ABOUT
The New School Urban Research Group is a community of learners that explores the manifold forms, networks, and conditions of urban life. We are dedicated to scholarly and creative inquiry that engages with cities and the urban across a range of disciplines, practices, geographies, and temporalities. In doing so, we draw on the long legacy of urban scholars and practitioners who have taught, lectured, or otherwise been affiliated with The New School.
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Purpose
The Urban Research Group is committed to the circulation of new understandings of cities and urban processes emerging from the intersection of research and creative practice. Rather than studying phenomena that happen to take place in cities, we take the urban itself as the primary point of departure for our work. We value inquiry-driven projects that unfold through a range of media, from books and articles to essays, photography, video, mapping, graphic storytelling, design propositions, and data visualization.
We are especially desirous to move beyond conceptualizations of power, urbanity, and design that take the global North as the sole point of departure. And we reject critical apparatus grounded in explanatory certainties or the primacy of one structural or embodied condition over another. Instead, we embrace the intersectional nature of power and the multidimensional condition of human experience. Our ultimate goal is to contribute to the making of just, inclusive, brave, caring, and convivial urbanities,
Photographs, top to bottom: W.E.B. DuBois, Lewis Mumford, Berenice Abbott, Charles Abrams, Jane Jacobs, Charles Tilly, Janet Abu-Lughod, Ed Blakely, AbdouMaliq Simone