NYU Cities Collaborative-Mellon Summer Institute on Urbanism

The NYU Cities Collaborative held its second Summer Institute on Urbanism for Predissertation Students in Madrid, Spain from May 21-31, 2023, with support from the Mellon Foundation. Under the leadership of NYU Cities Collaborative director Thomas Sugrue and NYU Metropolitan Studies professor Sophie Gonick, brought together ten extraordinary young urbanists, chosen from more than 200 applicants. Students received a $4000 fellowship and housing for the term of the Institute. 

Over ten days, in a series of lively seminars, workshops, and a walking tour of immigrant Madrid, fellows met with leading urbanists from a wide variety of disciplines, including Isabella Anguelovski (Barcelona), Hiba Bou Akar (Columbia), Neil Brenner (Chicago), Alberto Corsin-Jiminez (Spanish National Research Council), Eric Klinenberg (NYU), Keisha-Khan Perry (Penn), Heather Ann Thompson (Michigan), Andres Walliser (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Mabel O. Wilson (Columbia), and Caitlin Zaloom (NYU). Fellows presented their work-in-progress, discussed and debated the future of urban inquiry and urban life, and built a strong sense of intellectual community.

2023 Fellows – Biographies

Gregory Briker is a JD-PhD student at Yale Law School and Yale’s History Department. Originally from Rockland County, New York, his interests center on law and metropolitan inequality, with particular focus on local government, property, and criminal law and administration. He also studies the relationship between law and social movements more broadly. As a law student, he has contributed to active litigation on fair housing, voting rights, and other civil rights matters.

Malembe Dumont Copero is an Afro-Venezuelan and Spanish first-year PhD student in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. She combines questions of environmental planning and health justice, with particular attention to how community-led climate adaptation strategies, such as relocation, can impact the health of marginalized communities. Malembe uses participatory action research and knowledge co-production methodologies to center communities’ voices. Before Cornell, she was Fulbright Fellow in urban planning at Rutgers.

Brandon Flora Dunlevy is a first-year Ph.D. student and Mellon Humanities Fellow in Spanish & Portuguese at University of Pennsylvania. He grew up as a first-generation student in Brownsville, Pennsylvania and holds a B.A. from Princeton University, where he studied Spanish, Latin American & African American Studies. His research interests include trans-Pacific studies, contemporary discourse on colonial urban spaces, archival paleography, Afro-Latinx epistemology, and legal history.

Alexader Ferrer is a Ph.D student in geography at UCLA, who is researching landlord practices, housing markets, and community/regional economic development, with an emphasis on the corporate & business organization of landlords,
the interaction between housing market segments and landlord practices, and the political and economic forces which underpin changing housing conditions.

Raychel Gadson is a Ph.D. student in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. She works as an activist ethnographer with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust to study urban politics and neighborhood organizing in Baltimore. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that grassroots organizers in historically segregated, and politically marginalized neighborhoods fight to build decision-making power for their communities.

Maritza Geronimo (they/them) is a Nahua Guerrerense Xicanx raised in Anaheim, California. They are a Geography Ph.D. student at UCLA studying Indigenous and Latinx land back projects and food sovereignty efforts in Los Angeles. Their work is rooted in decolonial feminist geographies and urban political ecologies to think through the importance of coalitions in creating radical diasporic relations to land, place, and each other. Maritza is also a freelance filmmaker, photographer, and herbalist.

Payton Johnson is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at New York University. Originally from Denver, Colorado, he is interested in urban sociology and the sociology of culture. Payton’s research examines how cultural production, political economy, and racial inequality shape urban spaces. He is currently contributing to research studies at NYU Sociology and IHDSC (The Institute of Human Development and Social Change) and has previously conducted research projects on gentrification, cultural consumption, and spatial inequality at Columbia University and the University of Colorado Denver.

Luisa Melo is a Brazilian scholar with an international and interdisciplinary academic background. She got her BA in Design from the University of Brasilia in Brazil, her MA in Urban Studies from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico, and is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Sociology at Tulane University in the US. Her academic interest focuses on urban inequality, segregation, and urban planning. She is currently researching about cultural practices that takes place in marginalized areas on the outskirts of Brazil’s capital, Brasilia.

Treasure Tinsley  is a PhD student in history at the University of Minnesota. She studies the developments of twentieth-century US cities through the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, and law. Her research focuses on the reproductive and carceral politics of urban renewal. Treasure lives with her wife in South Minneapolis and loves gardening and pottery. 

Calvin Walds is a writer, educator, and sound and image-maker from Detroit, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. student in Geography at Rutgers-New Brunswick and holds an MFA in Cross-Genre Writing (with a focus on poetics) from UCSD. Current research and writing projects explore dispossession and place-making in Black and West African urban geographies, sound studies, particularly thinking about African diasporic spaces of experimental and electronic music, sound art, and field recordings as method, and fugitivity as a practice of resistance.  

 

 

The 2022 Summer Institute

The 2022 NYU Cities Collaborative-Mellon Summer Institute on Urbanism was a great success. The Institute selected 15 Fellows out of a pool of more than 200 applicants. A remarkably diverse group in background, experience, and intellectual interests, the 2022 Fellows included early stage doctoral candidates in city planning, sociology, anthropology, history, American studies, political science, environmental psychology, and architecture, with interests in urban areas as diverse as Accra, Atlanta, Belfast, Bogotá, Chicago, Dhaka, Jaffa, Lahore, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego/Tijuana, and Toronto, on topics including immigration, urban memorialization, real estate and housing, local government law, financialization, urban agriculture, and racial formation. Fellows met with distinguished urbanists from around the world, among them historian Nathan D.B. Connolly (Johns Hopkins), geographer Desiree Fields (Berkeley), sociologist and NYU Cities Collaborative member, Eric Klinenberg, urban planner Gautam Bhan (Indian Institute for Human Settlements), and urban theorist Abdou-Malik Simone. The Fellows presented their work-in-progress, discussed urban policy and activism with community leaders in New York, and visited one of the most diverse sections of New York’s most diverse borough, Queens.