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November 12, 2009
Jane Jacobs Atlantic Yards Report Cards, Numbers 24-27
Noticing New York
After posting umpteen-thousand words on Tuesday on 300 years of the history of judicial independence, Michael D.D. White somehow managed to run off four more installments of his "Jane Jacobs Atlantic Yards Report Card" series.
Jane Jacobs Atlantic Yards Report Card #24: Avoidance of “Border Vacuums?” NO
Jane Jacobs pinpointed and described a phenomena that is readily possible to observe many places in almost any city- What she called “border vacuums.” She observed how borders that interrupted the flow of the city and city streets tended to create areas of deadness surrounding them. Among other things, she observed that projects built like Atlantic Yards on superblocks visually separating themselves from the city created these borders and associated vacuums notwithstanding that they might offer paths and promenades for pedestrian travel.
...Some borders damp down use by making travel across them a one-away affair. Housing projects are an example of this, the project people cross back and forth across the border (usually, in any appreciable numbers, at only one side of the project or at most two sides). The adjoining people, for the most part, stay strictly over on their side of the border and treat the line as a dead end of use.
Jane Jacobs Atlantic Yards Report Card #25: Convert Borders to Seams? NO
Jane Jacobs suggested that borders could be converted to “seams” and would not have to function as borders if along their edges there were frequent invitations that would bring users across the border. Atlantic Yards does not seem to have any lively cleverness in its design that would accomplish this though some corrections might one day get fitted in to correct some of it problems. Corrections will be more difficult in some areas like where the arena presents large blank walls more than a block long. Further, as the megadevelopment will take decades, perhaps three to four, there will be decades where with acres of parking lots and a still open cut for the rail yards little or no correction will be possible.
(Above: The seven-story tall back of the proposed arena which, straddling a closed-off street, will be nearly two blocks wide. It is likely to face acres of parking lots and open rail yards for decades.)
Jane Jacobs devoted a chapter of her book to the subject of the way in which areas of cities thought of as “slums” went through natural processes to become anything but. She called the process “unslumming” but these days it might be considered much the same thing as gentrification depending on the income levels that come to prevail in an improving area. In describing this kind of improvement she countered the wisdom or dogma of the day that slums needed to torn down to be improved and that residents needed to be removed and relocated in large scale reshufflings of the population.
...Atlantic Yards involves the tearing down of blocks and reshuffling of people living on them in much the same fashion as the old-style urban renewal projects of the days of yore. In much the same way, justification for the tear down and reshuffling is being offered by describing as `unhealthy’ areas that don’t believe themselves to be such and are quite busy improving themselves through natural processes.
...Jane Jacobs, in realizing that the neighborhoods “unslummed” naturally with many of the same families remaining in place as the neighborhood improved realized that the poor were not just being unproductively evicted from a poor neighborhood, they were being evicted from a neighborhood that was likely a potentially wealthier improved neighborhood. In other words the less advantaged in society are being knocked off an ascending ladder.
Jane Jacobs was remarkable for being able to see and understand what “experts”who had proceeded her overlooked or failed to understand and she did it by rigorously going out to observe what was actually out in the world to be observed rather than seeing what she expected, wanted to or thought she should see. If the Atlantic Yards Environmental Impact Statement is representative of what the sponsors of Atlantic Yards see, or don’t, the evidence is that they are not seeing the world of this Brooklyn site for what it is but for what they hope would justify their proposed actions. Likewise, if you go by the inaccurate descriptions of the proposed project and area in the materials the Ratner organization promulgated to promote the project.
Posted by eric at November 12, 2009 1:00 PM