The housing project, spatial experimentation and legal transformation in mid-twentieth century New York City (original) (raw)
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The Journal of Architecture, 2015
Bronx-sited Twin Parks Housing Development in New York City, asked: 'to what purpose do you assign the space under the pilotis? The problem posed by the pilotis [ … ] is integral to the original model [ … ] What would the inhabitants of the Ville Radieuse have done with these continuous arcades? [ … ] This is the typological burden … ' The apparent banality of Frampton's observation obscures what is revealed in the lifting up of the building on pilotis: the ground itself. Rather than follow Frampton's use of typology as a descriptive tool in the service of a critical judgement, this paper will instead see the question of type as one involving a diagnostic and propositional gesture within the design process itself, and as part of an ongoing and critical questioning of the city. The paper will explore how the three-dimensional articulation of the ground level evident in a trajectory of projects in New York City has been a site of concentrated architectural research from the late nineteenth century through to contemporary approaches to urban intensification. Here the ground can be seen to be both an object of architectural investigation and spatial reasoning, and at the same time, to operate at a strategic intersection with the spatial politics of the liberal metropolis.
Architectural Theory Review, 2020
This paper explores the role of architecture as a catalyst for housing policy through analysis of the Tenement House Exhibition held in New York City in 1900. Organized by the progressive Charity Organization Society, this exhibition exposes the terms in which Americans addressed the problem of urban housing at the turn of the twentieth century. According to its organizers, a professionalized state apparatus, including a regulated rental market, would reform the sanitation problems endemic to the tenement typology while allowing it to continue as a profitable entity. This approach to housing reform reflects the “modern” liberal philosophy of the progressive movement and was intended to preserve the existing social and economic order. The paper explores the role of architecture in this reform movement, as both a model and a standard.
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Law and Social Inquiry-journal of The American Bar Foundation, 1996
This article examines politics on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, for evidence of law at the constitutive level. We see legal relations shaping grassroots struggles over public space and housing as forums, claims, and political positions. This view challenges instrumental conceptions of law still prominent in some social-scientific approaches.
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Ardeth, 2019
This article conceives an urban project as a mechanism that traces rights on the ground. First, and most relevantly, a project separates public and private land and defines what can be built. At another level, design decisions involve a broad range of permissions and obligations. Thus, urban projects act as a form of regulation, like planning, albeit a specific form with its own rules and limits. The paper explores a twostep process. First, in the policy phase, some regulatory decision-making is delegated to design. Then, design challenges the value assumptions underlying decision-makers' actions. 'Regulation by design' arranges material objects in space and activates those spatial mechanisms.
Antipode, 2003
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The story of property: Meditations on gentrification, renaming, and possibility
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2020
Property is a story. We assign land and resources legal status, and we narrate this as ownership and power. The interlocking loans, credit, and debt from which housing markets are compiled are built through narratives about value and its origins. The urban landscape, which is made by those markets, is produced through a confluence of human decisions, made with information about conditions and access. This information is based in stories-stories about what will sell, whether risk is viable, and what constitutes risk itself. These interlocking stories produce processes such as gentrification, one of the key contemporary challenges of booming cities in the Global North. Stories about the value of property, the primacy of growth, the role of race in valuation, and the urgency to invest in the urban landscape all shape gentrification. Meanwhile, stories from below have power too, offering important reframing. This paper examines two gentrifying neighborhoods in the San Francisco Bay Area, analyzes the role of narrative in framing urban change there, and identifies counter-narratives that offer tangible alternatives with the potential to drive decisions around urban development. In sum, this paper foregrounds the role of narrative and sto-rytelling in defining the economic forces such as property that shape urban places.
A key element of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's New Housing Mar ketplace program has been the use of voluntary inclusionary zoning, through which private developers have been offered tax breaks and density bonuses to develop affordable housing on newly rezoned land. While this program has failed to alleviate the housing affordability crisis in New York City, little attention has been paid to its political effects on communitybased struggles over housing. This article addresses this question by exam ining the 2005 GreenpointWilliamsburg Waterfront Rezoning, which combined a volun tary inclusionary zoning program with a tenant services contract intended to mitigate the residential displacement effects of the rezoning. I critically examine its design, execution and monitoring, based on two years of work as an organizer and administrator of the tenant services contract. I argue that technologies of consent and control have reshaped the politics of housing in North Brooklyn by replacing resistance to gentrification with amelioration of its effects, through the anticipated creation of affordable housing. The upshot has been an emergent politics of housing in which real estateled development is regarded not as a cause of gentrification but as its solution.