One of the projects on the field trip will explore the ways in which the cityscape of New York may be read as a 'landscape of power'. Understanding 'landscape' in its broadest sense as an assemblage of objects which produce the appearance of an area, which is always imbued with symbolism by the people who produce, use and observe it, we can assert that landscapes are always overwritten with power relations. Texts discussing this general concept can be found on the reading list.
The landscape of central New York is particularly poignant in its political
symbolism. As Sharon Zukin observes in her book, 'Landscapes of Power',
the cheek-by-jowl contrast between the skyscrapers of the financial districts
and the run-down housing projects of the Lower East Side or Brooklyn expose
the imbalance of power in the city. But the landscape of New York can be
read to display a series of different types of power relations:
At the same time, this landscape of power is resisted both by the notion of America as 'the land of the free' - a democratic ideal which was written into the original plan for the city - and by contemporary marginalised groups. The appearance of the landscape can become a focus for resistance to wider social processes - as in the Lower East Side - whilst public space can become the site of protest and conflict. As such, maintaining a landscape of power is not just about the physical appearance of the built environment, but can involve policing how that landscape and public space is used and by whom.· Power over nature
· Power of city leaders
· Power of the city
· American power
· Corporate power
The remainder of this section outlines some of the key themes which will be important in understanding New York as a landscape of power.
Power over nature
"Where New York previously had grown with respect for hills and streams and ponds, the grid was forced on the land; hills had to be carted away, waters buried, to keep the streets in line. The plan was a boast in itself, of man’s power over nature and the prospects for the city."Pye (1991) Maximum City, p 266
A Democratic Plan
"there were no boulevards or triumphal arches and very little open space; there was nothing aristocratic to offend a new democracy. Without palaces and monuments, the city seems to celebrate only itself; but it is egalitarian, homespun."Pye (1991) Maximum City, p 266"Secretly, the Commissioners ‘longed to lay out New York like Washington’, Edith Wharton says, thinking of temples and ornamental Malls, but they ‘laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought ‘undemocratic’ by people they secretly looked down upon.’"
Pye (1991) Maximum City, p 266
"Zoning came to New York as early as 1916… introduced in response to the outcry which greeted the eruption of the Equitable Building, forty-two storeys sheer up from the pavements of Broadway and Nassau Street. To stop skyscrapers casting the city’s streets into permanent darkness, New York was divided into commercial and residential zones, each of them with a specified maximum parapet height that limited the level to which a building could rise straight up to from the pavement."Deyan Sudjic (1992) The 100 Mile City, pp 90-91.
As the planning system developed it gave great power to those who controlled
it and allowed the city's political leaders to impose their mark on the
landscape. However, attempts to introduce comprehensive strategic planning
of the type used in Britain failed during the 1940s because the City Planning
Commission was seen as too powerful and therefore as a threat by the Mayor,
La Guardia. The consequence of this was to make the planning process even
more corrupt and symbolic of personal power:
"The vacuum was extraordinary: the political process was no longer connected to how the city changed, let alone to planning its mutations. New York’s budget, chronically inbalanced, needed new buildings to tax; to make jobs, the city needed construction. Instead of considering and evaluating some new tower, the city had to have strong reasons to refuse it. The city’s skyline became a matter of personal power - a commissar like Robert Moses or, later, the properly connected developers, the Trumps or Zeckendorfs, who can bamboozle and negotiate and bluster a building into being."Pye (1991) Maximum City, p 289
Even in the 1980s the power of the Mayor in regulating the landscape
of New York can be observed:
"At the urging of Mayor Koch, the city planners set about using incentive zoning to try to create two giant new landmarks. When the New York Coliseum…. ..became redundant with the opening of the I M Pei designed convention centre on the West Side in 1985, the city put the site up for sale. Koch had two interlinked objectives, to extract every last cent of potential profit that he could, and to give New York the doubtful kudos of building the world’s tallest skyscraper."Sudjic (1991), p 92
"If architecture can abstract power, the built form of downtown - sleek, dense, tall - embodies the growing outreach of capital investment and the enormous concentration of authority where investment decisions are made."Sharon Zukin (1991) Landscapes of Power, pp 185-6.
"Nowhere is the dialectic of concentration and exclusion, power and vernacular, more visible than from the elevated subway train crossing the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge. …… Facing the Statue of Liberty, on the Manhattan side of the bridge, tall towers of steel, concrete, and glass create a layered panorama of twentieth-century finance. The neo-Gothic minarets of the Woolworth Building - the world’s tallest skyscraper when it was completed in 1913 - delicately point to the World Trade Center’s mammoth modern boxes, built for Wall Street’s global expansion during the 1960s. These are flanked in turn at mid-height by the large, postmodern structures of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City, whose decorative mansard roofs and indentations fill the remaining pockets of cloud and sky."The skyscraper landscapes of the financial elite do not just symbolise power. They can also serve to exclude non-elite groups from areas of public space within the city. This is perhaps demonstrated at Battery Park City, a complex of offices and high-class residential apartments including the World Financial Center, developed during the 1980s. Battery Park City was supposed to be integrated into the city as a whole, and includes areas of 'public space' such as the waterfront:Sharon Zukin (1991) Landscapes of Power, p 184
"Although Wall Street’s white-collar proletariat uses the parks during weekdays, Battery Park City otherwise remains mainly a recreation zone for the relatively well-to-do. The interiors of the World Financial Center are in the standard style of corporate opulence, and entry to the upper floors is totally restricted to those with reasons to be there."Susan Fainstein (1994) The City Builders, p 183
"How public is public space, when it has been embedded in a context that raises such formidable social barriers that the masses of ordinary working people (not to mention those out of work) would feel uncomfortable entering it? How many poor families may be expected to cross the raised bridge into that citadel of wealth, the World Financial Center, and wander through the privileged enclaves of South End Avenue and Rector Place before reaching their permitted perch along the waterfront?"Philip Lopate quoted by Fainstein (1994), p 183
· City Hall areaAt each location you are asked to think about the political meanings and messages embodied in that particular landscape, as expressed through its architecture, its relation to surrounding areas, and the use and regulation of public space. The fieldwork will essentially be observational, but you are also encouraged to collect postcards or other representations of the place, and to talk to people on the street about how they interpret the landscape. Questions you will need to ask yourselves at each location include:
· Battery Park
· World Financial Center
· Wall Street
· What power is being represented?
· How is this expressed through architecture/design?
· How is this expressed through planning/layout?
· How is public space used?
· How is public space regulated?
· Evidence of resistance?
· How is the landscape of power consumed?
On reading urban landscapes:
* Groth, P & Bressi, T. (eds) (1997) Understanding Ordinary
Landscapes.
Jackson, J. B. (1984) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape.
Meinig, D W (ed) (1979) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes.
On landscape and power:
Daniels, S. (1993) Fields of Vision: Landscape imagery and national
identity in England and the United States.
* Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz. (esp chapter 4)
Harvey, D. (1979) Monument and Myth. Annals of the AAG, 69,
362-81.
Hayden, D. (1995) The Power of Place: Urban landscape as public
history.
* Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed) (1994) Landscape and Power.
Rotenberg, R. (1995) Landscape and Power in Vienna.
Yanow, D. (1995) Built space as story: The policy stories that buildings
tell. Policy Studies Journal, 23(3), 507-422. [borrow from MJW]
* Zukin, S. (1991) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
On New York:
Janet Abu-Lughod (1994) From Urban Village to East Village
* Cornog, E W (1988) To give character to our city: New
York’s City Hall. New York History, 69, 389-423.
Domosh, M. (1998) Those ‘gorgeous incongruities’: polite politic and
public space in the streets of 19th century New York. Annals of the
AAG, 88(2), 209-226.
Fainstein, S. (1994) The City Builders.
Mattson, K. (1995) The struggle for an urban democratic public: Harlem
in the 1920s. New York History, 76, 291-318.
Pye, M. (1991) Maximum City. [borrow from MJW]
Samuels, M S (1979) The biography of landscape, in Meinig (ed) The
Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes.
* Sudjic, D. (1992) The 100 Mile City.
Van Hook, B. (1992) Clear-eyed justice: Edward Simmon’s mural in the
Criminal Courts Building, Manhattan. New York History, 73, 443-458.
Zukin, S. (1991) Landscapes of Power.
For a good summary of politics in New York:
Costikyan, E N (1993) Politics in New York City: a memoir of the post-war
years. New York History, 74, 415-434.
Some other examples of landscapes of power:
Azaryahu, M. (1996) The spontaneous formation of memorial space: the
case of Kikar Rabin, Tel Aviv. Area, 28(4), 501-513.
Heffernan, M. (1995) Forever England: the Western Front and the politics
of remembrance in Britain. Ecumene, 2(3), 293-324.
Johnson, N. (1994) Sculpting heroic histories: celebrating the centenary
of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. Transactions of the IBG, 19(1),
79-83.
Johnson, N. (1995) Cast in stone: monuments, geography and nationalism.
Society and Space, 13, 51-66. [Reprinted in Agnew (ed) (1997) Political
Geography: a reader]
Osborne, B S (1998) Constructing landscapes of power: the George Etienne
Cartier Monument, Canada. Journal of Historical Geography, 24(4),
431-458.
Robbins, P. (1998) Authority and environment: institutional landscapes
in Rajastan, India. Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
88(3), 410-435.
Yeoh, B S (1996) Street-naming and nation-building: toponymic inscriptions
of nationhood in Singapore. Area, 28(3), 298-307