Legacy City Design

Design is a critical variable in urban life and is often excluded in the development of urban policy as it negotiates the space between physical reality and vision of what is possible. As Legacy Cities (48 US cities over with over 50,000 residents that have lost greater than 20% of their population since peak population) re-examine their futures, incorporating design strategies and processes into earlier stages of policy development will lead to better outcomes than treating design as a result of policy.

The J. Max Bond Center on Design for the Just City at the City College of New York and The American Assembly at Columbia University have partnered on the Legacy City Design Initiative focused on researching and cataloguing design interventions and policies that will regenerate these cities into new and vibrant models for urban American life and productivity.

Mapping American Legacy Cities (2015) is a comparative data report analyzing the urban trends of population loss, race and ethnicity, residential density and vaccy, unemployment and income for 48 Legacy Cities in the United States.  Legacy Cities are cities greater than 50,000 in population that have lost over 20% of their population since peak levels.