New York for Sale
New York for Sale

Author: Tom Angotti

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2011-02-25

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0262260328

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How community-based planning has challenged the powerful real estate industry in New York City. Remarkably, grassroots-based community planning flourishes in New York City—the self-proclaimed “real estate capital of the world”—with at least seventy community plans for different neighborhoods throughout the city. Most of these were developed during fierce struggles against gentrification, displacement, and environmental hazards, and most got little or no support from government. In fact, community-based plans in New York far outnumber the land use plans produced by government agencies. In New York for Sale, Tom Angotti tells some of the stories of community planning in New York City: how activists moved beyond simple protests and began to formulate community plans to protect neighborhoods against urban renewal, real estate mega-projects, gentrification, and environmental hazards. Angotti, both observer of and longtime participant in New York community planning, focuses on the close relationships among community planning, political strategy, and control over land. After describing the political economy of New York City real estate, its close ties to global financial capital, and the roots of community planning in social movements and community organizing, Angotti turns to specifics. He tells of two pioneering plans forged in reaction to urban renewal plans (including the first community plan in the city, the 1961 Cooper Square Alternate Plan—a response to a Robert Moses urban renewal scheme); struggles for environmental justice, including battles over incinerators, sludge, and garbage; plans officially adopted by the city; and plans dominated by powerful real estate interests. Finally, Angotti proposes strategies for progressive, inclusive community planning not only for New York City but for anywhere that neighborhoods want to protect themselves and their land. New York for Sale teaches the empowering lesson that community plans can challenge market-driven development even in global cities with powerful real estate industries

Brooklyn’s Bushwick - Urban Renewal in New York, USA
Brooklyn’s Bushwick - Urban Renewal in New York, USA

Author: Raymond Charles Rauscher

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2014-05-05

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 3319057626

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This book offers an extended case study of the urban community of Bushwick, located in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. The authors begin with a broad review of the history of Bushwick and Brooklyn, from before the earliest European settlements of the 1600s, through the 18th and 19th centuries and up the 1960s. Chapter Two begins by tracing the steep decline of the community, which culminated in catastrophic fires and looting in the wake of New York’s electrical blackout of 1977 and goes on to describe the beginnings of urban planning and renewal efforts which launched the recovery of Bushwick in the 1980s to early 2000s. Chapter Three steps back from the immediacy of the community to discuss urban change from a theoretical perspective. The authors outline advances in ‘sustainable urban planning’ and describe how these apply to Bushwick and the wider Brooklyn community. Chapter Four offers a detailed examination of the intent and function of New York’s community board planning system, known as the Charter 197-a program. In Chapter Five the authors examine the 197-a planning process and its application in the areas of Bushwick, Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Northeast Brooklyn; Brooklyn Downtown and in Southeast Brooklyn including Coney Island. The following chapter examines a number of innovative Bushwick high schools that offer practical experience in urban planning. Drawing the urban planning experiences together, the book concludes with a look at future directions in city renewal. Emphasis here is placed on ‘sustainable urban planning’ and the lessons to be learned from the experience of Bushwick and Brooklyn. The specifics of urban planning and renewal are illustrated with tables and figures. The details of planning are informed by an overarching sense of history, beginning with the dedication of the book to the memory of six Universalist writers associated with New York: Henry Thoreau, Helena Blavatsky, Henry George, Henry Miller, Arthur Miller and Walt Whitman. A rich trove of historical materials, ranging from family sketches to school rosters to rarely seen photographs, helps to keep the survey and analysis of urban planning grounded in the lives of Bushwick’s residents, past, present and future.

Harlem vs. Columbia University
Harlem vs. Columbia University

Author: Stefan M. Bradley

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0252090586

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In 1968–69, Columbia University became the site for a collision of American social movements. Black Power, student power, antiwar, New Left, and Civil Rights movements all clashed with local and state politics when an alliance of black students and residents of Harlem and Morningside Heights openly protested the school's ill-conceived plan to build a large, private gymnasium in the small green park that separates the elite university from Harlem. Railing against the university's expansion policy, protesters occupied administration buildings and met violent opposition from both fellow students and the police. In this dynamic book, Stefan M. Bradley describes the impact of Black Power ideology on the Students' Afro-American Society (SAS) at Columbia. While white students--led by Mark Rudd and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--sought to radicalize the student body and restructure the university, black students focused on stopping the construction of the gym in Morningside Park. Through separate, militant action, black students and the black community stood up to the power of an Ivy League institution and stopped it from trampling over its relatively poor and powerless neighbors. Comparing the events at Columbia with similar events at Harvard, Cornell, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, Bradley locates this dramatic story within the context of the Black Power movement and the heightened youth activism of the 1960s. Harnessing the Civil Rights movement's spirit of civil disobedience and the Black Power movement's rhetoric and methodology, African American students were able to establish an identity for themselves on campus while representing the surrounding black community of Harlem. In doing so, Columbia's black students influenced their white peers on campus, re-energized the community's protest efforts, and eventually forced the university to share its power.

In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower
In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

Author: Davarian L Baldwin

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1568588917

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Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.

Congressional Record
Congressional Record

Author: United States. Congress

Publisher:

Published: 1968

Total Pages: 1332

ISBN-13:

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The Congressional Record is the official record of the proceedings and debates of the United States Congress. It is published daily when Congress is in session. The Congressional Record began publication in 1873. Debates for sessions prior to 1873 are recorded in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (1789-1824), the Register of Debates in Congress (1824-1837), and the Congressional Globe (1833-1873)