Nonstop Metropolis

A multi-faceted project in collaboration with renowned writer, historian, and activist, Rebecca Solnit. Solnit is the author of 15 books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, the power of stories, and hope.

The roots of this project are found in her remarkable trilogy of Atlas books which propose creative mapping as a means to relay alternative histories of place, specifically of San Francisco and New Orleans. In 2016, the third and final book in the series will take New York City as its subject.

Titled Nonstop Metropolis Solnit is producing this publication with her collaborator geographer Josh Jelly-Shapiro, and a host of renowned writers, artists, historians, and cartographers.

Credit: Exhibition Overview from the Queens Museum website

 Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of experts—from linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalists—amplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York City’s unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history; but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past. Nonstop Metropolis allows us to excavate New York’s buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more.