If transforming Williamsburg was thought to be difficult, then transforming Harlem must have seemed impossible a few decades ago. While Williamsburg had its underground parties and its nightclubs, Harlem had a rich cultural history of musicians, political figures, and athletes. Though the two neighborhoods differed in many respects, it was […]
Monthly Archives: March 2019
34 posts
Discussions about the factors that affect development in New York City tend to cluster around ideas of zoning and demographics and, to a lesser extent, the demand for quality of life factors such as access to transportation, public school systems, and access to essential services. The belief in developers as […]
As I read through Sharon Zukin’s work, on the corporatization of Union Square, I could hardly keep myself from relating it back to an article I had read over the weekend. Just as the citizens of New York lost control over Union Square to corporate interests, the citizens of Brooklyn […]
In Talmudic discourse, public domains and private domains are distinct legal entities, each with its own set of rules. The rabbis therefore grapple with how to define certain spaces that don’t neatly fit into either category, possessing characteristics of both types of domain. Union Square might well be the sort […]
Private ownership of public spaces has become an increasingly prominent phenomenon in NYC, although there are mixed feelings about its use. One instance I found which outlines one of the issues associated with it is the Occupy Wall Street protest. In an article outlining the Occupy Wall Street protest in […]
Union Square to me has always been a public space to me that has been seemingly inclusive and welcoming to the people of New York City. After reading Zukin’s work, I cannot see the famed space the same. Although nothing can take away its historic importance to the very fabric […]
In this weeks reading, “Union Square and the Paradox of Public Space,” Sharon Zukin writes quite a bit on the different groups that control public spaces like Union Square and similarly the WTC. She mentions that after 9/11, there was a dissonance in the steps that were to be taken […]
Sharon Zukin unlike other urban sociologists doesn’t focus on ethnographically analyzing communities, immigrants and settlement patterns, moreover she is concerned with the role of the state and targeting how urban space is produced deliberately from capital necessity. Similarly, to Richard Florida and the “Creative Class”, Zukin coined the term and concept […]
Max Rivlin-Nadler, an investigative journalist, writes an article discussing the effects Business Improvement Directs have on a community specifically the social groups they exclude and the small business they hurt. He explains the devastating loss the government took on the bases of not being able to meet public expectations in […]
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 […]
I fear the day that parks, which are the epitome of public space, come to mean “safe” in the way that suburban shopping malls are viewed as safe – because of their sterility and exclusion of certain social classes. […]
Formation: Why and Where Volcanoes form when magma from the Earth’s upper mantle erupt outward, growing bigger with each eruption. This happens because of the Earth having tectonic plates, which converge or diverge at certain locations. We can compare this to New York’s real estate industry. Real estate in New […]
