Section
Urbanism
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The Once and Future Bathhouse
Utilitarian public baths and pools once filled the world’s cities, but now new expensive spas are taking their place. Has even bathing become a luxury?
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Counterhistories of the Sport Stadium
As large spaces where different sectors of the city converge, stadiums are sites of social and political struggle.
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Whose Brooklyn?
In 1939, the editors of Fortune planned a special issue of the magazine on New York City. They tasked James Agee—who had recently filed another Fortune assignment, which would culminate in the …
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Why Do Police Drive Cars?
Why did American police end up in cars? And how did policing the nation’s roads become so racially unjust? In Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom, legal historian Sarah Seo uses motor vehicle search and …
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Cities Run by Real Estate
After decades confined to the desk drawer of important but boring things, the minutiae of urban planning policy are now attracting some popular attention. Transit-oriented development might come up at a dinner party. Important changes to one city’s codes—say, zoning reform in Minneapolis—can make national headlines. Community benefits agreements, property tax overhauls, and the problematic…
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Pornotopia
In 1962, Hugh Hefner was photographed posing next to the scale model of a modern building, echoing the portraits of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier taken a few years earlier. Indifferent to the …
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A Just Future for Cycling?
I occupy three precarious categories: South Florida resident, humanities professor, and cyclist. The last, however, is a condition afforded to me because of …
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On the Brink of Failure
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Compared to the People’s Front of Judea’s comical political ignorance in Monty Python’s satire The Life of Brian, post-Enlightenment European countries were deeply familiar and…
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Back to the Women’s Land
How do women gain power in a society economically and politically dominated by men? This question vexed mid-20th-century second-wave feminists. At issue was whether women should occupy male spaces or create their own female spaces. For example, was power acquired by demanding entry to traditionally masculine domains like Ivy League colleges, private clubs, and corporate…
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Algiers: Capital of Revolution
In 2018, it is difficult to imagine what it felt like to live through a genuinely revolutionary moment, one that connected hopes for the Third World with dreams …
