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