The quiet radicals remaking the modern city.

Ninety-six pages on the architects, gardeners and night-mayors deciding what a street is for. Plus: a walk through the last analogue darkroom in the city, and why the new museums keep the lights off.

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In this issue

6 features

01Cities

The night belongs to no one

By Marisa Cole

02Art

What the museum keeps in the dark

By Idris Fenn

03Portrait

A gardener for the ruined lots

By Nour el-Amin

04Essay

On the last analogue darkroom

By Theo Vance

05Design

Chairs that refuse to be sat on

By Petra Lund

06Dispatch

Letters from a shrinking town

By Sam Okoro

Editor's letter

We went looking for the slow parts of the city.

This issue began with an argument about lifts. Someone at the desk insisted the most radical thing a building could do now is make you take the stairs, and slow you down, and put you back in your own body. We did not settle it, but we went out to look. What we found, again and again, was people fighting quietly for the unhurried city: the darkroom that will not go digital, the lot turned garden, the museum that turns the lights off so you finally see the work. None of them are loud. All of them are winning.

Rowan Ash, Editor

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