Forefront Residency Fellows developed a report to present innovative, multifaceted and cost-effective solutions to improve New York City’s public bathroom system.

Urban Design Forum is thrilled to release 73 Ideas for a Healthier New York City.

Urban Design Forum is pleased to release Tools for Connecting Local Food Systems, a new toolkit to a thriving food system.

Urban Design Forum is pleased to release Streets Ahead: Five Routes to a Thriving City.

This collection of original projects developed by the Urban Design Forum’s Forefront Fellows addresses how climate investment can spur an equitable economic recovery in New York City. Through Cooperative Works, our Fellows explored how to develop innovative financing for green cooperatives, build community power through hyper-local networks, and scale green entrepreneurship. In the Fall 2020, in […]

21 Visions of 2021 is a built environment agenda which serves as a resource and a call to action for the City's next leadership.

Cooperative Works: Equitable Business Development for Building Retrofits explores how to deepen New York City’s climate commitments through investment in minority-owned businesses and workers of color. 

This collection presents the work completed by the Urban Design Forum addressing climate justice issues in New York City through the 2019-2020 Forefront Fellowship. Through Turning the Heat, Fellows developed original design and policy proposals on creating circular economic and sustainable models in NYC, developing community resiliency within NYCHA housing, factoring design into preventative care, […]

In 2018-19, the Urban Design Forum’s Forefront Fellows investigated the homelessness crisis in New York City. This compilation presents the original design and policy proposals developed by the Fellows and accompanying interviews with subject-matter experts.

Leading up to our Cooperative Works program, we are pleased to publish a series of interviews with leaders in sustainability in the built environment, inclusive economic development, and racial justice.

The Turning the Heat report emerges from the Urban Design Forum’s partnership with the Mayor’s Office of Resiliency to research how urban design can mitigate the impacts of extreme heat in New York City’s most heat-vulnerable neighborhoods.

As part of the 2018 Forefront Fellowship, Julie Chou, Kevin Gurley, and Bo Hong developed a booklet highlighting the importance of public bathrooms in the public realm.

In 2017-18, we invited our Fellows and other experts to consider the question of maintaining New York City’s essential infrastructure: its open spaces, roadways, subway stations, public housing, commercial corridors, and green infrastructure.

We are pleased to publish our second class of Forefront Fellows' original design and policy proposals to empower emerging and historic immigrant neighborhoods in New York City.

In the fall of 2016, the Urban Design Forum invited its Fellows and experts to help us craft a vision for the future of mobility in New York City. Within these pages, you’ll find an inventory of imaginative thinking on what our city’s transportation landscape could be.

Our inaugural Forefront class spent the past year meeting with Carto, Intersection, Kickstarter, Sidewalk Labs, and NYU CUSP to discuss how smart city technology is changing the way we experience and build cities. We are excited to publish the cohort's proposals, ideas and critiques on design in the digital era.

During the spring of 2013, the Urban Design Forum invited distinguished civic leaders, developers and designers to pitch bold visions for a more competitive, livable and sustainable New York. The result was a collection of forty courageous proposals imagining rebuilt infrastructure, reformed government, and an animated public realm.

By the City/For the City is an index of ideas about the city centered on accessibility, beauty, connectivity, enjoyment, and social equity.

In May 2007, the Cities Conference on Urban Design gathered for the first time the chief planners of Boston, London, New York, Singapore, Toronto, and Vancouver. Over the course of two days, at a variety of venues in Manhattan, they examined common challenges, shared urban design strategies and argued over what defines a successful city.