Cities
Who gets to live in the cities we love to visit?
Venice's visitor controls are highly visible. The harder test is whether the city remains a workable home.
9 min readThe archive
Elsewhere Journal explores cities, architecture and cultural landscapes as inhabited places. We are interested in how destinations work for residents as well as visitors, how buildings change, and what the ordinary parts of a place reveal about its future.
Cities
Amsterdam is trying to count a different kind of success
Amsterdam's visitor forecasts and neighborhood research tell different, necessary stories. The difficult part is turning a desire for better tourism into a result residents can recognize on their own street.
9 min read
Design
Barcelona's superblocks are unfinished for a reason
Barcelona's celebrated street transformations remain a continuing urban project after the paving is finished. Their harder questions concern movement, maintenance and who can keep using the neighborhood as its desirability changes.
9 min read
Heritage
Keeping the useful life of an old building
Keeping a familiar frontage can preserve an image while discarding much of a building's material and social value. A more useful brief begins with what the existing place can still do.
9 min read
Journeys
The romance of the sleeper meets the railway timetable
The sleeper offers something genuinely unusual: a journey that occupies the hours usually given to a bedroom. Its revival depends on making that promise work within a railway, a booking system and an ordinary travel day.
9 min read
Cities
The quiet street is part of Kyoto's tourism infrastructure
Kyoto's visitor-management tools reach beyond the famous temple gate. Their real test is whether a resident can catch a bus, use a pavement and pass through a neighborhood without becoming part of someone else's spectacle.
9 min read
Cities
A city is more than its weekend market
Short-term accommodation is a real part of Lisbon's housing argument. Understanding its contribution requires keeping neighborhoods, registries, rents and purchase prices distinct—and following what happens to a home when a policy changes.
9 min read
Culture
A timed ticket and the hours inside the museum
A reservation can distribute arrivals without distributing attention. Inside a museum, visitors still converge on particular works, stay for different lengths of time and need space for more than forward movement.
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Design
Courtyards: a day in the shade
Shade, air and stored heat give a courtyard its climatic work. The lesson of traditional buildings lies in the relationships they organize—relationships a contemporary project has to adapt to its own weather, occupants and surroundings.
9 min read
Cities
The water, engineering and politics of Seoul's restored stream
Cheonggyecheon's transformation is real, but the water, public space and surrounding economy are still managed systems. The more interesting story starts after the before-and-after photograph.
9 min read
Design
Copenhagen's most useful cycling lesson is the ordinary trip
A city's cycling network earns its value between the photographs: at junctions, outside shops, through winter maintenance and across municipal boundaries. Copenhagen's transferable lesson is the attention given to a trip someone needs to repeat.
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Culture
The library that makes room for doing nothing
Helsinki's Oodi is celebrated for things people can do: record, sew, read and meet. Its quieter achievement is making public room for people who arrive without a task to complete.
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Heritage
What should an old factory be allowed to become?
At Zollverein, a swimming pool, a coal-washing plant and an exhibition about forced labor belong to the same site. Industrial heritage becomes more interesting when those stories are kept together.
9 min read
Journeys
The dark sky is not an empty tourism resource
A place promoted for its stars is also a place where people live, animals move and visitors need a way home. Protecting darkness means managing those relationships before the night becomes another product to consume.
9 min read
Design
The connections that make an accessible day
A usable day out depends on reliable information, transport, facilities and a way to recover when something changes. Accessibility improves when a city connects those parts and lets people judge the details against their own requirements.
9 min read