How Public Is Your Favorite Public Park?

From New York’s High Line to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, Wealthy Foundations Are Making Lovely Spaces That Lead to Less Equal Cities

Who owns your favorite park?

That might seem like a strange question. Many people assume that “we”—the public, the people—do. But from New York’s High Line to Houston’s Buffalo Bayou Park, parks in U.S. cities are increasingly managed, financed, and policed by private groups that have little accountability to the public. Just as many other services once seen as public goods—such as healthcare, schools, and water utilities—have increasingly become the property of corporations and wealthy financiers, public space, too, has been privatized.

Historians locate the origins of urban park privatization in 1970s …

Why Are Our Sports Stadiums Becoming More Like Roman Amphitheaters? | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Why Are Our Sports Stadiums Becoming More Like Roman Amphitheaters?

Today’s Shift to Status-Based Seating Is an Unwelcome Return to the Rigid Social Divides of an Imperial Age

More than 230 amphitheaters, among the largest and most memorable monuments left to us by the Romans, survive in cities from northern England to the banks of the Jordan River. …

Bite-Size Shanghai

Mi Young is a Chinese Canadian illustrator currently based in New York City. Young, who often draws from her own experiences as a global citizen, loves to explore characters and their interactions …

Journalist Frances Anderton | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Journalist Frances Anderton

I Think I Detest the Beverly Center

Frances Anderton, the longtime host of the weekly public radio show DnA: Design and Architecture on KCRW, currently covers Los Angeles design and architecture for print and radio. She is …

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Turned New York Into the Center of the World | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architecture Turned New York Into the Center of the World

Though the Wisconsin-Born Architect Called the City a ‘Pig Pile’ and ‘Incongruous Mantrap,’ It Made Him a Superstar

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City is architecture as sculpture—a smooth, creamy-colored, curved form that deliberately defies its square, gray urban context, and succeeds by harnessing the pure abstraction …

The Washingtonians Who Fought to Keep Their City as the Nation’s Capital

Rivalries Over Its Political Symbolism, and Damage From the War of 1812, Nearly Destroyed the City

As the national capital, Washington, D.C. always has carried special meaning—representing both the federal government and the United States as a whole. No matter how Americans might feel about the …