LIC in Context

LIC in Context: An Unorthodox Guide to Long Island City, a Furnace Press publication released in 2005, explores the development, redevelopment and perpetual reimagining of Long Island City, one of New York City's most dynamic and misconstrued neighborhoods. The project represents an effort to make sense of this physically and socially disjointed swath of Northwestern Queens, utilizing strategies culled from the fields of planning, architecture, history and art. Neither a comprehensive neighborhood guide nor a traditional exercise in urban planning or design, the book takes an ambitious, if selective, stab at evoking what is compelling and unusual about the neighborhood through the exploration of 54 sites. More broadly, LIC in Context represents an effort to learn from a neighborhood that, almost since its inception, has illustrated the implications of urban development as a bare knuckled sport.