Cities: Skylines is easily the pinnacle of the city-builder, city-sim genre, having dethroned Sim City. It has its issues, for sure. The lack of mixed-use zoning and the overreliance on car-based travel are disappointing in particular. But, working around that and with the help of a few (hundred) mods, Cities offers an unparalleled canvas for painting a city.

Moments of intense concentration, placing things just right, are interspersed with blissful periods of sitting back and just watching the city work. Immensely satisfying, gratifyingly creative and endlessly mesmerising, Cities has spent half the decade as one of my most successful tools for relaxation.

— My Ten Games of the Decade, Dom Ford

And then there are the birds — so many birds, who all seem so much louder. In fact, it’s likely that they’re actually quieter now than before the pandemic. They no longer have to sing louder to be heard over the racket of the city, a behavior, known as the Lombard effect, that has been observed in other animals, too.

— The Coronavirus Quieted City Noise, Quoctrung Bui and Emily Badger in The New York Times

On Sunday, the New York Times published an op-ed series on cities and inequality pegged to the coronavirus crisis. But a piece on how to redesign urban space post-COVID-19 never once mentions race, revealing a troubling blind spot in the way urban designers talk about this crisis: The idea that safe, generous and accessible common space is fundamental to public life is an essential American ideaas old as the Boston Commonbut if our current catastrophe can help recapture this birthright, it will have served a small purpose. Colonial Massachusetts? Whose birthright are we talking about here, exactly?

— Coronavirus and cities: What urban designers don’t get about COVID-19, Alissa Walker in Curbed

We’re working with London’s boroughs to identify places where temporary changes are needed to support social distancing or that would benefit from cycling and walking improvements.

To help our customers walk and cycle wherever possible, we’re concentrating on three key areas:

• Quickly building a strategic cycling network, using temporary materials and including new routes, to help reduce crowding on the Tube and trains and on busy bus routes
• Changing town centres so local journeys can be safely walked and cycled where possible, for example with wider pavements on high streets to give space for queues outside shops as people safely walk past while socially distancing
• Reducing traffic on residential streets, creating low-traffic corridors right across London so more people can walk and cycle as part of their daily routine

Some of the temporary changes we’re making could become permanent.

— Streetspace for London, Transport for London

Sale goes on to list four ways in which cities should think about slowing traffic down:

1. Cities should not try to move people to facilities but provide facilities where the people are.

2. Cities should be small enough so that inter-community trips, when necessary, could be managed either on foot, by bike, or with some simple subway or trolley system.

3. Cities should attempt to slow down the flow of traffic, particularly with plenty of squares and plazas and parks, places where wheeled vehicles are forced to halt, endpoints that invite stopping and resting.

4. Cities should try to bring home and workplace back together.

— Cities Are Meant to Stop Traffic, Jason Kottke quoting Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1980 book Human Scale

In one of the biggest car-free initiatives of any city in the world, the capital’s mayor announced on Friday that main streets between between London Bridge and Shoreditch, Euston and Waterloo, and Old Street and Holborn, will be limited to buses, pedestrians and cyclists.

— Large areas of London to be made car-free as lockdown eased, Matthew Taylor in The Guardian

Q: Aside from Hudson’s ship, what do we see?

A: Whales and porpoises. One of the earliest sketches we have of Manhattan shows a whale in the Hudson River. The charter of Trinity Church includes a provision specifically saying dead whales found on beaches in the province of New York are property of the church, which could use them to make oil and whale bone. So whales were clearly a meaningful part of the local economy and ecosystem.

— When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries, Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times

Through much of the 20th century, oil derricks towered over homes, schools, golf courses, and even orange groves across the Los Angeles Basin, once among the nation’s top-oil producing regions. Beginning in 1892, when Edward L. Doheny and his associates opened the region’s first free-flowing well, each new strike would quickly attract a cluster of the wooden structures, which supported the drills that bored deep into the Southland’s sedimentary strata.

— When Oil Derricks Ruled the L.A. Landscape, Nathan Masters in Lost L.A.

The message is clear: The storage of empty vehicles is more important than the neighborhood’s fundamental mode of transport. Which is why some of the tensions that have flared during the coronavirus crisis-over runners using the sidewalk, or pedestrians using the bike lane-are particularly tragic. These confrontations are often ascribed to some personality flaw of the runner or pedestrian herself-she’s rude or entitled-rather than seen as an indictment of the misguided system that pits two people on a narrow sidewalk against each other in the first place. No one yells at a parked car, and the driver who scuttles by in the road gets a free pass, even as his driving imposes noise, pollution, and elevated climate risk upon those around him.

— The Pandemic Shows What Cities Have Surrendered to Cars, Tom Vanderbilt in The Atlantic