TOPIC

City Government

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.

New City Critics

Three Ways to Reclaim Wood

Brooklyn-based studio Tri-Lox intervenes on the city’s waste stream, repurposing wood to furnish everything from Shake Shack interiors to Shakespeare in the Park.

New City Critics

Power on Wheels

How a Pakistani Rastafarian DJ in Germany came to lead a 25,000-member-strong New York City taxi workers union

The Artist Is Present

What happens when artists embed within city government? For ten years, New York’s Public Artists in Residence have been building bridges and breaking down walls between the civic and the public.

Safer Spaces

With the new mayor promising to deliver “community safety,” one well-established city program charts a path through new public spaces and long-needed repairs at the city’s most under-resourced NYCHA developments.

Designing Mamdani’s New York

At the start of a new mayoral administration promising an urban transformation, eight practitioners discuss architecture’s role in shaping the social democratic city.

New City Critics

Medieval Times

The MTA’s latest military-inspired tactics to curb fare evasion may be fighting the wrong enemy.