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The Government of London

The capital of capital, or a melting-pot city of workers, historically governed from the left? Owen Hatherley unearths inspiration for present-day struggles from London’s municipal-socialist past.

The Twin Faces of Athens

Myths and realities of Greek statehood writ large in its distended capital. From post-Ottoman neo-Hellenism to Cold War urbanization and the culture-sapping rule of the Troika, the delimitation of a new-fangled city of Pericles from the catch-all conurbation for Balkan migrations.

Company Town?

An archaeology of the radical dreams buried under Seattle’s glass towers, the expanding footprints of Amazon and Microsoft. Reverberations of the October Revolution on the far shore of the North Pacific, as Wobblies, loggers and shipyard workers rally to the general strike of 1919.

Remaking Ramallah

From Arafat’s pharaonic tomb and Dubai-style luxury apartments to sweltering refugee camps and landless, beleaguered villages: greater Ramallah as synecdoche for post-Oslo Palestine—and triumph for Israel’s fragmentation strategy.

The Year 1960

Prelude to the explosive struggles of the sixties in California, as the social actors, left and right, gather in the wings. Black student militants, white aerospace workers, City developers, RAND Corps dropouts, Latino activists—and Lena Horne, taking direct action against racism in Beverley Hills.

Africa's Global City?

Global-city status is the new grail of competitive modernity. Can the hipsterfication model spearheaded in Brooklyn’s dumbo district be replicated in the harsher conditions of downtown Johannesburg—and if so, at what price?

The Not So Eternal City

Angry and witty in equal measure, a blistering native account of Rome’s fate at the hands of avaricious developers, insensate priests, neo-liberal ex-communists and stupefied tourists: corruption, dilapidation, fossilization, Disneyfication and—now, above all—cementification of Europe’s oldest capital.

Mapping London’s Emotions

What light can be shed by quantitative analysis and digital text-mining on fictional cartographies of happiness and fear? Semantics of space and class in the nineteenth-century novel, polarized between normative landmarks of West End wealth and power, and the East End’s nameless warrens, a literary geography of the unknown.

Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power

The DRC’s capital is set to become Africa’s largest city, but struggles to assert its authority over a profoundly fractured state as it expands in chaotic fashion. Dilapidated infrastructure and a disintegrating formal economy have not extinguished Kinshasa’s extraordinary cultural vitality, or its role as a centre of political opposition.

Capital of Pariahs

Ian Birchall on Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis. Interwar Paris as incubator of anti-colonial revolt.

UNESCOcide

From Venice to Edinburgh, Porto to Rhodes, San Gimignano to Luang Prabang—the World Heritage label as vital tool for the global tourist industry, but death sentence for the hurly-burly of real urban life.

New Jerusalem

Dysfunctions and divisions of Israel’s largest city. Yonatan Mendel diagnoses the incoherent urbanism produced by its history of occupation and segregation, and by the vast, settlement-driven distension of its boundaries after 1967.

The Undercities of Karachi

Pakistan’s turbulent metropolis as battleground for gangsters and politicians, and the iniquitous rural order that propels impoverished haris to its slums.

The Sinking Of Marseille

The recent fate of France’s second city—post-war decline followed by modish resurgence—seen in the longue durée by its radical historian. A social and political archaeology of Marseille, amid the steady dismantling of its urban worlds.

Crowd Politics, Or, ‘Here Comes Everybuddy’

From Joyce to Lefebvre, sign-posts to a morphology of the demonstration in the age of Twitter and Facebook. Is the city still the indispensable arena of any collective uprising, and what would it mean to claim a ‘right’ to it?

Tehran: Paradox City

Walled citadel of the Shahs, hub of petro-modernity, post-Islamist metropolis: Asef Bayat on the history of struggles to define Iran’s capital, and the successive contests between elite projects and popular resistance that have shaped its spatial pattern.

Faces of Paris

The changing face of Paris, seen through the eyes of its leading radical publisher. Geographies of growth and resistance, from medieval walled city to alienated banlieue, via German occupation and végétalisation.

Who Will Build the Ark?

Copenhagen’s charades dispel any illusion that world rulers intend to deal with the environmental damage industrialization has caused. Mike Davis argues that green urbanism’s twining of social equality and ecological sustainability could offer an alternative starting-point.

The Right to the City

Examining the link between urbanization and capitalism, David Harvey suggests we view Haussmann’s reshaping of Paris and today’s explosive growth of cities as responses to systemic crises of accumulation—and issues a call to democratize the power to shape the urban experience.

The Greening of Istanbul

Its population swollen by six million new arrivals in thirty years, Istanbul has sprawled outwards from the Bosphorus with dramatic speed. Cihan Tugal analyses the contradictions of an urban Islamism, wedded both to vote-winning populism and to financial markets.

Casino Colony

The transformation of the former Portuguese enclave of Macau into East Asia’s gambling capital by an alliance of local elites and Las Vegas entrepreneurs, under the approving gaze of Beijing. A frenzy of construction, rising inequalities and rampant corruption as outcomes of a neon-lit decolonization.

A Symptom Called Managua

Nicaragua’s capital as microcosm for the country’s transformation since the 1970s: shattered by earthquake and the depredations of the Somoza dictatorship, briefly lifted by Sandinista urban reconstruction, remade in the 1990s by narco-traffickers and the returning Miami emigration.

Transcaucasian Triptych

The dramatic trajectories of Tbilisi, Baku and Yerevan, and differing roles in the present. Göran Therborn tracks the fortunes of Georgia’s capital, seat of monarchs and Mensheviks, through alterations in its physical fabric, setting these alongside the metamorphoses of its Caucasian counterparts.

Remaking Medellín

Transformed from murder capital to corporate boom town, Medellín has been hailed as a rare urban success story for neo-conservatism in South America. The singular progression of Escobar and Uribe’s hometown—cattle-trading post, industrial centre, drug-trafficking hub, neoliberal Latin Mecca.

Fear and Money in Dubai

On the rim of the war zone, a new Mecca of conspicuous consumption and economic crime, under the iron rule of Sheikh al-Maktoum. Skyscrapers half a mile high, artificial archipelagoes, fantasy theme parks—and the indentured Asian labour force that sustains them.

Learning from Lagos

Africa’s largest city not as chaotic laboratory of urban form, but end result of a specific historical trajectory. Beyond Koolhaas’s diagrammatic insights, the real context of spiralling debts, kleptocrat elite, infra-structural collapse and burgeoning informal sector as factors in Lagos’s expansion.