For more than 100 years American cities have been hustling and bustling powerhouses hosting major corporations and millions of inhabitants. Urban environments are ever changing spheres of constant improvement sculpted by the power of city planners and designers striving to create a perfect utopia. But city authorities can’t always hope that the public will stand in solidarity with their ideas. A few visionaries such as William Whyte, Mike Davis, and Jane Jacobs see the errors made by those who shape the city. An urban project could can initiate a domino effect of problems when not executed properly, leading to issues concerning safety on the street to the shattering of tight knit communities. Power and poor planning are clear factors of the …show more content…
In respect they didn’t seem to be acquired in 1961, when the city of New York began rewarding developers 10 square feet of commercial space for every square foot of plaza built along with their buildings. This permission to go over the amount of space permitted through zoning by creating plazas was a steal for the building developers. Focusing more on gaining space and profit, developers did not consider what was needed to make a plaza appealing to the public. Almost 11 years later, 20 acres of Manhattan’s most valuable land was substandard public space. At this time there was no standard code to creating usable open space. With permission from the City Planning Commission, William Whyte and his team spent 3 years creating hard guidelines to planning urban parks. “As a condition of the open space bonus, developers should be required to devote at least 50 percent of the ground floor frontage to retail and food use”. Considering sun, art, music, sitting space, etc. Union Square is a perfect example of good open space planning using these new guidelines. 180 degree low stairs wrap the 14th street plaza, a centered green park with asymmetrical walkways and sitting spaces, and store and restaurants encircling the park. Although these codes helped regulate the way plazas were built, city planners and building developers …show more content…
Robert Moses played a substantial role in power and poor planning during this time. Built between 1948 and 1972, the Cross Bronx Expressway is known as the brainchild of Robert Moses. In the effect of Bisecting the Bronx in half, middle and upper class residence migrated to the north, leaving the south section to be filled with run down slums of the impoverished. Moses’s dream was to carve right through lower Manhattan with an expressway (aka LOMEX), it would raze through what is now known as the West Village, Soho, and Little Italy. In contrast to Whyte’s improved park planning codes and Davis’s investigation of militarized cities, Jane Jacobs was the leading force of preserving downtown Manhattan from LOMEX. Uniting the inhabitants of lower Manhattan they protested against the construction of LOMEX. She emphasized how the wonder of a city's unique cultures lie within the network of communities, the streets, ma and pa shops, etc. “Moses had written over the people who disagreed with him, brutally negating the power of votes with money. Nevertheless after almost a year of protests and widespread disapproval from the public, the projected was turned down in 1962. Just 3 years later, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was established. It would protect and preserve the decay of historic structures that hold New York’s identity from the powers that
“The Deeper Problems We Miss When We Attack ‘Gentrification’”exhibit their opinion on the positives of gentrification and the potential of “revitalization” in low-income urban communities. Badger argues that gentrification brings nothing more than further opportunities for urban communities while integrating citizens of different social classes.Furthermore , she continues to question if gentrification is in fact the monster that brings the prior expressions against gentrification where she says “If poor neighborhoods have historically suffered from dire disinvestment, how can the remedy to that evil — outside money finally flowing in — be the problem, too?”(Badger) Stating that the funds generated from sources external that are brought into these communities can’t be problematic. This concept is further elaborated in the article “Does Gentrification Harm the Poor” where Vigdoor list the potential positive enhancements gentrification can have on an urban area in America ,stating that gentrification can
Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist with a rather impressive curriculum vitae to his credit, spent five years of his otherwise privileged life keeping company with drunks, derelicts, drug addicts and the homeless on the sidewalks of New York's Greenwich Village. His purpose was not to exploit the individuals whose reason for being on these streets is to drum up whatever income they can by selling books and magazines; rather, it was to learn and understand why they were there. In the process of doing so, Duneier drew his arguments and methods mostly upon symbolic interactionism perspective's theories; his focus on "shared meanings", "deviant", `laws", "individual (and social) interactions" flourish throughout "Sidewalk."
Mystique Caston Ms. Jefferson English 22 february 2016 Gentrification and Chicago Gentrification and chicago “Gentrification refers to trends in the neighborhood development that tend to attract more affluent residents, and in the instances concentrates scale commercial investment. ”(Bennet,).This means that gentrification can change how a neighborhood is ran or even how much income the community takes in depending on what businesses come in and what class of people decide to invest into that community. In this paper i will be discussing gentrification and and poverty, pros and cons of gentrification, relationships due to gentrification, conflict due to gentrification, reactions/ feelings or of small business owners about
People will be more willing and capable of living in denser, more efficient environments only when the underlying culture that sustains sprawl is altered. The sense of the American community needs to be re-established if there is to be any real progress in the battle against sprawl. The REAL problem here then, is that changing the culture of a state, of a nation, is a very long and difficult undertaking…
In the documentary, “Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City” the short movie analyses the great risk confronting Cleveland as a city as result of deterioration and dilapidation of the urban core. The documentary discusses factors that are responsible for this problem and possible solutions; as this has become a phenomenon, not just in Cleveland but other major US cities. The issue of the urban decline in most cities cuts across people, commerce, and the economy in general. However, the questions of how most cities arrived at their current predicament, consequences of abandoning these concerns, and what can be done to reverse the bad situation, remain unanswered.
Levy, J. M. (2013). Contemporary Urban Planning. New Jersey: Pearson-Prentice Hall. Retrieved from Course Smart.
Hope Hart Professor Maxey-Groege English 102 16 June 2024 Ethos and Pathos of Stacey Sutton’s 2015 Tedx Talk Stacey Sutton’s TedxNewYork talk, “What we don’t understand about gentrification” sheds light on the phenomenon of displacement of low-income communities through financial leveraging of business and housing investors. In her 14-minute talk, she outlines gentrification as “.processes by which higher income or higher status people relocate to or invest in low-income urban neighborhoods” (1:48), and maneuvers the conversation of the problem from four different angles: how it can be understood, what communities are vulnerable to it, the impact it has on such communities, and how it can be prevented. Sutton’s specific geographic study in this talk is the gentrification of New York City, NY. Through anecdotes and examples, Sutton engages the listener’s emotional instincts, while providing tangible
Gentrification is described as the renovation of certain neighborhoods in order to accommodate to young workers and the middle-class. For an area to be considered gentrified, a neighborhood must meet a certain median home value and hold a percentage of adults earning Bachelor’s degree. Philadelphia’s gentrification rate is among the top in the nation; different neighborhoods have pushed for gentrification and have seen immense changes as a result. However, deciding on whether or not gentrification is a beneficial process can become complicated. Various groups of people believe that cities should implementing policy on advancing gentrification, and others believe that this process shouldn’t executed. Both sides are impacted by the decision to progress gentrification; it is unclear of the true implications of completely renovating impoverished urban areas; gentrification surely doesn’t solve all of a community’s issues. I personally believe that gentrification is not necessarily a good or bad process; gentrification should occur as a natural progression of innovative economies and novel lifestyles collide within certain areas. Policy involving gentrification should not support the removal of people out of their neighborhood for the sake of advancement.
Of the many problems affecting urban communities, both locally and abroad, there is one issue in particular, that has been victimizing the impoverished within urban communities for nearly a century; that would be the problem of gentrification. Gentrification is a word used to describe the process by which urban communities are coerced into adopting improvements respective to housing, businesses, and general presentation. Usually hidden behind less abrasive, or less stigmatized terms such as; “urban renewal” or “community revitalization” what the process of gentrification attempts to do, is remove all undesirable elements from a particular community or neighborhood, in favor of commercial and residential enhancements designed to improve both the function and aesthetic appeal of that particular community. The purpose of this paper is to make the reader aware about the significance of process of gentrification and its underlying impact over the community and the community participation.
Recently, urban development has become increasingly vulnerable to the growing impact of gentrification. Our nation’s capitol, more commonly known Washington, D.C., unfortunately has been heavily affected by gentrification. Gentrification is the process of renovating and improving a house or district, so that it conforms to a certain middle-class taste. This certain exchange of private land is a continuous competing claim between public and private owners. In addition, Kathryn Howell, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University claims, “In the most recent wave of urban redevelopment, the change has been led largely by public–private partnerships in a market-driven process. … this type of redevelopment represents a perceived ‘win-win’ for
Gentrification is the keystone for the progression of the basic standards of living in urban environments. A prerequisite for the advancement of urban areas is an improvement of housing, dining, and general social services. One of the most revered and illustrious examples of gentrification in an urban setting is New York City. New York City’s gentrification projects are seen as a model for gentrification for not only America, but also the rest of the world. Gentrification in an urban setting is much more complex and has deeper ramifications than seen at face value. With changes in housing, modifications to the quality of life in the surrounding area must be considered as well. Constant lifestyle changes in a community can push out life-time
Location, location, location -- it’s the old realtor 's mantra for what the most important feature is when looking at a potential house. If the house is in a bad neighborhood, it may not be suitable for the buyers. In searching for a house, many people will look at how safe the surrounding area is. If it’s not safe, they will tend stray away. Jane Jacobs understood the importance of this and knew how cities could maintain this safety, but warned of what would become of them if they did not diverge from the current city styles. More modern planners, such as Joel Kotkin argue that Jacobs’s lesson is no longer applicable to modern cities because they have different functions than those of the past. This argument is valid in the sense that city
In the Gilded Age, Kalamazoo took on its own interpretation of the City Beautiful in the 1830’s with the creation of Bronson Park. The City Beautiful Movement’s goal was to remodel city space to attract middle class American who now had more leisure time than during the Industrial Age. Bronson Park was named for Kalamazoo’s founder Titus Bronson who donated the land that Bronson Park now sits on. The land was beautified in the ideal of a New England commons. In the 1850’s the land portrayed an image of an actual park, in the modern sense, with fenced off land, flowers, and graveled walkways.
When you think about New York, you think about Times Square, The Statue of Liberty, or The Empire State Building, however most people are blind to other attractions going on all the time. Since I am from the wonderful state of New York, I can fill you in on other attractions. New York City is way more than just a big, blooming, business city. Let me help you, by getting that sky scrapper image out of your head, and inform you on one of the oldest, most beautiful places to visit, containing plenty of attractions for one to do.
The word “cunt” remains one of the most powerful, shocking, and arguably vulgar words in the English language today. Its definition has shifted over time, going from a relatively innocuous word referring to a woman’s genitals or prostitutes, to the derogatory, highly censored term it is today. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a number of definitions for the word “cunt,” including “the female genitals; the vulva or vagina” and “a woman as a source of sexual gratification; a promiscuous woman; a slut. Also as a general term of abuse for a woman.”