This archive collects milestone stories where cities are the driving force behind positive change. From urban planning breakthroughs to local policy wins, these stories highlight how municipal governments, city agencies, and urban communities around the world are solving real problems.
Damascus began taking shape on the edge of a Syrian oasis more than 5,000 years ago, with excavated urban remains dating to the 4th millennium B.C.E. Fed by the Barada River, it later served as capital of the Umayyad Caliphate from 661 C.E. Few places offer such a long, layered view of how human communities endure.
Uruk, on the floodplains of southern Mesopotamia, became what archaeologists recognize as the world’s first true city between roughly 4000 and 3500 B.C.E., eventually home to tens of thousands. It was here that administrators pressed reeds into wet clay to track grain and livestock — the earliest known writing, and the beginning of external human memory.
Cusco was founded around 1200 C.E. in the Peruvian Andes, high in a mountain valley where Quechua tradition says a golden staff sank into the earth and marked the spot. From that small city-state grew Tawantinsuyu, an empire of roughly 10 million people built without wheels, draft animals, or writing — one chapter in the Andes’ long tradition of complex society.
Eridu, founded around 5400 B.C.E. on the marshy edge of the Euphrates, is among the oldest continuously occupied urban sites ever excavated. At its heart stood a small mud-brick temple to Enki, rebuilt on the same sacred ground for three thousand years. The Sumerians remembered it as the place where civilization began.
