Spaces We Share: Urban Omnibus's Mariana Mogilevich on Urbanism, Complexity, and Making the City Better

By Julia Gamolina

Mariana Mogilevich is editor in chief of Urban Omnibus, the Architectural League of New York's publication dedicated to observing, understanding, and shaping the city. A historian of architecture and urbanism, her research focuses on the design and politics of the public realm. Her book, The Invention of Public Space: Designing for Inclusion in Lindsay’s New York (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) received a JB Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Mariana was most recently the curator of “Streets in Play: Katrina Thomas, NYC Summer 1968” at New York City Parks' flagship Arsenal Gallery, and has developed exhibitions and other public projects on the urban environment for the National Parks Service, the New-York Historical Society, and Place Matters. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Mariana talks about writing, observation, and urbanism, advising those just starting their careers to take time to explore.

JG: I love Urban Omnibus, and I'd love to start by hearing a little bit about your plans for it for the rest of 2024.

MM: Thank you! This year is our fifteenth anniversary, and that's been a fun opportunity to do both some retrospective things and some things in real life. Since we are usually all online, we decided to make a printed, illustrated map of our version of the New York City we've been chronicling over the last decade and a half. We're having fun sending it off into the world, to bookstores and museums and library collections, and this fall we'll partner with Open House New York Weekend to host tours and visits to some of the places and with some of the people we've been engaging with over the years. Expect public bathrooms and a food forest and an interstate highway and more.

It's been nice to zoom out, because normally we are focused on producing really in-depth features. Our remit is to publish thoughtful stories about how we make and experience New York City's built environment. We gravitate toward subjects that no one else is likely to give that kind of attention to, or work from folks who don't have a big megaphone in the world of architecture and design. This fall I hope we'll finally publish a story we've been following for years, on the ten-year process to design and build a ground-up headquarters for the immigrant and worker justice organization Make the Road New York. We're also talking with an artist who's created an elaborate, speculative newspaper reporting from the future, when New York City moves from housing crisis to an age of housing abundance. We are always looking at how people make or imagine a city that reflects the needs and aspirations of its inhabitants.

Urban Omnibus New York City Map, by Urban Omnibus and Stipan Tadić, 2024.

Now let's go back a little bit — you started studying literature and then got your PhD in history of architecture. Tell me about the reason behind each step.

I majored in literature because it was so capacious, to use a popular word today. My interests really lay in documentary: photography and film. Literature — at least as an undergraduate at Yale circa Y2K — was a way to hold it all together. I also worked at the University Art Gallery and fell in love with the photo collections, archives and exhibitions, research that had a finished, public product. But I've also always been interested in urban space, how we understand it, how we represent it; I've always also never fit in very neat categories or disciplines. I think that's how you become an urbanist.

I loved school and did something I advise everyone against — I went right back after just two years out. I just wanted to learn more and write, so pursuing a PhD, which was free, made sense to me as a twenty-three-year old. I didn't realize it was a professional course of study to become a university professor. I ultimately thought I was going to be an art historian. At the time I was working at an architecture firm and got a little sucked in. I somehow found myself at the Harvard GSD, without any design training, studying history. That was pretty rough. But I appreciated being surrounded by people who engaged with the physical world around us. It was an exciting contrast to where I was coming from in literature. I learned a lot.

“It’s important to understand that no one works in a vacuum, and there’s much to learn from and do with very real constraints, from forces of capital to forces of nature, to people doing their everyday thing or speaking truth to power.”

— Mariana Mogilevich

You've had editorial, research, and curator roles prior to coming to Urban Omnibus. What did you learn from each step that then led you to this position today?

What felt like a lot of coincidences have cohered into a "career." I've moved between academia, and nonprofits, and museums, back and forth and not in a linear way. I like discreet projects. You learn as much as you can about something, and who else is invested in it, and then you gain a new perspective on it, and you figure out how to share that with other people. Telling stories, making arguments, assembling evidence, developing narratives: articles, books, exhibitions are slightly different ways to do the same thing.

At a certain point I wanted to start a family and have health insurance and basically grow up. This happened to be the same time that The Architectural League's former executive director and Urban Omnibus' founder, Rosalie Genevro, was looking for someone to take over from the original editorial team. UO's arguably niche interests and sensibility — combining spatial and historical research and scholarly inquiry with accessible writing and documentary work, engaging with practice, invested in the contemporary city — were my niche, too. It helped that I was born and raised in New York City and have a some hyper-specific expertise in public space experiments, the design and politics of public realm, but am also a bit of a generalist. It was very good luck.

Celebrating Urban Omnibus' 15th Anniversary Party, June 2024, Photos by Cameron Blaylock.

You’ve also taught. What would you say is most important for architecture students today to have as their foundation?

Architects' training is so much about professionalization, expertise. And importantly so — there are so many special powers that they develop! But everything is not architecture, and architecture is not everything. It's important to understand that no one works in a vacuum, and there's much to learn from and do with very real constraints, from forces of capital to forces of nature, to people doing their everyday thing or speaking truth to power. It's good to have a clear sense of your place in that ecosystem, the lay of the land, and where the possibilities are for transformation. That might be in a design project, and it might fall along the lines of political association. To answer your question: some humility and curiosity about what everyone else is doing.

Curiosity is also a big driver for the New City Critics fellowship we've been running with the Urban Design Forum. We're about to start our second cohort of six writers fearlessly and creatively taking on our urban environment. It's simultaneously getting designers and urbanists to think and write beyond their discipline, for a broader audience, and to help writers understand some of the complex dimensions of how cities are made.

“Everything I do is about excavating or presenting people with the complexity of how we negotiate and navigate the spaces we share; what governs the choices we make and the repercussions they have.”

— Mariana Mogilevich

Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges? How did you both manage through perceived disappointments or setbacks?

Speaking as a person who has been living and working in the United States the last eight years, I would say we've all been challenged a lot: rising totalitarianism, a pandemic, muddling through a society that has a real death drive. These things are personally, professionally, and existentially challenging. In that context, any personal disappointments — like working on a book for ten years only for it to be published to early in the pandemic when people had other things on their mind — feel pretty small. I'm grateful over the course of that time to have built a community of friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers who share values and help put things in perspective.

More practically, I always want to do more things than I actually can, and sometimes that's frustrating. It's also hard to imagine a world where there's a lot of material support for the things I do. I find it helpful to remember that life can be long, everything doesn't have to happen right now and all at once.

I remind myself of that all the time. Who are you admiring now and why?

Most of the people we talk to for Urban Omnibus are folks working indefatigably to make the city better, in solidarity with others. I spend a lot of time interviewing and speaking with folks doing the work, as it were, and I am filled with admiration for all of them. I am a writer and observer, and not a big doer or joiner, so my greatest awe and reverence is for the activists and organizers who work so hard and stay positive around changing things that feel intractable.

In recent months I've gotten to spend time with Nilka Martell, who has pretty much single-handedly put addressing the generational harms of the Cross Bronx Expressway on the city's agenda. And then I also went to Street Lab's warehouse to talk with their founder and designer, who are so cool for just making beautiful and clever furniture to repurpose streets.

Field trip with New City Critics fellows, courtesy of Mariana.

Celebrating the first cohort of New City Critics fellows. Photography by Sam Lahoz.

What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?

People want stories about design and cities to be simple. Projects are failures or successes, people are villains or heroes. Stories are then supposed to supply us with "solutions."

Everything I do is about excavating or presenting people with the complexity of how we negotiate and navigate the spaces we share; what governs the choices we make and the repercussions they have. I'm just encouraging people to think a little more deeply and critically, to go beyond received ideas. Acknowledging that complexity is not to make excuses for bad outcomes or to suggest that what we've got is the best we can do, but to see more clearly how things are, and how they could be otherwise. It's also endlessly fascinating.

Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?

Urbanism, publishing, and so many other things remain so very male. It's good — but hard — to keep that in mind and not try to measure your success or approach or value by someone else's dumb metrics. Don't expect that you can satisfy a desire for recognition, and remuneration, and authenticity in the same place. You are going to have to make choices. But, you have time to explore.