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August 30, 2007
Analysis of the Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn Campaign
A study of how aesthetic choices in the campaign perpetuated class divisions in the movement.
NYC Indy Media
By Jessica Cannon
In the new issue (#5) of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest (www.joaap.org/5/index2.htm), NYC based writer/artist Jes Cannon looks at how particular choices by the Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn Campaign perpetuated class distinctions among the Brooklyn residents, possibly contributing to the movements' loss.
NoLandGrab: "Loss?" Did someone forget to tell us that we were supposed to pack it in?
NYC Indy Media must have missed the pending lawsuits while they were busy dissecting the movement.
A recent conversation with Joel Towers, a founder of DDDB and practicing architect and educator, shed some light on the challenges of the process: “The DDDB project unearthed a great deal of potential to develop strategies and tactics that are about community organization and agency. It also revealed in rather brutal terms the mobility associated with wealth, the fact that community is a gross term, especially in neighborhoods that are in the midst of transformation. This plan affects one of the most diverse communities. Because of this diversity you have different degrees of mobility, agency, attachment to place, and those forces, ultimately the forces of capital ended up being stronger than our ability to produce community with other kinds of kinship patterns.”
NoLandGrab: Interesting, but the premise is a little simplistic. Missing from this analysis of the difficulty of maintaining a diverse grassroots, yet well branded, coalition is that the developer Bruce Ratner always has the advantage, not just of money and political and media clout, but the advantage of always playing offense.
Because many of the details of the plan were and still remain hidden from the public, the coalition has had the dual challenge of trying to steer a diverse group toward consensus while uncovering and publicizing many of the more astonishing and murky details of the plan, all the while under fire from Ratner supporters and newspaper columnists who have sought to brand the coalition as NIMBY.
This additional layer is probably still too simplistic, and the whole topic deserves further analysis and thought.
Posted by lumi at August 30, 2007 9:28 AM