The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

From Tribeca to Triburbia
The Conventional Urban problems—housing, transportation, pollution,
urban renewal and the like—were a major concern of only
18% of those questioned and these were expressed disproportionately
by the wealthier, better educated respondents. ... The issue
which concerned more respondents than any other was variously
stated—crime, violence, rebellious youth, racial tension, public
immorality, delinquency. However stated, the common theme
seemed to be a concern for improper behavior in public places. 8
For many, the solution seemed obvious: bring back the middle
class, with their higher incomes, at all costs. The middle classes, this theory
argued, could be attracted back to the city by the now degraded but still
high quality of blocks of nineteenth-century row houses. After they purchased
and then upgraded the properties, the value of the city’s property
would rise. In addition, this theory held that the middle class expected (as
if the poor did not) and knew how to demand better social services: schools,
sanitation, and parks. 9 The city would be transformed back to its pre-1950s
ideal of middle-class rectitude and order.
When I was an architecture student at the University of California
in the early 1970s, nearly every studio design project was a variation on this
theme of “bringing the middle-income families back to the city.” The sites
for our projects were usually in old, degraded working-class neighborhoods
in San Francisco or Oakland. Developers would visit our design reviews to
tell us what the middle class wanted and students would spend time designing
parking lots, swimming pools, and surrounding green spaces. Although
these use schemes meant to displace the present occupants, this
point was rarely discussed in studio. These projects mirrored what our design
professors were creating in San Francisco, one of the first cities in America
to feel the effects of gentrification. In the 1950s New York City began
to redevelop the Upper West Side, the largest area of abandoned and dilapidated
blocks in Manhattan. In order to accomplish this rebuilding it “presented
a plan of park-like open spaces”: tearing down scores of old buildings
would create a checkerboard of parks and gardens around once-elegant
brownstone row houses. This “West Side Story” hoped to bring the middleclass
suburbanites back from the leafy suburbs to a green city. 10 It would also
have had the effect of quietly clearing the potentially high-priced land of the
undesirable poor. Fortunately, this plan was defeated by local opposition.
Just as the post–Second World War suburbs were created and supported
by government legislation like the Veterans Home Loan Guarantee
program of 1944 (known as the “G.I. Bill”) and the Interstate Highway Act
of 1956, 11 so too was New York suburbanized through government inter-