cities

Moving documentary on ferry drivers who rescued 9/11 refugees

Toilet-sharing app CLOO' turns your home into a public bathroom

Hey, we all love sharing, right? It lets you live comfortably while limiting consumption and waste. And you have that bathroom, and you're not using it all the time, right? What are you, selfish? Put your money where your mouth is, toilet-hog, and offer up your bathroom to strangers with a deuce to donate. Otherwise the terrorists win.

If you're seriously willing to hang an "Open to Strange Butts" placard outside your lavatory (what are you, nuts? We were joking), a new app called CLOO' will let you take shit from just about anyone.

Is this the world’s greenest neighborhood?

Dockside Green, a redevelopment of a former brownfield site in Victoria, British Columbia, has been all about sustainability from the beginning.

Light pollution is stealing our night sky — here's how to get it back

This (left) is your sky. And this (right) is your sky on ONE MAJOR LIGHT SOURCE. So it's no surprise that suburban starscapes have been totally desaturated by the lights on buildings, roads, and parking lots. Less than half the U.S. -- and almost none of Europe -- has dark enough night skies to see the Milky Way.

Dirty 'hoods: Is your neighborhood bad for the climate?

Even dense urban areas like New York and Toronto harbor enclaves of high per capita emissions -- and they all have one thing in common: wealth.

Zip decoding: Can one Seattle area serve as model of diversity?

A south Seattle zip code once touted as the most diverse in the U.S. exemplifies the challenges and rewards of cultivating multicultural neighborhoods anywhere in the country.

Our new favorite city is inside this guy's brain

Okay, so this is more amazing folk art than realistic urban design, but think of it as your Friday 10 minutes of Zen. Jerry Gretzinger has been making and remaking his incredibly detailed maps since 1963, and he's basically generated an entire alternate universe. In this mini-documentary, he details his complicated creative process, which is […]

Peebottle Farms: Back to the land in Brooklyn

Welcome to my Bedford-Stuyvesant urban farm.

I'll be seeing you

It's my last day as cities editor at Grist, but I hate to say goodbye.