Gentrification Is…
Class war, theft, and much else besides. Plus, Vacant Spaces NY and vintage New York
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A Broken World
Gentrification isn’t what you think it is. Not exactly.
by Leslie Kern and Samuel Stein
LESLIE KERN: The evolution and indeed the versatility of the term “gentrification,” as it has come to represent a range of ways that urban spaces are taken, made over, and commodified, is one of the themes of my book and a good place to start this conversation. In the book I consider both gentrification as a metaphor and the metaphors that have been used to support and counter gentrification. As a metaphor, the term has found a broad usefulness for describing certain kinds of cultural shifts. This has sometimes been interpreted as a “watering down,” but I think of it as an indication that people understand instinctively that gentrification is a kind of theft and, fundamentally, that gentrification is about power. Class power, yes, but not only that. When the term is used to describe the commodification of yoga, for example, or the upscaling of soul food, it’s because people see a power imbalance at work and gentrification seems to fit the linguistic bill. Interestingly, some of the metaphors used to make sense of gentrification, casting it as “organic” or natural, for example, do the opposite: they make power and agency invisible, hiding the decisions and decision-makers that facilitate and actively profit from gentrification. This is one of those metaphors that limit our ability to grasp, but also to act on, gentrification. How we talk about problems matters, because it shapes the range of possible solutions or actions we might come up with. But we don’t need to be stuck searching for the right metaphor. There are plenty of words we can attach to gentrification that bring a more visceral immediacy to it, and ground it in concrete experience. Violence is one. Theft is another.
SAMUEL STEIN: And expropriation is yet another.
Policy Play
Peeling back the brown paper on Manhattan’s vacant retail spaces
by Jonah Coe-Scharff
Vacant Spaces NY reads as a conceptual art project playing with the visual conventions of a policy report. Meredith and Sample (along with their graphic designer, Studio Lin) have coaxed simple infographics to speak in a tone of outrage tinged with dry humor. My favorite is a pie chart on page 354 that displays the 0.17 percent chance of winning the city’s affordable housing lottery. The sliver, though printed in fluorescent ink, is barely visible.
You could also read Vacant Spaces NY as a policy report masquerading as a conceptual art project. Its central contention is that vacant storefronts should become affordable housing units (or, in some cases, social service hubs). The book’s final third plays this idea out in a series of case studies, showing conversions of twenty-six vacant storefronts across Manhattan. These design sketches suggest the spatial possibility of carving apartments out of ground-floor properties, with privacy buffers and courtyards to mitigate prying eyes and dark corners. But they operate within a delimited set of architectural challenges, free from economic constraints. They are not so much detailed proposals as they are provocations, as if to say: if these ideas are as simple and obvious as the authors (with a knowing wink) make them sound, then why is vacancy so rampant?
Only in New York?
On the too-muchness of New York: 1962–1964
by Sophie Haigney
What is it about New York? Or, rather: what was it? Specifically, what was it about New York, in the middle of the twentieth century, specifically in the 1960s, more specifically in the early 1960s, that seems to have sparked so much art, so much writing, so much music and theater and dance? Why was it that apparently all of a sudden, in this particular place and this time, everyone was making things? There was a certain creative energy, maybe, hard to pinpoint but contagious and unbounded; there was the propulsive force of big global shifts and cultural upheavals; there was the chaotic, exciting urban environment itself, which was rapidly changing because of “urban renewal” and the city’s growth. There was just something about New York, a mysterious alchemic interchange between it and its artists.
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our Editor is Samuel Medina and our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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