The first thing you see on entering the office of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), on the second floor of a converted industrial building in Gowanus, Brooklyn, is the literature: two shelves of brightly colored comics, posters, pamphlets, and handbooks.
These vibrant graphic manuals are the fruits of the Center's unusual approach to teaching the city. Working with neighborhood groups and city high schoolers, CUP's designers have distilled a slew of byzantine municipal regulations into zippy narrative guides.
