Urban Omnibus is powered by a diverse group of journalists, architects, planners, designers, artists, activists, scholars and citizens, all of whom contribute their knowledge, opinions, and expertise to this project. Following is an alphabetical list of the people who have collaborated with us thus far. Click on their names to see a list of each contributor’s posts.
Rachel Abrams
Rachel Abrams is Creative Director of collaborative design practice Turnstone Consulting LLC in New York. She is teaching Service Design for Public Space to a class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. In 2007, she co-edited Taxi 07: Roads Forward, as a Fellow of the Design Trust for Public Space.
Seema Agnani
Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC. In addition, she worked with Asian Americans for Equality for several years as a housing development associate while also focusing on fundraising and development; and later served as a coordinator of the Lower Manhattan Health Care Coalition. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
Rachel Aland
Rachel Aland is an Assistant to the Deputy Commissioner of Marketing and Revenue for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. She is a former project associate at Urban Omnibus. She lives in Brooklyn, and works in Central Park.
Nick Anderson
Nick Anderson is Program Associate at the Architectural League of New York. He lives in Brooklyn.
Hillary Angelo
Hillary Angelo is a Ph.D. student in sociology at NYU and the former Director for the Technical Assistance Program for Partnerships for Parks.
Alec Appelbaum
Alec Appelbaum writes about how cities can become greener and fairer for The New York Times, The Architect’s Newspaper and others. He lives on the Lower East Side.
Andrew Balmer
Andrew Balmer is a Project Associate at Urban Omnibus and a senior in the Barnard + Columbia Architecture program.
Diana Balmori
Principal of Balmori Associates, landscape and urban designer Diana Balmori is recognized internationally for her innovative work in the field of landscape and urban design. She teaches at the Yale School of Architecture and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and has recently been appointed a Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C. She serves on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts in Washington, D.C. She lives in New York City.
Kadambari Baxi
Kadambari Baxi is an architect based in New York City engaged in projects that incorporate expanded architecture and media concepts. She is a principal/partner in two collaborative practices: imageMachine and Martin/Baxi Architects. She is also an associate professor of professional practice at Barnard + Columbia Department of Architecture.
Graham T. Beck
Graham T. Beck is a writer and a critic based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He rides a bike to work.
Sidney Blank
Sidney Blank runs the strategic communication design firm Supermetric. His background in architecture greatly influences the methodology and areas of interest of his work as a designer. Sidney currently teaches in the Design & Management department at Parsons, The New School.
Andrew Blum
Andrew Blum is a contributing editor at Wired and Metropolis magazines, and a contributing editor at Urban Omnibus. He lives in Brooklyn.
Anna María Bogadóttir
Anna Maria Bogadóttir is a candidate in the Master’s of Architecture Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Shumi Bose
Shumi Bose is an architectural writer and researcher. She is currently working between London and New York.
William Bostwick
William Bostwick is a freelance writer, podcaster, and editor. He lives in Brooklyn.
Sara Bremen
Sara Bremen is a master’s candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) where she studies new media, computer programming, and interactive design. She is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus. She lives in the West Village.
Jenny Broutin
Jennifer Broutin is a designer based in New York City with professional experience in architecture, exhibition design as well as architectural publication. She has worked with such diverse groups as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Eyebeam Art & Technology Center and Volume Magazine. Jennifer is a partner in the research and development studio fluxxlab. Her multidisciplinary methodology allows her to create work that is thoughtful, engaging and responsive to the environment.
Nick Buccelli
Nick Buccelli is studying architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus.
Vishaan Chakrabarti
Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is an Executive Vice President of Related Companies, where he runs the design and planning operations for the firm’s extensive development portfolio. Chakrabarti also leads the design and planning efforts for the Hudson Rail Yards and Moynihan Station projects. Read more…
Lisa Chamberlain
Lisa Chamberlain is the Executive Director of the Forum for Urban Design and lives in Red Hook. Previously, she studied urban planning at Columbia University and covered real estate for The New York Times.
Candy Chang
Candy Chang is an artist, designer, and urban planner in Helsinki, Finland. She likes to make information more accessible and engaging through design and the creative use of public space. She also likes to improve the ways people share information.
Irene Cheng
Irene Cheng is the co-founder of Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York City and Philadelphia. She is a doctoral candidate in architectural history at Columbia University.
Terri Chiao
Terri Chiao is a co-founder of Katz Chiao, a design and research collaborative based in New York City and Philadelphia. She is a designer at 2×4 Inc. and lives in Brooklyn.
Jack Conviser
Jack Conviser has worked as a licensed architect in Colorado, studied urban planning, and served in the US Peace Corps (Lesotho 2005-2007). He is also a Native New Yorker who has developed a passion for understanding the role of community engagement in design and urban issues, volunteering time with Architecture for Humanity and the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative.
Adrienne Cortez
Adrienne Cortez is a licensed landscape architect with degrees from the University of Virginia and Trinity University, Texas. Recent work has ranged from an intimate city garden to a large post-industrial site. She recently relocated from Manhattan to Dallas to handle project work in Mexico. She can be reached at cortez (at) nyc-uncapped (dot) com.
Carter Craft
Carter Craft is a waterfront planner and licensed Captain working in the private sector. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Planning and the Environment at the Pratt Institute where he teaches the summer Waterfront Seminar. For more than a decade, he has been involved with a wide range of civic and community groups working to revitalize the waterfront including the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance, the Manhattan Island Foundation, the Hoboken Cove Community Boathouse, and the New York Harbor School.
Glen Cummings
Glen Cummings is a graphic designer and writer based in New York City. He is a partner at MTWTF (Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday) and a lecturer in design at Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
Steven Dale
Steven Dale is the founder of Creative Urban Projects (CUP Projects), a boutique planning shop in Toronto, Canada. He is an expert on Cable-Propelled Transit with several years experience researching and consulting on the matter. Steven recently launched The Gondola Project, an information campaign in support of CPT.
Travis Eby
Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
FASLANYC
FASLANYC (aka Roman Davis) works as a landscape architect for an urban design firm in New York City. He also writes the landscape criticism blog faslanyc and contributes to other design journals with features focusing on urban projects in South America.
Laura Forlano
Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies.
Neil Freeman
Neil Freeman is an urban planner and artist. His work has appeared in the Believer, Black Book and the Next American City, and in exhibitions in Chicago, London, New York and Cambridge. He recently received a Master in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He lives in Brooklyn.
Gerald Frug
Gerald Frug is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, he worked as a Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in Washington, DC, and as Health Services Administrator of the City of New York. In 1974 he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, before joining the Harvard law faculty in 1981. Jerry’s specialty is local government law. He has published dozens of articles on the topic and is the author, among other works, of City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (1999), and City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (with David Barron, 2008).
Rosalie Genevro
Rosalie Genevro is the executive director of the Architectural League of New York. She lives in Manhattan.
John Geraci
John Geraci writes, consults and speaks on how to make cities more efficient, effective and livable with web technology. He started DIYcity, a site that invites people everywhere to personally reinvent the spaces around them using common web applications. Previously, he co-founded and served as Head of Product for Outside.in, a leading hyperlocal news site that lets people experience the news right around them in real time.
Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware and the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use, is managing director of Urbanscale LLC, an urban systems design practice. He lives in New York.
Kirsten Hively
Kirsten Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Together with journalist Paul Lukas, she recently co-produced a show at the City Reliquary on the ersatz Candela Structures in Queens, and when not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.
Brian House
Brian House is a bricoleur interested in art, code, and cognition. Currently, he is Creative Technologist at Local Projects, a design studio in New York working primarily with museums and public spaces.
Amy Hwang
Amy Hwang is an architect at Keith Strand Architect and a cartoonist. She lives in the West Village.
The Infrastructurist
The Infrastructurist seeks to engage a general audience with observations the observations, conversations and current events about infrastructure, transportation, energy and the policies that govern them.
Interboro Partners
Interboro is an urban design, planning and architecture firm based in New York City that was founded in 2002 by four graduates of the Harvard Design School. The firm works at a variety of scales with a variety of public and private clients to deliver innovative, award-winning results. Interboro’s working process combines expertise in global development trends with sensitive and rigorous analyses of local dynamics.
Buck Jackson
Buck Jackson is an artist, designer and educator. He teaches furniture craft and digital design at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn and places most of his studio focus on designing skateboard parks and furniture. He lives in Long Island City with a partner and four cats.
Deborah Grossberg Katz
Deborah Grossberg Katz is a co-founder of of Katz Chiao, a design and research collaborative based in New York City and Philadelphia. Deborah teaches architecture and urban design at Temple University / Tyler School of Art, Penn Design and Columbia GSAPP. She lives in Philadelphia.
Alex Kauffmann
Alex Kauffmann is a former innovation consultant and a current tinkerer. He makes art that beeps.
Veronica Kavass
Veronica Kavass is a curator based in New York
Vanessa Keith
Vanessa Keith, AIA is a principal at Studioteka. She is a registered architect who received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her Master of International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, graduating with a concentration in Economic and Political Development and a focus area in urban planning.
Rob Kelley
Rob Kelley manages technology projects that connect mobile, social and local space. His past experience includes JetBlue Airways and WeightWatchers.com. He serves on the Board of NYCwireless, helping to make New York City a better place.
Jane Kelly
Jane Kelly is a Project Associate here at Urban Omnibus. She attends Colgate University where she concentrates in Geography and Studio Art. She was born and raised in New York City.
Janette Kim
Janette Kim is an architectural designer, critic, and educator based in New York City. She is principal of All of the Above and teaches at Barnard College and Columbia University GSAPP, where she is director of the Urban Landscape Lab.
Nancy Levinson
Nancy Levinson is editor of Places. She brings to the role a range of experience in design and practice, most recently as the founding director of the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory and a professor of practice at the School of Architecture + Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University. She received a B.A. from Yale University and Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Diana Lind
Diana Lind is the editor in chief of Next American City. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design.
Douglas Ljungkvist
Douglas Ljungkvist is a Brooklyn based photographer originally from Sweden. His focus is on travel, architectural photography, and personal projects. His work has been published in Condé Nast Traveler, Tate ETC UK, Focus Magazine, and National Geographic Traveler, among others. He is the recipient of accolades from the IPA, The Color Awards, Px3, and was runner-up in the 2009 Travel Photographer of the Year contest, New Talent category. He has exhibited at the Bridge Art Fair during Art Basel in Miami and at Michael Mazzeo Gallery in Chelsea. http://www.douglasljungkvist.com/
Michael Loverich
Michael Loverich believes the Rococo died too young and that our need for carnal, witty and humorous environments must be satiated. With his firm Bittertang he hopes to resurrect the Rococo’s lost agendas and in the process create sensational new worlds and provocative forms of interaction.
Jeff Maki
Jeff Maki is a creative technologist, researcher and activist whose work examines and interprets the ordinary systems behind daily life. His work provokes audiences to take a more active role in the management of public and private infrastructure—systems that increasingly represent power in everyday life. Jeff’s work has been funded by NASA, Google, and the National Science Foundation.
Adam Marcus
Adam Marcus is an architect and writer in New York City. He currently works at Marble Fairbanks and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Barnard and Columbia Colleges.
Jesse Mintz-Roth
Jesse Mintz-Roth is a practicing city planner, originally from Berkeley, who now lives in Fort Greene.
Kate Orff
Kate Orff is a registered landscape architect and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia GSAPP. She is also director of the Urban Landscape Lab.
James A. Reeves
James A. Reeves is a writer, educator and designer currently living in Helsinki.
Steven Romalewski
Steven Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center. His 25-year career has centered around accessing, understanding, analyzing, and publicizing data for public policy development, community planning, and research purposes. He lives in Chelsea, Manhattan.
Stephen Rustow
Stephen Rustow is the founding principal of SRA/Museoplan, a consulting practice working with arts institutions and design professionals on the presentation of cultural collections. An architect and urban planner, he is also a Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union and has written criticism for Praxis, JSAH and other publications. He lives in Manhattan.
Nicole Salazar
Nicole Salazar is a Multimedia Producer at the independent TV / Radio news program Democracy Now!. Previously she studied Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Leni Schwendinger
Leni Schwendinger is a recognized authority on the many issues and applications of public lighting, art and community outreach, creating lighting environments for architectural and public spaces all over the world. For almost two decades, her Light Projects studio has worked to energize architecture, landscape and infrastructure, with the ultimate objective of connecting people to each other and to their surroundings.
Samir Shah
Samir S. Shah, AIA is an architect and writer based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Fellow in Art & Architectural History and has written for various publications, including the Architect’s Newspaper. Samir has taught courses in architecture at the City College of New York and abroad, and is currently principal at Urban Quotient, P.C. , a full-service architecture design firm and research collaborative.
Jesse Shapins
Jesse Shapins is an urban researcher, media artist, curator, and design educator. He lives in Cambridge, MA where he is a PhD candidate in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, pursuing a joint degree in History and Theory of Urbanism and Film and Visual Studies.
Cassim Shepard
Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.
Varick Shute
Varick Shute is the project manager of Urban Omnibus. She lives in Brooklyn.
Anooradha Siddiqi
Anoo Siddiqi is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU. She is a licensed architect and a board member of Hester Street Collaborative, an organization working to involve ordinary citizens in the design of public spaces.
Sam Silver
Sam Silver is a project associate at Urban Omnibus. He is a student at Wesleyan University where he majors in environmental studies and philosophy.
Sarah Slobin
Sarah Slobin is a visual journalist. She spent 15 years at The New York Times where she was trained to report the story from the ground up, find the visual language to translate it, then write, design, chart, edit and produce information graphics. From 2006 to 2008 she was the head of graphics at Fortune Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.
Sarah Snider
Sarah Snider is the Executive Assistant at the Architectural League of New York. She has lived in London, Paris, and the Bay Area, and she now lives at Treehaus Brooklyn.
Brett Snyder
Brett Snyder is the co-founder of Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York City and Philadelphia. He teaches design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
Tim Sohn
Tim is a freelance journalist based in New York and a correspondent for Outside Magazine. Recent stories have taken him from New Guinea to Alaska and from BASE-jumping lessons to the Navy SEALs obstacle course. He lives in Brooklyn.
Matthew Storrie
Matthew Storrie is Associate Curator for The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 and former Project Designer at WW Architecture. He is a student in the Princeton University Master of Architecture class of 2012 and has resided in Brooklyn for the last 2 years.
Roy Strickland
Roy Strickland is Director of the Master of Urban Design Program at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and, with Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, is the designer of the new Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Manhattan.
Carmen Trudell
Carmen Trudell is an architect and inventor based in Brooklyn. Carmen teaches architectural design, sustainability, and technology courses at New York City College of Technology and introductory design at Columbia University. Carmen is a partner in the firm Both Landscape & Architecture, and a partner in the research and development studio Fluxxlab.
Nicola Twilley
Nicola Twilley is author of the blog Edible Geography and a freelance writer with work published in GOOD, Dwell, Wired UK, Volume, and more. She is also co-director, with Geoff Manaugh, of Future Plural; co-founder, with Sarah Rich, of the Foodprint Project; and co-curator of Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture during March and April 2010.
Alissa Walker
Alissa Walker is a design writer who regularly contributes to publications like Fast Company, Dwell, GOOD, Print and I.D., and irregularly contributes to her own blog, Gelatobaby. She lives in Los Angeles.
Sarah Nelson Wright
Sarah Nelson Wright is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She creates interdisciplinary media projects about the urban experience that both explore the changing city and investigate avenues for intervention. She holds a BA in American Studies from Yale and will receive her MFA in Integrated Media Arts from Hunter College in 2009.
Kate Zidar
Kate Zidar is an Environmental Planner working on soil, water and food issues in New York City. She coordinates the Stormwater Infrastructure Matters (S.W.I.M.) Coalition, teaches at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, and runs the North Brooklyn Compost Project.
