New City Critics

In 2022, Urban Design Forum and The Architectural League launched a fellowship program to empower new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge the ways we understand, design, and build our cities. The fellowship supports the development of critics from underrepresented backgrounds through guest lectures and workshops, research guidance, networking, and production of new critical projects on a dedicated platform. Through published work and other channels, the fellowship encourages a more expansive conversation on the future of cities.

New City Critics aims to drive change in the culture of criticism. Today, architectural criticism and urban analysis in mainstream media is a shrinking arena, though it remains extremely powerful. Newspapers and magazines have moved away from having full-time critics on staff, and feature the work of just a few, largely older, and mostly male, white writers. A handful of professional critics from similar backgrounds means attention to a limited selection of topics and perspectives. We want to see kaleidoscopic coverage from a much wider variety of perspectives and rewrite public understanding of why urban design and development matter. 

New City Critics is for a criticism of city design and development that reflects the people who live in cities. We need more informed and sustained examination of citymaking in media beyond small professional circles, for a broader public. Housing, workplaces, infrastructure, public spaces and monuments define the contours of our lives. They demand critical attention and a critical imagination expressed through novel formats and in new forums. Our goal is to equip a new generation of critics with new skills and a meaningful network to make urban processes legible and argue for a city they want to live in. 

2024–2025 Fellowship

Details and how to apply

Applications for the 2024-25 New City Critics fellowship program are now open!

Apply on urbanomnibus.net through Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.

Support

This year’s program would not be possible without the support of Critical Minded, Joan Copjec, Paul Goldberger, Mark & Carol Willis, Nat Oppenheimer, and Mary Margaret Jones. 

We are also grateful to the founding donors of the program: Critical Minded, Mark & Carol Willis, Charles H. Revson Foundation, Graham Foundation, Thom Mayne, Moshe Safdie, Joan Copjec, Paul Goldberger, Eric Owen Moss, Zach Mortice & Maria Speiser, Tami Hausman, Stella Betts, Mary Margaret Jones, Nat Oppenheimer, Deborah Berke, Zach Mortice, Calvin Tsao, Rosalie Genevro, Mario Gooden, Lyn Rice & Astrid Lipka, Karen Stein, and Vincent Chang.

Advisory Board

Garnette Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT.

Dario Calmese made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vanity Fair with his portrait of Viola Davis. He hosts the radio series The Institute of Black Imagination.

Sukjong Hong is the editor of Curbed and was previously managing editor and web editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.

Alexandra Lange is a design critic. She is a columnist for Bloomberg CityLab, and has been a featured writer at Design Observer, an opinion columnist at Dezeen, and the architecture critic for Curbed.

Carolina A. Miranda is an independent writer covering art, architecture and urban design, along with various other facets of culture in Los Angeles.

In Memory Of

This program is founded in honor of Michael Sorkin, a longstanding Board Member of The Architectural League and the Urban Design Forum. His death in March 2020 was a huge loss to the world of thinking and action in architecture and the shaping of landscapes and cities. He was a spectacularly good writer, fearless and funny, and adept at exposing and explaining the systems of power that create the built environment. We hope to honor one of his most important legacies: his generosity and care in encouraging the development of young thinkers and writers and designers around the world.

2022–2023 Fellowship

Over the course of eighteen months, fellows met with writers, editors, and cultural producers, went on site visits, and conducted workshops to develop their critical sensibilities and hone critical tools. Guest speakers included program advisors Garnette Cadogan, Dario Calmese, Vinson Cunningham, Carolina Miranda, and Sukjong Hong, as well as visiting writers and editors Alexandra Lange, Tanvi Misra, Carina del Valle Schorske, Mabel Wilson, Mazin Sidhamed, and Emily Badger, and urbanists Beatrice Chen, Yin Kong, Monxo Lopez, and Libertad Guerra. Three public programs in a series entitled New Conversations opened up the fellows’ discussions to a larger audience.

2022-2023 New City Critics Fellows

The inaugural cohort included Oscar Perry Abello; Alicia Ajayi, Sophonie Milande Joseph, and Emma Osore of the BlackSpace Urbanist Collective; Calil Arguedas–Russell; and Sabina Sethi Unni.

2022–2023 Advisory Board

Garnette Cadogan is the Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism at the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT.

Dario Calmese made history as the first Black photographer to shoot a cover for Vanity Fair with his portrait of Viola Davis. He hosts the radio series The Institute of Black Imagination.

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. A former White House staffer, he now teaches in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Sukjong Hong is the editor of Curbed and was previously managing editor and web editor at The Architect’s Newspaper and a reporter-researcher at the New Republic.

Carolina A. Miranda is a Los Angeles Times columnist covering art, architecture and urban design, along with various other facets of culture in Los Angeles.

2022–2023 Support

New City Critics is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. This project is also supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in cultural critics of color cofounded by The Nathan Cummings Foundation and The Ford Foundation. We thank them and our founding donors for supporting us in launching this fellowship.

A partnership between The Architectural League and Urban Design Forum.