North Carolina State University researchers found they could use Twitter to understand changes in what New York City park users valued most about four iconic city parks before and after COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect. The researchers also found Twitter useful for tracking complaints about individual parks.

Toni Griffin, one of the prominent black women in architecture and design, is leading her students at Harvard in envisioning and designing the "just city." An exhibition of her work featured a Just City Index, which she describes as a tool for communities and cities to use for crafting their own definitions of justice.

The High Line announces that a new exhibition, The Practice of Democracy: We Hold These Truths, is on now view through October 2, 2022 in the High Line’s 14th Street Passage. Through an immersive installation designed by April De Simone of the non-profit research and design agency Designing for Democracy, visitors are invited to explore the ways democracy shows up in our everyday lives, neighborhoods, and worlds. Organized as a past-to-present journey, the exhibition and related programming trace the policies, practices, and investments that shape how democracy is defined and experienced in our cities and the High Line in particular, and offer communities opportunities to connect through these experiences.

For the past two years, 15 park organizations—led by the High Line Network—partnered with researchers from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Urban Institute to explore the potential of public space to bring benefits to our cities and towns. They did so with a commitment to equity in their work, delving into history, experimenting with ways to share power, and building systems to center community in their values and actions. This work resulted in the Community First Toolkit, a process and tools codifying a path to embed equity in public spaces for park practitioners.

A racist mortgage appraisal practice used in the United States decades ago has resulted in less green space in some urban neighborhoods today, researchers say.

Will the COVID-19 pandemic prompt a shift to healthier cities that focus on wellness rather than functional and economic concerns? This is a hypothesis that seems to be supported by several researchers around the world.

A study by two researchers finds that the more attractive a city is, the more likely it is to draw college educated, high-income earning adults and increase cases of community displacement.

A new report published by the Urban Institute is tracking 11th Street Bridge Park’s progress on its Equitable Development Plan, which outlines strategies for affordable housing, workforce development, and cultural equity. The report addresses what it takes to achieve equity in the context of larger challenges that face any entity seeking to produce meaningful gains for historically marginalized groups.

Spending time outdoors, especially in green spaces, is one of the fastest ways to improve health and happiness. A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Health Research shows that within minutes of entering a green space, stress, blood pressure, and heart rate can decrease.

A new study published in the journal Social Science Research finds that people in the United States report greater levels of happiness in states that spend more money on public goods such as parks, libraries, infrastructure, and public safety. The author, Patrick Flavin, notes that the happiness boost from public-goods spending is roughly the same across a wide range of demographic variables: race, income, education, etc. suggesting public spending on categories accessible to everyone has an effect on the well-being of everyone.