All Posts Under cities

Ideas City 2015: Festival for the Future

Founded by the New Museum, IDEAS CITY is a 3-day festival May 28-30 in NYC exploring the future of cities with culture as a driving force.

Open to the Public, 100+ Free Events!

City Atlas is participating in the festival on Saturday May 30th – look out for us and come say hi! We’d love to meet you.

Minetta Brook Walk

Before NYC became concrete and asphalt, the island was covered by rivers, streams and marshes. Greenwich Village’s Minetta Brook is one such watercourse and still makes its presence known in the basements of the structures built on top of it; some are still visible if you know where to look.

Join urban explorer Steve Duncan of Undercity.org as he shows us the Minetta’s 1.5 mile buried path and explains the waterway functioning both today and in the past!

Eighth Annual New York City Wildflower Week

NYC Wildflower Week presents a full week of free events to showcase the 53,000 acres of open space and 778 native plants in NYC’s 5 boroughs. The goal of the week is simple: to encourage New Yorkers to get to know the nature in their own back yard and to inspire them to protect this natural heritage for future generations. Most events are FREE and open to the public!

Composting With Worms: Indoor Vermicomposting Demystified at the Brooklyn Brainery

Composting can seem too hard for the average citizen, but in this class, you’ll learn how easy it can be. We’ll talk through the basics of indoor vermicomposting (composting with worms) and how you can do your part to reduce your food waste.

Each participant will construct a bin, fill it with bedding, add some red wiggler worms, and watch them go to work!

Public Space: Opportunities and challenges for Empowering Women

While access to public spaces in cities is highly contested for due to pressures from rapid urbanization and large-scale migration, creating public spaces that cater to women’s needs and skills can give them an oft-missing space of their own to set up a business, network and interact with other members of the community to exchange ideas and information

Exploring Creative Community Resilience

Climate-adapted neighbourhoods. Green boulevards. Community food forests.

Around the world, more and more cities are committing to ambitious projects aimed at building resilience in light of climate change.

On February 24, 2015 we will convene at The New School to draw from the experiences of grassroots organizers, co-design champions, urban planning professionals, storytellers and representatives from many other fields of social innovation (that’s you!) to explore how to make resilience a collaborative and inclusive process of “civic imagination”.

A History of New York City Transportation – From Horsecars to Helicopters

By some estimates, for every New Yorker you see walking around on the streets, there’s one New Yorker underground, riding the train. That’s right – 1/2 of New York’s population is on some form of public transportation at any given moment.

This class covers NYC transportation from the early days, when the best you could hope for was a mud-spattered omnibus ride, through the first steam-powered elevated railroads, all the way up to the Pan Am building helicopter shuttle.

AfterTaste 2015: Inside Imagination (Day 1)

What does it take to imagine? We live in an era of environmental crisis and political unrest when complex systems and data analysis dictate projections of an uncertain future. Interiorists study existing places and are charged to imagine new worlds.

In AfterTaste 2015 the Parsons School of Constructed Environments draws inspiration from artists, educators, writers, and scientists who work to transcend what we know, to catapult culture into areas inspired and new.

Made in Brooklyn: Food Waste to Biofuel

The eight futuristic, stainless steel-clad digester eggs at Brooklyn’s Newtown Creek wastewater plant are designed to process as much as 1.5 million gallons of waste every day.

Join the Urban Green Council at this exciting event to learn more about the eggs, results from the plant’s recently completed food waste pilot program, and the three-year full-scale demonstration project that will be launching there soon.

Women, Climate and Cities: : An Intersectional Perspective

This event will focus on women’s role in raising awareness as well as providing solutions to climate change issues specifically within the urban context.

Participants will examine what women have brought to the table in the climate movement as well as the specific benefits of having a gendered approach to climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, namely, in terms of disaster risk recovery, green jobs and urban infrastructure such as public transport.

The Future of Cities: An Integrated Approach to Urban Challenges

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization and the American Institute for Architecture New York Chapter are co-organizing a high-level discussion, which will cover key developments in the area of sustainable urbanization, entitled “The Future of Cities: An Integrated Approach to Urban Challenges”.

This event will bring together high-level experts and representatives from national and local governments, non-governmental organizations, academia, foundations and industry.

Made in New York City: The Reinvention of Local Manufacturing

For decades, American and urban manufacturing charted a steep decline, a byproduct of globalization and outsourcing. Today, however, manufacturing is returning to our shores and entering a renaissance in major cities.

Come learn about what’s being made in NYC today and what you can do to support local manufacturing. We’ll cover industrial policy, business incubators, R&D, hybrid manufacturing, and the craft food movement, among other highlights.

Oculus Book Talk: Urban Alchemy

Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove will present Urban Alchemy, Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities, published by New Village Press. The presentation will be followed by a conversation with William Morrish on the intersections of public health and urbanism.