March 18. City as Community: Neighborhoods, Streets, Sidewalks, Commerce
Workshop: Caroline House
Theory
Jane Jacobs, 1961. “The Uses of Sidewalks,” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, pp. 29-54.
Lewis Mumford, 1962. “The Sky Line: Mother Jacobs Home Remedies [for Urban Cancer],” The New Yorker, December 1, pp. 148-179.
Jürgen Habermas, 1974. “The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article (1964),” New German Critique, no. 3 (Autumn): 49-55.
Marta Gutman, 2017. “Introduction: Making and Unmaking Neighborhood Boundaries in Postwar U.S. Cities,” Journal of Urban History, OnlineFirst, https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144217704129.
Approaches to the Case Study: Café Societies
Adam Gopnik, 2018. “What Cafés Did for Liberalism,” The New Yorker, December 24-32, 9 pp.
Maura McGee on Starbucks on Franklin Street.
Anna Steigemann, 2019. The Places where Community is Practiced. How Store Owners and Their Businesses Build Neighborhood Social Life. Springer, Chapters 1 and 2.
Philip Kasinitz and Sharon Zukin, 2015. “From ‘Ghetto’ to Global: Two Neighborhood Shopping Streets in New York City,” chapter 2 in Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai. New York: Routledge.
Workshop
We will discuss actually how to study neighborhood social life in Hunters Point/LIC or your research site by taking an ethnographic approach to interactions in stores, cafes, nonprofit organizations, and other gathering places.
Some additional thoughts may be found in: Christian Anderson, 2012. “Lost in Space? Ethnography and the Disparate Geographies of Social Process,” Professional Geographer 64(2): 276-285.
Last year, for a community workshop course in my Urban Planning and Policy program, my group of fellow graduate students worked as consultants for a Lower East side tenant’s organization to produce a needs assessment report. I’m including some of our observations and findings from that research because it offers some relevance, both empirically and theoretically, to our readings this week.
In brief, we conducted a storefront inventory of “Hell Square,” a small area bounded by Allen, Houston, Clinton, and Delancey Streets with the highest concentration of liquor licenses IN THE STATE. We found a 15% retail vacancy rate, which was more than double the city-wide rate in 2017. We interviewed store owners and managers, who consistently cited rent increases and lack of foot traffic as the greatest challenges to their businesses. Our findings confirm much of what Zukin and Kasinitz observe and critique on Orchard Street.
However, there were a few surprising and complex lessons as well. Many store owners, especially those who had been established in the neighborhood prior to the cultural “renaissance” and revival of the last 15 years, lauded the changes in the neighborhood. Their memories of the 1990s and early 2000s were almost invariably negative, and often referenced the abnormally high crime rates, drug trade, and desolation that characterized the neighborhood at the time. For these entrepreneurs, the benefits of gentrification outweighed the costs. Other long established businesses often owned their properties, which removed the potential for displacement in a speculative market.
But the most recent waves of immigrants, like those mentioned in the video from China and South Asia and the Middle East, most frequently operated storefronts as tenants in less viable industries for a “cultural” district (laundries, tailors, barbershops, bodegas).
The overwhelming presence of cafes, restaurants, bars, and clubs is what now characterizes the neighborhood. The rents of the area affect these entrepreneurs as well, however. Restaurant owners cited the paucity of day time foot traffic and lunch customers, which forced them to remain open until late at night as a bar/club in order to meet their overhead. This, in turn, prompted other venues to follow suit. Now, the neighborhood is at its most lively at 2am, the streets filled with college students, tourists, and 20-somethings bar-hopping. This is not the active “cafe culture” that Gopnik and McGee extol, nor does it, despite the physical density, small-scale, and liveliness, resemble a Jacobsean sidewalk.
These shifts in place identity and the “public sphere” that derives thereof seem to be a symptom of some very particular structural conditions: neighborhood disinvestment and deterioration due to macro shifts (i.e. deindustrialization, white flight, immigration); the emergence of a “rent gap;” the tendency of financialized real estate to speculate wildly on properties and thus drive up rents; the displacement of incumbent social groups and arrangements thanks to said speculation and the initiation of higher-yielding luxury uses. These new uses, however, are subject to the same logics and inflect the place identity and thus civic utility of place in new ways. What will happen when the LES reaches a similar plateau as Greenwich Village, the locale of “high-rent blight?” How can a neighborhood be defined if there is no one left to inhabit it? Do these structural forces necessarily determine the fate of all places, or could other unique conditions or policies affect the trajectory?
Our readings this week on “the city as community” all seem to agree that the structure of neighborhoods has a relationship with the kind of communit(ies) that can be formed, the action those communities can take, and the identities that are expressed. Simmel’s sociology – both of form and of the psychology of mental life – was in the background of our theoretical readings to various degrees. Though what Marta’s article and our case study empirical articles showed which Simmel’s work was less interested in is the reciprocal nature of social life and urban space, as neighborhoods shape and are shaped by collective identities.
One theme, first introduced by Jacobs and consistently prevalent in the case study articles, was the importance of “public space” in urban social life. But Jacobs introduction contrasted with my understanding of how the public/private dichotomy is experienced on the street, and I saw this contrast again in our case study readings. Jacobs writes that a safe street must have a clear demarcation between public and private space. Perhaps by this she just means that public space, which is immediately recognized as different from controlled, public space must exist. But the blurring of public and private space has the duplicitous effect of both controlling behavior (from Jacobs’ shopkeepers and people-watching residents keeping track of children on sidewalks to the kind of racist surveillance McGee shows us) and enabling encounter between diverse people. These examples contradict Habermas’ lamenting of the “interwoven” public sphere as “refeudalized,” and are more in line with Giddens “yes/and” theory of modernity. Jacobs’ statement is confusing to me – and perhaps someone who understood it differently will enlighten me – because the isolated apartments for the transient population seem to be an ideal separation of “public and private space,” and yet they do not yield safe interactions.
More generally, it’s interesting that much of our readings this week focused on the commercial landscape (as Maura McGee referred to it). I do wonder how nature fits into this understanding of community and space. Mumford criticizes Jacobs micro-oriented approach as missing the environmental destruction that urban growth necessarily (in his view) brings. I so appreciate Marta’s candid walkthrough of how neighborhoodliness could exist in rural spaces – that the built environment which may exist naturally can still be discursively and socially produced. Marta explains to us that Lefebvre encountered a conundrum in the production of rural space as leisure space, in that both disrupted and reproduced capitalist production. The separation of environment and labor space brings to mind William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness. There is a connection in that the production of wild space leads us, and indeed stems from a tendency to, ignore the ecological connections of our daily life. My point here is twofold, that the social creation and expression of place-based, collective identity happens in the perceptions and experiences of the “natural world” as much as it does in coffee shops, and that this identity formation happens across the poles of the rural-urban continuum. When does the environment become a salient factor in community formation? How do settings of injustice, such as coastal flooding or water pollution, differ from commodification, like ski towns?
Jane Jacobs, in asserting the centrality in cities of the “drama of civilization versus barbarism,” that the “bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure,” briskly precipitated that pang of detestation that is perhaps the lot in life of all people who know, and who have been formed by, the history of South Africa.
Anxiety about security was a basal motivation behind the rise of urban apartheid. Talk of crime – in Mumford’s words, “a preoccupation that is almost an obsession” for Jacobs – continues to involve euphemism for racism. I’m reluctant to lean in more vigorously: Mumford has his own prejudice. Having gone about largely unscathed, I myself am not very neatly positioned to diminish the real injury and iniquity, and reflexive fear, suffered by victims of criminal violence, especially by women.
It’s complicated. In the cul-de-sac of 3rd Avenue, Westdene, Johannesburg, the heart does not soften each time the neighbor approaches with dog whistle tales about the incompetence and corruption of the incumbent African National Congress (ANC); while her partner fashions improvised firearms for distribution to the neighborhood watch/dystopian fever dream of a Boer commando, à la Neill Blomkamp.
The murder rate has been cut by around 50% since the ANC assumed office. In Johannesburg it is half that of Baltimore or St. Louis.
Jacobs herself begins meaningfully to redeem herself when she offers the then surely avant-garde proposition that it is not “illuminating to tag minority groups, or the poor, or the outcast with responsibility for city danger.” The proper concern, she famously prescribes, is “eyes on the street.” These are best when they belong to storekeepers and others with a remunerative interest in keeping order, “the natural proprietors of the street.” Beyond this what is desirable is lots of shopping, errands, and thoroughfare. Police are necessary, but peace and safety are “kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”
Community, Jacobs argues, is a corrective to crime.
Community, all things beings equal, is not to be argued with. But all things are rarely equal, not in the Crown Heights of Maura McGee, certainly not in the most unequal society on Earth.
Johannesburg long secured its white communities by a state-imposed designation of racial “turf.” Westdene is one of Johannesburg’s inner suburbs. These form an arch around the greatest urban concentration of Africa, the arch terminating at a longitudinal line of mine dumps, itself stretching for the 35 miles of the Witwatersrand, where as much as 40% of the world’s gold is from. Adjacent to Westdene, moving west along this suburban arch is Sophiatown, seat of the Sophiatown Renaissance, South Africa’s Harlem, where legends such as Dorothy Masuka, Miriam Makeba, and Hugh Masekela once performed. By 1960 all its residents had been forcibly removed, dumped beyond the detritus of the mines in the south, in Meadowlands or Diepkloof, Soweto. Sophiatown was flattened to make way for the white working-class Radiant Garden City (I know this now) of Triomf, Afrikaans for Triumph (the city’s fathers at the time were English South Africans).
With the erosion of urban apartheid, from the 1980s, white Joburgers retreated into their automobiles. Jacobs describes this as “a technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa,” a characterization precise to many pale South African imaginations. The streets of these suburbs were turned to desolation, always astonishing to visitors from abroad, deserted avenues of high walls topped with barbed wire or electric fence. Confined within these forts, people were nevertheless brought together to watch out for each other, trade associated gossip, work with the police, pool money for street guards, keep undesirables out.
Community is a vector of power relations.
Westdene, lower middle-class in stature, is no longer majority white. The Whatsapp groups and the Facebook groups are riven with racial conflict, much like the whole post-apartheid public sphere, but they are nevertheless functional. The street guards still patrol the streets. ADT and G4S, the multinational security companies, mafia-esque, continue to make bank. Most suburbs are made effectively out-of-bounds for at least some people.
In famously progressive Melville, just to the east, nestled between the great cultural centers of the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Johannesburg, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation, the petty proprietors of 7th Street now employ bouncers to scour the curbs of homeless children panhandling for food, always reminding the revelers of their complicity.
Examples can be added, ad nauseam, as we move on to the wealthier Northern Suburbs.
In South Africa, neo-apartheid order is largely not state-imposed, it is a community endeavor.
– Ryan Brunette
I’ve tried something more personal, perhaps literary, and it came out occasionally dark. Sorry if that’s all painful.
On a side note, writing this brought to mind the song “Meadowlands,” written by Strike Vilakazi in 1956, in Sophiatown as it was being incrementally cleared out. The lyrics are in tsotsitaal, a street slang mixing especially Sesotho and isiZulu elements. Intended to be sarcastic, it was translated by white authorities as reading, in part: “We’re moving night and day to go to Meadowlands / We love Meadowlands.” Suitably pleased, for this the state is said to have given Vilakazi a house.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41hf8wQAO6A
I was fascinated by this week’s readings themes of neighborhood as community, neighborhood as commercial space, and neighborhood safety. These intersecting ideas, particularly as they relate to the Lower East Side / Orchard Street, come up for me often when leading tours at the Tenement Museum. The search for the “correct” answer to “what is ‘authentic’ to the lower east side” comes up all the time – and when history and migration policy is taken into account, the answer is constantly shifting and subjective. Reading about the concerns of shopkeepers today, watching the video for this week’s class, and connecting with Emily’s post from this week, the high-rent blight concern is real – on one walking tour, going past a stop in “Hell Square” (I hadn’t heard that before but it is spot on) – I am constantly adjusting the content of the tour, given how the commercial space in the ground level of a restore burial society has seen 9 wine bars in the last 8 years (there is now a Japanese restaurant).
Thinking about 97 Orchard Street, the building that is the primary space of the Tenement Museum — the longest running business (other than the museum itself, which is an interesting statement of the “cultural district” the LES is becoming, the neighborhood emerging as a “destination” enough to sustain a cultural institution for over 30 years…) was a German beer saloon from 1864-1886, at a time when the LES had 600+ beer saloons and New York was the 3rd largest German-speaking city in the world. As migration trends shifted, so did the businesses (exit beer saloons enter kosher butcher shops). As migration sharply declined with the restriction of European immigration in 1924 (coupled with the depression that followed), businesses faltered and residential density dropped. The timing of La Guardia’s ban on pushcarts is an interesting one in this case -1938 – just in time for the growth of car traffic and the 1939 World’s Fair. The relocation of pushcart vendors to Essex Market by lottery was coming up in my mind a lot this week – what was met with outrage with a change in sidewalk / public sphere and commercial life of the neighborhood, has gradually become part of the community. A neighborhood space that has evolved as the demographics of the neighborhood have shifted with migration patterns.
As many of you probably know, the market is scheduled to be torn down and the vendors relocated into the first of three phases of Essex Crossing, set to open “spring 2019…” –https://marketline.nyc/. The differing perspectives bring up the tensions of different neighborhood stakeholders – often of different class, nativity, and ethnic backgrounds- in this week’s readings. In the case of Essex Crossing, vendors are the ones in favor of the relocation, a comment on the low foot traffic in the old market and a lack of visibility in its aging design. Yet long-time residents (clearly familiar with the neighborhood after the market was opened in 1940) are upset and have clamored for the protection of the old market – it will soon be torn down to be the site of some of Essex Crossing’s affordable senior housing, I’ve heard. I’m curious to learn, as the relationship with the Market Line evolves and who claims to be “native” to the LES continues to shift, what will be “authentic” to the LES, or as distant a memory as the beer saloons of Kleindeutschland?
In this week’s explorations of the city as community, writers contend with the question of “what makes a city?” beyond its formalities. What is the connective tissue that gives a city its character, makes it fertile ground for art and innovative thought and also of the daily experiences of kinship and neighborhood?
The things that Jane Jacobs writes about New York, specifically Greenwich Village, are reflective of the things I was raised to love about New York – reflective of my own experiences of safety and comfort in the City, defined by noise and the constant presence of strangers. While some of her writing skews toward the romantic, she is strong in her conviction that cities live and die by their street life. However, the extent to which she centralizes surveillance as the mechanism for peace (though making clear that this surveillance should be performed by the community, not police) left me wondering what Foucault thought of her analysis and idealism.
So, when Mumford, in the first paragraphs of his piece, critiques of her fixation on reducing or eliminating street crime, it struck me as a comment one might hear today. Though, one can look at Jacobs’ ideals and also see a case for the abolition of formal policing. Much of his critique inspired a knee-jerk aversion and an eye-roll or two (he really wore me down with each reference to her thinking as naive or innocent). But regarding this first criticism he levies, it strikes me that 1962 pre-dates what is now remembered as a high-crime, particularly scummy time for New York in the 1970s. Would he ultimately stand by his dismissal of the impacts of urban renewal on urban crime 15 years later? Mumford ultimately, I believe, misses the core point of Jacobs’s writing and criticism of urban renewal. I did not get the sense that she was interested in scaling the particulars of Hudson Street. Rather, it was a response to the denial that such streets even existed in the places wiped out by urban renewal: not just that there was nothing to save, but that they lacked wisdom or inspiration for what could be a better urban life. That the grand visions of what might make for an ideal city consistently superseded what existed. I am reminded of Marshall Berman’s reminiscences of the Bronx he knew, full of Hudson Streets, now a highway.
The concern with the “place brand identity” approach
This week’s readings (Gutman, McGee and Gopnik in particular) made me reflect on the notion of place brand identity that is heavily used by place branding agents to legitimise efforts to make a place unique for sale. In the very essence of branding there lies the (re)creation of a unique identity (aka selling point) in order to build a coherent image to promote and sell for profit/ return on investment. This is indeed a set of complex, strategic procedures that involves several stakeholders and a managerial process for consumer/business products and services. However when we look at places, cities in particular, this gets even more complicated and problematic due to the impact and significance of cities on human life.
This echoes Lefebvre’s circle of taking rural areas as leisure spaces and contributing to the reproduction of capitalist spaces (which was emphasised in Marta’s article and much of Harvey’s work we have previously read/ discussed). This is also very much in line with (thanks to Joanna’s mentioning) William Cronon of whom is often misquoted within place branding circles as more of a justification to creating “this” or “that” environment (accepting that the damage is already done in megacities so go with the flow mentality) rather than seeing his core criticism of the exact opposite purpose. In an era where most city governments are working very closely with branding agencies in order to create a static brand image for a place, which in nature is dynamic and organic as well as being home and bread to many and 24/7 open to production and construction of social relations and meanings, to sell.
Indeed we do need places of commodification for neighbourhoods to flourish, streets to fill with people for interaction and to connect but where do we draw the line of creating static place brand identities and images to sell, to the point of exclusion of anything and anyone that may not fit in that image (often through real estate speculation)?
Jacobs (1961) chapter on sidewalks explores the idea what constitutes a thriving neighborhood community. For her, the mosaic of business owners, residents, and visitors are what keep a neighborhood thriving. Much like an ecological biodiversity, a neighborhood has a sort of ecosystem with spatial and temporal niches being filled resulting in a healthy environment for all. As a transplant to New York, I do agree that I feel a sort of safety in a sea of people and generally the only time I begin to feel uneasy in the city is when I find myself on a deserted street or subway car. Mumford (1962) challenges certain aspects to the narrative that Jacobs outlines. For example, plenty of urban neighborhoods simply do not look like the one that Jacobs describes. And others look very similar to the ones Jacobs describes but do not have the safety or security – other factors are at play. Gutman (2017) explores how neighborhoods become constructed in terms of community-identity and where these spatial boundaries lay.
The diversity of businesses in a neighborhood are symptomatic of a lifestyle that is often unique to the urban, which is one of ‘ten-stop shopping’ as described by Kasinitiz and Zukin (2015). Lack of automobiles and smaller apartments mean a different outlook to consumption in urban environments. That said, there are questions for the future of such a model with online shopping. As noted in Steigemann (2019), e-commerce has greatly affected how people shop, with certain niches faring much better in the digital world (like electronics, books, and clothing).
In an urban context, the café has a long and significant history as a place of community making in urban contexts. For Harbermas (1974), they represent an example of the public sphere – a communal site for public meeting and discussion. Gopnik (2018) traces the history of pre-WW2 Europe in which cafés were a place of community for Jewish populations. Kasinitz and Zukin (2015) describe how cafes are an early signifier of gentrification, and McGee (2015) describes how corporate (but familiar) Starbucks is more welcoming to the long-time residents of Crown Heights, versus the local Brooklyn-esque coffee shops that have a greater appeal to hipster transplants.
Overall the readings for the week bring the scale of focus from down from the more macro-urban to its community-based constituent – the neighborhood. A neighborhood is not only a spatial boundary, but also relates to population and demographic-based components that are apt to shifts, especially across generations. As these dynamic communities are the heart of the city and dictate the character of urban life, there is great value in determining how to nurture the health of these vital urban components with an angle of social equity and justice.
-Christopher Ryan
This week’s readings represented a constellation of theories surrounding a central question: does space construct community, or does community construct space?
Jane Jacobs argues the latter, vehemently. Neither the quaint, affluent neighborhoods of suburbia nor the young professional high-rises of Manhattan nor the sprawled neighborhoods of LA are, in her opinion, safe from the anxiety of city living without a fundamental community of watchers. These watchers, though they do not recognize themselves as participating in the constant policing of a neighborhood, are the vital component of a safe neighborhood that Jacobs finds the premier quality of livability. She has a point. Who among us has not walked a little faster when we find ourselves walking toward a stranger underneath scaffolding at night—well lit as that blind corridor may be? We feel safe when we feel assured that someone will intervene on our behalf.
However, this sense of intervention and community finds itself in direct conflict with some social structures, especially in today’s troubling climate of police brutality and often-cruel immigration policy. I am reminded of a conversation I had with Marta regarding DACA and undocumented students on CUNY campuses. The entire campus at CCNY has, thankfully, been declared a community into which ICE cannot enter without a warrant. But what does it mean when communities must protect each other and remain ever-vigilant, not against the “sometimes not-so-nice strangers” of Jane Jacobs’ imagination, but against the police and other supposed keepers of law and order?
Lewis Mumford’s idealistic and skeptical rebuttal to Jacobs’ community-based understanding of how public space is constructed is no solution to this kind of question. Mumford insists on the value of the beautiful and the planned, condemning Jane Jacobs and her understanding of community as an exercise best practiced from the bottom up. Le Corbusier, in theory, would enthusiastically agree with Mumford. Build it and they will become. Architecture is influential on the psyche, health, and community-minded spirit of the people who inhabit it. But for whom is this “beautiful” kind of architecture and public space built, really? In most cases, including the vast majority of Le Corbusier’s works, it is for an elite market seeking privacy and seclusion from society rather than community. Otherwise, it seems to represent an attempt to control (or, delicately, to provide for) the unruly majority in the form of public housing.
Those who watch, as Jacobs asserts, practice surveillance. Those watched feel protected by knowing that someone will intervene if necessary, with the power of the state behind them and a 911 call away. But what if those watched do not have the luxury of feeling protected by this surveillance? Or if those watching and worried cannot call the police for fear that the police might arrest them instead? The concept of surveillance is a representation of state authority. How do our communities shift when the state authority fails to protect our neighbors?
Caroline House
Apologies for focusing almost exclusively on one of the shorter pieces this week but it left me with many “thoughts.”
I have to take issue with a number of the assumptions and implications McGee makes in the analysis of Franklin Avenue in Crown Heights, particularly because I lived in that area during the years in question and some of narrative, as presented, seems off base to me.
It’s worth noting, for example, that Bruekelen Coffee House is a black-owned business that has a diverse (albeit young) clientele, as well as a wide range of events that bring together a lot of voices and people from the community (I will embarrassingly admit to co-hosting an improv comedy show there for the better part of 2011). I don’t mean to imply that the race of the owners and patrons needs to be implicitly stated but Marcus, McGee’s narrator of sorts, is described clearly as an African American man and it seems to me that the description provided for Bruekelen Coffee House would leave the reading assuming it to be a “white people” establishment. Furthermore, Tony Fisher, longtime owner of the grocery store and the Pulp and Bean, is a white man living in Bay Ridge. The author does not sufficiently give context for his role in the community despite giving him credit for the “reshaping of Crown Heights” commercial landscape. His authority in the Crown Heights is implied by his having “inherited the grocery store from his parents.” Between the two coffee shops, who in particular is the gentrifier?
I am not suggesting that race is the sole defining aspect of gentrification, but this piece does not go far enough in establishing its terms and defining what gentrification even means for the author. There is explicit mention that the Starbucks is friendly for the “long term black residents.” The changes in Crown Heights McGee describes “bear not only class…but distinct racial dimensions.” McGee seems to want to address the racial aspect only when convenient to the narrative presented. Would the acknowledgement of the black hipster ownership of Bruekelen Coffee House hurt the story?
Ultimately, I feel McGee suffers from the same problem as Habermas, the suggestion that the public sphere is monolithic rather than messy and full of division and exclusion. The work of Nancy Fraser pushes Habermas’ idea of the public sphere towards a much more modern conclusion, that the public sphere can contain and exclude a myriad of voices and publics. McGee’s subject Marcus, or the homeless person who charges his phone in Starbucks, may be one of those voices but is also merely an example of the “multiplicity of publics” that “is preferable to a single public sphere both in stratified societies and egalitarian societies” (Fraser, 1990).
McGee appears to me, by focusing on the singular perspective of Marcus (not to mention the homeless man in Starbucks), to suggest their public sphere is the righteous one in Crown Heights. I think the idea of who feels welcome in which coffee shop can be informed by generational identities for example, not just race or length of residency. There’s room for a Starbucks and a Bruekelen Coffee House in Crown Heights, neither can encapsulate entirety of public and social space.
This article brings to my attention the need for critical historiography, even for accounts of current events.
-Adam Sachs
Referenced:
Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, No. 25/26 (1990), pp. 56-80
In “Making and Unmaking Neighborhood Boundaries in Postwar U.S. Cities,” Professor Gutman studies the genealogy of the words neighbor and neighborhood and I appreciated her account of the meaning of a neighborhood in a rural setting. It instantly made me think of the “neighborhood” where my in-laws live in Saint Louis, which I perceive as being a conglomerate of similar looking houses bound in a specific area, and only accessible by car. In this case, the neighborhood is defined by the existence of houses built side by side, without an aspect of community. Given its residential nature, there would be no reason to visit this neighborhood unless one was invited to someone’s house.
This conception of the neighborhood does not make sense to me. Having grown up in both Paris and New York, I’d always conceived of the neighborhood as being defined by interactions with people and the built environment. In addition, since I have moved every year in the past ten years, I have had the chance to experience neighborhoods on the Upper East Side, the Lower East Side, South Williamsburg, Clinton Hill, Bed Stuy, Crown Heights, Flatbush, Park Slope, and Prospect Lefferts, where I currently live. Although many of these neighborhoods are adjacent to one another, they each have a distinct personality that is defined by a community of residents, business owners, architecture, and amenities (e.g., parks, playgrounds). As opposed to the neighborhood where my in-laws live, these New York neighborhoods thrive on interpersonal relationships that happen on the sidewalks.
Which brings me to Jane Jacobs. The first time I truly understood her argument that life on the sidewalk is a matter of safety was when I moved to Bed Stuy in 2013. It was the first neighborhood that I had lived in New York where everyone said hello to each other on the street. At first, I was taken aback since I had grown up to feel suspicious of strangers saying hello. But it became clear that this was a matter of safety – by saying hello and looking at people in the eyes, you acknowledge their presence and they acknowledge yours. And as the weeks went on, I started to feel recognized in the neighborhood and felt like I had a network of people who had their “eyes on the street” looking out for folks. I have carried this habit of looking at people in the eyes and saying hello to my neighbors ever since.
-Rebecca Krisel
Changes in and beyond the neighborhood level
The readings this week gave me the impetus to visit the streets of Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy to see for myself what McGee’s Crown Heights Starbucks article and Krasnitz & Zukin’s article (the Fulton/Bed-Stuy part) discussed; the other part of the Krasnitz/Zukin article on Orchard St is a useful comparison to Steigemann’s analysis of the urban revitalization efforts in the Neukoelln district of Berlin. Steigemann’s interviews with the local merchants underscore her insight that there are fundamental changes in consumer behavior and preference (which occurred earlier in US/NY, driven by same underlying causes): the accelerating one-way shift towards online shopping, and the preference for one-stop rather than ten-stop shopping and for a more entertaining experience. The impact on Orchard Street and on Karl-Marx-Strasse is comparatively greater because both shopping districts previously relied on “destination shoppers” drawn from OUTSIDE the neighborhood by the reputation of the neighborhood as a place to get discounted goods. In that sense, these neighborhoods were already not usefully analyzed as insular, discrete economic units. Their prior economic sustenance was from a “catchment area” far exceeding the boundaries of the neighborhood. This reaffirms the insight from an earlier week’s reading, by Teitz, in his critique of economic development strategies targeted at/within a neighborhood level.
By contrast, the Hudson Street neighborhood/block described by Jacobs, the famous all-day “ballet” seems closer to Krasnitz/Zukin’s Bed-Stuy’s Fulton St – the shopping streets’s businesses/merchants seem to be (still; fingers crossed on the future for the ever-gentrifying Bed-Stuy) mainly targeted at a local, neighborhood customer base – so perhaps less dramatically eroded by the macro consumer patterns that have already transformed Orchard Street and seems likely to do the same to Karl-Marx-Strasse. But though I am a card-carrying fanboy of Jane Jacobs, a Janatic if you will, I admit that the neighborly behavior and modes of living prevailing in mid-century New York City that made possible the eyes-on-the-streets, bodies-in-the-streets ballet she describe is also a bygone relic. I haven’t checked the recent prices of Greenwich Village real estate, but my perusal of the Bed-Stuy brownstone offerings in the window display of the Fulton St branch of Corcoran – median around $3 to $4 million, so I am guessing something in the “neighborhood” of $10 million for the Hudson Street area – and that economic neighborhood is not going to support the balletic neighborhood in Jacobs’ ode to working-middle class Italian-immigrant urbanism.