If you follow the ongoing and often heated debate over housing policy in Massachusetts, you likely saw the viral moment at a recent Marblehead town meeting, when a resident—dressed like a stand-in ...

The presumption here is that neighborhoods are in some sense “intrinsic,” that the proper form of cities is some “structure of neighborhoods,” that “neighborhood” is equivalent to “community,” and ...

I begin with a confession: the first city I ever visited, outside of that big-shouldered metropolis close to my suburban Chicago home, was Walt Disney World. At least, the Florida theme park seemed ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping design practice, opening new questions about how designers work, what they make, and how the discipline itself is changing. In 1991, two researchers ...

While the first article in this series on artificial intelligence (AI) explored how designers may be uniquely positioned to confront the technology’s implications, this second essay examines AI as a ...

A cone of intersecting strips of red-white-and-blue woven vinyl fabric greets visitors near the entrance to A Temporary Exhibition of Temporal Public Spaces, on view at the Harvard Graduate School of ...

The handful of blocks immediately across Stoney Island Avenue from the newly completed Obama Presidential Center (OPC) in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago are a typical South Side hopscotch of ...

At a moment when forced displacement has reached historic levels worldwide, some of the most urgent urban questions are no longer confined to emergency response but instead concern what it takes to ...

The zoning code has long been the primary policy target for planners seeking to increase housing production. More recently, however, cities that have already enacted meaningful zoning reform have ...

Parsing distinctions between architecture and “mere” building has been a preoccupation of thinkers and practitioners since ancient times. The very difficulty of defining neat disciplinary boundaries ...

Ancient pollen trapped in fresco wall-paintings, like a mosquito in amber, provides a historical ecological snapshot. Compacted grains of garden soil preserve 2,000-year-old footsteps. Even the ...

Gareth Doherty’s book, Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2025. Photo courtesy of the University of Virginia Press.