Under Annihilation’s Sign: Public Memory and Prospect Park’s Battle Pass

On the 238th anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, Ben Nadler and Oksana Mironova delve into the ways its history is embedded in Prospect Park and explore different notions of how we memorialize tragedy.

Daylighting Rivers in Search of Hidden Treasure

Restoring paved-over waterways is rightly celebrated for its environmental benefits. Zach Youngerman explores the practice in terms of post-industrial urban revitalization strategies.

Competition Report: Stormproof

Maria Aiolova of Terreform ONE discusses the design group's ONE Prize, an annual design and science award that this year focused on how cities can adapt to future challenges of extreme weather, yielding winning proposals that address coastal conditions from Staten Island to Tokyo to Sumatra.

New Lives for Old Piers

Historical maps and old aerial photographs show New York's shores wrapped with piers reaching out into the water to connect the streets and businesses of a port city to the world.

Paths to Pier 42

Hester Street Collaborative's Anne Frederick and Dylan House discuss a temporary pop-up public space on the Lower East Side that creates an asset for the neighborhood while informing and building momentum for the design of a future permanent park.

Studio Reports

Flux City

Chris Reed shares work from a Harvard GSD landscape architecture studio that considers how productive ecologies drive the development of urban form and uses Jamaica Bay as a case study for exploring the opportunities of richly fluid territories.

Experimental Landscapes: Alexander Felson on Ecology and Design

Urban ecologist Alexander Felson proposes a new kind of ecological practice, one that moves from analyzing nature to shaping it and embeds scientific experiments into the design process.

Learning to Read the Contemporary City

Andrew Wade looks at the experiential learning model in urban studies and how a balance of classroom learning and cross-cultural field research can help students better understand the sociology, planning, and development of cities.