Grant Houses Radio

Columbia’s discourse of “reimagining” the community in Manhattanville with their Expansion, including saving the neighborhood from blight and “bringing jobs,” undercuts the fact that their Expansion displaced many businesses and people, discounted the Community Board’s designs for the neighborhood based on what the community wanted, and reenacts earlier forms of urban renewal as well as securitization. Their perception is one of coming to save the neighborhood and revitalize it, without taking into account how it negatively impacts residents, or at least does not benefit them in a way a mixed-used development might have. Residents of Grant Houses, for example, seek to advance understanding and engage with the effects of late industrialism. They have taken the microphone into their own hands, using the Community Benefits Agreement funding, to express their view of community and to show that they are not isolated, but are part of a broader, wide-reaching network of actors. Giving a face to their name, the residents push for recognition and representation in a late industrial landscape through the use of a community radio station, presenting narratives of their own in the face of others that tends to value and promote certain forms of knowledge over others.