The city is a collective experience. It is a complex system “consisting of a vast multitude of individuals, institutions, processes and physical entities, all of which give rise to the buildings, cultures, laws and services that we think of as the urban. Though each one of these may be owned or controlled in a specific way, the holistic entity we call a city (in many cases a towering achievement of human culture) grows uncontrollably from the synthesis of these many parts, with no singular ownership, and is, therefore, something we have “in common” rather than co-own”.

As the boundaries between the responsibility of the state to provide public space and public goods (such as transportation, education, water, power, etc.) and the degree to which private entities provide such goods blur, the idea of the ‘common’ or the ‘collective’ may offer a third alternative to ‘public’ -which doesn’t always mean accessible to all and ‘private’ -which doesn’t mean closed off to all. The idea of land or services that are commonly owned and managed speaks to a 21st-century sensibility of participative citizenship and peer-to-peer production. In theory, at least, the commons is full of radical potential.

New York City, the most populous and the most urban of America’s cities will serve as a laboratory for these investigations. As a post-industrial city, it offers a multitude of areas for transforming the urban environment in order to support the city to face the challenges of the 21st century. At a point in history, where its population is expected to grow to 9 million by 2040, New York City relies on a physical infrastructure that was planned, designed and built in the past two centuries.

The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811 laid out the street grid of Manhattan; the city’s subway system, begun in 1904, now carries 6 million passengers a day, and the city’s intricate system of watersheds, aqueducts and tunnels, date back to the late nineteenth century. Many of these projects were visionary in scale and transformative for New York’s residents. However, they were not envisioned for a population of this magnitude and the challenges and lifestyles of the 21st century.

In the project, the desire was to explore urban design and infrastructure as a transformative agent to address the challenges of the 21st century. 62.3% of the residents were not born in the United States and 52.7% of them are not U.S. citizens. The 7 train is like an international express on which there are predominant groups from different cultures that connect Manhattan to Queens. It goes over the main commercial strip and where most of the neighborhood activities happen.

Jackson Heights is a desirable place to live, though it is running out of space and has no land to grow. It welcomes people from all over the world and is the starting point of a new life for immigrants in NYC. We see the opportunity to propose a new way of living around the 7-metro line. This is accomplished by improving the existing transportation hub, making it work as a public space with commercial and community areas. A rezoning model will also take place on Roosevelt Avenue; we propose mixed-used buildings with more generous public spaces, new retail stores that support the growth of small businesses, and community areas where different people of different backgrounds will be able to preserve their traditions. Offices and housing will be connected to a new layer of bridges over the 7-train. We see this model as a system that can be replicated along the 7-train line for it to adapt the community spaces for the needs of each place. An opportunity that relies on a physical infrastructure that was planned, designed, and built in the past two centuries to facilitate new modes of sustainable living.