New York City (Steady) State

1. Believing that the solution to a global environmental crisis must – in the face of national and corporate indifference, incompetence, and resistance – be solved democratically at the local level, we look at what individual cities can practically do.

2. Terreform’s long-term project, New York City (Steady) State is a working investigation and application of the limits of urban sustainability. Our first volume, Home Grown, takes the city’s food system as its object of analysis and design. While the relation between access to food and social inequality has been discussed before, our innovation is the granular nature of our design, which presents how city resources and regulations might specifically be reconfigured.

3. Through the project’s sustained community engagements and new models of urban design, we have seek to inform urban policy making, link diverse constituencies, and support grassroots projects instigating equitable access to limited resources. 

Support communities in designing and determining solutions around critical services

Make government and other institutions more accountable, transparent, and responsive to citizen feedback

Create or advance equitable and inclusive economic growth

Ensure all citizens can overcome barriers to civic participation and inclusion

With SOLVE support, we hope to focus on proposals at variegated scales that can be realized by individuals and groups of many different affinities, organizational styles, and economic models. 

Support communities in designing and determining solutions around critical services

Make government and other institutions more accountable, transparent, and responsive to citizen feedback

Create or advance equitable and inclusive economic growth

Ensure all citizens can overcome barriers to civic participation and inclusion

Current design guides and masterplans perpetuate models of sustainability that are too discipline-specific and divorced from context. New York City (Steady) State is a deep reflection on the character of sustainability and on current models for development and change.

Indeed, no such rigorous and comprehensive study has been undertaken before—this project is pioneering in its concept, methodology, and design. We hope to change the conversation around sustainability by demonstrating the radical practicality of our vision with our tandem of theory and working and living practice. 

Our design scenarios address future material, technological and cultural entanglements, by showing and staging the shifts in cultural norms and values of civic engagement required for a hyper-local food system. Specifically, we use three of New York City’s radically diverse neighborhoods as the testing grounds for these hypotheses and speculative designs. Our work demonstrates how food is not just a symbolic, cultural element that can influence social behavior through its consumption, but also how it is a vital factor in the physical formation of a city and the engineering of its political economies.

We have continually shared our working design with an array of experts and nonprofits, who in turn have submitted essays to be included in the book. These have suggested commonalities and trigger points to be converted to research graphics and system designs. Our hope is that the designs we create and the data we deploy will provoke and inspire, in addition to demonstrating that not only is this new kind of city practical, but also livable, and liberating.