Visualize NYC 2021: Changing City

*This event is occurring as a live webinar. Registrants will be emailed a link to access the program.*

This program will look at citywide issues we believe will be relevant to the 2021 local elections in NYC. 

The next 12 months may be some of the most momentous in New York City’s history, with a confluence of events—including the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and an election with the potential to reshape the political landscape— creating major opportunities for change. The November 2021 election will lead to an unprecedented amount of turnover in city government: in addition to the mayor, 40 elected officials will reach term limits, including four borough presidents and 34 City Council members. The number of open positions creates a singular opportunity for change in the five boroughs, and incoming civic leaders will have the potential to remake the political landscape.    

In response to this unique moment, AIA New York has partnered with MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab to undertake a web project titled Visualize NYC 2021, which will explore issues in our city that we believe will be central in the 2021 local elections.  

This program, featuring Purnima Kapur and Nicholas de Monchaux, is presented with the first phase of Visualize NYC 2021, a website that invites you to share your vision for New York City in response to prompts from experts in the built environment. 

Amongst other built environment issues Kapur and de Monchaux will discuss Kapur’s prompt: 

“The pandemic and social and racial unrest amplified the importance of the public realm in New York. We can apply these lesson to our future city by____” 

To respond to this prompt and others please visit VisualizeNYC.net.

Speakers:
Purnima Kapur, Planning Consultant; Urbanist 
Nicholas de Monchaux, Professor, Head of Architecture, MIT 

Purnima Kapur has over 25 years of experience in City building. She is also an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Planning and Architecture. Ms. Kapur serves as a Director on the Board of Trustees of the Hudson River Park Trust and the Skyscraper Museum, and on the Board of Advisors of Columbia University’s Center for Buildings Infrastructure and Public Space. She is the former Executive Director of the New York City Department of City Planning (DCP), where she oversaw the agency’s five Borough Offices as well as the Central Planning divisions. Ms. Kapur is one of the key architects of New York City’s groundbreaking Mandatory Inclusionary Housing regulation. Under her leadership, the City adopted five Integrated Neighborhood Plans in four boroughs, as well as an innovative plan for the redevelopment of Greater East Midtown. Ms. Kapur has been a key player in the redevelopment and transformation of Brooklyn over the past two decades. Under Mayor Bloomberg, she served as Director of DCP’s Brooklyn Borough Office from 2006-2014. She led high-priority and transformative projects, including the development of Greenpoint-Williamsburg waterfront, Downtown Brooklyn and Coney Island. In her role as Director of DCP’s Bronx Office from 2001-2006, she led the largest rezoning agenda in the borough’s history touching almost every neighborhood in the borough, from Yankee Stadium and Port Morris and Riverdale. Ms. Kapur is trained as an architect and a city planner, with dual Masters degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Nicholas de Monchaux is Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT. He is a partner in the architecture practice modem, and a founder of the design technology company Local Software. Until 2020 he was Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and Craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media at UC Berkeley, where he also served as Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. De Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize, as well as Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). His design work has been exhibited widely, including at the Biennial of the Americas, the Venice Architecture Biennale, The Lisbon Architecture Triennial, SFMOMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. His work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hellman Fund, and the Bakar Spark Fund. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.