New issue release! urbanomnibus.net

Over the next year, I’m doing a series about how urban animals adapt to human-built spaces for the Architecture League’s cool magazine @urbanomnibus.bsky.social. First one is about the ways marine life makes use of NYC’s piers and pile fields + the art is beautiful urbanomnibus.net/2025/12/the-...

New dispatches from the 2025–26 New City Critics Fellows urbanomnibus.net/series/new-c...

New release! “Unsettled Ground ” The city’s construction projects don’t just rise skyward, they also dig downward, displacing vast amounts of material whose movement in and out of the city largely goes unseen. Lynnette Widder traces the path. urbanomnibus.net/2025/11/unse...

New release! “A Question About Tomorrow” As goes Ravenswood, so goes New York’s energy future. ‪@oschwo.bsky.social‬ asks what it will take to bring a just transition to the city’s largest power plant. urbanomnibus.net/2025/11/a-qu...

New release! “Life Beyond Line Items” To get the city we deserve, New Yorkers must be active participants in its governance. In conversation, Celina Su and @thinaar.bsky.social ask: How can we build democratic muscle and demand moral budgets? urbanomnibus.net/2025/11/life...

New release! “A Century of Cross Bronx Developments” Who built the Cross Bronx? In Ray Bromley’s history of an ambivalent icon, the answer is as complicated as the highway interchanges. urbanomnibus.net/2025/10/a-ce...

New release! “Swimming Ahead” Speculative proposals by architect Karolina Czeczek ask, What if New York City’s public pools could make a splash all year long? Photos by Anna Morgowicz. urbanomnibus.net/2025/09/swim...

New release! “The Tempest” As midsummer nights get hotter and wetter, @kecaritter.bsky.social surveys how outdoor performance venues and workers are adapting. urbanomnibus.net/2025/10/the-...

Really cool exhibit in the Bronx from @urbanomnibus.bsky.social @nycplanning.bsky.social now through November! Learn about the Cross Bronx, its history, and its impact on local communities through history:

Read the latest from the New City Critics 2024–2025 cohort: "Monuments, Peripheries, and Ecologies" urbanomnibus.net Ellie Botoman, Ekemini Ekpo, Daphne Lundi, Anoushka Mariwala, Philip Poon, and Shirt ask a shared question: How and where do we continue to belong to this place? 📸 Samuel Lahoz

New release! “Permanent Resident” The new Queens headquarters of Make the Road New York is designed as a beacon for its working-class, immigrant community. Mariana Mogilevich tells the story of the building, which closely tracks larger struggles to secure a home in the city. tinyurl.com/ywuaxwj4

“Seneca Village, Envisioned” No visual records remained of a thriving, majority Black village cleared to make Central Park. A multidisciplinary team is using historical research, digital modeling, and informed speculation to return the community to our collective imagination. tinyurl.com/572prshc

New release! “The World is About to Turn” In the weekly Jericho Walk, Ravi Ragbir and the New Sanctuary Coalition (‪@newsanctuarynsc.bsky.social‬) confront a site of darkness and fear for many immigrants, and make sure that friends are not alone in their journey. urbanomnibus.net/2025/06/the-...

"Nowadays I don’t know what story to tell about Flushing." Jefferson Mao for @urbanomnibus.bsky.social: urbanomnibus.net/2025/05/neit...

urbanomnibus.net/2025/05/neit... New release! Globally connected and stubbornly self-contained, Flushing, Queens has never conformed to conventional planning wisdom. In the post-pandemic realm of digital dissociation and global isolation, Jefferson Mao asks, is it more unmoored than ever?

This is crazy-beautiful writing about the city in general and Flushing in particular. 🌆 💗

urbanomnibus.net/2025/05/netw... New release! “Networked Nursery” Preserving and propagating the city’s autochthonous flora, Staten Island’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center, Morgan Mueller argues, is at the center of an unseen infrastructure of ecological restoration and climate adaptation.

urbanomnibus.net/2025/05/sign... New release! “Sign Off” Blank billboards speak to power struggles, policy gaps, and shifting priorities for New York City’s public realm. Photographer Alexa Hoyer and writer Aaron Kang Smithson track them across the boroughs and the last century.

"The Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC) is NYC's only municipal native plant nursery and seed bank. More than just a greenhouse operation, it functions as an ecological infrastructure hub. The center cultivates native plant species adapted to New York’s unique urban and coastal environments..."

Urban Omnibus is soliciting new features, essays, and portfolios! Send us a one-paragraph pitch or proposal along with a little information about you as an author and an example of past work. Email any questions and your pitches to [email protected]. Deadline: Monday, May 19.

urbanomnibus.net/2025/04/try-... New release! “Try a Little Tenderness” A speculative municipal bureaucracy offers infrastructure for emotional support. Daphne Lundi and Louise Yeung of Romantic Urbanism interview Schuyler deVos and Ezekiel Maben about their Department of Tenderness.

urbanomnibus.net/2025/04/a-te... New release! “A Tentative Rollout” Shared e-scooter services around the city's edges are a first step in the long road to micromobility. Urban planner Thandi Nyambose tracks their ups and downs. 📸 Abigail Montes

urbanomnibus.net/2025/04/this... New release! “This Is a Rehearsal” With democratic institutions and processes at a nadir, the playwright Aaron Landsman (@thinaar.bsky.social) considers the public meeting's mise-en-scene. How might artists help perform power when we are out of practice?

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get updates on new stories, special events, and more! Urban Omnibus is an online publication of The Architectural League of New York, dedicated to observing, understanding, and shaping the city. mailchi.mp/urbanomnibus...

urbanomnibus.net/2025/03/home... New feature release! “Home Valuation” @city.bsky.social and @jonathantarleton.bsky.social discuss new stories from Mitchell-Lama co-ops and the LA Tenants Union narrate the housing crisis as a struggle for control, and over the true meaning of a home.

urbanomnibus.net/2025/03/the-... New feature release! “The Power Issue” Noah Fischer’s newspaper from the future imagines how New Yorkers defeat fascism, defend public power, electrify everything, and protect each other from flooding.

Read the latest from New City Critics! urbanomnibus.net/series/new-c...

Thank you to all who joined us for the Romantic Urbanism launch party last Wednesday! It was a joy to celebrate the importance of love and care and public service in our cities and hear from contributors. Listen to the Romantic Urbanism playlist here: open.spotify.com/playlist/5eg...

Please join us for a Romantic Urbanism issue release party and reading! Feb 19, 6 – 8 pm The Architectural League 594 Broadway Suite 607 New York, NY 10012 Free with RSVP www.eventbrite.com/e/romantic-u...

New issue release! For the month of February, we introduce a special miniseries on Romantic Urbanism, guest-edited by Daphne Lundi and Louise Yeung. How does the city support the timeless and universal endeavor of trying to love and be loved? urbanomnibus.net/series/roman...

Over more than two decades, Hester Street expanded means and methods by which New Yorkers might shape their city. Oscar Perry Abello asks what the nonprofit’s recent closure means for the future of community planning and engagement. Co-publisher: @nextcity.org urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/who-...

New feature release! The interests of the powerful dominate our collective imagination; Ruha Benjamin prompts us to imagine justice in the here and now, with the tools we already have. urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perh...

New feature release! Renovated facades provide a window into existential questions for the future of New York City’s public housing. Lizzie MacWillie explores what lies beneath their mixed reception. urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/more...

“At the heart of the controversy over massage parlors is a debate over who has a right to live and work in the city: a classic case of NIMBYism facilitated through municipal code, education law, and social exclusion.” urbanomnibus.net/2024/03/behi...

From flood proofing to ADA compliance to new forms of interpretation, New York City’s historic house museums are preparing for the 21st century. urbanomnibus.net/2024/03/this...

Last month, we interviewed Alexa Hoyer about photographing vacant tree pits in Ridgewood. The exhibition extending this work, Fallow Frames, re-opens this week at Manhattan’s PS122 gallery! ps122gallery.org/2024/02/fall...

Following the Cross Bronx Expressway from west to east, Abigail Montes photographed the road, not from the perspective of the windshield, but as neighbor. urbanomnibus.net/2024/02/livi...

Filled with bricks, scattered with litter, the tree pits of Ridgewood, Queens, have their own peculiar esthetics. urbanomnibus.net/2024/02/in-a...

The Cross Bronx Expressway looms large in the imagination of New Yorkers — but beyond its mythic stature is material fact. urbanomnibus.net/2024/02/livi...

Across the New York City metro region, zoning laws have led to racial and economic segregation. Can understanding this rulebook help us change the rules of the game? urbanomnibus.net/2024/02/a-bi...

Vacant tree pits can sit for years in bureaucratic limbo as the Parks Department works through a long backlog of cases; in the meantime, artist Alexa Hoyer is documenting their found assemblages of rat tunnels, stumps, and concrete. urbanomnibus.net/2024/02/in-a...

“In urban agriculture, what we see and envision are more vibrant green spaces that are in motion. They’re not only growing, sequestering, and retaining, but also they’re creating a space for active work, bringing in people to steward.” urbanomnibus.net/2024/01/what...

Organized labor navigates a changing climate as power plants transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. urbanomnibus.net/2024/01/a-un...

Urban agriculture today extends from small community gardens to commercial hydroponics. New York City seeks to cultivate its many benefits. urbanomnibus.net/2024/01/what...

An architect faces New York City's housing crisis and climate crisis, one building at a time. urbanomnibus.net/2024/01/buil...

“But if Queens is not the future, maybe it is one possible place from which to imagine a particular kind of future. That is, a future based on a multiethnic, polyglot, medium density urbanity.” urbanomnibus.net/2023/12/quee...

Architects think about materials as having embodied energy costs… But materials also have an embodied labor — the human and natural labor used to form them. When we build new, we are replicating energy already spent by a previous building. urbanomnibus.net/2023/12/a-wa...

“The plurality of those coming to New York have settled in Queens. Once they find themselves here, they begin the long process of articulating the built environment to announce their presence, to make it their home.” urbanomnibus.net/2023/12/quee...

A half century of immigration has continuously layered new urban forms on an otherwise unremarkable landscape. urbanomnibus.net/2023/12/quee...