Claiming the Right to the City: Timo Schrader's Loisaida as Urban Laboratory
Reviewed by Hongdeng Gao
In the 1970s, New York City witnessed an unprecedented level of housing abandonment and disinvestment, especially in low-income neighborhoods including Harlem, the South Bronx, Williamsburg, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the Lower East Side. Amid the citywide housing crisis, one local newspaper in Loisaida — a term coined by the activist and poet Bittman “Bimbo” Rivas in 1974 to refer to the largely Puerto Rican and low-income community on the Lower East Side — proclaimed a “Miracle on Avenue C.”
Read MoreThe Sustainability Myth: An Interview with Melissa Checker
Interviewed by Katie Uva
Today on the blog, Gotham editor Katie Uva speaks to Melissa Checker about her recent book, The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. In it, Checker examines and critiques current frameworks of sustainability in New York, where sustainability and economic development are often seen as goals that are mutually supporting. Checker argues that this belief leads to gentrification, deepens economic inequality, and even winds up worsening environmental conditions in some parts of the city.
Read MoreActivist Philanthropy, Indeed
Reviewed by Jeffrey A. Kroessler
Have you recently trekked to a farmers’ market for fresh produce? In this lockdown year, do you miss attending concerts at Carnegie Hall? A Broadway show? Have you enjoyed roaming through the romantic landscape of Central Park, or wandered the streets of the city’s historic districts? Do you go out of your way to experience the inspiring urban spaces of Grand Central Terminal? Are you invigorated when you head west to the Hudson River Park and marvel at the river’s recovery?
Read MoreProjecting “Spread City”: The New York Metropolitan Region Study and Its Critics, 1956–1968
By Peter Ekman
“This project is not a blueprint for action. It has no recommendations to make about the physical structure of the Region or about the form or activities of the governmental bodies there. At the same time, it is a necessary prelude to future planning studies of the Region.” The project in question was the New York Metropolitan Region Study (NYMRS), executed 1956–59 for the Regional Plan Association (RPA) by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from Harvard’s Graduate School of Public Administration. Unlike the RPA’s original Regional Plan of New York, issued 1929–31, which was zealously promoted to the public and substantially implemented by 1940, the ten-volume NYMRS very deliberately was not a plan.
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Community Struggles for a New Gouverneur: Tackling the Deeper Roots of the City’s Unequal Hospital Care
By Hongdeng Gao
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities in New York City’s hospitals. The decisions made by officials in power to direct money to private hospitals and close safety-net medical institutions in the past thirty years bear many similarities to another large-scale hospital closure effort in the city nearly six decades ago: the hospital affiliation plan authorized by Mayor Robert Wagner.
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“Little Pittsburgh”: Creating an Industrialized Landscape in Hunts Point
By Sam Hege
Since the 1950s, New York City has relied on the South Bronx to handle the vital and taxing components of its processing and distribution infrastructures. This strategy began with the decision to relocate the Terminal Market from downtown Manhattan to the Hunts Point peninsula, and has since been used to justify the siting of waste transfer stations, prisons, and industrial processing facilities. This consolidation of waste and congestion to the South Bronx supported the emergence of Manhattan as a tourist destination and financial capital, embodied by the redevelopment of the Manhattan market space as part of the World Trade Center project.
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Biotechnology, Race, and Memory in Washington Heights
By Robin Wolfe Scheffler
Amidst the economic and human toll inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic on the City of New York, one industry still thrives: the city’s Economic Development Corporation trumpeted the news in June that biotechnology companies were still “gobbling” up space in an otherwise sagging real estate market.
Read MoreWhose City? Fueling the Gentrification Machine through BID Urbanism
By Susanna Schaller
On September 16, 2016 Crains’ New York Business ran an article titled, “Shaping a Neighborhood's Destiny from the Shadows.” The article highlighted the work of business improvement districts (BIDs) in New York City. In the context of federal policies that had systematically drawn the life out of central cities followed by federal retrenchment, urban visionaries and the downtown BIDs they led were framed by bipartisan consensus as savior organizations.
Read MoreVisualizing New York City by the Numbers: An Interview with Kubi Ackerman
Interviewed by Hannah Diamond
Today on Gotham, Hannah Diamond interviews Kubi Ackerman, guest curator of Who We Are: Visualizing NYC by the Numbers, a special exhibition now on view and available online at the Museum of the City of New York. Who We Are examines the role data plays in shaping and reflecting the city around us. The exhibition examines New York City’s own history with the census and features works by contemporary artists and designers that illuminate our urban environment and our own identities.
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