polis: 

Poverty Below the High Line

Sahra Mirbabaee. Feb 1, 2013

Of all the factors that contribute to urban livability — including public health, education and infrastructure — policy is often focused disproportionately on economic growth. In pursuit of this assumed prerequisite for prosperity, municipal governments around the world are investing in urban design. At the same time, this investment is fueling inequality and displacement. The allocation of public funds to places of high economic potential favors the rich, creating an unfair playing field for all tax-payers. One of the most striking examples of this trend is the High Line in New York City.

Built on an elevated former railway, the High Line park runs 1.45 miles along Manhattan’s West Side. Since the 1990s, the surrounding neighborhoods have changed from a downtrodden post-industrial area to a hot spot in the city’s social and cultural scenes. They’re now home to many bars, galleries, restaurants and shops like Barneys, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. Past neglect created the conditions for profitable redevelopment, as evident in “Alphabet City” and many other Manhattan districts over the past 20 years.

Since its opening in 2009, the High Line has been hailed as an inspiring use of architecture for urban renewal. It has a large fan-base, including the municipal government. In fact, the High Line has thrived “within the confines of the community of money” because of strong government support. The first two installments cost areported $152.3 million, and the third is projected to cost $86.2 million. Funding sources comprise $112 million from the city government, $20.3 million from the federal government, $400,000 from the state and $44 million from private donations. Operating costs are estimated at $2-4 million per year. With over half the High Line’s budget coming from public funds, concerns over the return on this investment are more than justified.”

Photo: Elitism

The New York Times:

“Because Green Goes With Everything”

By CONSTANCE ROSENBLUM. Published: February 1, 2013

Ron Shiffman, an Israeli-born, Bronx-raised urban planner and a Park Sloper long before the Slope was chic, has spent half a century trying to make New York a more livable city. The journalist Jack Newfield once wrote that Mr. Shiffman “has saved more New York neighborhoods than Robert Moses has destroyed.”

Many of Mr. Shiffman’s fellow New Yorkers would agree. He is a former member of the New York City Planning Commission and the recipient of the 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for Lifetime Leadership. A burly, voluble bear of a man, Mr. Shiffman is at 74 also deeply engaged in of-the-moment issues. His efforts to make New York’s residential neighborhoods more environmentally healthy have resonated throughout the city.”

Photo: The co-founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Ron Shiffman teaches sustainable planning and development at Pratt Institute. Andrea Mohin/The New York Times.

Urban Times: 

Santiago’s Biggest Newspaper Takes a Visual Approach to Urban Issues

Helping people learn about their local neighbourhoods is rarely a priority for national newspapers, but in Santiago, Chile, that’s not the case. El Mercurio is widely considered to be Chile’s most influential newspaper, and their Santiago edition last year decided to take a new approach with local coverage.

Launched in July 2012, Santiago en 180° uses panoramic photography to show how the city is changing and how people are interacting with it. I recently spoke with City Editor Manuel Fernandez about the project, who explained:

We try to avoid the traditional panoramic picture that shows landscapes or buildings from a large distance. The ideal photo in “Santiago en 180°” shows places in a human-scale. The series has been a good way to show to our readers how amazing Santiago is, and now we’re doing the same with other Chilean cities that are undergoing rapid development. In fact, we recently launched “Chile en 180°.

The newspaper publishes panoramic photographs of areas in the city annotated with information such as facts about the area’s history, footfall, traffic, and notes about the changes happening nearby. Though a simple project, by rethinking what’s newsworthy El Mercurio has made urban issues accessible and interesting to millions of Chileans.”

The Detroit News:

Long-term Detroit neighborhood stabilization plan to be unveiled

BY LEONARD N. FLEMING. Jan 9, 2013

The Atlantic Cities: 

“How Black Gentrifiers Have Affected the Perception of Chicago’s Changing Neighborhoods

Emily Badger. Dec 31, 2012

The neighborhood of Bronzeville on the South Side of Chicago has been gentrifying now for more than a decade. Formerly boarded-up beautiful brick homes along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive have come to life. New construction has gone up on land where high-rise public housing projects were spectacularly imploded starting in the 1990s. Median incomes and property values have soared.

Gentrification, though, means something different in Bronzeville than it does in other neighborhoods. In most U.S. cities the word has generally come to imply the gradual taking of a place from one group (usually poor people, usually minorities) by another (usually middle- or upper-class whites). But in Bronzeville, a historically black neighborhood – once Chicago’s version of Harlem, the city’s “Black Metropolis” – the gentrifiers are black, too.

Some of them have been there for years, ascending the income ladder as the black middle-class nationwide has dramatically expanded. Then there is the sense that others are “returning” 30 or 40 years after the black middle-class left Bronzville. Either way, there seems to be space enough in the neighborhood amid the vacant lots.”

Photo: Flickr/Laurie Chipps

The Atlantic Cities:

Communities Aren’t Just Places, They’re Social Networks.

Richard Florida. Oct 25, 2012.

Cities are obviously more than just the sum of their physical assets — roads and bridges, offices, factories, shopping centers, and homes — working more like living organisms than jumbles of concrete. Their inner workings even transcend their ability to cluster and concentrate people and economic activity. As sociologist Zachary Neal of Michigan State University argues in his new book, The Connected City, cities are made up of human social networks. Neal took time to discuss his book and research with Atlantic Cities, explaining how cities work as living organisms and why what happens in Las Vegas cannot stay in Las Vegas.

RF: In the book, you write that “communities are networks, not places.” Tell us about why and how networks matter to cities?

“COMMENT> SPURNING SPURA

David Bergman protests the planning strategies of the proposed Lower East Side mega-project.

David Bergman. Sept 27, 2012

Forty-five years ago, when the lots on the south side of Delancey Street in the Lower East Side (LES) of Manhattan were first cleared for “urban renewal,” the prevailing planning theory called for “towers-in-the-park.” Indeed, that was what was installed slightly south and east of the site: one of the many bastardizations of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris. To the north and west, the landscape of low-rise walk-up tenements largely remained.

In between them is a hole, the black hole of the Lower East Side. If you arrive by the Williamsburg Bridge or emerge from the Delancey Street subway station, look south and you’ll see entire vacant blocks occupied mostly by parked off-duty delivery trucks.

This site, the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) has a long and contentious history. And finally a plan for its redevelopment is near approval. Community Board 3 and the City Planning Commission both recently gave the go-ahead.

Community groups and elected officials fought hard for a primary need of the neighborhood: affordable housing. Reaching a successful accord on that, though, seems to have distracted attention from the two disastrous backbones of the plan, both of which rely on old school ideas of urban renewal and zoning. Even more frustrating, newer enlightened policies are being promoted by the city’s planning department, while the outdated and discredited ones are still retained by another city organization which happens to be SPURA’s owner, the Economic Development Corporation (EDC).

The EDC policy derives from the continued presumption of the primacy of cars. A basic tenet of what’s known as transit-oriented development involves restricting the amount of parking in order to both discourage driving and congestion, and to free up funds and land for other, more valued uses.

But the EDC insists on pursuing the opposite track: requesting an exemption to provide additional parking spaces beyond what the current—yet to be updated—zoning allows. With the confluence of mass transit and existing density around the site, there is no justification for this outdated approach. (Please recall this is from the agency that brought us the white elephant of a parking structure sitting empty at the new Yankee Stadium.) People do not come to the LES by car to shop. Nor should we want them to. Delancey is already one of the most dangerous and difficult streets to cross in the city. While the city is in the midst of some safety improvements following a rash of fatal accidents, adding parking and traffic will just worsen the situation.

There’s an even more significant flaw in the EDC’s master plan. Though it’s informed enough, thankfully, to avoid repeating the street life-draining nearby towers, it doesn’t really get that it’s not just a matter of building to the street line.

In the 1970s and 80s, the low-rise sections of the LES might have been mistaken for some of the worst areas of the South Bronx, replete with trash-filled vacant lots and burned out shells of six-story walk-ups. In the following 20 to 30 years, the neighborhood picked up dramatically, coat-tailing on the bubble economy.

Unlike some other Manhattan neighborhoods, the Lower East Side managed its mini-boom fairly gracefully, at least at first. Abandoned walk-ups that no longer had stairs to walk up were gutted and repopulated. Some of the vacant lots were “infilled” with new buildings similar in height to the adjacent survivors.

Yes, gentrification took place, but there was a bit of a difference here from the typical pattern. Because of a combination of tenant protection rules and the availability of vacant space, the gentrifiers (myself included) often ended up meshing into the existing fabric, which, in turn, was strengthened with newly infused economic vitality. It wasn’t a perfect evolution, to be sure. But the LES became a rare example of change without upheaval and, aside from the inevitable issue of rising rents, few questioned whether it was an improvement over the previous decades.”

Via: the Architect’s Newspaper

Image: RENDERING OF PROPOSED PLAN FOR SPURA ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE.

“Europe’s Cities: Gentrification or Ghettoization?

By Harvey Morris.

ONDON — The widening gap between haves and have-nots in debt-saddled Europe has sharpened a debate over whether the accelerating gentrification of its major cities is leading to the ghettoization of their urban poor.

The rioting in housing projects in the northern French city of Amiens this month marked a recurring phenomenon in France, after decades of planning policy consigned the urban working classes to suburban “banlieues” where poverty and unemployment are now rampant.

In Berlin, a magnet for an international set of affluent hipsters and artists since the Wall came down in 1989, locals are opposing a plan to demolish Communist-era apartment blocks in a prime city center location and replace them with upscale homes and shops.

And in Britain, a proposal to sell municipally-owned homes in expensive neighborhoods, and move their low-income tenants elsewhere, prompted accusations this week that it would drive disadvantaged families into ghettos.

The gentrification debate is not confined to Europe. Neither is it new. Spike Lee, the American director, touches on the theme in “Red Hook Summer,” his latest Brooklyn movie. And social commentators have been debating the pros and cons since young professionals began revamping the urban landscape by regenerating old properties in previously working class neighborhoods.

The Observer last weekend revived an article from 1977 that reported tensions between older working class residents and middle class newcomers in the north London district of Islington.

“Like many a colonialist before them, the gentrifiers are convinced that their arrival has brought light into a dark place,” the article stated, before quoting a local doctor as saying: “You couldn’t even get a decent Camembert when I first came here.”

As factories and wholesale markets closed down in the centers of many of Europe’s cities, Paris became the archetype of the post-industrial European capital.

In a process of what the French call “embourgeoisement,” old districts were revamped as the working classes and poor immigrants were moved to vast developments on the outskirts.

In an essay last year, Hervé Marchal and Jean-Marc Stébé wrote: “Central Paris, which has attracted more and more of the mobile elite, has been completely gentrified, with rocketing housing prices driving the low to middle classes ever further out.”

Contrary to a perception among Londoners that their city remains more vibrant, thanks to a social mix that Paris may have lost, the French authors added: “The center of London is similarly totally gentrified. The British capital’s integration into the global economy has created profound changes on the human level.”

Via: The NY Times

Photo: The aftermath of rioting in the French city of Amiens pictured on August 14. Guillaume Clement/European Pressphoto Agency