Adam Lubinsky

This interview with Adam Lubinsky was conducted remotely on December 4, 2020 from his home in Brooklyn, NY. Adam is an urban planner and principal at WXY Studio, where recent projects have included the desegregation of District 15 in Brooklyn, and an attempt to address and reduce COVID-19 risk for students arriving at a charter school. Through his work, he examines the role of schools in communities and the school as a critical piece of a city's social infrastructure. Adam talks about these projects in his previous interview, and shares the progress and failures of that work during this interview. Since Adam's work and experience focuses on school issues from a more structural point of view, he shares points of tension between structural solutions and immediate needs of parents, teachers, and students, and the sensitivity one needs to have to inequities that arise as these different needs are expressed. Adam is also the father of a teenage daughter, and he talked about what kind of insights and understandings he has working both on big-picture systems, and being a parent, and the challenges he sees to bridging the perspective between systems thinking and frightened individuals. Adam also speaks about how his daughter has been managing remote learning and isolation from her friends, and how she and her pod negotiate COVID risk between themselves and their families across different neighborhoods in Brooklyn.