May 13. The City and the Grassroots
Workshop: Ryan Brunette
Theory
Manuel Castells, 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press.
David Harvey, 2003. “The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4):939-41.
Judith Butler, 2015. “Gender Politics and the Right to Appear,” chapter 1 in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.
For comparison, background
March 2006 special issue on 25th anniversary of Castells’ City and the Grass Roots, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, articles by Ward and McCann, Lake, Mayer, Miller, Staehli, Susser, and rejoinder by Castells.
Tamar W. Carroll, 2015. Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Approaches to Case Study: Neighborhood Activism
Robin Fryday, 2011. Barber of Birmingham: Foot Solider of the Civil Rights Movement, https://www.kanopy.com/product/barber-birmingham-foot-soldier-civil-right. For background: Dell Upton, 2015. “A Place of Revolution and Reconciliation,” chapter 4 in What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Marci Reaven, 2017. “Neighborhood Activism in Planning for New York City, 1945-1975,” Journal of Urban History, OnlineFirst, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217705446.
Nik Heynen, 2009. “Bending the Bars of Empire from Every Ghetto for Survival: The Black Panther Party’s Radical Antihunger Politics of Social Reproduction and Scale.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99(2):406-422.
Katharina Bodirsky, 2017. “Between Equal Rights Force Decides?” City 21(5): 672-681, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1374773
Workshop
We will discuss the role of protest, social movements, and other forms of activism on the evolution of Hunters Point/LIC and your research site.
So, I’m circling back around to Long Island City and I’m giving a teaser of my presentation.
Long Island City is the closest point, in Long Island, to midtown Manhattan. Located along the East River, it has a spectacular view of the city. It was also formerly zoned for manufacturing, so existing residences have hindered less the assemblage of relatively sizeable tracts of land for largescale development. These factors have, to some, framed Long Island City’s enduring promise, and to others, its perils.
Long Island City began gentrifying in the 1970s, but this was largely by way of owner-occupiers and, for this reason, on a small scale. In 1983, the Queens West Project was announced, sponsored by the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and the Empire State Development Corporation, and covering the stretch of East River waterfront between Anable Basin and the Newtown Creek. The announcement encouraged speculative land purchases by large corporate actors, and generated some concern about potential secondary displacement of nearby low-income residents. The area, however, remained stagnant until the 1990s, as the project slowly bought up land, gained municipal rezoning, and secured a mortgage guarantee from the Federal Housing Administration. In 1994, Mario Cuomo and Rudy Giuliani broke ground on the first construction project, what would become the Gantry Plaza State Park. Development from this point would be rapid and ongoing. In the 2010s the neighborhood has often been referred to as the fastest growing, by new housing units, in the United States. Its flight is generally understood to be unstoppable.
The Hunters Point Community Coalition was established in 1989. In some respects, it might be considered to be the lineal ancestor of the anti-Amazon campaign of 2018. It was established to resist Queens West, something it saw as damaging to Long Island City residents and businesses. It argued, correctly, that this unrestrained development would have the effect of eviscerating the community’s character, increasing congestion and pollution, raising property values, taxes, and rents, and displacing homeowners and tenants from the neighborhood. Its struggle, joined by a number of other community organizations, such as the Long Island City Coalition, the Hunters Point Civic Association, and the Court Square Civic Association, would continue into contemporary times. As late as March 2018, these planned a rally at the corner of Vernon Boulevard and 44th to demand “public land for public use.”
In a number of other respects, however, the anti-Amazon campaign operated on a different plane altogether.
The Hunters Point Community Coalition was a broadly middle-class outfit of often very parochial concerns. In the mid-1990s it published a newsletter called The View, prominently concerned with the fact that residential high-rises along the waterfront would block the neighborhood’s field of vision. The Coalition has not achieved a very notable victory; Long Island City developed in spite of it. In December 2018 the Coalition’s long-time chair, Tom Paino, went into the Amazon Community Advisory Committee, at a time when Council Member Jimmy van Bramer and State Senator Michael Gianaris were avoiding it. Both politicians were recently middle-of-the-road. They had historical ties to real estate interests and had been pushed by the anti-Amazon campaign. Or more specifically, the anti-Amazon campaign was just a moment in a broader social movement that pushed them.
The key and often underappreciated feature of this saga is that Amazon had stepped into a rupture, some time in the offing but most proximately caused by the primary victory of Alezandria Ocasio-Cortez over Joe Crowley, Chair of the Queens County Democratic machine and of the House Democratic Caucus. The precipitants and supporters of this rupture had already framed Amazon as an archenemy and would naturally, from this angle, use it as a pivot for a thoroughgoing realignment of power. From this perspective the campaign against Amazon HQ2 in New York had relatively little to do with such local factors as congestion and displacement. Rather, it was being mobilized, to use Castells’ words, to reimagine urban meaning and, ultimately, to reshape the whole relation between state and capital prevalent in the neoliberal world order.
It is against this background that the episode is explicable.
– Ryan Brunette