The Lower East Side of Manhattan is a hub of immigrant communities and affordable housing. It is culturally diverse but also an income desert among the more affluent areas around it. Over the decades, it has also been home to one of the largest concentrations of the Chinese community in the west - Chinatown. 

However, there is affordability problem. The push to “develop” this area is real, manifesting as ever-rising property ownership and rental costs. The working class Chinese community is slowly being pushed out as living costs rise, making it impossible to afford to live in Manhattan. Eventually the working class will have to move out. The southern part of the island would lose its vital organs, permanently in need of delicate life support from far away. 

The city has never been too intent to let its architecture reflect the communities it shelters. Even within the rigid Manhattan grid, fully built over with century old tenements, the Chinese population has managed to assert spatial influence over the area in whatever small ways they can. The people in Chinatown have already built social solidarities on an intimate scale. But these solidarities will amount to nothing in the face of economic realities of real estate and rising cost of living.

Now we ask the questions. Can good urban design establish systems and infrastructure that protect the LES from being eaten up by NYC’s bourgeois sprawl? Are there ways in which we can ensure that property owners in the LES get their fair share of income while still regulating rent for small businesses and affordable housing to survive? Can new public space typologies actively protect local interests and allow more freedom for cultural expression? To answer these questions, we present the Co-opulence Urbanism Model.

Teammate: Anirudh Venkat, Xindi Wang, Rui Zhang
Year: 2020 (Fall)