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.
New City Critics is a fellowship program that empowers new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge the ways we understand, design, and build our cities. A partnership between Urban Design Forum and The Architectural League, the fellowship supports the development of critics from underrepresented backgrounds through guest lectures and workshops, research guidance, networking, and the production of new writing on a dedicated platform on Urban Omnibus. Through published work and other channels, the fellowship encourages a more expansive conversation on the future of cities.
New City Critics aims to expand who writes about cities and shapes our public imagination. As legacy media shrinks and full-time critics disappear, there are fewer accessible, compelling stories interrogating how cities are made – and for whom. A small circle of voices dominates the existing conversation, with attention to limited topics and a narrow vision of what cities can be. We believe that to build better cities, we need a richer, more representative culture of criticism – one that expands who participates, what stories get told, and how we talk about design, power, and place.
New City Critics aims to develop critical writing on urban design, development, and daily life that reflects the people who live in cities. We need more informed and sustained examination of citymaking in media beyond small professional circles and engaging varied publics. Housing, workplaces, infrastructure, public spaces, and monuments define the contours of our lives. They demand critical attention and a critical imagination expressed through new formats and forums. Our goal is to equip a new generation of critics with essential skills and a meaningful network to make urban processes legible and argue for the city they want to live in.
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2025–2026 Fellowship
Urban Omnibus / The Architectural League of New York and Urban Design Forum are excited to name Jessica Angima, Amanda Chen, Olivia Fu, Saritha Ramakrishna, Enrique Aureng Silva, and Lucas Vaqueiro 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
Jessica Angima is a Kenyan-American organizer and social practice artist. In a constant state of process, she facilitates intimate community through the exploration of art, ecology, and contemplative practice. Her work focuses on self-formation; using writing, photography, and dharma to explore the effects of specific places, environments, and objects on personal and collective awakening. With 400+ hours of meditation instruction training, she leads community-engaged art and meditation workshops throughout New York City. She is a 2025 Bandung Resident and holds an MA in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Amanda Chen is a writer and artist from California living in New York. Her work broadly explores how individual and collective memory formation is shaped by representations and engagements with digital and embodied public space. Her essays, criticism, and fiction appear in BOMB, the Brooklyn Rail, Catapult, Dirt, the Drift, Harvard Review, MUBI Notebook, the New Republic, and elsewhere in print and online. Previously, she was a fellow at Dia Art Foundation and a member of the Critics Academy at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
Olivia Fu is a writer, organizer, and aspiring urban planner from San Clemente, California. Now based in Brooklyn, she supports New York’s grassroots organizing ecosystem as North Star Fund’s Youth Organizing Associate. She also works as a seasonal figure skating instructor in Prospect Park, where she spends a lot of time thinking about power, parks, and public spaces. She’s most interested in telling stories about cities that connect the rhythms of everyday urban life to their vast and complex histories—and that her friends would find interesting enough to send in the group chat. She received a BA with Honors in Urban Studies and a minor in Creative Writing from Stanford University.
Saritha Ramakrishna is a writer, researcher, and urban planner based in Brooklyn, NY, originally from Phoenix, Arizona. Criticism, reporting and fiction of hers has appeared in The New Republic, The Baffler, Orion Magazine, Literary Hub, Urban Omnibus, and The New Orleans Review. As a writer, she considers our 21st-century economy, the obligations between people and their institutions, and the interplay of landscape and ideology.
Enrique Aureng Silva* is an architect, editor, and writer whose work spans architectural history, storytelling, literature, and translation. He is drawn to unofficial, sideways modes of preservation, exploring how historic narratives shape the present and future of our built environment. He lives in Brooklyn, though his heart often wanders to Coyoacán.
*NCC Honorary Fellow: actively participates in all program sessions and contributes to publications; this is an unpaid position.
Lucas Vaqueiro is a Brazilian civic designer, educator, and researcher based in Queens. Informed by his experience working with cities across the Americas, from New York to São Paulo and Montreal to Montevideo, Lucas is interested in exploring how government bureaucracy can afford wonder. His practice includes installations, publications, and community engagement that reframe bureaucracy as a civic infrastructure worth reimagining—and celebrating. His work has been featured at Milan Design Week and the Creative Bureaucracy Festival.
Support
The 2025–2026 New City Critics program is made possible through the lead support of the Mellon Foundation, with additional support from Critical Minded, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Nat Oppenheimer, Karen Stein, and Calvin Tsao.
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.
Monuments, Peripheries, & Ecologies
Fellows, advisors, and friends celebrated the culmination of the program at a standing-room only capstone event at a83 on June 17, 2025, featuring conversations with the fellows and the launch of a new print publication, Monuments, Peripheries, & Ecologies. In the print publication and on Urban Omnibus, the fellows’ final essays queried the construction of queer spaces on Staten Island and in Crown Heights, the politics of monuments in New York City, and the search for community across time and space on cricket pitches in the Bronx and stoops in Bed-Stuy.
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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.
