Urban Planning Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

A big deal that’s not nearly big enough: what the “city of yes” will (and won’t) do

March 18, 2025 • by Center for New York City Affairs and Richard McGahey

In January 2025, Urban Matters, Center of New York City Affairs's weekly journal of ideas and opinion, wrapped up a wide-ranging two-part interview with noted urban policy expert Richard McGahey on the likely impact of New York City’s newly adopted "City of Yes" zoning package intended to jumpstart housing production. ...

Why Progressive “Myths” Distort Solutions to the Housing Shortage

Migration

A City on Fire

Arson and neglect in 1970s Utica, New York

October 4, 2022 • by Susan Hartman

Some residents still remember the bumper sticker: “Last one out of Utica, please turn out the lights.” Absentee landlords bought houses at auction—then hired people to burn them so they could collect the insurance money. And some owners torched their own homes. “Arson rates just skyrocketed,” Chief Ingersoll said. In ...

The New School

Albert Mayer’s Urban Village: Between The New School and India

A global conversation about using design to foster community

July 16, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

The New School does not look like most other universities, even those in large cities. It has no college green around which buildings are situated; no common architectural style; no grand monument-like buildings with Latin phrases carved into granite. Instead, it is a disaggregated collection of buildings, most in the ...

History

The QE2 Bridge and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) Hangover

A collectively inherited misfortune

February 4, 2020 • by David Anderson

High levels of traffic mean that the bridge is routinely denounced as Britain’s worst section of motorway, although it is in fact technically only an A-road, and not an M: this, according to a helpful attendant at the ‘crossing office’ on the Dartford side, being to permit the passage of ...