If you are exactly like me, you live in a dense urban environment and assume that dense urban environments are the way of the future, and suburbs are dark hellpits full of enormous PetSmart outlets and molly-soaked teens. But perhaps this is incorrect?
Right now, 94% of U.S. commercial districts are composed of bank branches. (The other 6% are takeout salad lunch places.) The good news is that we may have already witnessed the peak of the “bazillions of banks, everywhere you look” era.
New Census figures show that U.S. urban growth is slowing, “as a bulge of late-20s Americans reaches prime homebuying age and high urban real-estate costs are making suburbs and exurbs more attractive.” Good!!
A hellish and desolate landscape of “freeways”—an ironic name, for they only serve to imprison you in an idling, air-conditioned bubble as life slowly passes you by.
Zoning laws, governing how we use our land, are often thought of as mundane drudgery, or as opportunities for civic-minded people to help “Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful.” In fact, they can also be a powerful driver of inequality.
One of the most common laments of anyone who dwelled in a once-cool city is that our nation's urban spaces have become infested with identical chain stores. So what if we just... banned them?
Traditionally, young people come to the big city with a dream; then, when that dream inevitably fails to materialize, many of them move away to some smaller, more forgiving town and cry silently, years later, at what might have been. Now, the fucking tables have turned.
The people have spoken, and, damn, they sound terrible.
The quarterfinals of Gawker's America's Ugliest Accent tournament continue today, right here. Who's worse: Scranton or Tallahassee? Which is uglier, New York or Providence? Vote here!
The second round of Gawker's America's Ugliest Accent tournament kicks off right now. Who's worse: Boston or Chicago? Which is uglier, Philadelphia or Pittsburgh? Vote here!
Where do you have to be born to say that you're from a given city and not be lying? Back in August, prompted by a New Republic article called "Don't Say You're From the City If You're Really From the 'Burbs," we asked you—Gawker readers—to tell us the real borders of some of America's largest cities. Here are your…
Welcome to another edition of America's Ugliest Accent, where we as a country gather together to determine which of us in this great nation of disgusting vocal squalor has the least listenable accent. Every day this week, Round One of the Tournament, we'll be presenting two face-offs between cities. You, humble…
A decade from now, you will look back on the crowded, expensive, unforgiving urban landscape of New York City today and wish that life was still so cheap and spacious.
"You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." —Jake Barnes, in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, 1926
Every year since 1987, The University of Chicago has hosted a campuswide scavenger hunt called Scav that will validate to your speculation that smart college kids are always up to some awesomely weird insider shit. The event is on its last day and the clues this year are typically esoteric.
A series of MIT Media Lab maps are percolating through the internet, showing the locations and "walksheds" of independent coffee shops in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Cambridge. These shops play an important role in urban life, as the researchers explain in their project description:
The Economist Intelligence Unit reports yearly on where you should live if you have cash bleeding from your eyeballs, and this year they named that place Singapore. Since no one can live in Berlin anymore, and Singapore's probably no longer an option, where else is there?
What is your city's Williamsburg? What's its hippest—or formerly hippest—or sometimes just youngest—neighborhood, the one with the art galleries and the boutiques and the lines for brunch? (And what, for that matter, is its Bushwick, or "Next Williamsburg"?) If you don't know off the top of your head, don't worry. We…
Rising seas, high transportation costs, its enough to make a man move to the middle of the sea.... And be surrounded by thousands of other people in a beautiful floating city.
Williamsburg and Bushwick, two Brooklyn neighborhoods, have become, for various reasons both accurate and not, a global icon of "hipness." But it's obviously not the only "hip" neighborhood in the world. What's your city's Williamsburg? And what's its Bushwick?
