by: Daniel Fox
Event: Is New York Losing Its Soul?
Location: Donnell Library Center, 10.03.07
Speakers: Alison Tocci — President & Group Publisher, Time Out New York; Darren Walker — Vice President, Rockefeller Foundation; Tama Janowitz — novelist; Rocco Landesman — President, Jujamcyn Theaters
Moderator: Clyde Haberman — columnist, The New York Times
Organizers: The Municipal Art Society
The Municipal Art Society asks if Jane Jacobs would think NYC is losing its soul.
Jessica Sheridan
NYC’s ever-increasing crop of chain stores and banks is changing more than just the landscape. The city’s “soul” surfaces in many ways: artists and independent retailers; immigration and ethnic diversity; “organic messiness” and “sexiness.” The underlying theme overall, however, is uniqueness.
With the “Disneyification” of Times Square and the Atlantic Yards project as hot-button topics, panelists wondered: What would Jane Jacobs do? Her advocacy of short, tree-lined blocks, population density, and retail variety could be the answer; or maybe her 1950s approach to urban planning is irrelevant now. Panelists emphasized the importance of maintaining vital immigrant and working-class communities, and noted that the city’s African-American and young residents are on the verge of being priced out.
The onus falls on the city government to create sufficient interventions where growing economic inequality threatens the city’s uniqueness, such as through rent control or tax-break programs. According to Darren Walker, vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation, NYC has had the most aggressive subsidized housing program in the U.S. since Mayor Koch, and it is still insufficient. With significantly more demand than supply, and a million new residents projected in the next 10 years, creative solutions are needed at the leadership level.
Founded by a Dutch trading company, NYC has been shaped by money as much as it has by its penchant for evolution and reinvention. The question is how it will reinvent itself in this era of the market-based economy, when developers and “big money” seem to hold the cards. More questions than answers were raised, and there may not be a definitive solution. Jane Jacobs would turn the question to the community, and seek action at the neighborhood level.
Kate Soto is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor.