Hey Rebecca, great blog post, I think you bring up a number of interesting points. Unlike you, I wasn’t very surprised when I read about the city’s failings during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Personally, it took almost two weeks for my family to get their electricity and heat back after Sandy. We actually had to take refuge at a family-friend’s house, (although their area was closer to the water and struck a lot harder, it was also very upper-crust, so they got their electricity and heat back pretty quickly.) So although “crisis driven urbanization” is undoubtedly unfair, it’s not particularly unexpected.

I agree that this injustice may be facilitated by the way communities are built. Richer communities can afford generators and sturdier buildings, while less rich areas cannot. However, I don’t think the city was nondiscriminatory in the way they went about with their restoration efforts. If richer areas are less affected by storms, shouldn’t the bulk of the restoration efforts go towards poorer areas that need it more? I think it makes more sense to work from the bottom up.

Maybe I’m just jaded, but the points Checker brings up in her article aren’t surprising to me either. When money becomes the number one priority, it follows that cities and governments will pursue economic interests “at the expense of environmental safety and public health.” A perfect example of this is the recent water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

I agree that in order for cities to be more equal with the way they treat their citizens, they need to put human life above financial gain.

Amanda Burden was the director of the Department of City Planning and chair of the New York City Planning Commission after Bloomberg was elected in 2002. She was charged with, as Professor Larson puts it, “the task of infusing the Bloomberg redevelopment agenda with just enough human scope to make it amenable to a city still enamored of Jane Jacobs…” (133.) But, in reading the passage, it became clear to me that actual individual human lives took a backseat in Burden’s list of priorities, and that she was more concerned with upping the value of the city as a whole.

Burden was born with privilege, having come from “one of postwar New York City’s prominent families,” (133) and rose to prominence quickly. As The New York Observer noted, “Any major land-use change in the city must pass over Ms. Burden’s desk — if it didn’t originate there in the first place…” (135.) Although Burden became a star player in Bloomberg’s administration and in the city’s development of that time, it is interesting to note how much of an influence other thinkers had on her. Her fixation on street vitality was very Jane Jacobs, while her slightly obsessive attention to detail came from “Holly” Whyte. Burden focused primarily on public spaces, and while it seems as though public parks should benefit the public, Burden’s parks, such as the High Line, seemed to mainly exist to attract businesses and increase real estate value. 

Reading about Burden’s fixation on design struck me as slightly humorous. From policing park benches to appointing a “urban designer”, the city’s “attention to design” looked slightly ridiculous. After all, beauty is only skin deep. It seemed to me that Burden’s whole MO wasn’t to improve the city for its inhabitants, but to up its retail value and to lure in more commercial profit.

One line in the reading particularly struck me, and that is: “to the administration, then, design’s true civic virtue was its ability to make real estate worth more and to valorize a specific, class-oriented notion of quality of life” (144.) I feel this line perfectly encapsulates what was wrong in Burden’s approach to city planning.

In many ways, she was too fixated on surface level issues, like the minutiae of city benches or getting big name “starchitects” to work on projects for the city; the actual people of New York seemed to get the short end of the stick in her planning. 

 

Outside source:

https://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_burden_how_public_spaces_make_cities_work

 

Upon first reading “A Region at Risk”, I really got a sense of how slippery city planning can be. Where one thing goes right, another goes wrong. And often the solving of one problem causes another one –such as how the formation of the first plan necessitated the creation of the second  (Yaro, Hiss 2). It seemed the members of the RPA were continuously facing new problems, and were consistently addressing them. Whether they were population density, to the rise of suburbia. And of course, in their own words, the RPA’s intentions were purely noble. They sought to “improve the quality of life” (6) for all of the city’s inhabitants, and even provided a nifty graph to show how by focusing on “economy, equity and environment” would allow them to do so. While reading the article, it’s almost impossible to detect that the author’s are pushing a certain narrative, or that they might have an ulterior motive.

Reading “Planning and the Narrative of Threat” helped me put the first reading into perspective. In this chapter, Professor Larson details the planning and strategizing that go behind plan proposals. Robert Moses, for example, is notorious for hand picking sources and fabricating statistics in order to make his ideas more palatable to those in power (Larson 60). Other proposals, such as the ones put forth by Jane Jacobs, seek to gain favor by creating a do-or-die dichotomy, or a “narrative of threat”, as Professor Larson puts it. The narrative of threat is a rhetorical device used across the board, and in urban planning in particular. In Professor Larson’s words, urban planners often construct a world in which “the city is under siege and its very ability to survive has been rendered uncertain by some combination of malevolent forces…” ( 61). This “politics of fear” isn’t very hard for me to wrap my head around, as it is something that is so prevalent in political discord, especially now with the Presidential elections right around the corner. In the RPA’s third plan, they warn of impending doom for the city if it fails to abide by the framework they lay out in their plan. And although they back it up with facts and figures, I feel as though they may have inflated the problem a fair bit to lend importance to their proposals. 

Initially, I found myself agreeing with a lot of points put up by the authors of “A Region at Risk”. One for example, is the idea that “the economies, societies and environments of all the communities in the Tri-State Metropolitan region are intertwined, transcending arbitrary political divisions.” (Yaro, Hiss 6) It makes sense to me to zoom out when looking at issues facing urban areas, because in areas as congested and connected as cities, it doesn’t make sense to look at problems as though they are existing in a vacuum.

However, almost as important as the ideas are the people who propose them, and what they stand to gain from the implementation of these ideas. In this case, the RPA was comprised of an “elite group of globally oriented…industry leaders.” And the ideas they suggested “prioritized their needs, from lowering regulatory barriers and upgrading workforce skills to retaining and attracting highly skilled professional talent…” (Larson 67). I can forgive them for thinking of their own benefit in building their plans, mainly because it’s not unexpected or surprising.

 

 

 

Additional Sources: http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2013-08-12/regional-plan-association-civic-planning-model-new-york

 

Hi Jalissa,

I definitely think you hit the nail right on the head with the points you elaborate on in your blog post.  Jane Jacobs had (at the time) unique take on city planning and urban development that differed greatly with the ideas of her predecessors.

While going through the readings, I was struck by how different Robert Moses’ and Jane Jacobs’ approach to city planning was. One might even say that Jacobs was the antithesis of Moses. Robert Moses loved the city for the sake of its buildings and its highways. As a historian in the documentary we watched in class aptly put it, “[Moses] loved the public, but he hated people.” His approach to urban development put automobiles, highways and bridges as the priority. Jacobs, however, wastes no time in her book, and right from the get-go states that she is launching “an attack on current city planning and rebuilding” and is seeking to introduce ideas that are “new and opposite” from those currently in place.

I like how you pointed out how the advent of Jacobs’ ideas signaled a new era of city planning, and government proceedings in general. Where in the past, figures like Robert Moses, were given full reign in how they operated, Jacobs considered, and even prioritized the sensitivities of the people living in the city. Your link on participatory budgeting was very interesting and informative, and a great example of how much city planning and government work has changed in the past century..