Robert Moses

The fight for a dignified space to carry out the most basic of human functions was popular when 19th-century Progressives took it on. It's time to take up that fight again.

The history of garbage dumps is the history of America.

A compelling history of the fertile 1950s-’60s firmament surveys Lower Manhattan’s Coenties Slip.

“If the public pool isn’t available and open, you don’t swim.”

Robert Moses' final project, Co-op City, both reflected and defied major trends in New York City.

“That spirit of community, which we all talk about as the roots of hip-hop, really originates in that block party concept.”

Biking innovations brought riders freedom. But in a world built for cars, life behind handlebars is both charmed and dangerous.

Three books offer views of the shift from public planning to neoliberal privatization, and emphasize the need to reclaim planning in the public interest.

From Seneca Village to “urban renewal,” the government has claimed Black property—rarely with the “just compensation” promised by the Fifth Amendment.

The new film is set in a now-bulldozed Black neighborhood, so why is it all about whites and Puerto Ricans? Because it really takes place in Los Angeles.

How public interest groups inadvertently aided the right’s ascendency.

Peter L'Official on the Mythologies Behind Urban Renewal.

“Modern Housing,” by Catherine Bauer, argued—as many activists do today—that a decent home should be seen as a public utility and a basic right.

In the turbulent 1970s, the balm of pop cultural nostalgia set the tone for today's political reaction.

Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters in the ’60s.

Nearly 80 years ago, a construction standstill derailed the subway into its present crisis.

At least one monument has come down this summer, but two streets in Brooklyn have proved difficult to rename.

Racial injustice is not a regional sickness. It's a national cancer.

What E.B. White, Mickey Spillane, Death Wish, hip-hop, and the “Summer of Hell” have in common.

How garbage physically shaped the development of New York.