Citygroup New York City

Citygroup is an architecture collective founded in 2018 in New York City. It partners with a wide variety of local organizations to confront the forces of development that threaten the city. Through design projects, public events, exhibitions, and grassroots activism, Citygroup aims to interrogate the conditions that subjugate, alienate, and appropriate architects, architecture, and inhabitants of architecture.

We recognize that architecture tends to be beholden to conservative authority, both economic and political, as evidenced in particular by the architectural profession's profound inability to address the global housing crisis and protect the city from unbridled profit-driven development.

We are unwilling to defer to the status quo of capitalist political economy and believe we must interrogate the conditions that subjugate, alienate, and appropriate architects, architecture, and inhabitants of architecture. We challenge one-directional and hierarchical communication and advocate for a discursive model of knowledge, which we believe in turn engenders solidarity.

Participation defines membership in citygroup, as we seek to valorize use, encounter, and the authorship of the collective over that of the individual. Our aim is to establish an enclave for the production of theory and strategy that supports an alternative approach to architecture and a life of dignity for everyone in the city.