The most interesting design work happening in America right now isn’t inside buildings. It’s between them.
For most of the twentieth century, American city planning operated from a single dominant assumption: that the car was the primary user of urban space, and everything else — pedestrians, cyclists, transit riders, people who simply wanted to sit outside — was secondary.
That assumption is being dismantled. Slowly, unevenly, and not without resistance. But in cities across America, the spaces between buildings are being reconsidered in ways that would have seemed impractical twenty years ago. Streets are narrowing. Parking lots are becoming parks. Waterfronts that spent decades as industrial infrastructure are opening to the public. Plazas that were designed to be crossed rather than occupied are being redesigned to make people want to stay.
America ByDesign has been documenting this shift since the series began — not as a trend story, but as a series of specific projects in specific places, each one making the argument through what it actually is rather than what it represents.
The pedestrian reclamation
The most visible shift in American urban design over the past decade is the conversion of car-dominated space to human-scaled space. This takes different forms in different cities — a parking lane converted to a protected bike lane and expanded sidewalk in one place, a surface parking lot replaced by a pocket park in another, a multilane arterial road narrowed to allow for street trees and wider pedestrian zones in a third.
What these projects share is a reallocation of the most valuable resource in any city: street-level real estate. For decades that resource was reserved almost entirely for moving and storing cars. The shift toward allocating more of it to people on foot has been documented extensively in the projects featured on America ByDesign — not as activism but as architecture. The design question of how to make a street feel like a place rather than a corridor is a genuinely interesting one, and the answers are more varied and more resolved than most people outside the profession realize.
New York ByDesign: Innovations captures this at its most concentrated. New York’s density creates both the most challenging version of the problem — more competing demands on street space than almost any other American city — and the most legible examples of what happens when it’s solved well. A block that previously felt hostile to anyone not in a car, redesigned to accommodate outdoor dining, protected cycling, widened sidewalks, and street trees, becomes something categorically different. Not just more pleasant. More economically productive, more socially active, and more resilient.
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The waterfront question
Almost every major American city built on water spent the middle of the twentieth century turning its waterfront over to industry, highways, and infrastructure. The result was a generation of cities whose most valuable geographic asset — the water’s edge — was inaccessible to the people who lived there.
The reclamation of American waterfronts is one of the more significant urban design stories of the past thirty years, and it is far from finished. The projects that have worked best — Chicago’s Riverwalk, the Hudson River Park in New York, the San Antonio River Walk in its expanded form — share a common quality: they were designed as destinations rather than connections. Not a path you take to get somewhere else, but a place worth going to for its own sake.
America ByDesign returns to waterfront projects repeatedly because they represent the design problem at its most compressed: limited linear space, high public demand, complex infrastructure requirements, and a history of industrial use that shapes everything from the soil chemistry to the regulatory environment. The projects that navigate all of that and produce something genuinely good are worth studying closely.
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What sustainable cities actually look like
Going Green: Green Green World takes the urban design conversation to its logical conclusion: what does a city look like when it takes its environmental responsibilities seriously across every system simultaneously?
The show’s Copenhagen episodes are instructive. CopenHill — the waste-to-energy plant designed by Bjarke Ingels Group with a ski slope on the roof — is the most photographed example, but it’s the less spectacular interventions that define the city’s approach: cycling infrastructure so well designed that it’s the default mode of transport for the majority of the city’s residents, district heating systems that capture waste heat from industry and power, building standards that treat energy performance as a baseline rather than a premium feature.
Singapore’s Cloud Forest and Supertrees tell a different version of the same story — a city-state that has integrated biodiversity and green infrastructure into its urban form not as ornament but as system. The Supertrees collect rainwater, generate solar power, and function as air venting ducts for the conservatories below. They are also extraordinary to look at, which is not incidental. The cities being redesigned most ambitiously right now are the ones that have understood that environmental performance and genuine beauty are not in tension.
Watch Going Green: Green Green World on SHG Living →
The civic space as argument
The most ambitious urban design projects are arguments. They make a claim about what a city is for and who it belongs to, and they make that claim through built form rather than words.
The High Line in New York — an elevated freight rail line converted to a public park — argued that industrial infrastructure could become civic amenity, that the value of a city isn’t only in its buildings but in the spaces between and around them, and that the people of a neighborhood have a legitimate claim on land that would otherwise be developed for private use. The argument was controversial when it was proposed. The built result has been visited by hundreds of millions of people and has influenced urban design projects on every continent.
America ByDesign has featured projects across the country that are making similar arguments at different scales and in different contexts — a community garden in a food desert that becomes a neighborhood anchor, a public plaza in a mid-sized city that gives its downtown a gathering place it has never had, a waterfront park that reconnects a neighborhood to the water that defines it geographically.
These are not small projects in the way that residential architecture is sometimes small. They are interventions in the shared life of a city, and they matter in proportion to how well they work.
Watch America ByDesign on SHG Living →
America ByDesign, New York ByDesign: Innovations, and Going Green: Green Green World are streaming now on SHG Living, on Apple TV, Roku, Fire TV, Android TV, and on the web at watch.shgliving.com. No registration required.
