“Whose City? Our City!” : Layered Landscape of Gentrification in Brooklyn, New York

Tämä tutkielma tarkastelee gentrifikaation vastustamista Brooklynissa, New Yorkissa. Tutkielman lähtökohtana on tarkastella 2000-luvun kaupunkia antropologian näkökulmasta. 1980-luvulta alkaen neoliberaali kapitalismi on muuttanut monet suurkaupungit ympäri maailmaa superrikkaiden leikkikentiksi, joilla yksityisomaisuus ja liikevoitto on tärkeämpää kuin ihmisten oikeus kaupunkiin. Tässä tutkielmassa gentrifikaatio ymmärretään prosessina, jossa etenkin marginalisoituja pienituloisia yhteisöjä uhkaa pakko muuttaa, kun heidän asuinalueensa alkaa houkutella uutta rakentamista ja uusia ihmisiä. Näin ollen, gentrifikaatiota on käytetty kontekstina analysoidessa, kuinka urbaaneja eriarvoisuuksia yhtäältä systemaattisesti tuotetaan, ja toisaalta, miten niiden kanssa eletään, miten niistä neuvotellaan ja miten niitä vastustetaan jokapäiväisessä elämässä. Tutkielma tarkastelee kaupunkia monimuotoisena elettyjen todellisuuksien kerrostumana, joka on täynnä jännitteitä ’meidän’ ja ’muiden’ välillä, ja jossa ristiriidoista ja kompromisseista neuvotellaan jatkuvasti. Tutkielma osallistuu antropologiseen keskusteluun kaupungeista sekä tutkimuskohteena että -ympäristönä. Koska jo yli puolet ihmiskunnasta asuu kaupungeissa, tutkielma haluaa kiinnittää huomiota kaupunkiantropologian merkitykseen ihmisyyden ymmärtämisessä. Kootakseen kattavamman kuvan tutkitusta aiheesta, tutkielma yhdistää urbaanin kosmopolitiikan käsitteen ja antropologiset teoriat maisemasta, taiteesta ja vastarinnasta kriittiseen kaupunkiteoriaan, joka on vaatinut kaupunkeja ihmisille, ei voitontavoittelulle. Tutkielma pohjautuu etnografiseen kenttätyöhön, joka toteutettiin New Yorkissa huhtikuusta kesäkuuhun 2017. Tärkeimmät käytetyt tutkimusmenetelmät olivat osallistuva havainnointi erinäisissä tapahtumissa ja tilanteissa, sekä puoli-strukturoidut haastattelut kuuden aktivistin ja taiteilijan kanssa, jotka kaikki osallistuivat osaltaan gentrifikaation vastustamiseen. Kaikki haastatellut olivat asuneet koko tai lähes koko elämänsä New Yorkissa, ja heillä oli henkilökohtaista kokemusta gentrifikaation mukanaan tuomista taloudellisista paineista muuttaa pois asuinalueiltaan. Lisäksi, tutkimusdataa on täydennetty tiedolla, jota on kerätty sosiaalisesta mediasta, blogeista, verkkosivustoilta ja internetartikkeleista. Myös lukemattomat etnografiset kohtaamiset kaupungissa ovat edistäneet analyysia. Tutkielman analyysi osoittaa gentrifikaation muuttavan kaupunkimaisemaa, jossa ihmiset elävät, ja johon he yhdistävät kuulumisentunteita, yhteisöllisyyttä ja identiteettinsä. Tutkielmassa kaupunkimaiseman ymmärretään koostuvan fyysisistä, poliittisista, sosiaalista, historiallisista ja kulttuurisista kerroksista. Tutkielma osoittaa, että gentrifikaation vastustaminen New York Cityssä tarkoittaa systeemisen rasismin värittämän kaupunkikehittämisen vastustamista. Lisäksi, monet kaupungin aktivistiliikkeet vertaavat gentrifikaatiota kolonialismiin, mikä on keskeistä tutkielman analyysissa. Näin ollen, historiallisten menettelytapojen valossa tutkielma tuo esiin, kuinka gentrifikaatio ei ole vain väistämätön osa kaupungin elinkaarta, vaan kaupunkisuunnittelun tulosta; kaavoitus- ja asuntopolitiikka ovat suojelleet asuinalueiden segregoitumista ja edistäneet pienituloisten vähemmistöyhteisöjen pakkomuuttoja. Nämä kaupunkia muovaavat eriarvoiset valtasuhteet ovat olleet keskeisessä asemassa analyysissa vastarinnasta. Tutkielma tunnistaa monenlaisia vastarinnan muotoja , jotka vaihtelevat yksityisistä kollektiivisiin, avoimista piilotettuihin, ja mielenosoituksista vaihtoehtoisten narratiivien ja tulevaisuuksien kuvittelemiseen ja jakamiseen. Tutkielmassa osoitetaan taiteella olevan erityinen rooli vastarinnassa: se voimaannuttaa yhteisöä, luo tiloja erimielisyyksien esiintuomiselle, ja tekee näkyväksi kaupungissa sijaitsevat erilliset maailmat. Lopulta, tutkielma tuo esiin, miten vastarinta liittää ihmiset osaksi kaupungin politiikkaa; ulkopuolelle jättäminen päätöksenteossa, kestämätön kaupunkikehitys, ja kulttuurin omiminen ovat asioita, joita vastaan etenkin huonommassa asemassa olevat yhteisöt kamppailevat puolustaessaan oikeuttaan kaupunkiinsa.This is a study on resistance to gentrification in Brooklyn, New York. The premise of the study is to look at the 21st century city through an anthropological lens. From the 1980s on neoliberal capitalism has led to cities around the world to become playgrounds for the hyper-healthy where private property and profit rates trump people’s right to their city. In this study gentrification is understood as a process where marginalized low-income communities of color are disproportionately threatened by displacement as new development and people appear in their neighborhoods. Thus, this study has used gentrification as a context for analyzing how urban inequalities are systematically produced on the one hand, and lived, negotiated and resisted in everyday life on the other. It examines the city as a multiplicity of layered lived realities charged with antagonisms between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and in constant renegotiation between conflict and compromise. This thesis is a contribution to anthropology of, and in, the city. As over half of humanity now lives in towns and cities, this thesis speaks to the importance of urban anthropology in understanding the human condition. In order to assemble a more comprehensive picture, the thesis combines the concept of urban cosmopolitics and anthropological theories of landscape, art, and resistance with critical urban theory that has demanded cities for people, not for profit. This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in New York City between April and June 2017. The main research methods included participant observation in various events and settings, and semi-structured interviews with six activists and artists all in their own way engaged in resistance to gentrification. All of the participants had lived all or most of their lives in New York, and had personal experience with the pressures of being priced out of their neighborhoods. Supplementary information was gathered online from social media posts, blogs, websites and articles. Also, countless ethnographic encounters in and with the city have contributed to the analysis. This thesis analyzes how gentrification changes the urban landscape wherein people dwell and have formed their sense of belonging, community and identity. The urban landscape is seen as consisting of physical, political, social, historical and cultural layers. It is suggested that resistance to gentrification in New York City is resistance to systemic racism inherent in urban development. Moreover, social movements across the city have drawn an analogy between gentrification and colonialism, which is also factored into the analysis. Thus, connecting it to historical urban policies and practices the study suggests that gentrification in New York City is not merely an inevitable part of life in the city but a result of urban planning; zoning and housing policy have protected the segregation of neighborhoods and enabled the displacement of low-income communities of color. These unequal power relations that shape the city without regard to its people have been central in identifying and analyzing why people are engaged in resistance. This thesis examines various kinds of acts of resistance that vary from individual to collective, from overt to covert, and from demonstrations to imagining and circulating alternative futures and narratives. Special attention is given to art as resistance: it is analyzed as empowering the community, creating spaces of dissent, and making visible different life-worlds within the city. Finally, the thesis analyzes how resistance involves people in the politics of the city; exclusion from decision-making, unsustainable urban development, and co-optation of culture are issues that particularly disenfranchised communities across the city are facing in their struggle to assert their right to their city

Pedestrian-Oriented Street Design: Measuring Whether It Affects Downtown Employment and Housing Growth

Urban design is hard to measure. Unlike the bottom line in a financial pro forma, the quality of urban design cannot yet be calculated in a simple manner. The urban design quality of a development project, a public space, and a place contains multiple combinations of dozens of inter-connected design attributes. Furthermore, each unique geographic place and their specific characteristics add another layer of complexity to quantitative measurement. However, planning and economic development researchers continue to chip away at developing metrics of a place’s urban design environment because it is an important component in a project, a public space or a place’s success in terms of public perception of vibrancy, attractiveness, and safety. Regardless of whether the average person can articulate the presence or absence of certain design elements, all people can point to places they like and are attracted to and those places that they instinctively avoid. Investing, developing, and maintaining places that people are attracted to is an important topic for policy makers and public development officials to understand as this is a factor in maintaining and growing the tax base in terms of housing and jobs as well as providing a justification of public investment in the public realm. This research project used 2010, 2014, and 2015 data from the U.S. Census and 2010 NAVSTREETS pedestrian-oriented street segment data via the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Location Index to test whether there is a correlation between the presence of pedestrian-oriented street segments and growth in employment and housing units in all downtown census tracts for the 383 Municipal Statistical Areas (MSA’s) in the United States over time. The use of the MSA dataset will provide a large, 5 consistent data baseline from which future measurement can then be consistently conducted for pedestrian-oriented street segments and impact on employment and housing growth

The Reserve Advocate, 03-24-1923

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/reserve_advocate_news/1064/thumbnail.jp

Partnerships, bargains and the Postwar redefinition of the public realm, New York City 1965-1980

Thesis: Ph. D. in Architecture: History and Theory of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 194-214).This dissertation traces the architectural and urban history of the privatization of the public realm. At the center of the research is New York City during the "urban crisis" years of the 1960s, as the city grappled with issues of civil rights, urban policy, and physical decline. The period saw an ongoing shift in how city and state governments initiated, financed, and managed architecture and urban development. As an administrative apparatus of crisis management, the public-private partnership was the fiscal and legal device that was at the center of this shift. With the public-private partnership, there was an increased emphasis on transactions between jurisdictional authorities and private sector actors. These transactions privileged negotiations and bargains that exchanged power, responsibilities, resources, expertise, and narratives across a network of public and private sector entities such as city and state governments, quasi-governmental agencies and thinktanks, developers, design practices, and nonprofits. The 1960s saw the beginnings of an organized cultivation of private sector participation by city and state governments, in the funding, management and provision of public goods (parks, plazas and housing). Privately-owned public plazas, privately-managed public parks, privately-owned and managed low-income housing and Special Zoning Districts are some of the outcomes of these partnerships that have shaped and influenced New York City's public realm ever since. By examining the ecology and economy of these public-private partnerships, this dissertation seeks to examine the privatization of the public realm in New York City as a series of complex intersections between the city's economic, political, urban, architectural and real-estate histories beginning in the 1960s.by Deepa Ramaswamy.Ph. D. in Architecture: History and Theory of Architectur

Spirit of Improvement: Construction, Conflict, and Community in Early National Port Cities

“Spirit of Improvement” explores the social, economic, and architectural consequences of waterfront improvement initiatives undertaken in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston from the waning years of the colonial period through the passage of the first federally-sponsored warehousing act in 1846. City-dwellers replaced a haphazardly-constructed warren of crooked streets, wooden storehouses and buildings, and dilapidated wharves of the colonial period, with orderly streetscapes, brick and stone buildings, and expanded infrastructure dedicated to local and international commerce. Though in each city, construction differed in scale and regional form, improvements everywhere were a daunting physical, financial, and political task. This dissertation seeks to present the stories of men and women throughout American cities to uncover the social and economic complexities that lay at the heart of improvement initiatives in the colonial and early national periods. Merchants and speculators sought new forms of government authorization and the consent of property holders to reorder the landscape. Architects and engineers drafted cutting-edge designs for warehouses and harbors that looked to European examples and embraced the aesthetics of neoclassicism, industrial technology, and emerging theories of public health and disease prevention. White and black laborers dredged harbors, extended docks, and erected brick and stone warehouses. Female boardinghouse and shopkeepers established businesses adjacent to the wharves. Not only did residents confront the persistence of improvement projects in their midst, they also confronted their personal relationships to the abundance of interests jostling for prominence in the early-national marketplace. As a result, these initiatives proved highly contentious both for the elites who could afford to fund competing projects, as well as for the artisans, free and enslaved laborers, small business and property holders, and families living and working on the margins of society. As the cities’ poor and middling sorts witnessed the transformations occurring around them, many were left to grapple with the question, “Improvement, but for whom?” Today, inhabitants of America’s port cities will find many of these themes all-too familiar: the presence of corporate development along shorelines; the role of celebrated architects and planners in the design and construction of expensive waterfront buildings; the ousting of long-term residents and businesses in the face of high rents or shifting clientele; and the emergence of a socially invisible, but economically essential, service-sector workforce who provide the necessary labor to keep these ventures afloat. “Spirit of Improvement” seeks to uncover the complex historical roots of America’s fascination with waterfront development—a phenomenon that stretches back to the improvement initiatives of the early republic, when merchant-entrepreneurs began to truly exploit infrastructure’s economic potential. In the early nineteenth century, capitalist development served the interests of merchants and businessmen involved international trade and commerce. Today, we look to the future of our urban waterfronts and confront the historical foundations on which these physical and social structures stand

Piercing Poverty with Light, Air and Control 1887-1906: A Case for the Preservation of Eight New York City Small Parks

From 1887 to 1906, rising in the place of what were once blocks of squalor, poverty and slum tenements, eight small parks thrilled the children their respective New York City neighborhoods. Created under the Small Parks Act of 1887, these parks were intended to bring better health, light and air to neighborhoods where the city’s poorest lived. Four of the parks (Mulberry Bend, Hudson, Hamilton Fish and William H. Seward Parks), were clustered below 14th Street, where many of the city’s newest and poorest immigrants settled in the mid to late 1800’s, but the other four (East River, John Jay, DeWitt Clinton and St. Gabriel’s Parks) were located next to the East and North (Hudson) Rivers, along Manhattan’s perimeters, where the island’s pollution was at its worst, rents were at their lowest, and the populations of the poor at their highest, after the area below 14th Street. Each of these parks, and the neighborhoods surrounding them, has a unique origin and history. Well-known landscape architects, architects and engineers designed their landscapes, pavilions, bathhouses and gymnasiums plans. Designs of these parks fell into one of three landscape ideals: Picturesque, Beaux Arts or the emerging Playground-Recreational design. As a group, they are an important representation of the national Small Parks Movement, as New York City was one of the first major cities to create small parks. They are especially important because of the notoriety of their designers. Eventually, all of these parks would become first, playground parks, and then, recreational parks, each retaining some element of their original design. All eight of these parks are still beloved and well used parks in Manhattan. This thesis documents the histories and designs of these parks, as well as any significant subsequent changes to the parks; it documents elements in the parks worthy of preservation, including any extant structures, landscape plans or fencing, or foliage

Winona Daily News

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