This article relates to our readings for this week by Angotti and Tochterman which further the discussions we’ve had during the past few weeks about housing in the city, and how people like Moses and Jacobs influenced the grand scheme of planning. During this week’s readings, the idea of gentrification was much more evident, with Tochterman even talking about how Jacobs foresaw gentrification, referring to it as “neoliberal urban development “. Tochterman goes onto talk about how Jacobs had many visions for improvement of community in the city, and its preservation but failed to “offer vision of how class diversity should be preserved”. She wanted everyone of mixed backgrounds to live in harmony in the same city, but her lack of planning for this, “left the state and capital” to interpret her vision resulting in gentrification in places like the East Village. Although Jacobs, and later on her disciple Richard Florida, wanted the idea of a “creative class” to live in the city, it isn’t a simple task to achieve this with people of mixed backgrounds. There is a snowball effect of like-minded people shifting to one area. “The most intelligent in the arts, science, and technology appeared drawn to cities featuring a rich and unique urban form—organically developed neighborhood systems in Jacobs and Florida parlance — alternative forms of transportation, and the proper places to initiate contact with like-minded talent.” The Angotti reading also discusses community planning as a preventative measure of keeping people from getting kicked out of their homes, and also discusses how Jacobs made efforts to stop Moses’ onslaught on the city.
We can see the consequences of this still happening in this article about Denver, which looks like it’s following the same equation of finding a preservable area, raising its value, eventually resulting in the people living there having to leave. It’s quite a paradox, which is very contrary to what Jacobs and Florida really wanted. This raises the question: how do we preserve the entire history of culture, both the buildings and the people? This isn’t a question with an easy answer, because if so, we wouldn’t be discussing this as much as a problem. Fortunately, issues like this are being publicized and it is clear that there are people working to find a solution.
Because of the way things turned out, many people think that Jacobs gets more credit than she deserves, considering many people looked at her efforts as opening the path to gentrification. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree considering she made efforts to and was still able to prevent many of Moses’ advances to completely destroy certain neighborhoods, but this still ended up in many areas getting gentrified in the long run. All I can really say is that history has shown us that many efforts have been made to please everyone, but there still isn’t a concrete solution and we need to find one soon.
