For over a decade, WebUrbanist has featured a wide range of innovative and inspiring urban art and design projects from around the world. The website has attracted more than 500,000 subscribers and been visited over 100,000,000 times since it was launched in 2007. And while WU will remain online, we are not currently planning to publish new pieces going forward. We greatly appreciate your readership and hope you will continue to explore the site and enjoy the thousands of articles in its archives.

The main page of WebUrbanist features a curated series of resource-rich articles covering some of the site’s most popular and timeless themes — these are intended to be a jumping-off point for diving deeper into topics of interest. Or seek out specific subjects like adaptive reuse, vertical farming, cargo container architecture and space-saving design using the search box.

Kurt Kohlstedt, the founder of WebUrbanist, is currently focused on his work as a writer, editor and digital director at 99% Invisible, a radio show and website about design. With over 500,000,000 downloads to date, 99pi is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. These media projects have a lot in common, so fans of WU are encouraged to check out more articles on 99pi and subscribe to the show.

Kurt was a big fan of 99pi long before joining the show in 2015 and has since become a regular voice on the podcast. He has gone on tour with the show, given talks and participated in panels on subjects ranging from how the invention of Kindergarten fundamentally shaped Modern art and design to the improbable rise of tree-covered skyscrapers.

In 2020, currently co-authored a National Bestselling book with 99pi host Roman Mars: The 99% Invisible City:A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design. You can also follow Kurt for semi-regular tweets about design, cities, urbanism and synanthropes.  From the start, WebUrbanist was about making urban architecture, art and design more accessible and engaging to all kinds of people. As you continue to explore the world around you: stay curious, fellow urbanists.

Before it was abandoned in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Pripyat was a thriving Ukrainian city with a population of nearly 50,000. The relatively sudden exodus of its inhabitants left behind a physical snapshot of the times, preserved by the absence of humans intervention for fear of fallout.

Despite the dangers of returning, urban explorers have been visiting the place for years. Some photographers use cameras mounted on aerial drones to maintain a safer distance. Other in-person visitors less concerned about safety have gone in and looted old buildings. Most, though, go simply to observe, drawn to the deserted city by those mysterious forces that attract people to derelict places — embodied history, transgressive impulses and human curiosity among them.

Such dangerous or hard-to-reach abandoned places can particularly alluring, especially when their stories are compelling. Take Hashima, just one of many Japanese islands but unusually packed with old buildings. A thriving coal-mining city in times past, “Battleship Island” once had the highest population density on planet — until a drop in coal production led to its desertion. In recent years, more and more photos and videos of the place have proliferated thanks to the internet, in turn raising questions about how much to repair, restore or change it in order to make it more accessible for an increasing number of people visiting by boat.

While some architectural artifacts in remote locations like this have been left largely alone by visitors or modified simply to accommodate tourists, others have gone through generations of much more radical change. Off the coast of Great Britain, army and navy sea forts have been turned into everything from private retreats and luxury resorts to pirate radio stations and rogue micro-nations. Here, a combination of factors, including abandonment by the government and somewhat more accessible (yet still aquatic) locations have conspired to make these structures more appealing for different kinds of adaptive reuse.

Preservation, Restoration & Contention

In central locations with more people (and thus opinions) the fate of historical places has often been the subject of controversy. In many cities, preservation of a current state tends to win out. Even such a seemingly neutral position can be contentious, though, particularly when efforts to preserve are partial or seem superficial, as in the case of ‘ghost facades‘ where only thin surfaces are saved.

Rote historicism is a simplistic default that can lead to strange and unexpected results and extreme scenarios, like cities demolishing entire buildings to “preserve” the appearance of historical skylines.

In other cases, restorations are pursued, though choosing a target point of time or period can be fraught — some buildings have been changed substantially over centuries, making it challenging to decide what aspects to restore. Either way, renovations involve modifications, which can quickly divide people who crave a kind of physical authenticity from those who embrace the notion that architecture necessarily changes over time — the situation of Notre Dame after the fire illustrates the point. Supporters of extensions and additions that don’t match the original argue that visible differences will help people in the future understand what is truly old and new, while critics note that most famous old structures have already been damaged, rebuilt and changed for centuries. There is no single solution.

Ruination, Rediscovery & Reclamation

There are people, too, who think that historical ruins should simply be left alone to decay. Along those lines, many building infiltrators and urban explorers in the United States, Europe, Asia and other parts of the world where urbex is popular follow an unwritten code to leave no trace of their presence, allowing subsequent visitors to experience a disused space as they did. There is beauty in glimpsing snapshots of history and watching nature slowly reclaim a structure.

Some abandoned places endure through careful consideration and the avoidance of further damage, but many persist in their current form simply because they are less accessible in the first place — the latter status applies to many underwater towns and archaeological sites as well as underground tunnels, crypts and caverns.

Once rediscovered, though, the fates of such places depend on where they are located and current attitudes toward ruination, preservation and restoration, which continue to change over time, much like the locations in question will do … with or without further human intervention.

The world is full of architectural fake overs, from individual facades to entire buildings designed to look like something other than what they really are. Historically, some of these disguises have been less well-intentioned than others. During World War II, Nazis gave the Red Cross access to a concentration camp but they controlled the experience, putting up false fronts to make it seem more humane. Along similarly duplicitous lines, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reportedly had workers paint the bottoms of potholes along the routes taken by foreign dignitaries to disguise the degree of road disrepair.

When President Vladimir Putin was scheduled to visit a largely abandoned town, entire vernacular facade-covering banners were hung over rundown building exteriors. Colorful faux painted walls, windows and even cats were draped over the sides of derelict structures. Some of these quirky examples may sound outdated or limited to extreme regimes, but similar trickery can be found around the world. In anticipation of an upcoming G8 summit in 2013, for instance, closed storefront windows in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland were populated with images depicting open businesses stocked with goods, an illusion set up to impress visitors.

Sometimes, subterfuge is about making something look better, a kind of economic camouflage, but it can also be about political or military concealment. In World War II, a the entire rooftop of a Seattle airplane manufacturing plant was covered with a fake suburb complete with plywood streets, sidewalks, trees and houses. This elaborate deception was erected to conceal a vital piece of wartime infrastructure, confusing potential enemy spy planes and bombers that might pass overhead. In hindsight, attacks on the American mainland might sound improbable, but in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack the people in power were taking no chances.

Many misleading designs are less elaborate but also far more prevalent than most people realize. Hiding in plain sight in cities like New York, London, Paris and Toronto, among others, some architectural facades have been used to cover up infrastructure including sewer and subway exhaust vents. In other cases, entire fake buildings have been built as shells around around facilities like electrical substations. Similar strategies have been employed to reduce the appearance of blight in cities including Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, where fake interior scenes have been applied to boarded-up windows on homes and businesses.

Not all of these fakes are meant to distort reality or create believable illusions. Test track villages in places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, are used to help study road conditions and try out new autonomous vehicle technologies.

There are also “Hogan’s Alleys” around the world — fake towns made for training police, military and other emergency personnel by setting up simulated crimes, riots and terrorist attacks in semi-realistic built environments. Some of these can be quite detailed, like Survival Town, an entire development complete with furniture and mannequins built simply to be blown in bomb tests. Whatever their particular form and intended level of deception, all of these fake places share a common designation — and so-called “Potemkin Villages” have a strangely compelling origin story.

The Original Potempkin Village

A Potempkin Village is a false front designed to cover facts with fictions, painting a better picture (literally or otherwise) over the face of a less attractive reality. The name comes from governor Grigory Potemkin who, as the story goes, wanted to impress his former lover, Russian Empress Catherine II, as she toured the Crimean countryside in the wake of war. To win her approval, he concocted one of the craziest architectural plans in history, involving the erection of entire portable villages at various locations along the way. These fake towns would be disassembled when her delegation passed by on a barge and then moved downstream along the Dnieper River to be rapidly reconstructed at the next stop on the route — the changeovers happened while the empress slept.

Thus, the same faux buildings would be seen over and over again in new contexts by her highness and other ambassadors. Potempkin’s underlings, meanwhile, would dress up and pretend to live in these places along the way. While it can be hard to disentangle facts from fantasies in this particularly peculiar history, one thing is certain: from these stories arose the idea of the “Potemkin Village,” which came to have political and economic as well as architectural meaning.

Potempkin’s story is extreme, but his motivations are relateable — he was driven by that same desire ordinary people have to make their homes a bit tidier than usual when entertaining guests or that inspires business owners to put slightly idealized versions of their wares upfront on display. The difference is arguably one of scale and degree, and his position of power and authority enabled him to take things further. In the realm of international economics, politics, business and military operations, such deceptions can indeed become massive, surreal and in rare cases are persistently maintained, even when people know a place is fake.

The World’s Biggest Facade

Perhaps the most sizable and strange contemporary example is the village of Kijong-dong, located near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. To understand this place, though, one needs to first understand the context in which it was constructed.

The Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) have effectively been at war for over 60 years. The Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the active hostilities of the Korean War in 1953, but it was only meant to be a temporary measure. Absent a more permanent settlement, the conflict technically remains open-ended. The resulting KMZ spans 160 miles from coast to coast and is 2.5 miles wide with the Military Demarcation Line running down the center. To this day, the border between remains one of the most militarized in the world as both sides claim the right to govern the whole Korean peninsula. Along the border, both North and South Korea maintain “peace villages,” each of which is peculiar in its own way.

On the south side, residents of Daeseong-dong live tax-free and exempt from military service. The place may seem a bit artificial, but it has real residents living out their real lives. On the north side, the situation appears much stranger — even at a glance, Kijong-dong looks conspicuously luxurious for a rural North Korean town. Interior lights turn on and off at set times while street-sweeping caretakers and other “citizens” are positioned to make it look occupied. “Farmers” show up during the day but depart at night rather than heading into one of the “buildings” where people might be expected to live.

North Korea is well known for guiding visitors through particular routes of its capital city and controlling the experience of travelers to the country, but Kijong-dong takes this kind of coercive deception to the next level, staging an entire town for display complete with a support cast and crew. However real and fake modern accounts of Potempkin’s historical efforts may be, he would presumably at least be impressed by the effort.

In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

In the mid-1900s, Dutch citizens of Delft were sick of cars driving too fast down their narrow residential streets. The city was slow to respond, so residents took matters into their own hands. Groups of neighbors came together and tore up sections of pavement, then put up planters and other partial obstructions, often overnight to avoid traffic or official resistance. Their traffic-calming urban interventions were simply designed to slow down cars and reclaim streets. The government initially turned a blind eye to this illegal activism and eventually came to embrace new “woonerf” (or: living street) configurations. The Dutch Parliament  even enshrined woonerven strategies in national law as part of shift toward making the nation less car-centric.

The Netherlands in particular is well-known for being friendly to cyclists and pedestrians, but around the world there is a growing resistance to the dominance of motorized vehicle culture. Car critics note that personal cars not only add to pollution and street dangers but they also take up a lot of road and parking space, which, among other things, makes real estate more expensive for everyone. In a world largely designed around cars, pedestrians can at least can hope for sidewalks in some places but bikes often have to share the road, for better or worse.

A lot of workarounds for cyclists have been developed over the years, like “sharrows” to remind drivers to be aware of two-wheeled vehicles sharing the streets. There are tricks like the “Dutch Reach,” a car door-opening approach parked drivers are encouraged to use to avoid hitting cyclists; basically, it involves using the hand furthest from the door, resulting in an overreach that forces the driver to look backward briefly. For their part, some cyclists strap things like pool noodles to the backs of their bikes, a visible reminder of how much clearance they are entitled to while riding in lanes or along shoulders. Activists have taken things further, too, installing guerrilla bike lanes with whatever is at hand, from official-looking posts and traffic cones to toilet plungers. The idea here is to spur cities into action, using temporary measures to encourage permanent changes.

In many places, car-curbing efforts have begun to gain traction on a larger scale, driven in part by this kind of citizen activism. Cities like Paris have proclaimed car-free days so people can walk, bike and play in the streets. There are also some longer-term official plans to oust private vehicles from major metropolitan areas and there have even been proposals to create entirely new car-free cities from scratch.

A number of ambitious projects aim not just grow walking and cycling routes but also to better connect these across cities — prominent examples include a 60-mile “bike autobahn” across Germany, an adaptation of America’s famously Route 66 for cyclists and an extensive elevated bicycle path in China. One particularly bold proposal would create a raised cycling route running over 100 miles around London. Holland, as usually, as ahead of the curve, home to the world’s largest bike parking garage as well as the first raised roundabout for cyclists.

While some of these plans call for vast overhauls and dramatically reworking existing infrastructure, conversion approaches like those advocated by the rails-to-trails movement take advantage of lower-hanging fruit, transforming unused train lines and other abandoned routes into functioning pathways. New Yorks’ High Line helped spark the elevated greenway trend in particular, but the idea has since spread to cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Singapore and more. In some cases, where elevated routes are still in use by cars or trains, new trails have been introduced underneath trains and highways instead.

Some futurists think self-driving cars will solve a lot of traffic problems and collision concerns for pedestrians, cyclists and car drivers alike. Optimistic estimates suggest autonomous vehicles will reduce emissions dramatically while freeing up space currently used for parking, all while making streets safer from distracted human drivers. Other experts, though, warn that as cars become more comfortable places to lounge, more people will end up using them more often and over longer distances, further clogging up city streets and highways.

For now, full automation is still more science fiction than urban fact. In the meantime, there is evidence to suggest that simplicity may be the best way forward — that getting rid of signals, signs and barriers might actually make streets a lot safer. While some cities have attempted to confuse drivers into slowing down, other towns all over Europe are starting to experiment with streets on which cars, buses, bikes and pedestrians can all travel more freely. This type of “shared space” approach eliminates distractions while also encouraging drivers to focus on their surroundings more closely. Sometimes, less really is more.