Policy

With a mandate to decarbonize the city’s building stock, how can New Yorkers reconcile a transition to so-called clean energy with the environmental and cultural impacts of extraction beyond the city’s borders?

Designed for other uses and users, Corona Plaza has become a critical infrastructure for streetside selling. In the face of economic and legal pressures, vendors are organizing themselves and the space to ensure both individual survival and collective prosperity.

Public space may be essential to urban life, but its benefits are far from universally enjoyed. Could a municipal Department of Care bring context-sensitive design and services to every corner of the city?

After a historic oil spill and an unprecedented financial settlement, a Brooklyn community oversees its ecological repair.

The geography of methadone treatment in New York City follows familiar patterns of discrimination, while clinics subject patients to punishment, not rehabilitation. Does this one kind of medicine need its own space in the first place?

In Western Queens, activists see a waterfront warehouse as an opportunity to broaden the horizons of a community's control over its own future.

Announcing the launch of a campaign to create a new fellowship program empowering fearless and diverse voices to challenge the ways we design, plan, and develop our cities.

The Bronx County Building embodies the New Deal era's ideals of robust government presence in everyday life, for better and worse.

In Berlin’s city center, an activist-led redevelopment scheme is setting a bold example for rescuing financially valuable public land from privatization and gentrification.

New York City’s peaker plants are conspicuous emblems of a carbon-intensive energy economy — and its disastrous consequences.