Translations

Translations, conceived by Urban Design in Dialogue (UD:ID) as a forum for the field’s many conversations, approaches urban design as a practice of translations between disciplines and cultures; across the academy and practice; and among public, private, design, and policy realms. The inaugural issue, published in 2025, explicitly frames urban design as the work of reading and mediating dense networks of actors, histories, and politics, and sets the ambition to welcome more school departments to the table.

A foreword by Stephen Gray positions the first issue as both “mirror and map,” calling for a field that complicates itself: one that centers representation and power imbalances, resists reductive definitions, and embraces multiplicity, nuance, and tension as productive forces in shaping more equitable urban futures. The foreword underscores the magazine’s multi‑modal character of manifestos, interviews, essays, mappings, and photo work and argues for multidisciplinarity and multimedia as essential to urban design pedagogy and practice.

Issue #01 gathers contributions that span geographies and scales: from post‑industrial transitions in Calama, Chile and urban resilience in Kherson, Ukraine, to housing vacancy in Nigeria and the tourist mythologies of the Canary Islands. Closer to Cambridge, Massachusetts, it reflects on collaborative teaching and the overlaps between landscape and urban design. Formats are deliberately varied to make space for different ways of understanding the city. Together, the texts argue that urban design’s agency grows when it translates across mediums and disciplines and stays attuned to context.

Translations extends the GSD’s tradition of student publications that carve out a vital space for expression and cross‑disciplinary dialogue, both reflecting the School’s intellectual life and advancing its inter-departmental discourse.