Cities & Planning

Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we featured Los Angeles as our theme in May. With the conference still in mi…

Unlocking cities’ growing underutilised spatial assets for an emergent civic economy

We’re excited to share the latest updates on Permissioning the City (PtC). Our vision to transform how urban spaces are managed and shared…

The small town of Plympton, Massachusetts, took the bold step of making everyone pay for what they toss.

From the spring 2025 edition of Geist comes an amazing piece of writing  from essayist Soraya Roberts, who documents a trip on the The Canadian, Canada’s only mostly trans-national train. “This is …

A new book traces how the American prairie was nearly destroyed and why its return is so necessary for our future.

For a world covered in oceans, getting a drink of water on Planet Earth can be surprisingly tricky. Fresh water is hard to come by even on our water world, so much so that most sources are better m…

Before the large-scale use of fossil fuels, removable textile layers kept homes warm in winter and cool in summer.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to slow federal funding for building electric vehicle chargers across the country, the number of ports is

Norway’s crusade to eliminate gasoline powered cars was years in the making. Can that achievement be replicated?

For a short time, the U.S. government not only built houses, it constructed entire communities.

It is possible to coordinate the operation of large numbers of home air-conditioning units to balance supply and demand on the power grid.

Prehistoric humans didn’t create art and architecture out of nothing. They took inspiration from the nonhuman world

South County has half a million people and no full-service university of its own. But for years it’s been trying to lure one.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Keep It Rural, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Like what you see? Join the

This post is our way of collaborating on that strategy to you. To share where we’re headed, how we plan to get there, and why we believe this approach can unlock a new era of housing. We offer it in the spirit of transparency and gratitude for those of you who are already on board, and for those just beginning to tune in.

When calamity strikes, as it often has in the Appalachian community of Swannanoa, North Carolina, the “proud, fierce, and maybe a little crazy” working

Bioceramic Geodesic Domes

Antarctica hides a world that’s both fascinating and a little eerie: entire ecosystems untouched by humans and rivers that take the scenic route —against the

For decades, energy independence has been the elusive white whale of U.S. policy. We’ve tried offshore drilling, shale booms, solar panels, and wind farms the

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado and his wife Lélia Deluiz Wanick Salgado decided to show what a small group of passionate, dedicated people can do by turning deforestation on its head, and begin the process of reforestation.

Catherine King and Wayne Adams live on a sustainable, floating compound. “Freedom Cove” is a labor of love, hand-built using recycled and salvaged materials.

Leo Hummel put his "SeaWeaver" to the test in the waters of Thailand before passing

Designed as a series of interlinked building clusters inspired by tectonic boulder faces in the region, this school by GASS Architecture Studios hails local, sustainable construction.

# Cities in Washington will have the legal authority to create shared streets, which feature much lower speed limits and put pedestrians first, under Senate Bill 5595. Governor Bob Ferguson signed the bill into law Saturday. It will go into effect on July 27.

Using global land use and carbon storage data from the past 175 years, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Cognizant AI Labs have trained an artificial intelligence system to develop ...

Editor’s note: This is the second post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here. By AN In cities across the world, rivers once central to …

In fact, it would require about 31 hectares of corn ethanol to produce the same amount of energy generated by one ha of land covered in solar panels.