CityLab

Designing Cities for Families

A Pulitzer Prize-winning series explores how urban design and architecture affect parents and kids.

In the criticism category, the committee recognized the series “For graceful and genre-expanding writing about public spaces for families, deftly using interviews, observations and analysis to consider the architectural components that allow children and communities to thrive.”

Alexandra Lange is a design critic and author. Her most recent book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, was published by Bloomsbury USA in 2022. Her next book, Making Do, about how economic and environmental crises in the 1970s influenced designers, is slated for 2027. She also serves as a co-producer for New Angle: Voice, a podcast about pioneering women in architecture. Lange was a 2014 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a 2025 Fellow at MacDowell.