All articles by ian steadman
ian steadman
The Victorian Hyperloop: The forgotten pneumatic railway beneath the streets of London
Since the opening of the first underground railway in London over 150 years ago, we’ve settled on a mix of different ways for moving people through cities: train, tram, bus, car, bike, bus, foot. Over the years, though, major cities could afford to experiment with some pretty far-out technologies.
Australian kids could see their Minecraft designs turned into a real life park in Adelaide
For readers who don’t have children – or who aren’t basically children themselves (and we know some of you are)…
Game review: "Cities:Skylines" is the "SimCity" remake you've always wanted
Back around when my family got its first PC in the 90s (a 166Mhz Pentium beast), I also bought what…
Why doesn’t the tube make handpoles out of self-sterilising metals? And what is grippage?
In February 2015, bacteriologists from Cornell University published their results after spending more than a year swabbing New York City’s…
Public transport bodies: producing lots of data, not necessarily making the most of it
There’s an app called Citymapper that is probably the one thing I would consider necessary to my day-to-day life, and…
China's new tool for fighting pollution and climate change: kilometre-tall skyscrapers
Since the emergence of cities during the Agricultural Revolution, humans have struggled not to kill everything they love through bloody-minded…
How to break a bridge with the weight of too many padlocks
Above is the Ponts des Arts in Paris. In recent years it has become necessary that any two lovers visiting…
Why does London have more airports than any other city, anyway?
When you think about it, London does seem to have a lot more airports than it should. In descending order…
A floating city the size of Heathrow could moor up off Hong Kong
Seasteaders are fantastic. They’re toddler billionaires, grumpy and fed up and not going to put up with pesky guv’mint any…
Turning the Thames into a swimming pool is a nice way to reclaim a city's dead public space
The urban design trend in the major cities of the world is for the reclamation of disused infrastructure, for conversion…