We spoke with Masoom Moitra (she/her), who is supervising the 2025 DUE thesis course alongside Lauren Hudson. Masoom works with historically marginalized communities in decision and knowledge-making. At the center of her work is facilitating self-determination through community education initiatives, environmental justice advocacy, affordable housing, arts and cultural planning.

She was involved in the development of a Navajo Nation’s effort to develop alternatives on indigenous lands in the U.S., the first-ever comprehensive Cultural Plan for NYC, and strategies to ensure rezoning equity across NYC with Arts and Democracy, NOCD-NY, and El Puente. She is also an alumna of the MS in Design and Urban Ecologies program.

What are you currently working on?

Reimagining NYC is a community centered planning, policy and advocacy project that I have been working on as a part of a team put together by NOCD-NY/ Arts and Democracy for a few years now. You can read the policy recommendations that came out of this project here and my essay titled “Culture is Like Water—It Always Finds the Low Ground First: Community Hubs, Belonging and Anti-Displacement Strategies”. The goal of this project was to leverage the powerful imagination of artists and the vast creative knowledge that emerges out of NYC to inform the liberatory future planning of NYC, especially in the post pandemic era of widespread instability and inequity.

Though NOCD-NY, through the leadership of the legendary Caron Atlas, has been doing this work for decades, my involvement began with the engagement of 180,000+ New Yorkers through the first comprehensive cultural plan for NYC – thousands of grassroots organizations helped lead this effort and it was termed as one of the most participatory plans in the history of NYC. One of the outcomes of the project that is currently being implemented and I am working on with NOCD-NY is to create an interactive advocacy tool to map the complex network of cultural organizing in NYC so that we can organize better and build active solidarity and mutual aid networks both digitally and physically.

Aside from this I am working hard on formally setting up Schools of Hope- envisioned as intergenerational creative and intellectual spaces for the production of new forms of political, urban knowledge and building on indigenous systems necessary for the equitable development of neighborhoods and cities, alongside providing support to the reproductive labor of working families. I want to help democratize urban planning and design skills, even the technical ones we dearly guard within our institutions, because as I have found over the years- participation is absolutely not enough! Fun fact- this work started as my thesis project at the Design and Urban Ecologies (2014-16) and over the last decade I have piloted versions of it all over the city in partnership with various community groups.

Alongside teaching the thesis class at our program at Parsons, I also work with a small group of students at Pratt’s Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment as a part of their Sustainable Environmental Systems program on a project to support BK Rot, a composting and environmental advocacy organization, envision and build a proposal for a new site in East New York.

Is there a particular place in NYC that inspires you?

Recently, I have been very impressed and inspired by the mutual aid spaces that have activated around the city in the aftermath of the pandemic, and now in response to political organizing connected to the Palestinian cause. Many of them organize around abolitionism and emerge from leaders based in their own communities who also politically educate neighbors who are beginning to look for hyperlocal spaces that connect to international struggles. An event I attended recently was hosted by the Crown Heights Care Collective and it was everything one can imagine an ideal political space to be- centered in care, intergenerational, committed to distributing and providing for basic needs of people in the neighborhood including food and winter clothing, incubating cooperatives – it even had an entire mythical town being created by little children who were being cared for by everyone present.

Several of our brilliant DUE students are currently engaging in these cutting edge ideas (rooted in history ofcourse) through their thesis projects- I encourage all readers to be present for the final presentations which will be announced in this newsletter. Be prepared to be inspired!

If you could have dinner with any urban thinker or designer, who would it be and why?

A wonderful aspect of our DUE program has been to foster relationships between us and several incredible urban scholar activists who I could only have dreamt of being in dinner conversations with in the past- including Silvia Fedirici, David Harvey, Martha Rosler, Rob Robinson (who is adopted family now) and so many more. Our cohort was a very lucky one. At Pratt, the legacy of Ron Shiffman and Caron Atlas have been constant company and inspiration. My most enlightening meals have been in the company of grassroots urban leaders, creators and thinkers like Frances Lucerna, who I have the privilege of being mentored by. I have learned first hand my most important lessons about inequitable urban development and strategies to counter them in ways that cannot be replicated in classrooms through endless cups of tea with construction workers and contractors, farmers, politicians and builders when I worked in India. I hope to be able to continue learning from these powerful workers, activists, my peers and students who commit to the same causes over many delicious meals for the rest of my life!