More Curbed Stuff

The latest stuff from my Curbed stint:

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Feral City

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My new book, Feral City , hits the shelves October 4, 2022. You can pre-order it today from your local bookshop and wherever books are sold. Thank you! What happens when an entire social class abandons a metropolis? This genre-bending journey through lockdown New York offers an exhilarating, intimate look at a city returned to its rebellious spirit.    The pandemic lockdown of 2020 launched an unprecedented urban experiment. Traffic disappeared from the streets. Times Square fell silent. And half a million residents fled the most crowded city in America. In this innovative and thrilling book, author and social critic Jeremiah Moss, hailed as “New York City’s career elegist” (New York Times), explores a city emptied of the dominant class—and their controlling influence. “Plagues have a disinhibiting effect,” Moss writes. “As the normal order is suspended, the repressive force of civilization lifts and our rules fall away, shifting the boundaries of society and psyche."...
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Washington Square Bloodied

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In the aftermath of yesterday's incident of police brutality against New Yorkers participating in the Queer Liberation March for Black Lives and Against Police Brutality, someone has made a bold statement in Washington Square Park. Early this morning, I went by the park to find the statues of George Washington on the Arch vividly splattered in blood-red paint. (Below his feet on one side, graffiti from weeks ago still shows "fuck12 since 1492.") On the other side of the arch, more blood splatter. (Above more faded graffiti: "Stolen Lands FTP.") Crime scene body outlines ring the fountain, one after another, their torsos and heads blasted with red as if shot dead. While some of the paint was still wet, bits of rubber balloon left behind, detectives surveyed the incendiary work of graffiti art. A cooler full of watery, blood-red paint stands open before the spectacle. This will be temporary, paint washes off, but the lives lost to po...
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Zombie Urbanism

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Jonny Aspen , Associate Professor at the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape in Oslo, Norway, coined the term " Zombie Urbanism " in 2013 to describe the way many urban environments are being designed today. I like the term, so I got in touch with Aspen and asked him about it--and how it applies to the redesigning of New York City, including the High Line, Hudson Yards, Times Square, and the new Astor Place. Astor Place Q: Can you give a definition of what you call "zombie urbanism"? A: I’ve coined the concept in order to encircle what seems to be an increasingly more prevalent, and increasingly more worrying, phenomenon in contemporary urban development, namely the cliché-like way that many developers and designers talk about and deal with urban environments in general and public areas and places more specifically. On the one hand I use it as a reference to what seems to have developed into an increasingly more homogeneous discourse, globally speaking, on...
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