New York

Essays

New York Tech Dossier: The Declining Significance of Proximity in Venture Capital Investments

Joanna Dressel - 14 January 2020

Venture capital investment in New York City has increased over the last decade, contributing to the development of...

Essays

New York Tech Dossier: “Innovation Districts” in New York: Contentious Geographies of Growth

Sharon Zukin - 7 January 2020

Sharon Zukin analyzes how city government in New York has supported concentrations of tech firms—“innovation...

Debates

Diverting Eyes and Bodies: The Management of Homeless Visibility in New York City

Eric Goldfischer - 19 November 2019

Eric Goldfischer argues that homeless diversion programs in New York City simultaneously divert the bodies of...

Debates

What Does a Just Housing Plan Look Like? NYC and National Housing Movements Show the Way

Oksana Mironova & Sylvia Morse - 22 October 2019

How could we develop a housing plan that is not rooted in capitalism? Oksana Mironova and Sylvia Morse describe how...

From the Field

Community Movements and Housing Liberalism: Reflections on the Bank of America Low‑Income Housing Competition

Avi Garelick - 15 October 2019

Avi Garelick describes how the imperative for realism in affordable housing production conflicts with the goals of a...

Reviews

Crisis Makes Heroes: Affordable Housing in New York City During and After a “Decade of Fire”

Susan Saegert - 2 July 2019

Susan Saegert discusses the memoirs of two hard-fighting Bronx housing advocates, active at a particularly turbulent...

Reviews

Whose Bronx?: Decade of Fire Looks Back at a Complicated History of Neighborhood Abandonment and the Rise of Community Control in the South Bronx

Aly Hassell - 2 July 2019

Decade of Fire, a new documentary film by lifelong South Bronx resident and first-time filmmaker Vivian Vázquez...

Reviews

Special Feature: Whose Bronx?

Aly Hassell & Susan Saegert - 2 July 2019

As New York City’s overheated real-estate market begins to affect the Bronx, researchers and memoirists are rejecting...

Reviews

Incarceration, Human Rights, and Health: Life and Death in Rikers Island

Tawana Anthony - 25 June 2019

Tawana Anthony applauds Homer Venters’ Life and Death in Rikers Island for exposing the institutional indifference to...

From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019

The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of New...

Debates

Reclaim Value Capture for Equitable Urban Development

Laura Wolf-Powers - 28 May 2019

Land-value capture (LVC) mechanisms have become a popular tool for fiscally constrained municipal policymakers....

Debates

Post–Amazon HQ2 Incentive Reform: We can have good deals—but not without transparency and meaningful public participation

Mary Donegan - 21 May 2019

What does the collapse of New York City’s Amazon HQ2 deal mean for the future of economic development incentive...

Debates

Masculine Sports and “Respectable” Men in Working-Class Neighborhoods

Carine Guérandel & translated by Oliver Waine - 12 March 2019

In a work rich in ethnographic material, Akim Oualhaci questions how socialization through sports contributes to the...

Debates

Fixing the Accessibility Gap in Municipal Procurement

Emily Holloway & Nicholas Shatan - 5 March 2019

How can minority- and women-owned businesses overcome structural disadvantages to building wealth through...

Essays

As NYC (Again) Considers Comprehensive Planning, History Offers Insight

K. C. Alvey - 12 February 2019

Comprehensive planning can be a progressive governance tool, helping leaders keep broad principles like equity and...

Interviews

Teaching Art and the History of Tattoos at Rikers Island: An Interview with Tamara Santibanez

Lisa Jean Moore - 22 January 2019

An interview with Tamara Santibanez, who teaches art and the cultural and social history of tattoos to youth...

From the Field

Taste of Home: A Sociocultural Exploration of Food Habits and Health Among Bangladeshi Immigrants in New York City

Fatema Kamal - 22 May 2018

Resettlement in an entirely different country may have drastic consequences for an individual’s health. This is...

From the Field

The Cost of Affordability: Inclusionary Zoning and Displacement in East New York

James Shelton - 20 March 2018

What are the impacts of New York City’s Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program upon low-income communities of color?...

Debates

Where Does Public Land Come From? Municipalization and Privatization Debates

Oksana Mironova & Samuel Stein - 6 March 2018

This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by tracing the history of...

Reviews

New York’s Soul for Sale: Raising the Rent on Lunch Counters and Counterculture

Benjamin Terrall - 13 February 2018

Vanishing New York is Jeremiah Moss’s loving chronicle of the neighborhoods, characters, bars, and corner...

From the Field

“People of Color Are Not Props”: Black Branding and Community Resistance in Gentrifying Brooklyn

Maura McGee - 6 February 2018

When a new white-owned upscale bar-restaurant in the gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights advertised...

Essays

Institutional Roadblocks to Achieving Environmental Justice Through Public Participation: The Case of CSO Control in US Cities

Rebekah Breitzer - 24 January 2018

Rather than meaningfully involving representatives of environmental-justice communities in decisions about the...

Essays

Birdwatching in the City: A Case for Multispecies Tourism

Elizabeth Cherry & August Davidson-Onsgard & Lisa Jean Moore - 16 January 2018

This essay analyzes the growth of urban avitourism—wildlife tourism focused on birds—as an activity that drives...

Reviews

Making Their Own History: Squatters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side

Benjamin H. Shepard - 19 December 2017

During the 1970s, when Manhattan’s Lower East Side was full of derelict real estate, activists laid claim to...

Debates

Storm Recovery: Local Efforts, Municipal Constraints, and New Ways Forward

Michael P. McCabe - 28 November 2017

Climate change-induced storm surges and rising sea levels will steadily cause more damage to homes in low-lying urban...

Debates

When Does Police Violence Cause Urban Unrest?

Cathy Lisa Schneider - 14 November 2017

In the summer of 2014, police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York. Both men were black and...

From the Field

Swept Away: Public Work and the Politics of Employment in New York City’s Parks

John Krinsky & Maud Simonet - 6 September 2017

Upwards of 4,000 unionized civil-service workers once cleaned and maintained New York City’s parks. Today about 1,800...

Essays

The Happy Few and the Unhappy Many: Endangered Artists in Global Cities

Boris Grésillon & translated by John Barrett - 15 June 2017

While participating or having participated in reshaping urban spaces, artists seem to be increasingly driven away...

From the Field

The Evolution of New York City’s Black Neighborhoods

John Mollenkopf - 9 May 2017

Especially in the central cities of the Northeast, neighborhoods that were once identified with black politics and...

Essays

Counterpublic Spaces and Movement-Building

Oksana Mironova - 8 March 2017

To make themselves and their causes visible in traditional public arenas like streets and parks, social activists...

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