Zoned Out! Gowanus Rally

Zoned Out! editor, Tom Angotti, and contributor, Philip DePaolo, rallied with Gowanus residents last Wednesday arguing “that the cleanup of the toxic Gowanus Canal should take precedence over a rezoning.” More from Brooklyn Daily Eagle, article and photo by Scott Enman.

'Clean It Before You Rezone It,' Gowanus Activists Tell City by Anna Quinn in Patch - Gowanus.

In 2008, Angotti “The Race to Develop a Toxic Waterway” (Gotham Gazette).

The Gowanus Canal in south Brooklyn at the center of a formerly active industrial area once bustled with ocean-going ships. Today, it bustles with real estate investors who are pressing to convert industrial properties to condos and reinvent the canal as a miniature Venice.

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At a recent public meeting with the city's water experts many Gowanus residents did not exactly break out the sparkling to celebrate. Some remembered that when the flushing tunnel, which first opened in 1911, failed in 1961, it took the city almost 40 years to repair it. Over the years, the city has taken major action on water pollution -- building sewage treatment plants, stopping ocean dumping and addressing sewage overflows - only when the courts have forced it to.

Photo by Jim in Times Square, 2008

In 2013, Angotti: “New York City after Sandy: Who Benefits, Who Pays and Where’s the Long-Term Planning?” (Seventh Generation)

Bloomberg’s rezoning of Coney Island included new opportunities for condos and commercial development near the waterfront. He has been outspoken in his support for new condos in Gowanus and Newtown Creek, both located in the floodplains of Brooklyn and saturated with toxic waste. He ignored calls from community activists to clean up Gowanus before promoting new residential development, and the administration even opposed a federally funded Superfund cleanup. The mayor argues that the best hope for cleaning up the toxic land and water lies in private real estate development, which would improve each site as it develops. However, this would only shift the problem from one property to another and still expose new and older residents and workers to toxic waste.

In perhaps the most dramatic rezoning, the City overcame substantial opposition by neighborhood groups and in 2005 rezoned the waterfront in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods. This unleashed a frenzy of luxury condo development on the waterfront, resulted in the displacement of thousands of industrial jobs and virtually wiped out one of the last remaining city neighborhoods to combine industry and housing.

Also see Philip De Paolo’s analysis of the effects of Bloomberg’s rezoning in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Greenpoint neighborhoods in Zoned Out: Race, Displacement, and City Planning in New York City.

“New York is a city of neighborhoods, but Angotti, Morse, and their coauthors show that city planning policies systematically disenfranchise and displace low-income New Yorkers who live in historic communities of color. They urge us to rethink what ‘affordable’ housing means, and develop the political will to aim for a radically different system of public resources and community plans.” — Sharon Zukin, Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center

Zoned Out! is published by Terreform with support from Furthermore JM Kaplan Fund and Graham Foundation.

Editor’s note: In one of the final written statements about urban planning, the legendary Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) commented on the future of the Williamsburg-Greenpoint waterfront:

April 15, 2005

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and all members of the City Council

c/o City Council President Gifford Miller

Dear Mayor Bloomberg,

My name is Jane Jacobs. I am a student of cities, interested in learning why some cities persist in prospering while others persistently decline; why some provide social environments that fulfill the dreams and hopes of ambitious and hardworking immigrants, but others cruelly disappoint the hopes of immigrant parents that they have found an improved life for their children. I am not a resident of New York although most of what I know about cities I learned in New York during the almost half-century of my life here after I arrived as an immigrant from an impoverished Pennsylvania coal mining town in 1934.

… More via Brooklyn Rail.

Michael Sorkin in Metropolis

Michael Sorkin on the implications of the Green New Deal within the architectural industry. In good company — with practitioners and academics: Tom Jacobs, Jesse M. Keenan, Kate Orff, and The Architecture Lobby.

Metropolis, May 2019: “We can cool it: Why the building sector may be humanity’s best hope for averting catastrophic climate change” by Audrey Gray. Illustration by Ryan Peltier.

On Speculation and Smartness: Vyjayanthi Rao at Columbia GSAPP

Terreform co-director Vyjayanthi Rao’s lecture, “On Speculation and Smartness: Urban Practices and Forms of the 21st Century “:

On Speculation and Smartness: Urban Practices and Forms of the 21st Century For nearly a century, the city has served as a metonym for modern life. Both as geographical entity and as heuristic concept, the city gave birth to the modern social sciences as forms of knowledge in the quest for understanding newly emergent forms of social life.

Her lecture, was part of The Lectures in Planning Series (LiPS), an initiative of the Urban Planning program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.Urban Planning program.

Abstract:

For nearly a century, the city has served as a metonym for modern life. Both as geographical entity and as heuristic concept, the city gave birth to the modern social sciences as forms of knowledge in the quest for understanding newly emergent forms of social life. The idea of modernity gave the city and urbanism the power to stand in for emerging forms of social life, even as older forms were breaking down with the advent of mass society. At the beginning of the 21st century, urban studies is preoccupied with discussions about the endless city and the end of the city, the homologous association between capitalization and urbanization and the intimate relationship between climate change, planetary urbanization and the end of human life on earth as we now know it. In part, this talk will argue that these debates signal the breakdown of the association of the city as spatial form with modern civic life.

In this talk Rao explores the transformation of the modernist association of city form and civic life into a set of speculative practices and inchoate forms that are gathered together under the rubric of the ‘urban’. She argues that the rise of speculation as a distinct feature of urban practice - where speculation broadly signifies the production of value from states of uncertainty - has undermined the association between modernity and newness and a distinct sense of the future, instead replacing the modern sense of a progressive future with a multitude of speculative alter-realities.

See Vyjayanthi Rao’s body of work as an anthropologist and writer studying architecture, infrastructure and social life in large cities.