Running eastward all the way from west Manhattan in the newly developed Hudson Yards, the Line 7 subway crosses all of northwest Queens and ends in Flushing’s Main Street, connecting one of the richest areas of New York City with some of the poorest. Starting at 34 St-Hudson Yards at the northern end of the popular High Line, the 7 continues on to Times Square and Grand Central to then cross the tunnel under the East River and travel across Queens, passing by Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Corona and Elmhurst, and finally Flushing. The 7 train, famously nicknamed the “International Express” by the City Planning Commission, was publicized as an embodiment of the immigrant experience and cross-cultural encounters. It is towards the end of this line, just before the Mets-Willets station that sits the 103rd St - Corona Plaza station. Along with 111th Street, Junction Boulevard, and 90th Street, these stations trace the northern border of Corona, where the elevated tracks over Roosevelt Avenue rumble over two-story houses and street vendor carts, and where a neighborhood of majority immigrant and working-class families live.

Corona has a long history of community organizing and mutual aid, with a long-established and robust network of local organizations and well-developed grassroots social networks that have also situated Corona as a neighborhood composed of resilient communities where mutual aid and solidarity networks are life-sustaining for its residents and communities. They have historically occurred along racial and class struggles, mainly driven by struggles for the rights of immigrant communities.

These networks have also managed to articulate themselves in specific circumstances and advocate for more significant issues: in 2017 they successfully fought off attempts at an expansion of the Roosevelt Avenue Business Improvement District (BID) that would have effectively privatized more public spaces in the neighborhood, and from 2012 to 2018 they collaborated in a massive project with the Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Queen’s Museum that resulted in the reconstruction of the space in between 103rd and Roosevelt Avenue into what is now Corona Plaza. These events illustrate a story of Corona, one of a neighborhood plagued by systemic oppression and historical disinvestment, but also one of cooperation and resistance, where mutual aid is not only present but fundamental for the survival and formation of resilient communities in the neighborhood.

This project aims to visualize and spatialize these networks of solidarity and mutual aid in Corona, and the fundamental roles local actors play in establishing and maintaining them.

Feminist geographers have long established the solidarity economy as a distinct spatial subject, one that creates new geographies of cooperation, commoning, and collective care. This project maps these networks and shows them not as isolated islands scattered across the city, but as complex and expanding rhizomatic structures where encounters and exchanges occur, and where many things flow —ideas, resources, knowledge, and people. Furthermore, visualising them not only shows the spatial relationship between each other but also with the existing structural inequalities occurring in the city, and how they are distributed.

Corona in context

In order to explore mutual aid and solidarity in Corona (and the city), an understanding of the city and its inequalities as they present in space must first be examined.

Along with Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, Corona has the city’s densest concentration of overcrowded households, a process brought about by the reduction in public housing investment and rising property values. Here the average household size is 3.59, a big difference from the borough average of 2.8 and the city average of 2.55. This also only accounts for its documented population, and housing units in Corona are well known by the neighbors to commonly house over 6 people per unit, where 78.5% of the total population are renters and do not own their homes, a rate higher than the city average of 60%. Of this population, 56% are rent-burdened, meaning that more than 30% of the household income goes toward paying rent.

Corona is also a neighborhood of immigrants, most of them Hispanic: 61% of its residents are foreign-born, a number that almost doubles the city-wide average of 35.4%. And of the foreign-born population, over 40% are not citizens, almost triple the city average of 14.5%. Looking at this data in space shows a clear pattern, with both the foreign-born and noncitizen population being concentrated at higher rates in Sunset Park and South Brooklyn, Corona and Flushing in Queens, Washington Heights and Inwood in Upper Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Most of the population in Corona is Hispanic or Latine: the percentage of Hispanic Population in the neighborhood reaches 80% of the total in the area, an incredibly high rate considering the city average of 26% of Hispanic/Latine population. Looking at the map also allows one to see the incredibly concentrated character Corona and other well-known neighborhoods, while the rest of the city has relatively low concentration. The other areas correspond to neighborhoods popularly known as Hispanic hubs, such as Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Inwood in Upper Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Corona is also a working-class neighborhood, where the Median Household Income is $62,000 (an $11k difference with the city average of $73,000) and the Median Individual Income is less than $30k a year ($29k compared to the $41k borough average). Looking at the data in space once again allows to see the uneven distribution of wealth in the city, as the map below illustrates the Medium Household Income in relation to the city average — in Staten Island, Midtown and Lower Manhattan, South Bronx, Williamsburg, Downtown Brooklyn, and Astoria (the latter 4 being heavily gentrified neighborhoods), the Medium Household Income is above the average; while in South Brooklyn, Corona and Flushing and the Bronx, the Medium Household Income is markedly lower than the average.

Examining other expressions of inequality in the city yields similar results: the rates of uninsured population is more than double the city average (of 40%) with an estimated 84%, and while the rate of population receiving state assistance in Corona at 26% is higher than the city average of 20%, looking at the data spatially shows it has a much lower rate than other areas of the city such as the Bronx and areas of East and South Brooklyn. This is explained by the rate of the noncitizen population, as people without citizenship in the city cannot access state benefits and are usually employed in poorer working contidions.

The Networks of Mutual Aid & Solidarity

In this bleak panorama of social and economic injustice in the city, structural inequality, and systemic oppression, local immigrant communities have rallied together and organized themselves in order to provide the resources that they cannot access through formal means and ensure their survival, caring for each other collectively and creating robust social networks that establishes them as resilient communities.

In the establishment of networks and practices of mutual aid, a fundamental block for their formation has often been the presence of social infrastructure, referring to the infrastructure that fosters social and community relations and acts as the glue that binds communities together. Social Infrastructure includes spaces such as libraries, parks, or schools, and through them, people are more likely to interact with others around them and feel connected to their broader area. This seems to indicate that networks of collective care need the presence of social infrastructure to occur and establish routes, as they cannot happen without spaces that host them.

The map below visualizes this dynamic, showing in a base layer the presence of social infrastructure in different areas of the city through an index — the numbers closer to 1 indicating a higher presence of social infrastructures and the ones closer to 0 showing a lower presence of social infrastructure. The Social Infrastructures Index was created by creating a 1000 feet buffer on every Park, Plaza, Playground, Library and Public School in the city and calculating the percentage of coverage they had on each census tract.

The top element overlays the Solidarity Economy sites present in the city, a map compiled by the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City (https://gocoopnyc.org/). Cross-referencing these two variables visualizes the connection stated above and confirms its correlation. It also evidences how the areas that have experienced historical disinvestment, such as South Brooklyn and East Queens, have less Social Infrastructure and less presence of Solidarity Economy Organizations.

However, one question arises out of observing this map: what about Corona? As the people of Corona themselves would tell you, the neighborhood does indeed have very robust social networks of collective care. The same story can be said of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, the neighborhood with the highest rate of participation in Participatory Budgeting, which shows the same scenario in this map.

This is explained by the initial context maps: disenfranchised working-class, noncitizen, and immigrant communities don’t often function within the formal structures, and thus appear as inexistent to statistical surveys, registries, and other quantifying efforts. However, they do exist, are alive and thriving without social infrastructures and under the harshest circumstances, in informal networks and social connections.

For them to be visible then, qualitative efforts must be made to unearth them and make them visible. The following map is a first iteration of this network, an attempt to visualize and spatialize the connections, the flows of people, knowledge, and resources that occur within them, and the actors and lived experiences that are at their heart.

It is important to reaffirm the incomplete nature of this map, as it is simply the compilation of a single individual and does not replace the complex and nuanced nature of collective and participatory mapping.

📍 Let this statement be an invitation— if you are from Corona, work there, or simply love it, I enthusiastically invite you to add to this map! You can place comments, places, and links, add personal testimonies or new information.

And if you want to learn more about this project or collaborate, please feel free to reach out at franm047@newschool.edu.

Link(s) to full project:

• Link 1 - storymaps.com/stories/a2770539120345ecb9d4aaf39b085c60
• Link 2 - brick-bat-7c9.notion.site/Spatializing-mutual-aid-in-Corona-0ec6c3891c26430a93133131b377b379?pvs=4