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.

Hey Mariyanthie! Great post, I completely agree with you that the City should have responded differently after Hurricane Sandy completely whipped out and completely destroyed parts of the city. Instead of focusing on developing new real estate, the city should have catered to the low-income families in poorer areas. Many of these families lost their homes, personal belonging, and memories after the hurricane hit and rushed through their neighborhoods. And instead of the City investing money to rebuild these areas, they allocated their resources to the wealthier people even though there were people who were desperate need to that money and resources.

There is one thing however, that you wrote about that I do not necessary agree with. In you’re blog, you wrote that there could have been another Hurricane like Hurricane Sandy that would have completely destroyed this new construction, and therefore it didn’t necessarily make sense to build it in the first place. The only thing is though, in reality, one could say the same thing about investing this money into these poorer areas and rebuilding those neighborhoods. So one could make argue that the City shouldn’t rebuilt after a catastrophe hits because another one can always strike again. However, it that were the case, the City’s infrastructure would crumble and the city would crumble with it. I think the reason that Greenberg mentions “the fate of $51 billion in post-Sandy recovery aid [was] undecided,” is to reiterate that fact how poorly the City allocated its resources (46). On an economic level the city responded properly, those who can pay more get the resource. It was easier to make the easy fixes, and more those areas attractable again. However, on a human level the City once again put their profit before the people, and focused on economic gain.

Obviously, economic development is important in every city, but it is vital that the city take care of its inhabitants even more so. With caring for its inhabitants, the city loses its heart and soul and is merely left with the foundation and structure. And it seems as though the City, time and time again, has turned its back on its inhabitants and focuses on to real estate development and making a profit. The only justification that I can think of is that the city is under the impression that the trickle-down effect with kick into place (even though this phenomenon has been proven time and time again to be faulty). The City needs to realize that its composition is quite complex and there is value in everything, not just money.

What Jadxia said about “how New York City often seems to set precedents for other cities around the world” really struck a chord with me. For one thing, I completely agree, especially having read the article about New Orleans, etc. New York City is the Rome of today, the center of our world in many ways.

As much as I admit to the veracity of that claim, it still troubles me, as it evidently troubles Jadxia as well, if we can judge by her statement that “[i]t’s kind of scary that a city with such careless treatment of its middle and lower classes often sets the precedent for cities nationwide and worldwide.” Yet again, I agree with Jadxia–the lack of regard that the Big Apple shows for its inhabitants who are anything but ultra-wealthy is awful, and that it could be used as a precedent elsewhere verges on horrifying.

Nevertheless, I’d like to take Jadxia’s consternation one step further. It is bad enough, yes, that New York’s flaws are disregarded when it comes to setting precedents for other cities, but I think it is also bad that, in a world as globalized as ours, nobody can look past New York. Sure, it’s the financial capital of the world, but who ever said that it’s the capital of anything else? The capital of moral and ethics? The capital of environmental cleanliness? The capital of health and safety? Please, don’t try to convince me that this city is the capital of fashion.

It’s perfectly understandable to use New York City as a precedent–if you’re trying to run a successful financial company, that is. But if you’re trying to find the best example of, say, environmental friendliness, you’d better look in a dozen other places. I remember learning in my high school AP Environmental Sciences class that Chattanooga, Tennessee, was a great example of a city that has taken strides to reduce pollution and whatnot.

There are hundreds of cities around the world, each with its own magnificent specialty to show off to the rest of the planet. Why do we always turn to New York? Maybe it is the Rome of today, the capital of society and civilization, blah blah blah, but Rome had forced its lifestyle on all of its conquered territories. People who looked to Rome often had little choice. We have choice today.

Stop choosing New York.

Hi Sophia,

I really enjoyed reading your post.

I agree with your comments that technological fixes would not work in low-income neighborhoods without some kind of economic benefit for those companies. It seems unlikely that the poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods would receive aid proportionately to wealthier ones. When it comes to environmental crisis, settling for top down development just doesn’t cut it.

You mention how Murphy’s The Flood Next Time talks about how most people with knowledge of a natural disaster coming would still choose to remain where they are. I don’t totally agree with your argument here — that because of the fact that the danger is not pressing, people choose to stay there. While this may be true for some people, I don’t think it is true for everyone. In many cases, I imagine that low-income residents may be forced to live there- whether it’s for their job, or because the rent is cheap enough that they can live there. In high crime communities, danger is imminent — but many families stay there not by choice, but by necessity. I think it’s important that we make that distinction.

I think we also have to look critically at what we mean when we tell people to get out — or to evacuate. For many low income residents, they may not have access to a car, may have pets that they cannot take to shelters, or may not have the money/family ties to spend days somewhere else. Thinking about it this way — we can see another critical flaw in how we continuously set ourselves up for a huge disaster. When people are not considered, they are put in danger and raise the casualties that a storm can cause.

Thinking about money for rebuilding — low income families who rent their homes may not have the same compensation if any that home owners would receive. Building owners would be the ones to receive funding from NY to rebuild. When that eventually happens, those people who were displaced may not even be able to go back.

Ultimately, I agree that with your comments that we should not continue to focus on development as an answer to rising shorelines. However, for the already existing structures, perhaps some kind of barriers protecting the most vulnerable areas of NYC (not just in manhattan as the article you posted mentioned) could be helpful if it could be implemented on a wide scale. In addition, perhaps implementing an evacuation plan (buses?, properly equipped shelters?) that address some of the difficulties of low income residents could be helpful in avoiding the devastation that natural disasters can cause in this city.

What I am trying to get at here is very similar to what Neil Smith talks about in “There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster.” He talks about how “the supposed ‘naturalness’ of disasters here has become an ideological camouflage for the social (and therefore preventable) dimensions of such disasters, covering for quite specific social interests.” While there are certainly acts of nature which cannot be avoided, it seems like a cop out to categorize the deaths of NYC residents and destruction of communities as unavoidable and not as a failure of the city to protect its residents.

Additional Source:

http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/Smith/

Climate change continues to become a huge issue in the United States, particularly in coastal cities. New York City has already seen evidence of this through Hurricane Sandy and “the winter nor’easters that have always posed a more common threat than hurricanes to New York City” (Murphy), as all the readings point out. Thus, it has become of utmost importance that New York City and other coastal cities assess their preparedness and relief plans for such instances. Following disasters, with a spotlight on Hurricane Sandy, a lot of action has been going on in New York City; the problem, however, is that the main focus of this action has not necessarily been on the people in need following the disasters, but on more economic and real estate related ventures.

In Disaster Inside the Disaster: Hurricane Sandy and Post-crisis Redevelopment, author Miriam Greenberg calls attention to lack-luster recovery efforts following major disaster by referencing events in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and New York City following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Greenberg emphasizes that, while recovery efforts were not ideal, some areas received greater relief than others, linking this observation to socioeconomic status. She claims that “At each stage, low-income, disproportionately non-white communities, workers, and small businesses, the primary victims of disaster, were further disadvantaged in receiving aid, while wealthy, disproportionately white neighborhoods and high-end industries were privileged” (46). This is troublesome because it seems as though the people who need the aid the most are brushed aside, while those who could afford to invest more in their restoration efforts are rewarded for having more in the bank. This is not to say that the wealthy do not deserve any sort of financial help following natural disasters, but this disproportionate allocation of relief funds more deeply wedges a gap between the wealthy and poor.

But why are higher income neighborhoods being granted more funds for repair than lower income neighborhoods? It seems like the answer to this lies, once again, in the focus on real estate. Wealthy neighborhoods are being rebuilt at a much faster rate than poorer neighborhoods because it will help the economic status of the area. Contrastingly, lower income neighborhoods, like New Dorp (listed as one of the lower income affected areas after Hurricane Sandy in the Associated Press- NORC Center for Public Affairs Research Sandy relief report) in Staten Island, as mentioned in Criticism Continues of New York City’s Management of Sandy Recovery by Mara Gay and Josh Dawsey. This Wall Street Journal article comments that victims of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy are still waiting to see any sort of relief funds three and a half years after the disaster. It is appalling that a blind eye is being turned to people who need help the most, despite the fact that “the fate of $51 bullion in post-Sandy recovery aid is undecided” (Greenberg 46).

It seems silly for a city to focus on trying to develop new projects following disasters, rather than help its citizens clean up. With that being said, I was surprised that I was not already aware of Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to build a super Ferris wheel on Staten Island, rather than discuss the city’s repairs before reading Green is the New Brown: “Old School Toxics” and Environmental Gentrification on a New York City Waterfront. The topics brought up in this article were quite perplexing; how could a city try to masquerade a bunch of real estate developments as protection for the city? It seemed completely ridiculous, especially being that another disaster like Hurricane Sandy would result in a whole new set of damages to these new constructions that would need to be repaired. The whole situation seems a bit analogous to the water contamination crisis in Flint, Michigan. I just feel that the city should focus more on better protecting itself and its citizens and providing any aid possible to the citizens, rather than focusing on economic gain.

The entire disaster relief system is very confusing to me, and these readings really made me question whether or not the city’s government has the peoples’ best interests front and center.

 

Outside Sources:

Associated Press- NORC Center for Public Affairs Research Sandy relief report: http://www.apnorc.org/pdfs/sandy/sandy%20phase%202%20report_final.pdf

Criticism Continues of New York City’s Management of Sandy Recovery

http://www.wsj.com/articles/criticism-continues-of-new-york-citys-management-of-sandy-recovery-1436464778

 

And these are some interesting articles on the Flint Water Crisis, in case anyone was interested:

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1XqND4uQnHT7o2u0URWuYQOeaUnsACVQnvxz8UlXvBGs&font=Georgia-Helvetica&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2015.303003

Reading about the inequality of the post-Sandy response was shocking to me. I can’t believe Wall Street would stoop so low and take billions from people who literally lost everything they had. One of my teachers lost her home and most of her possessions–my sister’s ex-boyfriend had a tree fall on his house and nearly kill his parents. How could people really be so selfish as to take aid from these people who need it the most? And my town had a relatively wealthy middle-class population–multi-thousand dollar Sweet 16s were the norm in high school. I can’t imagine how much worse it must have been for areas with lower-income populations. It’s disgusting to see how the city puts profit over its people.

In terms of the readings compared to each other, I feel that Greenberg’s and Murphy’s works complemented each other well in that they addressed many of the same issues with different information and perspectives. Greenberg’s critique of the shortsightedness of the “profit”-seekers who insisted on developing New Orleans on the wetlands especially highlights the shortsighted and potentially disastrous nature of the SIRR’s waterfront development plan and its so-called “flexible-adaptation pathway”. Granted that was a completely different city with a completely different geography, and the environmental and sustainability issues involved with developing wetlands are certainly different to building in a flood-prone, beach area. Still, the concept is disturbingly similar: building in a potentially dangerous area with nonchalance and disregard for what the area’s future residents may have to face. The parallels Greensberg draws between the two cities makes Pinksy’s own remarks regarding the shortsightedness of the plan–“Let’s look for a way to buy time, and then our successors will address the next increment”–seem eerily reminiscent of the “I’ll Be Gone, You’ll Be Gone” sentiment prevalent in the finance industry.

The relation Greenberg made between New York’s post 9/11 policy and how it affected New Orleans’ policy also reminded me of how New York City often seems to set precedents for other cities around the world. It’s kind of scary that a city with such careless treatment of its middle and lower classes often sets the precedent for cities nationwide and worldwide. New York City’s Wall Street-focused response to 9/11 set the precedent for New Orleans; the gentrifying High Line inspired cities worldwide to build their own versions. While this may not have been intentional, I feel Greenberg’s paper highlights how dangerous it is for a city so riddled with inequality and political injustice to be held as ideal by other cities of the world.

On that note, I feel this article detailing how NYC become a “hub” for startups and “tech angels” and how other cities may emulate this success is relevant to our conversation. If other cities choose to emulate New York City’s wealth and “success” by implementing similar policies focused more on real estate and gentrification rather than treating its residents well, it could have far-reaching and horrifying implications for lower and middle-class people worldwide.

Florida, Richard. “Is New York City the New Model for Startup Cities?” CityLab, November 17 2014.

When I think of terrible disasters such as 9/11 or Hurricane Sandy that require a large restoration effort, I assume that the city would do all that it can to make sure people are being cared for and that they have a shelter. For example, During Hurricane Sandy, I remember that Queens College opened the gym as a shelter for people who lost their homes during the storm. Miriam Greenberg, author of “The Disaster Inside the Disaster: Hurricane Sandy and Post-Crisis Redevelopment,” turns my potential misconception on its head. She argues that the reconstruction of neighborhoods and infrastructure depends on how wealthy the neighborhood is. Since the people in the wealthier neighborhoods, such as Lower Manhattan, had strong existing infrastructure and health insurance before Hurricane Sandy, they were redeveloped quickly and had “services like electricity, heat, and hot water back within days and 99 percent of its commercial, residential, hotel, and retail inventory ‘back to business’ within weeks” (Greenberg 49). She contrasts this to places like Coney Island and the South Bronx where it took weeks or months for FEMA to reach and restore basic functions and schools. This is an example of what she calls “crisis driven urbanization” (46), where the wealthy communities get restored much faster than low-income neighborhoods after a disaster.

Though I know that it is “not fair” that rich communities get restored faster than low income neighborhoods, Greenberg fails to expound on why the wealthy communities get restructured first. Part of the reason they get rebuilt much quicker is that their existing infrastructure holds up better and the damage they endure is much easier to rebuild than to start building a whole neighborhood from scratch. If a building is still standing after the storm and it is simply a matter of getting the hot water and electricity back up, then of course that building will be fixed first. I believe that the way the rebuilding following Hurricane Sandy was not discriminating between low income neighborhoods, as Greenberg implies, but that it was done in a practical way that the organizations could do it: by starting on the small projects and moving to the larger ones.

Rebuilding houses and restoring heat and electricity was not all that was on the restoration plan. In Melissa Checker’s “Green is the New Brown: Old School Toxics and Environmental Gentrification on a New York City Waterfront,” Checker talks about how “economic interests are pursued at the expense of environmental safety and public health” (Checker 177). For example, while residents of Staten Island were still without heat and electricity, Mayor Bloomberg decided to hold a meeting on building the largest ferris wheel on Staten Island’s North Shore. I am shocked that this is what could be on someone’s mind during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy while people still needed somewhere to live. Clearly, Bloomberg did not care for the environment because this ferris wheel was going to be put in place of a giant oil tank that was originally there before the storm. Building the ferris wheel is not surprising, considering the Bloomberg administration was all about economic growth and not the day-to-day lives of residents of Staten Island. However, It was horrific how the people of Coney Island and Staten Island had to wait months and sometimes years for essential functions in their homes like heat and electricity. In “The Flood Next Time” by Jarret Murphy, Murphy writes about how it is crucial to care about the rising levels of water around New York. Even though the water levels are rising, we are not so concerned about building more housing near the shores in order to generate revenue. This ties into how economics is the main idea at play when we should be more concerned with the how the people are holding up.

So was Hurricane Sandy cleanup successful? If you were to ask the Environmental Defense Fund, their answer would be a resounding “yes”(check out the link below). They believe that much of the rebuilding efforts were done quickly and effectively in New York and New Jersey. However, there were many people waiting without electricity and heat for months after the storm that should have been taken care of. We must keep in mind that business and the economy are not always the most important considerations and we should be more worried about the lives of the people. Perhaps with better planning, New York could be better prepared for the next storm and its cleanup and treat lower income people with the same respect as higher income.

Additional Source: https://www.edf.org/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/content/SandySuccessStories_June2013.pdf

I think your blog post was very well written Sophia, and didn’t just sum up the readings; it was very helpful and informative! Although I myself am not convinced that the sea levels will rise drastically, but I do think we should be prepared in case they do and also for any future major storms. Like you, I also originally thought it was fine to put structures near the water, but after the readings I realized that it is not such a good thing. The city is compromising safety for business, and the lower income neighborhoods are being neglected, with respect to environmental safety. You summed it up well when you wrote “No one is going to come to these areas and provide these technological barriers without some form of income. If they can grab land and transform it to a new real estate market then the technology will certainly follow. However, this just ends up being a loop where the poor are pushed out and once again at the mercy of violent storms.”. I agree that it is not feasible to draw people back from the waterline, so that left me thinking about possible alternatives. The flexible adaptation pathway mentioned by Jarrett Murphy in “The Flood Next Time” seems to be a good idea. The many protective measures is a good idea, since it’s not likely the people will leave. It was interesting to hear about the different ideas proposed in the article you posted. I hadn’t heard about these ideas before, nor about the different measures the city was taking. However, like you mentioned, I’m thinking that the poor will fall through the cracks in all of these efforts, and that mainly the wealthy will benefit. The Big U does seem like a cool idea, but like you said, it would probably cater to the wealthy. Also, it doesn’t address the current problems such as toxins. However, it could be a step in the right direction for protecting the city from future storms. Your post was very thought-provoking!

This week’s readings bring up a completely new, daunting topic, climate change. Watching videos of calving glaciers ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU ) induces thoughts of the scary future that is imminently approaching, where rising oceans will impact large portions of the worlds population.

Analysis of the cities reactions to natural disasters discussed in the readings further induces doubt about the future of less privileged households in the face of rising oceans and other natural disasters.

Miriam Greenberg in “The Disaster inside the Disaster: Hurricane Sandy and post crisis redevelopment” discusses a pattern she calls “crisis driven development”, whereby changes in cities are implemented because of a radical problem. The opposite side of this same spectrum is discussed in Jarret Murphy’s “The Flood Next Time”, where he says the city uses its “flexible adaption pathway” principles to plan for the more foreseeable future, and hope for future innovations to help plan forward. Both “crisis driven development” and “the flexible adaption pathway” are really ways of saying things will happen because there will be changes pushing them along, either in the form of major crisis or new innovation.

However, in the meantime, Melissa Checker in “Green is the New Brown: “Old School Toxics” and Environmental Gentrification on a New York City Waterfront”, primarily discusses the North Shore of Staten Island, and actions taken by the Bloomberg Administration known as PlaNYC. PlaNYC is an effort to plan for changes in NYC, including expected increases in population, changing climates, and aging infastructure ( http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/html/about/about.shtml ). The Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency (OPR) also splits responsibility with The Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability (OLTPS) to ensure proper implementation of PlaNYC. These offices produce reports every four years to ensure continual progress and accountability. Checker, however seems disheartened with the projects taken on by PlaNYC because she sees them in direct contrast with other non-environmentally friendly projects the city has enacted such as Yankee Stadium where she says hundreds of existing trees were destroyed. She uses the term “environmental gentrification” to describe a correlation between gentrifying neighborhoods and “amelioration of environmental burdens” from one area, that will only encourage the burdens to move to other poorer areas.

The city has effectively, through New York State’s Brownfield Cleanup Program, changed and proposed changes to the landscape of previously completely industrial wastelands into more attractive businesses and residential space. While this situation may seem completely positive, it again is just another front for gentrification, and on its official website (http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/8450.html), it even states its intention to “revitalize economically blighted communities.” Much like in the reshaping of Times Square, perceived societal problems are “fixed” by intervening. However, through its “intervention”, many more economic opportunities open up for big businesses, pushing out those staked in before. Specifically in this case, increased truck traffic and overcrowding at schools haven’t really been a positive asset to the community.

On the other hand, Greenberg argues in “The Disaster Inside the Disaster” writes, “a technological fix will not build real resilience, as it will not address the broader social and environmental inequalities that increase vulnerability and lay the ground for future crisis.” Meaning that, a broader even plan needs to be laid out to help fix environmental concerns all around. Even though Greenberg is specifically addressing hurricanes and Brownfield Cleanup is about industrial wasteland, similar ideas persist about help only being pumped into furthering the economics of the city, as opposed to local residents.

It seems as though economic advantages tied to ecology, lead to further gentrification throughout the whole spectrum of both climate change preparation and waste cleanups.

 

I’d also like to note, however, that in a Siemens sponsored study measuring carbon dioxide emissions per capita, water consumption, waste recycled, and number of LEED-certified buildings NYC came up in the top three cities in 2011 (http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/06/30/new-york-emerges-as-green-city-leader/). So, it seems as though, Bloomberg was able to accomplish multiple goals. Not only did New York grow economically during his time as mayor, it also made great environmental strides. Nonetheless, through some of those policies, low income locals living in many parts of New York City, were pushed out of their homes to make way for gentrified, ‘green’ spaces.

Often people desire housing near a shore because most people find the view pleasant and it offers much different activities that what can be done purely on land. Originally, I felt that putting structures near the waterfront was completely fine. The people who buy it ought to assume that a storm (no matter how likely or unlikely it is to occur) would put them at risk. However, this constant push towards adding more real estate to these shores are creating a much bigger problem. Turning to Melissa Checker’s, Green is the New Brown first – she highlights several instances where the building of pleasing structures took precedent over toxic chemicals. For example, in New Orleans “Research  conducted  in  the aftermath  of  Hurricane  Katrina  demonstrates  that floodwaters  dislodged  and distributed heavy metals,” and “that storm surges have breached retaining walls and other barriers meant to seal in toxic contaminants” (Checker 171). Despite this, no plans were made to cap the contamination despite comments from the public urging for this action. Private companies get away with not cleaning up toxic waste due to the exemptions that they get. Checker notes, “To  attract  the  business  of  private developers,  these firms  tend  to  emphasize  cost-saving  measures  that  provide the  minimum  necessary  environmental  solutions” (171).

This becomes even more relevant in light of the devastating storm Hurricane Sandy. Greenberg’s The Disaster Inside the Disaster writes, “Most immediately, the devastation Sandy caused in Lower Manhattan was partly a result of shortsighted, market-oriented, post-9/11 redevelopment” (49). This statement was made because a large amount of federal money was used to make luxury residential and commercial towers near low lying water fronts to boost real estate. The claim was that through technology (which would be built along with the residential and commercial towers) the city would be able to make flood areas less dangerous. Greenberg argues “a technological fix will not build real resilience, as it will not address the broader social and environmental inequalities that increase vulnerability and lay the ground for future crisis” (50). While wealthy areas might be spared from storms, it doesn’t help the low income areas who have been suffering from nature’s fury for years. No one is going to come to these areas and provide these technological barriers without some form of income. If they can grab land and transform it to a new real estate market then the technology will certainly follow. However, this just ends up being a loop where the poor are pushed out and once again at the mercy of violent storms.

So what about the people who already live by the water? It seems from the testimony of Mundy from Murphy’s The Flood Next Time – most people even with the knowledge of the incoming floods would choose to remain where they were. Since the danger is not imminent, but perhaps a few years down the road, they don’t seem to care. It is a fact that water levels will continue to rise in the coming of years. I happen to agree that receding from the shore lines would be much too costly and difficult to pull off. However, that doesn’t mean that we should continue to build MORE structures near the water just because it can make a profit. This is a set up for a huge disaster. If we can’t move people away, we certainly should not be moving more people in. Murphy notes that some places like Chicago manage to lift itself two feet to change the course of its river (16). So using technology and not giving in to nature is very much possible for a place like New York. Yet at the same time there is still the possibility that we will not outsmart the future storms.
I did some research to look at the potential plans of remedying the rising level of water (since nobody seems to want to move away from the water’s edge residents and developers alike) and found an article on the NYTimes. Alan Feuer’s Building For the Next Big Storm seems to have some interesting ideas. There was a mixture of proposals from planting oyster beds to creating levees to protect the island. The most ambitious one that has caught the eyes of many people was and idea proposed called the Big U would defend the coastline of Manhattan and disguise itself as waterfront parks. The idea was for it to fit in with upscale look of New York and be aesthetically pleasing, but also protect Manhattan. I have to admit, it looks cool, but I have to think about what Greenberg said about how this doesn’t address social and environmental inequalities. Such a massive construction would cater to the wealthy who would be able to afford real estate near it. On one hand, I think if technology provides us a way to protect ourselves we should definitely use it. Yet, if it’s not available for everyone, and people become more focused on making pleasing structures rather than getting rid of environmental toxins what’s the point? It seems that there is a trend of saying plans will help an environmental issues when in actuality, it is a real estate, profit making project.

 

Extra source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/nyregion/after-hurricane-sandy-new-york-rebuilds-for-the-future.html?_r=0

Hey Noelia, I enjoyed reading your blog!

I had a very similar initial assessment of the High Line as the one you describe in the beginning of your blog when I went there. I had felt welcome and realized nothing suspicious of the environment.

I could not agree more about your comparison to the architectural ways that the city patrols the use of certain spaces. I myself was thinking of how on the train stops they do not have one long flat bench like they use to, but have seat divides so the homeless cannot sleep there. I looked at the link you attached and that was a really good compliment to “inconspicuous surveillance methods” that are discussed in our reading. Not only do some of the images stop homeless people from sleeping in places, but also, as with the image of the fire hydrant with spikes on it, even a person who wants to rest a moment cannot lean on it.

I think that your architectural comment fits very well with the High Line’s construction. Much of the path that has been created for the High Line is relatively narrow, and as you point out, it is made for walking. The design for the park was created for that purpose in mind.   It makes it really hard to loiter even if you are not a homeless person. As you point out sleeping on the High Line can actually be acceptable, but that is that the way in which the structure functions and how they control its uses only certain types of people even visit the High Line and, therefore, are people that are “socially acceptable” to nap in a public space.

At the end of your blog you ask how public space is really public and that’s an excellent question. I think that there really is no place that is completely public in the ideal way that it should be. As you say, the High Line is only public for some individuals so to others it becomes private. This is something that can be seen throughout the city. When you go to parks or areas that are created with the idea that they will be for elites then anyone else ends up being excluded. At the same time, some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, in a way, also become private to higher-class individuals; this is more by their choice, but at the same time the argument can be made that they are not welcome regardless.

I find it pretty sarcastic that Bloomberg declared, “ ’The [board’s] ruling is a great win for all New Yorkers’ ” (56). He may be the mayor, but he choosing to support this has nothing to do with helping every single individual in New York. It might help the economy, but the needs of the individual people are not being addressed. As soon as Bloomberg saw what an increase in value the properties all around the High Line would get and that it could potentially get the 2012 Olympics for New York City he jumped on the plan. What is completely left out of the reports that made him agree to the plan is what would happen to all the people in the neighborhood. With property values skyrocketing, there must have been a displacement of a great portion of the population due to the “super gentrification” that Loughran describes. Building a park like this does not get rid of all the homeless people it just makes them disappear from the eyes of tourists and other elites so that a certain image can be upheld for the area. What appeared to be solving a problem just displaced it somewhere else.

Eleni

Willow, I loved reading your blog post because I find that you express your opinions concerning the actions and beliefs the elite of the city have when it comes to city planning very clearly. I also enjoyed that while reading your post I found myself going back and forth on many of the topics you discussed and debated what I thought was right.

When I read the article about the Community Parks Initiative I felt optimistic about what I had seen. These parks in need of repair were fixed, painted and looked brand new. I thought this was good because it was improving the neighborhood without truly altering the makeup of it as we have seen in many of the redevelopment projects we have discussed in class. However, in the fourth paragraph of your blog you raise a brilliant point. By simply painting over these parks and adding new slides and swings, what are city planners really doing? Are they removing the symbols of art and culture that neighborhoods cherish? You say that by painting them over we are ignoring the actual problems that these communities face. I say you hit the nail on the head. However, I couldn’t help but then think would those in the community agree with you? I was reminded of my initial thoughts when I saw the before and after pictures. I imagined that the people who frequented these parks would have been happy that it was improved. I began to then wonder how different perspectives can determine whether or not something is good, and how those opposing views may clash.

When discussing the High Line you say that the reading displays the entitlement of the elite in changing public spaces to obtain wealth. Who’s to say that city planners did not vehemently believe that by transforming the High Line they would be doing a service to the community? As we discussed in class they see it as an opportunity to bring new businesses in and jumpstarting the economy. They had an idea for what the city should have been and they believed this was the best way to achieve that. Some may say that the High Line served its purpose in helping the area while some would argue it changed for the worse. Now I happen to personally believe that the High Line is a prime example of how redevelopment seems geared towards a certain socioeconomic class of people, I agree with what you say in your blog but I couldn’t help but wonder about the differing perspectives about the future of the city. People of different backgrounds, classes, and areas will obviously have different opinions. Who’s to say which opinion is right and the best for the city?

I really liked the link you posted along with your blog post. To be honest, I never thought about sleeping in public placing being different for different classes of people until the reading this week, and your blog post really hit on that. When I see upper class people sleeping in public, it never really bothered me. I just thought think to myself “Wow, they must feel really safe… They aren’t afraid of being robbed?” So the rules against sleeping in public places didn’t fully make sense to me. But from this article, I realized how ignorant my way of thinking was.

Homeless people who don’t have places to sleep, have to sleep in public places. However, upper class people think of the sleeping homeless as being “scary”. Perhaps it’s a combination of fearing that the homeless are violent and the realization that people live that way making people uncomfortable. People associate homelessness and poverty with nothing but crime, and that has led to laws and architecture meant to deter “bums”. It’s stereotyping and extraordinarily unhelpful in solving the issues of poverty and homelessness.

Last year I was in a dance video that was being filmed in Washington Square Park. It was late at night and there was a homeless man that kept jumping into the shot and trying to talk to my friend’s niece. My friend got scared and started to yell and chase after the homeless man and threaten him. That night, a man came over with boxes of pizza and he told us that he came every night to feed the homeless in the park, and that the one near us was a regular and wasn’t going to hurt anyone. He then proceeded to offer us pizza as well. This just goes to show how quick people are to make assumptions.

When people in power make these same accusations, we end up with institutions that are aimed towards attracting only the wealthy and businesses. The High Line is a great example of this, and it does its “job” well. It’s strictly regulated and often feels more like a museum than a park. One time, I believe last year, my parents took me to the High Line since we were in the area. And I actually remember being very bored! It was hot that day, and I felt like I had nothing to do besides slowly follow my parents while they took ten thousand pictures. It’s meant for the artsy, leisurely type.

The one place I somewhat disagree with you is when you ask if a fresh coat of paint even makes a difference. In my opinion, it does. Just repainting and replacing old playground areas with new ones can make the park look cleaner and more welcoming and safer. Parents would be more likely to want to bring their children there. It cleans up the park and turns it into a welcoming community space without changing it into a wealthy tourist magnet or alienating too many of its original visitors. I believe that too drastic of a renovation could change the use and make up of the parks and defeat the purpose of the renovation as a way of supporting an underprivileged community.

 

~ Samantha

Hi Noelia, thank you for an insightful and stimulating post. Your analysis of Loughran’s view on public parks was concise yet thorough. I found the architectural examples you brought interesting as well, since they provided a different perspective on “the growing inequality of public spaces in contemporary cities” discussed by Loughran.

After reading your blog entirely, I began to think more deeply about the purpose of parks. As you wrote, “it’s important to question what City officials or we really want out of public areas”. That said, I think there are some ideas relevant to this discussion that Loughran doesn’t focus on. You point out that many social controls and regulations “decrease the actual public-ness of the supposed public space”, however I think many of those controls and regulations are justified and even essential to the purpose of parks.

To begin, I researched various interpretations of parks and their purpose. Many organizations and groups express different perspectives, but two stood out to me. The first, BREC, outlines several goals all public park seeks to deliver. Amongst them are “creating safer neighborhoods, promoting public health, stimulating tourism and overall economic development”. An organization that operates public park and recreation facilities in Louisiana, BREC provides in depth research on each goal listed. For example, it is the objective of parks to promote public health through “physical activity and contact with nature”. In order for people to experience emotional or physical benefit from parks they must be encouraged to go outdoors and actually utilize the facilities. Allowing homeless people to inhabit the park can literally affect cleanliness if not public perception of how clean the park is. This, in turn, can discourage city inhabitants from using the park and indirectly infringe on the goal of public parks to promote public health. Similarly, public perception of a park that tolerates homeless people may dissuade tourists from visiting that park and disrupt the effort of “stimulating overall economic development”.

The second source I found that articulately describes the purpose of public parks is a report published by The Trust for Public Land. This nonprofit organization that facilitates and funds the creation of parks released a comprehensive study that outlines many of the functions a park has. Amongst them are “public health benefits and economic growth from increased property values”. With regards to public health, the report provides studies on the link between parks and increased physical activity, reduced anxiety, and lower stress levels. The driving forces behind these trends are usage of outdoor facilities, exposure to nature, and aesthetic greenery. If people don’t access parks then, by definition, parks are not delivering “public health benefits” as best possible. Therefore, it seems that any act which would increase the likelihood that people use parks should be implemented. I think this is a valid argument for those who say the homeless should not be allowed to sleep in public parks since it can actually affect aesthetics, cleanliness, and public perception which would discourage public use of the park.

Much of the above is predicated on the idea that a homeless presence in parks strongly correlates with reduced usage of those parks. I found this premise to be true based on an article published on the National Recreation and Park Association’s website. Written by Danielle Taylor, the article recounts her experience at a conference concentrated on homelessness and its affect on parks. She describes the overall sentiment held by attendees who feared the homeless will make a camp out of the public spaces city workers spend considerable time maintaining. In one specific example, Danielle shares the case of a park near California that was so consumed by homeless individuals it effectively became “an unintended campground where others were afraid to go.”

I agree with you that homelessness is a widespread problem, and one that requires further attention. However, I do think there’s legitimacy in forbidding the homeless from consuming parks as it can affect the degree to which others utilize them and indirectly hinder the goals of “promoting public health” and “economic development”. On a similar note, I recognize your view on what the true impact of “a fresh coat of paint and new set of swings” is but think there are certainly benefits. Improving the aesthetics of underserved parks in this manner can influence public perception and encourage greater usage of parks, indirectly promoting public health and economic growth, two of the main goals of public parks.

 

SOURCES:

• http://www.brec.org/index.cfm/page/1808/n/153
• http://www.eastshorepark.org/benefits_of_parks%20tpl.pdf
• http://www.nrpa.org/blog/taboo-topic–homeless-in-the-park/

In chapter nine of his book, Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind, Professor Scott Larson makes it clear that the goal of New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg was to build on a large scale in such a way as to make the city more marketable, and more competitive with other super-cities; attractive to businesses and the wealthy. One way this would be achieved was through design, and the recruitment of elite level architects, appropriately dubbed “starchitects”, to design these plans for the city. What is clear in Larson’s depiction of the Bloomberg plans is that his municipality was most concerned with overall economic growth  than anything else. Moreover, from the discussions in class over the semester it is clear that there is a big debate over what the priorities of urban planners should be: economy versus other considerations that are more vague and complicated. Furthermore, it seems that economy has been the victor more often than not and that if it continues this way, the city will become completely gentrified, which is arguably what Bloomberg wants.

Why is this problematic?

Some students in class may be taking the utilitarian economic approach, wherein the belief is that more money is better for everyone. That is hard to argue with, because money is power and makes life easier, not just more comfortable. Thus the more money for everyone, the happier we all are because we all enjoy easier lives in one regard. However, this is not what happens in America. The wealth is not redistributed to make people’s lives sufficiently and markedly easier. Granted, the wealth does provide americans with many of the luxuries they enjoy at least in metropolises like New York City, but who is benefiting from these luxuries? Only those people who can afford to live in Manhattan, and eventually in the burroughs, and then the suburbs, and then where do the lower class live? This is something that could happen.

What we are being told is that economy should not reign supreme, and that marketability should not be the primary and sole concern. Oddly enough, the utilitarian economist is arguably not even following his own principles of bringing the most pleasure to the most people and minimizing pain as much as possible. People in this country are discontent with the income and power inequality that exists between the upper five percent and the lower 95%. Such beliefs are enforced when the lower classes are evicted in favor of new development, or not considered in design consequences like who will patronize the high-line (these people but not those people because they are not into that kind of stuff). It is a problem when the majority is not the main concern.

if a not as developed economy means more people are satisfied, then what is wrong with that? You cannot argue that weakening the economy now will cause terrible economic issues for decades to come, even if that is true and correct, because the 95% does not care right now. The problem with my argument is that there are logical flaws in it, and the most apparent one is that I approach the problem presupposing that economy is not chief whereas the people I am addressing do consider it chief. Effectively, my argument is trash to anyone who believes economy is all that matters. However, even to my argument, is not considering economics as chief and supreme going to be these option for the city?

The point is that other considerations for urban planning always lose when it comes to money. Alongside this is that a prominent website for urban planning and development called planetizen does not even label gentrification as one of the top planning issues of the year or of years past. Either people do not care or do not know. Or perhaps they know about the inequity that exists in our country but do not think it is a big deal. One of the points of our seminar is exactly contrary to that conception. The equity or lack thereof is directly responsible to where you live and consequently how you have grown up. The only virtue in New York City’s plan currently is the virtue of making money; their chief civic responsibility. It remains to be determined if this is ideal or not.

http://www.planetizen.com/node/47535/top-planning-issues-2010

Hey Willow!

I found your blog post very well thought out and intriguing, and was glad that it addressed all the aspects of Loughran’s article. I didn’t initially think of the article in term of “fixing” different neighborhoods, but I easily see how you got there. 

I take issue with Loughran’s argument that the rich only want to fix these “quality of life violations” to destroy neighborhoods. I think that people who are born into specific circumstances and have always lived a certain way can’t fathom why someone would want to hang out on an abandoned rail yard. I don’t think that most people set out with a  mindset of ‘lets destroy the culture and cohesion of this neighborhood so we can all move in!” 

The ‘fetishization’ of the rustic aspect of the High Line is, in my opinion, a way for those in power to  reverse that which they unintentionally did. I find it hard to believe that that people intentionally destroy cultures, but once they realize they have, I have no problem with preserving that which they have destroyed.

If someone asked a rich person to design an ideal park, chances are it would look something like Bryant Park, or the reconstructed High Line. That is not because of malicious intent, it is because you asked a subjective question to a biased person. Because all people are biased! Perhaps the issue is not so much the decisions that rich people keep making, but rather the fact that as a society we tend to keep asking the rich people those questions. If it was easier for those who were not born with a silver spoon in their mouth to get to positions of power where they could make these decisions for their own neighborhoods, These discussions wouldn’t be happening.

Upon reading chapter nine, I want to reflect upon Amanda Burden and the High Line.

Amanda Burden seems to be quite the controversial figure. In chapter nine of “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind,” Larson discusses the differing opinions that people have of her. Many of these opinions were not very favorable. Burden’s emphasis on this idea of “design matters” affected her work and, by extension, the way people saw her. For instance, her insistence that private developers use “starchitects” for their projects was a product of her focus on aesthetic, which made developers unhappy because they would have to pay more to hire these “starchitects.” Burden was clearly also extremely detail-oriented, possibly to a fault. People who work for her claim that she micromanages and feels the need to have her hands in every little thing. This controlling nature may have led to her strong influence over Bloomberg and his agenda in the fixation on how things look as an approach to development. Another place where we have encountered Burden was in the video we watched in class about the rezoning of the 125^th street area in Harlem. In that video, again, Burden comes across as an extremely controversial figure. What I found really compelling in chapter 9 was how Burden’s preoccupation with the aesthetic of New York City is really a direct appeal or attempt at making the city marketable. And that includes the rezoning of 125^th street because to her, small mom and pop shops and neighborhoods that are actually culturally rich and diverse are not “marketable”- or at least not as marketable as they can be.

In the Vanity Fair article I posted below, Amanda Burden is interviewed by John Heilpern. To be honest, both when Larson went into Burden’s family background, and when Harlem residents railed against Burden for being a rich white lady, I didn’t understand why those things were relevant or important. However, upon reading this article, titled “Princess of the City” (referring to Burden), and further reflection, I see why it is relevant. Coming from such a wealthy background does not necessarily mean that Burden would be unable to understand the situations of people in the city unlike her. But once this can be seen to be the case, her background may be a valid reason why she is that way. I don’t feel that the article paints Burden in a positive light. She comes off as an uppity socialite who treats her incredibly important job as the city’s planning commissioner as a hobby, sprinkling talk of city planning in with another one of her hobbies, birdwatching. Burden proves Larson correct in his comments that Burden did not “need” the job, but rather she wanted it, when in her interview, she mentions that if she didn’t love her job, she “wouldn’t be doing it.”

Also in Chapter 9, Larson points out that Burden used the High Line as a prime example of “how design can be an amazing catalyst for private investment.” Honestly, it just sounds like Burden is saying gentrification without actually saying gentrification. Since the High Line opened, it has seen much criticism. Jeremiah Moss, author of the blog Vanishing New York, rails against the High Line and how the rezoning of West Chelsea in 2006 paved the way for a complete transformation of that neighborhood. While some of Moss’s claims are a bit dramatic (“I’ve gotten close to a panic attack, stuck in a pool of stagnant tourists at the park’s most congested points”), he was right in pointing out that although the transformation of the High Line was actually a grassroots effort and was meant to be for everyone, it is now a tourist attraction and a driving force for the rapid change of the neighborhood to include more luxury buildings and less working class folk. While this may not be what Amanda Burden was directly referring to when she championed the High Line for being an “amazing catalyst,” I think this may be what she actually had in mind.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/05/otl-burden-201005

 

I agree with many of your arguments about the burden Ms. Burden was on the city. Your analysis on the parallels between her and Moses are spot on; the scale of her projects were enormous and mostly only served the “public” that shared her elitist tastes. Her micromanaging of projects was ridiculous, and her perfectionism was futile and completely wasteful.

There are some points you make, however, that I have to disagree with, namely with your assertion that she overlooked projects’ impacts and placed “much more” concern on “how things looked”. On the contrary, I believe she was very aware of how her actions would impact the city, as evidenced by how she handled the rezoning of Harlem’s 125th Street.

Considering her remark of how there was literally “nowhere” to eat, I agree that her shallowness was definitely a significant factor in her approach. However, considering the way she argued that the rezoning would be for the benefit of Harlem and the they’ll-have-affordable-housing speak and the “charming” grin she gave when questioned about it would affect the Harlem residents, I’m sure she was aware of what impact the rezoning would really have.

Still, overall I think you nailed it with your analysis of Burden’s impact on the city.

I feel Loughran does a good job of highlighting some of the hypocrisies present in upper middle class society: how the people who visit the High Line devour anything “artisan”, when the High Line’s 5-artist limit is actually damaging to artists; how many of the High Line visitors value food that is “local” and “organic”, when the High Line was built with wood from rainforests; how sleeping is regarded as a luxury when perpetuated in the elite High Line atmosphere, but regarded as a danger and eyesore when done anywhere else by those who have no choice; how people come to experience the “wild” nature of the High Line with carefully manipulated foliage and the erasure of “assaults” on “quality of life”.

In terms of it being a “public space”, I certainly have to agree with Loughran when he says that it’s not. I went to the High Line with a friend for an assignment during my first semester; initially we were laughing and being silly, but we kept bumping into people and running out of space and kind of had to resign to just calmly walking. Because it’s true–the only three things you can really do on the High Line are walk, buy, and rest. Anyone who wants to do anything else is totally out of the park’s intended audience, and pretty much completely out of luck.

Actually, the impression Loughran gives of the High Line (i.e., large groups of white / similar people doing the same, leisurely things) to me seems eerily similar Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World society. Everyone is encouraged to do the same leisurely activities under constant government surveillance, with the government encouraging mindlessness to the point where people are forbidden to read and encouraged to consume relaxants / mood enhancers regularly, especially if the alternative is confrontation or being unhappy (supported by the moral mantra “it’s better to give a gram than a damn”). Obviously the High Line’s conditions aren’t that extreme, but it does give off the same sort of feeling of groupthink and general societally encouraged, organized mindlessness.

Following that, reading about the Community Parks Initiative made me hopeful and nervous at the same time. Yes, parks that many low-income children rely on for stimulation are being revamped–but is it possible this part of some other grand scheme to bring money into New York “for the good of the city”, that these parks are being fixed for someone other than the people who actually rely on them? Amanda Burden, for example, touted how the High Line would be “the greatest public space in the world” not too long after she approved a universally “beneficial” plan to gut Harlem of its historically significant commerce and community.

There is an article from The Observer that acts as a source of optimism, though. It details how Bloomberg’s team fought against the accusation that, compared to de Blasio’s parks initiative, Bloomberg’s park renewals were concerned only with bringing in wealthy visitors. Considering how the Bloomberg administration opposed this idea–notably by arguing how Bloomberg did not focus solely on “tourist destinations” by arguing that one of the places he revamped was Coney Island–this news could be critical to turning public awareness and opinion on development projects in New York.

Barkan, Ross. “Bloomberg Defends Legacy as de Blasio Touts New Parks Initiative.” The Observer. October 2014.

Hi Mariyanthie! Great blog! I appreciated your attention to detail oriented facts and examples. Your conclusions are well supported with evidence and you seem to have a great grasp on the material. Your comparison of Burden to Jacobs and Moses brings light to idea that a mixture of both ideas can create an even more exclusive ‘public’ place all while encouraging both the gentrification present in Jacob’s ideas, and the drive to build marvelous structures, like Moses had.

Burdens demanding attitude, is what allowed her to leave her mark on the city. In Building like Moses with Jacobs in Minds, an attitude present before the financial collapse was that Burden could simply point, and condos would go up. Similar to Moses, she did all in her power to produce what she saw as best for the future of the city. Similar to Jacobs, Burdens likes a modern walkable city filled with culture. However, Burdens likes carefully sculpted cultural areas, rather than naturally forming ones. Her desire for control, yet praise of urban aesthetics leaves her ideas in between Jacobs and Moses, pulling ideas from both to support her wild building.

Her micromanaging may have been annoying to those working with her, but plans representative of all her ideals took place. However, like you bring up, these seemingly praiseworthy plans came at the expense of other options that could’ve been used to help lower income families and provide greater access to public space.

It seems as though, however, that appealing public space only enables gentrification and pushing out of lower income people. All options of placement for an aesthetically pleasing park end up creating further divides either through gentrification or further exclusion. Burden, however, went beyond the typical park, and used starchitects to further push up the ‘level’ of her parks.

Her background as an Upper East Side socialite support an idea that she doesn’t care for local people and their leisure, but rather wants to have a place built to impress. Her goals lie in impressing foreign nationals and the ultra-rich coming to visit her projects.

Thus, your conclusion that Burden did more bad than good for the sake of the average New Yorker, supports the idea that the losers in the battle for public space, again are lower/middle income peoples, who just want a place to do what they want to do.

All this criticism of division of public space got me thinking about a good way to divize future plans. Perhaps, those who feel as if they’ve been negatively impacted should be encouraged to step forward and join committees of people forming new plans. Meaning that, while perhaps Burden only joined because she had time and money available, opportunities should be offered to lower income people along with a comparable salary, so that space can be designed with them in mind too. While obviously the pushiest most powerful will win, maybe new ideas could be brought to the table to help future spaces be built with the masses in mind.

When thinking about the elite reconstruction of the High Line, I think it is important to remember Amanda Burden’s characterization of Harlem, which was recounted in the documentary we watched in class (Rezoning Harlem). She motioned down Harlem’s main drag, filled with soul food and other culturally significant restaurants, and concluded that there was no place to eat (Rezoning Harlem). The readings we have done for this class (specifically Parks for Profit by Kevin Loughran) have led me to believe that the rich don’t want any place they might set foot in to feel ‘uncomfortable’ or in Loughran’s words like a “quality of life violation’. The High Line was no different. However, the moment they command a formerly impoverished neighborhood as their own ‘public’ space, they are quick to institute security and deterrents to privatize the place that they once felt excluded from. I was struck by the stark difference between the policing of public parks in poor areas and the policing of the High Line. I find it telling that parks with private investors and programming aimed at a wealthy neo-liberal audience have security guards and surveillance keeping people out, policing the influx of people into the park based on behavior (57). In poor parks, policing takes place within the park, and removes people participating in ‘illegal’ activity from the park after having patronized it. The High Line’s security and surveillance, coupled with the regulations on cleanliness meant to deter low-income people from collecting bottles (62) [and even from becoming food venders] (59), shows that the High Line’s regulations which come from the wealthy members of Friends of the High Line try to make the park as comfortable as possible for rich people, and patently uncomfortable for the poor. I would classify this as preemptive policing, which functionally privatizes the park without the community backlash of openly saying that the park is ‘rich-only’.

 

On a similar note, Loughran describes the way that people only pay attention to poor parks when they can make the wealthy money as “growth schemes” (51). This sparked my interest, because it made me think about the mindset of the upper class and the concept of entitlement in relation to public space. Specifically, when money is commodified to the point that it defines social worth, it provides a sense of entitlement to the bearer of that money. The highline as an abandoned railroad track was a part of a low-income neighborhood, a neighborhood that had very little to offer the wealthy (51). The privilege detailed in Loughran’s paper shows the nature of entitlement to public spaces, and the desire of the rich to obtain spaces using their wealth and change them to make them comfortable for high-brow activities.

 

In the 2013 article High Line Offers a Walk on the Wild Side by Lisa W. Foderaro, the plan for third installment of the highline is discussed. It was opened to the public in 2014. In Foderaro’s article, she builds the anticipation for the new section of the park which would be comprised of rusted rail road tracks overgrown with native plants and shrubbery. It is heralded in her piece as a way to “evoke the ruin and rebirth that the founders found so compelling in the first place”. She mentions that the money for the construction came directly from the luxury company Coach whose building was slated to “straddle the new section, called High Line at the Railyards” (Foderaro). It is interesting to think briefly about the initial call to arms concerning the High Line, in which it was implied that the only way to save it [and the neighborhood beneath it] was to change it, via sleek architectural design made possible by the donations of the elite. However, this third section is simply a sanitized version of the original High Line, created for the rich to meander on. When the High Line was synonymous with ‘poor’, the structure bore interest only in its potential to ‘fix’ the neighborhood it inhabited. Now that the High Line attracts predominantly white, high-income people (60), its patrons can fetishize the ‘wildness’ of the original rails without the discomfort of having to interact with people of other socio-economic classes.

 

 

In relation to the concept of “growth” schemes (50), much of what can be seen on the  “Community Parks Initiative Targeted Improvements” website for New York City Parks Commission seems to be cosmetic fixes, not functional ones. Most of the changes made seem to be paint jobs, the removal of graffiti, the planting of little bushes. This type of park restoration, which only changes the outward appearance of the park without improving functionality based on community consensus, is simply a way for the city to show how much they ‘care’ about income inequality and the poor, without having to actually spend any significant time or money assisting them with what they need and want. Furthermore, these changes and ‘upgrades’ reflect more on what the parks commissioner thinks a ‘good’ park looks like than what the people using it do. The painting over of graffiti, for instance, is seen by many who grew up without graffiti culture to be assisting and improving a neighborhood. However, graffiti can be seen as an art form and a way for people within the community to express themselves and air their grievances. Writing and making art on public property, while illegal, is one of the most pure and direct forms of protest to a city and a society that has left you behind. To paint over it in efforts to appease the angered masses is only to ignore their strife and, metaphorically, paint over the actual problems that impoverished communities face.

The complete rebranding of the High Line and the makeover of low-income parks, while different in cost and outcome, prove a similar point. The construction of parks is rarely based on the needs of the people currently living in their vicinity. Instead, changes made to parks largely have to do with keeping up appearances, within the city and abroad. Just look again at the ‘targeted improvements’ that DeBlasio’s administration has made. They harken back to Jane Jacobs’ “look what I made” concept: that developers and city planners ‘fixed’ these parks so that they could show them to the city, and prove that they ‘helped’ low-income communities. So, of course, in all of the ‘after’ photos, the weather is better than the ‘before’ photos. The sun is out, whereas each ‘before’ photo has a gloomy sky. The changes are paraded in front of the citizens of New York, to push this narrative: “You see? The poor aren’t that bad off!” and “See this ‘bad’ neighborhood? Look how nice we made it!”. With the High Line, the city officials and elite investors in this “growth” project get to peddle a narrative of having ‘fixed’ a poor area, and show how much happier the residents are with their shiny new park (50). Never is it mentioned in their triumphant account that the current residents are elite residents and that they have displaced the ones who used to live there. The poor are instead shifted to a new corner of the city, to have the same struggles and the same lack of visibility until their neighborhood starts to seem monetarily and socially beneficial to a team of elites, who can yet again band together to give them a park and ‘save’ their block.

Works Cited

Foderaro, Lisa W. “High Line Offers a Walk on the Wild Side.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 2013. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

Loughran, Kevin. “Parks for Profit: The High Line, Growth Machines, and the Uneven Development of Urban Public Spaces.” City & Community 13.1 (2014): 49-68. Web.

Rezoning Harlem

 

Hi Sophia,

The last piece of your response to Miriam’s blog really got me thinking. You wrote:

“In the end, how can any of these people claim to be building “with Jacobs in mind” when she advocated community above all else?

I totally agree with your statement that building “with Jacobs in mind” is completely in conflict the planning of Amanda Burden. The four principles of a successful city – mixed primary uses, short blocks, mixed age buildings, and population density – don’t seem to be a part of Burden’s planning much at all. Perhaps her micro-managing of projects and keen attention to detail is her interpretation of Jacbos’ principle of having diversity with buildings.

I believe you are correct in your statements that Jacob valued communities above all else. In her ideal city, I believe that the major influence to the neighborhood would be the people and businesses shaping it.

This is another section of your post that I really agreed with:

“These building methods where bureaucrats influence what kinds of development can happen through zoning and funding completely disregards any existing culture and familiarity built by the community itself.”

As we saw in the rezoning documentary, the rezoning of Harlem under Burden is a perfect example of how existing culture is erased for corporate gain. The community really did shape the area and most of the businesses reflected the people that lived in the area – something very rare in this day and age. Given her support for this redevelopment, I don’t think that she can honestly say that she is building with Jacobs in mind. If anything, she has Jacobs in her mind and is consciously choosing to ignore her. She certainly does have Moses in mind though, as she take on very grande scheme projects such as the high line designed for the “greater good” (in this case – bringing profit to the surrounding area and NYC in general).

Overall, I really agree with you that the planning within the city has become about mostly about businesses and how to make the most profit, even over maintaining cultural communities. While the city certainly gains something from this (more income and a more favorable environment to private corporations), the city and residents lose a lot as well. If planners continually pimp out the city to bring in wealth, then it will ultimately lose a lot of the charm and cultural diversity it’s known for.

 

 

 

I agree with you Mariyanthie, that Amanda Burden focused too much on the aesthetics of New York City and not enough on the people who live there. Her view of a successful city seems to solely rely on economic growth. Based on how she remodeled the Highline, as well as rezoning 125th street to consist of luxury housing, it is safe to assume that Burden was not interested in what the local residents wanted; she had her own motives in mind to remodel in order to bring in revenue in housing and tourists. Her desire for an economically successful city manifested in the way that she “micromanaged” projects, as you mentioned. She was so caught up in the details of how everything should look perfect, that she lost sight of what the people who lived there would like to see and instead focused on the city being aesthetically pleasing.

You mention that Burden was more similar to Robert Moses than to Jane Jacobs. While she was interested in pleasing the wealthy like Moses was, she went about it in a “Jacobsian” manner. She wanted people to live in the city, unlike Moses who built highways for people to leave the city. She also wanted “street vitality” like Jacobs wanted, meaning that there should be people on the streets at all hours. However, her idea of “street vitality” was of white wealthy people on the street similar to herself, and not a diverse group of people. She remodeled the Highline in a way that would raise real estate costs in the nearby areas dramatically, as you portrayed in the table. Overall, I think Burden was similar to Moses mostly in that she was focused on improving the lives of the upper class and similar to Jacobs in that she wanted people to stay in the city and enjoy it.

Though Burden ignored poor people who lived in the city, you are right that she did create a beautiful and enjoyable Highline park. It did generate revenue for the city because of the kiosks and nearby stores and it is a tourist attraction. Her sitting spaces that she created have a Jacobs feel because they encourage interaction of tourists and residents alike. However, Burden should not just be focused on what people like herself would enjoy seeing, but also on what the residents of the city need. Seeing the way that she kicked out the people who disagree with her in the movie shows that she does not have the compassion for all kinds of people living in the city, nor does she have the residents in mind when she plans. You gave some important insights into how Burden runs the city, Mariyanthe.

Before I read Kevin Loughran’s article, I never imagined the High Line as a privileged space. Granted, I’ve only been there once with my sister, but we certainly didn’t feel unwelcome or excluded, in fact, no one really paid attention to us. But after reading Kevin Loughran’s article, I came to realize that the space itself might not be as public as it seems on the surface.

Take for example, the “inconspicuous surveillance methods” and “…institutionalized social control to regulate the socio-spatial practices of park users” that the Friends of the High Line rely on to monitor the park. In this way, people who partake in “quality of life violation” acts (like bottle collecting), are effectively excluded from the park area, thus, decreasing the actual public-ness of the supposed public space!

These subtle surveillance methods used in the High Line remind me of another (not as subtle) tactic used by the City: the use of architecture to deter certain populations from being in an area. Examples of the architecture include placing spikes on the ground (to prevent the homeless from sleeping on sidewalks) or metal hoops or plates on doors (to prevent sex workers from loitering outside doors), and many more. The website listed below archives photos of “bum-free” architecture taken around the world, including NYC. What I found most striking in these photos is that a lot the architecture is in places that I consider to be very public areas! It seems that even sidewalks have been subject to a “continuum of privilege!”

Going back to the High Line, Loughran mentions the act of sleeping on the High Line. He mentions that sleeping is something that’s normally looked down upon when done in public, and I think this is because many have the image of a homeless person sleeping in public (which is what Loughran refers to as another “quality of life violation”). Yet, on the High Line, Loughran mentions that it’s natural to see some people sleeping. So what is the difference between sleeping in places like the High Line and sleeping in other public areas, like the sidewalk for example? Is it just a difference between the types of people sleeping and what’s socially accepted to do in our society? But who decides what’s socially acceptable to do in public in our city? Is is organizations like the Friends of the High Line that provide funding that dictate social norms in public places? Perhaps it does have to do with the fact that the High Line is better funded than other parks because of the neoliberalizion Loughran refers to. Or is it just the functions of the places (e.g. because sidewalks are made for walking no one should be sleeping? However, I would also argue that the High Line is certainly a highly pedestrian area as well)?

I think that by looking at the “inconspicuous surveillance methods” and “…institutionalized social control to regulate the socio-spatial practices of park users” of the High Line and the use of architecture to deter certain marginalized populations from congregating or doing certain acts, we can see what Loughran refers to when he states that “public spaces such as the High Line express the relationships among citizens, the state, and other institutions of power.” In other other words, public spaces reflect what we as a society value. And for some reason, society as whole doesn’t look upon the homeless population sleeping in public areas favorably, but people who sleep on the High Line are looked as totally normal.

Looking at Mayor de Blasio’s “Community Parks Initiative,” I’m wondering what a fresh coat of paint and a set of new swings are really going to do. Sure, it might attract more people and offer better opportunities for interaction within communities, but what else is this going to do? Is the initiative supposed to make underfunded parks in underserved communities more like parks such as the High Line- popular tourist areas and profit-based? I think it’s important to question what City officials or we really want out of public areas.

The readings for this week and the supplemental website I provided below certainly make me question how public a public space really is. In a sense, the High Line is public- but only for certain individuals, which makes it private to others. A sidewalk is (in most cases) definitely a public space, but it also seems to function like the High Line as a “continuum of privilege” where certain acts and people are excluded and others welcomed.

Additional Works

1. http://www.dismalgarden.com/archives/defensive_architecture/bum-free/new%20york%20city

I live in Nassau County, just over the border from Far Rockaway, where I got to analyze transformation of a public space. My close proximity to the Far Rockaway Beach and Boardwalk allows me to analyze the people there and the parks uses. The redesigning of the skate-park, and cleaning of the beach (most of which was a necessity after hurricane Sandy rocked the area), made the area aesthetically pleasing (in my opinion at least) and families of all different backgrounds roll onto the beach and promenade during the warm months. ( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/23/nyregion/boardwalk-returns-to-rockaways-in-time-for-beach-season.html ) My fondest memories there are on summer weekends where I’d bring my inflatable kayak, and paddle under the nearby Atlantic Beach Bridge. I’d notice great diversity of people on the beach, with many ethnicities and an often crowded, yet shared space. Typically, there would be Spanish music and barbeques, Jewish families wearing traditional modest dress, Muslims wearing hijabs and burqas, along with a multitude of different spoken languages.

Throughout the summer, my bike route from work in Manhattan sent me over the Brooklyn Bridge, around Prospect Park, down Ocean Parkway, along the Belt Parkway, over the Marine Parkway Bridge, and finally straight down the length of Far Rockaway. I thoroughly appreciated the bike friendly route I was offered, and had an opportunity to experience riding through multi-ethnic neighborhoods. I’d notice diversity of income in the different areas, yet was happy to see public open space throughout.

I never quite thought anything of it, it was the way I’d always visualized ideal public spaces, and saw only good in urban projects.

Yet, while reading through Parks for Profit, Loughran brings up unequal opportunities afforded to people during use of the High line. He discusses how privileged people more easily use the space and private security and targeted events seem to discourage use by people of color and less privileged people. I don’t have much to go by, never having visited the High line, but it seems as though public space was divided up and disproportionate amounts in the most valuable areas were given to wealthy young whites.

The High line along with new zoning laws shifted the neighborhoods around the High line, changing an area deemed to be the epitome of the cities decline to a booming area of economic growth and gentrification. Private money being pumped into public spaces further enables cleansing of the ‘unwanted’. This model of park development produces a class of losers, who previously operated in the High line area, and those banned because of regulation of space. Winners consist of real estate developers and those moving into the gentrified area.

The High line today, has rapidly become one New York’s most visited tourist attractions and is regularly filled with buzz of a new Urbanism and a social elite.

On the NYC parks website ( http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/framework-for-an-equitable-future/community-parks-initiative/caring ) pictures of refurbishments done to parks, show gentle changes to old parks at a seeming attempt to simply improve parks function, rather than change a demographic or use. This link shows a pattern more similar to what I witnessed in Far Rockaway, where the city rebuilt public space to make it look more modern, without forcibly changing its population or use. But none-the-less changes in the High line show a disproportionate amount of space being spent to produce parks and better public space for the wealthy, when compared to poorer areas.

 

I have to agree with most of your points about Amanda Burden. She constantly talks as if she is for the people of the community, but all of her actions points to the opposite. To answer your question, “Did the woman we saw chairing those zoning meetings seem like the sort of person who was trying to help people or an economy,” I would have to say absolutely not. The way she demanded removal of those brave enough to speak their minds proves that she’s not interested in the opinions of the residents.

Amanda Burden clearly is not the only one guilty of not caring about residents. In every project outlined in chapter three of Scott Larson’s book residents vehemently protested them. The residents lost every single time. While some projects were halted – let’s examine the reason why. The first time Hudson Yard’s redevelopment was halted was because, “a local cable television provider viewed a new stadium as competition for Madison Square Garden, the sports and event venue it owned” (p 35-36). The stadium plan was vetoed and “in spite of the administration’s efforts to unite members of the city’s elite, redevelopment of Hudson Yards was shelved” (36). In other words, this project was only shelved because private companies could not get together. This halting had nothing to do with the protests of the people. Of course work didn’t stop there. The development was slowed down this time by financial difficulties. Additionally “aside form the slowing economy, the project was plagued by the collapse of slow progress of the three projects that had been expected to “kick-start” further West side development” (p 37). Again – the reasons for delay has nothing to do with the people actually living in the area.

This trend continues with the Atlantic Yards and Colombia University. The local community protested and sited that these developments would raise the cost of rent to high and force them out. Those who tried to hold out against this gentrification in the case of the expansion of the Colombia University were constantly met with the imposing eminent domain.

So it boils down to this – if we’re not listening to the people who live in the area, the people who have the most to lose then who are we listening to? Clearly, we’re listening to corporations and developers with large financial interests in these “blighted” areas. Of course blighted gets assigned by those who are already backing these developers. In the end, how can any of these people claim to be building “with Jacobs in mind” when she advocated community above all else? These building methods where bureaucrats influence what kinds of development can happen through zoning and funding completely disregards any existing culture and familiarity built by the community itself.

All city planners bring their own personal style into their policies; Robert Moses mostly focused on an automobile centered future, while Jane Jacobs preached diversity. Amanda Burden, New York City’s chief planner under the Bloomberg administration, approached city planning from an aesthetic point of view. Although her policies were a mix-and-match collection of Moses’s and Jacobs’s theories, Burden’s policies were much more concerned with how things looked, rather than their impact. One must address whether or not these seemingly superficial values were actually worth the trouble it took to implement them.

To summarize Amanda Burden’s policies, “Burden brought to her position an aesthetic imperative, a distinctly high-brow sense of what constitutes good design merged with an appreciation for the Jacobsian notion of street vitality and a commitment to enhancing the vibrancy of New York City’s streets and open spaces” (Larson 134). Despite her “Jacobsian” approach, Burden seems to have adopted quite a heavy helping of Moses-esque qualities, mainly in the scale of her projects and whom they would actually benefit. I will touch on this a little bit later.

As mentioned in Design as a Civic Virtue, the ninth chapter in Professor Scott Larson’s book, Building Like Moses With Jacobs In Mind, Burden seemed to go above and beyond her duties as chief planner. She “micromanaged” projects, “insist[ing] that benches be rearranged, specific types of paving stones be used, or that seat heights, depths, and widths conform to exacting measurements” (Larson 140). Her excessive attention to detail and insistence on “good design” not only delayed many projects, but they made the projects much more expensive than they needed to be as a result of these delays. She also appointed “starchitects” to design New York City’s projects, a decision that hiked up the cost of completing these projects. In this sense, I feel that Burden was extremely wasteful in her position as chief planner and unnecessarily cost the city money that could have been put into more meaningful projects, rather than choosing the perfect bench and positioning it at just the right angle. I could be a bit overly judgmental of Burden at this point, but it becomes hard to overlook her background as a rich white woman when she so carelessly tacks on extra costs to projects that seem so superficial.

In terms of Burden’s background and approach to money, it seems that Burden closely parallels Moses. To clarify, I mean that she seems to have chosen projects that would benefit the wealthy, much like Robert Moses did with the construction of highways. An example of this is with the High Line, a set of elevated freight tracks turned public park. Although it seems like Burden’s pitch for the repurposing of the tracks would be a good undertaking for all residents of the city, as it would provide a new public space in New York City, the project seems to have benefited the wealthy. Much like the creation of Central Park, the creation of the High Line as a public park raised property values and real estate costs greatly. This is supported in Patrick McGeehan’s New York Times article, entitled The High Line Isn’t Just a Sight to See; It’s Also an Economic Dynamo and a report by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). McGeehan wrote that “Amanda Burden, the city’s planning director, emphasized the boost to property values, saying that in one building that abuts the lower section of the High Line, the price of apartments had doubled since the park opened, to about $2,000 a square foot,” and the NYCEDC reports that, as of 2011, the median market value within five minutes of the High Line has increased one hundred three percent since 2003. So while the High Line served as a boost to the real estate of New York City, this project also seems to further separate New York City’s wealthy from the poor, as now only the wealthy can afford to live near the once decrepit High Line.

(NYCEDC)

            Of course, one cannot criticize Burden without acknowledging the positive impacts some of her projects. To relate this back to the High Line, it must be recognized that High Line has created a great deal of revenue for the city in terms of tourism and investment in the area surrounding the park. Furthermore, Burden’s sitting space policies should not be overlooked. While, yes, it seems like people in today’s age seem to go to any lengths to avoid interacting with one another, some instances of seating in public spaces contest this. For example, one can consider the Red Steps in Times Square. The “glowing red glass amphitheater-style staircase” (Chung) “allows [visitors to the city to have] an amazing view of Times Square from the top of the steps—16-feet above street level—for free” (Chung). From every time I have visited Times Square, I always notice that the steps are overflowing with tourists and city residents alike, all of whom are interacting with one another, sharing stories and offering to snap pictures of one another. Even though I do not agree with a great deal of what Burden stood for, I can definitely see the value in her sitting space policies, as they make the city a more closely knit and hospitable place.

Overall, I think Amanda Burden was a greater burden to the city that an asset. Some of her projects seem to have been very superficial, and her attention to detail did not allow her to look at the big picture of the city as a whole. Furthermore, she cost the city a lot of money with her vision of “good design.”

 

Outside Sources:

(Chung) http://gothamist.com/2008/10/17/stepping_up_new_times_square_tkts_b.php#photo-1

(McGeehan) http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/nyregion/with-next-phase-ready-area-around-high-line-is-flourishing.html?referer&_r=1

(NYCEDC) http://www.nycedc.com/podcast/19-economic-impact-parks

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

 

In the ninth chapter of “Building Like Moses with Jacob in Mind,” Scott Larson writes about Amanda Burden and who work under the Bloomberg Administration. She was the director of the New York City Department of City Planning and Chair of Planning Commission. Burden believed that design is a critical element in city planning. It was the element that she stressed the most and one that is quite prevalent in all of Bloomberg’s larger redevelopment narrative (140).

Like Jacobs, Burden believed that one “can measure the health of the city in the vitality of the street life” (135). Therefore she prioritized public spaces and the availability of seating arrangements within these spaces. In 2007, seating standards were adopted into the set of design guidelines for privately owned public spaces. The guidelines specified that there must be a “minimum of one linear foot of seating for each 30 square feet of public plaza areas,” they must be “placed in close proximity and at angles to one another or in facing configurations that facilitate social interaction,” and they must provide at least two type of seating, which means wither moveable seating, fixed individual seats, fixed benches, seat walls or steps (139-140).

Now knowing that Burden spearheaded “the revitalization of the “dilapidated High Line elevated rail line,” and that she is known to micro-manage every project she is involved in, the design of the Highline doesn’t surprise me at all (135). Burden ensured that the Highline would include at least two types of seating arrangements. And one will take notice as he walks the Highline the countless of spots along the way where he can stop and to sit. Whether it is the benches, the moving reclining chairs, or the stairs on which there is a window overlooking the city, there will always be a spot for him to sit and interact with others.

The interesting thing, however, in recent years many articles have been published criticizing the city for its lack of “public spaces.” Buildings that once had benches for people to sit an enjoy the city are disappearing. In an article by the New York Times that was published this past September emphasizes that the amount of spaces throughout Manhattan where there is a public element has either diminished or it has completely vanished. Additionally, many of these public passageways, like the Knaves café, have banned all outside food and make you order something from their menu in order to sit down in what is supposed to be a public space. These public spaces are only allowing those who can afford to sit and order an eight-dollar latte into their public space, which makes one rethink just how public this public space actually is (Chaban, “Unwelcome Mat is Outside at Some of New York’s Privately Owned Public Spaces”).

Although Burden’s entire focus was on creating public spaces for the inhabitants of the city, it seems to be that although she may have created new areas for people to sit and enjoy the city, the amount of actual free and public spaces is rapidly declining within the city. Because the reality is that once these areas become privatized, these public spaces begin to remain less public until they are no longer public at all.

Outside Work: Chaban, Mattt A.V. “Unwelcome Mat is Outside at Some of New York’s Privately Owned Public Spaces.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 07 Sept. 2015. Web. Apr. 2016

It was really interesting to read your blog post and the Vanity Fair article you posted Miriam! I understand your point when you wrote “Obviously it never hurt anyone to live in an aesthetically pleasing environment, but the city government is supposed to help it’s citizens; wouldn’t money spent on these starchitects have been put to much better use funding, say, schools or other public services?”, and I think it is a valid point. I think she was a little too fixated on the way things looked, especially when it got to the point where benches had to be a certain size and be at certain angles. At the same time, I do appreciate the fact that she wanted the city to look nice. When I was reading about the little plaza areas and her ideas regarding their design, it reminded me of a plaza near W 52 St, I believe. It’s small, but I think it’s a nice little place to sit and eat halal food, for example. Like Burden wanted, it has benches that face each other, trees and plants, and is an open place. But I digress.

Even though I agree with your point that I quoted above Miriam, I disagree with your claim that she “is little more than the female, modern-day version of Robert Moses”. The impression that I got from the reading is that she believed in using both Moses’ and Jacobs’ ideas. “She talked of building like Moses with Jacobs in mind” (Larson p 136) and argued that “Great architecture keeps the city young, vibrant, and competitive” (Larson p 134). I think she did care about the people. I’m sure she had her own agenda and hidden motivations, but I still think she focused so much on aesthetics because she believed it would make the city better and more vibrant, as Jacobs recommended. I think I even tend to agree with her point of view, although I do think she went too far in her fixation with starchitects and regulations. While I realize it is possible for someone to say one thing (such as she supports Jacobs’ ideas) and act in another way, I think she genuinely cared about the city and making it healthier. Professor Larson notes that although Burden “trumpeted Jacobs’ influence on contemporary planners and urban form…instead, her inspiration stemmed from…William ‘Holly’ Whyte” (Larson p 137). Jacobs’ ideas and Whyte’s ideas don’t seem all that different, but regardless of which of those two she leaned towards, I don’t think she leaned more towards Moses’ ideas.

Well, I think that title sums it up pretty succinctly. What I got out of today’s reading was that Amanda Burden is little more than the female, modern-day version of Robert Moses. Obsessed more with what the city looked like than what the city could provide for the average person living within it, Burden sought to create a haven for the ultra-wealthy–a group of which she, of course, was a member.

 

Before I discuss Burden’s actual urban vision, I’d like to point out the sort of person that she is. Frankly, I think it speaks a lot to who she is that a Google search of her name turns up a Vanity Fair article that does little more than accentuate her wealth as the third result (following only the standard Wikipedia article and her page on the Bloomberg Associates website). For all that Burden claims to have done all she could to escape the stigmatism of being no more than an Upper East Side socialite, she still lives that type of life, and that comes through in her method of urban planning, where everything must look fabulous.

This UES attitude is further reinforced by Burden’s requiring her projects to involve “starchitects” like the world-renowned Frank Gehry, even at the expense of running up the cost of a project well beyond what may have been necessary (Larson 140). Obviously it never hurt anyone to live in an aesthetically pleasing environment, but the city government is supposed to help it’s citizens; wouldn’t money spent on these starchitects have been put to much better use funding, say, schools or other public services?

Burden tries to shake her Moses-like disregard for people, but she never really manages it. In an interview with Urban Land Magazine in 2011, Burden opens by saying that cities aren’t about buildings, they’re about people. But as she tries to explain this in her next sentence, she goes on to talk about “how important well-designed, well-used public open spaces are to the economic and social well-being of cities” (Burden 0:13 – 0:22). She goes on to talk about bringing private investment into the city, and though maybe her intent is that such investments will benefit the city, she rarely mentions the actual people of the city again.

It doesn’t say good things about the city and its planning when the people considered most influential in urban planning have a regrettable tendency to forget the people for whom they are purportedly working. Sure, maybe Burden’s design ideas were based on Jane Jacobs’s ideas as Burden received them through the hands of William “Holly” Whyte, but I find it hard to believe that Burden’s motivations equaled Jacobs’s. Think back to the video we watched about the Harlem re-zoning. Did the woman we saw chairing those zoning meetings seem like the sort of person who was trying to help people or an economy? Sure, some people may benefit from the economic gains of Burden’s plans. But which people? The residents and small business owners of 125th Street? Or the corporate giants of Wall Street?

Burden is unconvincing in her regard for the people, much like the last urban planner to have as large an impact as her: Robert Moses.

Hi Noelia,

I’m not scheduled for a response this week, but I wanted to add a comment to your response.

In your response to Ariana you wrote:

“On a side note, isn’t gentrification sort of expected as a result of rezoning areas in a capitalist society and urban landscape like ours?”

This is exactly what I thought after going over the readings and blog posts this week.

I also asked myself why it’s any surprise that rezoning has been used to displace low income residents when more profitable opportunities arise. Putting aside the capitalist spirit of the city for a moment, urban planning has focused heavily on economic growth and prosperity. Thinking back to our discussion of the past and present Time Square, it’s clear that urban planners favored the plan that would open up economic growth and prosperity. The Third Regional Plan, while stressing the Three E’s, similarly talked a lot about how to make the tri-state region desirable to global businesses.

Going back to your statement about capitalism and urban landscape, I totally agree with what you said. If we go with the typical capitalist narrative of picking ourselves up from out bootstraps, working hard and becoming wealthy, and we do so — doesn’t it make sense (in this system) that we get what we want? Shouldn’t we be rewarded with the convenience of living near Colombia University, for example?

Based on this model, why should the 19% of people earning $10,000 – $25,000 per year be protected from displacement? Didn’t they do something wrong? Didn’t the people who can afford to attend and live within Colombia University do something right?

I think what I’m getting at here is that the city and it’s planners do not value everyone the same. Rezoning and strategizing to take land by the Bloomberg administration using the justification of economic development says this. The prospect of putting wealth into an area of the city is more important than maintaining low income housing.

Based on a capitalist system, is this wrong? If the goal of both the city and it’s planners is to make money, then perhaps it is the right thing to focus on the upper middle class and wealthy at the expense of low income residents.

For the super wealthy, the city has a vested interest in attracting them and keeping them happy. Some information about NYC’s top 1% was in the Daily News today. NYC’s top 1% (individuals who earn at least $636,000 per year) paid 47% of income taxes in 2013. They earned $107.5 billion, around 38% of the city’s income. In our capitalist system, their voices far outweigh those earning $10,000 – $25,000 per year. But isn’t that only fair? If true equity “the quality of being fair and impartial” (dictionary.com) in the city is myth, then what does “urban equity” or “capitalist equity” look like?

 

I really enjoyed reading your blog post Mikki! The way you contrasted Bloomberg’s views on rezoning with those of de Blasio offered a sense of relevancy. I was able to relate to the readings much more than before, given the articles and sources you quoted.

As you discussed, Larson emphasizes the need for New York to plan for future growth. Per your post, finding a balance between sustaining growth and preserving fair standards of living posed a challenge then as well as today. While I do agree with you that a lot of Bloomberg’s actions seemed to be motivated by political interest, I’m not sure it was exclusively so. Larson mentions the strategic tactics employed by developers in circumventing regulation and building where they wanted to. I also think that much of Bloomber-era zoning policy was predicated on economic growth and foresight of what a future city should look like.

A New York Times article published a few years ago explores some of Bloomberg’s considerations in suggesting various zoning laws. For instance, the push for rezoning in Midtown to allow higher towers was a topic that underwent a lot of controversy. The article emphasizes, however, that global hotspots like Hong Kong and Tokyo continue to construct rising skyscrapers and attract corporate tenants. Surely a city like New York must continue to grow at a speed similar, if not faster than, other world leaders? That said, I recognize and agree there must be a balance between matching the growth displayed by other cities across the world while accommodating residents too. Aside from the economic considerations, the article discusses growth in the number of workers. With a larger workforce comes concern for transportation, sanitation, and public safety. The administration is quoted as supporting the allowance for rezoning and increasing skyscraper heights in order to meet these potential concerns.

I think you did a great job of applying the readings to today, and showing how applicable rezoning is. A continuous focus in class is what we think a future city should be like, and how we can plan today to realize that future vision. For me, your post revitalized the question we considered in seminar a few weeks ago- how can New York accommodate future growth while sustaining living conditions of its inhabitants? I thought about this question a bit differently than I did beforehand, when our attention was turned toward Jacobs’ and Moses’ beliefs. I’m not sure I’ve figured out what exactly I think, but considering this big-picture question in different contexts has certainly helped clarify a lot!

 

Source:

I enjoyed reading your post Samantha!

You brought up some very interesting points about redevelopment. I agree that most of us find it easy to blame Moses for not being considerate in his plans, but that at least he got things done. For better or for worse, the city has been majorly shaped to be what it is today through the implementation of Moses’ plans. It is hard to ignore how much of an impact he has physically left on the city and even in his ideas that still linger in planners’ minds.

I do not know if I fully agree with your reasons as to why the city has been unable to take on such massive projects successfully since Moses. The city definitely does not seem to be planning thoroughly, but I find it hard to do so with the incorporation of private interests in public matters. I do not think it is because people are afraid to be tyrannical that they have not successfully engaged in such works. I think that there are a lot of factors that attribute to it. One thing that can be considered is that the public voices it’s opinions louder today than it use to, or at least the media displays the rejection that these plans face much more. For example, today in the news they covered at story about how people are upset with the addition of new bike lanes in the city. People are coming out and publicly voicing their rejections and that makes it hard to ignore them. At the same time, it can be questioned why the redevelopment of Times Square received 47 lawsuits against it and it still was passed. Who decides which opinions get heard and which ones matter is the issue. In Chapter 3 of “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind” we see that even when the case of the Atlantic Yards came all the way to the Supreme Court they refused to hear the case (Larson 39). They had very substantial issues with its constitutionality in the use of eminent domain, yet they could not even be heard. The public opposition was able to “scale back aspects of the project,” yet none of this was able to put a stop to it (39). This inevitably raises the question of why such issues can just be ignored and can continue to go on when so many people can be against it, or, even more importantly, when the constitutionality of an action is questioned.

Although such tremendous building projects are not as easily accomplished today, as you point out, I do not think that is necessarily a bad thing. I do not agree that gentrifying neighborhoods is the way that areas should improve; despite this, if we cannot come up with a way to stop this then at least if smaller projects take place hopefully less people will become displaced.

At the end of the article that you posted a link for about the 7 train, Larry Penner makes a good point of asking, “At the end of the day, riders and taxpayers have to ask if $2.4 billion for a 1.5-mile extension to one additional station build 21 months behind schedule is worth the cost” (crainsnewyork). His question is a really hard one to find an answer to. Adding just one stop to the line will only benefit a certain amount of people and deciding whether taxpayer money should be used for this rather than another project is really subjective.  It is something that might not even be able to be proven until after a project has been completed and we evaluate if its use has possibly outweighed its loses, and even then it is not that simple.

Thank you for all your insights!
Eleni

Hi Mikki! Cool post. You really cover a lot of points, and support yourself with the most accredited of sources. You clearly define winners and losers under Bloomberg’s plan, and show how even today under De Blasio, similar patterns persist and not enough changes are being made.

I’d like to temporarily diverge from broader ideas on change and instead discuss some basic economic theory. Let’s start with our axis, we have price on the vertical axis and supply of housing on the horizontal axis. Let’s draw a supply curve sloping downwards from higher up on the price axis, and a demand curve sloping upwards from the origin.

When housing is subsidized, (meaning that the government shifts the natural supply curve) by paying part of people rent, demand will simply increase and more people will want to rent apartments. Even though there is a deadweight loss, meaning that there is societal monetary loss, there are more people living in houses, and there is a change.

By Melissam16 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25533700

 

However, now picture a realistic supply curve for housing in an area where developers have maxed out capacity based on current zoning laws. It would be completely vertical, meaning that no matter the price, there were always be the same number of houses available. This means, that by subsidizing houses, where the market can’t just move along a sloped supply curve, you don’t even allow for more houses to be built, and more people to move into them. It’s the same number of people, just paying less (with the government paying more).

By allowing for increased density and thus more housing, you allow for greater numbers of people to live, for less cost.

None-the-less, your concerns about which areas were chosen are valid. The plans created winners out of developers, and theoretical monetary gain for society as a whole (with more money for building owners, and cheaper housing for people because of increased demand, yet some people lost: namely those who lived in the neighborhoods before didn’t want change, and who local government was meant to protect.

In the end, I agree with your conclusion: money and power speak. Changes are being made, but in the end politics don’t necessarily help people. Corruption will run rampant, and those will wealth will encourage change for their own benefits.

Hey Ariana! GREAT blog post! I really feel like your post helped me understand the significance of rezoning a lot better!

I found it very interesting that you kept bringing up rezoning as a way that was meant to “better the City” or “help the City” in city planners’ eyes (although you do effectively argue against rezoning as a beneficial practice in my eyes). On the surface, rezoning seems to be an effective method of redevelopment, but your blog post made me really curious as to what what making the City “better” really means and what people actually benefit when planners try to make the City “better!”

I think, from the readings this week and the extra articles you provided, that rezoning isn’t the best method for redevelopment. In your blog post you saw the significance of rezoning through the impacts on the areas being rezoned themselves, using gentrification as an example. I’m so glad that you mentioned the expansion of Columbia University in your blog because I had a lot of similar thoughts on the issue as you did. No doubt, Columbia brings diverse groups of people to the area but I’m just as skeptical as to how beneficial this expansion is on the surrounding residents as you are! Will the 19% of families that make between $10,000 to $25,000 in the area really benefit as much as people traveling to Columbia will? I also think that redevelopment of the area will invite gentrification to take place. So how does this make the city “better?” It makes it “better” for those outside the area, but those within it become victims to the raising costs of living. It seems like rezoning only accomplishes to make the city “better” for another group of people rather than the current residents of an area.

On a side note, isn’t gentrification sort of expected as a result of rezoning areas in a capitalist society and urban landscape like ours? It’s totally normal and logical that people are driven to areas with lower rent, so is it necessarily a bad or unexpected thing that the- as you put it- “ethnic landscape” changes because of gentrification? Perhaps shifting the current populations of residents to a more “desired” (as according to whomever is planning or contributing money to the rezoning efforts) population has to do with what city planners refer to when wanting to “better” the City? In other words, is gentrification the desired effect of rezoning practices in making our City “better?” And if gentrification is a natural process in our capitalist society, then perhaps rezoning as a tactic for redevelopment isn’t the main issue to tackle, but looking at why populations of people can’t make enough money to support themselves is? 

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times articles exemplify your point exactly! Although de Blasio’s rezoning efforts are to help residents, he might essentially be pushing residents out because of increasing housing prices. I found it interesting that in the Wall Street Journal article, it quotes several administration officials saying, that “it was impossible to build units for low-income families in East New York through zoning alone because of current market conditions in the neighborhood.” It seems that rezoning doesn’t achieve everything city planners might be aiming for! And it’s evident that this rezoned area is “better” for everyone, except current low-income residents! Going back to my discussion on gentrification, it’s ironic that de Blasio is rezoning an area as part of his Affordable Housing Initiative, yet the area might end up gentrified! 

Overall, wonderful blog post! I had a lot of fun trying to decipher what rezoning does to make the City “better” and who a “better” city really serves.

 

In “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind,” Larson points to sustainability as one major issue that New York faces today. New York’s population is rapidly growing, and a key question is how to accommodate that kind of growth, while keeping a healthy standard of living for its inhabitants. Larson discusses the various strategies and plans that Mayor Bloomberg employed to address these problems. Bloomberg used rezoning as a tool to adjust where and how people lived in New York City to fit in with what he thought would be most efficient, while stimulating the city’s economy. Rezoning was a way of reshaping the city passively- it created the framework for what could be built and where, and the idea was that “the market” or private investors or corporations would come along and develop where they wanted to. When incentives for developers to add public spaces were included with zoning, this was taken advantage of. Even with all the regulation that went on with zoning, developers were still able to get around them, and to build what they wanted where they wanted to build it.

Zoning as a way to provide for affordable housing is still used today. In fact, just this week, Mayor de Blasio got changes to the zoning code passed. The new rules change zoning requirements across the city and require that developers create affordable housing along with other projects, instead of simply incentivizing it.

What I found so interesting about the discussion of zoning in Larson’s work and also about the new rules de Blasio is trying to implement are all the politics involved. Especially in Larson’s discussion of Bloomberg-era rezoning, it seems like so many of the decisions made were made out of political and economical self-interest. The fact that a large amount the downzoning under Bloomberg took place in neighborhoods where Bloomberg was trying to gain political influence is crazy! And this is just one example of how the communities chosen to be downzoned or rezoned was not quite equitable or, at the very least, random.

With de Blasio’s rules, there are many council members who voted against the bill because they didn’t feel it required enough affordable housing to be developed, or because the housing that would be developed wasn’t affordable enough. (De Blasio, in defending the changes, pointed out that while the mandated affordable housing was extremely important, what would really boost low income housing is the 8.2 billion dollars in subsidies that would be spent on low income housing over the next ten years as part of this plan.) It just goes to show that in politics, you can’t make everyone happy. Even though most would agree that the new rules are a step in the right direction, it seems like the same political and legal restrictions that come with the democratic and capitalist processes that existed under Bloomberg continue to be relevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/23/nyregion/new-york-council-passes-zoning-changes-de-blasio-sought.html?_r=0

http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2016/03/8594595/council-overwhelmingly-approves-de-blasios-plan-rezone-city

Larson, Scott. Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Print.

 

What I found most striking about Ariana’s post is a fact that, quite honestly, shouldn’t be new to anyone in this class at this point. We’ve all been through multiple Macaulay seminars–we must have all heard dozens of times about the rampant inequality that is in large part a defining facet of New York City. However, seeing the numbers in black-and-white, as Ariana quotes them, remains astonishing. I refer, in this instance, to the middle of Ariana’s final paragraph where, talking about the NYC housing market, she says, “the idea that municipal planning requires a share of new construction to be low-income affordable housing units. However, the ratio for this is 80 percent market rate housing to 20 percent affordable rate housing. I was shocked to see this ratio because 20 percent in my opinion is nowhere near enough.” And, of course, I completely agree with Ariana.

The fact is that NYC feels ever more like an environment that is hostile to all but the super rich. Not only are lower-income households neglected and forced to struggle, the ultra-wealthy are continually more empowered.

To my mind, the prime example of the empowerment (a term that may not precisely convey my feelings, but it’s the best I can think of at the moment) of the one-percent is the recent construction of 432 Park Avenue. For those to whom the address is unfamiliar, you might know the building better by the description Professor Omri Elisha gave it during a particularly frustrated outburst during a Peopling of New York class last spring: “It’s just a ****ing matchstick!” The second tallest building in NYC, the tallest residential building in our hemisphere, and who does it service? Only those with extreme wealth–and a mere 104 of them, at that. Think of it: over 400,000 square feet of potential living space, and only 104 people will get to take part. For the luxury of living in 432, owners have paid starting prices of $7 million (the penthouse sold for a whopping $95 million) and will likely not even be spending much time there. The massive monument to money is estimated to be only a quarter occupied at any given time. And who will be occupying it? “Middle Eastern oil magnates, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, and the Latin American aristocracy,” says Joshua Brown of Fortune. Not low-income New Yorkers.

And bringing this back to the numbers that Ariana quoted, for all the extreme wealth that is wrapped up in this building, how many affordable housing units have to be built? Using the ratio Ariana quoted and assuming that my math isn’t as bad as I dread it is, the total is approximately 25. For the obscenity that is 432 Park Avenue, benefitting the extremely wealthy as usual–and not even New Yorkers, not even people who will live in the City’s precious real estate–25 people will have access to affordable housing. I’m sorry if I’m not being clear about what exactly the problem is here–it’s that I have trouble wrapping my head around numbers this ridiculously out of whack.

Admittedly, I’m having trouble tying this back to zoning. I’ve gotten a little fixated. But look at the skyline. Isn’t 432 noticeably…ah, distinct from its surroundings? Mind you, it sits on a property that once housed the Drake Hotel, which topped out at 21 stories–a far cry from the 96 stories of 432 Park Avenue. How is this zoning even ok? (The answer lies in FAR, a concept I don’t totally understand even after reading a couple of articles, but which I found most helpfully almost explained here.)

And, obviously, 432 Park Avenue is just the (very tall) tip of the proverbial iceberg. Although an extreme example of the drastic inequality in New York, it is one of many similar luxury buildings available to only the deepest pockets. Ariana sums up the problem succinctly, I think, when she says, “we need to be very careful about the choices we make concerning this city.” After all, who really needs new apartments? Is it the super rich who live in other countries? Or the low-income, full-time residents of New York?

Hey Kirsten! Great blog post, I really enjoyed reading your what you had to say about the RPA Third Regional Plan and it really got be thinking about things that I didn’t think about when I first read it. I found it very interesting the way you compared the city planners to lawyers and how like lawyers have to make the convincing narrative, so too do city planners. And I agree with you that the city planners probably played off the fears of the people and over-exaggerated the situation that the city was actually in.

While reading that, it reminded me of the book, Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating, by Paul Oyer, which I had to read for my microeconomics class two semesters ago. In the second chapter of the book, Oyer discusses whether or not one should lie, or stretch the truth, on his online profile. Although Oyer recognizes that lying is bad, he concludes that if one would be at a disadvantage if he did not lie on his profile. Since most people are known to lie, by not lying he is only making himself less desirable. Since lying is such a common occurrence, people will probably assume that he is lying even if he were telling the truth.

Now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with Economics or the RPA Third Regional Plan, so let me explain… Trying to find a match online is similar to selling a product—it must be marketed properly. The most important thing of course is to know that talk is cheap. Therefore, one must be a smart shopper and even smarter salesman. And when you think about it although they aren’t selling a physical product, city planners need to market their “product” properly in order for it to sell. Businesses have to lie just enough to sell their product, but they cannot over-do-it or else they’ll loose their customers for good. (And getting back to the online profile… well he probably won’t be getting a second date if he over exaggerates or lies too much).

At the end of the day, everyone who is trying to sell something whether it is a physical product or a type of service, lying (even if it’s just a little white lie) will always be intertwines as being apart of the equation. So it doesn’t surprise me that the city planners composed this narrative that the city was being threatened, and its success and future solely on the city implementing their solutions. I’m not commenting on whether or not this is right or wrong, I’m just saying that I can’t blame the city planners for exaggerating or lying. Because I’m sure the other city planners who were trying to get their plans approved were doing the exact same thing.

Kirsten, you have once again written a very thought-provoking blog. After reading all the blogs for this week, yours stood out to me again. I really enjoyed the way you narrated the evolution of your thoughts as you analyzed each reading. You presented your thoughts really nicely and clearly.

I agree that it became very easy to follow long and agree with the considerations in “ A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area” by Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss; it seems as though everyone jumps behind a cause the moment someone mentions education for the children. I agree that the turmoil the city was in was clearly exaggerated at the time. I also agree that this realization did not occur during the “A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area” readings, but during Professor Larson’s “Planning and the Narrative of Threat” from Building Like Moses With Jacobs in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City.

After reading “Planning and the Narrative of Threat,” I, like Kirsten, was able to realize that the “the sky is falling” style claims were purposely shaped that way to inspire fear in the city’s residents so that the plan could be approved. I will acknowledge the truth in Kirsten’s comment that the Third Regional Plan brought up some valid issues, “such as we need improved schools, better regulation of land, and an economy that can keep up with the rest of the world” (Baker), I can’t help but feel that the way the planners tried to sell the Third Regional Plan cheapened the points and diminished their integrity; I believe that people should be given accurate and complete information before they can support a plan. This is not to say, however, that I would not like to see some aspects of the plan succeed, I just wish a more honest approach was taken.

I liked that Kirsten brought up the U.S. Business Bureau of Labor Statistics information. It helped put the considerations from the reading into perspective for today, especially being that she wrote about her struggle to keep in mind that the “A Region at Risk” readings were from 1996. I found it particularly relevant, being that my economics class covers weekly updates about jobs and unemployment rates in the United States. From what I understand, the unemployment rates have decreased since the beginning of the semester and last year, so perhaps that supports what Kirsten was arguing about hope for New York City’s future.

In the reading this week, chapter 3 discussed various plans during the Bloomberg administration that ended up falling through. Attempts to hold the Olympic games in New York City and building up the West Side and transportation extensions including a new LIRR terminal all withered and died. The problem is, it’s very hard to get things done in New York nowadays.

Almost all plans for “improvement” invite gentrification, and therefore anger poorer areas. But if improvements were made to wealthy areas, people would disagree with that as well, complaining that poorer areas deserved attention as well. There are issues with costs, since people are always looking for someone else to pay. Additionally, different organizations with conflicting interests have different visions of what they’d like accomplished, and there are always people who’d prefer for nothing to be done at all.

It’s easy to talk about Robert Moses and claim that his methods were cruel. However, his plans were far more likely to be enacted and paid for and accomplished on-time than plans today. Nowadays, too many people and organizations claiming Jane Jacob’s vision aim to prevent government plans, and it’s also harder to find funding for large projects.

I did notice however, that since the chapter from the reading was written, the 7 Line extension has actually been built and is operational. With some issues, including leaks. However, as a separate article points out, it had been delayed many times and ended up around 500 million dollars over budget, and had to scrap a second station that was originally planned as part of the extension. The article mentions that funding became an issue, but the MTA was unwilling to ask for government money from the New Starts funding. If they had done so, there might have been a way to build the second station. Overall, the city seems to be unable to plan as thoroughly as it should. I don’t know if it is out of fear of being seen as tyrannical and uncooperative as Moses, or simply laziness. But this lack of foresight adds to the growing distrust of city planning!

New Yorkers are always skeptical of big plans. They don’t trust the government to act in their best interest, and they don’t expect plans to actually come to fruition. This leads to even less support for different initiatives. For example, as mentioned in a New York Times article, our current mayor recently proposed a streetcar line between Brooklyn and Queens. He argues that the added transportation line would help people in lower-income communities and projects. However, at the same time, it is suggested that the project will pay for itself with increasing property values. To me, this screams asking for gentrification. If property values go up enough that cost won’t be an issue, how will poorer people still be able to live within useful distance of the new line? I see a lot of oversight.

Zoning was discussed in the second half of the reading as a way to facilitate certain kinds of growth without the government getting directly involved. However, zoning itself rather confuses me. I understand the basic original purpose to prevent overgrowth of certain areas and protecting homes or businesses. But the way in which it is used to subtly suggest building plans ends up not making a lot of sense. Builders tend to just find the cheapest way to be allowed to build extra floors. The city ends up with a lot of similarly planned out buildings. The zoning changes again. And the cycle starts all over. There are so many exceptions and different zoning rules that there doesn’t seen to be any kind of pattern at all anymore, and it just ends up influencing property pricing.

There are more than a few people that would like to see big building and transportation projects being again. However, they need to be planned out properly from beginning to end. The person doing the planning needs to make sure the project can actually be afforded, that it can actually get built within a certain time frame, and that it’s actually useful or feasible in an area. Otherwise, nothing substantial will ever get fully completed and the city will appear to have stagnated. Planners might think that people are only being disagreeable or distrustful, but judging by the number of planning oversights that have occurred recently and have been mentioned in the reading, it makes sense that New Yorkers no longer have real expectations for successful projects.

 

Sources:

 

7 Line Extension:

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20150918/TRANSPORTATION/150919860/no-7-subway-extension-is-500-million-and-one-stop-short

 

New York Times Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/nyregion/a-waterfront-route-to-serve-the-poor-not-just-the-wealthy.html?_r=0

 

“ Samantha

In chapters 3 and 6 of Scott Larson’s Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind we are introduced to the plans for city redevelopment that arose during the Bloomberg administration and the many controversies and changes that occurred as a result of these proposals. We also see how rezoning was used for city planners to carry out redevelopment. While reading the two chapters I kept going back to the idea that these plans do not account for the people in these communities and what happens when you change the structure of it.

When it comes to city planning, chapter 3 of Larson’s book features the many different projects that were proposed to redevelop and reshape New York City during the Bloomberg administration. Many of the plans in my opinion were grand in scale with a huge impact on the future of the city. However, I kept wondering on whether the impact would be a beneficial one, take for example, the plans for the expansion of Columbia University in Harlem. Larson discusses how the university claimed that the many years of construction would provide twelve hundred construction jobs and that the new building would provide university positions to make Upper Manhattan a center for knowledge. According to Area Vibes’ page on the demographics of Harlem, the neighborhood has a predominantly African-American population in which 19 percent of families make between $10,000 to $25,000. With the university’s expansion I can’t help but think of the effects this has on the people living in this area. I’ll be honest, I laughed when I saw the mention of university positions that would be created because I doubt they will serve those currently in the area. If anything this expansion will lead to gentrification that areas like Harlem are increasingly facing. The New York Times points out in their article, “Then as Now- New York’s Shifting Ethnic Mosaic” that black populations are declining in traditionally black areas where whites are moving in. This influx of white populations into these neighborhoods, driven by lower rent costs and the appeal of the area due to redevelopment is forcing out lower income families. Which begs the question, what happens to them? As the effects of gentrification grow the people that generally thrive in these neighborhoods will have to leave and the ethnic landscape is changed.

In chapter 6, Larson discusses city planners’ attempts to address the issue of affordable housing for low-income residents. He points out that in 2002 Mayor Bloomberg outlined the New Housing Marketplace Plan in which 92,000 units would be created and 73,000 units preserved for low to middle income families. Reading this made me optimistic, had city planners finally taken into account the needs of the people on the lower end of the financial spectrum? Surely this would help those displaced by redevelopment projects. Sadly though Larson went on to discuss that this plan fell through due to the effects of the Great Recession. He goes on to discuss that many people felt that affordable housing was a growing concern in the city and that one of the things to address this inclusionary zoning. This refers to the idea that municipal planning requires a share of new construction to be low-income affordable housing units. However, the ratio for this is 80 percent market rate housing to 20 percent affordable rate housing. I was shocked to see this ratio because 20 percent in my opinion is nowhere near enough. Why can’t it be higher? This is the big question that comes to mind when reading about all these plans for redevelopment. I feel that they will end up changing the landscape of the area and make it harder for lower-income residents to remain in the area. In the Wall Street Journal article, “Activists Criticize Rezoning Plan for East New York”, Mara Gay discusses that people in the area will not be able to afford the apartments that will be built there within the next two years.Once again I’m forced to wonder whether redevelopment will really help the city and how it will change it in the future. Who will be able to afford to live here? As pointed out in the NY Times article, African-Americans are being pushed out of the city to suburban areas because they simply cannot afford to live in the new housing units. In my last blog post I raised questions as to the changing nature of Times Square and how it will impact what NYC is in the future. I’m brought back to this question in terms of the people that live here. NYC is known for its diversity, what happens when that diversity is affected by redevelopment that intends to better the city? I’m reminded of all our discussions about Robert Moses and the ‘greater good’. I feel  we have reached that similar situation again and we need to be very careful about the choices we make concerning this city .

Sources:

“Harlem, New York, NY Demographics.” Area Vibes. Web.

Fessenden, Ford, and Sam Roberts. “Then as Now — New York’s Shifting Ethnic Mosaic.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 2011. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.

Gay, Mara. “Activists Criticize Rezoning Plan for East New York.” WSJ. 20 Sept. 2015. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.

Larson, Scott. Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Print.

While the Robert Moses’ contributions to New York City cannot be understated, his accomplishments come at the cost of his reputation. To outsiders the typical New Yorker is two contradicting things; a bleeding heart liberal who trades in his gun for some legal marijuana, and a ruthless businessman who squashes all in his way to achieve corporate success (washingtonpost.com). Bloomberg was dealing with the scars Moses left on the city’s consciousness by personifying the second persona, and therefore had to mask his Moses-style building projects in a friendly Jacobs haze.

Jacobs, historically, is seen as the more compassionate take on city planning. Her ideas tend to sit better with people and lend themselves to acceptance. A Moses-style building initiative requires ruthlessness, which is simply much harder to sell to the public. Bloomberg is remarkable in that he was unafraid to be the bad guy with his actions, but played the deft politician in how he presented them to the public. While he experienced varying levels of success in his projects he embodied Moses’ legacy by recognizing that the unpopular move is usually the right one. It is impossible to make everyone happy, and some people never will be, that shouldn’t stop elected leaders from doing what is best for the city. Much like Moses, Bloomberg brought the city into the modern age. For Moses that meant accommodating cars, for Bloomberg it meant being able to compete in a globalized economy.

 

The Bloomberg initiatives were met with varying levels of success largely due to public opinion regarding the project at hand. Moses could accomplish much more because he could be more aggressive. “He did not need to be nearly as accountable to the community as [the Bloomberg administration did]” Nevertheless, The Bloomberg Administration did achieve most of its goals, even if they were watered down versions of the original plans. The Hudson Yards was redeveloped, albeit minus the stadium and badly financed. The Barcalys Center was built, but without all the extra trimmings of surrounding buildings. Columbia University’s expansion was eventually approved after a prolonged legal battle over the use of eminent domain to acquire land from several holdouts. The use of eminent domain to acquire land that was unavailable through more conventional means is the clearest link between Moses and Bloomberg. The main difference between the two eras is that Bloomberg had to make concessions to community boards. In the case of the Columbia expansion this meant “spend[ing] $150 million over 12 years on the establishment of a community based K-8 public school administered by Columbia’s Teacher’s College, as well as $20 million for affordable housing initiatives.” Moses was not an elected official, but rather the City Park’s Commissioner (nypost.com), an appointed position. This meant that he had the luxury of not having to worry to much about what people thought. It should also be noted that in the modern age we have more oversight of our elected officials because technology allows regular people to easily express opinions and criticisms. This was not possible during Moses’ time, making his job much easier.

 

I believe that Bloomberg wanted to be the modern equivalent of Robert Moses. He was certainly just as ambitious, and pursued grand scale projects similar to that of his idol. Unfortunately for Bloomberg, the man he wished to imitate left behind too strong of a legacy that New Yorkers were not willing to forgive. The realities of building in the Post-Moses age made it impossible for Bloomberg to be as successful as Moses.

 

Sources:

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/01/18/what-ted-cruzs-new-york-values-attack-is-really-about/

http://nypost.com/2015/07/28/time-to-give-new-yorks-robert-moses-the-public-recognition-he-deserves/

As someone who did not grow up in New York, I found reading about zoning during the Bloomberg administration extremely enlightening. By reading Building Like Moses With Jacobs in Mind by Scott Larson, I was able to better grasp the legal and social tactics that are used to “fix” a neighborhood that is perceived to be blighted.

The Bloomberg administration’s neglect of the needs of the most vulnerable citizens of New York was appalling. In Chapter 3, “The Bloomberg Practice”, Manhattan’s Far West Side was discussed. Larson brought up that it was referred to by developers as “a literal hole in the ground” which could be transformed in a “profitable development” (Larson 34). When proposing developments for the Far West Side, history seemed to repeat itself in reference to Moses and Jacobs’ feuds: while Bloomberg’s planners and developers proposed to build faster, denser, and “better” in efforts to create something profitable, the people for whom they were building had a decidedly Jacobsian response: they simply did not want or need it (Larson 35). It was described as “privatized planning” (Larson 35) that “ran counter to the local community’s own desires with very little public oversight” (Larson 35).

Atlantic Yards was yet another Bloomberg era redevelopment plan, and was meant to be largely residential, with a guarantee of 50% of the housing to be affordable for the middle class. Larson pointed out that they had promised, “30 percent of construction contracts would go to contractors run by minorities and women”(Larson 39). This interested me because eminent domain was being used to forcefully develop this new residential neighborhood, yet the developers were using the promise of fair and progressive hiring to disguise the immorality of their actions. It seemed like a slap in the face to the women and minorities who were displaced in this project. The reading explained (dishearteningly) that despite all the opposition, the development still happened. The promise of money and profit for the upper classes and the government seem to to consistently outweigh the desires of the middle and low-income classes.

The description of the development of Columbia University was possibly the most difficult and infuriating for me to read. The more I read, the more clear it became that the Bloomberg administration did not care about real people, but instead just an esoteric theory of what constitutes the “greater good”. An area that was eventually condemned as blighted was actually exhibiting the beginnings of Jacobs style diversity. Larson noted the mix of small businesses and residential units, providing jobs, homes and upward mobility for the low-income and middle class people who lived there. The Bloomberg administration relied on loopholes and cutting corners in its quest for development at any cost. While all of this was presented as beneficial to the city because it would get rid of an ‘underutilized’ area and replace it with a university, the discussion of it in Larson’s book got me thinking about who/ what constitutes a city. Who are the lucky few that get to benefit from Ivy League education? More broadly, who gets to benefit from the prestige New York City garners from expanding its most globally prominent universities instead of its most affordable ones? The reading was thought provoking on this subject for me because it prompted me to look at how the ‘greater’ good actually affects most people. Does the majority (the hypothetical ‘greater’ in ‘greater good’) actually benefit when the city does things supposedly in their name? Generally no. Small business entrepreneurs, diversity and the real greater good of the former residents of the area was sacrificed for a university that only the super wealthy are likely to have the privilege of using. Sure, you can argue for ‘public’ or ‘greater’ good, but instead of just the good of the city’s wealthiest or the city’s reputation, let’s start arguing for the good of the majority of people and the good of the existing community. The city should work to improve the lives of citizens, and then start asking whether they want an Ivy League university to be expanded, or funding for CUNY.

In Chapter 6, “The Armature for Development” Larson explains, “The Bloomberg Administration generated its own narrative of eminent danger as the justification for a new era of aggressive planning” (Larson 79). Borderline illegal planning practices were used and areas were falsely marketed as blighted, all of which was justified through slippery slope logic of ‘what will happen if we don’t?”. The threat of economic inferiority to other developed countries and cities was lorded over as a cloud of doom, but made no reference to moral inferiority, the fact that sacrificing our impoverished and middle class people and subjugating them to the suburbs only improves our reputation with the 1%. Larson’s points gave me the opportunity to think about how we measure a city’s success as a society: rarely do we compare ourselves to Norway’s happiness, instead we agonize over matching Shanghai’s prestige. I enjoyed the discussion of the “underutilized” areas of NYC because it again brought up some great Jacobsian recurring themes like: a) who wants these new developments? b) for whom are these areas underutilized?.

The more I read Larson’s accounts of urban planning, the more I thought: what is this obsession with catering to the wealthy? Are they really at a loss for housing? Are they going homeless? Is Whole Foods not near enough to them? In The Poor Are Better Off When We Build More Housing For The Rich by Emily Badger, she attempts to answer my question. She argues that as more market rate homes are built for the upper-middle class and wealthy class, the poor will gain better quality housing approximately 30 years in the future because wealthy housing today becomes the low-income housing of tomorrow. She argues that based on economic theory, as more homes are built there is an incremental ease in demand, lowering home prices in the long run. Certainly the theory of this is sound and the intention behind it admirable, but based on my reading of Larson’s book, I feel that her conclusions are misleading. I think that to build for the rich without concern for the poor in the present so that they may be housed in the future can only work on paper or on a computer screen. When real people and real livelihoods are involved, the promise of affordable housing after 30 years of economic strife and homelessness is hardly any consolation to those who are displaced.

In a similar vein, the Bloomberg administration’s propensity for cutting corners to build as much as fast as possible made them lose sight of whom the majority of his constituents are. There is a legal and moral obligation as mayor to serve your city. There comes a point where you seize so many middle class and poor homes and businesses to create parks for those citizens that they have nowhere to live or work. So, sure, you made them a place to relax and play, but now that they are homeless they have to sleep on the benches the city laid out for their amusement. Certainly this is an exaggeration, but my point is this: making people a playground should never be more important than making them a home. My thought after contemplating the reasoning behind zoning is that it let developments seem Jacobsian without having to actually follow her principles and be made accountable through listening to the needs of their community.

It is impossible to make rules that create a good city or a good village or a good neighborhood that will fit every single situation. Let’s ask the people what they want, ask the developers if it is possible, and then start building, creating a compromise between the needs of an economically successful city and the needs of its citizens. Zoning only succeeds in sanitizing and distilling the “public good” and “public space” into a set of distinctly unwanted offerings that can only be called impartial or beneficial by those whose homes and lives are unthreatened.

Works Cited

Larson, Scott. Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Print.

“The Poor Are Better off When We Build More Housing for the Rich.” Washington Post. The Washington Post. Web. 27 Mar. 2016.

 

I found it very interesting that you mentioned that the three E’s ultimately transformed into a philosophical/moral argument supporting certain types of building projects. Originally, the three terms made me think facts and statistics. However, the “narrative of threat” definitely shows how the three E’s definitely can fall into a moralistic argument. Fear mongering often can garner support very quickly, especially is the narrative can place blame on something that happened in the past. Moses “featured liberal use of creative assumptions, delivered as facts,” according to Ballon (Larson 60).  Yet I feel that Jacobs also preyed on emotions and morality. Her narrative of “eyes on the street,” and diversity creates a very Utopian seeming society where everyone takes care of one another. She felt that city planning should involve “knowing” and understanding what each city need. In theory, this idea sounds great, but in practice this type of planning still leaves out the underprivileged who slowly get pushed out of their homes anyways. You also wrote about how planning for future sustainable cities often “romanticizes our sustainable past” which led to an overly vague holistic plan. This romanticizing of “the good old days,” or however it gets phrased is another way of preying on emotions.

Areas that are deemed “blighted” are the areas that are renovated. If we disregard any moral and/or philosophical argument then we should not care about previous residents there. Blighted areas are often repurposed by private companies to make a better profit that what already exists in the area. It would become “more amenable to tourists, to a new class of worked, and to corporate and speculative real estate interests” (Larson 71). The alternative is leaving the area as in which might mean leaving certain people in a very low standard at living. Yet at the same time, they can stay where they are and keep their homes.

In summation, I wonder what factors should considered when doing city planning. If we focus on just the moral aspects, we fall into the trap where the most convincing narrative shapes the city. Facts, even incorrect ones can be skewed to support certain agendas. Should our morals favor lower income people, or should our morals lean towards harming a few for the “greater good”? In other words, should we care about people living in poor income areas, or should we just see the area as an opportunity to make more money for the city and also jobs? Alternatively, if we just focus on facts and numbers, the city might be planned to bring in the highest income possible while disregarding poorer residents. Either way it seems that the city is constantly being shifted to please tourist and higher income classes, or in shorter terms a “‘retaking’ of cities by the upper and middle classes” (Larson 74).

I really like your blog post because it says all the things I could not articulate. Thank you for being my voice.

 

I agree with everything you wrote specifically that it seems almost impossible to detect any ulterior motives from the text of the Regional Plan itself, and that its not surprising that the planners did have ulterior motives in mind. Moreover, I agree with your point that any macro-level decisions are very intricate and that any course of action creates an entirely unique set of problems.

 

Would not you agree that if we had read the entire plan as proposed by Yaro and Hiss that perhaps we would have done the almost impossible and been able to see that there were ulterior motives that were factored into the plan? I read an article by Elliot Sclar and Tony Schumann titled New York: Race Class & Space: A Historical Comparison of the Three Regional Plans for New York in which they point out that within the extended text of the plan we can see that they do not directly address a solution for the social issues that the previous plans have created, but do propose extensive solutions for growing the economy. They argue that this is because of politics, as most decisions are influenced by politics in some way or another. Specifically, the men in charge of the RPA had economic interests that took precedence over the social issues. Ultimately, the authors of the aforementioned essay say that Yaro and Hiss may have been empathetic to the social needs of the era but were limited by the political forces. Now, that may be giving Yaro and Hiss too much credit insofar as how much they really care for the economically disadvantaged, but Shumann and Sclar emphasize that in the text of the Regional Plan is a heavy acknowledgment that these people are essential to creating a sustainable economy. That being said, it is odd that they did not offer concrete solutions and only offered moral exhortations; what good does that do? So either they don’t really care, in which case, why would they include any mention of the economically disadvantaged in a report that will probably only be read by their super wealthy and fiscally biased bosses who would not likely be swayed, or they were being careful not to agitate their employers, following the advice of Dale Carnegie, and trying to win their bosses to their way of thinking; or something else?

 

You got me thinking more about what professor Larson says about creating a narrative of threat in order to accomplish political goals. I think that the way the readings were presented created a “narrative threat “of sorts for Yaro and Hiss and not just the guys above them who ultimately made the decisions for the region. (Admittedly, no one would have read the entire plan). Yaro and Hiss did not have any wicked ulterior motives; their plan was for the betterment of the economy, only as long as it lead to the betterment of as many lives as possible in their quality of living. This is a very utilitarian approach. The moral action is the one that will bring pleasure to the most people and pain to the least people after all things are accounted. The article I mentioned makes the higher ups the ones who ignored the social issues, and renders Yaro and Hiss as helpless pieces of the larger political dynamic, not villains themselves. The point I’m trying to make is that not everyone who makes public decisions is a villain. The most we should ever do is just realize that there are problems; we should not place blame but look for solutions. And these solutions seem to come down to entirely restructuring the sociopolitical structure from the ground up, a daunting and seemingly initially catastrophic series of events. This may even be worse for the long-term sociopolitical and/or socioeconomic structure because the ideal can rarely become reality when it comes to socio-political-economics.

The first reading, “A Region at Risk”, discussed the Third Regional Plan. Unlike the first and second regional plans, this third plan, according to authors Yarro and Hiss, was markedly different. One of the biggest differences noted was that the third regional plan addressed the interconnectedness of urban cities and suburban sprawl. In the overview of the Third Regional Plan, the authors asserted that “more than ever, the economies, societies and environments of all the communities in the Tri-State Metropolitan Region are intertwined, transcending arbitrary political divisions” (6). According to the authors, redevelopment plans had to include both localities because the success of one depended on the success of the other, and the two “share a common destiny” (6).

Even though the plan was developed in 1996, some of the key themes in the Third Regional Plan are particularly important to understanding contemporary urban planning.

For one, as Larson notes in Building Like Moses With Jacobs in Mind the “narrative of threat” is ever-present. in the Third Regional Plan. Like Moses and even Jacobs, the authors spend a lot of time talking about how without the specific instruments listed in the plan, the city would ultimately fall into a cycle of stagnant growth. In this regard, the plan is not different from previous planning agendas such as Moses’ because it relies on threat and perceived morality to garner public support. The “narrative of threat” evident in the plan makes it largely based on morality and ideology. One example of this the focus on the three E’s — economy, environment and equity. In describing the three E’s, the authors focus on philosophical/moral arguments. In describing how each of the three E’s unite us, they write that “we all inhabit the same landscape, breath the same air” and go on to stress that “when our cities and suburbs are interdependent, they succeed or fail as one” (6). They wrap their explanation by stating that “our lives are embedded in far-reaching networks… that stretch across all social, racial, economic, physical and political boundaries” (6). While similarly employing a paternalistic attitude (reminiscent of Moses) towards large scale projects to aid “a region at risk,” it simultaneously focuses the justifications for these plans on the individual, arguing that everyone within the region has responsibility to save the region, presumably by supporting the plan. The authors go on to assert that the current dillema facing the city was due to “global changes coinciding with our own failure to change — of 25 years of economic transformation unfolding worldwide during a generation of underinvestment” (7). While the lack of planning making our cities more vulnerable may have indeed been the case, hindsight is 20/20, and using fear as a method of change may not be the correct approach. Examining the past and attributing current societal ills to failure to act may be a convenient method to garner support to a redevelopment plan, but again shows the tendency of the Third Regional Plan to use ideology and moralistic arguments for proposing these changes.

While the Third Regional Plan does present a similar narrative of threat at most planning initiatives, one of it’s greatest strengths the incorporation of both Moses’ and Jacobs’ ideas for the city. On the one hand, the plan broadens it’s scope to the tri-state region, and focuses heavily on economic development for the city (although simultaneously stressing the importance of focusing equally on the three E’s). In redeveloping the tri-state area to acclimate to a global economy, grandiose projects like those Moses initiated for the city can serve as an enthusiastic model towards the major overhaul of planning that “A Region at Risk” proposes.

On the other hand, it also stressed the importance of citizen involvement and Jacobs’ ideals of natural, organic cities with growth that is conscious of the existing atmosphere of neighborhoods. Remembering that Jacobs’ The Death and Life was a response to the Moses era of urban planning, it makes sense to incorporate some of her ideas towards community building. With such large-scale projects, small neighborhoods within the tri-state region could easily be disregarded or overlooked, as was the case of the South Bronx during the Moses era.

Perhaps one of the most glaring challenges that the plan deemphasizes is the difficulty of implementing the three R’s given such a broad scale redevelopment of the tri-state area — which would include both urban and suburban areas.

One of the best examples of this difficulty is in regards to the environment and sustainability mentioned within the Third Regional Plan. The focus on sustainability as protecting or introducing nature into otherwise industrial environments isn’t a great sustainable model. Sustainable cities mean more than just throwing green-space around, adding parks, and planting trees. Sustainable development must also include a decrease in fossil fuel consumption — most notably in a drastic reduction in dependence on cars. Redesigning suburban sprawl to include walkability and “pedestrian connectivity,” as explained in “Evaluating Pedestrian Connectivity for Suburban Sustainability,” is a unique, region-specific planning issue within itself. Regional transit, as well as more walkable destinations, requires the “retrofitting” of suburban sprawl. In practice, implementing these changes would take a great deal of compliance and coordination with local ordinances across the tri-state area.

In “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?” Scott Campbell highlights that sustainable development  and planning within the urban environment is already facing challenges. He argues that in planning sustainable cities, we tend to “romanticize our sustainable past” and propose plans that are “too vaguely holistic” (1). The planner must therefore contend with the “planners triangle” — with the environment, economy, and social equity at each of the three corners. Unsurprisingly, he argues that that there is a tension between these three points, and with sustainability being in the center. Going back to the three E’s, the authors’ insistence that all three E’s must be given equal consideration, or else the system fails, is overly optimistic.

 

Additional Sources:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdcamp/Ecoeco/Greencities.html

http://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/(ASCE)0733-9488(2001)127:1(1)

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

 

In “ A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area” authors Robert D. Yaro and Tony Hiss discuss the founding of the Regional Plan Association (“RPA”). New York City was growing very fast and there needed to be a way to accommodate everyone. Lewis Mumford thought that instead of promoting growth, efforts should be made to “restrain development and deconcentrate the urban core” (Yaro, Hiss 1)—in other words, stop the growth of the city. However, Thomas Adams, the first planning director of the RPA argued that instead of stopping the growth, it should be accommodated by planning for the future growth of the city.. The goal of the RPA was to plan for the future of the Metropolitan area. Adams turned out to be correct, as evidenced by unsuccessful recent efforts to limit migration and economic development in places like Moscow or Beijing.

Professor Scott Larson in his book Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind, notes that one of the ways that the regional planners like Robert Moses promoted his plans is by persuading business leaders and politicians that the city could only be sustained by using his plans. Robert Moses saw himself as a great planner. However, he used “planning…as an exercise in the mechanics of persuasion” (Larson 59). The constant persuasion is called “the narrative of threat,” or planners’ tendency to say their projects are essential to the future and promote fears that the city will fall apart if they don’t follow their projects or if the projects are not built. Lots of the early planners, like Robert Moses, only did planning for part of their job, but more of their job was spent persuading business leaders and politicians that their plans were the best possible plans. I think that while planning was important, if city planners such as Robert Moses and others could have focused more on a wide variety of opinions and taken them into consideration, he could edit his planning and make an even greater city. In addition, instead of spending so much time trying to persuade that his plan was so good, if more of the city planners saw their plans in the large planning of the city, they would be more likely to agree with him and not need persuading.

Jane Jacobs, however, argued that Moses’s version of city planning was destroying the city. “Ultimately, Jacobs was able to counter the Moses narrative with her assertion that it was Moses and other modernist planners meddling with the natural rhythms and designs of neighborhoods who were rendering cities unliveable” (Larson 61). Jane Jacobs’ viewpoint promoted sustainable cities because she wanted everyone to live together in the city. “The third regional plan…at its heart…is a ‘transit plan’ that is regional in scope, making it consistent with Moses, with much in it about city planning and community design that is derived directly from Jacobs” (Larson 70). This is a key point because of the importance of both Moses and Jacobs to the development of New York City.

Scott Campbell from the university of Michigan has postulated the same key factors of equity, environment, and economy, but he sees the intersection as “sustainable development” as compared to Yaro and Hiss’s “quality of life”. Campbell coins the term “planner’s struggle” for the conflicts that he sees amongst the 3 corners of the triangle.  He sees his formulation as the key to bring social equality into the equation. “Planners would benefit both from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental injustice” (Journal of the American Planning Association).

 

Additional Source: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sdcamp/Ecoeco/Greencities.html

Max, you really nail the question down, and clearly state a well formulated opinion about how Time Square experienced a rebirth. A rebirth of times square allowed it to be revitalized into the bustling hub it is today.

 

In the 1970’s walking through Times Square one would see drugs, alcohol, fights, knifings, and shootings right in the street. The deteriorating street scene impacted loads of people and businesses, including pillars of Times Square such as the New York Times for whom Times Square got its namesake. In an interview with Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of the New York Times he said journalists were often refusing jobs, for fear of walking the one block between Port Authority and their building. Sulzberger related an anecdote, where a truck driver was sitting in his truck waiting for it to be loaded, when he was shot.

A scene of disorder and griminess was present, and crimes and muggings were all too common. My uncle related a story to me, where he was mugged by a group of 10 men, who picked him up, ripped off all his clothes, and ran away leaving him shocked and in his underwear. These types of occurrences drove hoards of people away leaving New York desolate.

 

By the early 1980s New York was on the verge of bankruptcy and Times Square was a symbol of its decline. The city approved a radical redevelopment plan that would’ve gotten rid of the sleaze and culture of Times Square. The plan called for the construction of 27 high-rises. And a quartet that would’ve surrounded and dwarfed the Times Tower. Big signs and flashing lights would’ve been eliminated from Times Square. The city was offering zoning incentives to get people to build bigger building and create a cavern of quiet office buildings.

Clearly, the city was looking for a way to change Times Square. They were hoping, that by uprooting the industry supporting the violence, they’d be able to disperse it, and normalize day to day behavior.

 

Groups like the municipal arts society lead campaigns to stop the city from redesigning times Square. At one such event they staged a blackout to show how Times Square would look at night if it was just an office district. The city eventually abandoned its high-rise plans in the 1980s. Clearly, there was enough pressure to get the city to drop its plans, and a search for new plans ensued.

 

The city came up with a new idea built off shopping and media icons, to revitalize Times Square in a less seedy way. The critical turn-around came when Disney decided to come on condition of less sex shops. The city created new zoning laws to push out the sex shops and encourage big media outlets and high profile shopping in Times Square.

 

The order of events leading to the cities encouraging of Disney to come to Times Square shows the cities scorn of the prevalent sex industry that was Times Square. Today, as you state tourism has grown and crime rates have fallen. Times Square is occupied by new driving forces of more culturally acceptable entertainment and shopping.

 

I’d like to note that, although I definitely see a rebirth of Times Square shining through its changes, elements of revanchism also ever present. The idea of reversing losses caused by changes is a common theme in urban planning. Times Square had almost lost its ability to attract large crowds. It had almost become a struggle to find advertisers to fill the large billboards, and the policy makers missed the glory that once defined Times Square. They wished to recapture elements of old Times Square, and were thus thrilled with the refurbishment of old theatres.

 

Essentially, revanche and rebirth are two related terms. A city enacts a policy of revanche to recover losses and produce a rebirth. And although you describe a rebirth and I agree with you, I think elements of revanche are also prevalent.

This was an interesting read because as I read “A Region at Risk”, it was easy to get caught up in the argument and narrative they were pushing. First of all, I had to keep reminding myself that this was written in 1996, and not more recently, and that they were writing in response to problems they saw back then. But, it was easy to get swept along by what they were saying about how “the economy faced new pressures from technology and global competition” and how the “communities were threatened by sweeping economic and demographic changes” (A Region at Risk, p 4). They even had me further nodding my head along with what they were saying when thy discussed the declining income and employment opportunities, since in another class we’ve been discussing the relationship between poverty and education, and how poverty is a major barrier for kids getting a good education. When they mentioned how our economy was threatened by technological developments and other factors, it made me think of the scene in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” where Charlie’s father was laid off from the toothpaste factory because he was replaced by machines. I was even worried when they described how the region’s quality of life is in decline (p 5).

It wasn’t until I read Professor Larson’s book that I realized I had fallen into the trap of believing everything I read and accepting what they asserted as fact. In his book, Professor Larson wrote “a challenge for promoters of any particular plan is to convince the greater public, by producing superior narratives, that theirs is the preferred vision for the future” (Larson p 59). They put together the narrative that the city was being threatened, and the success and future of the city depended on the city implementing their solutions. Just as how court trials are a competition between lawyers to put forth the most convincing narrative/story of what happened, so also do planners work to put forth the most convincing argument for why we need their plans to save the city. While I think the Third Regional Plan has valid points, such as we need improved schools, better regulation of land, and an economy that can keep up with the rest of the world, I do think they played on people’s fears and tried to manipulate them. I understand that they were still experiencing some effects of the 1989-1992 recession, and were worried about the future of the city, but I do not think the city was in as dire a situation as they claimed.

Professor Larson noted that “this elite group of globally oriented, predominately white-collar industry leaders recommended plan prescriptions and strategies that prioritized their needs” (p 67). I believe that the planners genuinely wanted to help the city and had good intentions, but I also think that they manipulated facts and policies to benefit themselves and/or their allies. I know it’s impossible to come up with a plan that would help everyone, but it seems even harder when all of the people researching the problem and proposing solutions are of the same demographics. At the same time though, I understand what they were trying to do and why. I agree with their assessment that not just one issue can be addressed individually at a time. I agree with their assessment that we must “rebuild the three “E’s” through investments and policies that integrate and build on our advantages, rather than focusing on just one of the “E’s” to the detriment of others” (A Region at Risk, p 6).

The RPA had a grim vision of what New York would look like, and I don’t think New York ended up as badly as they predicted. According to the U.S. Business Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment rates in 2015 decreased from what the were in 2014. Also, the hourly wages for certain jobs are higher in the New York area than the average wages for the United States. Although this is only looking at one year, out of the 20 years that have passed since the RPA published their third regional plan, I still like to think that this shows hope for the New York City area and that New York is more resilient than they thought. According to YIMBY, the fastest growing real estate trade publication in New York, New York City is growing much faster than anticipated, although the RPA expected NY to decline. I know that an increase in population doesn’t necessarily mean a city is flourishing, but I think it is a sign that the city is doing well, since people keep coming. The authors of YIMBY write “The greater New York region gained 526,443 people between 2010 and 2014” and that the city is “undergoing an urban renaissance”. One of the problems, though, is that the housing demand cannot keep up with the growth. I think the authors make a good point when they write “Continued growth is a good thing, but with over 20 million people now living in the New York metropolitan region, the city cannot keep moving forward without a comprehensive regional planning policy that covers infrastructure and housing in both New York and New Jersey.” I do not have any solutions to offer though.

 

http://www.bls.gov/regions/new-york-new-jersey/summary/blssummary_newyorkcity.pdf

From the assigned excerpts in A Region at Risk and Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind we were presented with two different representations of the Third Regional Plan (herein referred to as TRP). From Yaro and Hiss’s brief comparisons of the first, second, and third regional plans, and from how they explain the TRP, the TRP’s holistic approach to urban designing seems to be the wisest choice when making decisions that will have large-scale global consequences, because “if you pull on a thread, you move the stars,” (Yaro, 2) and that’s some serious universe shaking stuff. The TRP’s core of balancing the Three E’s – economy, equity and environment – was presented to us as a plan for improving everyone’s overall quality of life, especially that of the lower class, by strengthening the region instead of expanding it. But then we read the fifth chapter in Professor Larson’s book and the TRP seems like it directly made gentrification into a corporate and governmentally controlled agenda to the supreme benefit of economy and environment, but at the expense of equity. As Professor Larson says very eloquently, “gentrification emerged as a calculated component of the intentional and methodical production of urban environments amenable to global corporations and their highly compensated workers,” (Larson, 73), and thus gentrification became an economic tool that furthers the economic disparity between classes.

What we have here is the ideal and the reality. Another plan went awry, as plans do; but why did this one falter? Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind had me blaming the “system.” The politicians and billionaires, and even the authors of the plan, had economic interests that corrupted the execution of the TRP. The social factors to the plan were weighed by rich, elite white men, who were more concerned with their own economics than with establishing a sustainable economy with less income inequality; immediate economy TRUMPed equity and sustainable economy. Undoubtedly, this did play a large role in how subsequent urban development occurred.

Still, do not think that all of the “system” could not give a damn about the lower classes and that only college students, the lower class, and Bernie Sander champion the cause for income equality (herein referred to as IE), because the authors of the TRP were very aware and conscientious of this issue. According to Tony Schumann and Elliot Sclar, the TRP indeed gave “prominence to issues of education and access to jobs” by “recognizing discrimination and segregation as obstacles to labor force productivity,” and characterizing the immigrant and minority workforce as essential to its growth and competitiveness. Moreover, it is stated in the TRP that the region is “shamed by its persistent racial and income segregation.” (Schumann). Schumann assures us that the TRP acknowledges the connection between segregation and income inequality as a big problem facing the future of the regional economy. Now, it is true that Professor Larson acknowledges that the TRP was very concerned with IE and increasing general life quality for as many people as possible, as he mentions Jacobsean philosophy multiple times, so I could very well have missed the point. But, I do not think I have because he stresses the “corporate agenda” aspect, implying to me that they did not care even a bit for the disadvantaged.

So, I ask again, how did it manage to not aid the problem if part and parcel of the documented plan was in considerable favor of helping the situation of this population? According to the same Tony and Elliot, it comes down to a contradiction in the Regional Plan Association that prevented the TRP authors from proposing an extensive and effective concrete campaign to combat segregation and income inequality at its roots. Yaro and Hiss, only provide “moral exhortations” (Schumann) in the TRP, which most people did not read and even if they had, would that have done anything? Anyway, the contradiction is that they are spearheading the efforts to encourage unified regional development that does not use up land as it enhances its human resources efforts, while corporate sponsorship of the RPA limits the practical initiatives it can suggest, and when social issues clash with immediate political issues, politics typically are more important to bureaucratic entities. Indeed, Schumann and Sclar point out that Lewis Mumford articulated this underlying principle of the RPA and assert that it is apparent in all three regional plans. Mumford said that the RPA was made to “meet the interests and prejudices of the existing financial rulers… and its aim from the beginning was as much welfare and amenity as could be obtained without altering any of the political or business institutions which have made the city precisely what it is.” (Schumann). Assuming this is true, we see that the RPA became more socially conscious and caring over time.

This is a story like many others. One in which what is popularly conceived as morally correct or morally repugnant is disregarded in favor of politics. It is a corruption of sorts, but what is the root of the corruption? Stories like this make us wonder how far do we have to go to establish institutional social change.

additional sources:

by Joshua Libin

I really enjoyed reading your post Max!

I wrote our first assignment about the redevelopment of Times Square so it was really interesting to see another’s point of view on the subject. I completely agree that the new image that was created for Forty-second Street left lasting impacts, which can be seen today.

I do, however, think it was not simply the “Disneyfication” image that aided in decreasing the crime in the area and helped jumpstart the economy. In the redevelopment process there were a lot of other changes that were made, in addition, to the visible commercial changes we can see as we walk down the street. For example, mayor Rudy Giuliani passed a law that prohibited “sex businesses from operating within 500 feet of homes, places of worship, schools – or critically for Times Square- each other” (NY Daily News). The commercial aspect and all the new stores really helped create a completely new image and encourage a safer environment, but throughout the years policy makers and government officials passed laws like this which helped make sure that it would be very hard to go back to things the way they were before. The stage was set for a completely different economy through such implementations. Another way that Times Square became such a central location for tourism, as Reichl describes, was because the mass transit system was being created in the decades to follow (47); it became a hotspot by having stops on Forty second Street through several train lines, both above and below ground, and terminal of a ferry.

I agree that choosing Disney as the theme to guide the redevelopment was a financially intelligent idea, but I also think there was a lot of factors that contributed to choosing this. When I read the source that you added to your blog I noticed that Robert Stern, who was a major architect that took part in the development, had ties to Disney so that was probably a reason that added to the economic benefits.

I really enjoyed reading the New York Times article you also added to your blog because it talked about how the rebirth of Times Square was heavily impacted by government intervention. As we have often discussed in classed the use of eminent domain was largely used to justify the government taking over all the buildings to allow for the plan to become reality. Many did try to resist this and, in fact, there were 47 lawsuits against this project. These are things that are not often highlighted. Indeed, many of the things going on at Times Square would not make everyone comfortable, but there were people and businesses there before and a project like this displaced them.

I do find you to make a very valid point that there are many remains of the old Times Square left today. As Reichl states, “commercialized sex has proved to be a lasting and stubborn feature of the area ever since (49). Some people point to the topless women that you find taking pictures with tourists as an example of this lasting commercialization of sex. Reichl uses the shows that go on in the theaters to demonstrate that this sexual culture still pervades the area. The history of any place is hard to simply erase, and sometimes it shouldn’t be erased; it is what brought it to its current place and we cannot deny it.

Thank you for all your insights Max!

– Eleni

Hi Samantha!

I really enjoyed reading your post because of it’s personal touch tied in with the facts.

I can definitely relate to al the anecdotes you spoke about in your post. I work in the city twice a week, and take late-night classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology. While both the company I work at and the school I attend are in the garment district, in order to get to places that sell kosher food I need to cross through times square. I would also consider myself a part of the Times Square Demographic. 

As a woman, I am always hyper aware of whatever it going on around me. I am fully cognizant of the fact that I do not look very strong, something else you touched upon in your post, and that I relate to.

I completely agree with your characterization of New Yorkers in that we ‘tend to avoid interaction with strangers a much as possible’. However, I do not feel that is what Delaney meant in his essay. As Willow already pointed out in her response, the times Square that dElaney was referencing was not one filled with strangers and tourists, ti was part of the community of that specific location. Today, very few people live in that area at all. The LGBT community of Delaney’s time adopted Times Square as their city center. The people you might meet in Delaney’s Times Square were not complete strangers. I also think it’s important to note that Delaney is speaking about a time before it was normal to walk down a street carrying a smartphone. People used to actually see things when they walked around. With their eyes. Not their cameras. Take a minute to let that sink in. Crazy, I know.

Whether or not Times Square has been ‘fixed’ or needs ‘fixing’ at all is something that I have not made up my mind about yet, but I feel these points are an important part of the discussion.

-Rebecca

I find it incredible how an area like Times Square can be so radically different today than it was a century ago. Todays Times Square stands in stark contrast to the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, prostitute-filled area that was called by the same name not that long ago. Reconstructing Times Square brought to light many of the issues facing an earlier Times Square, a good deal of which are arguably still present. Reichl challenged me to think about the methodology employed by public officials in rebranding Times Square, but left me ultimately convinced that the area indeed tells a story of rebirth.

Although there were various events in the early and mid nineteenth century that demonstrated a change from residential area to commercial, business hotspot, I think the true transformation came later on. Nearly twenty years ago, Times Square underwent a change that is today termed ‘disneyfication’. In nineteen ninety-three, Disney expressed interest in opening a theatre on forty-second street and entered talks with the forty-second street development project. Public officials and city leaders conveyed the belief that, “Disney’s presence alone would symbolize the conquest of Forty-second street by the forces of good over evil” (158). Statements like these made me realize that the entire Disney project was predicated on sending a message and creating an image. Times Square should cease being this dangerous, unenjoyable location in the minds of New Yorkers. The potential for new, exciting attractions were plentiful and Disney was seen as the catalyst for bringing about those attractions.

In all honesty, at first I considered the possibility that Disney was chosen over other entertainment companies because of financial influence. While economic forces were certainly at play in the decision behind development of a Disney theatre, the goal of the project was nevertheless one of rebranding. After all, “With Disney in place, the new image of West Forty-second street as an area of popular entertainment was sealed” (158). In addition, statements by public officials and leaders of the development project placed a strong emphasis on the company’s “symbolic presence”. Disney’s strong arm tactics and firm negotiation methods shouldn’t detract from the projects motivation to reshape public perception of the area by introducing a company with positive presence. Moreover, the deal with Disney brought about a stream of deals for new entertainment attractions, restaurants, bars, and cafes. The introduction of Disney essentially transformed Times Square into a place of live entertainment, exciting merchandise, and revamped tourism.

What truly categorizes the Disnyefication of Times Square as a rebirth, in my mind, is the fact that its effects have continued unto today.  Disney not simply boost the economy and jumpstart commercial activity on a temporary basis, it effectively changed the downward trajectory of crime and poverty facing the area. A recent article published by Janos Marton illustrates the transformation of Times Square as facilitated by the Disneyfication of the late nineteenth century. He emphasizes the “exodus of porn shops, peep shows, and other vice” as well as the marking of Times Square as “one of the biggest tourism hotspots in the world”. A New York Times article published a few years ago quantifies many of the benefits brought about by a transformed Times Square. In the article After 30 Years, Times Square Rebirth Is Complete, Charles Bagli focuses on various economic and cultural measures of the locations success. He shares how, “The number of tourists is up about 74 percent since 1993, and attendance at Broadway shows has soared to nearly 12 million”. He goes on to discuss rent paid by large corporations, the downfall of crime figures, and other measures. In many ways, this article demonstrates how the effects of a late nineteenth century deal with Disney were far from temporary. On the contrary, Disney brought about growth and development that has continued to this day.

The argument that Time Square has tremendous room for improvement when it comes to crime, danger, and commercial domination is a valid one. Many of the issues faced a century ago have not been completely resolved and surely warrant attention by todays public figures. That said, it is incredibly difficult to discuss the rise in tourism, cultural activity, and economic prosperity without using the word ‘rebirth’. At the end of the day, Times Square transformed into a place people are excited by and enjoy visiting, a stark change from the dangerous, dirty area it once was.

 

Sources

• http://untappedcities.com/2015/02/11/today-in-nyc-history-times-square-turns-the-corner-in-1981/

• http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/nyregion/04square.html

 

Rebirth: the action of reappearing or starting to flourish or increase after a decline.

Revanchism: when policy is designed to recover lost territory or status.

Which one of these do I believe applies to the change that occurred in the late 1900s in the area known as Times Square? When I first approached the question at first I thought rebirth. In my mind Times Square was an area that over a century has gone through so many rebirths before becoming the huge attraction it is today. When it was known as Long Acre Square it featured predominantly horses and carriages. In 1904 when the New York Times set up their headquarters there the area was renamed for it. With the introduction of the sex industry and its later dissolution in the late 1900s to the Disneyfication of the city I truly believed that Times Square had a history that told of its rebirth, from a small time trading area to one that dominates New York City today. However, after reading Reconstructing Times Square I started to feel a bit differently about it, especially after reading about the events that took place to bring Disney to NYC. I realized that though much of the change that people were calling for was based on the social issues that plagued the area, the methods with which the government took to solve these problems, were completely economical.

In 1993 when Disney expressed interest in opening a location in NYC and reached out to the 42 Street Development Project, they jumped on the offer and did whatever they could to get Disney. They were so desperate that they offered to pay the $250,000 necessary to buy the land for the site. As it says in the reading, other companies were offered but none of them had the symbolic might of Disney. I totally agree with this. Disney is a multi-million dollar corporation synonymous with happiness. People wanted a return to the Old Times Square and this was the best option at bringing that nostalgia to life. As soon as the deal was made public the business poured in from all sources, restaurants, bars, and cafes. Times Square was going to become a nice place for people again. The old status of what it was was being reclaimed little by little.

What I realized after all this was that people hated Times Square because it wasn’t safe, it was full of prostitution, and was home to people that were considered vagrants and criminals. Instead of looking for reasons as to why these people were in the situations they were in and solving that, they resorted to getting rid of the businesses and shops that facilitated these individuals. They used money and made deals to bring in nicer businesses so they could attract wholesome people and families instead.

Back to the original question, Times Square: Rebirth or Revanchism? I can honestly say that I do not have the same positive view as I did about the history of Times Square. I feel that the area has gone through more of a revanchism because many of the things in the area have to do with choices tied to economics. For example, in the New York Times article, Several Days After Christmas, Toys ‘R’ Us Closes in Times Square, Elizabeth Harris discusses how the megastore is closing because of the high rent costs. It turned out that this was the same reason the Disney store that changed Times Square in the late 90s closed up shop. It’s interesting that the two stores that without a doubt helped create the image of Times Square as this wholesome tourist attraction are now being closed because the rent is too high and staying in these areas would not prove profitable. The article says that a Gap Inc. will be opening stores there to which one woman replied, “Oh wonderful… we really need another one of those.” Seeing that these stores have closed because they simply cannot be open anymore makes me wonder how the landscape of Times Square will change within the next few years. How will people see it then? Are things about to change again?

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/04/nyregion/04square.html?_r=0

 

 

 

Hey Samantha!

 

I thought that you had very interesting insight on Times Square. I particularly found your anecdotes contrasting your feelings about modern day Times Square to your Mother’s lingering fear of the area.

While I thought your musings on the social changes in Times Square were very interesting, I did disagree somewhat with your analysis of Delany’s essay. I believe that when you talk about talking to strangers on the street, you are referencing the part of Delany’s article when he talks about sexual and nonsexual exchanges between people on the street before the rezoning of Times Square. Understandably, as women in New York, any sort of verbal or physical contact with strangers clearly jumps out as dangerous to us. However, I think this is a case where we have to analyze the circumstances that the LGBT community was facing in 1960’s and 1970’s New York. Many young people had been kicked out of their homes without money because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Furthermore, some LGBT people were unable to obtain a job due to prejudice, or were fired from their jobs if they were somehow ‘outed’. There were very few places where people could be themselves and find more people with whom they could identify. People were searching for comradery and also for unconventional moneymaking activities, and Times Square became a place where both of those things could happen. Given the social norms of the time, and the cultural safe house that Times Square was, it is very hard to apply our modern day assertions about talking to strangers to the people who lived, worked and sought pleasure in pre- zoning Times Square. As Delany expressed in his essay, social interactions in Times Square were really not between strangers, as most people lived or lingered around the neighborhood consistently, meaning that even if you had not spoken to someone before, you likely had seen their face.

 

In short, your blog got me thinking about the actual meaning behind Delany’s essay. I have come to the conclusion that it is not fair to classify this essay as solely being about the ‘safety’ of past and present Times Square. Instead, I think Delaney was attempting to paint a picture of a cultural center, with all of its positives and negatives, being dismantled by the capitalist desire for a money making tourist hot spot. Something that I agree with in your analysis is that Times Square really is not safer now than it was then. It has just managed to mask its crime with a populated, ‘safe’ looking façade. If Times Square was corporeal, it would be Mickey Mouse smoking a cigarette. But that is what makes the rezoning of Times Square so much more futile. They destroyed an oasis for oppressed communities. Furthermore, they did it through the slow eviction of poor and underserved minority groups, letting them slip deeper into poverty and consequently become more susceptible to the lure of crack cocaine. After all of that heartache, all of those human lives damaged in the name of ‘safety’, nothing even improved. All that was accomplished was a shiny new tourist trap and the destruction of any eyes-on-the-street policing that would have occurred when there was an actual community there.

Thanks for the thought provoking read!

~Willow

I believe that most of us are aware of Time’s Square’s past reputation for being seedy and dangerous, but the reading this week went farther in-depth, and really explained the gradual changes that have taken place and the changing role of the square as the city developed. It changed from a residential area into theaters and other businesses became crime and pornography ridden, and then was slowly and forcibly “renewed”. To be honest, I did not expect there to be much controversy regarding this. But in the second reading, the author argued that interaction between people became limited and that not all of the so-called “shady” industries in Time’s Square had been bad.

I pass by Times Square at least twice a week nowadays. I have late-night dance rehearsals on 38^th street. I suppose in some ways, I could be considered a member of the modern Times Square demographic. I even know a girl who plays the violin sometimes on the streets to get some spending money. Walking around this past Wednesday night, I thought about what it must have been like in the past, according to the reading. I probably would have gotten some serious looks for saying I had to go to Time’s Square because I danced.

However, as much as we would like to see Times Square as a prime example of urban renewal, it’s still not the safest place in my opinion, despite the police presence (and honestly, I don’t even see the police that often). My mother always tells me how she used to be scared to walk though the area, especially at night, and you can see how she still doesn’t quite trust it by the way she clutches her bag extra tightly and constantly looks around her. It’s definitely a contrast to me, plowing through tourists with single-minded determination while rolling my eyes when they insist on walking far too slowly for my liking. I’m definitely more comfortable than she is. But I don’t particularly trust anyone either.

In that way, I disagree with the second reading. I feel that New Yorkers in general tend to avoid interaction with strangers as much as possible. I don’t think that the changes that occurred in Times Square created that. There might be a lot of tourists, but that doesn’t mean I never run into anyone I know. And I would never talk to a stranger regardless of where I am. That kind of interaction is just unsafe, especially considering I’m a rather small person practically begging to be robbed or harassed. There is no way I would ever talk to someone to give him or her advice about what to do with a body.

There are always those costumed people asking for money and other street performers whose intentions I question. Also, the many topless women wandering around always made me rather uncomfortable. I understand that it’s legal to be topless, but in my opinion, there are some things that I don’t want to see, or that parents don’t want their children to see, especially considering the large number of tourist families that pass through. The battle of what is OK and not OK in Times Square is still ongoing. Way back when, the city had trouble removing the sex industry from the square because it was against people’s rights (Stern 1999). So they decided to condemn buildings known for it instead for economic blight. Nowadays, the same issue is happening with the street performers. An article from CNN explains how they are legally allowed to be there. However, many see them as causing trouble or ruining Times Square’s family-friendly atmosphere. Occasionally, costumes characters are arrested, and not being able to see any of their faces adds a level of suspicion on top of it (Louis 2015). The Revlon “Kiss Cam” must now be shut off because the distraction encourages crime. And even half a block from where I have dance rehearsal, there is a rather shady looking place advertising young attractive belly dancers inside.

In my opinion, Times Square hasn’t been “fixed” really. Tourism has increased, and as traffic increases, the area further becomes a target. Not only is it a terrorist target, but one for thieves and people aggressively selling things on the street. Times Square has always had this central location, and no matter how many times the ownership of the buildings change, it will always attract people, both good and bad. Crime rates may have gone down, but it will always be an area of concern. The “cleaner” the square gets, the more attractive it is for foreign tourists. The more tourists, the more attractive the area is for thieves and con people. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that will probably never be able to be stopped. Yes, the crime level is certainly not as bad as 30-40 years ago. But even with increased policing and rebuilding in the area, it still hasn’t reached the level of safety and comfort some would have liked.

 

Bibliography (Sources)

Louis, Errol. Should topless women be banned in Times Square? August 24, 2015. http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/23/opinions/louis-times-square-naked-women/ (accessed March 2016).

Stern, William J. The Unexpected Lessons of Times Square’s Comeback. 1999. http://www.city-journal.org/html/unexpected-lessons-times-square%E2%80%99s-comeback-12235.html (accessed March 2016).

 

~~~ Samantha

I find it interesting that you and Jalissa both cited paternalism–in your case, how Moses was part of a “class and generation that was not about helping one’s fellow man” and how Jacobs’ motivation is different than Moses’ due to her not being a “rich white man”. I have to disagree on this point somewhat. Although that may have been true during his early life, Caro describes how Moses idealistically and stubbornly fought for projects that would better the people before the Depression made him a jobless husband with three mouths to feed (Wait Until Evening)–if anything, I would say his need for money–i.e., his not not being a rich white man–may ultimately be what led him to shift away from for-the-people politics to become the unrelenting authoritarian he ultimately became known for.

I do agree, however, that the policies he acted upon were more in the interesting of efficiency and self-satisfaction than care for the actual people of the city. I also agree that the Cold War may have played a part in his more “selfish” policies; the fact that he became public enemies with FDR, who is remembered for his “socialist” New Deal policies, certainly suggests some aversion to socialist policy, or at least a preference for its opposite (Wait Until Evening).

I also agree that Jacob’s more community-driven policies would be more “acceptable” in today’s world than Moses’ (at least by the general public–those who made millions off of policies likes Moses’ would probably disagree). As Jalissa pointed out, efforts at establishing participatory budget policies in New York City have proven citizens’ interest in being involved with their communities; people who were previously inactive regarding voting and politics taking more of an interest in their community (Sangha, “Putting in Their 2 Cents”). Indeed, although they may not have been initially, Moses’ motivations for changing the city as he did were largely self-serving.

I enjoyed reading your response, Jalissa. I agree with your points that Jane Jacob’s ideal city is composed of a diverse population with various building structures. She did not agree with “orthodox urbanism,” or the classical teachings of how a successful city is run and thought that this would cause more harm than good in building a city.

I agree with you that many of Jacob’s initiatives are in place today. Like you said, today we have participatory budgeting in many communities where residents can input their views on how the taxpayers’ money should be effectively spent. This seems exactly like what Jacob’s vision was–to have the residents input on what they would like to see happening in their community. She is the one who fostered the participation of the community instead of city planners deciding how a community should best be built and run.

Jane Jacobs thought that “orthodox urbanism” was the wrong way to plan for a successful city because one cannot build a successful city using specific formulas of green-space and types of building because it does not take the population’s ideas into account. On page 15 of the introduction of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs writes about her encounters with residents in East Harlem who hated the lawn because they had no input in making it. It was the city planners who thought it would be good for the people who lived there, so they added it without the input of the residents. The people she talked to proved her point in that building certain spaces will only work if the people living there have a say in what is being built. However, she thinks of her own formula for building a successful city, which is exactly what she was trying to prove is the wrong way to build (Jacobs 150-151). She does not know that the people living in the city necessarily want a diverse city containing different types of buildings until she asks them, and no where in her four points is asking the residents what they want to build in their complex.

Despite Jacobs’ slight inconsistencies, I agree with the points you make, Jalissa, about how Jane Jacob’s would compose a successful city. Many of her ideas are implemented today. She fostered community participation, which we have today and many of the communities within New York City are diverse with varying structures. I can now notice and appreciate varying structures and diversity more than I have in the past thanks to Jane Jacobs.

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..

When reading assigned articles, it so often and so easily becomes a robotic action that students just automatically perform. They frequently do not even process the material and simply accept the given information as fact. In reading Introduction and The Generators of Diversity from Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities and David Halle’s Who Wears Jane Jacobs’s Mantle in Today’s New York City, I went on an autopilot of sorts. I welcomed Jacobs’s person and relationship centered ideals in contrast to Moses’s “I will do whatever is best for this city, provided that the city only consists of white men who own automobiles” approach. I did not, however, question the mechanisms by which Jacobs’s would actualize her ideals. I really enjoyed reading all of the blogs because they provided me with some extra insight; in particular, though, I thoroughly appreciated Kristen’s blog because of her well phrased and appropriately raised criticisms of Jacobs.

The first issue raised concerned Jacobs’s central belief in creating a prosperous city: diversity. Kristen very appropriately brought up the fact that, while Jacobs constantly called for diversity in cities, she never proposed a means of implementing such diversity. I agree with Kristen’s observation that this, however optimistic, does not seem feasible. After reading this blog, I found myself struggling with this idea of diversity; what kind of diversity is Jacobs calling for? The diversity of people? The diversity of businesses? It became clear through Halle’s article that Jacobs was an advocate for the diversity of buildings, meaning that she supported a healthy mix of tall and short and old and new buildings, but Jacobs, herself, wrote in Introduction that this kind of diversification is a difficult undertaking due to the lack of funding available. Furthermore, I agree with Kristen in her comment that one cannot just force entire cities to diversify. Would city planners force members of one community to transplant to another or coerce business owners to move their sources of income to uncharted territory for their industry? Had I not come across Kristen’s blog, I most likely would not have thought to question the likelihood of Jacobs’s vision being actualized. While I still believe that Jacobs’s diversity-centered vision is more reasonable that Moses’s transportation-centered vision, I can see now that it does carry its own cons.

Kristen also called attention to Jacobs’s generalization that “urban life was really better and the maximum number of people possible deserved to live it” (Halle 240) in comparison to suburban and rural life. Kristen maintained that she believes that suburban and rural life is superior to urban life due to their less dense populations and ample “green areas.” It is impossible to pass a clear judgment on which setting is better because it is a matter of personal preference, as Kristen admits, but I disagree with Kristen’s claim. While her opinion is completely valid, I can understand Jacobs’s point of view; I think it goes back to the idea of diversity. I feel, although I may have misunderstood, that Jacobs so heavily favored diversity in cities because it allowed the residents to experience so many different aspects of life in a spatially convenient way. This is definitely true in New York City, as it is in most cities. Take Queens for example: while this is a pretty broad area to contemplate, one can visit a movie theater, a shopping mall, a botanical garden, a small corner store, a museum, and endless other venues all within the matter of a few minutes’ commute, whereas in a suburban area like Southold in Long Island, New York, one can visit a supermarket in town, but must travel a few towns away to see a movie, and a few more towns away to reach an outlet mall. The inconvenience of this spatial barrier can easily discourage residents of Southold to experience out-of-town activities. I personally believe that limiting one’s daily life in this way lessens the quality of that life. At the same time, I can completely see Kristen’s point because the fast-paced New York City life can be extremely stressful compared to the relatively relaxed atmosphere of a small suburban setting. In this case, though, I believe that accessibility outweighs a serene environment.

In terms of the population density issue in cities, I may be mistaken, but Jacobs was in favor of building up rather than initiating new constructions. To my understanding, Jane Jacobs was in favor of population density in cities, but allowing this great population to exist without the erasure of green space to accommodate the population.

I also found it interesting that the self-proclaimed Jane Jacobs disciples severely misinterpret her values for their own personal gain. They manipulate her for-the-people type of ideology to further their own agendas. I enjoyed reading the supplemental article Kristen posted. It was exactly as ridiculous as I expected it to be from my impression of it from the Halle publications, even if it did make a good point about Jacobs’s unrealistic views of diversity.

Thank you, Kristen, for a thought provoking blog. It was a pleasure to read and easy to respond to. I think you had a good understanding of the material and posed perfectly valid questions.

 

The introduction to Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, for the most part, sums up some of the difficulties facing New York City at the time of her writing (1960’s). Neighborhoods such as Morningside Heights were descending on a downward spiral towards a slum like squalor, in spite of the city’s multiple planning efforts to revitalize the area. To Jacobs, this allegiance to “orthodox urbanism” – employing classical teachings to city neighborhoods that clearly did not work – on the part of the city’s planners was not redeveloping the city, but sacking the city instead.

In Jacobs’s view, a successful urban city is one that has diversity. According to her, this diversity is not automatically generated,but is instead  generated because of the various efficient economic pools of use that they form.

I believe that significance of her methodology lie in the fact that she rejects the paternalistic, authoritarian approach to city planning and instead fosters (on some level) a sense of community participation in the city planning process. Although her approach is by no means a democratic process, it relies on the diversity of communities and therefore interacts with how individual people within a neighborhood have shaped the space around them. Her idea of city planning is then an extension of this, maintaining the value of previous structures and economic pools while consistently adding new ones that fit within the system.

Based on this principle, it is entirely possible for huge cities like New York to develop in a holistic way, examining neighborhood dynamics as well as fostering economic and density growth (even if the power to do so is centralized within a city agency). As David Halle acknowledges  in “Who Wears Jane Jacobs’s Mantle in Today’s New York City,” “The Death and Life is a cry for better central planning, albeit a planning that recognizes and respects local and market-based characteristics of neighborhoods” (240). In terms of influence, Jacobs’s work seemed to be ahead of it’s time in promoting a more inclusive methodology of city planning that is “geographically balanced and sensitive to neighborhoods,” a method which the Bloomberg administration implemented in the Department of City Planning (240).  

Interestingly, it was community boards, not city officials who misconstrued Jacobs’s arguments. Her reaction to Moses and the “modern world” was not one that promoted a return back to small, intimate cities, but one that was growing with diversity (both old and new) and increasing density. According to her arguments, tall buildings that were opposed in Greenwich Village were at odds with her fundamental ideas. To allow the city to grow, old structures should mingle in close quarters with new, and the city should also build upwards if necessary to facilitate greater urban density.

The days of authoritarian city planners (at least to the extent it was during Moses’ time) has ended. Communities are more interested in democratic ways of becoming involved in their communities, and city wide initiatives have shown this to be true.  Participatory budgeting for example, has been implemented in various community boards throughout the city. In this program, citizens are able to directly allocated funds towards various projects within their community, such as investing in public spaces like parks or recreational facilities. While this doesn’t directly influence the new structures entering a neighborhood, it does provide an opportunity for maintaining some of the old structures Jacobs described as essential to urban diversity. Overall, Jane Jacobs’s legacy of activism and central planning was a valuable starting point for the greater sense of representation that exists in city planning today.

 

Participatory Budgeting: http://ideas.pbnyc.org/page/about

Although many criticize Jacobs for not having a college degree and being self-taught, it was for this exact reason that she was able to accomplish as much as she did. Instead of learning “the ‘value’ of top-down planning and modernist mega-projects” in University, she learned by observing the city and the people that called that city home. Jacobs understood that the only way to better a city is to take into account both the social and economic needs of all its residents. Jane Jacobs believed that “big cities are natural generators of diversity and prolific incubators of new enterprises and ideas of all kind” (Jacob, 145). The intermingling of different people, professions, cultures, and cuisine is what allows a city to achieve its greatness.

It was this belief that led to her to advocate against the urban renewal programs and the works of Robert Moses. In the introduction to her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she criticizes urban developers of her time for focusing on fixing the issue automobile traffic, explaining that cities have more economic and social concerns that traffic, and if one is unable to recognize that than he will never be able to understand how the city itself works. Jacob continues to explain that city planning and the art of city design is a “pseudoscience” and those who abide by it “have yet to embark upon the adventure of probing the real world” (9). In other words, those that bulldoze the slums of the city and the dilapidated building are completely misunderstanding the complexity and greatness of a city. It isn’t enough for the inhabitants of a city to be diverse, but the buildings and infrastructure need to reflect that as well.

Jacobs believed that cities should “foster a mosaic of architectural styles and heights,” while allowing people from different ethnic, income, and racial backgrounds to live in close proximity. The streets should be filled with mix-sized buildings, little corner stores, and pocket parks for people to meet casually, rather than high-rise development, big commercial projects, and highways carved through neighborhoods. This is why Jacobs was among the most “articulate voices against ‘slum clearance.’”

On page nine, of her introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, writes about the neighborhood of North End. Although, North End was in fact a great place with statistics confirming it was a safe and healthy place to live, it was still deemed as a slum. If one were to visit North End, one would be amazed by all of the buildings that had been rehabilitated and the life that was pouring from the buildings onto the streets. North End was revived, by the continuous retouches like neatly repointed brickwork, new blinds, freshly painted building, and a burst of music as a door was opened. And remarkably no bulldozer was necessary. Not only were the people who lived there happy, but also there were businesses such as upholstery making, metalworking, carpentry, and food processing. North End serves as an example to show the type of contribution that a neighborhood that is deemed to be a ‘slum’ can actually bring to a city.

It was through observation and mindfulness of the people and buildings that surrounded her that made Jane Jacob the influential urban developer and activist that she is known to be. Although she may have gone to jail a few times for protesting Moses and other like-minded urban planners, her efforts weren’t for nothing. It was because of her work that helped catalyze grassroots movement against urban renewal planning, in New York and around the entire country. Her belief that residential neighborhoods should be both lively and diversity filled allowed for cities to look the way they do to date. There is a current revival of many areas of American cities that were once deemed slums. These cities are filled with old buildings with a modern twist. Lofts are being converted into new residential areas, historic districts are being restored, and there is an overall residential real-estate boom in many cities around America.

 

Additional Works Used:

http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/146/janejacobslegacy.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2006/04/home_remedies.html

 

As we have already discussed several times in class and in a paraphrase the words of the experts on the topic we watched in that stimulating video, Robert Moses cared less about people than he did cars. Again, as we have discussed, his projects, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway, was built with little care for the people living in the neighborhoods they affected. Using the example of the Cross Bronx Expressway that I am now familiar with from our class discussion, the construction of that particular highway, though beneficial, perhaps, to those using it, particularly those travelling to Moses’s somewhat beloved Long Island via his Whitestone or Throgs Neck bridges, remains to this day detrimental to the socio-economic situation of the South Bronx—a neighborhood, it might be added, delineated by the very existence of the Cross Bronx—and its residents.

Addressing and contradicting Moses’s attitude is the purpose of Jane Jacobs’s famed book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as she herself says in the Introduction to that selfsame opus. Her opening words, wasting no time, are “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding…on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding” (3). Having just completed a discussion concerning Robert Moses’s disregard for people, it is obvious that he and those like him are the object of her opposition. The fact of the matter is that the two were operating in entirely different worlds, and their respective methodologies reflect that distinction.

Moses lived in a world that went, over the course of his career, through two Red Scares. Although aspects of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that allowed Moses to complete several of his projects resonates, to some extent, with socialist principles of government assistance to those who require it, much of that was undone or reduced by the middle of the fifties. Moses was of a class and generation that was not about helping one’s fellow man economically or on a grand scale. Jacobs, however, was younger, and, moreover, a woman (as is, not a rich white man). She was not about building a city for the rich, nor even the middle class. Jacobs advocated the building of cities that would stimulate diversity and “argue[d] for high population densities in cities” (Halle 238). In contrast to Moses’s love of winding highways that were parks in and of themselves, Jacobs wanted places for people to live.

In today’s climate, the argument of whose perspectives are better aside, Jacobs ideas are probably more popularly acceptable. After all, consider how many times in class we gave scathing reviews of Moses’s work. In an increasingly globalized world, Jacobs’s views of a diversified city are much easier to accept—and, possibly, better than Moses’s, although that’s a different essay.

 

While Jane Jacobs seems to have had good ideas that I agree with partially, I have a few critiques/comments regarding them.

She lists the problems that the current attitude toward city planning resulted in, such as the decay of cities, and she says what she thinks one of the solutions is, which is diversity, but she doesn’t necessarily say how to implement this solution and get to that point. Yes, she lists four conditions that she thinks will lead to diversity, but these conditions don’t seem entirely feasible. She claims that diversity will improve cities economically and socially, and that diversity can be created with shorter blocks, diverse buildings, districts that serve more than one purpose, and dense concentrations of people, but how can this really be implemented? I do think she is on the right track here, and that these qualities would definitely improve neighborhoods, but I don’t see how this can be done in poorer, monotonous neighborhoods, as she puts it. I suppose one can imitate Robert Moses and replace the old, worn down buildings with different ones, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea. It would require money and work, and the government and local banks don’t seem too interested in Jacobs’ ideas. It just seems like it would require a lot of upheaval, with the uprooting of many people. Also, certain neighborhoods already have certain stigmas attached to them, and i’m not sure that improving the neighborhood in these ways would remove the stigma, so other people would want to go there. Maybe I’m just cynical, but I don’t think her ideas would work in these types of neighborhoods, despite it having worked in the North End. It just seems easier said than done. It seems hard to make areas diverse, that aren’t already diverse. But, when I think of certain successful districts, they do meet her requirements.

I also have another issue. Though this may seem minor, I did not agree with her assessment that cities are better than sub-urban and rural areas, and that “urban life was really better and the maximum number of people possible deserved to live it” (Halle, p 240). I think this is actually subjective, and is different for everyone, yet it seems as if she is trying to pass it off as fact. She argued that cities should be made available for more people to love there, and that cities should be more densely populated while sub-urban areas should be less densely populated.I read the article mentioned by Halle written by Nicolai Ouroussoff. I understand that he was a critic of Jacobs, and that he misunderstood and misrepresented much of what she wrote, yet I think he raised a valid point when he wrote “Nor did Ms. Jacobs really offer an adequate long-term solution for the boom in urban population, which cannot be solved simply through incremental growth in existing neighborhoods.” Personally, I would rather live in a sub-urban or rural area. But personal opinion aside, I am wondering how cities would keep up if large numbers of people were to abandon the sub-urbs/country for cities. Cities already seem overcrowded, so where would everyone be put? I would hate for the city to lose green areas so new apartments & etc. could be put up, but the only other solution seem to be to build upwards even more.

I find it interesting that much of her main ideas are misrepresented by various groups, and her ideas are taken out of context and twisted, such as the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation did. Although I didn’t understand everything she wrote, I did get the main ideas. Although I question a few of her ideas, I do think she had the right idea when she focused on what makes cities effective, and when she advocated for “planning that recognizes and respects local and market-based characteristics of neighborhoods.” (Halle, 240). I respect that she wanted to preserve the sense of community, and to work with communities. Maybe I was too critical in this post, and it’s quite possible I misunderstood what she was saying.

Most of what you said echoed the sentiments expressed in the reading and other sources about Jane Jacobs I read. I definitely see all of her/your points as valid, and understand from where they stem.

Jane Jacobs was criticized as a “housewife” and told her work was also unscholarly and imprecise. While insulting Jacobs based on her marital status is an ad-hominem logical fallacy, the notion of criticizing the impracticality of her ideas of preserving communities based on their own natural development can be taken seriously.

Take the analogy of some horrible traffic on the highway, caused by a cardboard box on the road. While obviously, the cardboard box could easily be moved, every driver simply goes around it, and speeds ahead. Each individual sees no need to move the box, as it doesn’t directly inhibit them once they are passing it, yet it would impact large numbers of people, for one person to just stop for a second and move the box… This analogy epitomizes the benefit of a central force, working on behalf of the ‘greater good’. Nobody wants their house or property to be the sacrificial lamb used to benefit the ‘greater good’ yet somehow consensus is reached about the projects deeming them positive.

On the opposite side of the same coin, there is no way to ever repay  a displaced person. Their dwellings are invaluable for sentimental reasons, and impossible to calculate, especially after public projects change the value of surrounding properties.

While Jacobs was definitely an ‘activist’ of sorts, she can also be presented as a coward. Soon after she was arrested in 1968, Jane Jacobs abandoned New York and moved to Toronto (she said it was to avoid her children’s military draft into the Vietnam War.) It seems, as though when comparing her to Moses, Moses presented a greater level of dedication, basing much of his work on New York, and looking at it in a task/goal oriented fashion, as opposed to causing some helter-skelter, and running away.

A further criticism of both Jacobs writings and actions are implied gentrification. Jacobs lived in a New York converted candy shop- turned house in an up and coming neighborhood.  Again, poor people and old city dynamics are uprooted by new changes and rich people- proving that there is no ‘fair way’, only some are more natural.

During the construction of the Eiffel Tower in Paris there were many protests as it was called an eyesore. Guy de Maupassant said he went to a restaurant right under the Eiffel Tower daily because “it is the only place in Paris one can’t see the structure”. Yet today, Parisians generally love the Eiffel tower and appreciate it as an integral part of their city.

The Eiffel Tower analogy implies that nobody really knows what’s best. People’s opinions change and the world rapidly moves. What will we like/hate tomorrow nobody (including Moses) knows….

In Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs reveals her position and aim immediately in her introduction. She states bluntly, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding” (3). Throughout the chapter, Jacobs criticizes nearly all modern day styles of city planning. In fact, she mentions that city planning taught in schools in modern days ought to be called a pseudoscience. In other words, what is being taught in universities is fundamentally wrong, and only helps to solidify incorrect methods with each new generations of city planners (9). She proceeds to compare modern day city planning methods to the archaic medical practice of bloodletting, which for some time was considered medically sound. In fact, it was also a topic of study taught to many aspiring physicians. Those who disagreed with bloodletting were simply considered wrong (12-13).

So, considering that Jacobs is quite strongly opposing modern day city planning, what does she suggest? Jacobs offers a different approach to how modern urban areas ought to be created. There is not particularly a “right” or “wrong” way, rather Jacobs advocated that one must understand both the social and economic needs of the residents in the city. She believed one cannot plan a city if they do not intimately know it, as well as the culture of its inhabitants.

I happen to agree with Jacobs. To build a city preemptively on the premise that all humans want, or need the same thing mostly likely will lead to disaster. Jacobs provides several examples where the generalizing cities based on statistics and prior belief becomes a problem. Jacobs’s first example comes from her visit in the North End of Boston. This area was labeled as a slum based on the quantity of dwelling units to the net acre (10). However, examining more statistics showed that the North End also had low infant mortality rates, delinquency, rent, and more – yet North End was still labeled a slum (10). This led Jacobs to the conclusion that theories on what made a good city ultimately are useless. Her second example, which I found the most powerful, came from interviews in East Harlem. A large rectangular lawn was put in place, however, all the tenants came to hate it. One of the tenants said, “ ‘Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place…But the big men come and look at the grass and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful! Now the poor have everything!’ ” (15).

The story of the East Harlem residents resonated with me. If planners are putting in place features that the residents don’t want that is a true waste of space. Looking at a map and deciding an area needs more greenspace might not actually be a good idea considering the area couldn’t care less about such a feature. A city is not a mathematical equation where an algorithm can create a perfect fit each time. With varying neighborhoods comes different needs. Some people would interpret Jacobs’s work as opposition to all modern buildings and a cry to free the city in time. However I believe, David Halle’s Who Wears Jane Jacobs’s Mantle in Today’s New York City? offers a better view. Halle writes, “She believes that urban neighborhoods should have a good number of such buildings (referring to modern day buildings), along with a mixture of other types (e.g., older, smaller, and less expensive structures)” (2). This sentiment refers to Jacobs’s strong belief that cities should have diversity. In chapter 7 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs writes of how the vast amount of skills pooled into a city is what makes it flourish. The high density of different people creates not only a variety of small stores, but also a huge pool of people that can support the small businesses. The diversity in culture, professions, and personalities intermingling was Jacob’s idea of a great city. Safety would come from what she called “eyes on the street” (Turner). To Jacob’s governmental agencies should not impose what they believed was a good city onto an area, but rather let the inhabitants shape where they lived.

Overall, I believe Jane Jacobs to be a magnificent activist. She did not have any formal education in city planning and made conclusions through her observations. One of Jacobs’s most famous actions was her fight against Robert Moses. Jacobs and protestors were able to rip Washington Square Park out of Moses’s grasps when he attempted to extend Fifth Avenue through the square. Jane Jacobs pressed for a sense of community in cities and hoped for cities that would be busy at all times of days. She did not want planners to impose what they believed the “ideal” structure of city onto the large urban areas. While I love Jacobs’s ideas, I continue to wonder if it’s really possible to “know” a city. Jacobs often talked about how diversity between the “old” and the “new” helps foster a successful environment. In a world where technology rapidly changes, thus making a community’s needs different, is there a way to reconcile the past and the future?

Additional Source:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/12/jane-jacobs-new-york-history

Great post Rebecca! I found your analysis of Robert Moses’ actions very interesting. I think it provided a nice look at a possible reason behind why he has often come to be seen as a racist. I liked how you managed to not necessarily support, but not necessarily condemn his actions either. I feel that every person has multiple sides to them and reasons for their actions, and so I found that your post really spoke to me.

I agree that the New Deal tended to lean more towards supporting whites only. However I think that many politicians in general, especially those that were older, probably saw no need to support equality. Segregation was still part of the status quo, and it probably got pushed to the back burner as an issue while the government was dealing with the economic turmoil of the time. I think that not only FDR, but many others most likely just decided to leave racism for another day. Especially considering that FDR was known to fight to get his way (think about his attempt to modify the supreme court).

When you mentioned that Moses made a “conscious decision not to rock the boat”, I slightly disagreed. I feel that Moses was barely thinking about race at all as even a real issue. I think that his version of “the public” was automatically, to him, white. I don’t think it was him deciding to be lazy necessarily, but instead I believe that he just disregarded the issue entirely. Some of his pools were built in minority neighborhoods. But as you mentioned, he tended to build them around parks and schools. And there were probably fewer large parks and school areas in minority neighborhoods. To Moses, all he probably cared about was convenience and speedy building/lack of necessary location clearing.

I don’t mean to say that Moses wasn’t personally racist, but that he may not have consciously decided to be racist in all of his building decisions. It was more acceptable at the time to give minorities a disadvantage or to forget about them. White lifeguards were probably hired because white people were offered more jobs to begin with, and to be honest, I hate cold water myself, so I’m not sure if that had any real effect on the race of pool clientele. Moses to me seems like the type to go the extra mile if he cared strongly about something. I feel that he didn’t see much to gain for himself from particularly helping minorities. They probably often had less money to help fund his projects and therefore he saw no use in seeking to cater particularly to them. Moses was more interested in his own reputation as a builder than in social issues, and therefore went along with the status quo he was used to.

New York is home to an incredible amount of parks, highways, pools, and other public facilities. The man to whom credit is often granted, Robert Moses, undoubtedly played a fundamental role in the development of much of New York’s infrastructure. Take the Whitestone and Verrazano bridges, for example, which have served New Yorkers for over fifty years. Without Moses’ vision or creative approach, New York would surely be a different place economically, socially, and culturally. Yet in spite of this recognition, he is often questioned for employing unequal or even undemocratic practices. As we’ve discussed in class many times, it is crucial to assess any situation within its context; “who won, who lost, and what historical factors impacted the outcome?”. I believe Marta Gutman, in her essay Equipping The Public Realm, describes numerous factors that impacted the decisions made by Moses. That in mind, it seems difficult to brand him as somewhat of a self-absorbed, unconcerned, undemocratic visionary. On the contrary, Robert Moses was a man faced with difficult circumstances who acted in line with those circumstances while striving to always better New York.

Preceding Moses’s role as commissioner, the country was recovering from the most severe economic collapse in its history. The aftermath of the Great Depression left unemployment as a major issue, urging Moses to consider how many jobs would be created from a given project. In many ways, there was a sense of urgency in contributing to economic recovery, surely impacting the projects and methods Moses ultimately chose.

Also pressing during his time was the recent Prohibition repeal, which created challenges of social control. Crime was on the rise and adults who drank regularly were left with few alternatives to release stress. The construction of recreational facilities had to now consider this “challenge of the new leisure” (74). In other words, it’s possible that Moses asked himself- ‘to what extent will different neighborhoods benefit from the implementation of this alternative source of leisure?’. Towns with large numbers of saloons could certainly have been given priority for a new pool, for example, in the hopes that men would choose a positive outlet to let off steam, such as swimming.

Another factor that influenced Moses’ decision making process was the conditions he entered into. “When Moses arrived at the Department of Parks, the city’s parks, pools, and beaches were in deplorable condition, having been sullied for decades by poor maintenance and corrupt management” (74). I found it interesting that Moses did not face a ‘blank canvas’ before constructing any facility or building. On the contrary, he was presented with hazardous conditions that grew even worse with the increasing concern for public health. With this in mind, it’s quite conceivable to see how Moses faced the daunting task of not only modernizing and improving the City, but keeping it clean, safe, and within regulation.

One example offered by Gutman which illustrates the contextual challenges Moses faced is the construction of aquatic recreational facilities project. Many question why Moses built pools on existing sites, invariably placing homes and established buildings in jeopardy. As expressed by Gutman, historians propose that the site and location decisions were based on “economy and expediency” (77). With regards to the pool project as a whole, Moses and his team faced obstacles such as scarce land, high acquisition costs, and a tight construction schedule.

While many of Moses’s projects could have serviced Americans in a more equal, even, or democrat fashion, it’s important to be cognizant of the context surrounding his decisions. Robert Moses faced historical, social and economic circumstances that made his initial task of improving New York’s infrastructure that much more difficult. There is surely more to be said on this topic, but from the reading it seems incredibly difficult to brand Moses an “Evil Mastermind”, simply given the frame of reference.

After reading the section of Equipping the Public Realm, by Marta Gutman, it easy clear to understand that in addition to Robert Moses’ craze for developing highway after highway, he also recognized the significant role that parks play in the development of the city as a whole. As we have discussed in class, there are many battles that the city is constantly have to fight in order to figure out what the greatest good for the greatest amount of people is. This is something that really has no answer.   Whoever is coming up with certain decisions about what should be put into place will always have some sort of bias. This is seen through todays reading, and from any other plans that are set forth.

There is no doubt that Robert Moses shaped New York City. As we have gone through the various readings and documentaries in class we see that he and others have greatly impacted how certain structures are created today. In addition to creating new parks and expanding on others, Moses implemented the creation and addition of many public pools. The pools were meant to be a place that anyone could go no matter what their economic background or even gender was. I feel that although this was the goal it was not as successful as Moses thought it would be. Another point that Gutman makes is that all the ideas proposed were suppose to have “the ideal of providing leisure activities for all ages while retaining some segregation of uses for convenience and safety” (80). I think the latter part of this excerpt is very accurate; there are some things that adults and children should do separately in terms of safety. What I found to be missing from the selection is how exactly adults would be drawn to these attractions.

The ways in which they created the designs were, in my opinion, not as safe as they should have been; having “three tiers of diving boards” for people who might not have been athletic and in pools open to children could have potentially led to many unfavorable outcomes, although the reading selection does not mention any. Despite some potential dangerous, a lot of what they designed seemed to have been very practical. For example, having under water lights for those that cannot attend during the day was very thoughtful. An idea like this seems impossible today. Despite things supposedly advancing from the description of these parks it seems that we have only descended in terms of designs even as we constantly strive to create the next best thing. The great ideals of cleanliness and hygiene that had been put in place with things like the footbaths to use before going into pools, are rarely seen anymore (81). Now most of the public pools are far from clean, only within private pools will you find such cleanliness. Something like this must always be an emphasis and it makes me wonder why it does not appear to be considered.

Related to our reading selection for class is an article from Newsweek, De Blasio’s Battle for Equality Starts in the Parks by Victoria Bekiempis. In the article Bekiempis discusses the immense importance that parks have to the city and how each administration has struggled to tackle the issue of development and expansion, some with more success than others. Mayor Bloomberg was one of those that has been regarded as very influential in park development. Bloomberg spent tremendous amounts of money to the beautification of the city’s parks. This article exemplifies that this is an ongoing issue. Before Moses ever existed there were redevelopment projects going on, but it was not until he came along that everything became possible to put into action and complete. Since his time we have continued to struggle and just as mayor Fiorello La Guardia gave Robert Moses this role many others have done similar things. As seen in Newsweek article, mayor Bloomberg has passed the torch to mayor de Blasio that has to figure out how he can further improve the city’s parks.

Gutman does a good job of pointing out how hypocritical the attempts of keeping racial prejudice out of the framework of the creation of these facilities. As she questions if Moses’ plans actually just highlighted the privilege of the whites, I question that myself. By the end of the reading selection I find myself believing that Moses was completely racist. Moses directed people to put cold water in the pools because they supposedly did not like swimming in it. If this is a true statement then his creations were nothing but a statement about privilege. Planners were supposed to constantly find ways to include people, but ultimately someone always gets left out. Is there a way for everyone to truly be able to use the facilities of the city or is it just inevitable for some groups of people to always be left out?

 

The link to the article mentioned above:

http://www.newsweek.com/de-blasios-battle-equality-starts-parks-225310?rx=us

 

Also, a link to a wonderful timeline of the historical development of parks throughout the city: (It is really interesting to follow the time line all the way to today and see how over time things have been added and taken away, beginning from the time Robert Moses was made Park Commissioner).

http://www.nycgovparks.org/about/history/timeline/robert-moses-modern-parks

 

Hey Rebecca,

I really agreed with a lot of what was said in your post. I loved the assertion that Moses was “ruthlessly practical” because I feel it describes his methodology in every aspect of his career. He was unstoppable in the face of naysayers, because he saw the fastest and most logical (not necessarily the most moral) way out of an economic or infrastructure related dilemma and pushed his plans through until they were allowed by default.

I thought you did a great job of further connecting the argument that was posed in the reading about the affect of the New Deal funds on Moses’ construction plans to racist nature of the funds themselves. It was clear that the New Deal money was intended for white people, because those were the people whose vote Roosevelt felt was at stake (and most likely the people who Roosevelt thought mattered more).

The place where I do mildly disagree with your argument is that I do not think Moses’ decisions were entirely without malicious intent. Although it was a different time, he did make the express decisions to cater his quality of life improvements to white neighborhoods and white people. From my readings, it seems that most improvements he made to the city only positively affected white middle class and upper class people, and these swimming pools were no exception. While they perhaps reached a wider income demographic, the intense discrimination and segregation against black people insured that they would not obtain the same benefits as white people did from the city’s allocation of tax money and New Deal funds. Furthermore, as everyone else got to enjoy the brand new highways with which Moses had reshaped NYC, many black people were discriminated against at car dealerships and were refused service or given an exorbitant price that middle class people could not afford.

Simply put, I agreed with nearly all of the assertions made in this blog post. The place where I disagree is that I do not think Moses was lazy. I think that the racist nature of his building projects was simply something that did not matter to him, because he did not care about black people. When he talked about rebuilding the metropolis and providing beautiful park space for the community, he meant his community. Black people did not even cross his mind.

Thanks for the great read!

Robert Moses is idolized as the man who had the biggest effect on New York City’s parks and recreation areas. He is recognized for his ability to get things done in the middle of a depression and to circumvent corrupt politicians in the interest of the good of the public. Some feel this crystal clear image of someone who fought for the people begins to crumble when looked at more closely, especially in relation to the African American community. I think that Moses was ruthlessly practical in how he implemented his policies. He took the path of least resistance to accomplish his end goals, without really caring about how it affected the African American community. I don’t think he acted maliciously, just lazily.

Almost every decision has a money trail that can be followed, revealing inherent bias. Robert Moses’ swimming pools are no different. Once the source of Moses’ money, the New Deal, is examined more closely all of Moses’ decisions fall nicely into place. In getting the new deal passed, President Roosevelt needed the support of Southern Democrats, who strongly favored segregation and racist policies. FDR decided that the economy was more important than the moral issue of segregation and therefore made concessions to these Southern Democrats. . There are many technical examples of how FDR could have better supported the African American community including, the National Recovery Administration had lower pay rates for blacks, blacks could not get mortgages in white neighborhoods, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s policies were particularly harmful to black sharecroppers because it made it more profitable for white landlords to live the land unworked (digitalhistory.uh.edu). President Roosevelt allowed for these racist policies to continue, so he could pass his New Deal. (It should be noted that the head of the National Youth Administration, Mary McLeod Bethune, was black. A significant amount of NYA funds were directed towards the African American community).

Robert Moses knew that in order to achieve his goals he needed to strike while the iron was hot, and the New deal money was available. This meant that in order to get as much of the New Deal money as possible into New York City, projects needed to be completely quickly. I believe this caused Moses to make a conscious decision not to rock the boat. He took the path of least resistance, which perpetuated already existing racial divide. The quickest way to find land for the swimming pools was to use land that was already available in public parks. Moses also believed in putting parks near public schools. Centering the project on a neighborhood centric location, forces the pools to reflect the neighborhoods. The neighborhoods were already segregated, the pools merely reflected this.

There are some reports of policies that specifically discouraged African Americans from using the pools. These include keeping the pools cold and hiring white lifeguards. While there is some evidence to support this, none of these could be confirmed or definitively traced to Moses personally.

Moses reflected his time and more importantly, the source of his money. Much in the same way President Roosevelt chose not to rock the boat in order to promote his plans, Moses chose the path of least resistance to providing New York City with an amazing 10 new pools in one summer. I do not believe that there was malicious intent here, just an unwillingness to go the extra mile to change the status quo. In decided to leave things the way they were, Moses squandered an opportunity to better integrate New York City.

 

Additional Source:

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3447

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