Figure 1. Queens Public Library card. Photograph by Yeon-Joo Kang, 2025. “We speak your language,” the slogan of the Queens Public Library, captures Queens as a meeting point of countless cultures, histories, and ways of keeping time. Walking along Roosevelt Avenue, I began to see how multiethnic commercial streets reveal the borough’s dense linguistic and spatial complexity. In Jackson Heights, every corner, passageway, and basement façade becomes a site where immigrant-run

On Friday November 14th and Saturday November 15th, the Urban Space Lab hosted the doctoral student colloquium Urban Worlds: Cities, Spaces, and Materialities .  Over the course of two full days we convened to engage theoretical, methodological, and practical dimensions of urban research.  Sixteen Ph.D. students from six universities presented their work and received feedback from session chairs and audience members.  A substantial amount of the organizational work was done b

Figure 1. Section of Main Street rebranded as “Palestinian Way.” Photograph by Noah Allison, 2025. At first glance, Main Street in Paterson, New Jersey , is indistinguishable from the Garden State’s hundreds of other commercial corridors. Its low-rise built forms comprise an array of low-density commercial and mixed-use buildings with little unifying adornment. Yet, a closer look reveals its distinction (Figure 1). The restaurants, markets, sweet shops, hookah bars, hair salo

“A definitive perspective on fashion follows solely from the consideration that to each generation the one immediately preceding it seems the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable.” --Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project Budapest in midsummer. Hundred-degree days in the dry heat of the Carpathian basin. The sun like a hammer by early afternoon. My wife and I had made the journey here for the past three years to visit friends I’d made while studying at a local university. We me

On a recent trip to London, I had the pleasure of hanging out for half a day at the Barbican, the famed Brutalist residential estate in the heart of The City. My wife Ashley and I took a 90-minute tour of the site with an excellent guide, after which I sat outside at the café attached to the performing arts center while Ashley plundered the gift shop. We had visited the estate back in 2010, so it was exciting to return some 15 years later. It hadn't changed much at all. Th

On an early June day I find myself on the sixth floor of a large hotel in Midtown Manhattan. I am there for a large supportive housing...

Renée Zelles, one of the contributors, surrounded by student works exploring Cities and Landscapes. The Urban Space Lab organized an...

The Lab caught up with Milano alum David López Garcia (Ph.D. 2021) about his research, and the publication of his book Worker Mobility...

The Promise of Infrastructure Walking along the sidewalks of Tripoli, you might stumble upon an unusual sight: a miniature airport...

A Conversation with Father Carl Public Land in People’s Hands Community Festival at Queensbridge Park, Queens. (2021). Courtesy of...

The streets of Kharadar are narrow and labyrinthine, an agglomeration of old and new structures built cheek-by-jowl in the dense urban...

The release of President Biden’s initial infrastructure plan set off a flurry of controversy and partisan debate—what constitutes...