The Beach Beneath the Streets , livre ebook

State University of New York Press - Gregory Smithsimon , Benjamin Heim Shepard

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190 pages

English

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Focusing on the liberating promise of public space, The Beach Beneath the Streets examines the activist struggles of communities in New York City—queer youth of color, gardeners, cyclists, and anti-gentrification activists—as they transform streets, piers, and vacant lots into everyday sites for autonomy, imagination, identity formation, creativity, problem solving, and even democratic renewal. Through ethnographic accounts of contests over New York City's public spaces that highlight the tension between resistance and repression, Shepard and Smithsimon identify how changes in the control of public spaces—parks, street corners, and plazas—have reliably foreshadowed elites' shifting designs on the city at large. With an innovative taxonomy of public space, the authors frame the ways spaces as diverse as gated enclaves, luxury shopping malls, collapsing piers and street protests can be understood in relation to one another. Synthesizing the fifty-year history of New York's neoliberal transformation and the social movements which have opposed the process, The Beach Beneath the Streets captures the dynamics at work in the ongoing shaping of urban spaces into places of repression, expression, control, and creativity.
Acknowledgments

Part 1. Repression

Introduction. Control, Exclusion, and Play in Today’s Future City

1. Seeing Space through Exclusion and Control

2. Dispersing the Crowd. Bonus Plazas and the Creation of Public Space

3. The City as Seen from the Plaza. Changing Regimes of Private Control

Part 2. Resistance

Introductory Notes to Part 2

4. Fences and Piers. An Investigation of a Disappearing Queer Public Space

5. “If We Can’t Dance It’s Not Our Revolution”.Reclaiming the Streets and Creating Autonomous Space

6. Gardens, Streets, and Convivial Places. The Struggle for a Ludic Counterpublic

7. From Contested to Popular Space. New York’s Bike Lane Liberation Clowns

8. Conclusion. This Land is Your Land?

Notes
References

Sujets

Region

Regional

Gender studies

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	03 juin 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438436210
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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“Shepard and Smithsimon remind us of the critical importance of public space, not as something given, but as something imagined, contested, and creatively utilized. The Beach Beneath the Streets is inspiring.”
—Stephen Duncombe, author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy
“Skeleton versus bodies, cemeteries against joy; Shepard and Smithsimon create a montage that underlines the weight against which cultural activists push to create a space for all to live in the City of New York.”
—Marc Herbst, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
“Shepard and Smithsimon have written an especially timely and important book. At a time when all of the public sphere and collectivity is imperiled they have developed an incisive narrative about contestation and resistance. They remind us through both theory and rich case study that the struggle over who controls informal public space is one of the most important front lines in waging a counter offensive to the present blitzkrieg on public services and unions. I highly recommend this book.”
—Michael Fabricant, Executive Officer, Hunter/CUNY Graduate Center Social Welfare PhD Program, PSC-CUNY
“ The Beach Beneath the Streets moves like dancers at some illicit street party, right in tune with the rhythms of public life and public space. And like the dancers, bicyclists, gardeners, and activists they describe, Shepard and Smithsimon well understand that this public space remains a contested realm, a place of both repression and resistance, and so a place where essential matters of social life are always at issue. Because of this, and because of its evocative mash-up of images, ideas, and events, Shepard and Smithsimon's book does indeed succeed in prying up the heavy pavement laid down by the powers that be, and in finding beneath it a wide-open world of human possibility.”
—Jeff Ferrell, author of Tearing Down the Streets: Adventures in Urban Anarchy

The Beach Beneath the Streets
Contesting New York City's Public Spaces
Benjamin Shepard and Gregory Smithsimon

Cover illustration courtesy of Caroline Shepard, www.carolineshepard.com
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli W. LeRoux Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shepard, Benjamin.
The beach beneath the streets : contesting New York City's public spaces / Benjamin Shepard and Gregory Smithsimon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3619-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4384-3620-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. City planning—New York (State)—New York. 2. Public spaces—New York (State)—New York. 3. Plazas—New York (State)—New York. I. Smithsimon, Gregory. II. Title.
HT168.N5S54 2011 307.1'21609747—dc22
2010032059
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
The name for this book was hatched in one of New York's great public spaces, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, during birthday party of Scarlett, Ben's younger daughter. In much of the United States, public birthday parties are unusual, but New York's small apartments and big parks mean that a sunny day can find three or four kids' parties going on in sight of each other. Kids were hula hooping and chasing each other with squirt guns. The two of us were taking a break from the action, standing in the shade of a tree and talking to another parent when we hit upon the title of the book. That moment captures the many debts we owe: to our families, to the intellectual fecundity of New York's public spaces, and to the many people who provided interviews, insight, inspiration, and action that made this book possible.
Much of The Beach Beneath the Streets was born of conversations during play dates, in New York's parks and streets, its art galleries and restaurants—with our kids, Dodi and Scarlett, Eamon and Una. It is their creative energy and our need to find abundant space for them to play and grow in a healthy, imaginative way, which propelled this project from idea to book. Caroline Shepard and Molly Smithsimon, our wives, were there to support the project as we moved from play dates to dinners and ongoing conversations, and occasional struggles just to move forward. Caroline also provided us with early photos of the streets of New York as well as the cover art for this project ( www.carolineshepard.com ). Other artists, activists from FIERCE and RTS, and photographers, contributed historic images that are just as irreplaceable. The Times Up! archive as well as activist photographers were tremendously generous with their time and photos.
The research on the history of bonus plazas relied on interviews from people who could have felt no compulsion to be as generous as they were. Among the many architects interviewed, the meetings with Richard Roth in an Upper West Side diner stand out as particularly revealing and representative of a classic use of public space: of how a generation of influential New York city builders eschew their offices or homes and set up meetings in bustling diners. There the sound quality is poor, but the energy of New York's street life energizes the interview. Likewise, the help of Philip Schneider, who continues to advocate for better plazas in the offices of the Department of Planning (although he has nominally retired) was invaluable.
Moving to the Hudson River Piers, we would like to thank Kate Crane, Michael Fabricant, Kerwin Kaye, and Bob Kohler for their close readings of Chapter 4 . Thanks to Barton Benes for sharing his story and allowing us to republish copies of photos from his 1978 work Pier 48: Letters from My Aunt Evelyn . Several interviewees, including the legendary Bob Kohler, told their stories in some of the final days of their lives. Two interviewees were sent back to jail. And two of the chroniclers of life on the piers, Allan Bérubé and David Wojnarowicz, died before their time. They are sorely missed.
We could only write this book because earlier writers, theorists, and activists created the questions, stories, and movements of New York's public spaces. Activists welcomed us as participant observers into their meetings, and walked us through their movements. People like Alex Vitale could walk through a crowded event on Broadway, explaining how the activists' perception of police practices had influenced how they planned an event and organized a group. Groups such as RTS, FIERCE, Time's Up! and its Bike Lane Clowns marched, danced, and pedaled across Manhattan's streets to establish our right to the city. They in turn were building on the insights from queer theorists, the generation of 1968, Emma Goldman, and others who helped invent the idea of a pulsing democratic public space by and for the people. Only because they dreamed there could be a beach beneath the streets could we see it for ourselves.
Our respective academic departments, both vital parts of New York's besieged yet still thriving public sphere, the City University of New York, were just as helpful and just as present in public space. The Brooklyn College sociology department, Gregory's home base, has been a model of an academic department engaged in public space, whether playing softball or participating in a road race together in Brooklyn's parks. Their support, intellectual and collegial, has made working on this book a pleasure. The offices of the Department of Human Services at City Tech are surrounded by some of downtown Brooklyn's best public spaces, and have been the starting point from which Ben has investigated New York—from its activism to its water-front.
We benefited immensely from discussions with colleagues. Dave Madden can parse a sentence like no one else, even while walking across 34th Street after hours spent in a local bar discussing friends' manuscripts. Among the many people whose input have made this book better are Herbert Gans, Sudhir Venkatesh, Charles Tilly, Sharon Zukin, Harvey Molotch, and Cuz Potter. Gregory also wants to thank Michael Donnelly at Bard College, who pressed me to explain the significance of my bonus plaza research. Though it is a delayed response, this book is the answer. We also benefited from reviews from Urban Affairs Review, Liminalities, Working USA , and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest , and the book Altered States: Politics after Democracy , where earlier versions of some of these chapters were published.
We'd like to thank Larin McLaughlin and Kelli W. LeRoux of SUNY Press for first seeing promise in the proposal and for supporting, guiding and helping us pull together the book. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their prescient suggestions for the project. We would also like to thank the PSC-CUNY 63251-00 41 University Committee on Research Award for support to complete the final production of this manuscript.
And finally, our debt of gratitude to the people who use and bring alive New York's public spaces. New Yorkers have an undeserved reputation for being hard. Conditions in the cit