View of Downtown Brooklyn’s Fabric with Infill Housing Spatially Integrating the Farragut Housing Towers (indicated with brown roofs). By Author

For much of the 20th century, the image of cities was defined by the skyline of corporate office towers. The disruption of the pandemic, however, has reduced the demand for new office towers and dampened their allure as the image of the city. At the same time, the importance of housing in cities has only grown and is now the critical focus of city governments across the world. Despite the ability to work and live remotely, urban housing, especially in global cities like New York, is still in high demand as cities are the economic engines of their region, providing opportunity to a diverse range of people. These city governments are working to meet the vast needs for new housing stock, in particular affordable housing, while at the same time preserving as much existing housing as possible, especially housing for low-income families. This task of meeting the housing demand is daunting, with hundreds of thousands of new units required and many older buildings faltering due to a lack of adequate investment and maintenance. Making this task more difficult is the resistance many communities have to change, rendering proposals for new housing contentious. This volume of housing research offers multiple perspectives considering the nature of housing and specific instances where the provision of housing is a complex process with social, economic, and political implications.

My paper explores this complexity in the context of the vital questions surrounding the survival of public housing in New York City. The research and speculative design demonstrate the potential for new housing and site-specific urban design to be part of the solution to saving and upgrading the deteriorating subsidised apartments for low-income New Yorkers. This new housing, the fabric of a new neighbourhood integrating the public housing towers, is shown to simultaneously address the economic needs for the existing housing and the spatial and social isolation of public housing residents by providing the definition of new streets, parks, and public squares as an active and connected public realm. This paper’s goal is to help move the conversation forward by demonstrating what change could look like and how new urban housing development could benefit a wide range of new and current city residents.

Addressing urban social and spatial stratification: testing the potential for integration of public housing by Jason Montgomery (School of Architecture and Planning, Catholic University of America, USA) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 28.

Jason Montgomery is an architect, urban designer, scholar, and educator. An Associate Professor at Catholic University School of Architecture and a principal at Truong Montgomery Architect, his research reflects his interests in urban architecture and morphology. He co-organized a number of conferences and symposia addressing the complexity of cities, the evolution of downtown Brooklyn, and housing along the Brooklyn waterfront. He was the editor of a recently published volume Place-based Sustainability: Research and Design Extending Pathways for Ecological Stewardship, and a guest editor of a special issue of AMPS Journal: Re-imagining the City: Urban Space in the Post-Covid City.

public space public housing affordable housing urban infill urban housing urban design urban morphology