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.

Performance artist Karen Finley actively reimagines Columbus Circle through the conceptual and geometric elements of the mandala.

Presenting one of two runners-up in our Common Shares writing competition: Keith Engel gives voice to a man who takes it upon himself to enforce the rules governing the gray area between personal and collective responsibility.

Presenting the winner of our Common Shares writing competition: Frederica Hill sifts through what her neighbors discard to find her own place in the city.

Last fall, Bjarke Ingels and Daniel Kidd led a Parsons M.Arch studio based on the HUD Rebuild by Design competition brief. In advance of next week’s unveiling of the final Rebuild by Design proposals, Kidd looks back at how the studio informed BIG’s early competition research and shares some of the students’ work.

Sociologist Colin Jerolmack explains how the inescapable pigeon can help us understand the broader systems — natural, physical, and cultural — that build our experience of the urban environment.

In advance of The Architectural League's Beaux Arts Ball on September 28th at the 69th Regiment Armory, we take a look back at the civic and social role of National Guard armories in the American city.

Writer Steven Thomson and photographer Cameron Blaylock respond to Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument, a conceptual sculpture commemorating an Italian philosopher installed at a NYCHA complex in the Bronx.

Hester Street Collaborative's Anne Frederick and Dylan House discuss a temporary pop-up public space on the Lower East Side that creates an asset for the neighborhood while informing and building momentum for the design of a future permanent park.