Have You Seen This Couple?
Demystifying—and diversifying—development in New York City through two curious architectural figures.
By Daphne Lundi
They go on long meandering walks through New York City. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them: Jacques and Claudette. They’re probably in their 50s. He’s bald, wearing a light blue dress shirt, khaki pants, and brown loafers. She’s wearing hoop earrings, a pink T-shirt, and bootcut jeans. They would not seem out of place in Canarsie, or Flatbush, or Crown Heights, or East New York, or any neighborhood that has a strong uncle and auntie contingent.
The couple in question are scalies, stock characters inserted into architectural renderings to populate imagined urban futures.
I started noticing them 10 years ago while working as an urban planner in New York City. My media diet included the regular perusal of real estate websites like New York YIMBY, Crain’s New York Business, and neighborhood blogs to get a pulse on development murmurings. Unless a development comes to the city government for a regulatory approval, the average person is mostly kept in the dark about what a development might look and feel like until the scaffolding comes down. But on sites like New York YIMBY, you’re offered a peek—usually by way of permit filing notices and glossy renderings that feature people walking, sitting, riding a bike, pushing a stroller, and taking advantage of what this new apartment building, office building, or park has to offer.
As far as the scaly influencer market goes, Jacques and Claudette are busy. They’re often tucked into megaprojects, popping up in courtyards, strolling through Coney Island, visiting community centers, on the High Line, and in New York YIMBY post after post. They’ve quietly populated the imagined futures of New York City, always walking, always together (unless it’s a controversial development, in which case they suddenly part ways).
I should mention that Jacques and Claudette are not their real names. I pride myself on my skills of internet sleuthing, archival research, and obsessing over a particular topic to exhaustion, but I was never able to find the real names of these architectural rendering celebrities. The earliest usage of their image I could find dates back to 2015, when Columbia GSAPP students started NONSCANDINAVIA—a collection of racially diverse scalies meant to counteract the mostly white, able-bodied ways in which people were represented in renderings.
If you were in architecture school a decade or more ago, using sites like NONSCANDINAVIA—and the sleep-deprived ingenuity of scouring Creative Commons and celebrity tabloid sites for people to cut out—was what it took to make renderings less generically Nordic and more representative of the neighborhoods where development was actually happening. Diverse scalies traveled from studio to studio, passed along like genetic building blocks and rearranged in an infinite number of configurations, slowly shaping how a generation of architects imagined life in cities.
The 2010s also marked a period when more architects and designers began interrogating the homogeneity of the built environment professions—and how spaces and places were represented. The first Black in Design conference was held in 2015 at Harvard GSD. In 2018, the National Museum of African American History and Culture organized a symposium focused on the activism and organizing impact of Black architects and planners from the civil rights era to the present day. Around the same time, grassroots networks of architects and designers began organizing counterprogramming—like BlackSpace, Spaces and Places, and Hindsight—to challenge the more traditional and expensive offerings of the AIA and APA. It was a moment when many designers, planners, and architects were actively questioning norms of representation, even in renderings.
Jacques and Claudette became my personal Where’s Waldo? of development in historically Black neighborhoods. I would spot them walking through parts of Central Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx—the byproducts of major developments and neighborhood rezonings in places like East New York and The Rockaways, and of the warped market forces that turned any neighborhood with decent transit and access to a major park into an investment opportunity. They became main characters in photorealistic renderings of the coming-soon future: future schools, future apartment buildings, future bike lanes, future renovated train stations, future parks. As these developments neared completion, and as I was on the hunt for a new apartment, I began noticing them on NYC Housing Connect listings, standing in for the few who beat tens of thousands of other New Yorkers to win the housing lottery.
This anonymous couple started to feel less anonymous, in part because they never seemed out of place in the imagined future. For a pair that hasn’t updated their style in over a decade, they somehow don’t read as outdated; they’re timeless rather than time-bound. Other scalies can sometimes feel like relics of the 2000s and 2010s—jeans too skinny for today’s denim conventions, hairstyles that harken back to the era of makerspace idealism and Richard Florida-esque creative-class urban revitalization, rather than the private-equity–laced streets of the 2020s. Jacques and Claudette have a versatility that makes it easy to imagine them almost anywhere—or anywhen. I ended up calling them Jacques and Claudette because they remind me of the aunties and uncles I grew up with in Flatbush and Crown Heights, the headquarters for Jacques and Claudettes in New York City.
So what’s their story? Maybe they’re both former civil servants, enjoying retired life on a Tier 4 pension. Maybe they sold their home in Jamaica, Queens, deciding to downsize once their kids went to college and wanted an apartment with in-unit laundry and no risk of pulling your back while mowing the lawn or falling off a ladder while cleaning the gutters. Maybe they were looking for a walkable NORC to spend their last decades in.
Maybe they’ve left the city altogether, becoming stand-ins for the reverse Great Migration driven by rising housing costs, predatory landlords, deed theft, and the sense (and reality) that home ownership, or just plain housing stability, feels out of reach in most northern cities. In the last 20 years, New York City’s Black population has decreased by over 125,000 people. I wonder what they make of the city in 2026 versus 2005, which neighbors they’ve watched move away, which developments they loved being featured in, which they hated, and, of course, their thoughts on Eric Adams’s tenure as mayor. Perhaps they’ve relocated to Atlanta, Houston, or Dallas, where instead of being the spokescouple for affordable units in new high-rises, they advocate for accessory dwelling units and fourplexes.
Perhaps we would discuss their new scaly colleagues: the matte, AI-generated, sometimes faceless NPCs performing human activities in renderings. Their uncanniness makes it easier for me to focus on the actual design of the project—which may or may not be a good thing, depending on the quality of said project—but it makes it harder to project any kind of backstory onto them. It can feel like I’m looking at stills from a video game rather than a real construction project scheduled to be completed in a matter of months or years.
Maybe that’s a more honest reading of renderings. When the human or humanoid figures in the images look uncanny, less photorealistic, it’s harder to get swept up in the futures the images are trying to sell. Sites like AntiRender offer an antidote to the pollyannish rendering. It can’t be sunny all the time.
The little figures sprinkled throughout these visions are not the main characters. We’re meant to appreciate, or at least focus on, the building, the plaza, the new train station. When a rendering feels too real, too complete, it makes the project, or the future, feel like a done deal. And then we run the risk of obscuring the realities: the area median income of a development, the budgetary gap between rendering and reality in green space design and maintenance, and balconies value-engineered into Juliet balconies.
Perhaps Jacques and Claudette’s recurrence over the past decade is the result of that discernment. They aren’t flashy, aspirational placeholders or faceless human blobs; they’re real people standing in for real people. They persist across renderings, offering a sense of permanence, even as the material conditions of most cities make that permanence increasingly difficult to achieve. ⌂