Gabriela Rendón is Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development and Founding Director of Parsons Housing Justice Lab at The New School. She is also co-founder of Urban Front, a transnational consultancy offering localized knowledge to public and third-sector organizations that work for social and environmental justice, and of Cohabitation Strategies, a nonprofit that facilitates community-led local efforts through participatory frameworks leading to urban and social transformation. She has worked on projects commissioned by nonprofits, public agencies, municipalities, and national governments across cities in Western Europe and South and North America.

Gabriela’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the 4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, the Istanbul Design Biennial 2012, the Vienna Biennale 2015, the Portugal Triennial 2016, the Museum of Modern Art, and the 17th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. She has authored and co-edited publications on housing, cooperative urban practices, and neighborhood restructuring.

Gabriela is currently working on a book tentatively titled Defiant Neighborhoods: Rise, Revitalization, and Gentrification of Immigrant Communities in Latinx Brooklyn which explores the forces driving housing and neighborhood restructuring in post-industrial Brooklyn, focusing on the Latinx community’s efforts to establish and preserve their barrios. Drawing from shifts in global economic and immigration patterns, the state’s role in community and neighborhood development, housing policy, and the motives and agents driving the new scale of gentrification, the book brings out the continuous community struggles and efforts for housing access in Bushwick and Sunset Park, two neighborhoods that rose from the ashes after the atrocious fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and turned into thriving communities with the arrival of new immigrants from Latin America and other nations. Based on narratives from the Mexican diaspora, a vital immigrant community in the city often overlooked by urban scholars, the book lays out Latinx's housing struggles as they fight to stay put in the neighborhoods they have forged and call home. 

Defiant Neighborhoods examines how in light of government withdrawal from community and neighborhood development affairs, shared and socially oriented visions and strategies are emerging from immigrant and working-class communities to protect their barrios. Urging collectivized housing visions and resistance practices based on community organizing, cooperativism, and coalition building across races and neighborhoods, communities like Bushwick and Sunset Park are turning into defiant neighborhoods. In other words, spaces of resistance building a unified front to preserve Brown and Black communities across Brooklyn and beyond.