New York Revisited

New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015

What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to

Journal of Urban History, 2017

The introduction to this special section argues that the deconstruction of the city’s municipal social democracy was overdetermined by shifts in the global political economy toward increased income inequality and the depoliticization of national economic management. The city’s creditors forced it into an ideologically-motivated program of market discipline that cut its operating budget as the city’s economy financialized, defined by Greta Krippner as “the tendency for profit making in the economy to occur increasingly through financial channels rather than through productive activities.” The city’s leaders believed that their program would revive the city for the middle class. But financialization exacerbated income inequality. In 1970, the top 0.01 percent of earners made fifty times the average income; by 1998, that figure had increased to 250 times the average income. In 2013 Mayor Michael Bloomberg commented that: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap,” which, he argued, was good for the whole city, because it would raise its tax base. The four articles of this section are part of a new and growing body of historical works about New York City since the 1970s that challenge the linear narratives of concepts such as neoliberalism, gentrification, public space, law and order, and resistance by reviewing how ordinary New Yorkers coped with declining infrastructure, services, standards of living, and increasing inequality.

Journal of Urban History, 2020

This article advances the concept of the orderly city, which has structural qualities and as a vision has dominated ideas about law and order in New York since the 1980s. The realization of the orderly city depended on the successful implementation of broken windows policing. This implementation required considerable reforms in the criminal justice system and the provision of substantial financial resources. Even then, without a considerable decline in serious crime rates, the city government would be unable to justify a war against minor infractions. The crime decline that occurred in the 1990s allowed the city government to equate the safe city with the orderly city. Moreover, as the economy of New York improved, the orderly city was promoted as a precondition of affluence. This article shows how these correlations are questionable and how the orderly city is based on morally and legally questionable actions such as racial profiling. In 2001, Steven Malanga of the conservative Manhattan Institute wrote an op-ed for the New York Post in which he linked New York City's improved economic fortunes with the elimination of crime and disorder. Malanga's claim represents a standard narrative shared by the mass media, the business sector, and many public policy makers around the world. According to this narrative, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1994-2001) and his first police commissioner William J. Bratton (1994-1996) followed the prescriptions of the broken windows theory and ordered the police to go after disorderly people because their behavior, if unchecked, represented a gateway to serious crime. In the process, both minor incivilities and major crimes declined and this seemingly made the city even more desirable for affluent people and corporations. This narrative has prevailed mostly because of adept political entrepreneurship by conservative commentators, politicians, think tanks, social scientists, and public officials. The orderly city is represented as an unquestionable precondition for economic prosperity. The ordering of urban space has a long international history with multiple ideological connotations that seek to justify the dominant political and social order. In the United States, the preoccupation with urban disorder intensified in the post-1945 period because of anxieties about racial transition and the future of cities. Urban disorder was divided into two components, physical and social. The terms " slum " and " urban blight " were utilized to define physical disorder,

Journal of Urban History, 2015

Workingusa, 2008

City & Community, 2007

Eric Wanner of the Russell Sage Foundation showed extraordinary leadership in bringing together New York’s vast network of scholars to “use the tools of social science . . . to probe the deeper dimensions of what has happened in the wake of September 11” (xi). The Foundation moved quickly to develop its series of volumes on the disaster and as a consequence we have a rich and detailed history of the immediate and early stages of the post-9/11 landscape in New York. In Contentious City: The Politics of Recovery in New York City, John Mollenkopf had the difficult task of editing a volume of essays whose stated purpose is to address the political consequences of the 9/11 attack on New York City and to evaluate both the decision makers and their decisions. Mollenkopf states at the outset of the volume that “September 11 did indeed change the political dynamics of the city and the rest of the world, but in completely different ways than anticipated” (4). It is unfortunate that Mollenkopf chose to make such a sweeping conclusion at the outset of this volume. Cataclysmic events are generally best understood years, if not decades, after they happen, and 9/11 is no exception. As I recall, the news media kept repeating that 9/11 would change everything in New York City and the nation. It is surprising that nowhere in this volume does anyone make any effort to explain exactly what the media were saying and what changes they were anticipating. The most successful edited volumes are integrated around a theme or an interesting research question. Mollenkopf makes a valiant effort to put a frame around this diverse set of essays, but the real value in this volume as it relates to 9/11 comes in the essays by Lynn Sagalyn, Susan Fainstein, and Mitchell Moss. Did 9/11 significantly change the existing political dynamics in New York City, or is rebuilding the World Trade Center (WTC) just another economic development project in which political faultlines simply follow the usual intense, fractured, and contentious struggles of other large-scale development projects? Sagalyn and Fainstein put the WTC rebuilding process in context. At first glance, this is an epic story of the clash of interests—the power of a big developer; a public still in mourning after the terrorist attack; a government agency whose power was largely invisible to the public and which was unaccountable to the City’s elected officials; the destruction of a national icon and a symbol of American capitalism; an act of war with a still-unidentified enemy; and the City’s need to rebuild something spectacular and powerful to reclaim what was lost. All three writers in this section of the volume help us understand that the

Streetnotes

The editors of Streetnotes 29: New York City in Transformation provide an introduction to the issue and its content.

2008

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2013

Early social scientists sought to theorize 'the city', and to provide a framework for understanding life in the modern urban world. These grand explanations have long since given way to approaches that home in on themes characterizing different facets of urban environments, such as economic growth, global competition and immigration. In this review I discuss three recent collections of mostly original readings that attempt to explain cities through such specific analytical lenses. Each of their editors revolves their volumes around a central theme pertaining to the politics of and policies within contemporary cities: the importance of entertainment in influencing urban growth policies; the conflicts over the inclusion, presentation and representation of ethnicities and ethnic cultures in cities; and the socio-psychological role of fascination in the commercialization and theming of urban landscapes. Through theoretical engagement and empirical case studies the authors in these volumes offer varying, and in some cases interrelated, insights into these important patterns in contemporary cities. The first volume is The City as an Entertainment Machine, edited by Terry Nichols Clark. It is a paperback edition to his 2004 hardcover volume of the same name, with some changes. Here Clark removes three chapters from the original edition and adds a new final chapter that was originally published in the journal Social Forces. Two of the three missing chapters are not written or co-written by Clark, while he is the second of three authors on the new chapter. The result-seven out of ten chapters written or co-written by Clark, one (chapter 8) a collection of dialogic emails from the Urban and Community Section of the American Sociological Association Listserv that he also contributes to, and another (chapter 6) a chapter in direct dialogue with another of Clark's (chapter 7)-makes this new volume more a collection of his own personal work dealing with the idea of the 'city as an entertainment machine' than an invitation for urban scholars to engage with the concept. Clark first proposed the entertainment machine concept with Richard Lloyd (who also appears here as a co-author) in a 2001 chapter that serves as his larger volume's namesake. While empirically informed, this initial chapter with Lloyd was extremely light on data and relied extensively on making connections between claims made in the existing urban political economy literature. In this volume Clark supports this intriguing idea with a considerable amount of quantitative data to explain how cities develop today. Clark derives his term and title from Harvey Molotch's classic 1976 article, 'The City as a Growth Machine', that he later developed into a book with John Logan (1987). The concept metaphorically considers cities to be machines consisting of formal and informal coalitions that are geared towards growth through the intensification of land use and the increase of exchange value (i.e. rents). Urban growth revolves around such traditional factors as land, labor and capital as leaders seek to extract the most value from their city's Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.

2016

En los sesenta algunos barrios de Manhattan se habian convertido en paisajes desolados y, cincuenta anos mas tarde, los pisos construidos ahi son los mas caros del mundo. Aunque parezca sorprendente, este no es un fenomeno exclusivo de Nueva York. Uno tras otro, los centros urbanos de todo el mundo han ido cambiado. Donde habia comercios tradicionales ahora se amontonan tiendas alternativas y donde vivian las personas mas excluidas ahora se congregan artistas y ejecutivos. Ante estos cambios, algunos hablan de regeneracion urbana y otros, en cambio, lo llaman gentrificacion. Mientras los primeros celebran un renacer urbano, los segundos denuncian la venta de la ciudad. A traves de este paseo por barrios como Malasana, Belleville, El Raval, el Bronx o Lavapies se conoceran las claves para entender las ciudades y los principales argumentos para transformarlas. El libro toma su titulo del estribillo de una de las canciones mas famosas del cantante Leonard Cohen : �(I'm guided by th...