by: Gregory Haley AIA AICP LEED AP
Event: Gothamitis: Malcom Gladwell & Adam Gopnik in Conversation — The Inaugural Event of the Design Trust Council
Location: Museum of Modern Art, 05.02.07
Speakers: Adam Gopnik — author, Through the Children’s Gate, Paris to the Moon (Random House, 2000); Malcolm Gladwell — author, The Tipping Point, Blink; Deborah Berke, AIA — Co–Chair, Design Trust Council (Introduction)
Organizers: Design Trust for Public Space
Central Park is necessary to preserve a unique sense of place in NYC, according to Adam Gopnik.
Jessica Sheridan
New York City has lost “a part of its identity,” bemoans Adam Gopnik in his article entitled “Gothamitis” (The New Yorker, 01.08.07). Although the city has drastically reduced crime, lowered unemployment, and cleaned up its streets since the 1970s, he describes the NYC of today as “an old lover who has gone for a facelift and come out looking like no one in particular.” Author Malcom Gladwell agrees that the city has changed drastically, but he believes the city has more subtle diversity than ever.
What NYC has maintained in density, it has lost in variety, according to Gopnik. The result is a “mono-cultural desert of sameness.” Gladwell, in contrast, posits that this loss of “physical diversity” has made way for “a more profound human diversity.” Conjuring an image of a coffee shop populated with young people working on laptops, he points out that these people are engaged in “highly varied pursuits, but the outward appearance of their production is the same.” Likewise, many of the city’s loft buildings that once housed the garment industry now support a variety of uses, from housing to commercial businesses. They may be “similar people with similar salaries,” Gladwell admits, but “they are doing very different things.”
While global economic trends have resulted in economic variety, Gopnik worries that, for the first time, Manhattan has no “Bohemian frontier.” While acknowledging the transfer of this activity to locations such a Williamsburg and Red Hook, NYC’s nature has changed from a compact and cosmopolitan place where varied socio-economic groups are in constant interface to a model of a city more akin to London, with far-flung and largely isolated neighborhoods of cultural generation.
Dismissing accusations of nostalgia, Gopnik sees the vernacular form of memory as defining “cultural values.” If global economic shifts affect NY, they cannot be left unquestioned. Looking to zoning codes, Central Park, and landmark preservation, Gopnik believes that similar interventions within the free market are necessary to maintain a desirable and valued city.
Gregory Haley, AIA, AICP, LEED AP, is a project architect and urban designer at Studio V Architecture and teaches architectural design studios at NYIT School of Architecture.