by Tom Angotti, Professor Emeritus of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Angotti was the founder and director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. He is the author of many books, essays, and articles on urban development, focusing on issues of race, class, and environmental sustainability.

by Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan. In the early 1980’s, New York’s East Village became a hub for artists and galleries. This foundational essay reframes the East Village art scene and the majority of its promoters as contributors to the displacement of the area’s working class inhabitants. Rosalyn Deutsche is an art historian and critic who teaches modern and contemporary art at Barnard College/Columbia University.

by Luigi Ghirri (1943–92). The Italian conceptual photographer playfully explored framing, mapping, scale, and symmetry in his work. Beginning in the 1970s, he also wrote short essays on photography and culture. This essay begins with the impact of the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon.

by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. These interdisciplinary thinkers have collaborated on a number of essays and publications that draw from the Black radical tradition and autonomist and postcolonial theories to put forth economic, political, and aesthetic critiques.

by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. These interdisciplinary thinkers have collaborated on a number of essays and publications that draw from the Black radical tradition and autonomist and postcolonial theories to put forth economic, political, and aesthetic critiques. Harney is Honorary Professor at The Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia and Moten is a poet and professor of performance studies at New York University.

by Tarry Hum, Professor and Chair of Queens College’s Department of Urban Studies, and member of the Doctoral Faculty at the Graduate Center’s Environmental Psychology program. Hum’s research areas include immigrant urbanism, transnational capital and real estate financialization, urban planning and community economic development. Her scholarship and activism have often focused on these issues in the neighborhood of Flushing, Queens.

by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). As a whole, Kant’s essay outlines principles for sustained peaceful relations between nations, laying the groundwork for today’s international law and global bodies such as the United Nations. The Third Definitive Article states that “hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility,” and builds an argument for the rights of the refugee.

by Stephen Korns, Susan Jahoda, and Caroline Woolard, founding members of NYC TBD, a community land trust (CLT) initiative for internet activists, artists, makers, and community organizers, formed in 2012. NYCTBD transformed in 2014 when the group decided to support the New York City Community Land Initiative rather than focusing on collective housing for artists. Stephen, Susan, and Caroline continue to be in a collective living “pod” during COVID-19.

Hong-An Truong’s conversation with Leung focuses on Leung’s ”squatting projects” which have used the squatting body as a performative intervention since 1994. Truong is an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at University of North Carolina.

by Josh Lubin-Levy, scholar, dramaturg, and curator. Lubin-Levy is currently on faculty at the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University, the Senior Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal. This essay looks at downtown artist Jack Smith's use of rent and the notion of “plaster”—artifice, surface, perhaps hypocrisy—as a way to talk about the commodification of art and artists, and as a stand-in for a critique of market capitalism as a whole.

by Yvonne Rainer, experimental dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker. The program for the performance includes a text by Rainer, in which she states “The world disintegrates around me. My connection to the world-in-crisis remains tenuous and remote.” Rainer invokes this tension between concept and materiality in her role as Edgar Allan Poe in Leung’s POE.

by Damon Rich, designer, artist, and partner with Jae Shin at HECTOR, an urban design, planning, and civic arts practice. In this text, published after the 2008 housing market crash, Rich outlines three critical developments in the evolving relationship between finance, politics, and, property under American capitalism.

by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar. This excerpt tells the story of Seneca Village, a community of free often landowning Black people displaced from the land that would become Central Park. Roy Alan Rosenzweig (1950–2007) was an historian at George Mason University in Virginia. Blackmar is Professor of American History at Columbia University.

by Elizabeth Schambelan. Executive editor of Artforum, Schambelan is currently working on a book about masculinity, fraternity culture, and feminism. In this essay, our real estate developer-in-chief stars in a true tragicomedy of corruption and collusion, as New York City replaces its residents with one shining, unsold luxury tower after another.

by Neil Smith (1954–2012) geographer and activist. The timeline was produced for the exhibition catalog of Wodiczko’s 1989 exhibition at the alternative space Exit Art, New York. Smith traces the history of conflict at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village from 1831 through the end of the 1980s, revealing a pattern of conflict, occupation, and expulsion spanning nearly 150 years. Smith was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

by Samuel Stein, PhD candidate in Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and Urban Studies instructor at Hunter College. His scholarship addresses the increasingly powerful faction of government that seeks to bend public policy to support ever-rising property values. Stein has collaborated with Hum on a number of articles about how Sunset Park, Flushing, and Manhattan’s Chinatown are interwoven in a larger system of gentrification.

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is also author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, which won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. In this essay, Taylor outlines the policies of predatory inclusion that have shaped homeownership since the Fair Housing Act and the HUD Act of 1968. Born from the civic uprisings of 1967–68, and intended as remedies for years of de jure housing segregation, their failure, Taylor argues, stems from the entanglement of public policy with real estate interests.

Minutes from the Congressional Record—House (1969) and the United States Senate Executive Session (1969), including S. 1941, a bill to authorize appropriations to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for research and development, construction of facilities, and research and program management, and other purposes. Under this proposal, members of Congress discussed if and which flags and symbols should be planted on the Moon.

by Kathryn Yusoff. This text takes as its basis the proposed geological epoch dating from the start of significant human impacts on Earth’s geology and ecosystems known as the Anthropocene. Connecting Black feminist theory, geography, and the earth sciences, Yusoff argues the very discipline of geology is rooted in the extractive economies of colonialism and slavery. She is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London.