"In Suburb, Royce Hanson explores how well a century of strategic land-use decisions served the public interest in Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Transformed from a rural hinterland into the home of a million people and a half-million jobs, Montgomery County built a national reputation for innovation in land use policy--including inclusive zoning, linking zoning to master plans, preservation of farmland and open space, growth...

The High Line, a new park atop an elevated rail structure on Manhattan's West Side, is among the most innovative urban reclamation projects in memory. The story of how it came to be is a remarkable one.

For thousands of years, the Tigris has acted as a lung exhaling life into Mesopotamia. Its cycles of flooding created seasons of plenty and seasons of scarcity. Water was once everywhere, from the northern mountains to the southern marshlands. But it is now beginning to falter, becoming clogged and erratic, and the changing climate is bringing environmental instability to the countries that rely on it. During the pandemic, in 2020, Leon McCarron travelled...