The Shape of Cities to Come Institute

Home
United States
New York, NY
The Shape of Cities to Come Institute

Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from The Shape of Cities to Come Institute, Nonprofit Organization, 9 Avenue B, New York, NY.

06/21/2024

❤️‍🔥Join for the launch of New York 2044, a speculative social sculpture by artist, writer, and organizer Noah Fischer (). This research-based artwork takes the form of a newspaper that proposes the city we want to inhabit in 2044, and how to get there.

❤️‍🔥The first issue focuses on housing, and features reports from the imaginations of New York’s committed citizens, including SCCI peer Betty Yu of and co-founders Sam Stein, Miguel Robles-Durán, and Monxo López.

🗓️ If this sounds up your alley, be sure to RSVP to the launch on Saturday, June 22 from 2-5pm

🌆 More about New York 2044:
Issues report on how the gap between rich and poor is radically narrowing, green housing is plentiful and affordable, and life is healthier and more equitable in New York City, 20 years in the future, without avoiding the familiar challenges and paradoxes. Each headline is shaped by interviews with someone deeply committed to that particular aspect of city life in the present, and a snippet of their personal journey is told in graphic novel format by clicking their author picture on the article. Three playful, aspirational, retro-futuristic, visually stunning printed and online issues will be produced over 2024, joining in concert with More Art’s other public programs, events, and projects for the year.

06/04/2024

❤️‍🔥An end of semester celebration with a beautiful, brilliant group of folks 💐

🌷We’ve finally reached the end of PLAY! Throughout this phase, our peers co-envisioned and strategized projects that are aimed to inspire, mobilize, and connect our communities.

🌷Now that we’re two-thirds of the way through the STUDY.PLAY.ACT program, our peers have sculpted the frameworks of their projects and will spend the summer in pre-production to prepare for the launch of their interventions in the fall.

🌷Keep your eyes open for our official announcement of our peers’ projects!

05/03/2024

💌 In case you missed it, we sent out our April newsletter earlier this week! What’s in the newsletter? In short…

🇵🇸 Much of our peers’ and team’s energy is focused on Gaza and supporting the student encampments across NYC. Before we give our updates in our monthly recap newsletters, we share a list of resources for solidarity actions for Palestine.

❤️‍🔥 Our recording for our second public dialogue, Direct Actions, is out now on our YouTube channel. Link in bio.

🌷We shared our latest updates with the STUDY.PLAY.ACT process, like our Community Brain Trust meeting on April 11.

💐 SCCI shoutouts and upcoming events! We like to highlight what our SCCI ecosystem has been up to for the past month, and plug y’all into upcoming events from our network/friends.

💌 Read our newsletter today! Link in bio.

04/12/2024

🧠Another milestone for our peers’ project progress: the Community Brain Trust!

🔥As we mentioned in our last update, we know how vital it is to ground our work in community feedback as we build upon organizing legacies. That’s why our peers presented their nascent project plans to trusted badass allies last night.

🔥Their feedback included how to focus on depth versus breadth to maximize impact in a short activation timeline, which local campaigns could offer potential alignments, best practices for language justice in educational/outreach materials, which political frameworks could bridge different movements, how to tailor accountability demands to our different targets, and much more.

❤️We thank everyone who participated in our Community Brain Trust! Our work is only stronger with feedback.

04/04/2024

❤️‍🔥 Thank you to everyone who came out on a rainy Tuesday evening to engage in our public dialogue on Direct Actions! We’re in awe of all of y’all’s brilliance, and of our featured speakers, Briana Calderón Navarro (.online), Lisa Fithian (), Minahil Akbar (), and Juan Carlos Ruiz (). 
❤️‍🔥 Much gratitude to the Babilla Collective () for helping us make our event bilingual as we practice centering language justice in our work. 
❤️‍🔥We loved holding space to hear from the various organizing lineages of our speakers, discuss how we can bridge different exigent struggles in the city, and address tangible organizing questions from attendees.

❤️‍🔥Stay tuned for the event recording and the emergent work from our peership! We’re excited to host future public dialogues and collaborations. We often share our major news and announcements with our listserv first, so be sure to sign up for our newsletter to stay in the know!

03/25/2024

🎙️¡Nuestro próximo diálogo público es en una semana!Interpretación en español de Joél De Andrade Ledesma y Pao Lebrón Guzman (Colectivo Babilla).

💥Huelgas, sentadas, boicots, bloqueos, redistribución de recursos: los movimientos sociales incitan a una diversidad de acciones directas para lograr justicia en nuestras comunidades.

💥En este diálogo público, reuniremos a una variedad de actores de la acción directa para compartir lecciones aprendidas con tanto esfuerzo en múltiples campos de lucha: militancias abolicionistas y sindicales, solidaridad palestina, ayuda a los solicitantes de asilo, y operaciones de ayuda mutua.

💥Nos discutiremos cómo las acciones directas (tanto materiales como simbólicas, estratégicas y tácticas) se crean y adaptan en movimiento para satisfacer las necesidades cambiantes del movimiento. Reflexionaremos sobre cómo las campañas de acción directa que incluyen agitación y cuidados pueden profundizar la confianza colectiva y sostener riesgos valientes para una transformación a largo plazo.

💥En este momento histórico de convulsiones, unámonos para estudiar nuestras acciones directas con el fin de difundir más eficazmente su impacto.

💥Regístrate ahora: bit.ly/SCCIevents

03/20/2024

📣Mark your calendars for Tuesday, April 2!

🔥Join and for the next installment of our Public Dialogue series on Direct Actions!

⚡️Strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, blockades, resource redistribution – social movements incite a range of direct actions to achieve justice in our communities.

💗 In this public dialogue, we will gather four direct action practitioners to share hard-earned lessons from multiple fields of struggle: abolitionist and union militancies, Palestine solidarity, aiding asylum seekers, and mutual aid operations.

✨We will dive into how direct actions – both material and symbolic, strategic and tactical – are created and adapted in motion to meet changing movement needs. We will reflect on how direct action campaigns that include agitation and aftercare can deepen collective trust and sustain courageous risks for longterm transformation.

🌱In this historic moment of upheavals, let’s come together to study our direct actions in order to more effectively spread their impact.

💫RSVP today! bit.ly/SCCIevents

03/15/2024

✨Recapping weeks 6 + 7 of the PLAY phase!✨

🌿Our peers are fully in their process, digging deeper through research, and scaffolding structure to each other’s ideas.

🔸This past Tuesday, our peers engaged with folks from Community Service Society to do a thematic deep dive into housing policy. Over the course of the evening, we discussed challenges of subsidized housing, community-controlled management, and new paradigms of social property. We thank Oksana Mironova, Iziah Thompson, and Sam Stein for sharing their knowledge with us!

🔥And before we sign off, here are some quotes that have been giving fire to our work:

🔥“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.” Audre Lorde

🔥“Education is the practice of freedom.” Paulo Freire, bell hooks

🔥“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” C.L.R James

03/01/2024

🎉Before the weekend hits, here’s a recap of Weeks 4 and 5 of our PLAY phase!

As we continue our project development process, we have an array of visiting practitioners who share their knowledge and experiences with us.

🎭 Artist, cultural organizer, and popular educator, Jorge “Cano Cangrejo” Díaz Ortiz (), spoke about his work through his organization, AgitArte () and street theater collective, Papel Machete ().

He gave insight into how the performance art form of puppetry can push political boundaries, what strategic collaboration can look like amongst organizations that are geographically far but kindred in mission, the labor behind performance and events, and building trust with our communities.

For instance, Papel Machete’s latest production, “On the Eve of Abolition,” is a bilingual, speculative futurist, multimedia and mask/puppet theater performance. The story, set in 2047, “is about the last day of the last prison in transnational liberated lands of what used to be known as the U.S. and Mexico after a movement of abolitionists have created the conditions to end the prison industrial complex.”

🌱 As for our peers’ progress, we are entering the next sub-phase: digging/sampling. During this next stage, our peers will be co-researching, linking experiences to history, and more! Stay tuned.

02/22/2024

🔥Our peers met for an all-day retreat last weekend! Together, they further identified alignments and connections across their work and ideas from previous brainstorming sessions. As we explore new possibilities, we are thinking about how to keep our work grounded in our communities’ needs in this pivotal time period—through what criteria should we benchmark our projects to ensure they emanate from the values and relations we hold dear?

💫 During the retreat, Gabriela Rendón and Miguel Robles-Durán—two of our co-founders—shared with peers about Participatory Action Research (PAR), which is a methodology that uses collective inquiry and community participation to enact social change. Gabriela and Miguel spoke about the social-spatial research/actions they have accomplished over the years using PAR as a framework, such as urban unions and housing cooperative trusts.

🌱 As our peers develop their interventions, it’s helpful to see how other organizations execute projects from start to finish, how challenges or roadblocks are addressed, and how the small details are considered. For instance, Gabriela and Miguel visualized their process of how they undertook long-term projects, such as the “Playgrounds for Useful Knowledge,” which was a project to occupy empty lots to create community hubs to celebrate local knowledge and address land occupation, gentrification, and environmental restoration in South Philly.

🌷For the remainder of the retreat, our peers further examined potential NYC interventions on housing justice, migrant solidarity, and transforming urban spaces through the lenses of arts and culture, data and agitprop, and community-led strategies. Stay tuned for what continues to emerge!

02/16/2024

🎁 We’ve just wrapped up Week 3 of the PLAY Phase! 
❄️On Tuesday, our peers met virtually (on account of the snow), to delve deeper into our ideas for potential interventions across the city. We’re narrowing down themes, and mulling over how to connect hyperlocal work into a citywide movement and what structural change could look like in NYC.  
⚡️And on Thursday, our friends from (SBU), Mychal Johnson and Arif Ullah, came to speak with our peers about their powerful work to reclaim and rebuild community-owned assets through community land trusts (CLT), and their ongoing fight for environmental justice in the South Bronx. 
Specifically, Mychal and Arif shared how SBU and community members in Mott Haven and Port Morris continue to honor and build upon the legacy of the Young Lords through the reclamation of the abandoned, city-owned Lincoln Detox Center into a holistic community center for health, education, and the arts (H.E.ARTS) through their community land trust. They also spoke about their campaign against Fresh Direct and how it opened the conversation about the environmental racism that South Bronx neighbors have endured for decades.  
The conversation delved into how organizers can ensure that the communities we are fighting for/with are not left with crumbs when engaging with figures like government officials and developers. We discussed the need for stamina in organizing and the importance to keep showing up no matter what, how storytelling with visualizations and data can help fight for what our communities deserve, and much more.  
💗 Much love and appreciation to South Bronx Unite for sharing their knowledge, experiences, and work with us.

02/09/2024

📖📚The second week of our PLAY phase is in the books!

🌟On Tuesday, we continued our collective imagining for what potential interventions could look like. Our peers mulled over how to ensure their work could be sustainable, connect the local to the global, what is needed for true community justice to occur, how to make our movement intergenerational, and much more!

💓On Thursday, our peers met for their first peer-facilitated session, where they continued to brainstorm and draw points of convergence across their respective work. As we continue to imagine, we are grounding ourselves with ongoing reflections, like how are we moving and shifting power in NYC? and how do we move beyond crisis response and build movement infrastructure?

💭We’re sure this is no stranger to you all, but we’re also wrestling with the recurring contradiction and struggle of feeling despair while trying to cultivate joy in movement work. We pose to you—what are some ways you incorporate joy in your lives and communities as we all navigate the capitalist and racist structures of our world?

Address

9 Avenue B
New York, NY
10009

Website

http://shapeofcitiestocome.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when The Shape of Cities to Come Institute posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Organization

Send a message to The Shape of Cities to Come Institute:

Shortcuts

Featured

Heart River Center for Intuitive Healing

Want your organization to be the top-listed Non Profit Organization in New York?