What is the future of work and how can we accommodate new paradigms of manufacture?
Lodged within the rusty remains of an industrial-era infrastructure in, the East New York Industrial Business District (ENY- IBZ) are junk yards, workshops and parking lots filled with school busses and police vans, shelters and transitional housing. The landscape appears bleak until one notices the counterpoints of urban care- community gardens, schools, bodegas, public housing, and most importantly…. the large number of underutilized city-owned properties. These ‘commons’- poorly articulated and scrappy as they are, have the potential to be reclaimed by a community that is anxious about the threat of displacement as these properties gain value.
In this co-taught architecture studio by architects Pedro Cruz Cruz and Nandini Bagchee at the Spitzer School of Architecture CCNY, we worked in close collaboration with two main organizations: East New York Community Land Trust and Universe City. These organizations are generating a comprehensive plan for 8+ city owned sites within the ENY IBZ to create a synergetic urban work environment that incorporates food, education, cannabis and energy production. They aim to rethink the concept of “manufacturing”. They depend on the support of state and city institutions but ultimately espouse a model of development and ownership based in community control and self-governance.
The research is focused on how new paradigms of manufacture and cooperative ownership can move us from an extractive economy to a regenerative one in our post-post-industrial city.