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 …

Columbia University Sociologist Jennifer Lee | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Columbia University Sociologist Jennifer Lee

I’m Surprised by How Much Sleep I Need When I See People in Person

Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University. She researches the implications of contemporary U.S. immigration—particularly Asian immigration—from a variety of lenses. In advance …

Look Away | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Look Away

On Nazis, Not-Sees, and Singing ‘Dixie’ in My Middle School Chorus

Obviously, revisionism is a problem. In America, there are real children in real schools reading textbooks that say that black people thought slavery was awesome. But at least revisionism requires …

The Street Vendors Who Make Christmas for New York City | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

The Street Vendors Who Make Christmas for New York City

With COVID Bearing Down, Gotham’s Neighborhood Tree Sellers May Be More Important Than Ever

It’s hard to imagine New York without Christmas, but what will Christmas look like in a city gripped by the COVID-19 pandemic? Gotham’s Christmas streetscapes are legendary: the towering 75-foot …

How Horace Greeley Invented the Persona of the Crusading Journalist | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

How Horace Greeley Invented the Persona of the Crusading Journalist

The 19th-Century Publisher Made Reform-Minded, Opinion-Driven Journalism Commercially Viable

December 3, 1840, a Thursday. A bank president in New Jersey goes missing in broad daylight, leaving his office in New Brunswick around 10 a.m. He is never again seen …

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 …