Urban studies, territory and technology

The city, explained

The width of your pavement, the height of the building opposite and what you pay in rent were all decided by somebody. Here you find out who, on what criteria and at whose expense.

Browse by topic Watch the channel ↗

Browse by topic

Housing

Land prices, rent and gentrification.
95 videos
Streets & mobility

How the width of the street is shared between those passing through and those staying put.
84 videos
Urban form

Why the city has the shape it has.
42 videos
Climate & nature

Heat, water, flooding and green.
47 videos
Technology & power

Who programs the city, and with whose data.
62 videos
Thinkers

From Lefebvre to Sassen: who thought the city, and what exactly they said.
153 thinkers

Most watched

Public space
Henri Lefebvre: urban space as a social product

Henri Lefebvre showed that urban space is not a neutral setting: it is socially produced, and whoever produces it…

Henri Lefebvre 3 min read
Public space
Tactical urbanism: testing the city before building it

Tactical urbanism tests plazas, bike lanes and pop-up gardens to find out what works on the street before it is…

2 min read
Urban geopolitics
Saskia Sassen: what makes a global city global

New York, London and Tokyo concentrate capital, information and decisions. Saskia Sassen explains what links them…

Saskia Sassen 2 min read
Public space
Jane Jacobs: the street as the engine of the city

Jane Jacobs showed in 1961 that mixed uses, density and active streets keep a neighbourhood safe better than any…

Jane Jacobs 2 min read

No city is an accident.
Every pavement, every height limit and every rent is the result of a decision somebody made and almost never explained.

Latest

Urban form
Edge cities: skylines built at a highway exit

Joel Garreau and Robert Fishman explain edge cities: offices and malls that grew at motorway junctions without…

7 min read
Urban form
Liminal spaces: why the non-place unsettles us

Marc Augé, Rem Koolhaas and George Ritzer explain the non-place: airports, malls and terminals with no history,…

7 min read
Urban history
Ghetto: the cage that also worked as a shield

Wacquant, Wirth, Sennett and Kenneth Clark: how forced enclosure in Venice, Rome and Chicago also ended up…

7 min read
Housing
Root shock: why losing your neighborhood feels like grief

Mindy Fullilove and Herbert Gans on the trauma of displacement: urban renewal scattered whole communities, and the…

7 min read
Urban history
Facadism: keeping the wall and demolishing the building

Ruskin, Venturi and Baudrillard against facadism: why the front is saved, everything behind it is razed, and the…

7 min read
Urban psychology
Urban anaesthesia: why the city makes us ignore each other

Simmel, Milgram and Goffman explain urban indifference: stimulus overload, the familiar stranger and civil…

7 min read
Urban form
Liquid city: the megalopolis that never stops

Gottmann, John Rennie Short and Harvey: why the Boston-Washington corridor behaves like a river of concrete, and…

7 min read
Urban ecology
Animal city: planning for pigeons, rats and foxes

Jennifer Wolch, Donaldson and Kymlicka: what a city planned for pigeons, rats, foxes and buried rivers looks like,…

7 min read