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.

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.