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Urban form should reflect collective value for place in communities. Urban squares in particular have the potential to serve as the nucleus of communities, urban artefacts that link place to memory and heritage while serving basic needs for everyday life in the city. Civic squares, those linked to governmental institutions, have further potential to facilitate community gatherings for memorialisation, commemoration, celebration and political action. Despite these important functions and potential, the incremental planning of Brooklyn in the early nineteenth century placed little emphasis on squares of any kind, despite the community’s expressed desires. Brooklyn’s first civic square, here referred to as City Hall Square, in fact emerged in the city almost as an afterthought. Despite this lack of clear intent, this square evolved as a unique place in the urban culture of the region, simultaneously a crossroads for everyday life in the city, a commercial and cultural centre and the governmental seat and judicial centre of the city and county. The square was a seamlessly woven and connected place in the larger urban structure. While some discussions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, documented in the local newspaper, provide evidence of appreciation and value for this place, others suggest a resistance to the investment of community heritage and memory as it evolved. This urban space and the larger territory around it, confronted by regional pressures for transformation in the early and mid-twentieth century, was disrupted, leaving the place diminished, no longer serving as a meaningful hub of life in the city. An examination of Brooklyn City Hall Square’s emergence and diminishment reveals a problematic treatment of this place that undermined its potential as a place for civic life, a repository of memory and heritage, but also a living nucleus of the community. It also provides insights for a conceptual framework for future reconstructions or transformations that may facilitate new civic values of place and reinvigorate this urban artefact, relinking it to both the origin of the city and the city’s heritage and memory, but also the square’s future potential as an inclusive, connected and meaningful place of community and civic spirit.

Most people in the United States began to alter their decisions and actions beginning in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when the closures and ‘pause’ on most work were established. Studying the transforming urban conditions in New York City specifically presents a lens through which to understand how we quickly adapted to new spatial conditions as measures were put in place for keeping people healthy and encouraging businesses to stay open and approachable. Immediately, the need for social distancing asked us to consider how to navigate exposure as we moved beyond the home. Necessities for businesses to survive became a priority for the city and coalesced with people’s desire for seeking ways to do things outdoors. A focus on using city streets as urban public spaces resulted. Policies such as Open Restaurants and Open Streets were developed by the Department of Transportation to mitigate pandemic circumstances and to stir dynamic and optimistic possibilities for street use. Open Restaurants called for food/drink establishments to quickly reimagine their adjacent pavement or available street space. Open Streets initiated new ways for creating pedestrian zones in previously trafficked areas. This article highlights fieldwork documentation comparing a Cluster and Line of food/drink establishments with a newly pedestrian Avenue, in connected Brooklyn neighbourhoods. Diagrams, photographs and maps document the ingenious street constructions and the observed and felt psychological or phenomenal transformations taking place. An urban interiorism grew out of the imposed formalisation of rules for movement patterns and compact constructions, while the ad hoc or serendipitous conditions allowed for other intimate conditions. Notions of ‘village cafés’ or ‘urban beaches’ evolved through myriad forms and materials inviting unusual seating configurations and interactions. Speculations on what these internal/external spatial experiences, changing identities and continued urban freedoms are teaching us are also explored through a multidisciplinary set of voices.

Approximately 11 miles from the bright lights of Manhattan, a barren, windswept island sits in the Long Island Sound. The landscape is punctuated by crumbling buildings, trees snaking through broken windows after decades of neglect. There are no people here, save for the incarcerated men brought over from Rikers Island to dig endless wide trenches, muddy and dark. Under the ground, the remains of over one million of New York’s most unloved citizens lie stacked in mass, unmarked graves. Or so the dominant narrative goes. This 131-acre island is better known as Hart Island, New York’s public cemetery where the unclaimed dead have been buried since the mid-nineteenth century. The site has long been positioned as the city’s ‘dark shadow’, the final resting place of the unwanted, the lonely, the forgotten and the marginalised. Elements of this narrative are undeniably grounded in truth – the stories of those who have ended up here, many of which have been carefully collected by renowned non-profit The Hart Island Project, offer up endless shades of heartbreak, loss and pain. However, the enduring public perception that a city burial here inevitably means a deeply shameful and degrading end to an unfulfilled, unhappy life is not only inaccurate, but it also severely limits the ways in which we can imagine a possible future for this site. This article aims to bring a historical perspective to the complex issues surrounding the public perception of, and possible future uses for, Hart Island, in order to offer an alternative view on how we can better understand sites of death and contemporary approaches to mourning going forward.

Sobolev descent has long been established as an efficient method for numerically solving boundary value problems, ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations in a small number of iterations. We demonstrate that for any linear ordinary differential equation with initial value conditions sufficient to assure a unique solution, there exists a Hilbert space in which gradient descent will converge to the solution in one iteration. We provide two elementary examples, one initial value problem and one boundary value problem, demonstrating the effectiveness of the theory in numerical settings. As there are ample efficient numerical methods for solving such problems, the significance of the paper is in the approach and the question it raises. Namely, do such spaces exist for wider classes of differential equations?