Maintaining Decomposure

Grassroots groups have kept organic waste collection alive in neighborhoods across New York City during a most difficult year. For community composters, the stakes of an equitable waste system stretch far beyond the pile.

Terra Incognita

Encouraging New Yorkers to probe the mysteries of the material beneath their feet, the Urban Soils Institute is moving knowledge of urban soils outside the domain of science and into the hands of communities.

End of the Line

An architect follows the path of a nearly-finished, controversial pipeline in Brooklyn, casting underground infrastructure against the resilient physical and social fabric of the communities above.

Studio Reports

Green and New

In the service of one of the most ambitious policy frameworks in living memory, design students conjure future visions of environmental recovery where social justice comes first.

Follow the Frontline

Communities of color have long been the vanguard of New York City's environmental justice movement. How can designers support and learn from their efforts to mitigate a climate crisis that is up close and personal?

Down to Earth

Viewed from the perspective of its raw material, Manhattan’s brassy Seagram Building illuminates architecture’s massive energetic and social consequences.

Gimme Shelter

Photographs of Prospect Park’s unsanctioned constructions simultaneously suggest traces of past settlement and the start of a new civilization. Behind the scenes is a struggle for ecological succession among salamanders, kindergartners, and park management.

Posts from the Edge

Unfolding alongside New York's latest waterfront planning process, a participatory art project considers what happens when we reorient our attention, and our bodies, toward the city's 520 miles of coastline.

Before the Surge

As larger projects are debated and delayed, an array of sandbags, earthworks, and other humble infrastructures of defense are emerging across New York City to provide buffers against the sea.

Dispatches

Making Science Actionable

The Urban Systems Lab talks about overlapping social vulnerabilities to climate change and COVID-19, and their efforts to gather and share the data that matters most in a complex and ever-shifting situation.