Ever wondered where you might see revolutionary graffiti* in Cairo? Or been at a loss to find a Cuban cafe con leche** in New York City? Or really needed a beer in Madrid*** but wanted off the tourist-beaten track? Wonder no more. Our recent series profiling interesting innovators who live and work in cities around […]
On St. Patrick’s Day in 2008, Chris Downey, an architect, planner and consultant who lives in Piedmont, California, some 10 miles east of San Francisco, reported to the hospital for surgery to remove a brain tumor. The procedure was a success. But two days later, his sight started to fail. On the third day, it […]
It might seem strange to show a gallery of images of places the narrator can’t actually see. But as architect Chris Downey explains, he picked these locations in San Francisco because they’re meaningful to him, not because they’re photogenic (though as it happens, they’re that too). “As with any large, great city, its success is […]
You could, on first glance, see Dhaka as a fast and loose place, the kind of city that draws people in, churns them around and spits them out after a few tough years. Many in Dhaka face circumstances similar to those in other South Asian cities: poverty, limited education, exploitation. Dhaka itself sits at or […]
Nurur Rahman Khan was born and bred in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A practicing architect and university lecturer, Khan alternately marvels at the city’s convivial culture and bemoans its economic and structural deficiencies. He’ll brook no debate over the quality of Dhaka’s food, though: It’s miraculously good. Here’s a taste of Khan’s Dhaka, photographed by Mohammad Tauheed, a […]
New Zealand is located on a continental plate boundary, so earthquakes aren’t unexpected. But no one was ready for the quake that hit at 12.51 pm on February 22, 2011. “Everyone in Christchurch will never forget that moment,” says Danny Squires, who lives in the city with his wife and four children. Even though they’d […]
Christchurch-based Danny Squires is director of Space Craft Systems and co-founder of WikiHouse/NZ, a global project aiming to make it possible for anyone to design, download and “print” houses. Squires was going about his daily business in Christchurch on February 22, 2011, when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake ripped through the city, causing horrific damage and killing […]
Juliana Rotich didn’t grow up in Nairobi, but the Kenyan capital has been her official full-time home since 2011. Now, she describes the city as “another node in my network.” It’s a suitable metaphor for a woman who’s immersed in the technology business, from her work at the nonprofit data and mapping collective, Ushahidi, to […]
Juliana Rotich was not expecting our interview to end in tears. Neither was I. But on reflection, we were both completely ok with it. After all, that’s what happens when terrorism becomes personal. For Rotich, that happened at the end of September, when al Shabaab terrorists attacked the Westgate Mall in the northwestern part of […]
Biologist and TED Fellow Juliana Machado Ferreira grew up just outside of São Paulo, and went to both university and graduate school in the megalopolis. [Read a profile of her life and work.] She prefers a more natural environment, but after a brief stint in the Amazon, she is back in the city, looking for an […]
Juliana Ferreira is not a city person. Although she grew up just outside of São Paulo — the largest city in the largest country in South America, with a population of 11.32 million — she prefers beaches, or parks or even the country’s vast savannas and forests, where she once spent 20-day stretches collecting blood […]
Bahia Shebab is an artist, activist, and advertising executive who has been living in Cairo since 2003. And she also has been known to head out on the streets in the middle of the night to spray paint stenciled series that protest injustice and reflect on the fast-shifting politics of the city. Of course, Shehab […]
Early one morning, hours before the sun would rise, Lebanese-Egyptian artist, activist and historian Bahia Shehab was alone on the streets of Cairo, spray-painting a stenciled message that spoke out against the stripping of veiled women. It’s a campaign she discussed in “A thousand times no,” her inspiring TED Talk, and it was not only […]
In 2005, at the start of my first visit to Shanghai, the city clothed itself in a growling thunderstorm. When dusk fell and neon began to score the sky, the city was more Blade Runner-y than I thought a real place possible to be. I remember diving into a luxe spa for a post-train massage, […]
David Li has lived in Shanghai since 2003, when the Taiwan-born consultant and entrepreneur moved to the city to take advantage of a place in which he felt like “everything was possible.” A decade later, he’s still relishing all that the city has to offer, from vast cultural spaces to XinCheJian, the small community hackerspace he […]
By Nicola Twilley “In Lahore, you don’t get lost: you start off lost,” explains Khurram Siddiqi. “It’s a condition, not a situation.” Siddiqi, and his friends Asim Fayaz and Omer Sheikh, decided to collaborate on a proposal to install and maintain road signs in the city after it took several phone calls and half an hour for Fayaz to […]