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.