Class 4. September 18: Researching present day land uses
Methods: GIS, accessing public data sets, searching property records
(Friday, September 20: open for site visits, meetings, etc.)
Experts: Steven Romalewski (GIS), Director, CUNY Mapping Service
Readings or applications:
Andrew S. Dolkart, “Hints on Researching New York Buildings” (New York: typed mss., 2012).
MIT Library Introduction to GIS (2013)
Maryanna Pavlovskaya, 2002. “Mapping Urban Change and Changing GIS: Other Views of Economic Restructuring.” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 9:281-289.
For background on the city’s PLUTO dataset and BetaNYC’s great resources about open data
• Overview slide presentation about the ins and outs of the data
• Wired article on the decision to make PLUTO available for free\
• Classes about NYC open data
• Community Boards and leveraging of open data
• “A People’s Roadmap to a Digital NYC”
OASIS, ACRIS, assessments and taxation, zoning code, building code, OASIS links to databases, title, recoding of transactions and financing
In “Mapping Urban Change and Changing GIS,” Marrianna Pavlovskaya seeks to challenge the positivistic nature of the study of geography and the use of GIS by demonstrating that these are socially-constructed by nature. She does this by incorporating critical, feminist, and post-structuralist thought with GIS in order to visualize changing patterns of economic development at a household level in pre and post-privitazation Moscow. Whereas most maps would focus on mapping the transition at a macro level of analysis (national or urban level), Pavlovskaya specifically focuses on a household level of analysis since this is where we are most likely to track the impact of the transition to capitalism on women. Her final results demonstrated that, while the private service sector grew, the production of goods and services within households also grew. This had an impact on women in terms of domestic labor and their position in the labor market. This is a critical, feminist, and post-structuralist layer of understanding about the transition to capitalism that a map focused on using macro economic indicators a national or urban level would not be able to uncover.
One aspect of Pavlovskaya’s methods that I think is especially relevant to our final project is the idea of mapping the respondents’ vision of urban change. It’s a way of avoiding a path dependency based on using data collected in a way that supports the hegemonic approaches to geography and data collections. It’s also an interesting approach to combining ethnographic or interview data with spatial coordinates. Perhaps we can even combine information from the interviews in Gowanus by Design in addition to information from our own interviews to map a vision of urban change from the perspective of residents and others closely engaged with the redevelopment of Gowanus.
– Rebecca
I am stuck on a few questions on how we can creatively use GIS to contribute to and bridge the academic and civic debates on Gowanus’s rezoning. To summarize my thoughts and key take-aways from this week’s content: governmental data/digital resources, while plentiful, can still cause researchers and engaged citizens to experience serious limitations in representation, transparency and connections across departments and related issues. These gaps lead to DIY and creative responses to policy and coverage of many issues, yet I worry these “people first” projects may reintroduce similar structural barriers and biases they seek to break down.
Pavlovskaya’s article made me think on how to use this semester’s project as a way to not only challenge the assumed objectivity of government data sources and categories by reading against the grain (Pavlovskaya 284). For example, learning from her methods to map the informal or secondary systems of place by reimagining scale and the household economy, how can we build on the work that is already being done by other organizations to make sense of Gowanus’s environment, and make an additional perspective visible?
Second, in my review to the NYC Roadmap Project, I am interested in the concept of a “digital city” – and empowering people by the fight to connect and collaborate (who are “the people” in practice here?)… While the site seems to be squarely in the 2011-13 range, how can we bring these principles to the present moment of unbridled redevelopment, displacement, and growing inequality? Also, while there have been successes in terms of the policy adoption of their recommendations, when I read this Medium article with a 2018 update, it seems the shortcomings of the project (including making the report more user-friendly and including more voices) are falling into step with the very systems their project sought to address – https://medium.com/read-write-participate/the-peoples-roadmap-to-a-digital-new-york-city-e9a71f93e92d
Looking forward to our discussion as we formulate our draft for our class project.
Because maps are reflections of our physical world, they make for a compelling tool in the presentation of social scientific knowledge and study to a broad audience. The visual representation of information, not just relation to other abstract information but onto space as we understand it, can make them seem like particularly accurate representations of the world we live in. In her piece on feminist alternative uses for GIS technology, Marianna E. Pavlovskaya hones in on a key structural element of GIS work that reveals its biases, the particular type of light it has shed: its separation of public and private space. Because the technology has been mostly used with publicly/commercially available data and has been used to aggregate data over large geographic areas, private space is all but erased. But in Pavlovskaya’s writing, private space and local space become entwined – a sort of intimate plane that includes businesses that lie within the polygons recognizable from above that allow her to present a different type of data than that which is usually represented via GIS.
This issue of scale, and how the scale of one’s research is related to the type of knowledge produced, I think is key for us moving forward. As Pavlovskaya concludes in the research she conducted in Moscow, the economy of a home expands far beyond the businesses that come to their blocks. The scale at which we think about Gowanus should be relevant to the lives of the people who currently live there, but also the people who are imagined to live there in the future. This goes beyond transportation systems, but into food systems, education, domestic labor, etc. How does looking at the history of buildings (which is a scalar element) relate to these relationships? If luxury housing comes to dominate the area, those folks will live in a different geography than those who are there, whether they are homeowners or residents of the housing projects. If we are looking to contribute to the information publicly available relevant to the redevelopment, we must consider: whose lives are represented by what spaces and institutions and the buildings and blocks and networks they inhabit? Our geographic definitions go beyond the block-to-block formal political or real estate boundaries.
The week’s methodological turn begins to broach the topic that I raised two or so weeks ago. Future weeks will cover this more broadly, but I’ll take the opportunity to preface it here.
Lots of politics – more than we suspect, even in contemporary times of ‘eyes-wide-open’ concern with the corruption of democracy – is oriented around efforts to make money from state operations. In city politics, the most money can be made via municipal land use decisions. In South Africa, for instance, early estimates being developed by colleagues suggest that the revenues available here are potentially exponentially greater (to the power of 2) than the R50 million available in metropolitan procurement budgets. Municipal land use decisions, moreover, are off-budget and so (although I’m less certain of NYC) not subject to the same level of scrutiny (extensive segregations of duties, checks and balances, financial accounting, internal and external auditing) applied to public finances.
So, being interested in understanding city politics, I’m interested – it should be said, from a position of some ignorance – in understanding the land-use “value-chain.”
Oasis offers a useful resource for beginning to do so. It’s map links to transaction and financing records of New York City’s lots. These offer an early window into the “organizational architecture” – sometimes the individual proprietors, but more often the companies – through which values will be capitalized and realized. In exploratory mode, I’ve begun to trace, from the northern end of the Gowanus Canal, a block on each side, what this organizational architecture looks like.
Covering just the eight blocks between Butler Street and Union Street, there are just seven small lots that are owned by individuals. An additional one was transferred from one Ricardo Fiallos to Ricardo Property, LLC, both having the same address. Of these eight, three have been held by these individuals for over two decades or have been inherited, suggesting that these can be described as family-held properties. There are 24 other lots, most of greater scale.
The FAC Renaissance Housing Development Fund Corporation, under the care of the Fifth Avenue Committee, holds Lot 11 in Block 411. The entirety of the two blocks to the north-east, along Nevins Street, has been expropriated by the City of New York, asserting its right to eminent domain. These will locate a facility for reducing the discharge of combined sewer outflows and form a part of the general environmental rejuvenation of the area. Just south, Block 425 will by order of court for eight years from 2018 act as a staging ground for the construction of that facility.
The records are unclear for two lots. The remaining eighteen lots are held by limited liability companies, apparently in various states of speculation and assemblage. These companies are maddeningly anonymous. One is called Eponymous Gowanus, but it has no real name. New York’s company register appears not to make the names of directors public. There are, of course, some advantages to confidentiality, in terms of avoiding popular scrutiny and to out-maneuver smaller property owners who might “hold-out” to extract better purchase prices from obvious assemblers.
There does appear, however, to be at least one assemblage that has approached a state of completion. In 2000, Lot 1 in Block 417 was owned by one Suzanne Usdan, a scion of Samuel Lemberg, who built something of a real estate empire on the back of the Great Depression and whose philanthropic concerns included education and funding the immigration of Jewish people fleeing Nazi and Soviet persecution in Europe. John Usdan, Suzanne’s son, is today the CEO of a development company, either the same or closely related to Lemberg’s, called Midwood Management Corporation. Midwood has under its care the company that gained control of Suzanne’s lot in 2000. In the course of the next two decades Midwood gained control, through a subsidiary and through a development agreement, of two more of the four lots. The final lot is owned by a company that is located in the Cayman Islands.
It might be interesting – I do not know – to consider whether that is also an Usdan company and how it can act as a channel for shifting money beyond the reach of American taxation.
Forgot to note that one or two of those LLCs might be real businesses, that do stuff beyond just providing cover for assemblers, but would have to look into that more.
Like others in the class, I was impressed by the fruits of Pavolovskaya’s critical feminist approach. By developing a supplemental set of “private“ and “micro” data gleaned from 45 in-depth interviews, she revealed a paradoxical result of Moscow’s early privatization years that the “public” and “macro” picture from maps and statistics hide or obscure. Namely that “public” retail and services (Eg private businesses and shops) can boom while not reducing the time spent by housewives in “domestic” chores. This confirms our contemporary understanding from living in a gentrifying City – longer term residents often have to go farther to find affordable outlets as their neighborhoods are “taken over” by shops too pricey for their income. I have two quibbles, one minor and one more serious. The actually map-based data presentation reprinted in her article seems rather pedestrian. More concerning is the selection of 45 interview participants. The area of study is relatively central in Moscow. My limited knowledge of that sprawling city of many millions is that most people live far away in large social housing complexes along the metro system. Are the central area informants representative? The Kasinitz article on Gowanus old timers last week cautions us that who we select to interview matter greatly. Without knowing more about the selection criteria, it is hard to know how robust the findings are.