March 11. Urban Visions: Architecture, Planning, Utopia
Workshop: Joanna Dressel and Shan Shan Lee
Theory
Le Corbusier, 1937 (1947). “I Am An American,” from When the Cathedrals Were White: Journey to the Country of Timid People, trans. Francis E. Hyslop, Jr. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock.
Mabel O. Wilson, 2005. “Dancing in the Dark, The Inscription of Blackness in Le Corbusier’s Radiant City,” in Architecture Theory: A Reader in Philosophy and Culture, ed. Andrew Ballantyne. Continuum, pp. 210-30.
Scott Larson, 2013. “Jacobs versus Moses: A Fight for the City’s Soul,” and “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind,” chapters 1, 10 in Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Approaches to the Case Study: Reading Spaces and Places
Marshall Berman, 1982. “In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York,” chapter 5 in All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Samuel Zipp, 2010. “Culture and the Cold War in the Making of Lincoln Center” and “The Battle of Lincoln Square,” chapters 4 and 5 in Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marita Sturken, 2004. “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero.” American Ethnologist 31(3):311–25.
Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores, 2008. “De La Disco Al Caserío: Urban Spatial Aesthetics and Policy to the Beat of Reggaetón.” Centro XX(2):34–69.
Workshop
We will discuss how official plans have affected Hunters Point/LIC.
https://longislandcityqueens.com/licplan/
https://www.nycedc.com/program/long-island-city
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/long-island-city-core/long-island-city-core.page
https://issuu.com/designtrustforpublicspace/docs/long_island_city_connecting_the_arts
The readings this week introduced a new perspective of planning and urban design that I rarely consider but is fundamental to one’s perceptions of and experience in the urban environment. Sturken, Zipp, and Berman foregrounded the notions of historical trauma as forces that both condition and erect urban milieus, most self-evidently in Lower Manhattan after 9/11 but more subtly in neighborhoods like Lincoln Square, Stuyvesant Town, the South Bronx, or Turtle Bay. Definitions and perceptions of trauma, however, are subjective and socially-specific: Berman’s lyrical description of the Bronx of his childhood and its bulldozing and destruction is a great example of the heterogeneity of social trauma. The Bronx continues to reckon with this traumatic legacy in many ways, and the top-down, technocratic, large-scale planning initiatives that attempt to “revitalize” these areas simply reiterate Moses-ian tactics of creative destruction.
Larson’s excavation and critique of Amanda Burden’s tone-deaf and practically meaningless mantra, “we’re building like Moses but with Jane Jacobs firmly in mind” forces the reader to take a step back and find the parallels between the eras. The “Jacobs” that Burden instrumentalizes to justify the massive restructuring of the built environment has no relevance to the social inflection on the city that Jacobs romanticizes and illustrates. For the managerial city government of the 21st century, human interaction and vitality are reducible to ratios of public space to residential; concentrations of specific retail types in certain neighborhoods; and miles of bike lanes. Absent from these scientific prescriptions (echoes of Le Corbusier, perhaps not in form but in spirit) are people. Perfunctory public review and participation may have been part of DCP’s strategy, but I think one would struggle to find a long-term resident of North Brooklyn or Willets Point or Hell’s Kitchen whose voice counted when planning decisions were made.
What strikes me about Le Corbusier’s critique of New York in addition to his vision for The Radiant City is his emphasis on design and uniformity. While he did have a vision for how residential buildings should function in the city (surrounded by parkland and away from cars as well as commercial areas), he seems to have had no regard for the actual user-experience of living in a city. The idea for The Radiant City appears to have been designed in a vacuum without any consideration for the actual fabric of city life. In particular, he overlooked the user-experience of the city for low-income communities, for whom mixed-use city planning was a matter of opportunity and safety. Thanks to the planning authority of Robert Moses, the concept of the Radiant City can be seen in practice in New York’s Stuyvesant Town in the East Village and Penn South in Chelsea. These oppressive looking mid-century housing complexes essentially guettoized low income communities and enclosed them into buildings that were separated from the life of the city. In addition, the enclosement also enabled these housing complexes to becoming breeding grounds for gang violence. As Wilson describes in “Dancing in the Dark,” there is an inherent desire to whitewash the city in Le Corbusier’s conception of The Radiant City.
In Larson’s “Building Like Moses with Jacobs in Mind,” it’s clear that the Bloomberg administration used the debate between Moses and Jacobs as a rhetorical device to build a narrative that attempts to deflect criticism from both sides of the debate. According to Larson’s account, the Bloomberg administration was similar to Moses in its heavy handed use of eminent domain to tear down “blighted” neighborhoods and make room for its redevelopment agenda. The administration claimed to be blending this large scale city redesign with Jacob’s principles by including a “celebration of diversity, mixed uses, neighborhood vitality, and citizen participation in the planning process” (148). However, as Larson points out, those ideals were not top of mind in the administration’s plans. For example, the plans to open an additional Columbia University campus in Harlem causing displacement of low income communities, force the question: redevelopment for whom?
– Rebecca Krisel
This week’s readings focus on post-war New York: what do we want our cities to say about us as a society? What does it mean for physical space to reflect its people and its economy? What do these aspirations reveal about Western society?
I was particularly struck by questions of the physical layout of city streets across the readings. Le Corbusier writes of the mental freedom that emerges from the grid of New York City streets (though I am somewhat unclear what pedestrian pathways look like in his Radiant City). Larson writes of Jane Jacobs being taken by the intricacies of medieval cities as reflected by Camillo Sitte. Is the city meant to reflect an ideal mode of communication within the economy? Or is it meant to reflect the complexity of the human condition? Did Le Corbusier ever go below 14th street? Or to Bushwick? Semi-related, how did coming from post-war France impact his apparent yearning for urban order?
I am stuck, also, on the contradictions and overlaps of how Le Corbusier and Jacobs, in particular, think about what it means for a city to be a sort of natural habitat or reflection of a human society. In Mabel Wilson’s essay, she highlights how race and racism are embedded in Le Corbusier’s vision of cities as dedicated to some sort of local ethnicity – that the Radiant City would be constructed to suit the population, constantly put in contrast to blackness, against blackness. Meanwhile, Larson quotes Jacobs as writing that cities “are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters.” But her vision of the city, as far as I understand, is not racially exclusive or somehow ethnically tailored, beyond what communities themselves create in their lived environment. How has the concept of the “naturalness” of cities travelled across different visions of urbanity? How is this different in the American vs. the European context? How can this type of thinking be used to include or exclude from the benefits of urban life?
Toby Irving
From a historical perspective, the aesthetics and the idea of vertical utopias was engrained under the skin especially through the manifestation of aeropainters in a clear attempt to establish a new sense of reality that has very little in common to the horizontal perspective of the times when Le Corbusier had long before planned his ideas. From the the Italian Futurist movement, initiated by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, to Siegfried Giedion’s work, whose ideas highly influenced the modernist movement, hailing the idea of going upwards after the war as a result of the catastrophic bombing attacks from the air and gas bombs on street levels in cities. In consideration of today’s national and international politics and securities topped up with the technological advancements in weaponry, this does sound ironic. At the core of the fundamentals of modernist way of architectural and urban design, shifting the urban society upwards would symbolise riddance of the damp and mouldy basements and everything else that represented the lower level lifestyle.
The concept has been loud and clear that speed and technology is the way forward and the advancement of faster, bigger and reliable elevators played a pivotal role behind the stacked housing and its changing social urban geographies.
This only to be emphasised even further now with the likes of Ed Glaeser’s declaration of defeat by overgrowing population and the speed of urbanisation and that it can only be overcome by not putting height restrictions in planning and conserving old housing stock but by building upwards. Also admitting to the rise of housing prices and gentrification is forcing people to leave their not-so-affordable houses, his contested argument was that building vertical housing for the masses is the cheapest possible solution to meet the requirements of the new urbanisation. This would not only ensure that the poor can stay in the city (unrealistic assumption that the new vertical buildings promise offer “affordable” solution instead of luxifying the skies even further and that the tax from the rich occupying the penthouses of the skies will be benefited by the displaced), create and be a part of a diverse environment but also smaller businesses can continue to contribute to cities’ thriving economy. This sounds very much the opposite of Jane Jacobs’ defence of protecting the older buildings and the horizontal cities where citizens can foster the essence of street life through the use of public spaces.
In line with Wilson, as well as Mumford, and Massey, the physical environment of cities, its plans and buildings are a symbol of the citizens’ social relatedness to the city and when the physical environment is disordered, the social functions that it serves become harder to identify. What do we, as citizens, left with when our social relatedness is challenged?
Reading Le Corbusier, I couldn’t help but notice a constellation of familiar indicators of ideology.
He is obsessed with hygiene (the term “clean” appears no less than sixteen times in the assigned chapter). He prefers, over individualism, communal endeavor as a solution to social problems. He has scorn for the refined tastes of academicians. He relates: “I come back to the immense and like a barbarian I enjoy it, or better, as a man animated by a constructive spirit, active but wearied by the depressing atmosphere of cowardice and abdication in Paris, crushed, often dishonored, treated as a madman and Utopian…. here I find reality.” He admires the courage and boldness of the Americans. He mourns, fiercely, the ways in which modernity has removed humankind from its bucolic idyll. He looks forward, nonetheless, to the modernist transcendence of this descent; for him the skyscraper, the elevator, and scientific urbanism promise a return to closer union with nature. The natural, in his illocution, takes on a spiritual ambiance. In France especially there has been decline. “When the cathedrals were white, spirit was triumphant. But today the cathedrals of France are black and the spirit is bruised.” He says that the socialists bear some blame here. He anticipates, however, France’s greatness if it cultivates America’s almost Dionysian, in the sense of Nietzsche, its “catastrophic” vigor. Writing In the 1930s, Le Corbusier says: “Let order reign.”
Ergo, I could not help but think: Le Corbusier was or he wrote from within the intellectual milieu of fascism, not in the presently prominent and loose sense of ur-Fascism, but in the historically specific and discursively thick sense of fin de siècle vitalism, biologism, conservative collectivism, Maurras, Marinetti (who, I’m pleased to see, Ruya already mentioned), and Mussolini.
So then, looking around, it turns out that there is controversy about exactly this point. During his life some people denounced Le Corbusier as a fascist. In 2015, two books provided extensive evidence to this effect. Like many fascists, Le Corbusier early flirted with the Left. It appears that from 1927, however, he became involved with the political party Le Faisceau, then later with Action Française, Croix de Feu, and Jeunesses Patriotes. He founded and contributed to a variety of French fascist journals such as Le Nouveau Siècle, Prélude, and Plans. Le Faisceau and, to a lesser extent, the Vichy regime modeled aspects of their conceptions of fascist order on his work. Le Corbusier worked with Pétain’s Vichy. He had relations with Stalin’s USSR, but in this he paralleled Mussolini’s own admiration for that regime. (1)
Le Corbusier is also reported to have been involved in numerous expressions of anti-semitism. Mabel Wilson deals with his racism and (with Larson) some of the racial-structural articulations of his ideas in the course of implementation. Through South African architects like Rex Martienssen and Leslie Thornton-White, Le Corbusier registered influence on apartheid spatial planning. (2) His ideas, of course, are not reducible to his political genealogy. Still, this sort of implementation-history, along with their intrinsically undemocratic, technocratic, and even totalitarian connotations, does suggest some abiding affinity to fascism.
(1) The extensive accusation of fascism is most readily available in Simone Brott. 2017. “The Le Corbusier Scandal, or, was Le Corbusier a Fascist?” Fascism, 6 (2).
(2) See, for instance, Alan Mabin and Dan Smit. 1997. “Reconstructing South Africa’s cities? The making of urban planning 1900–2000,” Planning Perspectives, 12.
– Ryan Brunette
Le Corbusier (1937) sets the stage for this week’s readings with his outline for what he viewed as wrong with New York City’s design. To him, New York City was young and America itself represented a land of infinite reserves of materials (p. 35), perhaps setting the stage for large urban development projects – a relatively clean slate to work from and the materials to do the job. On one hand, Le Corbusier’s vision of urban life rings true today. The boom of Ford’s automobile industry in the U.S. had led to 1.5 million cars flooding the city (p. 69) with a lack of sun, space, and trees (p. 71) that he viewed as key to city planning. The streets had become clogged with cars as they were designed for horse and buggy (p. 189) and despite Manhattan being an island, the Hudson and the East River were inaccessible for enjoyment making the borough as landlocked as Moscow (p. 190). To him, the skyscraper was simply too small and inappropriate for “dramatic Manhattan” (p. 191).
Ultimately, his vision was male-and-white focused and Wilson (2005) does an excellent job of breaking apart his narrative to demonstrate the inherent bias in his vision for the natural order of the city. Unfortunately, this understanding is not merely a philosophical critique, but manifests through Robert Moses’ urban renewal projects as described by Zipp (2010). With focus on Lincoln Square, it becomes evident for how the destruction of “slum” neighborhoods with the goal of urban renewal really was about displacement of poor and minority communities for the benefit of white and middle to upper class residents. For the case of his failed attempt to build a highway through Greenwich Village, Moses was quoted saying that “There is nobody against this […] but a bunch of mothers” (Larson, 2013), for it is the women who live most closely with their communities that bare the weight of their destruction.
While such urban renewal projects were advanced on the ideals of slum removal, the reality is that the largely minority populations found themselves displaced often into now-further crowded remaining slums and minority-concentrated neighborhoods. Segregation and poverty only increased, while the advantages remain for white middle-and-upper class people. Long-time businesses were eradicated, and in their place monolithic structures like Stuy-Town were built that lacked these community amenities. In line with Le Corbusier’s vision, Moses insisted on a public park in the new Lincoln Center complex, and similarly Stuy-Town incorporated green-space into its design.
Overall this week’s readings described the destruction of communities and history for the sake of revitalization and urban renewal. Such projects were not done in cooperation or for the benefit of existing community members, but instead preached urban vision and legacy much larger (a more modern example being the memorial at Ground Zero conceptualized without consideration for the existing residents of lower Manhattan (Sturken, 2004)). While cities do exhibit a high degree of flux, endeavors that the city takes must be rooted in community – or they risk harming existing residents and creating soulless architecture over the scars of neighborhood destruction.
-Christopher Ryan
The game of skyscrapers is afoot. Le Corbusier’s sly critique of the American architectural scene in the early 1930’s raises typical questions of ideology, practicality, and elitism. With this treatise both lauds the American spirit and energy to build monumentally, Le Corbu finds himself disappointed at the multitude of these building projects. “The skyscrapers are too small”—what a fantastic soundbite, and one that is deliberately provocative to the American architects of the day. Le Corbu sees in New York, and America in general, as a welcome blank slate for the construction of his ideal city, with glass shards of skyscrapers rising from an Edenic wooded and sunlit landscape. Unburdened by the crumbling shells of the centuries past as European countries, especially France, America has the potential to build an ideal city, paradoxically both dense and sparse.
However, I have a suspicion that this piece of writing served more of a purpose than simple elucidation of ideals. Le Corbusier was fresh off a trip to the United States in1935, a trip that proved frustrating for him, as he did not receive a commission to build in New York, as he had hoped. Furthermore, this business of the stepped skyscraper—think of many of the buildings south of Grand Central on Park Avenue—was actively being challenged in the 30’s by a new generation of architects who built taller skyscrapers on smaller footprints (a loophole in the zoning policies of New York at that time) thus leaving Le Corbusier’s called-for green space. Rockefeller Center, Casa Lever, and several other skyscrapers were commissioned and constructed in the late 1930’s. A question we might ask ourselves today is how well this public space actually functions on behalf of the public today. Does it function as intended? And how is new “public space” is constructed and experienced in places such as Hudson Yards?
As Ryan pointed out in his post above, Le Corbusier’s theories, as well as the man himself, struggled with political alliances and accusations during his lifetime. Alternately accused of being too socialist by the Americans, too fascist by the French, and too capitalist by the Russians, the vertical garden city that he imagines is inherently impractical. To such an ened, Wilson’s article presents a glass-sharp elucidation of Le Corbusier’s avaricious and paradoxical relationship with blackness and femininity. This uneasy and deeply troubling relationship between Le Corbusier’s ideals and any part of society that is not the white man or the dutiful white wife is evident. But skyscrapers have been being built in Manhattan in a continuous, ever ending stream of creative destruction since this essay in 1935. Has the nature of the game of skycrapers changed?
-Caroline House
Building like Bloomberg with Marx in mind
It was (un)happy coincidence that Hudson Yards would be unveiled this week while we read about Bloomberg’s vision, skyscrapers, and the past urban redevelopment projects of Robert Moses. I couldn’t resist venturing over to the west side on Saturday to walk through the new development. The center piece of Hudson Yards is the Vessel, Thomas Heatherwick’s honeycomb Escher-esque structure, a spiral structure meant only for visual appreciation (cost $200 Million). It reminded me of Larson’s description of the Bloomberg administration’s “promotion of design as a civic virtue” (page 147). Walking up to Hudson Yards on the Highline (also a major accomplishment of Bloomberg-era Dept of Planning’s Amanda Burden), the sense of public access and leisure is readily apparent but a look up to the office towers, luxury apartments, and a stroll through the designer mall (“The Shops”), it becomes obvious that the public is here to experience the beauty but not participate in the production of wealth that Hudson Yards manifests.
The Hudson Yards is a perfect example of the Bloomberg process as described by Larson, a template for his Moses-like, Jacobs-light method. Unlike de Blasio and Amazon HQ2, Bloomberg was quick to let the public have their say, even more so when their demands fit their preconceived agenda. The product is a direct result of that process and thinking. A leisure stroll, a spiral staircase to nowhere, and The Shed, a $500 million arts organization for no community in particular. Our guest last week, David Harvey, describes “the right to the city in the sense I mean it here is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization” (Rebel Cities, 2012, page 5). The Bloomberg (and Le Corbusier) perspective is that the hoi polloi have a right to the city in an experiential sense but not in shaping its evolution.
-Adam Sachs
I’m posting late today and so have read everyone’s comments before writing out my own. Its great to hear from so many diverse backgrounds, I also found Le Corbusier’s writing to be evocative of the Italian Futurists’, and so am grateful to Ruya, Ryan, and Caroline for expanding on the world-political contexts of his work. I think this is also important to keep in mind when we think about the political and cultural project of Moses’s urban development. If Le Corbusier’s legacy (or one of his legacies) is as a stand-in for the insecurities around national unity in the face of global capitalism, one of Mose’s legacies is urban (and national-through-urban) development by men who see that insecurity as conquered. As Larson writes, Moses’s modernism, structured heavily by the Keynesian state, was one of tamed capitalism.
Jacobs’s legacy gives us a story of the double-movement, in Polanyian terms, of a bourgeoisie trying to maintain a way of life in the face of massive external change. The Polanyian framework is useful here to understand the tensions between urban renewal projects of Moses and incremental, collaborative projects of Jacobs, because as Larson shows Jacobs is not quite an example of spaces of difference or hope that Harvey and Lefebvre imagine in Marxist terms. Larson seems to be differentiating between Jacobs’ method of community-responsive real-estate development and the Marxist’s “right to the city.”
Our readings this week made me wonder about the intellectual lineage of current urban development projects. Harvey attribute’s the replication of architectural forms to the economic forces of capitalism – the deregulation that marked a transition from Keynesian protectionism to neoliberal global capitalism renders the competitive advantage of places ephemeral and thus foments serial production. I think there is more to it, not in the sense that there is more than just capitalism in urban planning but that there is more than just the market in capitalism. Jens Beckert and others have written about the cultural meanings that are embedded in seemingly object market transactions, with Beckert specifically focusing on the role of imagined futures in capitalism. What are the imagined futures in the projects of urban planning today – mega projects like Hudson Yards, or “New Urbanism,” or transit-oriented-development, or “fast urbanism?” Can we interrogate the social and political ramifications of these futures the way Wilson does in “Dancing in the Dark?”
Apologies for the tardy reply – and thank you to all for such thoughtful engagement with our readings this week. Something that Christopher notes and I also found quite striking, is the male-dominated vision of the utopian urban visions. As demonstrated by the discussion and critique of Le Corbusier through Wilson, as well as the exploration of the tension between Jacobs and Moses, the gendered experience of the city comes through. This also can be heard in other comments on this blog, thinking about, development for whom? How can future visions for our city create sites of inclusion, rather than design upholding white-male dominance, particularly incorporating how different segments of the population move through the city and interact with public space?
I am curious to hear in our conversation together tonight how these intersections of debates will inform our discussion of the LIC study site and the failed Amazon proposal. How would the “building like Moses with Jacobs in mind” play out had that project gone through? How does the plan’s proponents illustrate the vision expressed in the “comfort in contradictions” of PlaNYC and the opening quotation in Chapter 10 of Bloomberg’s views on gentrification?
-Ali