Journal
Reports, analyses and features from all 195 countries - the journalism behind the journeys.
Cartagena's Hidden Neighborhoods, Street by Street
Past the walled city, the barrios stretch toward the sea. The real Cartagena eats at plastic tables and dances until 4am on Tuesday.
Tbilisi After Midnight: The City That Never Settled
A club in a drained swimming pool under a football stadium, sulphur baths in use since the city was founded, and a nightlife that in 2018 became the place a national argument was held.
Count the Lit Windows
A historic centre on a Tuesday evening in February, and the arithmetic that emptied it. Nobody decided to hollow out the old town; several thousand owners each decided, correctly, that visitors pay more than neighbours.
Younger Than the People Walking Through Them
Warsaw, Dresden and Frankfurt each rebuilt what the war removed, and each did it for a different reason with the same technique. The conservation objection, the residents’ reply, and why the newest old town is interesting about something else.
A City Built for the People Who Live in It
Proximity planning is a policy about residents that has quietly become the best thing to happen to walking around a strange city — and the reason a hire car will collect a fine four weeks after you returned it.
Several Hundred Thousand People Optimised for the Same Thing
The same café has opened in every city on earth and nobody franchised it. A feedback loop with one fixed point — plus the case against the traveller’s complaint, and the thing that is genuinely being lost two streets away.
The Lever a Planning Committee Already Has
A city cannot cap arrivals without a border. It can cap beds with a planning committee — and a growing number have. What a bed cap reaches, what it misses entirely, and where the value moves when it lands.
Four Instruments and a Housing Market
Registration, night caps, zone refusals and principal-residence rules. The anatomy of short-let regulation, why an unlicensed listing is the guest’s risk rather than the host’s, and what an enforcement action does to a booking.
A Hundred People in One Alley
Overtourism sounds like a quantity problem. Nearly every measured case is a concentration problem — a few streets, a few days, an afternoon peak set by twenty scheduling decisions. Including, this magazine should admit, decisions like ours.
The Fee That Was Never About the Money
Venice became the first major city to charge day visitors for entering it. The amount is trivial, the revenue is small, and the residents are unconvinced. What the scheme actually produced was advance notice of who is coming — the one number the city never had.