cities
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Many teams are named for a fascinating episode in their city’s history. Take a punt on what makes the New York Jets green, which tube stop is named after a football club ... and where the murder rate spurred an NBA team to rebrand
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Built on a swamp at the cost of thousands of lives, Peter the Great’s ‘antidote to Moscow’ has survived uprisings, sieges and floods to become Europe’s third largest city. But is history now catching up with St Petersburg?
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William Penn’s city was planned as a utopian ideal: a grid of broad streets to promote green urban living for settlers to this 17th-century colony. While Penn grew disillusioned, his design lives on in Philadelphia and around the world
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House prices in Cambridge have risen 50% since 2010 – caused in part by Chinese investors whose passion for the city may have begun with a poem they learned at school. But what do local residents make of this romantic vision?
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City links: Driving ‘clean’ in the Emerald City, the world’s tackiest architecture and the birth of Gotham feature in this week’s roundup of best city stories
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Iconic chapel will be resurrected to create a 600-capacity venue while former sacristy and crypt will be used for exhibitions
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A lawyer representing a Eurosceptic party founded by a comedian, Virginia Raggi is looking to shake up the Eternal City
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Staring into space as they watch TV or water the garden, the real-life subjects of Alec Dawson hint at vast reserves of despair and missed opportunity
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Police in Auckland secretly filmed scores of people walking past an actor posing as a child scavenging for food as part of recruitment campaign
in depth
the big picture
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For Guardian Lagos week, Instagrammers across the city have been sharing their brilliant photographs. Here are just some of our favourite images
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As transport commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan faced down critics to transform New York with 400 miles of cycling routes, a bike share scheme and the remodelling of Times Square. Any city can do it, she tells Peter Walker
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The Argentinian capital’s many cooperatives showed that Occupy movements were not simply a response to economic crisis – they could be sustainable business models, too. So why are they now under threat?
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In an extract from his book Slow Burn City, Rowan Moore argues that if London is to grow to 10 million, it needs an intervention
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The wetlands are this Indian city’s free sewage works, a fertile aquatic garden and, most importantly, a flood defence – but they’re under threat from developers. One environmentalist is leading the resistance
talking points
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Booker prize nominee Chigozie Obioma loves Lagos, but shares the centuries-old fear that it may ‘spoil’. With 2,000 new people arriving every day, the city faces its toughest challenge yet
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get involved
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Cities around the world are seeing a rise in ageing populations. Wherever you live, share your experiences of urban life in older age and how it can be improved
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Readers from Istanbul, London, San Jose, Montreal, Newcastle and Buenos Aires share their experiences of neighbourhood change over the decades
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From noise and pollution to street harassment and anonymous crowds, readers share their experiences and thoughts on what makes cities stressful – and which places are the biggest offenders. Is it time to relocate?
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You shared your experiences, photos and memories of forgotten or unloved rivers in cities around the world, from Birmingham to Belo Horizonte
in pictures
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Photographer Laurent Kronental spent four years documenting the lives of older citizens living in the Grands Ensembles housing estates built around Paris after the second world war for his Souvenir d’un Futur project
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Photographer Berenice Abbott started Changing New York – her grand project to document NYC – in 1935, capturing shops and buildings before they were torn down. The photos are held in the archive of the New York Public Library
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In 1869, French artist Gustave Doré and British journalist Blanchard Jerrold began a landmark account of the deprivation and squalor of mid-Victorian London
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Ten years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, photographer Mario Tama of Getty Images returns to the city to document how things have changed
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No distraction is too bizarre when it’s in the middle of a roundabout. Here are some of the strangest and most beautiful examples, including from the hitherto-uncelebrated roundabout hotspot of Oman
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Urban growth, sporting events, financial crashes and political turmoil have left a trail of city airports and airfields deserted around the globe. While some lie abandoned or face redevelopment, others are being creatively reused
popular
you may have missed
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Thirty years on from The Smiths’ only UK No 1 studio album, how do the band’s legendary evocations of 1980s Manchester compare with life in the city today? There’s only one place to start …
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The truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities
Oliver WainwrightAffordable housing quotas get waived and the interests of residents trampled as toothless authorities bow to the dazzling wealth of investors from Russia, China and the Middle East -
The heavyweight world championship showdown between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman electrified a city full of pride and promise in the early years following independence – and then the money ran out …
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What is life like in Mali’s ‘city in the middle of nowhere’? Guardian photographer Sean Smith recently spent a week there, meeting everyone from Timbuktu’s chief muezzin to its only DJ
'Erase and I will draw again': the struggle behind Cairo's revolutionary graffiti wall