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.

Malaika Kim, one of two runners-up of the Fuzzy Math writing competition, traces how the intangibles of her life — the passage of time, acquired knowledge, and changes in lifestyle and family — have shifted her perception and experience of the physical environment in very measurable ways.

Announcing the winner of our Fuzzy Math writing competition: Steven Higashide imagines a near future in New York, in which a new City agency — the Department of Externalities — monitors and evaluates the social and environmental effects of everyday actions.

In the first in a series of profiles of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts, Caitlin Blanchfield reports on how a robust network of community-based groups in Corona, Queens, has put local cultural vitality and institutional partnerships to work in reclaiming a public space for neighborhood use.