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Officials Say Flint’s Water Is Safe. Residents Say It’s Not. Scientists Say It’s Complicated.

“It could be five years from now, and I’ll still never drink this water.”

Four years ago, the city of Flint changed its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Almost immediately, foul-smelling, discolored water began coming out of city taps. For almost two years, the mostly low-income and black residents were left to cook, drink, and bathe in water that was contaminated with lead. The crisis led to criminal charges leveled at more than a dozen state and city officials, thousands of children with dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstreams, and the collapse of confidence between residents and their government.

Now, at the fourth anniversary of the water crisis, state and city officials say the crisis has ended and Flint’s water is safe to drink. But residents aren’t buying it.

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As the Indian capital, New Delhi, has grown in recent decades, surrounding states have sprouted urban offshoots speckled with gated high-rise apartment complexes, glitzy office buildings, and fancy malls.

The most well-known example is Gurgaon, or as it likes to call itself, the “Millennium City”—a suburb often positioned as the future of urban India. It’s a metropolis created by private developers where companies, not local governments, serve the municipal needs of the residents. The result: haphazard urban islands housing the rich and aspiring—but no room for anyone else. The guards, maids, nannies, vendors, construction workers, and other working poor often live in makeshift shanty towns at the edge of construction sites or the city itself.

While spending time in the area, French photographer Arthur Crestani noticed this disconnect between the migrant workers whose labor built the city and keeps it running and those who get to enjoy its exclusive benefits. The workers are at the margins of the margins. In his photo series, “Bad City Dreams,” he has focused on that stark inequality.

The Hidden Workers of New Delhi's Shiny Satellite City

[Photos: Arthur Crestani]

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What many black people want assurance of, when they see a Starbucks opening in their community, is that they will be able to walk into this new establishment without suddenly being made to feel like a trespasser. It’s not that black people don’t want sophisticated amenities in their neighborhoods, or that they don’t drink coffee. The racial income and wealth gaps are real, as is black poverty, but there are certainly enough ably-incomed African Americans who can purchase a $5 macchiato if they choose. What they don’t want, though, is to be viewed with suspicion because of their skin color. That is one of the parts of gentrification that is most difficult to live with.

Suspiciously Black in Starbucks

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The Wakanda Guide to Urbanism

There's a lot to learn from Black Panther about the future of cities. We've compiled everything you need to know.

CityLab has pulled together a Wakanda Reader, or online bibliography of sorts, to indulge those who are interested in the larger questions around urbanism implicated in Marvel’s Black Panther. We would call it a syllabus, but there are already several syllabi available—this #WakandaSyllabus from Walter Greason, an economic history professor at Monmouth University and founder of the International Center of Metropolitan Growth, is particularly good. This Wakanda curriculum for middle school grades from school teacher Tess Raker has also been making the rounds.

As for what else has been circulating, here’s an exhaustive, still-living-and-growing list of articles that build upon the Wakandan mystique.

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When it comes to guns in America, so much of the public dialogue reminds me of issues of faith and religion. In any belief system, faith in the higher truth—God, scripture, or some other spiritual reality—always wins out; faith prevails over reason, over science, over facts, and over civility. The gun debate has taken this turn. It has long ceased to be a dialogue about logic or facts or reason and has become an ideological conflict between people with fundamentally differing worldviews. And if the great religious wars over human history have taught us anything, this clash is likely to take a lot longer to work our way out of than we want to admit.

Why I Won’t Bring My Gun Into My Classroom

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The Maglev Train from 'Black Panther' Is the Transit We Deserve

Vibranium-powered urban rail could be ours. (Except for the vibranium part.)

Among the many dazzling technologies in the new Marvel superhero film Black Panther—self-healing catsuits, holographic self-driving cars, indestructible woven capes—one technology is bittersweet to behold, at least for one subset of sci-fi nerd: the trains. (Spoilers ahead.)

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For “Sanctuary,” an exhibit at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York City, artist Derrick Adams created pieces based on the Negro Motorist Green Book to examine travel through the lenses of history, fashion, and architecture. The Green Book, as it is otherwise known, was a compilation of businesses—gas stations, restaurants, motels, clubs—across the country that were willing to serve African Americans in the mid-20th century.

In the decades before the Civil Rights Act, businesses could discriminate along racial lines with impunity. African Americans relocating, traveling for business, or simply vacationing with their families could find themselves stranded in a sea of establishments that were whites-only. Along the storied Route 66, six out of the eight states that housed the road had official segregation laws on the books. There were also “sundown towns” scattered all across the country, which had explicit or implicit rules about non-whites leaving city borders before the sun set.

When creating the show, Adams says, “The very first thing I thought about was access and boundaries. The way the exhibit was constructed, I want to have this fence going through the space to automatically stop the viewer and make them realize it’s something they have to go through to get to somewhere else.”

An Art Show Inspired by The Green Book

[Photos: Terrence Jennings and Jenna Bascom/Museum of Arts and Design]

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“One day in 1969 while filming a mural across from the Black Panther Party’s Boston office in Roxbury, I was approached by three black youths. The mural depicted an egg cracking open and giving birth to a Black Panther—I thought they were coming to congratulate me for my interest in it.

Instead, a member of the group informed me that they were appropriating the movie camera ‘for the community.’ When I refused to hand it to them I was punched and pushed to the ground. My first encounter with the Panthers only increased my interest in the ghettos in which they were active.”

Photographer Camilo José Vergara has studied the Black Panthers’ street graphics since the 1970s. His reflections on their significance today:

The Black Panther Party’s History of Urban Street Art

[Photos: Camilo José Vergara]

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For Project Backboard, there’s a simple way to turn a dilapidated court into a vibrant community hub: Just color outside the lines.

The nonprofit, which was founded in 2014 by Daniel Peterson, has renovated public basketball courts in cities from LA to St. Louis. According to people involved, the group cuts through bureaucracy and makes public art happen quickly. “It’s always easier for [cities] to say ‘no,’ and just stick to the standard script rather than try something different,” Peterson said. But he’s not buying it. “Cities will start recognizing that making basketball courts special in this way will make the public space more vibrant, especially in cities that aren’t like New York, that don’t have the same type of street culture.”

A Brighter Future for Run-Down Basketball Courts

[Photos: Daniel Peterson/Project Backboard]

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Part of the social programming is the idea that the poor are this tiny population of probably pathological people. It's really important to understand that in the United States, 54 percent of us will be in poverty at some point in our lives between the ages of 25 and 60. Two-thirds of us will access a means-tested public program, which is just straight-up welfare. So, the reality is these systems are already a majority concern.

The Rise of ‘Digital Poorhouses’

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In artist Hannah Rothstein’s series “National Parks 2050,” she reimagines seven historic posters, originally designed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) between 1938 and 1941, to show what the parks might look like in 2050 after being damaged by climate change. 

“[The posters] are representative of a time during which we remember America being very great, and I wanted to take that symbol of greatness and examine what we are likely doing to it through our current actions,” Rothstein says.

What Will America's Iconic Parks Look Like in 2050?

[Left side: Original WPA (or Ranger Dave) poster; Right side: Rothstein’s 2017 poster]

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"Detroit never died. It might have gone to sleep for a minute, but it never died. The people and the energy just would not let it.”

Native Detroiters Lauren Hood and Adriel Thornton offer CityLab an insider’s view on visiting Motor City:

Travel Like You Live Here: Detroit

[Illustration: Mike Burdick]

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For local residents, starting work in this facility or one like it can seem like a blessing. At around $12 an hour, 40 hours a week, full-time jobs pay higher than many others in the region, and the benefits are also better than many other jobs in the industry. But workers are required to be on their feet all day, and receive scant time for bathroom breaks or lunch. They’re pressured to meet certain production goals and are penalized by getting 'written up'—the first step in getting fired—for not meeting them, they say. They’re also allowed very little time off, and written up if they go over a certain amount of time off, these workers say, even if they get sick.

What Amazon Does to Poor Cities

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Salvadorans are the largest group of immigrants in Washington, D.C., surpassing Mexicans, Cubans, and even Puerto Ricans. But that number could decline next year after the federal government’s decision to repeal the Temporary Protected Status, a benefit that since 2001 has allowed 200,000 Salvadorans to live legally in the United States, and which expires on September 9, 2019.

After that date, every Salvadoran who hasn’t changed her immigration status to another kind of visa or green card could be subject to deportation. The nation’s capital is home to the largest group of Salvadoran beneficiaries of this humanitarian policy: More than 32,000 Salvadorans from who live and work in the Washington metro area have TPS.

Mayor Muriel Bowser vowed in a statement to support these residents in whatever limited way she can, but Salvadorans in D.C. say Trump’s announcement has exacerbated other threats they face to staying in the city itself—like rising housing costs and changing neighborhood demographics.

What Could Happen to Washington's Salvadoran Strongholds

[Photo: Martín Echenique/CityLab Latino, Chart: Madison McVeigh]

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A report released this year by the Economic Innovation Group, a research group started by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, found that one in six Americans lives in what the group calls “economically distressed communities” that are “increasingly alienated from the benefits of the modern economy.” Such communities have high shares of poverty, many housing vacancies, a large proportion of adults without a high-school diploma, high joblessness, and a lower median income than the rest of the state in which they are located. They also lost jobs and businesses between 2011 and 2015.

Many of these distressed communities are located in Rust Belt states like Ohio, New York, and Michigan. They include Youngstown, Buffalo, and Flint. In the months after the 2016 election, there was a lot of conversation about how people living in these areas felt left behind by the changing economy and the prosperity in the rest of the country.

The Places That May Never Recover From the Recession

[Photos: Jae C. Hong/AP and Alana Samuels/The Atlantic]

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Northern England is set to get a whole lot greener. On Sunday, the U.K. government unveiled plans for a vast new forest spanning the country from coast to coast. Shadowing the path of the east-west M62 Highway, the new forest will create a broad green rib across England from Liverpool to the east coast city of Hull.

If fully realized along the lines announced this week, the forest will ultimately contain 50 million new trees, stretched in a dense 62,000-acre patchwork along a 120-mile strip. Not only will the forest repopulate one of the least wooded parts of the country with local, mainly broadleaf tree species, it will also provide a band of newly greened landscape to escape to from the many big cities located nearby.

Britain's Next Megaproject: A Coast-to-Coast Forest

[Photos: Woodland Trust]

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In a secluded area of New York’s Catskills Mountains, there’s a small campsite that promises a full escape. The woods seem to continue forever in all directions, and aside from the occasional hiker, there’s no one to be seen. For the visitors who are here, a few tiny-home cabins offer just the bare necessities.

It’s an attractive spot for nature lovers, and perhaps even more so for visitors from New York City, with their reputation for fast-paced, overstressed lifestyles. That’s exactly what Getaway, the startup behind this campsite, wants to help them with.

City Life Stressing You Out? Flee to These Tiny Homes in the Woods

[Photos: Getaway]