Urban design: why architects should look beyond property lines

In October of 2012, Hurricane Sandy pummeled the city, inundating southern Manhattan with flood waters from storm surge and record-high tides. Streets and subways were flooded, two million people lost power, and nearly 70,000 residential units were damaged. In its wake, the disaster spawned a moment of infrastructural opportunism for New York City.

A selection of the ideas born in “Rising Currents” were fine-tuned for the 2014 Rebuild By Design competition, an initiative led by the federal Housing and Urban Development agency in partnership with the Municipal Art Society, Regional Plan Association, NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, and the Van Alen Institute with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. This sparked the National Disaster Resilience Competition, a federally led model of allocating post-disaster funds, guided by innovation and expertise with community insight. Between 2011 and 2024, New York state received over $27.8 billion in federal disaster assistance from NDRC and other sources related to extreme weather.

In New York City, much of those dollars have been put towards “soft” or “spongy” urbanism, strategies that increase permeability and water absorption, adapt parks and public spaces to avoid or accommodate flooding, and implement berms and floodwalls where necessary. The Climate Week event I spoke at, organized by the University of Miami’s Climate Resilience Institute and Battery Park City Authority, was focused on just these kinds of strategies, and hosted at one of its premier locations, Warner Park in Battery Park City. Part of the Lower Manhattan Coastal Resiliency Strategy and a segment of the Rebuild by Design-funded BIG U, the new Warner Park is designed to reduce flood impacts by integrating passive water capture and filtration systems through lawns and native plantings, with active flood control when needed. Permeability and adaptability are prioritized without sacrificing views and recreational space — or beautiful design — from the material choices of the floodwall and deployable gates to the rooftop garden.

From Battery Park City I walked north on a thickly vegetated, shady, separated bike and pedestrian trail — not feeling New York-like at all — to the hauntingly sublime 9/11 memorial, then on to the Calatrava-designed Oculus, a transit station buried in a monumental mall. Earlier in its design phase, I pointed to the Oculus as a moment of infrastructural optimism, an aspiring celebration of connectivity and redemption in stark contrast to the limping bus system in post-Katrina New Orleans. Day two included a walking tour of the evolving mixed-use neighborhood along the formerly industrial Gowanus Canal, the result of the Gowanus Lowlands Masterplan and subsequent rezoning. Organized by Tom Klein, director of the Center for Urban & Community Design at the University of Miami and former project manager at SCAPE Landscape Architecture, the tour was led by the Gowanus Canal Conservancy with contributions from members of the New York City Department of City Planning, SCAPE, and environmental consulting firm Langan.

That afternoon, the Waterfront Alliance organized a boat tour that cruised by half a dozen projects certified by the Waterfront Edge Design Guidelines, or WEDG, a relatively new assessment structure that encourages resilient, accessible, and ecologically beneficial waterfront design for this new age of climate change pressure. Everywhere I turned, there was new housing, robust pedestrian and bike infrastructure, transformed industrial fabric, and thick green park space. New York was very different than the last time I was there.

Highlighted in each tour was the army of collaborative partners necessary to move projects from idea to implementation — city, regional, and state agencies; community members and organizations; transportation authorities; environmental groups; private property owners; and, of course, designers and planners. Along with them came the recognition that political will and culture have been moving towards this reformation for much longer than a decade. At the center of these efforts are urban designers. Though it’s undeniably an all-hands-on-deck process, to reference my colleague Sagi Golan, deputy director of urban design in New York’s Department of City Planning, the urban designers are the ones at the table leaning over the (real and metaphorical) sheets of trace and holding the sketch pen.

At the Urban Design Matters conference the next week, more time was dedicated to this premise. What New York was verifying in real life was the same thing that drew me to urban design in the first place — change happens beyond the scale of the discrete object, beyond the boundaries of singular development, and beyond the scope of individual agencies or owners. Cities are made up of complicated, interconnected systems and their often unequally distributed assets — transportation, water, air, finance, housing, education, waste, even power. The territory of urban design is in negotiating those forces in ways that improve holistic quality of life while reducing resource use all through the mechanisms and innovation of design. And though urban designers are central, it is absolutely an interdisciplinary effort.

So, what did I bring home with me to St. Louis? These two cities are markedly different, particularly in scale and density, but we are all facing the challenges of complex climate realities. Had I visited St. Louis 16 years ago, I would’ve crossed a stark lawn and a wide highway, or parked in an anonymous 1600-space parking garage, to get to the base of the Gateway Arch. The parking garage is gone, replaced with a new retention pond, water-absorbing prairie grasses, and bike access to the Mississippi River. A land bridge now completes the axis from downtown to the Arch, and a new effort to extend the park grounds across the river is underway. Unlike the pearl grey marble floodwall of Battery Park, our industrial concrete version annually attracts some of the best street artists in the nation for the competitive Paint Louis festival, a celebration, perhaps, of our persistent grittiness and outsider status.

St. Louis is not New York, and I generally find the wide variety of our cities to be a positive thing. St. Louis is a picturesque, park-rich, highly affordable city, but also a city with a deep and troubled history. It is both southern and northern, eastern and western, on a mighty river, with a Midwestern sense of texture and authenticity. In May of 2025, we had our own version of hurricane Sandy — an EF-3 tornado that ripped through Forest Park and north St. Louis, damaging 6,000 trees and over 10,000 structures and killing five residents. In a city with limited resources, under a federal administration antagonistic towards aid, we are still figuring out what our rebuild by design might look like. Though the responses will certainly be different, the process must be inclusive, community-centric, and patient.

The wicked problems facing the globe — crises in climate, public health challenges, extreme wealth disparity, and infrastructure collapse — don’t fall tidily in any disciplinary basket. Urban designers are uniquely skilled to think, work, and create in those complicated systems, to work across and with competing interests, to engage community, and to envision creative, multi-dimensional, cross-sector, and cross-scalar solutions. Our job is to continue to transform cities, in small fast ways, and in big slow ways, making places that are more local, flexible, and adaptable for the people who live there every day, or who visit once every 16 years.