Navigating Policy Toward a Good Food New York

Food chain expert Karen Karp weighs in on the complex policies behind school lunches, equity and access to healthy food, and ambitious new initiatives to better connect New York City residents to upstate agricultural wealth.

Room for All: Designing for Special Needs

Tamara Petrovic and Garner Oh discuss how their design of a series of interventions to address special mobility needs fosters independence and well-being for people of all abilities.

"The scythe of progress must move northward”: Urban Renewal on the Upper West Side

Oksana Mironova documents varied approaches to City-led redevelopment in Lincoln Square and the West Side Urban Renewal Area and calls for an evolution of contemporary rezonings to prioritize the preservation of existing communities.

Staying Power: Organizing for Affordable Housing in New York City, Past and Present

An exhibition at the Interference Archive illuminates the long history and remarkable continuity of organizing for affordable, safe, and stable housing in New York City.

Profiles in Public Service

Putting Health in All Policies

Marlon Williams, Director of Cross Agency Partnerships at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, describes how the city's built environment impacts health, his work with the Center for Health Equity, and the challenges and promise of cross-agency collaboration.

Maintaining NYCHA: Debunking the Myth of Unmanageable High-Rise Public Housing

In an excerpt from the new book Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy, Nicholas Dagen Bloom challenges the assumption that high-rise public housing is fundamentally unmanageable by examining the history and vital importance of NYCHA’s dedicated maintenance staff.

The Right to Budget

The week before New Yorkers hit the polls in the city's participatory budgeting process, journalist John Surico tracks its evolution from non-profit project to institutionalization within the Council Speaker’s office, learns of its achievements and frustrations, and contemplates the future of this exercise in direct democracy.