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.

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.

How have dancers and their movements shaped the built environment of New York — and how has the city shaped them in return?

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

In the shadow of the Flatiron, a writer spends an hour conducting her own public space audit.

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.

Local birds evicted from their usual habitats find themselves nesting and hunting atop skyscrapers, power lines, and traffic lights.

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.

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