ABOUT

WHO WE ARE
Perfect City was instigated in 2016 by playwright Aaron Landsman. Housed at Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side of New York City, our work includes performances, mapping exercises about belonging and avoidance, roundtable discussions, writing, and research on street harassment and gentrification. Now in our eigth year, undaunted by the pandemic, we remain committed to envisioning and enacting cities for everyone, civic engagement for the most marginalized, and reinventing public space by and for the people who live together here. 2025 is a year of quiet expansion, with new partnerships, a synthesis of theatrical and visual tools, and a bourgeoning network for artistic civic action locally, nationally and beyond.

WHY US?
People who grow up in cities are natural born urban planners. We have to be. We ride public transit before we are even born; we use creative strategies to navigate invisible and visible boundaries as we go through our days. But our needs and our narratives are not at the table when decisions are made about zoning, planning and which neighborhoods are in the crosshairs of development.

All of us house policy knowledge in our bodies and minds, but few of us are asked to honor that knowledge, or made to feel we can contribute. Through mapping, popular education, creative organizing and more, Perfect City creates pathways toward inclusive city policy, developed with and for the people most affected.

OUR PRINCIPLES
Rather than build from a specific formal aesthetic, we made principles to work by, that try to do away with some of the hierarchies that dominate art-making. Our principles include Emotional Amnesty (no one holds what you say against you), Aesthetic Amnesty (no one’s ideas about art are better than anyone else’s), Compensation for Labor (self-explanatory but bears repeating), Logistical Flexibility (you come and go when you can), and Art Grows from Necessity (we don’t know exactly what that means either).

OUR NEIGHBORHOOD
Abrons Arts Center has been part of the Lower East Side and Chinatown for 125 years. Even if you are not from here, a lot of families in the US have a history with this neighborhood. It’s like a microcosm of America: diverse, vibrant, complicated, rich in history. And it’s changing. Fast. Our neighborhood is disappearing before our eyes. Perfect City is a window into the vital mix of voices and views that are often cleaned up when the city is gentrified. 

NEWS

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THE CREATIVITY NECESSITY IN THE NATIONAL CIVIC REVIEW

The People Act’s Katy Rubin and Perfect City’s Aaron Landsman have co-authored a short and sweet article on putting creativity at the center of local policy interventions.

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PERFECT CITY IN PORTUGAL
AT THE INTERNATIONAL OBSERVATORY FOR PARTICPATORY DEMOCRACY

October 2024

Aaron Landsman and The People Act’s visionary founder Katy Rubin led a workshop on how artistic work – including Perfect City’s Avoidance Mapping exercise – must be at the center of civic action and process. Together we got people on their feet, asked folks to make maps, and then asked them how they’d pitch this work to their cities. Stay tuned for more collaborations with The People Act!

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PERFECT CITY FOR SALE, 2024

June, 2024

At The Center for Performance Research!

Did you know that working group members Aaron Landsman, Jahmorei Snipes and Tiffany Zorrilla all make our own, strange and wonderful art? Perfect City: FOR SALE celebrated our work together and separately over the past two years, as we’ve been supported by Creative Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Plan. We each showed new work-in-progress, and our roundtable guests included the amazing Flako Jimenez, and folks from the neighborhood, from Penn State and from Africa by way of Connecticut. Click the link for all the details.

Perfect City: FOR SALE was supported by Creative Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Program, and by the amazing staff of Abrons Arts Center and Henry Street Settlement.

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OUR WORK

CIVIC ACTION – Starting in 2024, we have begun integrating our working group’s tools and activities around local politics and urban planning here in NYC, and Aaron Landsman’s earlier work around performance and civic power. Watch for us in partnership with The People Act, The National Civic League, Princeton University and HomeWorks Trenton, among other groups and individuals.

THE CATCALLING PROJECT – In 2017, frustrated that Perfect City’s first projects had been led by men in the group, working group members, Tiffany Zorrilla and Jahmorei Snipes began a project researching the relationship between catcalling and gentrification. What they found were rhetorical and geographic ties between the two – the way we talk about colonized bodies and colonized land bear striking and harrowing similarities. Members of the Catcalling Project have been hired this year as part of an international study on community safety and resiliency at NYU called Confident Futures.

(IN)VISIBLE GUIDES – Since 2019, Perfect City working group members have worked with women at a neighborhood family domestic violence shelter on mapping, visioning and storytelling work. We are now developing (In)visible Guides as a public art work in collaboration with local artists, advocacy for organizers, and mutual aid for shelter residents. Our goal is to imagine new ways our non-profits and cities can support vulnerable populations.

AVOIDANCE MAPPING – this exercise came out of a meeting this fall. It’s a way to identify unconscious bias, the sophisticated ways we know about where to go and who to steer clear of, and how there are many cities mapped onto one concrete location. Avoidance Mapping has been done as a workshop with the Architectural League, with students from middle school through graduate school, and in several US and foreign cities.

ARTICLES – UrbanOmnibus and Longleaf Review have published our writing. Look for new articles coming soon to a publication near you!

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OUR TEAM