history

Reviews

Dakar, Portrait of a Capital City

Armelle Choplin - 12 September 2025

Dakar, métamorphoses d’une capitale, by architects Carole Diop and Xavier Ricou, takes readers on a journey through...

From the Field

The Paris of Yesteryear: A Photographic Inventory

Pauline Rossi & translated by Oliver Waine - 14 May 2024

The Commission du Vieux Paris has kept meticulous records of urban transformations, with its own perception of what...

Reviews

Finding the People’s City

Benjamin Holtzman - 26 March 2024

In A People’s Guide to New York City, Carolina Bank Muñoz, Penny Lewis and Emily Tumpson Molina provide an engaging...

Essays

Feminist Non-Mixity: For Women or Against Men?

Alban Jacquemart & translated by Oliver Waine - 10 October 2023

For women, the choice to gather together serves a variety of objectives within feminist mobilizations. Looking back...

Reviews

The Black Middle Class, or the Harsh Reality of the American Dream

Sylvie Tissot & translated by Oliver Waine - 24 January 2023

The suburbs of the United States, once the epicenter of racial segregation, are now home to more African Americans...

Reviews

Underground Berlin: Where Infrastructure Meets Politics

Clarence Hatton-Proulx & translated by Oliver Waine - 2 December 2022

Water, electricity, gas: in Remaking Berlin, Timothy Moss presents a history of Berlin’s infrastructure networks from...

From the Field

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914

Vanessa Caru & translated by Oliver Waine - 18 November 2022

What consequences can an epidemic have on a city? Vanessa Caru describes the ways in which a plague epidemic in...

Essays

The Emergence of Ecological Thinking in the City

Charles-François Mathis & translated by Oliver Waine - 27 September 2022

What place does ecological thinking have in the field of urban planning? In describing the use of vegetation in...

Essays

We Have Been Here Before: Crisis, Response, and the Stasis of Urban Policy

Robert W. Lake - 29 June 2021

The disruptions produced by the global pandemic have spawned predictions of sweeping change that are unlikely to...

Interviews

What Has Happened in Berlin Since 1989?

Thibaut de Ruyter & Olivier Gaudin & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 June 2020

Since the fall of the Wall in November 1989, Berlin has metamorphosed into one of the world’s most popular urban...

Essays

Educating Tenants: A Historic Remit of Social Housing

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine - 17 April 2020

In France, the professions of social worker and concierge both emerged in the early 20th century, and both responded...

Reviews

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

Anaïs Albert & translated by Oliver Waine - 21 February 2020

The republication of an early-20th‑century realist novel set in the northern Paris suburb of Aubervilliers brings the...

Debates

The Limits of the Accepted Orthodoxy on Rent Control

Loïc Bonneval & François Robert & translated by Oliver Waine - 22 March 2019

In response to a recent critique of their work, Loïc Bonneval and François Robert defend their method and results. In...

Essays

As NYC (Again) Considers Comprehensive Planning, History Offers Insight

K. C. Alvey - 12 February 2019

Comprehensive planning can be a progressive governance tool, helping leaders keep broad principles like equity and...

Reviews

Photographing the Slums of 1900s Berlin

Danièle Voldman & translated by Oliver Waine - 14 September 2018

At the turn of the 20th century, the dramatically poor conditions of urban working-class housing was a cause of major...

Reviews

Miscounting Americans Correctly: Post-Truth as a Guide to Race and the US Census

Gregory Smithsimon - 12 June 2018

Paul Schor’s book Counting Americans demonstrates that, in the hands of the US Census Bureau, the concept of race has...

Essays

Looking Forward to 2020 While Looking Back: A Brief History of the US Census

Frank Donnelly - 27 February 2018

As preparations for the 2020 census are under way in the United States, Frank Donnelly looks back at how the census...

Essays

Looking Backward into the Future of New York

Ted Steinberg - 12 January 2015

Can the lesson of Hurricane Sandy dampen the enthusiasm of New York City’s growth machine? Ted Steinberg, author of...

Reviews

Entry into the Anthropocene

André Micoud & translated by Oliver Waine - 20 November 2014

Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, backed up by an impressive amount of data, trace the history of our...

Reviews

History of Modern Architecture Revisited

Karla Britton - 3 October 2012

The latest work by Jean-Louis Cohen is an original contribution to the history of modern architecture. His fresh...

Dakar, Portrait of a Capital City

The Paris of Yesteryear: A Photographic Inventory

Finding the People’s City

Feminist Non-Mixity: For Women or Against Men?

The Black Middle Class, or the Harsh Reality of the American Dream

Underground Berlin: Where Infrastructure Meets Politics

Plague and Urban Policy in Bombay, 1896–1914

The Emergence of Ecological Thinking in the City

We Have Been Here Before: Crisis, Response, and the Stasis of Urban Policy

What Has Happened in Berlin Since 1989?

Educating Tenants: A Historic Remit of Social Housing

Aubervilliers: Portrait of a Working-Class Suburb

The Limits of the Accepted Orthodoxy on Rent Control

As NYC (Again) Considers Comprehensive Planning, History Offers Insight

Photographing the Slums of 1900s Berlin

Miscounting Americans Correctly: Post-Truth as a Guide to Race and the US Census

Looking Forward to 2020 While Looking Back: A Brief History of the US Census

Looking Backward into the Future of New York

Entry into the Anthropocene

History of Modern Architecture Revisited

Series

Featured

Covid-19 Transformed New York’s Destination Food Markets

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Filming Ethnic Diversity in New York

Looking Inward, Across the Border

The Political Aesthetics of Drag

Disarm the Police

Other resources online

“Our hallway’s big enough to play football in!” The council housing...

Saudi Arabia: How is Mobility Being Transformed in the Oil Kingdom?

Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age (Paul Mees)

Geopolitics and Electric Vehicles: The Rise of Climate Protectionism

One Way to Fight Rising Food Prices: Public Grocery Stores

The Quiet Power of Car-Free Neighborhoods

Partners