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July 27, 2010
Clear and Hold
Boston Review
by Casey Walker
Though I have closely followed the Atlantic Yards scuffle for years, I barely know what the project is anymore, what it will look like, or what it will contain. My guess is you would find city officials who are similarly unsure. I doubt even the executive vice presidents of Forest City—who tout a “vibrant addition to a thriving borough”—could offer more than a guess about how many apartments and how many office buildings, let alone how many residents and businesses, eventually will be located within the project footprint.
...It is impossible not to notice that the tenor of the debate over Atlantic Yards has been right out of the mid-twentieth century street fights that pitted Moses-style “urban renewal”—demolition and rebuilding—against the Jane Jacobs model. Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, advocated on behalf of local, self-organizing neighborhood regeneration around what already exists. She resisted the overreach of any city planner, developer, or administrator who thought of the city as a simple machine rather than a complex ecosystem. “You can’t build the ovens and expect the loaves to jump in,” Jacobs said.
In her new book, The Battle for Gotham, activist and veteran urban critic Roberta Gratz contends that decades after the biggest clashes between Moses and Jacobs, their disagreement is still at the heart of fights over urban life.
Related coverage...
Atlantic Yards Report, In the Boston Review, an Atlantic Yards-centric review of The Battle for Gotham
The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, by Roberta Brandes Gratz, is the subject of a thoughtful 2900-word review in the Boston Review, Clear and Hold, by Brooklyn resident and Princeton grad student Casey Walker.
Atlantic Yards gets a significant cameo in the book's Conclusion (its tenth chapter), but it is the focus of Walker's review, which states:
Atlantic Yards is a familiar urban story: surrounding neighborhoods are braced for upheaval; architects have come and gone; redesigns have been announced, lambasted, tweaked, disowned; lawsuits multiply like kudzu; millions of dollars are all but blowing through the air; and the likely date of actual completion is anyone’s guess (Forest City Ratner, the developer, contends the Barclays Center will be finished by 2011, but the Web site does not give a timetable for the rest of the project).
Actually, they're saying 2012, now.
Posted by eric at July 27, 2010 9:52 AM