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

To get the city we deserve, New Yorkers must be active participants in its governance. What spaces and methods can help us build democratic muscle and demand moral budgets?

Public art proposals are a highly contested terrain. But the processes for the commissions themselves escape scrutiny.

With democratic institutions and processes at a nadir, a playwright considers the public meeting's mise-en-scene. How might artists help perform power when we are out of practice?

Over more than two decades, Hester Street expanded means and methods by which New Yorkers might shape their city. What does the nonprofit's demise mean for the practices of community planning and engagement in the future?

The interests of the powerful dominate our collective imagination; a visionary thinker prompts us to imagine justice in the here and now, with the tools we already have.

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.

Unfolding alongside New York's latest waterfront planning process, a participatory art project considers what happens when we reorient our attention, and our bodies, toward the city's 520 miles of coastline.

As local newspapers dwindle, an artist revives New York’s classic newsstand to collect and circulate more diverse stories about immigration.

This is what democracy looks like: not only public squares, but office buildings. In the Lower East Side, the Peace Pentagon was the source point for four decades of resistance.