Clayton P. Gillette (NYU): Dictatorships for Democracy: Takeovers of Financially Failed Cities. Detroit would rather you not take pictures of its ruins. The robots that saved Pittsburgh: Glenn Thrush on how the Steel City avoided Detroit’s fate. Jason Farago on our odd, revealing obsession with "gritty" photos of the 1970s NYC Subway. Darryl Pinckney reviews Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto by Camilo Jose Vergara. New York Elsewhere: Detailed maps of other cities’ neighborhoods show ex-pat New Yorkers where to emigrate. Is San Francisco New York? With rents higher than Manhattan’s, the lefty city is at a philosophical crossroads. How do you diagnose what is wrong with San Francisco now? You could say that San Francisco, like New York and other US metropolises, is suffering the reversal of postwar white flight. Can Oakland buck the gentrification trend? Meghan Herning investigates. Reinventing Skid Row: Ed Leibowitz on when hipsters met the homeless, and made a new downtown L.A. From Wonkblog, what happens when the government tries to help poor people move to better neighborhoods? Emily Badger investigates; on the most important fact we rarely admit in talking about segregation and poverty: The American geography of segregated housing is no accident; on how metropolitan areas are now fueling virtually all of America’s population growth; and what if we mapped cities by how hard it is to get to work? Open data is making it easier to understand how transportation connects us to everything from jobs to schools to health care. Kevin Drum on how America's cities are the Real America. Danny Vinik on how climate change will force us to abandon coastal cities — we better start preparing right now.
