Culture
CityLab Daily: How Geocities Suburbanized the Internet
Also: A black-led food co-op grows in Detroit, and Tokyo offers free food to ease subway crowding.
Keep up with the most pressing, interesting, and important city stories of the day. Sign up for the CityLab Daily newsletter here.
Cyber-sprawl: It’s 1995. You’ve just purchased a Windows laptop, and thanks to the miracles of dial-up, you’ve joined 16 million other users on the World Wide Web. But where do you go? While AOL and Netscape helped early users find their way around the net, it was Geocities that gave them a home. It did that by building “neighborhoods”—communities based on interests and hobbies, where users picked empty lots to build out their web presence and engage with their neighbors.