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.

For much of history, urban planning as we know it didn’t exist. Sure, there were cities with zoning ordinances and building codes, but ones thoroughly planned from scratch with heavily controlled development are largely a recent phenomenon. So a few years ago, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (known as SPUR) assembled ten key illustrations to summarize the twists and turns planners took to get where we are today.

Illustrations like this one of the Garden City from the early 1900s are powerful things, able to distill complex ideas down into compelling graphics. The idea in this case was to create greenbelts for urban dwellers and keep urban centers limited to populations of just over 30,000 people. Along similar lines, Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park” vision incorporated vast open spaces, but instead of spreading out, it pushed up, proposing people live in towers. This idea heavily shaped urban design in America, and public housing projects in particular.

More known for his architecture than his urban planning ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright had a lot of thoughts on how people should live and work outside of the actual houses and offices he built. His ideas for things like Broadacre City were more rural than urban, taking large plots of land and turning them into family housing in which each person would live on an acre of land. If implemented, this idea would have turned the entire country effectively into a giant mega-suburb.

The street grid was not a modern invention as such, but it was deployed much more rigorously and often starting from scratch in American cities like Philadelphia that were essentially working from a blank slate. In many cities, grids were laid out regardless of complex topography, creating problems down the road. Linked together, some of America’s gridded cities have started to become something bigger — megaregions, alluded to by science fiction authors like William Gibson decades ago and increasingly a reality today.

On a more closeup scale, transects have been used to show spectrums of possibility for urban planners ranging, for example, from highly paved urban spaces to lush green areas, rendering visible different hybrid typologies in between. As cities grew up, they also employed setback principles to guide growth and maintain light access, which fundamentally shaped the skylines and on-the-ground experiences of major metropolitan areas.

A classic in any list of historical city maps, the Nolli Map drawn in the 18th century was incredibly ambitious for its time, detailing every last little aspect of Rome and providing a basis for comparing old and new forms of this famous city. Notably, it is a straight-on view — maps of its time often tilted things at angles, which distorted the geography, but this one became a precursor for what we think of as typical plan-type maps today.

At the other end of the spectrum are the psychogeographical maps developed by Situationists in the mid-1900s, which aimed not to depict the shapes of buildings and spaces in between but to instead document the subject experience of the city. It was in many ways a reaction against a Nolli-type approach as well as the rigorously rectilinear plans of people like Le Corbusier. Maps were drawn from memory and then used to understand the “psychogeography” of cities.

Finally, the most unusual selection of all: the so-called “hockey stick” chart. This captures an aspect of the history of cities, specifically: the effects of the industrial revolution on global temperatures. It’s a diagram not so much about how to physically build a city but the big-picture impacts to think about while designing one.

Food trucks need to step up their game lest the edibles prepared behind the grill lose out to competitors with flashier paint jobs and more memorable names.

We’re Number Hun!

Are you ready for “an Asian flavor invasion”? It sure beats a British invasion, assuming the latter involves British “food”. But we digress… Attila The HUNgry serves up a ravening horde of fusion foods like their signature Thai PB & J, made with Thai peanut butter and strawberry Sriracha jam. Sounds like that could turn hungry feelings to hangry ones but at least they’ll never run out of Hun puns. Flickr member Mack Male photographed – and possibly pillaged – this aggressively red food truck in Edmonton, Canada, during the summer of 2014.

Spam I Am

Serve canned pork loaf from a mobile platform and price the offerings accordingly? Brilliant! Hey, sushi is sushi, even if it’s Spam Musubi, so get yer wallet out if you wanna chow down. Flickr member Sam Howzit spied the Aloha Plate food truck at Coachella 2014, which is undoubtedly the ideal place to serve sushi made with Spam.

Lucious Speed

According to Flickr member Ezra Wolfe, “Big Lucious belongs to the third-tier syndicate known as the Oryza Kings, where he is a ground-level distributor selling sticky rice directly to the public.” That may or may not be entirely true (though we really, really hope it is), but the copious quilted foil cladding and enormous extractor thingy on the roof indicate the eponymous owner’s definitely cooking up something special inside.

Food Truckin’

If the Grateful Dead had a food truck, it would probably look a lot like this though using a VW Microbus would have completely nailed it. That said, Honest Tom’s Taco Shop’s pushes all the right buttons from the LSD-lightful paint job to a decorated grinning skull right out of Dia de Muertos. Gotta love their menu board too: breakfast tacos and iced coffee are a classic post-hangover meal. Flickr member Ezra Wolfe snapped the flashback-inducing roving roach coach in May of 2010.

Praise Cheeses

You can’t get more understated than the Big Cheese food truck, shown here at PopaPalooza… a convention-style event for the Funko community. Indeed, even Funko fans gotta feed their faces sometime and nothing satisfies like cheese in all its deliciously odoriferous permutations. Yes whey! Those reluctant to accept cheeses as their gustatorial savior can seek solace via the truck’s Nutella with Roasted Banana sandwich. Flickr member justgrimes caught up with the charmingly minimalist food truck in April of 2011.

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Incr Edible 10 Van Tastic Food Trucks

Gerrymandered districts are perhaps the most visible forms of political corruption, dramatically redrawn into implausible shapes to benefit one political part or another. The idea for this font dubbed “Gerry” by Ben Doessel and James Lee explores just how many forms these places are bent into — as it turns out, one can make an entire alphabet out of them.

“To ensure the eroding of democracy isn’t an issue that is lost in the news cycle, our design team from Chicago concocted a creative way to keep our warped voting districts top-of-mind,” says the font’s makers. “What looks like a ‘G’ is really the 4th Congressional district of Ohio, the ‘E’ is actually Missouri’s 6th district, and so on.”

The font, downloadable for free, started with Chicago’s 4th District, which the designers noticed had a distinctive “U” shape. Searching around, they found more and more letters, and realized they could create a full typeface from their discoveries. Since then, gerrymandering has stayed in the spotlight, and Gerry has been used on things like the US constitution. Its hard-to-read letters make it less than ideal for legibility, but that isn’t the point — the message is in the shapes themselves.

Talk of bees usually conjures images of buzzing hives acting in concert, but most species around the world are actually lowners, hence this series of chic abodes for less social bees. Honey bees and bumblebees work together, and get most of the media buzz, while solitary bees work alone — not producing honey or wax, but still playing an important role as pollinators in the global food system.

“When we talk about bees, we usually imagine the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) when in reality, around 90 percent of the bee species are considered solitary,” explains Gabriel Calvillo of MaliArts, who designed these bee condos.

“The fact that solitary bees do not generate any ‘consumable product’ for humans has meant that they are not given much attention, but recent studies point to the fact that they are possibly the most efficient pollinators in nature.”

The ‘Refugio’ series contains three different structures, each designed around the preferences of different solitary bees. They feature pine and teak wood finishes, ceramic roofs and steel legs with integrated feeding and watering systems for maximum comfort.

Perhaps most importantly: nearby literature will explain to passing city dwellers what the structures are about, and the importance of bees to the world as we know it.