TOPIC

City Government

When Care Gets a Charter

Will a new Business Improvement District bring stability and support to East Harlem's placekeepers, or does it spell the end of community stewardship and power?

Cloudbusting

A decade after its original publication, a revised field guide to the urban internet offers a fresh perspective on the era of mass surveillance and AI blitzscaling.

Lessons from 2044

Urban infrastructures are transformed by crisis and ingenuity in three stories pulled from a newspaper of the future.

New City Critics

What Water Wants

The low-lying Jewel Streets neighborhood, once coastal marshlands now cut off from the waterfront, is prone to extreme flooding. What happens if planners and advocates learn to go with the flow?

New City Critics

Temu’s Last Mile

The river of packages running through the city inscribes a hidden geography of resource-intensive e-commerce.

New City Critics

Pothole Chic

Civic leaders have long expressed their allegiances and courted public trust through sartorial choices. Can the current mayor’s OSHA-compliant uniform inspire a new guard of civic engagement?

Shelf Life

Locations, Locations, Locations

Location scouts have shaped representations of New York for decades. Now, changes to the film industry and the built environment both threaten a carefully cultivated way of seeing.

The Null Hypothesis

It’s easy to be a visionary when the alternative is an ash heap. A casino megaproject promised for Queens reveals the persistent failures of imagination driving “development” and its discontents.

Keep the Change

Landmarking has long been one of the few tools available to preserve a building. Can historic preservation adapt to protect affordability and utility alongside cornices and columns?

New City Critics

A Labor of Love

Up a marble staircase, in the attic of City Hall, a trio of civil servants steward an eclectic archive of city objects.