In Amanda Burden’s TedTalk in 2014, she presents the importance of public spaces within a city and how they function to produce benefits and make the city more desirable to live in. Working as the Director of New York City Planning Commission under Mayor Bloomberg, Burden was faced with the problem of a potential increase of around 1 million people in an already dense city. She had to establish new zoning programs to house the influx of people and promoted the transit system near new development areas. In order to understand the neighborhoods she was rezoning, Burden spent years walking through the neighborhoods and holding panels to establish trust within these communities to learn how zoning could benefit community concern. Her success presented itself when she rezoned 124 neighborhoods, 40% of the city, and around 12,500 blocks. She also made sure that 90% of all new development was located within a ten-minute walk from the transit system, decreasing the need for cars.
While rezoning was attempting to solve the problem of increase growth, Burden’s interests also lied with creating waterfronts and public spaces that would change the image of New York City. She worked on projects including Battery Park, waterfront parks in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, and the Highline Park and promoted the establishment of pop-up cafes, tables and chairs where Broadway used to run, and sidewalk cafes. She viewed these public spaces as areas that provide the city with an acquired aesthetic and improved the way New Yorkers felt about their city. Her passion was to make these areas an attraction to New Yorkers and tourists and leave them with a meaningful new perspective when looking at this city.
While this was not discussed in her TedTalk, Amanda Burden combined the ideas of Robert Moses’ drastic changes and Jane Jacob’s caution of preserving neighborhoods when applying her ideas to creating the new public spaces. However, her support for new development had similar consequences described in Sharon Zicklin’s “The Naked City.” Towards the end of the Bloomberg term, homelessness rates, housing prices, and rent in New York City had all drastically increased and the problem of gentrification arose. Similarly, Zicklin describes the lifetime of Union Square Park and its dynamic change caused by Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) and Local Development Corporations (LDCs) also affecting the neighborhood it resides within. Although these organizations worked to upkeep Union Square Park and revolutionize it, their power increased greatly over time as they invested more money into the park. They were able to select the social groups that could enjoy the park and removed undesirable characters, like the homeless, which further weakened the diversity of the public space. They were able to regulate the behavior of the people who visited the park and shifted the businesses around the park from merchants that catered to low-income shoppers to bigger business and luxury stores. In turn, the property values around the park began to increase and promoted an influx of new residents that fell into a certain criterion.
Historically, Union Square Park had been an area where labor unions and democratic groups kept their offices nearby and housed many protests or open-air people’s forums. However, the BIDs and LDCs increased the privatization of the park and limited the events that could occur within the park. Commercial interest was deemed more important than establishing a public space where New Yorkers were proud to visit as Burden suggested. Her ideal image of these public spaces is ruined once these organizations take hold of the area and limit the diversity and freedom once shared. Although Burden herself had to fight with the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to create a public waterfront in Lower Manhattan, the new construction and development had the same detrimental effects as when the rich tax property payers were involved.
I found Burden’s TedTalk to be interesting because it seemed like an alternative approach in which the city could fund for public spaces but instead, the consequences are shared between each method. Any new development or money poured into projects within a neighborhood will increase property values and rents. Gentrification of these neighborhoods seems almost unavoidable when looking at it from different perspectives. Therefore, we are left with the question of how to improve our neighborhoods without drastically affecting the already present dynamic within it.
