Inequality and Informality in New York

Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, an ongoing exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, focuses on the complex relationship between urbanization and inequality. Over the 14-month period leading up to the launch, six interdisciplinary teams explored how these issues are playing out in different parts of the world, each developing an architectural response for a specific city.

Architecture firm SITU Studio was tasked with studying its home city, New York. Sarah Wesseler spoke with SITU principal Bradley Samuels about his investigations into informal housing conditions in the five bouroughs. 

'The issue of housing in New York gets a lot of attention — everybody talks about it as a crisis — but there’s a large part of the population that’s actually left out of that conversation,' Samuels said. "There are about 200,000 people or more, depending on how you’re counting, living in illegally converted apartments in New York. They don’t show up on the census; this condition of density is more or less hidden."