Class 11. November 20. The Gowanus development agenda: Luxury housing, Powerhouse, remediating brownfield conditions.
Methods: environmental analysis
(Friday, November 22: Visit to Powerhouse; Prof. Gutman out of town)
Expert: David Briggs, Gowanus by Design
Readings or applications:
Suleiman Osman, “Inventing Brownstone Brooklyn,” chap. 6 in The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Aaron Shkuda, “Gray Areas and Industrial Slums: The Lower Manhattan Expressway,” and “Artists Organizations, Political Advocacy, and the Creation of a Residential Soho,” chapters 3 and 4 in The Lofts of Soho: Gentrification, Art, and Industry in New York, 1950-1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Review these resources:
NYC Department of City Planning proposed rezoning framework: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/planning/plans/gowanus/gowanus-framework.page
Gowanus by Design, http://gowanusbydesign.org/
“Awesome Project: Help Gowanus Take on Toxic Sludge, Climate Change, Unethical Developers, and Brooklyn Gentrification,” Ioby, June 14, 2017.
Powerhouse materials
Suggested:
Marta Gutman, “The Ladies Intervene,” chapter 2 in A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland 1850-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Osman and Shkuda provide evocative accounts of the contending forces that shaped New York City’s built environment over the course of the third quarter of the twentieth century.
Of course, this was a time when the high modernist ambitions of top-down, rationalist urban planning came up against its antithesis. It was opposed, increasingly successfully, by a grassroots movement, arguably post-modern, or reflexively modern in character, that favored a bottom-up approach to development, ordered by the more spontaneous and dispersed rationality of individual denizens and their communities.
The conflict is commonly personified as one between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. It is really interesting though to see the rich tapestry of people and associations that were involved in it, along with the strategy and tactics that they used to create urban space. On one side we see, primarily, the elite politicians, orthodox urban planners in the city, and often closely related urban development professionals and protagonists in such bodies as the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA). These have access to the legal and prerogative powers of the state, to the finance and professional capacities of the corporate sector. Their major instrument is the comprehensive plan. On the other we see, very simply, middle-class brownstoners, loft-living artists, ordinary people and their plethora of civic associations. These have access to the resources of civil society, such as community media, protests, fairs, block parties, tours, and so on. Their major instrument is the historic preservation district.
Perhaps the most striking thing, for me, is the broad isomorphism between this milieu and that which pertains in South Africa into the present. Fights over how to shape the urban occur along much the same lines of interest, using much the same strategy and tactics, down to the level of fairs and block parties.
There are interesting puzzles around how that isomorphism occurred, about its structural determinants and possible institutional learning from New York to South Africa. There are also, however, strong grounds for comparative work across both contexts.
Ryan, this is a nice clustering of the capacities and traits of the contending groups. If you have not read Marshall Berman’s discussion of the transformation of the Bronx in this era in All that is Solid Melts into Air, you would enjoy it.
The readings for this week helped to contextualize the conversation we had last week with SJ and Karen. With a focus on the pivotal role that community-based organizing plays in neighborhood protection and placemaking, both Osman and Shkuda force us to see that the New York residential landscape has largely been shaped under the influence of community leaders who have opposed particular changes to their neighborhoods (e.g., fighting against The Lower Manhattan Expressway). These readings helped me to understand that, without the efforts to build a coalition to ensure that NYCHA is not completely left off the table in the Gowanus rezoning, the residents of public housing don’t stand a chance at reaping any benefits from the changes underway in Gowanus.
While I understood why Karen believed that it would be nearly impossible to organize NYCHA residents to vote for candidates that might better represent their interests – especially given public housing residents’ well-founded sense of being political dejected and disenfranchised – I still agree with John that political influence via voting systems is likely the strongest avenue to demand and impact change for NYCHA. It seems like such an obvious solution, and yet NYCHA’s infrastructure appears to have been explicitly built to impede organizing.
Separately, I so appreciated Nellie Bowle’s NYT article chronicling the trail through San Francisco. I could imagine creating something similar for Brooklyn – perhaps as a tour of Brownstone Brooklyn with historical references along the way? Of course, this is great fodder as we piece together our final assignment.
I’m really interested by the alignment of my readings this week: Shkuda and Osman for this class, along with my reading for another project “From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: time, Place, and Urban Redevelopment” by Michael Ian Borer (Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 33, 2010) makes me think about how each of these profiles we’ve read about neighborhoods in transition, including Gowanus, is critically temporal in its production and outcomes. Timing is such a huge factor not often explicitly named in these discussions…. yet Shkuda argues that the artist colony of SoHo would not have developed the way it had were it not for the timing of the LOMEX, and the nuances that Osman introduces in Brooklyn connects to the temporal reactions of middle class white New Yorkers to the changing social and economic conditions of post-war suburbanization and “romantic urbanism” (Osman, 230).
Both of these cases involve the collective redefinition of a nostalgic an idealized (often mythic) past of place, in the process of collective imagination of a future. In Borer, his contribution is to build on the idea that neighborhoods have identities as expressed through “symbolic connections between people and the places where they live, work and play” (96): he calls on the need to explore the process of group hopes and imagination of collective futures in the proposals of new developments. In all of these readings for this week, and the case study at hand with Gowanus, we learn that a lack of consensus on a community future and the temporal nature of these decision processes will ultimately be the abstractions that factor into power and collective action in community evolution.
I too found some resonance among readings for this week with those from another class, which included a study of the disparate impact of subprime lending (higher risk, higher interest, with more exotic triggers that can blow up when financial markets go haywire) on homeowner communities of color, in particular African American and Caribbean American homeowners of brownstones and other homes in Bed-Stuy. My main takeaway from Osman is that it took (1) patience and a multitude of participants to build or fight over the long term and (2) ingenuity in finding resources and creating support and demand were essential in the construction of Brownstone Brooklyn. Left mostly unspoken is that these are features distributed unevenly along racial lines. These features were also major factors in Shkuda’s account of SoHo’s decades-long fight against the building of a huge expressway through its heart and its concurrent and subsequent development into an art-centric district (almost quaint to read about it now, two decades into its further transformation into something much more commercial and “high-end”), but with the extra element that is probably an unintended blessing: low cost of entry/occupation/squatting due to frozen (non-)development (which really means steady decline since structures require continual or periodic injection of resources to maintain themselves) due to political uncertainty.
I really enjoyed the story about the new trail in San Fran. It’s refreshing that there are still some areas that are working-class and neighborhoods that are Latino or black. I have a feeling that if the trial is revisited in a few years the demographic gentrification will be completed to eliminate these socioeconomic unicorns from the tech Mecca.