The city is not for everyone
When we think of cities, we often think of public space, collections of diverse groups, and centres of resources, commerce, and business. Yet, these diverse public spaces are not actually open to everyone. Not only is the right to occupy the city not equal, the right to influence and shape the development of the city is even less accessible. Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey present points that define the right to the city in opposition to this reality, as the following.
“The right to the city is:
A collective Right
About the regular access and use of urban space by everyone
About the freedom to give shape to our cities
It is constantly disputed by economic and political power
It has been a part of the most urban conflicts and revolutions”
While I very much agree with their points theoretically, I also see that they are not true in practice and present a more ideal situation. While many of the systems and structures that prevent this equality are baked in from historical decisions and policies, they still cause real harm. We know of the ongoing effects of redlining, gerrymandering, gentrification, “urban renewal,” and highway development on diversity and equity in cities, not to mention more explicitly discriminatory laws and policies that lead to segregation and ghettoisation and created ethnic enclaves within the larger metropolis. There were also specific choices directly influencing the built environment that created lasting issues of access and inclusion. Robert Moses, the unelected racist power broker of New York for over four decades, provides plenty of examples. From the popular (though somewhat contested) story of Moses making the bridges over the Southern State Parkway too low for buses to pass under, thus making Jones Beach essentially white-only, to evicting 7,000 minority residents from thriving neighbourhoods to build Lincoln Center (Haber, 2019; Vogel, 2020). From setting the temperature of public pools lower in Harlem to dissuade Black residents from swimming, to removing language in the city contract for development of Stuyvesant Town preventing discrimination so Black veterans couldn’t move in (Haber, 2019). Even his decorative choices supported his racism, as he chose the images decorating the wrought iron trellises in public parks as curling waves in white areas, and monkeys in predominantly Black communities (Haber, 2019).
In many cases, as Curtis et al. (2020) argue, “the psychological impact of one person’s designed experience of leisure is fostered and upheld to the neglect (if not expense) of another’s” and the actual experience of a space is influenced by “tangible design decisions,” requiring designers to consider “beyond physical engagement [to] emotional, embodied, lived, and human [concerns].” Going further, architect and researcher Alicia Olushola Ajayi questions not only the idea of public space, suggesting “‘there is an implicit bias in the use of ‘public space’ because there are so few examples of it ‘that are conceptualized with meeting the needs of the general public,’” but also the concept of the “general public” itself, arguing that it should more accurately be described as the “prioritized public” (ibid). Ajayi further suggests that, as I argued above and contrary to the supposed collective right to the city, urban public space “is really intended and designed for a select few” (ibid).
If this is the case then, what do we do? If we are shaped by choices in the built environment, we as designers of the built environment are uniquely able to help reshape and improve it toward the ideals presented by Harvey and Lefebvre. As Curtis et al. (2020) assert, designers must engage critically with public and leisure spaces to have an informed base and more liability on which to build their “own contributions to the built environment to be anti-racist, ably inclusive, and anti-segregationist.”
Curtiss, L., Kingston, C., & Pellerin, E. R. (2020, December 11). Low life: Revisiting Robert Moses’s exclusionary design scheme at Jones Beach. PIN-UP. https://archive.pinupmagazine.org/articles/jones-beach-robert-moses-segregation-design#18
Haber, J. (2019, September 15). Robert Moses’ name should be mud: New York State should remove the racist man’s name from Public Works. New York Daily News. https://www.nydailynews.com/2019/09/15/robert-moses-name-should-be-mud-new-york-state-should-remove-the-racist-mans-name-from-public-works/
Vogel, J. (2020, July 28). Robert Moses’ low parkway bridges. NYC URBANISM. https://www.nycurbanism.com/blog/2020/7/28/robert-moses-low-parkway-bridges
Comments
Post a Comment