There are hundreds of miles of space beneath the city’s elevated transportation infrastructure, much of it underutilized and uninviting. Here, a team of designers and planners discuss a two-year study investigating creative yet practical ways to enliven and expand access to these corridors of public space.

Composer and acoustician Anne Guthrie explores our fraught relationship with urban sounds and takes us on twelve sonic explorations of the city.

Earlier this year, a group of community advisors in Queens attended a community design school to formulate proposals to reconnect Flushing Meadows Corona Park to the surrounding communities. We hear from Design Trust Fellows Sam Holleran and José Serrano-McClain and Community Advisors Esther Sánchez and Jason Chin-Fatt on how it all went down.

Laura Hansen explains how the Neighborhood Plaza Partnership supports the local non-profits that operate the city’s newest plazas and asks how much we should, and can, rely on private support for maintaining our public realm.

Damian Santucci, Director of Production and Operations for the Times Square Alliance, walks us through the groundwork behind the spectacle of the Square and the logistics of coordinating hundreds of events, film shoots, and public art installations in a public space that sees 350,000 visitors a day.

For more than 200 years, street vendors have been an integral part of New York City. Their mobility and flexibility make vendors beneficial extensions to existing fixed systems during moments of crisis.

Urban planner Daniel Campo and public artist Dylan Gauthier revisit the Williamsburg waterfront, once an informal playground on abandoned land appropriated by residents, and discuss how unplanned open spaces can create potential for adventure and discovery.