Past Projects

NewCities has helped shape the urban narrative since 2010. Browse through an archive of our past work, press, and network of contributors. 

Events

The Big Rethink – Housing

Apr 13, 2020

Room for ImprovementApril 21, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Global orders to “shelter in place” implies housing is indeed a fundamental human right, but even a cursory reading of housing policies suggests this is an aspirational goal, at best. The economic fallout of COVID-19 has pushed two unspoken truths about housing into the…
Events

The Big Rethink – Public Transit

Apr 07, 2020

How Public Transport Bounces BackApril 14, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars,” former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa once said. “It’s where the rich use public transportation.” At the moment, America’s urban elites are definitely not taking transit. Trains and buses are empty save for…

The Big Rethink – Public Space

Apr 07, 2020

Pandemics and the Public Realm April 7, 2020 | 9am PDT | 12pm EDT Joni Mitchell’s refrain that you “don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” has never felt more applicable to our urban public spaces. The plazas where we congregate, the thronging walkways, the parks we think of as “the lungs of the…
The Big Picture

Will COVID-19 Make Us Think of Cities Differently?

Mar 20, 2020

SARS-CoV-2, or ‘COVID-19’, is quite a formidable foe. Easily transmissible, low-mortality rate, the flu-like virus spread across national borders and social strata with little discrimination. Cities and urban thinking might be fundamentally affected by the present reality of quarantine, social distancing, and global dis-connection. Will all of this drive a change in the way we…
The Big Picture

Open Letter to Citymakers: 10 Key Implications of the COVID-19

Mar 19, 2020

On January 21st, I traveled from Shanghai, my adopted home, via a one-day layover in Los Angeles, on my way to spend several weeks in Boston for some non-critical medical treatments. The next day, the first case of Coronavirus hit Shanghai. Four days later, my husband, who owns an import-export business joined me in the…

A Solo Space For All To See

Mar 19, 2020

Social distancing. A blend of physical distancing and virtual organizing at a time of “pandemic peril” and “Google Urbanism” presided over by the World Health Organization and the happiness industry. In self-isolation as in lockdown, data collectors mine the coronavirus as well as the citizenry. What happens when digital surveillance becomes “good for you,” so…

The Time Before Shelter, The Time Now

Mar 19, 2020

I moved to New York on the heels of 9/11, in the summer of 2003, when the bathtub—which is what we called a massive hole in the ground that had once been the base of the Twin Towers—had been full excavated, and a discussion about rebuilding had just hit full swing. I’d just graduated with…

The U.S. National Healthcare Security Cloud

Mar 19, 2020

In April 2020, Kinsa, an American connected health company, announced a project tracking epidemic outbreaks with smart thermometers in collaboration with Benjamin Dalziel, an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. The project is based on Kinsa’s U.S. Health Weather Map which claimed to predict the flu season in the United States 12 weeks in advance.…

Carehaus: Designing for Care, Building Community

Mar 17, 2020

Caregivers play critical frontline roles in regular illnesses and especially in the Covid-19 pandemic. In the pandemic’s early stages, when our children have the flu or a bad cold, care-workers filled in so that we could continue to go to work. Throughout the pandemic, caregivers for the elderly and those with reduced mobility function as…