• Angotti, T. (2008) “From Dislocation to Resistance: The Roots of Community Planning” from New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, p. 81-109.

On Monday we traced the roots of contemporary community planning to various modes of community struggles over urban land and development throughout NYC’s history.  Angotti’s analysis is helpful in highlighting the community resistance that has always been present, and in showing us how the nature/character of that resistance has changed over time, and been shaped by its historical context.

First we reviewed Precursors of Community Planning in NYC identified by Angotti, including:

1. Slave rebellions (17-1800s)
2. Late 19th century populism/Henry George’s campaigns for mayor (1886 and 1897)
3. The rise of labor, left, and tenant movements (1904- city’s first rent strike on the LES, 1920s fight for rent control, and the development of housing cooperatives)
4. The organizing for jobs and housing during the Great Depression (fights against eviction, rent strikes, victory gardens).

(Harlem Rent Strike, 1919)  Angotti said that rent strikes were less successful when they targeted single landlords then when they also focused on building a political movement.

Then we turned to what Angotti calls “the most important foundation for today’s community movements”: Urban Renewal, Negro Removal, and the Struggles Against Displacement (late 1940s-early 1970s). These struggles connect with last week’s reading on Robert Moses (who engineered much of the “renewal”/removal on behalf of the federal government) and Jane Jacobs (who criticized and resisted him, along with many others).  This week’s reading emphasized the racist underpinnings of “slum clearance” in “blighted areas” and how this became one of the most politicized periods of NYC history.

As Angotti points out, 1968 was a pinnacle year for Revolt and Reform-
across the country, city, and community planning efforts, only to be followed by a period of Decentralization and White Backlash, which was particularly evident in struggles over community control of public schools.

For instance, in February 1969, black and Puerto Rican students demanded that CUNY’s student body match that of the city’s high schools.  They shut down campuses across the city, forcing the CUNY administration to adopt an “open admissions” policy, which expanded the student body significantly and tripled its share of people of color (in just one year!)

Soon however, as Angotti explains, “the demise of the Keynesian and Fordist models of economic development in the 1970s gave rise to the city’s fiscal crisis in the 1970s and a wave of neighborhood abandoment.  As the private real estate market collapsed in many working-class neighborhoods, it created a vacuum that community organizers and activists filled with new alternatives.  This laid the foundation for community control over land and greater community influence over land-use controls.” (p. 97) through Squatting, Homesteading, the Rise of Community Land.  It also involved a proliferation of Community Development Corporations becoming housing developers and landlords, and fighting for Flexible Zoning and Preservation (p. 105).

What to make of all of this?  Angotti closes by saying: “The history of labor and communities in NYC is one of people’s progressively greater involvement in efforts to stop displacement and gain effective control over land, even as capital dominates and gains increasing control over all spheres of social and cultural life” (p. 108).