How cities are tearing down urban highways to reconnect neighborhoods, restore ecological corridors, and reimagine what these corridors can become.
essayOnce a city accepts that traffic responds to price and design, a harder question follows: what to do with the land and street space it no longer needs for cars. Five cities are answering it in five different ways.
essayPlanners treat traffic as a fixed volume that must go somewhere. When roads have been widened, removed or narrowed, drivers have changed their routes, their timing, their mode and sometimes their minds.
essayI get lost in Madrid most easily underground. At street level the city is still negotiable—but in the tunnels everything becomes a geometry exercise with too many variables. Then the city quietly changed the rules.
essayWhen 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.
essayIn 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.
essayIn 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.
essayPhiladelphia's green infrastructure program transforms urban runoff into community assets, showing how cities can work with water instead of against it.
Four essays tracing the flaneur tradition beyond its Parisian origins -- into Madrid's rhetorical streets, Lisbon's vertiginous hills, the archival cities of Buenos Aires and Mexico City, and the acoustic corridors of New Orleans.
UrbanStories' own take on rating living quality—23 cities scored across six lived-experience criteria (shelter, human scale, civic voice, nature, mobility, conviviality), weighted for the people who live there rather than those who fly in.
A human-scale ranking of the world's great cities. Not the best, happiest or most powerful city—but the one where a full life is possible. Thirty-six cities scored on ten criteria of daily life, then adjusted for the shadows: housing extraction, car-dependence, inequality, climate negligence.