disasters. Almost three decades later, his book is still relevant.
How the housing shortage was tackled in the Weimar Republic – and what we can learn from it today.
For 15 years, Nicolas Buissart has been guiding curious visitors through the industrial ruins of Charleroi, the largest municipality in Wallonia, Belgium. With his storytelling skills, he has transformed the supposed ugliness of this urban landscape into a tourist attraction.
Tech’s biggest fortunes are funding a project to build a new city of 400,000 people just an hour outside of San Francisco. But the residents of the region’s most rural county are resisting.
A government plan to build a series of highways that pass through centuries-old cemeteries in Cairo has sparked public backlash in recent years, as the Egyptian capital must measure itself against both places like Dubai and Manhattan..
June 3 – June 9, 2024
An anthropologist who has focused on urban geography and violence, Omnia Khalil reflects on how her daily movement was shaped by architectural design in Egypt, a country where sexual harassment is a widespread and serious problem.
When a violent earthquake rocked the High Atlas in 2023, traditional earthen buildings resisted the seismic shocks better than other more modern ones. Yet despite its resilience and sustainability, this valuable cultural heritage is the victim of misperceptions and risks abandonment.
Mama Shelter, pioneer of the lifestyle wave in Europe’s hotel industry, is celebrating its 15th anniversary. For Serge Trigano, the former Club Med President who co-founded it after years of hard work, the chain’s success is a form of revenge.
Born in Madrid but working around the world, art collective Boa Mistura explores creativity as a powerful force to inspire dialogue and transform urban environments into canvases of hope.
Higher, faster, more expensive – in German cities, renting out office space was a booming business. Then came remote working and higher interest rates.
Wild moose have been spotted on Polish beaches and even near cities. They’re a rare example of successful conservation efforts, but they’re increasingly coming into contact with people.
Two years ago, forests planted according to a method invented by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, began to spread across in urban spaces in the Portuguese capital. It’s a way to bring real enclaves of nature to urban realities in record time.
Barcelona architect Ton Salvadó explains how a new way or organizing urban areas might lead to greener, more peaceful cities.
The war rages on, but some in Ukraine are already looking to how society can be rebuilt. Two Ukrainian architects share their vision for what a future Ukrainian urbanism — and society — might look like.
This dearth of urban planning in the Egyptian capital dates back half a century. But it reached a new peak starting in 2019, when one of its last livable districts saw its old ways demolished.
From Moroccan migrants to British pensioners, Spain has plenty of foreign-born residents. Each group differs, however, in terms of where and how they concentrate upon arrival.
Planning experts from Denmark and the U.S. tasked with redesigning a Buenos Aires shantytown were surprised by some of its built-in people-friendly dynamics, which can be applied elsewhere — even in upscale projects
Ground has been broken on the signature domestic project of the Chinese leader’s next term. It is meant to be a massive model city of innovation, forever linked to Xi’s Chinese Dream.
César Pelli has designed some of the world’s best known skyscrapers. But he writes that the wonder of a beautiful city is collaboration over generations of many talented architects who care about the way people live.
The architectural icon begun by Antoni Gaudi in the late 19th century is still incomplete. Now city hall wants to end a century-old legal exception, as debate continues about protecting the original architectural vision.
HAVANA — Cuba“s belated embrace of the Internet has people packing into places like the Plaza de la Revolución and the colonial fort Castillito, two of the island’s just 114 public WiFi hotspots. Overall, the number of Cubans who regularly access the Web is still relatively small. But things are changing, and quickly. The Internet […]
COLÓN ISLAND — As the world continues to bury itself in plastic bottles, a few pioneers are coming up with clever ways to put all that refuse to good use. One of those people is Canadian innovator Robert Bezeau, who decided after a visit to Panama to build an entire plastic-bottle village — presumably the […]
GRASSE — They call it “the Provençal permit,” a local custom of sorts that involves building first and asking questions later. The logic is that once a construction is in place, authorities will feel more or less obliged to approve it retroactively. It is surprising how often that actually happens. Recently, though, one land owner […]
The Indian city is among the worst in the world for air quality. Automobiles share much of the blame, with some 1,400 cars a day joining the estimated 8.5 million vehicles already circulating there. But there are other factors too.
To both improve cities and conquer markets, companies are turning to urban simulators with the interactive power and graphics of video games.
Hosting 30 million people in the world’s largest pilgrimage, Nashik is a temporary example of “extreme urbanism,” and researchers are studying what happens in the process.
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After building Beijing’s Olympic Park for the 2008 Games, a Chinese-American urban planner and Israeli architect continue to help develop green cities in a largely polluted China.
The most memorable graffiti and wall murals are often demolished by the force of urban real estate development projects.