Concrete

Marybelle Landberg sits in her immaculately kept parlor in Lakeville, Minn., just twenty minutes from the Minneapolis streets where she spent 80 years of her life…

Think of the kind of B-roll footage used in an advertisement to represent a post-apocalypse city. Think of stained brick walls, cracked cement, and tipped over oil barrels. While we haven’t suffered such a fate yet, scattered places like this do exist…

Today, over 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities. “Cities are perhaps the most important and complex tool created by humans,” says Ignacio San Martín, Dayton Hudson Chair of Urban Design at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design and the director of the college’s Metropolitan Design Center.

She heard jokes, then laughter. She heard the faint beat of rap songs from an iPod, conversations, and the buzz of cell phones. This wasn’t how her first day of teaching was supposed to sound. It was not the way it was supposed to feel.

On any given day, cities vibrate with activity: businesses, theaters, museums. But when the sun goes down and the people tire, the city keeps moving, breathing.