Urban Design Archives - Public Seminar

The Islandization of Miami

Stephanie Wakefield’s new book explores what “urban resilience” programs get wrong about our future

April 22, 2025 • by Lily Chishan Wong

Do cities have a place in our future? Geographers such as Stephanie Wakefield have identified urbanization as both driver and product of the Anthropocene, the “geological time impacted by human activities.” The uneven capitalist productions of urban spaces, along with operational landscapes required to sustain urban life—such as global supply ...

In Search of the Sublime … Underground

How far can art carry us through New York City’s broken subway system?

February 26, 2025 • by Mary Karmelek

Weekday mornings, as I walk to the 36th Street subway stop in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I quicken my pace, anxious that if I miss the train, I’ll be late for work; worried that if it’s too crowded, I won’t get a seat on the 40-minute commute that lies ahead. As ...

The Promise and Perils of Life in Outer Space

A conversation with architect Fred Scharmen

April 19, 2022 • by Emma Celebrezze and Fred Scharmen

I got really obsessed with these paintings from a NASA project that was about designing giant, free-floating, spinning cities to orbit Earth. I decided to take them seriously as real proposals that were in the lineage of architecture and urban design. What I found was that far from being this ...