The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

In 1978 I moved to Tribeca, an intensely urban district of industrial and residential
buildings in New York City. I still live on the same lower Manhattan
street, but my neighborhood has been transformed into Triburbia, a
district increasingly as suburban as any in the 100-mile wide metropolitan
ring around New York City. The New York Times portrays it as a model of
successful urban regeneration. The newspaper, which supports gentrification
as it does local sports teams, claims that Triburbia is now one of the
most popular districts in the region for affluent middle-class families who
previously would have wanted to live only in the leafy outer edges of the
city, perhaps in Connecticut or New Jersey: “Father’s a broker, mother’s a
lawyer—who would have been looking for a $600,000 house in Short Hills
[to] raise their family. But their work is in the city, [and] they have their
schools nailed down . . . in the city.” 1 However, in its transformation to an
affluent residential suburb, much of the dynamic urban life of the area has
been lost. It was a neighborhood where artists’ studios, working-class tenements,
small family-owned business, and busy garment factories coexisted.
The edges of the district easily gave way to the surrounding Lower East Side
working-class neighborhoods of Chinatown and Little Italy, an abandoned
waterfront, and similar blocks of nineteenth-century factory buildings.
How and why my central-city neighborhood transformed itself is a
classic case of gentrification, but one with a particularly contemporary
twist. To walk its streets is to realize that it has learned and absorbed the
“lessons that modern planners first mastered in the suburbs” and morphed
into a “new concept of the city” 2 —a suburb in the city center. Lewis Mumford
had hoped that low-density “garden cities” would lead to better living
conditions for the majority of Americans. Further, he believed these suburbs
would even influence the form of city. However, the development of
American suburbs has produced a quite different residential condition and
influence on cities. Benefiting from the opportunities of the city, yet simultaneously
repelled by its cacophonous life, the space and form of the traditional
American suburb have almost always been isolated, fortified, and
affluent domestic communities focusing on a limited social condition—the
nuclear family. More specifically, they represent a balance of private and
public, defined by what and who they include and exclude.
But how did the American city get to the point where it began to
mimic the suburb? When American cities began experiencing explosive
growth in the nineteenth century through immigration, the city was not
able to provide adequate services for this largely poor population. The
middle classes quickly tired of aiding the poor, except through occasional philanthropic
charities (sometimes making a profit), and began moving outside
the city’s taxing boundary. 3 Since at least 1815, the American middle class