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Will Allen discusses cashing in his retirement fund to buy a two-acre plot near Milwaukee’s largest public housing project to build the country’s preeminent urban farm—a food and educational center that now produces enough vegetables and fish year-round to feed thousands of people. In The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities he describes founding Growing Power to prove that local food systems can help troubled youths, dismantle racism, create jobs, bring urban and rural communities closer together, and improve public health.

A new study predicts that 42 percent of American adults will be obese — a category beyond overweight — by the year 2030. We talk to Keith Davis, owner of Goliath Coffins, who is working to accomodate America's bigger, more obese future by making caskets for the morbidly obese.

David Harvey, leading social theorist, Distinguished Professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, discusses how cities are at the center of both capital and class struggles--and asks how cities might be reorganized to be more just.

New York University is the latest city institution to evoke controversy with its ambitious expansion plan, which would more than double the amount of density on two Greenwich Village area superblocks. Vin Cipolla, president of the Municipal Art Society, Brad Hoylman, Chair of Community Board 2, and Mark Crispin Miller, an NYU faculty member, discuss what the plan means for the city, for Greenwich Village, and for NYU faculty and students. The Municipal Art Society is hosting a panel discussion on the merits and drawbacks of the plan on March 27.

Joe Nasr, Co-author of Carrot City, takes an in-depth look at the growing number of urban farms, gardens, and parks around the world. He’s joined by Eli Zabar, who tells us about the vegetables he grows in the greenhouses situated on the roof of his marketplace, The Vinegar Factory, and Annie Novak, co-founder of the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn.

The head of the Center for Urban Real Estate at Columbia University, Vishaan Chakrabarti, talks about their idea for connecting Lower Manhattan to Governor's Island, and other big ideas for NYC.

WDET's Martina Guzman spent six weeks in the German city of Berlin, exploring a long-recognized but underreported connection between that former manufacturing giant and the Motor City. In this post, which you can hear from the radio here, she gives a first-person account of visiting Berlin and talking with several people that recognize the connection between the two cities, especially their diminished but still "sexy" industrial prowess. 

Susan Silberberg, Lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at MIT and planning consultant, and Robert Rogers, Principal at Rogers Marvel Architects, PLLC, discuss the physical changes to our public realm post 9/11. Susan Silberberg has been studying how "security creep" is impacting city dwellers and the varied motivations for the securitization of urban space. Robert Rogers' firm, Rogers Marvel, has helped design sections of Battery Park City to insure security for the buildings in and around that neighborhood, developed new architecturally pleasing street elements for Wall Street to insure security, and has developed a master plan for the area around the Pentagon.

Filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky, talk about their documentary “Battle for Brooklyn.” It’s an intimate look at the very public and passionate fight waged by residents and business owners of Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights neighborhood facing condemnation of their property to make way for Forest City Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project—16 skyscrapers and a basketball arena for the New Jersey Nets. “Battle for Brooklyn” has its theatrical premiere in New York City on June 17; it opens this year’s Brooklyn Film Festival on June 3; and will screen in the Rooftop Films summer series on June 9 in Fort Greene Park.

New York University's plan to add 6 million square feet of new construction to its campus in the next 20 years, half of that in Greenwich Village, has neighborhood residents up in arms. Urban critic and journalist Roberta Brandes Gratz, author of The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, and Vin Cipolla, President of the Municipal Arts Society, discuss what those plans mean for the Village, and how this fits in with larger, citywide development issues.

The tag line for Jerusalem’s transportation master plan is "everything is connected," a resonant phrase for such a complicated place. Palestinians and Israelis, science and faith, politics and religion — it's all connected here but in a tenuous and tense way. Still, everyday life continues and the fact for many Jerusalemites is that traffic is terrible. It’s hard to get around even though the city is small, with a population of about 800,000 people.

As millions of Jews prepare for Passover seders that conclude with the words "Next Year, in Jerusalem," the city is struggling with very modern problems.

David Owen explains why cities like New York are the greenest communities in the United States. People who live in urban centers consume less oil, electricity, and water, live in smaller spaces, throw away less trash, and spend far less time in automobiles than other Americans. Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability looks at why suburban sprawl may seem green, but it actually increases environmental damage. Owen looks at how to make cities more like the countryside, and how to make other settled places more like Manhattan.

Professor and Slate architecture critic Witold Rybczynski discusses how current urban planning ideas have evolved from 20^th century movements such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. In Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, he looks at urban planning for the twenty-first century—creating a new kind of city with mixed-use developments, downtown living, diversity, density, and liveliness.

David Owen explains why cities like New York are the greenest communities in the United States. People who live in urban centers consume less oil, electricity, and water, live in smaller spaces, throw away less trash, and spend far less time in automobiles than other Americans. Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability looks at why suburban sprawl may seem green, but it actually increases environmental damage. Owen looks at how to make cities more like the countryside, and how to make other settled places more like Manhattan.

Public garden designer Lynden Miller talks about the benefits of enhancing cities with gardens, parks, and street trees. Her work has changed the face of New York City’s public places—in neighborhoods rich and poor. In Parks, Plants, and People: Beautifying the Urban Landscape, she calls on the public, gardeners, urban designers, architects, landscape architects and public officials to create and support well-planted parks and gardens.

In the last five years, New York has added hundreds of miles of bike lanes and closed parts of Broadway to cars, a re-allocation of street space that has caused no small measure of controversy. But those plans? Child's play, compared to what a group of international planners wants the city to do: tear down the lower part of the FDR drive.