Public Space

Our historic subway stations are our most used public spaces. Partnering with the private sector will give them the innovation and investment they need to thrive.

Let’s transform New York’s subway stations into public realm destinations that inspire civic pride.

With a forthcoming environmental cleanup and neighborhood rezoning, Gowanus is changing.

The Gowanus Field Station embodies hands-on learning: it is an outdoor classroom designed to also be a storm-water “eco-machine” that will host a green roof, sit next to a bioswale, capture rainwater for reuse, and use a vegetated rain garden to clean sink water before discharging to the canal.

A close read of Fifth Avenue in the Trump era and Mother Gaston Boulevard in Brownsville.

The Urban Design Forum is the proud curatorial partner for the 2017 Times Square Valentine Heart Design competition, led by Times Square Arts. Designed by The Office for Creative Research, We Were Strangers Too, is a public data sculpture highlighting the role that immigrants have played in the founding, development and continued vibrancy of New York City.

Open (Your) Heart is about the greatest love of all - the love of self and what follows - the ability to love others, particularly the most vulnerable amongst us.

Heart to Heart is a temporary public structure that symbolizes how New Yorkers depend on each other, especially at a moment where opening our hearts is more important than ever.

Blind Love is a participatory art project inviting New Yorkers to write love letters to those people who remain in our nation's blind spots during the current era of mass incarceration.

Heartfelt is a participatory public art project which prompts two or more participants to put away their phones and hold hands to light up Times Square, the Heart of NYC.

This installation for Times Square Valentine rethinks the Sacro Bosco for the 21st century: a labyrinthine experience of unexpected encounters with others and with oneself.

In the name of love and immigrants and freedom of movement and right to assembly, this proposal aims to honor both Duffy and the contemporary vitality that this tiny piece of open space supports in the heart of Manhattan.

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.

In Williamsburg, there is a tremendous opportunity to cap the trench of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and build an open space amenity for the South Side Williamsburg community. This is not a tunnel and not a “Big Dig.” Instead, it is a thin deck capping the BQE that could benefit over 160,000 people in the surrounding neighborhood, which is a primarily low-income and Hispanic area.

Partially elevated and partially subsurface, the greenway would extend 3.5 miles from Rego Park to Ozone Park and would serve 140,000 residents within a ten-minute walking radius and an additional 250,000 people within a mile.