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.

From the creators of WebUrbanist and 99% Invisible comes a new beautifully designed and illustrated guide to cities. In their New York Times best-selling book, The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars zoom in to tell fascinating stories behind everything from power grids and drinking fountains to fire escapes and street signs. In the US, you can click here to order a copy — or check out this page for international options!

What reviewers are saying about The 99% Invisible City

“Here is a field guide, a boon, a bible, for the urban curious. Your city’s secret anatomy laid bare—a hundred things you look at but don’t see, see but don’t know. Each entry is a compact, surprising story, a thought piece, an invitation to marvel. Together, they are almost transformative. To know why things are as they are adds a satisfying richness to daily existence. This book is terrific, just terrific.” —Mary Roach, New York Times bestselling author of Gulp, Stiff, and Grunt

“We usually define cities in terms of their bigness, so it’s easy to forget that our daily experience of any city is made up of countless tiny, intimate encounters. Just as Jane Jacobs did fifty years ago, Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt provide a new way of seeing urban life, finding secrets and surprises behind every sewer grate, storefront, and street sign.” —Michael Bierut, design critic and author of How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World

“The 99% Invisible City brings into view the fascinating but often unnoticed worlds we walk and drive through every day, and to read it is to feel newly alive and aware of your place in the world. This book made me laugh, and it made me cry, and it reminded me to always read the plaque.” —John Green, New York Times bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars

“The 99% Invisible City is not a book, but a pair of magic glasses that transform the mundane city around you into a vibrant museum of human ingenuity.” —Justin McElroy, three-time New York Times best-selling author

“The ideal companion for city buffs, who’ll come away seeing the streets in an entirely different light.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Conversational, bite-size entries [and] beautiful tricolor illustrations ….  A field guide for anywhere.” —Booklist

“A brief review cannot do justice to such a diverse and enlightening book …. The 99% Invisible City is altogether fresh and imaginative when it comes to thinking about urban spaces.” —Kenneth T. Jackson, book reviewer for The New York Times 

Much like WebUrbanist, 99% Invisible is a big-ideas production about small-seeming things, revealing stories baked into the buildings we inhabit, the streets we drive on, and sidewalks we traverse. 99pi celebrates design and architecture in all of its functional glory and accidental absurdity, with tales of exceptional designers but also everyday designs. This book will captivate devoted fans of WU and 99pi plus anyone curious about design processes, urban environments, and other unsung marvels of the world. If you’ve enjoyed WebUrbanist, you’ll love The 99% Invisible City!

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.

The whole world is watching Hong Kong, where a battle is playing out in the streets between authorities and citizens protesting China’s encroachment on their independence. It started in June in response to a proposed amendment of an extradition bill that would make it easier for Hong Kong citizens to be sent to mainland China, and has escalated as authorities refuse to make concessions. Now, police in riot gear are marching into crowds of masked protestors with tear gas and water cannons.

Protesters escaping PolyU by rope from a footbridge to nearby volunteer motorcyclists
by inHongKong

In an effort to retain control of Hong Kong Polytechnic University (and the rest of the city), the protesters began crafting gear of their own: improvised catapults, slingshots and barricades. They’re also using encrypted messaging apps to coordinate daring escapes from police, like descending by rope from a footbridge to be picked up by riders on motorcycles below.

On r/HongKong, Redditors are posting some of these inventions alongside updates from within the semi-autonomous city. Many of them are incredibly simple yet effective, like gluing bricks to the streets or driving nails through sections of garden hose.

Students from the University of Hong Kong building brick walls to defend themselves from the police.
byu/DustineTetris inHongKong

Who will win?
byu/sadandwant2die inHongKong

In some cases, bamboo poles are zip-tied to the bricks to create barriers that could damage the undersides of vehicles that attempt to drive over them. It would appear that the police used armored trucks to break through the barricades, clearing the path for other vehicles, but it seems like it could be an effective way to shut down traffic in other protest scenarios.

A Hong Kong style barricade set up in Central today.
byu/EDoric inHongKong

Using little more than bamboo poles and helmets, some protesters set up homemade catapults:

The students of the Chinese University of Hong Kong successfully created a giant slingshot using only bamboo sticks and helmets. The campus has been under siege by the police for 3 days by now.
byu/DustineTetris inHongKong

Citizens in the streets are also demonstrating novel ways to fight tear gas with thermoses and leaf blowers.

The new way of Hong Kong protesters deal with the tear gas
byu/OWStep inHongKong

Man used a blower to deal with tear gas in Mongkok tonight
byu/Orhac inHongKong

Observers are also reporting the use of drones to deliver supplies to those trapped inside Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Thus far, thousands of people have been arrested, some being transported by train to unknown destinations (which some fear to be mainland China.)

The protesters are also leaving messages to each other and the world using graffiti:

We are not rioters. We are gamblers, gambling our futures for a better Hong Kong.
byu/thpkht524 inHongKong

Don’t know if this has already been posted here but this shows the extremity of things.
byu/ThatisWild inHongKong

Check out more of the Hong Kong protesters’ creations at Interesting Engineering.

Top image via u/VaelinAISo

Ever wonder what it would be like to work on a container ship, traveling across the Earth’s oceans and seeing its cities from a new perspective? Canadian photographer and sailor Jeffrey Tsang provides a window into world with videos like this one:

Spanning a month at sea, the sped-up images capture the barge’s journey from the Red Sea to Hong Kong. Around 80,000 photos shot in 4K depict “breathtaking views of quickly shifting skies, deep red sunsets, and brilliant blue lightening amidst ferocious storms,” per Colossal. For the full effect, enlarge it to full size, sit back and enjoy the ever-shifting weather and scenery.

Tsang has produced a huge collection of excellent videos detailing his life and work, giving viewers insights into the world of cargo shipping one container at a time with bridge tours, anchor demonstrations, safety explanations and reasons to (or not to) pursue a similar maritime career.

“Sailing in the open sea is a truly unique way to grasp how significantly small we are in the beautiful world,” the photographer says. “Chasing the endless horizon, witnessing the ever changing weather, and appreciating the bright stars and galaxies.”

His are not the only high-seas adventures out there for container fans and cargo lovers, however. Below is another documentary video worth a watch for those anyone interested in the inner working of these ocean-going behemoths.

New to cargo ships and how containers revolutionized shipping? Took a look at this explainer video from Vox and take a listen to the podcast series Containers produced by Alexis Madrigal.