Atlas Urbium

Editorial Team

Oslo, Norway

About

The Atlas Urbium editorial collective examines urban planning, infrastructure, and city transformation through data-driven journalism and lyrical narrative. We believe cities can be understood, improved, and reimagined.

Expertise

Urban PlanningInfrastructureCity PolicyData Visualization

Articles by Atlas Urbium (17)

essayJan 10, 2026

The Father of Urban Planning: How Ildefons Cerdà Invented the Science of Cities and Why Barcelona Still Proves His Theories

Walk through Barcelona's Eixample and you're moving through the world's first scientifically planned urban expansion. Every chamfered corner, every 113.3-meter block, every diagonal avenue was calculated to solve the particular problems of 19th-century urban life. What Ildefons Cerdà couldn't predict was how prescient his solutions would prove for 21st-century cities.

essayJan 3, 2026

Hydrogen Airplanes for 500–5000 km: A Long Essay About Fuel, Cities, and the Strange Future of Airports

I once watched a baggage cart nudge a cone with the lazy confidence of something that has never read a safety manual. The cone fell over with a small, dignified surrender. Nobody panicked. At airports, tiny collisions happen constantly—and the whole place keeps moving as if movement itself were the religion.

essayDec 31, 2025

Learning Forward from Art Nouveau, Part II: A Design Playbook for the Next-Century City

Art Nouveau taught us that good geometry and human-scale engineering are productivity tools for happiness. This sequel assembles a pragmatic code: what to keep, what to improve, and where the biggest opportunities lie for climate, comfort, mobility, and cost. When the city is run like good software—clear interfaces, reliable defaults, honest metrics—everyone debugs less and enjoys more.

essayDec 24, 2025

The Art Nouveau Apartment: A User's Manual for High-Quality Urban Life

Art Nouveau—call it Jugendstil, Secession, Modernisme, Liberty—was never just ornament. It was a coordinated urban technology for living well in dense neighborhoods: daylight engineered through bay windows, structural walls thick enough to buffer heat and noise, floor plans that cross-ventilate, stoops calibrated for convivial streets.

essayDec 23, 2025

The Carbon-Literate Apartment: A Practical Field Guide to Shrinking Urban Footprints

Buildings account for 30% of global energy use and a quarter of emissions. This field guide shows apartment dwellers how to shrink those loops—with measurement frameworks, city-specific tactics, and a 12-week carbon sprint that turns vibes into verified reductions.

essayDec 16, 2025

Cities, Water, and the New Heat: How Climate Change Rewrites Urban Thirst

The modern city is a water trickster that drinks from mountains, trades with the sea, and disguises vulnerability behind steel valves. Climate change will strip away that disguise—not with a single catastrophe, but with alternating extremes that test every reservoir, pipe, and aquifer.

essayDec 9, 2025

Cities That Outgrew Their Rivers: How Megacities Manufacture Water

Modern megacities are deliberate fictions piled higher than local hydrology can serve. This is the anatomy of "complex water"—where population outran the watershed—and what cities are actually doing to close the gap.

essayNov 28, 2025

The Tapestry of Czech Towns: History, Identity, and Contemporary Challenges

Each Czech town is a palimpsest, a manuscript of urban history overwritten repeatedly by culture, power, and practicality. Unlike cities scarred by wars or reshaped by rapid modernization, Czech towns have evolved carefully, retaining a sense of continuity.

essayOct 28, 2025

Argentina on Two Clocks: Javier Milei's Shock, the Slow Grind of Society, and a Narrow Future

Nearly two years into Javier Milei's chainsaw presidency, Argentina lives on two clocks: markets stabilizing at record speed, society bearing deep scars. The midterm win creates space to synchronize them—if the government chooses design over decree.

essayOct 21, 2025

Harbor Drive Pioneer: How Portland Invented the Art of Highway Removal

Long before other cities discovered highway removal, Portland tore down Harbor Drive to create a waterfront park. The 1974 decision launched a movement that continues reshaping American cities today.

essayOct 31, 2024

Ecological Democracy and the Big Cities: Imagining an Urban Future

Cities are organisms composed not only of brick, glass, and steel but of ideas, dreams, and democratic desires. When we speak of ecological democracy, we embrace an expansive notion—one where democratic practice and ecological awareness coexist, reinforcing each other.

essayOct 24, 2024

A City on Borrowed Ground: The Quiet Decay of New Orleans

When rain falls in New Orleans, it falls gently, as if hesitant to disturb the fragile equilibrium of a city already half submerged in memory. Yet, even gentle rain is enough to flood the streets.

essayOct 17, 2024

On Tap & Plate: An Intimate Cartography of How Often Urbanites Feed Their Thirst for the City

A comparative human-geography essay mapping how frequently residents in six cities—Madrid, Dublin, New York, Liverpool, Aarhus, and Brighton—eat or drink outside the home, and what those rhythms reveal about urban identity.

essayOct 3, 2024

Footsteps over Asphalt: Reimagining Napoli's Traffic for 2030 and 2045

At sunrise in Napoli, the first sound is neither gull nor church bell but the impatient horn of a scooter. The city awakes as a choreography of metallic snarls—yet this score can be rewritten.

essaySep 12, 2024

Urban Wounds: When Highways Become Scars

In 1956, New Orleans surrendered its streets to the interstate. Today, neighborhoods severed by concrete arteries are fighting to take their city back from the highways that promised progress but delivered division.

essaySep 5, 2024

Reclaiming the Human in the Smart City: 2025 and Beyond

In every city there is a secret hour, just before dawn, when the lamps flicker—unsure whether to continue shining or surrender to the sun. It is 2025, and we must choose between silicon efficiency and the delightfully unquantifiable human soul.

essayAug 29, 2024

The Big Dig's Hidden Legacy: How Boston Learned to Bury Its Mistakes

In 1991, Boston began the most expensive highway project in American history. Today, the real story isn't the tunnels beneath the city—it's the neighborhoods that rose above them.