Why India’s Urban Forests Are Dying and How to Save Them
Ground reporting from 14 Nagar Van sites shows how urban forests are neglected once one-time creation grants run out, and what a two-stage funding model could fix.
Shared Space, Human Presence
A photographic essay by Beau Thomas on how presence, absence and boundaries shape our experience of public space.
Massatin: Father Gareth Jenkins and a Community Beyond the Road
Inside Massatin, Liberia’s isolated community for leprosy survivors, where decades of stigma meet quiet resilience. A photographic essay by Fer Mugica.
Cities Need an Authority Map Before AI Agents Run Public Services
Photo: A high-tech surveillance camera monitoring an urban street. Credit: Giant Asparagus via Pexels. Guest expert opinion by Gleb Tsipursky, PhD Cities understand that infrastructure creates obligations long before a crisis occurs. That is why local governments study traffic capacity before approving major developments, water demand before rezoning land, and emergency access before permitting new […]
She Lost Two Kittens, Then Raised Three
Ara’s rescue from a Yongsan demolition site and the family she made afterward — by Julie Choi / YongsanCats.
Homes We Carry
2025 – Ongoing I have been searching for home for most of my life without realizing it. My journey began on 25th December 2013 before sunrise, when war broke out in my hometown of Malakal, South Sudan. I was just ten years old. Christmas was only hours away. The day before, I spent the afternoon […]
Urban Health Is a Major Crisis—How City Planners Need to Think
Photo: Rahib Yaqubov A city planning department can hit every density target, transit-ridership goal and housing-completion number on its scorecard and still be making its residents sick. That is the uncomfortable finding running through recent public-health research: cities are not only engines of growth, they are machines that manufacture — or prevent — heat stress, […]
When the Climate Breaks: How a Warming Planet Is Reshaping Human Health and Migration
Climate change rarely announces itself as a health story today. It shows up instead as a heat wave, a failed harvest, a river that no longer stays inside its banks. But strip away the framing of melting ice caps and carbon graphs, and what’s left is a far more immediate and human problem: a warming […]
Town Plaza Marsh and Forest (Remembering the Birds Amidst Fast Growing Urban Sprawl)
Author’s Note: In the fast-changing world, one in many places having urban sprawl uncreative and uniform, taking over green spaces and wildlife habitats, it is sometimes healthy and soulful to pause and reflect upon something like birds. They are in their flying moments anyhow, emancipated from all this trouble. I saw the other day a […]
