What we organize and bring to design are creative communities - you will see this in the projects presented here and how the partnerships play an innovative role.

The social, cultural, and developmental features - what people create together - is what we design for in architectural and planning projects.

After years of community building while practicing as an architect, I felt that this was the time to create an approach to architectural design synthesized with growth and development.

For example, from 2013 - 2018 we helped to build awareness about the effort to privatize public housing in New York City among New York City Housing Authority residents. In our view and the view of thousands of residents, privatization, while bringing needed capital to repair public housing’s horrendous conditions, converts public assets to private sector control and will lead to rent increases, evictions, and homelessness. Everyone knows that what happens on the ground will change under private management and resident protections will be severely weakened in not non-existent. After all, public housing - to become Section 8 - will now need to be profitable for its investors.

Privatization does not build an environment for social innovation, exactly what is needed to address poverty and the isolation of residents of public housing. It is

not a humanistic plan. It is not concerned with the growth and development of the residents, the community and the city.

So, we set out to develop a design thought exercise to discover something about what we can do to create something new which is presented here. The exercise includes several elements — building new partnerships, how to build new partnerships, a new concept for turning inside out how we understand mixed income and mixed-use neighborhoods, and most importantly, developing a community of people who want to collaborate on creating the city we want. This approach grows out of my history as an organizer and architect.

This design thought exercise focused on an East Harlem NYCHA development, and the work to design and bring it into a conversation was a social activity. It is not idealistic or dreamed up or utopian. It was the genesis for Center for Developing Cities.

Other projects that I have developed over the past 20 years as an organizer and architect are featured here. New ones are on the horizon and will be added. I invite you to join me and others in broadening a conversation about building new partnerships, development, and design.