Cities are the result of both necessity and desire. Cities exist because they are places of encounter, opportunity, expansion of knowledge, productivity, and cultural exchange. However, cities exist primarily because of a fundamental fact intrinsic to our nature: cities exist because we humans need each other in order to exist. We are interconnected beings that need physical ties to our constituents to be able to live.
The industrial city, the origin of the city we inhabit today, was designed to support the new forms of production, understanding the logic of labor as the central actor. Houses, designated as the places of rest (as if the most important labor: care labor, was not a job) for the long hours of the worker in the factory, roads, transport modes, commercial areas, were all imagined to support this logic. As the society transformed, and production areas shifted dramatically linked to a complex global network left the cities, this place became a place of exchange and trade and its principal asset, its real estate.
In the city of today relationships are sustained on an exchange basis, and to exist on it we need to earn it first, in this city we can’t exist if we don’t produce money before. The fundamental friction comes to play when we understand that to produce anything we need first to exist. And to exist the labor that is needed is the labor of care.
We care, therefore we are 1
Care is what keeps us alive. Care makes us—humans and non-humans—exist with our shared planet, the Earth. Care is not only indispensable to life and survival, but also constitutes the conditions that determine how we live, how long we live, how well we live, whether we thrive, and even how we are mourned, grieved, and remembered after we die. Care connects our bodily and our material existence.2
Care is the labor that is hidden inside the house or tucked in the allies of cities. If the house has become the central structure of the city of production and capital that has become the instrument for exploitation, discrimination and displacement mechanism of the city its urgent to rethink the house and the central structure of care in the city as the space of revindication of the city of care.
In this studio we will analyze 4 blocks in a specific neighborhood in two cities. New York and Mexico City share many generalities, but mostly they share the increasing pressure for the majority of the population to live there.
Precisely and probably because of this, their inhabitants have chosen two leaders who share many political fights. A historical moment where the political fronts of two of the most marketable cities are emerging to defend their citizens and offer an alternative to the majority who had been pressured to leave them.
Both, the upcoming NYC Mayor and CDMX Governor, are working around a campaign on housing, care and affordability. Elisa Itube, in her essay Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity,3 explains in great detail why we cannot build zero-carbon buildings today, or think that we could simply continue with the construction industry, or any other industry for that matter. If we are talking about eliminating carbon production we need to rethink first the city in which this is placed. The city we live in today is shaped by carbon, that is, all activity today has a carbon footprint, which is deeply rooted in all human settlements today.
The same way, we can’t think of a carbon zero building on a carbon form city we can’t think of affordable housing as an isolated response in a city that is completely unaffordable, there for is urgent that we imagine how to transform the city of production, exploitation and capital extraction to the city of care. A place where the most vulnerable are able to live, this city will therefore become the place where affordable housing can be built.
To do that we will work on the two neighborhoods with a lens of race, gender, and property we will analyze how to transform spaces into possibilities for care, from housing to public infrastructures we will first understand the process that has shaped the specific place condition and will create an intervention in a ratio of 4 blocks of different programs that support the politics that have been promised.
In parallel we will critically address the house. This protective structure for our bodies, the one that delivers a primary form of care, has been central to human life since the dawn of civilization. Expressed in many different forms, the evolution of its use, implications, and definition has simultaneously driven and reflected sociopolitical changes throughout history. As defined by the United Nations, housing is the “basis of stability and security for an individual or family. The center of our social, emotional and sometimes economic lives, a home should be a sanctuary—a place to live in peace, security and dignity.”4 This was recognized as a fundamental right in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
The definition of a house is not neutral, nor is there a single, universally accepted one. Still, society has taken up the task of establishing a standard definition—one that applies to all—as if inhabiting a space were not only an individual act but one intrinsically linked to the ontological conditions of place, culture, and history. The current definition of the house—the one that most radically transformed its social, political, and cultural understanding—emerged with the paradigm shift following the Industrial Revolution. It was during this time that the house, the one most of us inhabit today, came to be recognized as such. Certainty is the one that has been the definition of the right and the codes, and the one that is being built in most of the world.
If the house we live in today is the center of the definition of our society of production, this studio’s aim is to understand what are the necessary networks and infrastructures that are needed to transform the city and the house to the place of care.
Students will be confronted with the many models of resistance to this fact, places like community land trusts, housing co-ops, cooperatives, social ownerships, public housing and more in different parts of the world will serve as examples that will support the project’s premises. In the same way we will analyze models developed in different cities of public infrastructures for care such as communal kitchens, to community centers, or blocks of care, like the ones in Bogota or Mexico city.
First exercise will be auto reflective, by the production of a self-portrait, students will reflect on their own domesticity and place of primary shelter, their home. The second exercise will reflect on the students’ own neighborhood and their systems of care, the familial, the communal, and the collective in the form of an expressive map. Then the studio will start the research process first on precedents through extensive sources including the studio trip, to then start the process of design in the two specific locations of New York and Mexico City.
The studio trip will be to Mexico City and New York, and its aim is to provide a visual and effective reference to spaces that have attempted to do this. During the trip, students will have the chance to visit the sites of work and also interview key players on both the production and design of Utopias and different types of cooperative and social housing,
This studio will be running during the semester in parallel to a reading group led by Anne Barret and both will be the ground to complement the Domestic Revolutions and Feminist Cities symposium in the school on April 9-10, 2026.
The symposium is dedicated to analyze the feminist city as a work in progress. Organized by Tatiana Bilbao and Annie Barrett, and dedicated to Dolores Hayden, the symposium will spotlight innovators from Europe, Latin America, and the United States who are reinventing urban infrastructure to recognize women as valued workers. Vienna has led the way by building a “Fair-Shared City” with safety for women in public places, housing projects that integrate childcare, playgrounds appealing to girls as well as boys, and streets named for women. Barcelona has expanded definitions of housing to experiment with kitchenless units, collective kitchens, and shared childcare. Bogota, Columbia, has provided dozens of “care blocks” to support women whose unpaid domestic work makes all paid work possible. Today campaigns for more egalitarian cities are expanding across the globe. Speakers include Eva Kail from Vienna, Anna Puigjaner from Barcelona, Diana Rodriguez Franco from Bogota, and many other distinguished architects, planners, and elected officials.
During the course, and shared with the reading group we will also have online lectures of different personalities such as Cristina Gamboa or Maria Scheherazade Giudici.
1 Krasny, Elke, Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19, Feminism, and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript, 2023), pp. 167-70
2 Krasny, Elke. ‘Situating Care in Architecture: Violence, Sovereignty, Solidarity’, To be published at Situated Ecologies of Care, forthcoming, Ruteledge, 2026.
3 Iturbe, Elisa. “‘Architecture and the Death of Carbon Modernity.’” Log 47: Overcoming Carbon Form, Fall 2019, pp. 11-23.
4 “The Human Right to Adequate Housing,” Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/human-right-adequate-housing.