Accounting for Community
Oscar Perry Abello: What kind of bank can help secure New York neighborhoods' future? The same small banks that have been doing it all along.
New City Critics
A fellowship program to empower new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge the ways we understand, design, and develop our cities.
Graphic identity by Manuel Miranda.
A partnership between The Architectural League and Urban Design Forum, New City Critics aims to drive change in the culture of criticism.
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.
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2024–2025 Fellowship
Urban Omnibus / The Architectural League of New York and Urban Design Forum are excited to name Ellie Botoman, Ekemini Ekpo, Daphne Lundi, Anoushka Mariwala, Philip Poon, and Shirt as the newest cohort of New City Critics, a fellowship program empowering new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge how we design and develop our cities.
About the Fellows
Ellie Botoman is an environmental art historian researching the impact of climate change on cultural heritage preservation and possibilities for multisensory and multispecies collaboration in the design of exhibitions and institutional architectures. They have previously held roles at the Cooper Hewitt and the Center for Architecture, among others. Their criticism and poetry can be found in The Long Now Foundation and The Brooklyn Rail.
Ekemini Ekpo is a journalist, researcher, and theater artist seeking to catalyze intellectual and emotional inquiry through these forms. She is currently a resident actor at Mercury Store, a theater development lab in Gowanus and has previously participated in the Vox Media Writers Workshop. She was born and raised in Texas, and her people are from Akwa Ibom State, Nigeria.
Daphne Lundi is an urban planner, policymaker, and artist. The child of Haitian immigrants, and as a native New Yorker who experienced Hurricane Sandy, her work is shaped by the impacts of climate change. As a Public Scholar at The Moynihan Center at CCNY, she has been exploring the intersections between sci-fi and city planning.
Anoushka Mariwala is an architectural designer, researcher, and writer from Mumbai. She is interested in considering the body as a site, producer, and interpreter of place and object. Most recently, she has been thinking about land history, property formation, and its entanglements.
Philip Poon is an architect, artist, and writer. Informed by his background as a Chinese-American from New York City, his work as a registered architect, and his engagement with art and activist movements in Chinatown, his projects materialize issues at the intersection of space, race, and class. As Dimes Square Tourist, he leads walking tours of Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Shirt is an artist working across writing, rap music, performance, video, photography, painting, and sculpture. Using a bricolage of language, sound and object, he considers ways of unlearning as a means of creating a more expansive readership. His work was recently published in Unlicensed, a volume on bootlegging as creative practice.
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.
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.
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.
About the 2022-2023 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.
$10,000+
Joan Copjec
Critical Minded
Paul Goldberger
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
Thom Mayne
Eric Owen Moss
Charles H. Revson Foundation
Moshe Safdie
Zach Mortice and Maria Speiser
Carol and Mark Willis
$5,000
Tami Hausman
$2,500+
Deborah Berke
LEVENBETTS
Mary Margaret Jones
Nat Oppenheimer
$1,000+
Rosalie Genevro
Mario Gooden
Rice+Lipka
Calvin Tsao
$1-$1,000
Vincent Chang
Eva Franch i Gilabert
Nicolas Kemper
Jennifer Miller
K. Emma Ng
Martin Pedersen
Cassim Shepard
Karen Stein
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.
Partnership
A partnership between The Architectural League and Urban Design Forum.
