Communities on the front lines of the climate crisis have seen the immediate benefits of locally-managed digital infrastructure. But beyond resilience, grassroots networks are a test case for a collectively-forged technological future.

For high school students in the Climate Resilience Leadership Lab, emergency preparedness means mobilizing the neighborhood.

Rather than extractive economic development, the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative cultivates a vision of home-grown wealth that stays in the borough.

In Sunset Park, a community-owned solar garden promises a new kind of security for long-time residents, and a new life for the industrial waterfront.

When it comes to building schools, a little-known entity with radical roots has had an outsize effect on the city’s skyline. How can the Educational Construction Fund adapt an experimental ethos to changing times?

People returning to city life after time in prison will soon be able to find help at some branch libraries. How can designers help librarians create life-saving connections?

Seed libraries can restart agriculture after disasters. But what of useless plants? Two artists save the spontaneous, weedy species that serve no purpose but their own.

Nandini Bagchee shares her students' work to forge an equal exchange with activists fighting for community space in the South Bronx, in a studio where designers became advocates and advocates became designers.

As Manhattan's Chinatown experiences rapid change, a historic porcelain store on Mott Street reinvents itself as a space for intergenerational dialogue and community activation. UO talks to Mei Lum and Diane Wong, the minds behind the W.O.W. Project, about what they've learned and where they're headed next.

Can public art, oral history, and open dialogue help rebuild burned bridges between estranged community groups? Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani recounts her experience in the Lower East Side's Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA).