Henry Grabar is a journalist, author, and researcher who thinks about cities. Since 2016 he has been
a staff writer at Slate where he writes the Metropolis column, with a focus on housing, transportation, and the environment. His work has also been published in Architect, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other outlets, and he has produced podcasts for Decoder Ring, 99 Percent Invisible, and What Next. His research on French colonial architecture in Algiers after 1962 was published in the journal Cultural Geographies. He was the editor of The Future of Transportation anthology (Metropolis Books, 2019), and was the author of Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Penguin Press, 2023), which was named a best book of the year by the New Yorker and the New Republic.
Henry has discussed these subjects on television and radio, and before audiences at the Brookings Institution, the National Press Foundation, and various conferences and classrooms. He has taught journalism to students from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Southern California, Sarah Lawrence, and other institutions. His story about immigrants in the meatpacking town of Fremont, Nebraska was a finalist for the 2018 Livingston Award for excellence in national reporting by a journalist under 35, and his work has also been recognized by the National Association of Real Estate Editors and the Writers Guild of America. He was a 2024 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Henry graduated from Yale with a degree in American Studies and French.
For commissions and other professional inquiries, he can be reached here.
Portrait by Amy Elisabeth Spasoff at the Mercantile Library, Cincinnati.