cities
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Can a new 'global alliance' rethink disaster response in cities?The deadly spread of ebola in west Africa and the prolonged earthquake recovery efforts in Haiti were a wake up call for the international community: they must find a more effective way to tackle humanitarian crises in urban settings
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Share your photos of the most out of place city buildingsLeftover heritage or new developments in cities can sometimes stick out like sore thumbs. Share your photos of incongruous city buildings with GuardianWitness -
The gated Buenos Aires community which left its poor neighbours under waterThe richest and poorest residents of Argentina’s capital are separated by the walls of gated communities. When heavy rains in 2013 left those outside the barriers vulnerable to severe flooding, their only hope was to tear them down -
How Vejle built a blueprint for resilienceAs Rotterdam becomes the latest city to unveil its resilience strategy, Athlyn Cathcart-Keays looks at how the port of Vejle – the ‘Manchester of Denmark’ – came to create its own roadmap for future survival and growth
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The death of Richard Nickel, guardian of Chicago's heritagePhotographer and activist Richard Nickel spent much of his life battling to preserve Chicago’s diverse architecture. His death, while trying to save remnants of its Stock Exchange building, gave him ‘an almost mythic status’ in the city
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Street life in Yangon: from roadside eateries to ear-cleaning stalls – in picturesWhile Myanmar comes to terms with huge political changes and a flood of foreign investment, life on the streets of the old capital goes on. David Levene documents the people of Yangon
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Rio de Janeiro review – the dark side of Brazil’s ‘Marvellous City’With Brazil in crisis and Rio about to host the Olympics, this is a timely book that gets behind the cliches, from Luiz Eduardo Soares whose own political career was recently destroyed
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Darkness is a luxury not granted to Britain's council estatesLighting in social housing aims for maximum visibility for better CCTV surveillance. Only more affluent neighbourhoods have access to darkness
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London borough installs 6,000 solar panels over marketplace£2m scheme by Hounslow council on Western International Market will be biggest solar scheme by any local authority, and use batteries to store energy
the big picture
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No vacancies: life in Mozambique's abandoned Grande Hotel – in picturesWhen it opened in 1955, the Grande Hotel in the Indian Ocean city of Beira was one of the most luxurious in Africa. Photojournalist Fellipe Abreu documents the lives of the 3,500 people who now fill this long-closed hotel to capacity
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Expect the unexpected: how to measure and improve a city's resilienceIn today’s cities, a failure of any sort can be ‘on the scale of major natural disasters’. So a new online tool hopes to help urban leaders across the world understand their vulnerabilities – and make better decisions for the future
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Superblocks to the rescue: Barcelona’s plan to give streets back to residentsThe Catalan capital’s radical new strategy will restrict traffic to a number of big roads, drastically reducing pollution and turning secondary streets into ‘citizen spaces’ for culture, leisure and the community
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Story of cities #44: will Dadaab, the world's largest refugee camp, really close?Twenty-five years after it opened, Kenya has announced its third biggest ‘city’, the Dadaab refugee complex, is to be shut down. But for many residents, this sprawling slum in an inhospitable desert is the only home they know
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After Fort McMurray: where are the world's most fire-prone cities?Images of the devastated Canadian city show just how destructive fire can be to urban populations. But the risk is greatest in informal settlements, where high population density and low-grade construction can be a deadly combination
talking points
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The birth of Baghdad was a landmark for world civilisationThe foundation of al-Mansur’s ‘Round City’ in 762 was a glorious milestone in the history of urban design. It developed into the cultural centre of the world
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get involved
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'Teach young people we are not going to move over': stories of ageing in citiesFrom tackling isolation in Leicester to better footpaths in Dhaka, you shared your experiences of how cities could be improved for older generations
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Call yourself an urbanist? Take our ultimate city pub quizTo kick off our collaboration with the Young Urbanists, quizmaster Rob Cowan tests your city knowledge with questions straight from the group’s pub quiz
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Have you recently migrated to a new city? Share your storyRefuge cities Europe continues to be gripped by a refugee crisis, but forced migration is happening all around the world. We want to hear your first-hand accounts of migrating to a new city and how you’ve been received
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'You are left with no choice but to leave' – your stories of long-term gentrificationReaders from Istanbul, London, San Jose, Montreal, Newcastle and Buenos Aires share their experiences of neighbourhood change over the decades
in pictures
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Playgrounds for the elderlyCities around the world have been designing outdoor gyms and play areas for older generations to improve fitness and wellbeing. Even non-specialist playgrounds are getting multi-generational. Play’s not just for kids...
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The heritage of London's brutalist architectureA new project by photographer Rory Gardiner and studio esinam highlights the subtle beauties hidden beneath the hard surface of London’s oft-maligned brutalist buildings, from the Barbican to the National Theatre
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Street football in Africa: flyovers and floating schoolsIn Africa, the beautiful game isn’t confined to the stadium: from city roads to markets to beneath giant flyovers, football belongs everywhere
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The hidden life of Rome's Tiber riverThe Tiber’s banks provide an isolated ecosystem in the centre of the Italian capital. Photographer Luigi Pastoressa documents a riverside used by cyclists and street vendors, homeless people and artists, drug addicts and fishermen
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Abandoned airports around the worldUrban 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
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Cracked walls, wrinkled faces: Paris' modernist housing estates and their elderly residentsPhotographer 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
you may have missed
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Is Morrissey's city still recognisable?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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Affordable 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 EastThe truth about property developers: how they are exploiting planning authorities and ruining our cities
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Rumble in the Jungle: 40 years on, Kinshasa is a city of chaosThe 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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Timbuktu: portrait of a city on the edge of existenceWhat 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
Myanmar rising How democracy is changing Yangon's skyline
Street life in Yangon: from roadside eateries to ear-cleaning stalls – in pictures