Category: 2020 Spring

Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor BY EVAN HAZELETT May 21, 2020 Dear readers, I am pleased to present The Urban Review’s third edition, I’s on the Street. In this collection, we bring together work from graduate students at three universities across several degrees and disciplines. The authors, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Columbia [...]

Finding Space (and Myself) in Chinatown

Finding Space (and Myself) in Chinatown BY AMY ZHOU May 21, 2020   I am Chinese Canadian. Even when I first wrote these words for an earlier iteration of this article back in October, they were meaningful. Now, with COVID-19 at our doorstep and the President of the United States adamant about labelling the virus [...]

Diaspora Memory and the (Emotional) Infrastructure of Ex-Yugoslavia Collective Housing

Diaspora Memory and the (Emotional) Infrastructure of Ex-Yugoslavia Collective Housing BY NEVENA PILIPOVIC-WENGLER  May 21, 2020   Most academic definitions of infrastructure function under the influence of Western capitalist economic and technical norms. Even when such definitions focus on critiquing this influence, the arguments often reify the norms as the starting point, to which anything [...]

The Beautiful Chaos

­­­ The Beautiful Chaos BY KIRTHANA SUDHAKAR  April 20, 2020   “Architecture is to be appreciated at the scale of the human, at eye-level, through the experience of the street. Bengaluru robs us of this experience of architecture. One is always looking downward to dodge holes in the pavement, piles of fresh, steaming cow-dung and [...]

The City Revealed

The City Revealed BY ALEXANDRA SANYAL  April 20, 2020 I’ve always been compelled by the stories with pick-your-own endings. You know, the ones in which you get to choose your own adventure and each decision you make results in an entirely different outcome? Sometimes I feel like walking through the city is like that—a different [...]

Strangers on the Subway

Photo by Simon Shim / Unsplash.com Strangers on the Subway BY JIAE AZAD April 20, 2020   There are certain places in the New York subway system where the tunnels enlarge to accommodate two trains going in the same direction. As the trains traverse the tracks side-by-side, sometimes there’s an opportune moment where the two [...]

A Request in Transit

Photo by Manuel Lardizabal A Request in Transit BY EMILY KLEIN  September 3, 2019   Shortly after I boarded an Uptown 2/3 Express train on a recent commute, a woman entered my train car. With grey—almost white—hair, an overstuffed backpack, and an unstable gait, she made her way down the car. As she walked, she [...]