GSAPP Incubator Open Sessions. Cassim Shepard - Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism

In Citymakers, Cassim Shepard offers a vivid survey of how urbanism today is no longer the domain of just planners, politicians, and power brokers removed from the effects of their decisions, but an array of citizens working at the vanguard of increasingly diverse practices, from community gardeners to architects to housing advocates.

Drawing on six years as the editor of Urban Omnibus, one of the leading publications charting innovations in urban practice (launched in 2009 by The Architectural League of New York), Shepard explores a broad variety of projects in New York: a constructed wetland in Staten Island, a workforce development and technology program in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a public art installation in a Bronx housing project, a housing advocacy initiative in Jackson Heights, Queens. These and a wide variety of other examples in Citymakers comprise a cross-disciplinary, from-the-ground-up approach that encourage better choices for cities of the future.

By blending intimate portraits of individuals and projects with incisive social analysis, Citymakers reports from the front lines of urban practice with up-to-the-minute examples and arguments that reframe our understanding of urbanism. Revising traditional notions of urban intervention and providing new directions for the next generation of citizen-practitioners, Citymakers is a lasting document of the perspectives driving cities today, and tomorrow.

Moderated by Michelle Young ‘12 UP, former Incubator member and founder of Untapped Cities.

If you are not a member of the GSAPP Incubator or NEW INC community and would like to attend this event, please RSVP.

Cassim Shepard produces non-fiction media about cities, buildings and places. Trained as an urban planner, geographer, and documentary filmmaker, he lectures widely about the craft of visual storytelling in urban analysis, planning and design. His film and video work has been commissioned by and screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Ford Foundation, the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the United Nations, among many other venues around the world. He is an adjunct assistant profesor at GSAPP. Citymakers: The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism, published by Monacelli Press in 2017, is his first book. As the founding editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, an online publication of The Architectural League of New York, he spent six years working with hundreds of local architects, designers, artists, writers, and public servants to share their stories of urban innovation, with a particular emphasis on housing, infrastructure, and the changing nature of cultural institutions.

Michelle Young is the founder of Untapped Cities, a web magazine and tour company about urban discovery. She is a graduate of Harvard College in the History of Art and Architecture and holds a master’s degree in urban planning from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is an Adjunct Professor of Architecture. She is the author of Secret Brooklyn, An Unusual Guide, New York: Hidden Bars & Restaurants, and Broadway.

Organized by GSAPP Incubator at NEW INC