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THE URBAN DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION and the fallacy of innovation
Ife Vanable Fire, Jump / Not New (Introduction) Just after 8:00am on an overcast Sunday morning on March 22, 1987, an eleven-year-old girl, Dwana, and her two older brothers, Robin, 16, and Stanley Jr., 22, jumped to their deaths from their 33rd floor apartment window of the south tower of Schomburg Plaza apartments located at Fifth Avenue and Central Park North, on an edge separating Central from East Harlem [Images 01-04]. The threebedroom apartment, shared with their parents was ablaze. Trapped inside, driven by smoke, acrid fumes, and physically consumed by flames, left with little choice, the siblings sought refuge in the air and space beyond the window. In a spectacular display of raw humanity and keen self-preservation, perhaps hoping to land on a downstairs neighbor’s balcony, the children fell to their deaths amid screams from onlookers on the ground imploring them not to jump. Upon review of the Jenkins children’s bodies, Fire Commissioner, Joseph E. Spinnato, observed, “The bodies were sufficiently burned to the point where it would cause people to opt to jump” (Verhovek, 1987). An investigative report into the cause of the fire by the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA, Schaenman, 1987) asserted, “Almost onequarter of the population of the United States lives in multi-family dwellings. Many of these are high-rises. There are thus tens of millions of people who may be exposed to similar problems if the lessons from such fires are not heeded.” By the late 1990s, ten years after the three siblings leapt from their engulfed 33rd-floor Schomburg Plaza apartment, the USFA found that an estimated 15,500 high-rise structure fires raged each year between 1996 and 1998, three-quarters of which occurred in residential structures (USFA, 2002). The “lessons” to be learned from such fires are many, but are fundamentally tied to entrenched and enduring legacies of urban planning processes that championed schemes for development touted as new, but were often (and have become) systematically customary. In the name of combating
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various forms of perceived urban crises, urban planning processes have been marked by affording outsize power to programs deemed innovative to ultimately skirt or wholly override established regulations and local ordinances and make critical decisions about land use without regard to traditional jurisdictional boundaries or recourse to the electorate for approval, all in the name of “public benefit” (Brilliant, 3). No New Plans Perpetually cloaked in seemingly new initiatives, programs, corporations, re-organizations, etc., public planning indelibly requires a delegation of authority to some small group of decision makers and the allocation of resources for agreed upon public purposes. Fundamentally, how decisions are made and who has been endowed with the authority to enact those decisions is critical in the planning process. As such, considering the structural framework of public planning as relatively fixed, the ways that major public planning resolutions—what may be referred to as policies—have been implemented has been indelible, merely shape-shifting and taking on new names. Schomburg Plaza, developed by the Urban Development Corporation, dedicated in 1974, exemplifies the methodological and theoretical endurance of social policy aims and planning schemes in the American context since the emergence of the field in the early twentieth century. Historically situated urban planning schemes have routinely staged scenes of subjection (Hartman 1997), that arguably operate as racial formations borrowing an analytical tool developed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1994), in which human bodies and social structures have been represented and organized (Omi and Howard Winant, 55-56). As such, these processes and their resultant material artefacts operate as aesthetic acts, as what Jacques Rancière (2014) describes as “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and produce novel forms of political subjectivity” (p. 3). And while
