The Urban Design Forum has selected 38 early-to-mid-career professionals for its 2026 Forefront cohort, a fellowship the organization said will explore how to transform New York City’s public spaces into what it described as living, adaptive and sustaining landscapes of care.
The Forefront program, which the organization bills as an action lab for emerging urbanists, is now in its tenth year. According to the Urban Design Forum, this year’s interdisciplinary class draws talent from across the fields of design, landscape architecture, planning, economic and community development, policy, journalism, transportation and land stewardship, with each fellow engaged in work the group said is shaping the city’s future.
The forum said the incoming fellows’ work spans the region. Among the examples it cited, fellows steward parks in the Lower East Side, organize programs in public spaces across Jamaica, support community-based climate action projects in the Hudson Valley, develop natural resource protection programs across New York State, and train practitioners in street design and sustainable mobility internationally.
The Urban Design Forum credited a selection panel of Forefront alumni and city partners with reviewing the candidate pool, naming its members as Genesis Abreu, Nicole Cheng, Genea Foster, James Francisco, Neil Gagliardi, Nicholas Pettinati and Melody Stein. The group said it was partnering with the New York City Department of Transportation on the program, among other partners it did not fully detail in the announcement.
