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  Intelligent Densification

  Yusuf Abdeljawad

  Urban life is becoming ever more prevalent in modern society and with this growth come new challenges, responsibilities, and consequences. In my piece, I present what a city should look like both now and in the future. I hope to inspire city dwellers, old and young, to make contributions, no matter how small, to creating the cities we deserve, and more importantly that our world deserves. To make my square for the quilt, I researched projections of what cities would look like in the future and the role of cities in the fight against climate change. Reusing fabrics from old clothes and other cloth provided to me and of my own supply, I carefully quilted the square, full of color and life, to show how “intelligent densification” in cities can help reduce carbon emissions. It is possible to aid our environment and to improve city life for all. Our cities are beacons of hope for humanity, providing opportunity, a chance to be reborn, and most importantly, a home. If our cities can do all of this for us and more, what’s stopping us from doing this for them?

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  Community Gardens

  Kavya Antony

  In urban areas, there are countless buildings, but where is the green? Community gardens are important in maintaining urban sustainability whether to strengthen bonds within communities or contribute to a better urban environment. In my piece, I convey that it requires the efforts of different people to support a community garden. The garden is represented as a big flower that is held on both sides. The flower itself is made up of petals with different colors to represent the variety of plants that could make up these gardens. The center of the flower is brown to represent the soil that holds and nurtures these plants. On one side is the community that supports the garden and on the other side is government officials. Ideally, people in community gardens shouldn’t have to worry about losing the garden but as of now in New York City, if the property is owned by the city, then at any time the city finds another use for the property, it has to be cleared. Around the supported flower is a prosperous environment with butterflies and content people. Though the kind of changes represented by community gardens may take time, I want my quilt to be the view of the light at the end of the tunnel.

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  Quality Foods at Affordable Prices

  Sarah Choudhry

  One person dies every thirty-six seconds from cardiovascular disease in the United States. One contributing factor to developing this disease is unhealthy eating. But how can you eat healthy foods if they’re inaccessible to you? My quilt square represents the relationship between the lack of access to quality foods and the development of cardiovascular disease in cities like New York. The central piece of my quilt square is an anatomical heart. When looking at my quilt square, I want individuals to think about what foods they have access to, their health, and how this disease may affect them.

  To create my quilt square, I chose to use a rich dark fabric, to represent a human heart, specifically, one that has been affected by non-nutritious foods. Damaged human hearts tend to be dark in color. The stitch work on my quilt square is basic stitches. I refrained from using intricate stitching designs as I wanted the main focus of my art piece to be the anatomical heart. In viewing my art piece, I want individuals to feel curious about exploring food choices in their own community. Are healthy foods accessible in your neighborhood? If not, what can you do to change that?

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  Green

  Saarah Elberhoumi

  The concept of my quilt square revolves around the power of technology in helping us achieve urban sustainability. Urban problems like pollution prevent us from enjoying everything a city has to offer. I believe technology can help save our environment and restore biodiversity through research and the development of new tools capable of detecting and reducing carbon emissions. In my quilt, the green fabric represents a “green” city which is something I hope to see one day. On top of the earth, you have different constituents of the built and natural city such as trees, flowers, buildings, cars, and a factory. I used bright colors to portray a dream city. The robotic hands represent an emerging technology called Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has the potential to accelerate global efforts to protect the environment and conserve resources through the detection and reduction of energy emissions. I chose to place the hands at the center as a symbol of hope and potential change. The extension of the hands represents technology solving environment problems such as air pollution produced by cars and factories.

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  Compost

  Margaret Marcy Emerson

  In 2019, an estimated 35% of all food was lost or wasted in the U.S. In 2015, the EPA announced a goal to cut food waste in half by 2030. Organic waste in landfills generates methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than CO2 and one of the major contributors to global warming. Composting significantly cuts the amount of food that goes into our landfills, reducing the climate and environmental impacts associated with food waste.

  Compost has many benefits. It enhances soil and reduces or eliminates the need for chemical fertilizers. Compost enhances water retention in soil, providing carbon sequestration. Composting locally conserves energy and reduces emissions from truck transport. As an active member of my local community garden, my hope is that we all do everything we can to work towards a more sustainable community and planet.

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  Info

  Thomas Eyles

  For my final paper, I wrote about how urban art affects the urban problems that it addresses. I wanted my quilt square to reflect some ways that such art affects its target. The main idea of the square is to demonstrate different methods artists use to combat environmental problems through representation, performance environment, and intervention. The middle of the square, which depicts these methods, is divided into thirds; each third contains an image representing one of the methods. Representational art spreads awareness and information about the issue. To illustrate this method, I made a bunch of people looking at a billboard that says “info” on it. The billboard represents the art and the word “info” represents the information the art is meant to provide. The viewers of the art are gaining awareness and knowledge about the issue. To depict what a performance environment means, a person can be seen in a bubble that signifies a city. Outside the bubble are different environments. A tree and an iceberg represent deforestation and global warming, respectively—issues that city dwellers may not understand because of their location. The last image depicts a person building a windmill. This is supposed to represent intervention because the person’s art (the windmill) sets the scene for creating change (sustainable power). The art thus directly helps to combat the problem.

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  How the Other Half Lives

  Rebekah Gandy

  In my quilt I try to show the uneven distribution of pollution that can be seen in cities. I split my square in half. On one half there are smaller houses that are very close to factories. It can be seen that the smoke that is produced by the factories surrounds the houses that are close by. On the other half there are much nicer houses that are meant to be brownstone houses. The smaller houses that are surrounded by smoke are meant to show how people of a lower socioeconomic position tend to be more exposed to pollution, while people in a higher socioeconomic position are not exposed to pollution to the same extent as the other side is. I use cooler and darker colors, to bring out a sense of sorrow and some sympathy for those people who suffer the negative impact of living in neighborhoods that have high exposure to pollution. The warm and brighter colors are meant to show how people in more affluent neighborhoods are almost unaffected.

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  Chaos in the mind and world

  Asha Griffis

  For my quilt square, I focus on mental health and climate change. What I want the viewer to take away from my piece is the impact that climate change and the extreme weather patterns that arise from it have on the mental health of urban populations around the world, particularly in cities. Natural disasters cause loss of personal property, livelihoods, and life. Extreme weather patterns have been known to negatively affect human health by exacerbating mental illnesses. People who survive natural disasters caused by climate change develop anxiety disorders regardless of their history of mental illness.

  My piece features a distressed woman painted gray with tears. streaming down her face symbolizing the collective struggle of those who face mental illness. In her hair, there are two painted scenes. The first painted scene that begins at the root of her hair is a forest fire which gradually changes into the next scene which is a city flooding. Both the forest fire and the flood represent the natural disasters caused by climate change. I chose these two natural disasters because in recent years they have become more common. The words “Chaos in the mind and world” are prominently featured on the square. These words reflect what is going on with the rest of the quilt square showing that the discord in the natural world affects the discord of the mind.

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  Pollution in Minority Neighborhoods

  Adrian Lewis

  The process of crafting my quilt square helped give my research topic a clearer direction. My topic is centered on why and how pollution affects impoverished, minority neighborhoods more than white neighborhoods in America and how this can affect the futures of the children living there. To convey this message using my quilt, I constructed an image of an impoverished, urban environment using fabric and markers. On my quilt, you can see a large factory with smog pouring from its chimneys adjacent to several dilapidated apartment buildings and children playing in the street, signifying the poor and polluted neighborhoods that impoverished minorities inhabit. I also crafted a pair of ill-looking lungs to symbolize the respiratory diseases that these conditions can produce in the inhabitants there. Lastly, the phrase, “Pollution in Minority Neighborhoods” acts as the closer for my quilt, summing up the overall message it presents. The inspiration for this piece is the Industrial Business Zone in East New York, where my middle school was located. This section of the community is lined by factories, vacant lots, and abandoned houses, so my quilt serves as a window into the reality of areas like this one in American cities.

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  Disposal

  Alex Lion

  My piece examines the impact of New York’s uniquely bad disposal system on the city as a whole. My square is made mostly of recycled materials, including clothes and scraps from other sewing projects. The focal point of the piece is a pair of back pockets from old jeans, arranged to appear as trash bags, sitting on a sidewalk. Rats, a clogged storm drain, and a flooding city complete the image of the dangers that this system of disposal creates. There are three buildings in the background, each one representing a different community, all of which are in danger. The synagogue represents the upper-class Chasidic communities throughout the city, known for the power they have over various spheres. The florist shop represents small businesses throughout the city, and the middle-class people who own, patronize, and work in those small businesses. The final building is a NYCHA apartment, representing lower income people who live in government housing. While the flooding affects all three structures, the water is at different levels for each building, showing how those who are already vulnerable are most severely affected.

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  The Nature of the City

  Deborah Mutnick

  As an academic, I believe it is my responsibility to incorporate political economic and ecological concepts and histories into my research, teaching, and community involvement. To avert a worstcase scenario already unfolding, we collectively need to understand and overcome the pressing, interrelated crises of our time of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and obscene levels of social and economic inequality worldwide.

  I aim broadly in this quilt square to express “the nature of the city,” playing on the double entendre of “nature” as character or quality of urban spaces and “nature” as all the life and elements surrounding human beings and the built environment. However, I also want to represent the problem of centuries of humanity’s attempts to conquer, master, and control nature, which has catapulted us into a new epoch of the Anthropocene. The large hawk and small city skyline represent what Marx called an “irreparable rift” in the social metabolism between nature and society. The challenge for humanity in the 21st century is to mend the rift by ceasing to extract fossil fuels and other natural resources from the earth and building egalitarian societies based on human need for the many rather than exorbitant profits for a very few.

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  The Right to the City

  Auraib Naveed

  My work reflects the voice of the public — specifically the residents of NYC. The bottom shows hands reaching out to the top in a unified sense to emphasize that sustainable living is out of reach for many people. The top is a silhouette of the city floating on clouds to symbolize the desire of an established and organized urban living. Between the hands and the city, a phrase reads across “The Right to the City” — an idea advocated by David Harvey, an economic geographer and writer. It is sewed to portray the city as a magical dream that was once of that of the public. The hands of different skin tones represent diversity and are reaching out to the city with a desire to grab it and become a part of it again.

  Over time, cities have moved towards the notion of prioritizing economic prosperity rather than that of its society. Wealth rotates in the upper classes and leaves little room for lower and middle classes to progress. This system has led to unsustainable practices and working-class minorities are deprived of equal rights and access to education, housing, and healthcare. In essence, my work depicts the potential for unity — created by the city — of people longing for access to an equitable and sustainable community. I hope this image encourages viewers to stand up collectively to claim their right to the city that has neglected their needs.

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  Workers of the World Unite

  Irvin Tapia

  My quilt square depicts exploitation of workers in cities. Having been born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, I felt it was appropriate to portray the city I love. The city skyline in my square is composed of various cool or neutral-colored fabrics. I did this to portray how the city is becoming increasingly unkind and mechanical. The large strips of black fabric patterned with leaves, which support the city, symbolize the immutable truth that cities and their inhabitants affect the natural environment and are a part of nature. I fastened the skyline to my square using several running stitches and occasional whip stitches.

  The Statue of Liberty, the central figure of my square, is composed of a collage of various fabrics fastened to the statue using a running stitch and whip stitches in some areas for added security. I collaged Lady Liberty to mirror the grandeur and diversity that she symbolizes to New York City. That she stands on Liberty Island, torch aloft, represents an invitation for all to come to New York and experience all that the city offers. She is a symbol of inclusivity and welcomes all in search of prosperity to a diverse cityscape. However, the modern city has become increasingly hostile to this racial and economic diversity, seeking at times to eradicate it. The words I chose to include in my square from Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus, and the popular political slogan, “Workers of the world Unite,” together, I hope, inspire those who see my square to act to create a better future.