Q+A: Amanda Hurley, Senior Editor at CityLab

Amanda Hurley is a senior editor at CityLab, an online publication about metropolitan life and the people and places changing how we live. Her work on architecture and urban issues also appear in Curbed, Architect, the Washington Post and more. Study Hall spoke to Hurley about CityLab, the broader relevance of city-centric journalism, and how to write about people even when writing about things. 

Study Hall: What do stories about how we plan and build our cities reveal about us as people?

Amanda Hurley: So much! The city is one of humankind’s earliest and greatest inventions, and as Aristotle said, we are social animals. Living in community is part of what makes us human. The decisions we make about how to build and run our cities, and simply how to exist together in them, say a lot about what we value.

For example: is the city of the future a place where we’ll walk and bike more, or will we go everywhere in autonomous vehicles? This is often couched as a transportation question, but it’s about so much more—how we think about the private versus the public realm, whether we plan to live close together or farther apart, and what we will do (or not do) about the impacts of climate change.

Even though cities have been around for thousands of years and are fantastically complex, urban planning and urban studies are relatively young disciplines. There is new research coming out all the time, which makes this an exciting field to work in as a journalist.

SH: Can you talk a little bit about the five sections of CityLab — design, transportation, environment, equity and life — and why these are useful categories for considering how we live? The ways in which they all come together or intersect?

AH: Together, the sections capture many dimensions of urban life: the design of the physical city around us; how we move through it every day; the interface between the city and nature; the principle that cities should be for everyone; and the vast array of urban (sub)cultures.

There may not seem to be much in common between a story on Brutalist architecture (in the design section) and a story about how country clubs are struggling to attract young members (in the life section). Our audience is broad, but it spans distinct groups of people who are very informed about particular facets of 21st-century cities. (Especially cycling and mass transit, which people really nerd out over.)

Still, there is plenty of overlap. The categories aren’t rigid—I’d guess more than half of our stories appear in more than one section. I think one of the best things about the site is that readers who come wanting to learn about the history of the New York subway can segue from that to the rise of urban farming in Detroit, or why Japanese cities have cuddly mascots, in a few clicks.

SH: CityLab strikes me as unique in that it is both local and global — local in that the reporting is done at the city or even neighborhood level, global in that your coverage spans Madrid to San Francisco. Each story also seems to have a broader relevance beyond the city it is about. How do you see these two seemingly opposite categories interacting? How do you make a local story global and vice versa?

AH: You’re right that we try to be both local and global. Our journalists are based in D.C., New York, Pittsburgh, the Twin Cities, and London. We also work with freelancers around the world because on-the-ground reporting is important to us.

But that broader relevance is key. I sometimes tell writers that the perfect CityLab story is about a local event, project, or idea that will pique the interest of people outside that place, get them thinking and talking.

Let’s say the high-school graduation rate in your city has declined in recent years. If researchers believe a change in school boundaries or some other, perhaps counterintuitive factor has contributed to this—that’s a story for us. If a local nonprofit has hit upon an innovative way to keep kids in school, that’s also a story for us. Without that wider takeaway, though, it’s probably more of a local story.

SH: CityLab does a great job of producing interesting narratives about things like infrastructure, which have the potential to be dry — can you talk a bit about how this is done? Any general rules of thumb to follow for captivating audiences when writing about things (as opposed to people)?

AH: If it’s a dry or abstract topic, we try to relate it to people’s lived experience as much as possible. You can write that the D.C. Metro has frequent delays and long headways (i.e. wait times between trains). But if you describe a platform crammed with hot, frustrated riders, and talk to them, you make the problems of relying on a dysfunctional transit system a lot more relatable. We also follow the usual good-writing advice: avoid passive constructions and jargon terms. (Our audience is so familiar with a few urbanist terms of art, however, that we use them freely. Like “sneckdown” and “induced demand.”)

We’ve found that maps, graphs, and charts really appeal to readers—even graphs and charts that are pretty wonky. They appreciate being able to take in complex numeric information at a glance. It’s a quick and highly visual way into a story.

SH: Ultimately, what do you look for in a story?

AH: I like stories that walk readers through the nuances of a topic without condescending to them, and cut through the minutiae to offer a smart analysis.

SH: And what do you appreciate when working with a writer?

AH: I respond best to pitches that pose an intriguing question and at least hint at the answer, then tell me how the writer is going to suss it out fully. I am not a big stickler about story formats or word limits. To me, the most important thing in a writer is a sense of intellectual curiosity.

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