"Cities generate close to 85 percent of US GDP and are hubs of innovation and growth. However, structural factors--such as the prioritization of businesses and the wealthy, a long-standing federal bias against cities, state government hostilities toward municipal governments, and structural racism interwoven throughout nearly every pillar of society--have been left to generate and reproduce poverty and inequality in metropolitan areas across the country....

One of our great urbanists and one of our great public health experts join forces to reckon with how cities are changing in the face of existential threats the pandemic has only accelerated
 
Cities can make us sick. They always have—diseases spread more easily when more people are close to one another. And disease is hardly the only ill that accompanies urban density. Cities have been demonized as breeding grounds for vice...