Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani: The Cities We Need
Interviewed By Katie Uva
Today on Gotham, we talk to Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani about her recent book, The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places. In this book, the culmination of more than two decades’ work, Bendiner-Viani takes a close look at neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Oakland and the often-inconspicuous places that foster community in each.
First, can you give us an overview of the projects The Cities We Need describes? How did you arrive at the walking tour as a method?
The Cities We Need grew from a series of projects in Brooklyn, NY and Oakland, CA that I called “Guided Tours.” I began these projects in 2001, when I started asking my neighbors in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn if they would take me on a tour of wherever they considered to be their neighborhood. While I had grown up in New York, I was new to this neighborhood, and had been working on guided tours in other cities and neighborhoods — London, Buenos Aires, the Lower East Side of New York — so it felt right to continue in Brooklyn. Several years later, living in Oakland, I asked my neighbors there the same question.
The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places
by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
The MIT Press
2024, 288 pp.
About ten years after the first of my neighbors gave me their tours in Brooklyn, this project encompassed yet another series of walks — these for the public, for which I created a set of guidebooks based on my tour guides’ stories, and from which we took turns reading on the Intersection | Prospect Heights walking tours that I led. As participants on the walks took turns reading other people’s stories aloud back in the places they were originally told, they cared for these stories, building power and empathy and making spaces for new dialogue about the rapidly changing and gentrifying neighborhood.
I came to walking tours for many reasons — not least that as a New Yorker I love to walk — but also that I wanted to understand people’s everyday experience, which is hard to talk about and notice, so I felt I needed to be there with people, have an embodied experience of their places, and to listen to the way their stories grew, changed, emerged as we moved through space together.
Photography is an important tool in your work and in the book–how did you undertake the photography part of the project and how did it complement or diverge from your experience of the walking tours?
The walking tours were the basis for my photography, and my photographs seeded the later interviews I did with my tour guides. Each time someone took me on a tour, I would make note of the everyday places they’d taken me to — and then over the following weeks I would return to each place, remembering the story my tour guide had told me and making a photograph in response to that story. I thought about how those stories might be embedded in a photograph of a place. As a photographer, I like to be still in a place, watch it happen around me and then make a photograph. In some ways, my photography of cities and places is like a still life — though not of grapes on a table. I’m interested in stillness and careful looking —framing, light, and time are the materials of any photograph.
In the context of research, I thought of the photographs as part of an exchange between myself and my tour guides. I always want to value the stories people tell me. Spending time with those stories, going back to their places, doing the work it is to make a photograph there, is part of that respect. I interviewed my tour guides a second time with the photographs, showing people what I’d seen in their places.
I loved being able to put the photographs in people’s hands, allowing them to look closer, to sort them on the table. It wasn’t a choice as to whether to share them with people digitally or in prints — though I made photographs with both film and digital cameras. Much of this project happened before the ipad or iphone existed. But had these digital devices existed, I would still have wanted to give my tour guides the tactile experience with the photographs. Holding a picture or pushing it away, or taking a beloved print home with them, were all important parts of our conversations over the photos. In all of this, I take seriously the idea that photography can slow, can let us hold on to, the everyday.
What are some ways you feel that your qualitative, interdisciplinary approach gets at things that empirical data obscures or doesn’t account for?
I think that qualitative work helps us find the right questions to ask about our world. You can’t begin to measure or count anything until you know what it is you should be measuring. Otherwise, the numbers – like most news snippets we’re bombarded with – will have no real meaning for, or connection to, our lived experience.
For my work in particular, I’m interested in people and experience in place, and that can really only be found by meeting people where they are, valuing how they experience their worlds, being willing to be there with them, and taking the time to understand them. People are contradictory and complicated and wise and strange, and the everyday is so easy to gloss over or forget about. It’s important to have an approach that makes space for all of people’s complexity, and an approach that helps us really see and hold on to the everyday – which both the embodied interviews I do with people as we walk, and the photographs I make of their everyday places make possible.
Your book is a deep dive into work you did in Mosswood in Oakland and in Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. Were there notable contrasts in your collaborators’ impressions of their neighborhoods or the nature of how people built community or do you feel that these two different places offer consistent, potentially universal insights?
Across the book, I draw on learnings from both places — I found many more similarities across the places than differences — in many ways because the book is about the work places do for people – and most people need the same things. We all need to feel that we belong, we need to feel free, we need to feel like there are other people around us who see us as part of something shared. And this last is why these stories resonate not just with people in Brooklyn or Oakland, but with people in many cities and towns, who can find something of themselves, and their places, in these stories.
Of course, the way people moved around these two neighborhoods was different – everyone in Brooklyn took me on a walk, while in Oakland some people walked, but most took me on drives. But even in these distinctions, I found an embodied experience of these places – though the drives often let us cover more distance geographically. There are fascinating similarities in the histories of the two neighborhoods, especially through the segregationist policies that shaped post-war urbanism across the country, like urban renewal, redlining, disinvestment, and later the gentrification of those disinvested areas. A powerfully-felt similarity between the neighborhoods was that in both places, people described an essence of their place as being a “mixed neighborhood."
Can you share a particular moment from your research in Brooklyn that really stayed with you?
There are so many–these stories and these tours have been such a big part of my life, as well as my research, so honestly, every story lives in my mind. I’ve turned to these stories in moments of difficulty in my own life – a sacred text of learning from humanity for me, an avowed atheist.
Two particular moments that have stayed with me are connected to Dixon’s Bicycle on Union Street in Brooklyn, which unlike many places in the book, still exists. Neville took me there on our first tour (though I’d already brought my own bike in several times). And on that visit, I got to talk with Lester and David Dixon, learning much more about the place and the people who made it — and the bigger community sustained — than I ever had. The second moment at the bike shop that stands out was when I was writing the book, and knew I wanted to include Neville’s story about the place – and wanted to let the Dixons know.
On that first visit in 2001, David had pointed to a bike in the shop and said to Neville, “Remember, you had one like this! Oh! The green Dawes! Them guys joking all the while talking about all you guys used to ride back in the day, and Neville and him Dawes bicycle!” And Neville had exclaimed:
Yes. Yes. I still have it! I still got it! And I won’t part with it. I used to store it away, and then I went to the supermarket, and somebody steal it! And a couple of days afterward, it appeared at the supermarket, and I got it back—it had a flat!
We used to have a club upstairs, and we all formed a band! We used to play together. [I played] percussions. And bass guitar. We had a bass guitar, missing the strings, and we strung it with wire, and we still used to play it like that—missing a couple of strings.
Oh, yes, we used to go to the park, and ride. I was on my Dawes, and these guys all wanted to beat me, but . . . never!
When I was writing the book in 2023, I called Dixon’s on the phone — to see if I could find David or Lester, who’d been there that day twenty-two years earlier. A kind man answered the phone, asked how he could help. I started to say I was looking for David, explaining that it had been two decades since I’d come into his shop taking pictures with our mutual friend Neville, and did he remember? “Of course! How’ve you been?!” came his laughing reply, and even on the phone I could feel the place and its people. A few weeks later I stopped by the bike shop to bring David a print of this photograph, of himself, his Uncle Lester, and Neville. The past was past, but also very present, as we looked at the picture back in that dim, friendly space, packed to the rafters with bicycles and stories.
Your research occurred between 2001 and 2016, a time of major rezoning, redevelopment, and gentrification in New York, and we’re currently as a city considering instituting a new wave of rezoning and redevelopment in the form of the Mayor’s City of Yes program. Are there any new places that have come to be since your research started that you think succeed in fostering community? What does it take for something new to support a community rather than undermining it?
There are of course new places that have opened that have been thoughtful and welcoming to building community — though many new businesses, either by their own interest, or by the need they have to make enough money to pay their exorbitant rents — are primarily transactional, and do nothing of the placework that makes a space for more than commodities. The new places I’ve seen that do this work often have much in common with the places people took me to on our tours — they allow people to hang out, they are free or low-cost in what they sell, and very often they have all-important people who facilitate conversation in that place — often in between the more prosaic parts of their jobs, like making sandwiches or shelving books.
But even more than any one new place, policy is essential.
What these rezonings for housing need to do is to define real affordability for New York, rather than simply allowing developers to satisfy the “inclusionary” aspect of zoning by setting a portion of apartments that they call “affordable,” but which are really just pegged to an income range often almost of their choosing, since they currently are negotiated for each separate development. These income ranges themselves are expressed as a percentage of “Area Median Income” or AMI, which is itself problematic, since the “area” includes places beyond the city. This results in a portion of apartments in a development with rents that are somewhat less than “market rate” (affordability seen as paying 30% of your income in rent), but with no need to be actually affordable for the majority of New Yorkers. For example, a new building in my uptown neighborhood is advertising their “affordable” two-bedroom apartments for $3,939/month for people earning between $135,052 a year all the way up to $218,010 a year.
Real affordability would consider New Yorkers who have the least amount of mobility and choice in the housing market — there are so many people who make below $30,000 a year, and almost none of the new housing caters to them.
If these new rezonings don’t prioritize real affordability, we will end up with the knock-on effects of large developments that end up pricing out surrounding retail and residential, that we’ve already seen across the city many many times. Atlantic Yards in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, is just one spectacular debacle of an example. If they don’t put real teeth to affordability, these rezonings will just be a giveaway to developers.
At the same time, city planning needs to protect the existing housing and small businesses with rental protections that are genuinely robust and allow residents and small businesses real stability and tenure in their homes.
Towards the end of the book you talk about the idea of our being in a “crisis of place and dialogue,” which really resonated with me, especially in the wake of the election. It seems to me that on a local level the 2024 election showed some major rifts over perceptions of public safety, migrants and immigrants, and economic issues. In general, a lot of our media landscape and our physical landscape seems to encourage isolation and less interaction across demographics. What would you like to see happen on a policy level to protect, sustain, and strengthen community? What would you like to see on an individual and interpersonal level?
My tour guides taught me that transformative meaning can be made in the most mundane of places, and that these experiences can be absolutely vital to our senses of self, and our sense that we belong to a larger society. An acknowledgement of, and a protection of, these places that do what I call in the book “placework” will be central to this.
We have a huge amount to work out in this country — we’ve gotten to the point where we can’t even see each other as human, can’t see each other at all, and, as you say, exist in very segregated physical, virtual, and media spaces. The divisions are enormous and high stakes. But we can’t jump into fixing this, or having hard conversations without even having practiced having low-stakes conversations. I don’t think that talking trash at the diner can fix all our problems, but this casual talk helps us practice, build muscle for the much more difficult conversations we need to have. This is why I think these spaces where we’re able to negotiate even small exchanges and connections will be so important (among so much other work!) for bringing us back from the brink.
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani is a visual urbanist and cofounder of the interdisciplinary studio Buscada. She is the author of Contested City, a finalist and honoree for the Brendan Gill Prize. A widely exhibited photographer, she holds a doctorate in environmental psychology from the Graduate Center, CUNY.