Citymakers ─ The Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism

Cities are where solutions to the twenty-first century’s key challenges—inequality, grassroots activism, climate change, innovation—will be tested. And as cities adapt to new developments in technology, infrastructure, public space, transportation, and housing, so too must urban practices and our understanding of how to effect positive change evolve. 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, Shepard explores a broad variety of projects in New York, a city at the forefront of experimental and practical research: 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. With original photography by Alex Fradkin, the book fuses the rich visual and graphic sensibility of architectural publishing with the informative readability of sophisticated, long-format journalism. 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.

Cassim Shepard is the founding editor-in-chief of Urban Omnibus, the online publication of The Architectural League of New York. For the past six years, he has worked 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. In addition to his editorial role, Shepard makes films about the design, planning, and experience of cities and places. His film and video work has been screened at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Ford Foundation, and the United Nations, among many other venues around the world. His writing on urbanism has appeared in Next City, Places, Domus, Public Culture, as well as in books and catalogues documenting work by Geoff Manaugh, David Adjaye, and others. He has taught courses at the Cities Programme of the London School of Economics and Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. From 2010 to 2013, he was a Poiesis Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He studied filmmaking at Harvard University, urban geography at the University of London, and urban planning at MIT.