Place Proposal

What would it mean to look at the “city” as an institution that is becoming increasingly privatized, rendering it intentionally socially and geographically toxic to many current residents? This project aims to comprehend urban planning in the U.S. as a social and material reordering of cities that is largely being dominated by private, knowledge-producing institutions. By attempting to visualize the toxicity embedded in power structures (law/public policy) and powerful institutions (city, state, federal government, development corporations, and universities), I seek to comprehend how spatial takeover and corporatization on the one hand and activism and everyday resistances on the other inform the privatizing of cities and their shifting landscapes, from public to private and from brick to glass. I focus on Columbia University in New York City as a crucial example of how deeply embedded non-governmental institutions are in the structuring and reordering of U.S. cities, utilizing narratives borrowed from the “urban renewal” days of the 20th century to perpetuate social and geographic segregation and isolation.

Columbia’s method of “urban renewal” has historically been the physical reordering of the city to combat “blight,” carried out under the principle of “controlled interracialism,” whereby the University seeks to “maintain racial harmony” within nearby housing developments while removing people deemed to cause disorder—predominantly Puerto Ricans and African Americans residing in single residency occupancy units (SRO’s). Columbia accepted Robert Moses’ approach to urban planning, who linked housing and recreation in public housing to “reform slum dwellers.”[1] Iron-fisted policing strategies such as broken windows became additional forms of coercion. Such strategies were based on the “culture of poverty” narrative, defined by social scientists as “both an adaptation and a reaction of the poor to their marginal position in a class stratified, highly individuated, capitalistic society” which tends to perpetuate itself generationally.[2] From the early 20th century onward, Columbia implemented both narratives as they sought to establish an “Acropolis on a Hill,” a site of social formation catered to the white upper-class. Such social and geographic claims were exemplified in Columbia’s attempt to build a gym on the hill of Morningside Park, consisting of an eight-floor space resting atop a two-story structure built for children of the community. The entrance for Columbia affiliates was at the top of the park while the entrance for other Harlem residents was on the other side of the building, resulting in a Jim-Crow era-esque segregation. The gym plan was eventually discarded due to protests, along with preliminary visions for the Manhattanville Expansion, which required eminent domain and would arouse more conflict.[3] Through residents’ interference, Columbia was pushed to somewhat reshape its approach to social relations.

By 2003, Columbia announced its plan to expand into Manhattanville, justifying it as necessary since it is the smallest of all Ivy Leagues with 32 acres of property. Columbia used eminent domain to claim land where businesses and residents were already present, asserting that research conducted in the Expansion would serve the broader public good, “directly, by researching cures for illnesses such as Alzheimer’s disease, and, indirectly, by helping to usher the city into a knowledge-based economic future.” With the inception of the Expansion, Columbia claimed to be more cognizant of its impact on the community by creating a Community Benefits Agreement. Yet a gap persists between what the university promises and benefits the community receives. How might examining the power structures at play in Columbia’s Expansion and their impact on West Harlem feed into broader discussions of race (whiteness) as constructed in U.S. cities?How might gentrification by universities reveal the trans-scalar nature of capital and real estate as a reordering of the urban U.S. socially and physically?

My project poses new questions about an already heavily researched (and visualized) topic that will be important to ask because gentrification is often examined at a more localized level by qualitative social scientists and this needs to be challenged to comprehend systemically, historically and trans-scalarly how these projects come to be in the first place. This work will contribute to the literature because it will take seriously the notion of gentrification being a form of urban intra-colonialism. In addition, considering what appear to be general trends toward reversed white flight in U.S. cities, it is crucial to understand how power structures are set up in such a way that makes it possible for segregation to continue, and to identify how privatization of city spaces may be an additional method of segregation. I want to denaturalize these processes by determining exactly how they are planned and justified in the present ethnographic moment under the guise of serving the “greater good.” I seek to begin collecting and creating visualizations with the following questions in mind:

1. How do various stakeholders in the West Harlem neighborhood perceive the sociostructural changes occurring in West Harlem and the city overall? How is geopolitical dispossession raced, classed, and gendered?
2. How do spatial takeovers occur, and what is the role of media coverage and public policy in naturalizing the reordering of cities?
3. How are the entangled histories of city and institutional governance, spatial (re)ordering, and activism in the U.S. city implicated in policy-decision making in the ethnographic present, both in the U.S. and abroad?