Sharon Zukin, author of Naked City, was interviewed about her book (http://www.citsee.eu/interview/naked-city-authenticity-and-urban-citizenship-interview-sharon-zukin). In the interview she was asked about the term authenticity, specifically “What do you mean by ‘authenticity’ in this urban context?” She responds “I chose very deliberately to use the word ‘authenticity’ to talk about changes in New York” and this immediately made me think of the question we keep coming back to in class which is the idea of who this city belongs to and who gets to enforce change. City planners and people of the likes of Robert Moses would argue that they know how best to fix things, whereas Jane Jacobs would argue that it’s the people in the neighborhood who will be affected that know what’s best for themselves. I think the part of our reading that spoke about 9/11, specifically what to do at the WTC site, really embodies that question. 9/11 was a heartbreakingly tragic event, and in the aftermath someone had to decide what to do at the WTC site. It was like every single person wanted to be heard. It made me wonder who has the right to say who takes precedence over who? And who does actually take precedence over someone else? Is it the victim’s families who have suffered a devastating tragedy that should get to decide what to do with the area where their loved one died? What about the people who live nearby whose daily lives will be affected by these changes? Is it the state? The city government? The people who are actually paying for it? Objectively, I would argue that whoever is paying for something can do whatever they want since it’s their money. Subjectively, I could never support that argument in any context, but particularly in this context since I would never want the victim’s families to feel like they aren’t being heard.
This passage really struck me because I had never considered what went into rebuilding after 9/11, and I had certainly never thought there would have been so much disagreement and so many different groups of people giving input. When we had talked in class about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, I never really thought about how hard it actually is to determine who gets a voice. Reading this text put things in perspective for me. Zukin goes on in her interview to talk about the changes made in the city in terms of gentrification which is much different than the decision making process that occurred in the wake of 9/11, but she sums up this idea of authenticity in a statement I really liked:
“I wanted the slipperiness of the term to allow people to understand that the city changes in ways that are both acceptable and not acceptable for both objective and subjective reasons, and our criteria for evaluating change in the city are both objective and subjective.”
It’s a really hard thing to decide who gets a say when changes are being made in any context, and I kept trying to think of one answer to the problem, but this quote made me realize that there isn’t one because it’s always going to be relative to the situation at hand.
- How do public-private partnerships complicate decision making processes?
- How do you determine whose voices are heard in decision making processes?
- How does the word ‘authenticity’ needing to be defined in specific contexts reflect the objective and subjective reasons for change Zukin mentions?
