Today we discussed My Brooklyn and viewed the film Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, considering the questions How did Jane Jacobs see the city differently than the trained architects and planners? and How would you assess Robert Moses’s projects? All good or all bad or a bit of both? On Tuesday, we will continue our discussion and view the film The Human Scale.
We reviewed how to blog on the OpenLab. For our next meeting, on Tuesday, February 5, please write one 100-word (minimum) blog post in response to this prompt:
Do people have a right to the city? Do longtime residents and businesses have a right to remain where they are? If so, how should local governments, urban planners, and other decision-makers ensure these rights are maintained?*
Remember, blog posts are due by the start of class for which they are assigned.
*adapted from My Brooklyn Study Guide, 2015
POST 1 – Do people have a right to the city? Do longtime residents and businesses have a right to remain where they are? If so, how should local governments, urban planners, and other decision-makers ensure these rights are maintained?
People have a right to the city such as engaging the city improvement schemes and ways to live. In the film “Brooklyn”, Anderson shows us the gentrification of Brooklyn begins in 1988. The old neighborhood is forced to reshaping due to the government’s plan of rezoning. As a result, hundred small businesses are evited by the developers and the politicians. Small stores are replaced by high rise luxury housing and chain retail. The small store owners are so desperate about to be forced to moving out of their district due to the “improvements” by the developers and politicians. The old residents who created a culture that got dismissed with oblivious racism. The city officials disregard the needs of the less privileged is as same as much-maligned as Robert Moses. The film of Citizen Jane: Battle For The City is about Jane Jacobs has a voice against the most powerful ideas that urban planning movement of willing to displace the entire city blocks by rebuilding them, and she doesn’t agree the beautiful architecture was superior to crowded streets. She insists the mixture of stores, offices, and housings for longtime residents will make the city great rather than nationwide to build new high-rise, civic plazas, and office buildings interspersed with parks. Compared to Le Corbusier saw the streets as “an dislocated organ” that is crowed, noisy and unpleasant and want to change it by building multiple high-rise and beautiful skyscrapers, Jane Jacobs saw something different about the streets that she thinks a “sidewalk ballet” of people interacting with and depending on each other. Longtime residents know their neighbors for long time which provide them emotional connection in their life. People should feel safe as they walk down the street at night. Jacobs focus on civil lives such as how sewer system working, what exist in that area for people use a lot, and the connection between the streets and the neighborhoods and the function of the city that is similar as the ecosystem. In the other hand, Robert Moses is a hungry and powerful man who built highways, housings, parks by displacing thousands of people. He is willing to sacrifice small group of people to achieve his goal, and he would take down anyone in his path without caring the consequences of his actions. Even though some plans are good for the city, his action causes lots of people get isolated and desperate.
The local government should implement the solution such as create special zoning to protect small business by limiting land owners who couldn’t consolidate several small areas to build big and high-rise buildings for privilege people. They should facilitate the development of communities and their life style on the basis of the right to the city and the right to living. Urban planners and developers can not just come in and build something they want without considering the old neighborhoods. They need to figure out the way to preserve the neighborhood character while improving the city and inviting the density, and they have to build enough affordable housings for the old habitants, they must avoid increasing the segregation and inequality in the city. Both of developers, government and urban planner need to reform the land use process and create benefits for communities with their consciousness about the preserving the old neighborhoods in stead of treating them as an obstacle to powerful people to making more money, and ensure the city with sustainability, democracy, equity, and social justice. People do have their own rights to the city which is about democratic control in the city with the right to access, occupy and use urban area instead of demolishing and evicting the old neighborhoods.
I agree that people have the right to the city. I don’t believe it is right to push out old longtime residents from their homes and businesses to make way for a higher class community. Gentrification which was discussed in “My Brooklyn”, mostly hurts the communities of color and low income. As the government implements new zoning plans, wealthier people start to migrate to these communities. Landlords begin to raise the rents for their housing and businesses. And this greatly effects the longtime residents who have been there since the beginning, and can’t afford to stay there anymore. The small local businesses suffer because they are losing competition to the larger new businesses opening shop in their communities. These people have no choice but to protest and fight to stay in their communities and that is not how these people who started their lives in these communities should be treated. In order to maintain everyones rights to the city, the government should support and implement more benefits to the small local businesses such as tax breaks and government subsidies. The larger corporations that are being implemented in these communities should be taxed. In order to satisfy the people who claim that most of these communities are dangerous and that they would feel unsafe, there should be more police and security presence. The cultural aspect that has been developed throughout these communities should also be preserved and supported.