Urban Omnibus
Deconstructing Saint Jane
The iconic urban thinker has influenced generations of planners, but how do her ideas hold up in an age of massive upheaval and economic inequality?
Where Care Meets Confinement
For doctors trying to provide mental health care to people who are incarcerated or detained by the New York City Department of Corrections, city jails pose a challenge — and provide an opportunity.
Haul Together
With New York City on the verge of reorganizing the private sanitation industry, union organizer Allan Henry connects the dots between street safety, worker rights, and environmental impacts.
Growing in the Gaps
In post-bankruptcy Detroit, planner Maurice Cox and his interdisciplinary team are making vacancy an asset, revitalizing through preservation, and listening to residents who know the city the best.
Policing is an Information Business
The NYPD vaunts crime mapping technologies from CompStat maps to a vast networked surveillance infrastructure. Who benefits?
Illuminated Futures
The city that never sleeps depends on 396,572 street lights. As bright white LEDs replace the familiar amber glow, what does tomorrow (night) hold?
The Happy Jail
Where do the street trees come from, and where does the compost go? Rikers Island was New York City's growing outpost for years. But does “greening” the jail always improve things for prisoners?
Public Space Arms Race
Battles for inclusion and exclusion in the life of the city more often end in stand-offs than in skirmishes.
Noncompliant Bodies, Accommodating Space
The architects behind “Stalled!” see gender as one of many variables and identities to consider in designing inclusive environments.
Off the Beaten Path
Designing comfort stations to accommodate more than 60 million annual New York State Parks visitors — representing many different genders, backgrounds, and accessibility needs — is no simple task.
Yes Sitting, Yes Skating, Yes Music
Where can teenagers hang out and be safe in public? Members of Yes Loitering, advocates for public spaces where youth can “hang out and be themselves” without fear of reprisal.
Beacon / Bunker
Kris Graves photographs all 77 NYPD precincts from Tottenville to Edenwald, looking to these buildings—sometimes humble, sometimes imposing—for the face and footprint of law and order in the neighborhood.
Home Sharing or Illegal Hotel?
Like many companies in the “sharing economy,” Airbnb prides itself on “disrupting” the traditional marketplace—but at what cost to New York’s affordable housing?
What Jail Can't Do
Frank Greene and Kenneth Ricci discuss the changing paradigms of half a century of justice architecture and what we should ask — and expect — from courts and jails.
Blow-Up Bulwark
Climate change is real, and happening now — but exactly what that means for coastal cities is surprisingly uncertain. Engineers at Princeton’s Form Finding Lab choose flexibility over fortification to protect coastal cities from flooding.
Boxing Gyms in Shrinking Cities: Refuge for the Formerly Incarcerated
Sociologist Lucia Trimbur describes how urban boxing gyms provide an opportunity for a particularly vulnerable population, formerly incarcerated men of color, to "recover from detention and establish stability in the free world."
Along New York's Waterfront, An Opportunity Without Peer
New York's lengthy waterfront was once dotted with an extensive array of piers, reaching like tentacles from the city's shores into the surrounding harbor and rivers. As the city again embraces its waterfront, those that remain are getting new life.
What Will it Take to Build a Smarter New York?
Cassim Shepard and Varick Shute respond to an exhortation by Governor Cuomo to "build [the New York City area] back smarter" in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, and in the face of changing weather patterns, with some ideas on what that will entail.
How Does Urban Farming Fit into the Big Picture?
Irmak Turan discusses agriculture's place in the city, as seen by a handful of Brooklyn activists. From stormwater absorption to community ties, these farms provide more than just fresh food for earthy hipsters.
Returning Big Ideas to Planning in New York
Urban Omnibus declares the visionary work of the Speculation Studio at Columbia University an overdue evolution in architectural education.
City of Costa Mesa
Licking County
Barrett Planning Group LLC
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact Transit + Community
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Tufts University, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning
City of Universal City TX
ULI Northwest Arkansas
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
