An Architecture for New York Communities for Change


Climate Change in NYC



Hurricane Sandy (2012) 











Income Inequality in NYC


In New York State, poverty and hardship exist alongside great wealth. In both testimony and commissioner reflections, this contradiction was emphasized. 


New York has the highest income inequality in the nation, as measured by the Gini index. (Fiscal Policy Institute, 2018 Executive Budget Briefing, pg. 18).


According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, almost half (48 percent) of increases in income in New York post-recession (2009-2015) went to the top 1 percent of earners (Fiscal Policy Institute, 2018 Executive Budget Briefing, pg. 18). 


As in the nation generally, inequality in New York is increasing. The top 1 percent's share of income grew from 12 percent in 1980 to 32.4% in 2015.


In 2013, the average income of the top 1% in New York State was $2,006,632 and the average income of the bottom 99% was $44,163.




An Organization that Focus on Both















OUR FIGHT


Change Climate change and inequality are the two great moral crises of our time. The climate crisis is here: worldwide, people are running for their lives from fires and floods. Low-income communities of color are hit the hardest.

NYCC fights for bold, transformational change at the scale of the crisis. We demand policies for 100% renewable energy while creating good, union jobs for communities of color.



OUR WORK







CAMPAIGNS

  • Stop Wall Street’s financing of oil, gas, coal and pipelines 
  • Stop all fossil fuel infrastructure projects in NYS and move to 100% renewable energy
  • Slash New York City’s climate pollution and create good jobs
  • Create good jobs and invest in communities of color
  • #GreenNewDeal 




The Green New Deal






Ideas for Studio Project



  • Skyscrapers are literal and figurative instruments to demonstrate power
  • There are not many but they are tall and powerful – symbolic of the top 1%
  • Community buildings (residential, independent retailers, mom & pop stores, etc.)
  • There are many but they are not very tall or powerful – symbolic of the bottom 99%
  • What kind of architecture can we make to take back the streets and the power from the top 1%?
  • How can this be used to facilitate activism?
  • How can this idea empower communities affected by climate change and transition to a green economy?
  • Small interventions throughout NYC, a network of sustainable structures that create renewable energy and fund their initiatives through the electric payback system. Build a nationwide smart electricity grid that can pool and store power from a diversity of renewable sources, giving the nation clean, democratically-controlled, energy.
  • Simultaneously allow the community to take part in sustaining their neighborhood.
  • It can provide assistance to workers and unemployed people affected by the outbreak of COVID-19.
  • According to the IEA’s 2017 forecasting model, if current global policies remain on a steady trajectory through 2040, global co2 emissions will rise to 43 billion tons per year.
  • Through the investment program of the Green New Deal, it becomes realistic to drive down global co2 emissions relative to today by 40 per cent within twenty years, while also supporting rising living standards and expanding job opportunities.
  • We must also reduce the amount of energy wasted through generating and transmitting electricity, and through operating industrial machinery. Therefore, it is best to have localized areas of distribution instead of a grid, it’s a network. Instead of a headquarters, it’s small interventions.
  • Average solar photovoltaic costs are likely to fall to parity with fossil fuels as an electricity source within five years.
  • The most effective renewable-energy infrastructure would combine solar and wind, along with geothermal, hydro and clean bioenergy as supplemental sources.
  • However, in NYC the most realistic is solar infrastructure and electrifying the grid.
  • How might alternative ownership forms—including public ownership, community ownership and small-scale private companies—play a role in advancing the clean-energy investment agenda?
  • Clean-energy investments will nevertheless create major new opportunities for alternative ownership forms, including various combinations of smaller-scale public, private and cooperative ownership. For example, community-based wind farms have been highly successful for nearly two decades in Germany, Denmark, Swede, and the UK. A major reason for their success is that they operate with lower profit requirements than large-scale private corporations.
  • Juliet Schor describes in True Wealth (2011) what she calls ‘a prima facie case that the emerging green sector will be powered by small and medium-size firms, with their agility, dynamism and entrepreneurial determination’.
  • Over time, Schor writes, ‘these entities can become a sizeable sector of low-impact enterprises, which form the basis of animated local communities and provide livelihood on a wide scale.’
  • We could also insist that high-income people—regardless of their countries of residence—be permitted to produce no more co2 emissions than anyone else.
  • The richest in the US and the UK have an unequal ability to pollute. The first component of this is luxury consumption. Their lifestyles are high-carbon because they are based on highly polluting forms of transport such as flying.




Other Links