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Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed
Conor ‘Coco’ Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican~Irish gender-fluid scholar-organizer of radical cultural/educational movements in the Americas and the Caribbean, and the Program Director of the Shape of Cities to Come Institute.
Coco's new book New York Liberation School: Study and Movement for the People's University (Common Notions) chronicles the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women’s Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City, as well as CUNY’s post-9/11 opposition to imperialism, colonialism, and carcerality. They are also co-developing the quadrilingual anthology Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean (Malpaís Ediciones). Coco is the current co-managing editor of LÁPIZ Journal and a contributing editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative.
They have been immersed in almost two decades of struggles at the City University of New York and in New York City around transforming education and public space, anti-imperialism, police and prison abolition, solidarity with Palestine and Puerto Rico, reproductive rights, housing justice, and beyond.
COMMUNICATIONS AND PROGRAM ADMINISTRATOR
Caitlin Peng
Brooklyn-born and Staten Island-raised, Caitlin specializes in urban education policy and has a background in grassroots organizing.
Prior to joining SCCI, Caitlin got her start developing and facilitating political education workshops as a youth leader at CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, an organization that builds grassroots community power across diverse poor and working-class Asian immigrant and refugee communities in NYC. She later worked in local government at the District of Columbia State Board of Education, where she provided policy research, communications, and operational support to the elected State Board members and Student Representatives.
Caitlin holds a B.A. in Government with a minor in Education, Inquiry, and Justice (EDIJ) from Georgetown University.
BOARD OF DIRECTORs
Monxo López
Museum curator, educator, cartographer, and South Bronx-based environmental and urban justice activist. Monxo is Curator of Community Histories at the Museum of the City of New York and was a Mapping Fellow at the Design Trust for Public Spaces. He is a founding member of South Bronx Unite, and founding member and board member of the Mott Haven/Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the local Community Land Trust. He currently serves as a board member of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust in the Lower East Side. Monxo holds a Ph.D. in political science from CUNY’s Graduate Center, and an MA from Université Laval in Québec, Canada. He has taught political philosophy and Caribbean studies at the CUNY system (Lehman, Brooklyn, and Hunter College). His academic and curatorial practice revolves around spatiality, mapping, social justice, political theory, and Latinx communities. His writings have been published in Salon.com, LatinoRebels, and NACLA, among other media outlets; and his activist work has been profiled by The New York Times, UrbanOmnibus, and Corriere della Sera.
At the Museum of the City of New York, Monxo has worked on the exhibitions Who We Are: Visualizing New York City by the Numbers, New York Responds: the First Six Months, Puppets of New York; Food in New York: Bigger Than the Plate; and This is New York for the museum’s centennial exhibition.
Oscar Oliver-Didier
Bronx-based urban designer and researcher from Puerto Rico. Oliver-Didier is a Henry M. MacCracken and Urban Doctoral Fellow in American Studies at New York University and adjunct faculty at the Visual Arts Program at Fordham University and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. He has also taught at Parsons School of Design at The New School; and the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (PUPR). Until recently, he served as the Lead Urban Designer for the borough of the Bronx at the NYC Department of City Planning.
Oliver-Didier’s current research studies the role of fiscal incentives in fostering police-community developer partnerships. He has written on public housing in Puerto Rico, the politics of language in the South Bronx, and the performative nature of urban protests and occupations, and has published articles in Housing Theory and Society, Truthout, Urban Omnibus, CounterPunch, Revista Cruce, Planning Perspectives, and a chapter that was included in The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, The City and Urban Society. Oliver-Didier was founding director of the research collective CIUDADLAB. He also directed the Laboratory for Housing, Planning and Urban Studies at the PUPR; and was an Auxiliary Adviser on urbanism to the Governor of Puerto Rico. He has served as editor of multiple journals including ENTORNO, Polimorfo, and Planning Perspectives. In 2019, Oliver-Didier was awarded the Michael Weil Award for Urban Design; a recognition of excellence in the pursuit of urban design in the NYC public sector.
Gabriela Rendón
Mexican-born architect, urban planner, and educator based in Brooklyn. Rendón is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development and Founding Director of the Housing Justice Lab at Parsons School of Design, The New School. In 2008, Rendón co-founded Cohabitation Strategies, an international nonprofit organization committed to empowering communities through action-research and long-term community-driven projects. Since then Cohabitation Strategies has engaged in projects commissioned by nonprofit organizations, cultural foundations, public agencies, municipalities, and national governments across cities in Western Europe, South, and North America. In 2019, she also co-founded Urban Front, a transnational consultancy focused on helping progressive public and social sectors achieve their goals as they address the critical urban problems of the 21st century.
Rendón’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012, the Vienna Biennale 2015, the Portugal Triennial 2016, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. She has authored and co-edited publications on housing, cooperative urban practices, and socio-spatial restructuring of immigrant communities. Rendón is currently working on a book titled Defiant Neighborhoods: Rise, Revitalization, and Gentrification of Immigrant Communities in Latinx Brooklyn.
Miguel Robles-Durán
Urbanist working at the intersections of urban political-ecology, unitary urbanism, and the design of complex urban systems. He is an associate professor of urbanism and director of the graduate urban programs at The New School / Parsons School of Design in New York City. Robles-Durán is a co-founder and co-director of Urban Front, a transnational consultancy that helps progressive public and social sectors tackle critical urban issues. Robles-Durán is the host of Cities After, a podcast and YouTube program that discusses the future of cities. Politics In Motion, an anti-capitalist media organization he co-founded with the Marxist geographer David Harvey, produces the program.
Robles-Durán is a founding member of Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), a Rotterdam/NYC based non-profit agency that works towards socio-spatial design and development for urban justice. From 2014 to 2017, he also worked as the co-director of the National Center for the Right to the Territory (CENEDET) in the Republic of Ecuador. The design work of Robles-Durán has been displayed in prestigious venues worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), MAK Museum Vienna, La Biennale di Venezia, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Rotterdam Biennial, and the Lisbon Architecture Triennial. Currently, he is co-writing a book titled Cohabitation Strategies: Challenging Neoliberal Urbanization Between Crisis, which is scheduled for publication by ORO Editions in 2024. Among his other publications is the critically acclaimed book, Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization, which he co-authored.
Samuel Stein
Researcher and writer on the politics of planning in New York City, with an emphasis on housing, real estate, labor and gentrification. Stein is a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York, and has previously worked for such New York City housing and labor institutions as Tenants & Neighbors and the Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ. He has taught geography and urban studies at Hunter College, Parsons the New School for Design, Sarah Lawrence College, the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, and John Jay College.
Stein is the author of the book Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, published by Verso in 2019. He has also contributed chapters to several book projects, including Zoned Out: Race and City Planning in New York City, Immigrant Crossroads: Globalization, Incorporation and Placemaking in Queens, New York, and Transformative Planning: Radical Alternatives to Neoliberal Urbanism. His scholarly writing has been published in such journals as Urban Affairs Review, International Planning Studies and Journal of Urban Affairs, and his essays have been published in The Guardian, The Village Voice, The Baffler and many other magazines and journals.
PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Libertad O. Guerra
Urban anthropologist, curator, and cultural organizer/producer with vast arts management experience specializing in startup phase and strategic turnaround of community based cultural organizations with an intersectional approach. Guerra has led the creation of incubation NYC spaces and collectives of Latinx cultural producers and educators. Her academic research / symposia has focused on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and NYC’s social-artistic movements and aesthetic politics of place in im/migrant urban settings.
Several of her exhibitions have been featured in Art Net best exhibitions of the year, and listed by the New York Times list of 10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Lower East Side. In 2020 she became the Executive Director of The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Education Center in downtown Manhattan. Guerra is also a co-founder of the South Bronx Unite environmental justice coalition, serves as a member of the Mott Haven / Port Morris Community Land Stewards board, and most recently co-founded the Latinx Arts Consortium of New York (LXNY) network of 40 plus arts organizations.