Long Read.

Two years after the Eixample’s expansion of the superblock model, the most-asked question among visiting city-halls is no longer how, it’s how did the politics survive.

Five years into the rolling reduction of car space, the second-order effects are becoming visible, in air, in noise, in property prices and in who is showing up to the neighbourhood meetings.

Heat-pumps are no longer a single-family home story. From Stockholm’s district networks to a 9,000-flat retrofit in Hamburg, the technology is quietly displacing gas at city scale.

Affordable, dense, and climate-aware: a generation of architects in Lisbon is taking on the contradiction at the heart of European housing, and the city is, gingerly, helping them.

In a quiet revolt against the asphalt monoculture, Vienna is rolling out unsealed lanes, planted curbs and rain-fed gardens. The Stadt Wien is not waiting for federal climate-adaptation money, it is rewriting its own …

At two in the afternoon on the last day of July 2024, a Greenpeace technician points a thermographic camera at the granite of the Plaza Mayor and the screen returns a number close to sixty-three degrees. A few hundred…

Walk into the lobby of a residential block in Wood City Jätkäsaari and the first thing you notice, before the lift, before the postboxes, is the smell. It is the smell of a Finnish forest in the third week o…

From the dyke road at Hoek van Holland, the two gates lie open against either bank of the Nieuwe Waterweg like the jaws of something that has not yet decided to bite. They are painted a flat industrial white, and at l…

At twenty past eight on a Tuesday morning, the cycle path on the Eerste Constantijn Huygensstraat in Amsterdam West is doing something that the people who built it never planned for: it is queuing. Not gridlocked, exa…

The decisive sentence in a Zurich tender is no longer the one with the lowest number in it. On a procurement officer's screen in the city's finance department, a spreadsheet adds the purchase price of a thing — a flee…

On a grey morning on Plac Piłsudski, the scaffolding tells you nothing about what is being built. The raw brick walls rising on the western edge of the square could be a new development anywhere in central Warsaw — ex…

On a wet evening in the Navigli, the queue outside a dark kitchen is not made of diners. It is made of riders — a dozen of them, straddling bicycles and battered scooters, thumbs hovering over the same app, waiting fo…

At the eastern edge of the National Garden, on a stretch of Vasilissis Olgas that used to carry four lanes of traffic past the Temple of Olympian Zeus, the asphalt is gone and the cars with it. What is there instead, …

On a cold Tuesday in a Pankow side street, the electrician fitting a heat pump to the back wall of a 1930s terrace pauses over a form he did not have to fill in two years ago. Below the unit's rating plate — nine kilo…

At rush hour on the Dronning Louises Bro, the bridge over the lakes that separates the city centre from Nørrebro, the bicycles arrive in waves timed to the lights. There are more of them than there are cars on …

On a working morning in Prague's New Town, the most consequential anti-corruption tool in the country is also the dullest thing on the screen: a government website at smlouvy.gov.cz, the national registr smluv — "regi…

The drawings arrive at the Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid identified only by a word. Not a studio name, not a logo, not the practice's carefully built portfolio — just a lema, an alphanumeric codeword chosen…

On a side street in the 11th arrondissement, just east of where the boulevards thin out into the working grain of the city, someone has been at the foot of a plane tree with a trowel. The square metre of earth that us…

On the morning of 16 April 2020, the last coal boiler in the city stopped burning. The unit was called KVV6 — combined heat and power block six — and it had stood on the Hjorthagen waterfront in the Värtahamnen d…

At a bus stop on Waterloo Road, the dot-matrix sign says the 59 is four minutes away. So does the phone of the woman standing under it, and the phone of the man twenty metres on who never looks at the sign at all. The…

On a bright February morning in 2026, a tram slides into the new terminus at La Doua–Gaston Berger, on the northern edge of Villeurbanne, and disgorges a carriage-full of students into a campus that, for the first tim…

On a grey morning in the European quarter, the building that does more than any other to shape how Europe's cities will report on their own warming looks like nothing at all. It is an office. There are lanyards, a cof…

On a narrow street in Arroios, a four-storey building waits for a decision. Its facade is dressed in blue-and-white azulejos — the glazed ceramic tiles that have skinned Lisbon's buildings for the better part of two c…

On a quiet stretch of the Bulevardul Magheru, between a phone shop and a shuttered cinema, a small painted disc the size of a saucer sits at eye level on an interwar façade. It is red, and it means what everyon…