The City

Ancient Rome in reality: flimsy apartments, streets strewn with human excrement, garbage, and the occasional corpse.

Across America, small and midsize cities, particularly those that traditionally have relied on manufacturing, are struggling to forge new identities in a globalized world gripped by recession.

How can you be an urban pioneer when you move to an inner-city neighborhood where families have lived for generations?

Reviewing a new history of Islam in America.

America's relationship with food is dysfunctional.

New York City's garment district illustrates that manufacturing can still be vital to the innovation that cities foster.

Many cities launched revival efforts with downtown festival marketplaces such as Boston's Faneuil Hall. Can retailers work the same magic in less affluent neighborhoods?

“Take what’s in front of you, not what it was or could be. And do what you can with it.”

A better approach to shaping the places in which we live has emerged just as Americans responding to the rising cost of energy begin to crowd into older suburbs and cities.

Thomas Toch on the new urban schools.

For centuries, the passionate and sometimes persecuted Irish have felt a peculiar sympathy with Europe’s self-anointed capital of sophistication.

A critic has uncovered a warm, fuzzy strain infecting modern literature. It seems centered in Brooklyn.

Mimi Schwartz reviews a new guide to Queens, the largest of the city’s five boroughs and the second most populous (after Brooklyn). The book's author calls it “the most heterogeneous place in the world.”

Three events defined 1989 in NYC: the Central Park jogger attack, the murder of Yusef Hawkins, and the election of the city's first (and only) black mayor.

It's time for the American environmental movement to rethink its hostility toward cities.

Welcome to the jumble.