The New Gentrification
The Friday Times took another look at the work of Jane Jacobs, who “waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks.” According to Sharon Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places,…
The Friday Times took another look at the work of Jane Jacobs, who “waged heroic war against planners who dreamed of paving the Village’s cobblestone streets, demolishing its tenements and creating sterile superblocks.” According to Sharon Zukin, a Brooklyn College sociology professor and author of Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, saving the cobblestone streets and old architecture may retain a neighborhood’s character superficially, but is doesn’t do much for the community who gave the neighborhood its soul. Zukin paid a visit to Williamsburg (“the East River gold coast”), where she pointed out “a low-slung old granary with a MacBook-speckled coffee bar” and said, We’ve gone from Jacobs’s vision to the McDonald’s of the educated classes. Are you buying what Zukin’s selling?
A Contrarian’s Lament in a Blitz of Gentrification [NYT]
Haha, I bet Zukin’s facade ain’t falling down 🙂
This is rigorous academic analysis? Oh, right, it’s 40 years out of date. Must be rigorous and academic.
Yeah, Jane was all about the “eyes on the street.” Her point was that tearing down “slums” (eg brownstones) and replacing them with public housing projects (big apartment buildings) that have blind alleys and “parks” that no one uses creates more crime. And she’s right. I don’t think we want to go back to that. Hence someone’s point today (bxgirl?) that the Mayor is going to fund fixing up existing old houses, not new projects.
If there is a fund for me and Montrose to fix our facades and our ailing staircases, that’d be nice too. Maybe a WPA-style public works project to pull our economy out of the doldrums with some good old redistributed public tax funds?
jessibaby,
you are right, there is certainly a need for a sociological evaluation of housing and living trends.
we tend to look at it from the perspective of jaded new yorkers, yada yada yada.
given the recent drive back towards urban living it is definitely a good idea for somebody to be applying a rigorous acadamic analysis to the process of gentrification (good or bad) and it’s implicatons on city populations.
btw, I didn’t know you were originally from PA. 😉
As I recall, Jane Jacobs’ thing was not gentrification. She did not dwell on that very much in “Life and Death of American Cities”. She was railing agaisnt the accepted urban vision at the time that called for the demolition of obsolete buildings (brownstones) and their replacement with highrises set in parks that were supposed to be more convenient and hygenic.
That was the era of Urban Renewal that fostered projects like Peter Cooper Village and Cadman Plaza Towers, to mention two of the more successful examples.
> Wait, what bad effects?
Now you’re just poking the ant hill, DH.
Zukin introduced me to the ideas and made them easy and accessible. Reading Loft Living (her book about Soho and the first about its gentrification) as a college kid made me want to better understand the issues.
My only complaint is he underplays the bad effects of gentrification. But not by much.
It’s enlightening.
Posted by: mopar at February 22, 2010 2:33 PM
Wait, what bad effects?
Anyone who wants to read a really good book on gentrification, check out Columbia professor Lance Freeman’s “There Goes the Neighborhood.”
My only complaint is he underplays the bad effects of gentrification. But not by much.
It’s enlightening.