It’s interesting to think of a community as a body. Similar to a body, communities have their own stages of development, growth, period of sickness, period of prosperity, and ultimately—if the state allows it—death. In this metaphor, Wallace emphasizes the fact that the government of the City of New York failed to revitalize its ailing neighborhoods. In the medical profession, doctors are bound by the Hippocratic Oath to ensure that their patients “suffer no hurt or damage”. Clearly, these rules don’t apply to legislators. Through racist and classist notions of the ideal community, neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx were systematically destroyed.
“Benign neglect” and “planned shrinkage” were essentially as harmful and blatant as Robert Moses’ physical destruction of communities of color. As the large-scale residential clearance for highways and bridges became controversial and fell out of favor, subtler forms of racism ensued. The “top-down” model of urban planning struck again as ignorance influenced the destruction of low-income communities of color. By using meaningless, pseudo intellectual mathematical models and botched fire report data, Rand was able to bring about the rapid decline in population in these areas. Specifically, Wallace points out that the Resource-Allocation Model didn’t take into account the fact that fires fluctuate depending on the time of day and the season. Just speaking to a community member or a nurse at a local hospital would emphasize this important variable. The disregard for public safety in these areas on behalf of Rand, Daniel Moynihan, and Roger Starr was far more antisocial than the community members themselves.
One issue mentioned early in the reading was the lack of industry in the South Bronx, which was cited as one of the reasons for its slow rate of development and the social climate of the area. Following Robert Moses’ urban planning model, it would follow that revitalizing the area would mean emptying out entire pockets of residential areas to create industry sectors. The city wasn’t interested in orchestrated attempts to revitalize the neighborhood. The “slash-and-burn” approach to urban planning is random, as city planners can’t choose where fires will happen—for obvious reasons. If we’re following the trajectory for the Robert Moses school of urban planning, we can refer to one of his more unabashedly racist quotes from 1977: “Now I ask you, what was that neighborhood? It was a Puerto Rican slum. Do you remember it? Yeah, well I lived there for many years and it was the worst slum in New York. And you want to leave it there?” This ideology of urban planning is based on a standard of achievement with middle class whites as the norm. Under this standard, it’s easy to assume why the South Bronx, East Harlem, Brownsville, and East New York were targeted for “planned shrinkage”.
It is the City’s responsibility to create sustainable communities for all residents. No city should allow communities to fail because of their demographies. One might argue that one of the reasons for the turmoil and social climate of the South Bronx was the earlier “renewal” caused by the displacement of hundreds of residents for Robert Moses’ Cross Bronx and his stance on public transportation (he hated public transportation, which many South Bronx residents were dependent on, as they couldn’t afford to purchase cars). As Wallace points out, communities are like bodies, and proper scales, measures, batteries, surveys, analyses, and examinations need to be performed before legislation is passed.
Discussion: Should urban planning be subject to greater scrutiny and regulations?
