Next New York
EDs: Mona el Khafif & Seth McDowell
(Next Cities Series)
Over the last 500 years, a range of innovative, responsive, and pragmatic civic actions have helped to generate, define, and maintain New York City’s global significance.
From early on much of these actions were responses to population density and the accompanying challenges for health and well-being. Approaching its next growth cycle, New York is again amid important urban transformations that demand new urban and architectural models that allow for an open city to balance gentrification, and to address a lack of public spaces, social infrastructure, and affordable housing. These challenges and their architectural and urban implications are the focus of Next New York. The book captures the city’s current momentum through the lens of three important urban actions: sharing, connecting, and partnering.
Through 10 essays from scholars and practitioners working on pressing urban issues, a photographic essay portraying New York during COVID-19, and more than 35 design projects from graduate studios at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, Next New York reflects, comments, and speculates on New York City’s capacity to bring about new conceptions of city-making and collective cohabitation through architecture.
RVTR's contribution Infrastructural Hybrids unpacks dimensions of New York's infrastructural histories to outline ways in which Infrastructure can be conceived as relational networks that enable higher systemic goals, and thus, a new agenda for infrastructure must reassemble flows, materials, and entities toward the needs and empowerment of communities that have been expelled from and ignored by contemporary and historic systems. A new agenda for infrastructure must be articulated from an activist position to enable social change and an emancipatory alternative.