When a global developer purchased Industry City in 2013 and set out to remake the Brooklyn waterfront campus into an “innovation district,” it set off a fight that would consume a community for years. Both material and existential concerns hung in the balance: who is New York City made for, and who gets to decide? 

Emergent City, a documentary that explores the battle over the future of a neighborhood, and of New York City itself.  The film takes viewers inside the public hearings, backroom negotiations, and community meetings where the city’s future was quietly shaped, and sometimes loudly contested.

Hailed as “a vividly thrilling story about democracy” and “the best New York City-based documentary in a decade,” Emergent City offers extraordinarily nuanced portrayals of a real-life ensemble cast with deeply divergent stakes, including the local City Council member, Industry City’s developers, and Sunset Park community members. The film contextualizes the Industry City rezoning battle within Sunset Park’s history of rising rents, environmental racism, and the loss of the industrial jobs that once sustained the neighborhood.

Following the screening, directors Kelly Anderson and Jay Arthur Sterrenberg join newly re-elected Council Member Alexa Avilés for a conversation about the film and the forces it documents, moderated by filmmaker and Open House New York Board Member Cassim Shepard. Anderson, who chairs the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College (CUNY) and is herself a Sunset Park resident, has spent her career examining the hidden pressures shaping urban neighborhoods, including the 2012 documentary My Brooklyn. Her decade-long commitment to examining gentrification brings both lived proximity and unflinching rigor to the work. Avilés, who is featured in the documentary as a community member and now represents Sunset Park and the surrounding district, brings a firsthand perspective on the civic battles the film portrays — and on what comes next.

The talkback will explore what the Industry City fight reveals about the broader mechanisms of zoning, displacement, and civic agency in New York today – and what it might look like to build differently.

This program is made possible by the generous support of the Empire Wind Offshore Wind Project. For more information, visit empirewind.com.

The Dr. S. Stevan Dweck Cultural Center at the Brooklyn Public Library Central Branch is accessible by two ADA compliant lifts.