Every day, as I climb the stoop of a beautiful old Brooklyn brownstone, open the door, and enter my sublet apartment, I come across an impressive map of Manhattan Island from the eighteenth century (Figure 1). Part of my everyday landscape in New York City, this map serves a purpose: it reminds me of the backstory of the made lands, intricately interwoven with water, wetlands, and marshlands—features that are no longer easily recognizable in the city today, at least in Manhat

Image 1. The Shed. Photograph by Bas van Heur, 2025. Photos are selective: they frame complex realities by foregrounding certain aspects while backgrounding others, which raises questions about photography’s capacity to capture urban phenomena in a holistic manner. During my fieldwork in New York–part of a longer sabbatical investigating how philanthropic and public funding shapes arts organizations globally–I found myself repeatedly drawn to photographs of arts organization

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 by

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 salon

“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 conference. (Incidentally, it is the second time I have been in this same hotel for a housing conference in a month, but the conference-industrial complex of hotels in Midtown Manhattan is a subject for another post). Late in the day, I step out of the breakout sessions to tend to non-conference business. The atrium, lined with vendor tables,

Renée Zelles, one of the contributors, surrounded by student works exploring Cities and Landscapes. The Urban Space Lab organized an end-of-year exhibit of creative works by students related to their research. Exhibition was open to all Milano students as well as students taking Milano courses. Both Masters and Doctoral students participated. The theme for this year was "Cities and Landscapes," with a call for entries of 2D work, including photography, collage, posters, ma

The Lab caught up with Milano alum David López Garcia (Ph.D. 2021) about his research, and the publication of his book Worker Mobility and Urban Policy in Latin America: Policy Interactions and Urban Outcomes in Mexico City, published by Routledge Press in 2023. David is now an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Read the full text of the interview here.

The Promise of Infrastructure Walking along the sidewalks of Tripoli, you might stumble upon an unusual sight: a miniature airport nestled around the base of a street tree. The words on the sign, “The Tripoli Airport Welcomes You,” are both a reminder of a city’s dreams and a wry critique of the unfulfilled promises of its sectarian leaders. The Qoleiat Air Base, situated approximately 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) northeast of Tripoli, once operated as a joint military-civil ai

A Conversation with Father Carl Public Land in People’s Hands Community Festival at Queensbridge Park, Queens. (2021). Courtesy of Bagchee Architects. As many congregations face declining membership, shifting neighbourhood demographics, and the pressures of a speculative real estate market, an urgent question emerges for the Episcopal Church and other faith traditions: How might we reimagine inherited lands, buildings, and institutional privileges to serve the common good in