Women, Care, and Housing: Envisioning New Housing Cooperative Models for Sunset Park’s Immigrant Communities initiated in the fall of 2018 as part of Design and Urban Ecologies Studio 1. Students worked closely with Beyond Care, a worker cooperative led by immigrant women providing childcare services in Brooklyn, which became a partner during the previous semester. As part of this project, a number of workshops, working sessions, and discussions around housing cooperatives and Community Land Trusts were organized in collaboration with Beyond Care members to work toward the design of a new model of housing cooperative for their families.

The Voces Ciudadanas’ Interim Sunset Park Library Campaign is a community-led project involving multiple community and grassroots organizations in Sunset Park. The campaign seeks to keep for the community the space currently used by the Interim Public Library as the new library opens in the Fall of 2023. This project has been developed by students from the MS Design and Urban Ecologies program in partnership with Voces Ciudadanas, a grassroots organization founded to create an alternative space for neighbors to come together and engage in dialogue about gentrification and other issues affecting Brooklyn’s Sunset Park.

This research project supports Sunset Park’s cooperative legacy in the context of the Community Land Act, an urgently needed package of laws that gives housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other nonprofit land organizations the tools to develop and preserve large, permanent housing, as well as community and commercial spaces and other critical needs.