Culture
What Defined the Decade Since CityLab Launched
What’s changed and what hasn’t since we set out to chronicle cities in 2011? To answer this question, we went back to CityLab’s roots.
It was almost a decade ago, in 2011, that this very website was launched, at the time dubbed The Atlantic Cities. The conceit, then as now, was that “to understand cities is to get a handle on how most of us live, work, and play,” as CityLab editor emeritus Sommer Mathis wrote at the time.
Now, an even greater majority of the world’s population lives in a town or a city. And cities have increasingly become the places where some of the most pressing issues of our time may be decided.