Neighborhood

Integration without gentrification? Self-determination without segregation? Who has the power to determine Harlem’s future?

Emily Schmidt spins the origin story of the affordable row house in the 1980s, when pastors and businessmen sowed scorched earth with rows of new homes.

Junior architect Zulmilena Then, our second featured People Mover, is on a mission to preserve East New York’s history in the face of speculation.

Theater-makers, natives, and newcomers draw mental maps of how they navigate comfort and discomfort in a rapidly changing city.

In a new series, People Movers, community organizers share how they shape the city from the ground up. First, Verónica Ramírez of the Queens-based Mujeres en Movimiento mobilizes immigrant moms to fight for safer streets.

Nandini Bagchee shares her students' work to forge an equal exchange with activists fighting for community space in the South Bronx, in a studio where designers became advocates and advocates became designers.

A city needs memory like it needs streets, trees, and people. But how do we build an infrastructure to contain and deliver the city's history? Ben Vershbow, former director of NYPL Labs, talks with Shannon Mattern about libraries as stewards of the past in the age of Google Maps.

Why does the history of squatting in New York matter? Artists, historians, documentarians, and writers reflect on a singular passage in the city's story, and what it can offer today.

As Manhattan's Chinatown experiences rapid change, a historic porcelain store on Mott Street reinvents itself as a space for intergenerational dialogue and community activation. UO talks to Mei Lum and Diane Wong, the minds behind the W.O.W. Project, about what they've learned and where they're headed next.

Happy Birthday, zoning! The codes may have changed over 101 years, but as Andrea Renner and Eric Goldwyn explain, when it comes to how New Yorkers use zoning to advance their own visions of a perfect city, much remains the same.