Call for Applications for the New City Critics fellowship

By The Architectural League and the Urban Design Forum

Jun 20  |  Culture

Apply through Thursday, June 20, 2024 at 11:59 pm.

Program

In 2022, Urban Omnibus/The Architectural League and Urban Design Forum launched a fellowship program to empower new, fearless, and diverse voices to challenge the ways we understand, design, and build our cities. The fellowship supports the development of critics from underrepresented backgrounds through guest lectures and workshops, research guidance, networking, and production of new critical projects on a dedicated platform. Through published work and other channels, the fellowship encourages a more expansive conversation on the future of cities.

New City Critics aims to drive change in the culture of criticism. Today, architectural criticism and urban analysis in mainstream media is a shrinking arena, though it remains extremely powerful. Newspapers and magazines have moved away from having full-time critics on staff, and feature the work of just a few, largely older, and mostly male, white writers. A handful of professional critics from similar backgrounds means attention to a limited selection of topics and perspectives. We want to see kaleidoscopic coverage from a much wider variety of perspectives and rewrite public understanding of why urban design and development matter.

New City Critics is for a criticism of city design and development that reflects the people who live in cities. We need more informed and sustained examination of citymaking in media beyond small professional circles, for a broader public. Housing, workplaces, infrastructure, public spaces and monuments define the contours of our lives. They demand critical attention and a critical imagination expressed through novel formats and in new forums. Our goal is to equip a new generation of critics with new skills and a meaningful network to make urban processes legible and argue for a city they want to live in.