THE AGONISTIC CITY: Building the Political in Sunset Park by Parsons Graduate Urban Programs

THE AGONISTIC CITY building the political in Sunset Park

Michele Girelli, Verena Lenna

Research developed in the framework of the Atlantis Program in collaboration with Parsons, The New School of Design Spring Term 2012

Permission for Use of Content: The author herewith permits that the present dissertation be made available for consultation; parts of it may be copied, strictly for personal use. Every other use is subject to strict copyright reservations. Particular reference is made to the obligation of explicitly mentioning the source when quoting the present dissertationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s results. Venice 2012

THE AGONISTIC CITY building the political in Sunset Park

Michele Girelli, Verena Lenna

European postgraduate Masters in Urbanism

Acknowledgements This research would not have been possible without the support, critiques and encouragement of many people. First and foremost, we express our gratitude to our supervisors Bernardo Secchi, Bruno De Meulder and Paola ViganĂ˛ for their inspiration and guidance. We wish to thank them for their insights and continuous support during the research process and the along the development of the whole Master Program. For having pushed us towards a critical view on the processes that invest the city and for the valuable knowledge they continuously shared with us. We would like to express our gratitude to American supervisors Miguel Robles Duran, Angel Luis Lara, Quilian Riano and Maarten Van Acker who guided our studio and research in New York. They contributed to develop a richer perspective concerning the condition of low-income communities in Sunset Park and the power structures of the city, opening us to alternative models of engagement in urban practice. We express our gratitude to all the members of La Union , for having welcomed us in the neighborhood, for having shared with us their time, their knowledge and stories, pushing us towards an unexplored, exciting research path. Special thanks to Miodrag Mitrasinovic for his caring support during the time we spent in New York, encouraging us to follow our inspirations; for having listened to our thoughts and shared with us the important moments spent at Parsons; for having hosted us in an amazing context of research. Thank you to all the students we worked with during the course of the EMU Master. Finally, we are thankful for the love and support we received from our families throughout the whole study period. Michele and Verena

View from the window. Parsons The New School for Design 12th floor 16th East 60

Premise This research has started within the Atlantis Program, an exchange project between European and United States university hosted in spring 2012 at Parsons School of Design, New York. The European Postgraduate Master of Urbanism thesis semester has been guided, for a four month period through the design course ‘Urban Ecology#1: Sunset Park, Brooklyn’ and oriented to ‘develop a research that have the capacity to grasp and operate inside the structures of a highly complex condition’ in the ‘intricacies of low income neighborhoods and its delicate urban ecosystem’. This opportunity of exchange besides personal interests in the topic of social inclusion in urban context is one of the reasons that input for this investigation. The course proposed a research on ‘the production and use of participatory mechanisms and collaborative methodologies’ and as ‘a means to develop collective action and organization around every process’ through ‘specific action projects’. Besides the morphological and economical analysis of the site, a relevant amount of time was spent in interviews and fieldwork in order to understand the social dynamic and neighborhood complexity. To understand the realities of the low income urban ‘ecosystem’, we have been working in collaboration with members of La Unión, a community based organization in Sunset Park, with the intention of working together to produce a thorough study of living quality in that area. This perspective is aware about how social movements and communities are already producing expertise and methodologies. The general hypothesis is that this ‘knowledge’ can provide useful insights for social sciences and design disciplines. Besides understanding the processes and actors that affect Sunset Park we speculated about ‘socially, environmentally and economically alternative models’ conceived as design frameworks and capable of being adapted to other environments1. The last part of this work has been produced during the next four months after returning to Europe, this has allowed us to take the needful ‘critical distance’ to complete this research.

1 For a more comprehensive description of the course and methodology propsed see ‘Urban Ecology #1: Sunset Park. Unitary Urban Research and Design Speculations in Sunset Park, Brooklyn with Miguel Robles Duran, Quilian Riano, Maarten Van Acker, Angel Luis Lara hosted in Spring 2012 at MFA Transdisciplinary Design, School of Design Strategies, Parsons the New School for Design.

Inside and outside academia, during the period of staying in New York, we have been exposed to an environment of interdisciplinary work. Besides working together with members of La Union and students having very different background, also debate with artists, professors from different fields, activist and civil society, has become relevant for the progress of this research. During the four month of research a multitude of events, lectures, small action-project and social manifestations within and as part of the recent social movement ‘Occupy’, fueled an intense debate on the city. The slogan ‘the right to the city’ closely associated with Marxist French philosopher Henri Lefebvre , nowadays reclaimed by big portions of civil society seems, generally accepted by recent wave of protests and at the base of growing interest in social inequality. The recent economical crisis is increasing social inequality and disparity between the few very rich and the multitude of poor, process of privatization and worsening labor conditions under the implementation of neo-liberal policies, have highlighted social disparities and the need for a change. At the same time the evidence of increased social inequalities become an occasion for social movement, grassroots association and local organization to raise their voice and protest against an unjust state of things, a practice that have a strong historical legacy in New York and more in general in the United States2. The city seems to become, for one more time, the arena for social struggles, and where groups can organize and jointly reclaim their rights. The network of solidarity percolating civil society especially low income groups at the neighborhood scale and the need to imagine a ‘more just’ future seems open for the exploration of alternative economical and political models, these among many others are the reason of recent interest in Urban Ecology ‘s theory.

2 Cartosio Bruno, 2012 I lunghi anni sessanta, published by Feltrinelli Editore, Milano.

MAP OF CONCEPTS

THE ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT space = time the rise of Urban Ecology within social and environmental theory

SUNSET IN THE FRAMEWORK OF NEW YORK CITY Sunset Park as a case study: transition and social justice which opportunities and potentials: - spaces, zoning tools, actors and Institutions - local activation, within the realm of social movements.

LABOUR AND PROPERTY AS ENTRY POINTS given the urgency of the social justice issue: reclaiming bio-authoriality as a premise of the political

PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESEARCH questioning: what we learned working with the people in Sunset Park > people grouping in movements, associations, cooperatives are active and aware. > we think Institutional role is relevant to empower, to guarantee accessibility, to structure action > forms of latency as opportunities for bottom-up forms of direct activation

role of space role of Institutions the conditions of the political alternative property patterns forms of welfare role of architects and urbanists

> RESEARCH BY DESIGN exploring the ecological potential in Sunset Park towards the political: the agonistic potential of the city

Potential: available tools of planning availability of organized citizens vacancies and other spatial opportunities > space reclaimed: new systems of property > space reclaiming time: housing and public space > actors and economical logics

INDEX

Sections Chapters Materials PREMISE THE ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT Brief introduction to Urban Ecology SUNSET PARK IN THE FRAMEWORK OF NEW YORK CITY Socio-economical profile Conflicts and internal migrations Community based planning A self-organized approach to community The present of social movements SPATIAL FRAMES OF LABOUR Prelude: I have no time A.Spatial conditions of labour A1 Geopolitical and social framework A2 ( In )visibility of Labour Transcalar conditions of labour: a dialectical approach From the assembly line to the desk Vacancy Forms of visibility and invisibility of labour The embodied experience of precarity Welfare reclaimed: under the political FRAGMENTING PATTERNS OF PROPERTY Housing as a right Living models and social fragmentation Property spatial fragmentation Ownership and shrinking of the public Alternative patterns of sociability THE PROCESS OF RESEARCH ( AS DESIGN ) Participatory action research with La Union La Union La Granja Figures of power Drawing the sociogram A block with a view: La Granja A1+A2 Emerging negotiations and conflicts Looking for agon: where is agon? The process of research as design of the relational realm and generation of knowledge

BIBLIOGRAPHY

RESEARCH BY DESIGN The political nature of ecologies Sunset Park zoning tools Space becoming time Emerging ecologies: spaces and actors involved Open finale

17 23

41 43 52 57

63 67 72 75

89 95

103

121

THE ECOLOGICAL THOUGHT

Brief introduction to Urban Ecology

Brief introduction to Urban Ecology Since the term ‘Urban Ecology’ is acquiring relevance for this research, it could be useful to remember summarily its origins and implications in urban theory. Conscious that the different approaches can have emerged some years before, we locate the origins of ‘urban ecology’ in two different fields and historical moments. One during the 1920s considering the relevant contribution in social theory developed at the School of Chicago and the other during the 1970s since its relevance in environmental studies in that period. During the 1920s at the University of Chicago Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess developed a program of urban research in the sociology department. In that period, scholars of geography economy and sociology sought to understand the dynamism of the modern city founding inspiration in ecological science. Taking their cue from ecologist Frederick Clements’s theory that vegetation evolves through a series of predictable stages, they argued that urban ‘human environment’ functioned similarly. They eagerly read studies of plants and animals in the hope of establishing ‘human ecology’ as a discipline and developed a ‘naturalistic visions of cities’. In numerous research projects focused on the city of Chicago, R.Park and E.Burgess elaborated a theory of ‘urban ecology’ which proposed that cities were environments like those found in nature, governed by many of the same forces of Darwinian evolution that affected natural ecosystems1. R.Park and E.Burgess suggested that the struggle for scarce urban resources, especially land, led to competition between groups and ultimately to the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological ‘natural areas’ in which people shared similar social characteristics because they were subject to the same ecological pressures. R.Parks proposed two social processes in the formation of the community. First a process of differentiation, that he called the ‘biotic order’ producing a sorting that would group residents into a series of ‘natural areas’ within the geography of the city. These natural areas, are not only determined by physical attributes of the city, being bounded for example by bodies of water, highways, infrastructure, or industrial areas but also by historical, racial cultural linguistic characteristics of residents. Once natural areas are defined, a second process begins: the development of a coherent ‘moral order’ in each natural areas where physical space become a ‘locality with sentiments, traditions and history in its own in other words become a community2.

1 In that period Darwin’s theories where very influential within scholars at School of Chicago see Burgess E. Park R., 1925 The city, published by the University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. In particular chapter 3 ‘The ecological Approach’ by R.D. McKenzie. 2 Burgess E. Park R., 1922 Introduction to the Science of Sociology, published by the University of Chicago Press, Illinois

R.Parks developed two very important arguments for that time and nowadays particular relevant for this research. First, the link between the geographical space of the city to the mechanism of social integration as ‘network of relation among community members’ and second the notion that the primary locus of integration in the city is the geographical subdivision we call community or neighborhood. More recently some researchers neglected these arguments, affirming that certain key process of social integration and social order no longer operate at the scale of the neighborhood in the ecological tradition recognizing within an ecological approach, the non-isolated nature of urban neighborhoods. Nevertheless, Park’s understanding of community guided subsequent generation of sociologist attempting to understand the production of urban integration in urban life. His approach proved to be particularly influential during the 1980s when social scientist began trying to understand the disturbing and unusual concentration of problems in certain city neighborhoods. Park’s ecological idea that ‘biotic’ order of the city strives toward equilibrium has been criticized and failed to recognize that society and urban transformation may in fact, be driven by political and economical interests3. During the last years, scholars of urban poverty and sociology began to consider the role formal organization as potentially relevant to the task of creating social integration. This theory advance the hypothesis that poor people benefit from involvement in neighborhood organizational activity and forms of integration within the formal organizational structures of society can cut across the geographic boundaries of neighborhoods. In environmental theory the term ‘ecology’ was used long before in studies of natural phenomena and biology but it is in early 70s that it becomes relevant and has an important moment of recognition in urban studies. During this period, that coincide with an energetic crises in US, for the first time a reflection on scarcity of resources and of environmental risks is produced. The idea of a new relation between nature and humans, supported by a strong social movement started initially in California, produce a crisis in the idea of unlimited progress and resource consumption. It is in this period that environmentalists, encouraged by what they saw as a public awakening to environmental concerns, issued books and reports that predicted that if population, consumption and with them the global economy continued to grow, the world would soon run out of food and other resources.

3 Castells M. ,1972 La question urbaine, Maspero, Paris.

On 4th Street the public space of Latin community people gather in proximity of street vendors, informal workers offer traditional drinks and food.

The sale of ethnic foods and drinks in the street become a reason for gathering and space of sociability.

The Club of Rome’s 1972 best seller, The Limits to Growth, was associated in many reviews with dire projections: for example, that the world would run out of minerals. In 1970, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, predicted that global food shortages would cause four billion people to starve to death between 1980 and 1989. Further warnings poured forth in the Global 2000 Report 1980 and in annual State of the World reports by Lester Brown and the Worldwatch Institute. Ecologists begin to study the conditions of living organisms in relation to their environment in cities and the maintenance of biological diversity of ecosystems in urban context. At the beginning studies focus on effects of humans actions on ecosystems in order to help in minimizing the harmful effects of urbanization on other species, later studies include humans in urban ecosystems and focus on the effects of humans on other species and humans themselves. Generally more recent study approach considers a city as an ecosystem, characterized by its history, its structure and function, including both biotic and abiotic components and has its own spatial organization and distinctive patterns of change through time4 and aims to understand how human and ecological processes can coexist and help societies with their efforts to become more sustainable. Because of its interdisciplinary nature and unique focus on humans and natural systems, the term “urban ecology” has been used variously to describe the study of humans in cities, of nature in cities, and of the coupled relationships between humans and nature. Recent literature on urban systems distinguish ‘‘ecology in cities’’, the study of ecological structure, function, biota in urban settings from ‘‘ecology of cities’’ a systems approach to the study of entire metropolitan areas from an ecosystems perspective. Urban ecology has been criticized for focusing too much on competition between species in urban ecosystem at the expense of the cultural and subjective forces that shape the city. Arguing for the necessity of a ‘spatial turn E.Soja warns about the danger that an excessive focus to environmental problems risk to move the attention far away from social problems and the question of social inequalities5. Both approaches take their moves from natural environment studies but the two perspective seems relatively distant each other, both approaches have inherent strengths and limitations. While in social theory urban ecology is still careful to the relation between dynamics of production of the city and quality of life at neighborhood scale, in environmental study urban ecology is pursuing the idea of city as ecosystem and relation between species to be addressed as hole by multiple disciplines. The first approach is too focused on the benefit from involvement in organizational activity at the scale of the neighborhood, without considering the broader economical and political potential of local organization at the general level. With the risk of focusing too much on competition between species in urban ecosystem, addressing the problem managerially with the risk to stray from questions of social inequality, the second does not consider the cultural subjective forces that shape the city.

4 McDonnell M.J. and Pickett S.T.A., 1993 Humans as Components of Ecosystems: The Ecology of Subtle Human Effects and Populated Areas, published by Springer-Verlag, Berlin. 5 Soja E., 2010 Seeking Spatial Justice, published by the University of Minnesota Press, MN.

BX16

MN30

BX11

bronx

8 MN20

BX22

manhattan

BX18 BX03 BX23

brooklyn

newark 7

BK11 BK15 BK03

long isl

BK14

staten island QN05

QN09

BK13

144

SUNSET PARK IN THE FRAMEWORK OF NEW YORK CITY

Socio-economical profile Conflicts and internal migrations The present of social movements

land

2 Miles

1215 Miles

Located in the western section of the New York borough of Brooklyn, Sunset Park is one of the most diverse and multiethnich neighborhood of the city.

Socio-economical profile Sunset Park, known as Community District 7 (CD 7) , is a rapidly growing district. Its population went from an estimated 136,334 in 2000 to an estimated 150,460 in 2010. The immigrants from Latin America and Asia, as presented above contributed to the revitalization of the community after the decline of the 1960s and 1970s. Approximately 57.1% of the population in 2008 is foreign born. Many of the groups are similar to the year 2000, but compared to 2000 there is a larger proportion of Chinese and Mexicans. Located in the western section of the New York borough of Brooklyn, Sunset Park boasted a large Scandinavian, Italian and Irish population into the second half of the 20th century. Historically a first stop for immigrants, beginning in the 1960s, a large influx of Latinos from Puerto Rico began to move into the community. Today Latino population represents the majority of the community. More recently, immigrants from Asia, primarily China, have reinvigorated the 8th Avenue area of the district and now represent almost twenty percent of the population. The Arabic population in the community has also begun to grow quickly. The dominant ethnic groups are Puerto Rican (13.8), Chinese (11.8), Mexican (11.4%), Dominican (5.2%), Japanese (5.2%), Irish (4.1%), Italian (3.6%), Ecuadorian (3.6%) and Cantonese (3.4%). After hitting a low of 98,567 in 1980, population grew to 120,063 in 2000 – an increase of 22% (New York City’s growth rate during this period was 13%). CD 7 has a highly mobile population. According to the 2008 data, approximately 60% of the population moved into their residence in the last nine years, therefore you may encounter a number of differences compared to the 2000. Sunset Park consists of a strong residential community, two viable commercial strips as well as a large industrial area. The Gowanus Expressway looms over Third Avenue, separating the industrial from the residential sections of the neighborhood as well the community of Sunset Park from its waterfront. The community holds the largest Federal Historic Housing District and has some of the oldest cooperative apartments in the country. The big industrial area location of an active maritime and industrial sector that hosts much of the noxious infrastructure that sustains New York’s economy, including power plants, waste transfer stations, and several of the region’s most heavily-traveled highways and truck routes. The waterfront is primarily, occupied by industrial and commercial uses and has historically been largely inaccessible to the public. The 58th Street Pier is currently the only access community residents and workers have to the waterfront.

Prospect Park

29 T

36 T

4T H

3R D

37 T

Cemetery

6T H

5T H

40 T

5T H

30 T

45 T

3R D

50 T

40 T

8T H

7T H

Brooklyn Army terminal

61 S

50 T

6T H

62 N

5T H

55 T

8T H

4T H

45 T

7T H

60 T

8T H

55 T

64 T

60 T

Vision Plan Administrative Boundary Re-zooning Plan

Sunset Park

Brooklyn

Other 4% Asian 25%

White 19%

NYC

Othe r 4% Asian 7%

Other 4% Asian 10%

Black 24%

Black 34%

Black 2%

White 35%

Hispanic 50%

Hispanic 20%

Hispanic 27%

Data Source: U.S. Census 2010/NYC Department of City Planning

While Sunset Park’s industrial activities declined considerably in the 1960s and 1970s – largely as a result of global economic trends and development of containerized shipping - its strategic location on Upper New York Bay, extensive industrial infrastructure, access to a large local labor pool, and connection to major transportation networks serving New York City as well as the wider region, maintained its importance as a working waterfront. Economic development policies and programs put into place in the last two decades have generated substantial reinvestment in the area. Current industrial policies, aimed at diversifying New York City’s economy and supporting and strengthening its industrial base, have placed renewed emphasis on revitalization and full utilization of the waterfront. Sunset Park’s upland communities are completely disconnected from their waterfront and have, until recently, largely been excluded from discussions concerning development of this important economic and natural resource. The New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), the state, and federal funding is developing a new waterfront park between 43rd and 51st Streets on the former Bush Terminal Piers 6-12 that claim to strain the quality of life of local inhabitants. This plan is part of Bloomberg’s plan 2030. Released in 2007, PlaNYC was an unprecedented effort undertaken by Mayor Bloomberg to prepare the city for one million more residents, strengthen the economy, combat climate change, and enhance the quality of life for all New Yorkers. The Plan brought together over 25 City agencies to work toward the vision of a greener, greater New York. The industrial area has fallen on hard times over the past few decades but recent investments and plans point this area toward s a ‘better’ future. Nowadays actual land use plan consider the cemetery that occupy the 60% as ‘recreational’ space. Waterfront is generally not accessible and the vision plan proposed for the waterfront redevelopment does not provide new public spaces except the park. The recent rezoning plan proposed by community based organization is an attempt to control process of development and to preserve the morphological characteristic and view of Sunset Park, since recently development with the old rezoning was not good. The project is in danger of becoming a logistical platform, leaving very small room for the planned park. The waterfront redevelopment project claims to provide better condition of living but in reality, is at high risk of fostering a new process of gentrification. With the poverty rate of 23% Sunset Park is home to about 9,000 households living below the poverty line and a median household income of $25.875. The concentration of poverty in an area where environmental 19

DATA LABOUR

Domestic Workers

200.000 in New York City, 43% of women working outside the home hire domestic workers: this would bringthe number of domestic workers in New York City closer to

600,000

On the corner

working in Sunset Park w

4,349 - 8,283 workers

14,3 % 5,9 %

are either employed or searching for work as a day laborer, on a typical day in the New York metropolitan area. 1

Female occupation data

Male occupation data

Unemployment rates

Commuting

0 -5 % 5.1 -10 % 10.1 - 15 % 15 %

working in Brooklyn and other parts of New York

no data

52,1 % 25,3 %

Unionization rates in New York City 5 Boroughs ghs Because these data are highly aggregated (mainly due to the limitations of the sample size), they fail to convey the full complexity of New York unionization rates, which also vary by race and ethnicity. This too reflects differential racial and ethnic patterns of employment across industries. U.S.-born workers are more highly unionized than foreign-born workers, while the unionization rates of those who have become naturalized U.S. citizens, as well as those who arrived in the United States before 1990, are comparable to or higher than those of U.S.- born workers. More recent arrivals, by contrast, have extremely low rates of unionization. These newcomers are relatively young, and few of them are union members, regardless of nativity. Moreover, recent immigrants are disproportionately employed in the informal sector, in jobs that have relatively low unionization rates. Source: The State of the Unions, Center for Urban Research and NYC Labor Market Information Service, CUNY. September 2010

management occupations (except farmers) business and financial operations occupations computer and mathematical occupations education, training, and library arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media

35% NA NA 55% NA 35% ( except home health )

healthcare practitioners and technical occupations service occupations sales and office construction, extraction, and maintenance production occupations transportation and material moving community and social services occupations

NA NA 28% NA 46% 66% ( public administration )

military port

1st AGE

SUNSET PARK MIDDLE CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD 40S 50S

gowanus expressway

conditions compromise residents’ health and quality of life and reflects the lack of housing options available to poor households in New York City. There were 29,723 total housing units, of which 95.8% occupied, 75.1% rented and 24.9% owned; the median property value was $235,400. The median household income in 1999 US dollars was $30,152, and the median family income was $31,247; The per capita income was $13,141; 27.9% of individuals, and 26% of families were living below the poverty line. 93.9% of residents were of one race, while 6.1% were multiracial; Roughly 42.6% of residents were Hispanic or Latino, 36.2% were white, 29% were Asian (mostly Chinese), 3.2% were black/African American, and 24.7% were “another race/ethnicity”. The history behind the development of the waterfront is inseparable from the human history of the waves of Dutch, Irish, Polish, Scandinavian, Italian, Latino, and Asian immigrants who have, at various times, made Sunset Park their home in order to benefit from and to advance the area’s economic opportunities. Their energy and creativity have been one of the major driving forces behind Sunset Park’s long and significant history of economic success leading to the development of its infrastructure, its transportation linkages, its historical role in maritime trade, and the incredible density and diversity of its industry. Nowadays, as in the. past, the area continues to hold much promise for individuals and entrepreneurs looking to create their future.

Conflicts and internal migrations Sunset Park lies between Bay Ridge and Gowanus, stretching from 15th Street to 65th Street from 9th Avenue to New York Harbor, Sunset Park is a demographically diverse neighborhood of approximately 150,000 people. Once known as South Brooklyn, and later considered part of Bay Ridge, Sunset Park was named in 1965 for the 25 acre park built in the 1890’s which overlooks the neighborhood. This beautiful park, located on the slope of Dead Man’s Hill in Brooklyn gives this neighborhood its name. Along with playgrounds, a pool, basketball and handball courts, the western end of the park boasts a gorgeous view of the Manhattan skyline. Largely rural until the mid - 19th century, the area began to grow rapidly in the late 19th century with the establishment of the Brooklyn waterfront as a major port for maritime trade. Fueled by successive waves of immigration and a steady demand for labor to work in its factories, warehouses, and piers, Sunset Park quickly became a Mecca for all who sought work. 1st AGE due to the strong investment for the port activity and Gowanos Expressway infrastructure during the 40s-50s the neighborhood attracted flows of immigrant workers mainly from Italian Finnish and Irish nationality. From the turn of the century through the 1960s ships from all countries sailed into New York Harbor and lined up for berthing space at one of the many handsome finger piers that dotted Sunset Park’s shoreline. To meet the cargo handling demands of these ships, thousands of longshoremen worked on the docks loading and unloading goods. Several more thousand men and women worked around the clock within the millions of square feet of manufacturing space in the area churning out the goods demanded by a growing U.S. population. On any given day, each shift change was marked by hundreds of workers walking through the streets to and from their upland homes. The development of the neighborhood was been closely linked with Bush Terminal, a complex of piers, warehouses and factory lofts, built by Irving Bush in 1890 and the Brooklyn Army Terminal built in 1919. In 1941 the Gowanus Expressway was built, connecting 23

2nd AGE

new freight port

SUNSET PARK LOSS OF PROPERTY VALUE 70S 80S

brooklin waterfront

waterfront investment

3rd AGE

4th AGE

SUNSET PARK

LATIN NEIGHBORHOOD

MIDDLE CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD

80S 90S

10S 30S

VISION PLAN investment

gowanus expressway

waterfront investment

REAL ESTATE investment

Sunset Park with surrounding parts of New York City. The Gowanus effectively bisected the residential and industrial communities and separated the neighborhood from its waterfront. As a consequence, 3rd Avenue quickly lost its commercial appeal and 5th Avenue soon became the street of choice for shopping. 2nd AGE during 70s and 80s due the dismantling of military port and good’s ‘containerization’ we assist to migration of middle class living in Sunset Park towards suburban areas, racially homogenous zones and gated community (white flight) with consequent loss of property value and price of rents.. Brooklyn Army Terminal Designed by Cass Gilbert and completed in 1919 as a military ocean supply facility. During World War II as much as sixty three million tons of supplies and 80 % of the troops sent overseas passed through it. Since 1984, the Terminal has been converted as space for small businesses. Big investments are oriented to Newark port area. 3rd AGE during 80s and 90s the neighborhood has become home to a large Chinese population, as well as Latin American and Indian. The neighborhood become a good place for low income Latin community mainly Portorican, Mexican and Dominican that work in textile industries near the port area, with a low percentage of Asian mainly Chinese originally from Fhuzou area of China. Investments are tendentially oriented to upper Brooklyn waterfront. 4th AGE Sunset Park today remains a first stop for many newcomers to the United States. About half of Sunset Park’s one hundred thousand residents are Hispanic. As stated above, they include a large number of Dominicans, as well as Ecuadorians, Nicaraguans, and Puerto Ricans, and, recently, many Mexicans from the province of Puebla. Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park is the commercial center for this community, with many restaurants, food shops and record stores reflecting their countries of origin. We witnessed, during last 20 years, that the port area became object of Vision Plan, as part of the project of renewal proposed by major Bloomberg and later on implemented. Asian community is growing and a process of gentrification from Park slope produced an increasing in rent price. Latin community that tendentially rent the houses is suffering unaffordablity of housing and is moving towards more cheap areas in Newark.

ATLAS OF COMMUNITY BASED PLANS

Greenpoint Brooklyn: Draft Plan

Old Brooklyn District: Draft Plan

Brooklyn Waterfront: Draft Plan

Red Hook Shoreline and Public Access Plan

Bedford-Stuyvesant: comprehensive plan Atlantic Pacific Yard: alternative project to FCRC Kermit Place: zooning recomandation Sunset Park: draft plan recomandations

Map redesigned from Planning for All New Yorkers: An Atlas of Community-Based Plans A campaign for CBP by The Municipal Art Society of New York

Miles

The Community-Based Planning ‘Section 197-a’ of the New York City Charter, provide community boards, grassroots organizations citywide civic groups, planning professionals and academics with the opportunity to develop and submit community-based plans to the City Planning Commission. The original intent of the ‘197-a’ plan was to provide a mechanism through which City agencies could consult with communities when public policies were formulated and planning decisions were made since New York is composed of many different neighborhoods, and because of its size and complexity, a strictly-centralized planning process is inadequate. Without planning staff or financial assistance being provided by government, community-based planning have turned to foundations, institutions, banks and technical assistance providers for support in developing their plans. However, while on paper New York City has what appears to be strong support for community based planning, this commitment is less apparent on the ground, in practice these plans are often adopted by the City and then left unused or unimplemented. Both community boards and local organizations that plan often find it difficult to get their plans taken seriously and integrated into official plans, policies, and investments. Clearly, the current 197-a process is neither efficient nor effective. Today there is an urgent need for timely development of affordable housing, open space, and economic development opportunities community-based planning represent an unique opportunity to adopt a new approach to planning that recognizes and values the ideas and contributions from the communities at neighborhood scale. Community-based plans, with their emphasis on these pressing issues, frequently offer the most inclusive answers and, in some places, have resulted in almost miraculous urban transformations.

This Atlas contains a number of “197-a” plans developed by community boards. In addition, the Atlas represents the efforts of many grassroots, local organizations to present the needed improvements for their communities. SOURCE: Planning for All New Yorkers. A project of the Municipal Art Society.

The CommunityBased Planning Task Force is working to secure a more meaningful role for New Yorkers in the city’s land use process, and to establish community-based planning as official New York City policy.

28 28

A SELF-ORGANIZED APPROACH TO COMMUNITY

How would you describe your organization and the work you are doing? I Began squatting in the late seventies in the Bronx., an area destroyed by forces of displacement at the time. Generally, people tend to see the problem of homelessness and displacement in purely economic terms. Capitalism system is not interested in provide housing to poor people but we tend to join that with analysis that has to do with social control. Decision made in late sixties and seventies has to do more with the idea of displacement from a political point of view, both consequence as economical motivated decisions and requirements but as well of social control and disempowerment. Therefore, we can say that homelessness can be seen as produced by economical forces but also from the desire of social control. Which is in your perception the limit between legal and illegal when it comes to occupy abandoned spaces? Squatting means occupation, renovation and defense of vacant space in order to create housing. The city of NY used to have legal means that allowed people to enter in vacant spaces and renovate them called “urban home study program” or “sweat equity”. This means that you could work for a lease instead of paying with money, until middle eighty’s a group of people could find a building, apply for a permit to the city to go in and work on that building. They could secure lease to that house, still owned by the city, by giving a report on a regular basis to the city. Nowadays most of the banks control vacant spaces. Before, the city controlled the vacant space trough the agency. In 1986, the city issues a proposal for people who wanted to do this, these are groups that would want to live in a vacant buildings and work to renovate them. Through a regular repolr ther was a kind of relationships. From 1986 until now there is no legal means by which people that were interested or needed to work on these houses could create housing, there is no option available. From 1986, we are involved in occupying vacant spaces in what we call ‘unpermitted’ way. We do not mention it in terms of illegality because for us the crime is to have vacant houses when there are homeless people. Weather is the owners, the city, the banks, they should not be keeping places off the market when there is people suffering, this should be criminalized. What we are pushing for is for the city to restate legal means by which people can work and renovate these houses, but now everything we do is in an unpermitted way.

Could you describe one process of squatting from finding the right place and other tactics you use? Organizing for Occupation (O4O) organizes different groups of people that take part in the process. First, you spot a vacant building, than you do a title search and find out the ownership of the building. You identify the potential target that you would have to relate to once you make your first move. In terms of research, you want to get as much anecdotal information from the street as possible. After you have all the necessary information, the crack team goes in to the house, in the morning or at night. The team makes an evaluation of the house, we put our own lock then they clean out the house. The construction of the space does not follow the traditional priority. Priority is to get people inside in a limited space for a limited period of time. Working in the same time, we have an intake team. The intake team finds potential people that need and have the ability to enter in this process, interview the people to match up with the right space and we find the best situation. We are not a development operation; we are organizing with and among homeless people. We get together with the people that are interested in that space and we work together with the idea that they will get in that house. We get electric and water basic from basement or friendly neighborhood or from the street. Basically, everything that a trained constructor knows how to do, we learn to do and when you learn how to construct, you can look at one house evaluate costs required and count the time needed to renew it. In NYC there is legal no right to squat unlike England where there was a way but there is particular tactic that we use: NYC thirty day law. If you can show you are residing in a place for 30 days or more through the receiver of mail than you have to be evicted by court. Once you have the mail going on for at least 30 days, it is harder to get evicted. They will go on but they will not evict you easily. That is why it is important to go about this way. The Court is not the end of the line. The other process is engaging and organizing in the neighbor for defensive capabilities if the owner shows up. Ideally, this happens simultaneously. An eviction watch group is created in the neighborhood, makes awareness and horizontally tasks are fulfilled. Over last five years, most of housing are owned by banks. It is important politicize the case, involving the media in a non-violent resistance that cost them money and negative publicity. We are interested in organizing a counter pressure and open a potential for negotiation. How long can you stay in a squatted house? No limit to how long a space can be squatted. We have been in these houses since the mid 80â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Until 2002, we were total illegal. There is no limit to how long one can stay in a house. And this is a neighbor that suffered gentrification. Orizontal organization. Build horizontal solidaritywith neighbors, keep the level of speculation down, their house can be potentially a target, this we need to explain to people. In the late 80s in lower east side down price some local newspapers attributed to squatters activity since developers do not want to deal with evicting people for time money reasons.

Which relations do you see between recent housing crisis and the past? The crises of homelessness is very present and politicized NY city leads the country in disparity. The separation between rich and poor is the biggest in time. Things demarcably went down in the last twenty years. In the seventy emergence of homelessness, have seen as a mean to displace people at the base in order to eliminate the potential of insurrection. People of color and students were seen as potential for revolution. Nowadays destabilization can be seen as form of control.

Over 10% 5 to 10% 2.5 to 5% Under 2.5% Insufficient data

New York Times Graphics Department analysis found that foreclosure rates in the region were highest in areas with high minority populations. The visualization highlights the neighborhoods most stricken by the housing crisis. Comparisons between 2005 and 2009 are indeed areas with high minority populations, including Bushwick in Brooklyn, Jamaica, Queens, and Newark, NJ.

2005

2006

2007

2008 31

The present of social movements

“A movement engenders expectations that is not able to fulfill” Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ann Barr Snitow, The Feminist Memoir Project The months during which the research in Sunset Park, approximately the first half of 2012, was developed corresponded to an intense moment of engagement for the civil society of New York City, brought to the light of the global scene by the public assemblies in Zuccotti square and proliferation of the Occupy declensions, as an effort to achieve specificity but also a strategy of visibility and empowerment. The Occupy Wall Street movement is the heir and the contemporary expression of a long tradition of social movements for civil rights in the United States. A tradition institutionally framed in the Sixties but actually part of a longer process, for some historians ( Dowd Hall, Cartosio )already in the Thirties beginning to crack the politeness of the established order and growing through differently successful paths, overlapping reclamations and testing strategies at least till the half of the Seventies. The true story of these movements is longer than the official version when relevance is given to the isolated gestures of minorities and single individuals, which could not be correctly interpreted if separated from a common background stratifying largely shared injustices and activation of groups in the framework of wider programs. Gestures thus revealing a vast underworld of passions but also of awareness and strategic forms of organizations. Gestures thus justifying the reframing of the official history. In 1956, supporting the first black citizens who performed a sit-in in a public place - non accessible to them - , there was a whole network of groups having the purpose and the strategies to multiply this gesture in the following days, prepared to deal with all the psychological and legal implications of the situation. Being aware of this past helps to cast a different light on the meaning and the reasons of strength or weakness not only of the contemporary movements but also of the growing number of organizations and community based groups which, in a market driven context such as the context of New York City, continue to claim for basic rights. Barak Obama in one of his speeches at the beginning of his presidential career realistically conveyed the attention on a number of different forms of exclusion and injustice still characterizing our society, dramatized and deepened by the economical “crisis” especially in highly speculative environments such as New York. But if Obama has been able to give that speech as President of the United States, having faced a female adversary, Hillary Clinton, it is probably necessary to acknowledge that something has changed through the years. Today, at least on a formal level Institutions are called to warrant justice and equality without distinctions of race, gender and religion. The efforts of the movements and of the civil 33

society have not been useless but still a good number of battles has to be won: despite its limits and the incoherencies that have been remarked on different levels (Mouffe, Marcuse) Occupy Wall Street, especially in the peak moments of its action, has shown that passions are still alive. Coagulating the interest of different parts of the society in some way OWS pushed on the stage the less glamorous battles daily sustained by common people and modest community based organizations. Within the perspective of this research, an important aspect of the action of OWS concerns the use of public space. Inscribing themselves in an ancient tradition that has in the agora one of the most renowned antecedents, the people participating to the public assemblies in Zuccotti Square recall to our minds one primordial right connected to the use of public spaces, the right of expression and the exercise of democracy. An obvious right to which corresponded the obvious reaction of the authorities of New York in 2012, inappropriately implying a political judgment in the character of their interventions, thus forgetting about their hypothetical institutional role, by definition: to protect democracy and its forms of expression for all the citizens. Especially given the complexities of our society, welfare should go far beyond the efficiency of sidewalks and the safety of parks: it should also give an answer to the growing claim for democracy in a society as diverse as the contemporary one, which exactly for its plurality cannot be framed in given schemes or given shapes, but requires a sort of infrastructural logic, acknowledging and providing the opportunities for the appropriation of the means and the specification of the rights as forms of political expression. The experiences of Zuccotti Square as well as the continuous multiplication of the community gardens suggest the pivotal role of public space in supporting the definition of rights. In this direction the role of Institutions and of the Planning departments - among others - is crucially questioned: together with citizens called to conceive the spatial infrastructure required for the achievement of the political. While New York City has on paper what seems to be a strong support for community-based planning, this commitment is less evident in reality. So for example it is important to recognize that if a map of Community based project has been realized (Angotti) more than an Institutional openness this registers the efforts of community based organizations motivated to intervene in the design and management processes concerning the space of their daily lives, the welfare space. Also the rezoning plan of Sunset Park is similarly resulting from the needs and the rights claimed by the local community through the voice of Sarah Gonzalez as member of the Community. These processes and their results if on one hand declare the latency Institutions, on the other hand encourage civil society to continue with their actions and strategies and to consider these margins of inefficiency as possibilities of democratic expression: margins that appeal for new forms of institutional responsibilization, shaped through bottom-up processes and logics emerging as urgencies in the everyday.

Map of the actions of the OWS mouvement and the Community based organizations in NYC metropolitan area. Sources: http:// occupywallst.org/ and http://google.com

COMMUNITY BASED ORGANIZATIONS AND ACTIONS OF OWS Actions of OWS 90

SPATIAL FRAMES OF LABOUR

Prelude: I have no time Transcalar conditions of labour: a dialectical approach From the assembly line to the desk Forms of visibility and invisibility of labour Welfare reclaimed: under the political

Prelude: I have no time.

M. lives in Sunset Park, at the third floor of building along the 4th avenue. She moved there some years ago, with her husband and children because she knew that in the neighborhood other Mexican citizens were living, as part of a friendlier environment for her daily activities: shops selling Mexican food, better schools, a small park where her children could play. M. arrived in New York at the beginning of the 90. As the great part of Mexican migrating women, she moved in the United States hoping to find a work as nanny or house keeper. Which was a likely perspective, given the growing tertiarization of the economy in New York, which among other things affected also the activities of the Port of Sunset Park. Because of the tertiarization a high number of women massively became part of the work system. But this did not imply a redistribution of domestic tasks between men and women: simply women were replaced by other women, being waged to take charge of the reproductive functions within the family. Thanks to the solidarity network that also helped her to arrive in New York City, M. became one of those domestic workers, for years living and working in the same house in the upper east side of Manhattan. She used to work from twelve to fourteen hours per day and at the end of her day she could rest in her room in the basement of the house. Her life was completely absorbed by her rhythm of work and by the space of that house. One day she finally found the courage to leave that safe work and salary and to face the risks related to her condition of illegal migrant in New York, looking for another job in Brooklyn where she finally met her husband and built her family. At that time M. had no time. But today she is determined to take care of her own family, as nobody else could help her â&#x20AC;&#x201C; not only her family is far, but at present it would be impossible for her to be back and visit them: being non documented this will determine her impossibility to go back in New York . Particularly involved in the school activities of her children and in promoting other educational programs for her neighborhood, she is also an active member of La Union, a community based organization of Mexican citizens operating on many different fronts, from educational activities to the start-up of entrepreneurial activities. La Union at present has no physical site, which means that meetings happen every time in a different location. This on one hand is a good pretext to involve new citizens and spread the voice; on the other hand, it is a problematic issue for those people - as M. â&#x20AC;&#x201C; with a busy schedule till the end of the day, without the possibility to count on the help of someone to prepare the dinner for her husband and look after the children. The model of Mexican families living in Sunset Park is still deeply based on traditional values. If La Union had its own place where organize meetings and activities, at least some spaces to entertain children could be organized by the community; some food could be provided thus encouraging a greater number of people to join the meetings at the end of their days. 39

A. SPATIAL CONDITIONS OF LABOUR

(in )

ge op oli tic

vis

ibi lit

an ds

yo f la bo ur

ia l

fra me wo rk

People that don’t have time: especially women, being female the majority of the members of this community based association. And in fact in New York City – as probably in many other cases around the world - an high number of associations is based on female initiative and participation. So, if despite the wide range of activities and the high number of enrolled people La Union is facing an issue of scarce participation – thus of scarce effectiveness -, this is due not only to a lack of trust in the potential role of the association - by an high number of people considered just as another institution, ineffective and sooner or later asking for money - but also to a lack of time. Time subtracted by distances to be crossed, by fragmented and flexible schedules, by the inefficiency or by the absence of spaces helping to condense efforts, to support solidarities, to create synergies. Given these premises then it is thus understandable the popularity of a small community garden, spontaneously occupied by some Mexican inhabitants of Sunset Park, also part of La Union, and successfully managed in the course of the years. Successfully because an abandoned space, perceived as unsafe and attracting drug trafficking and prostitution, was transformed in a cleaner site, a meaningful place not especially for the vegetables cultivated within its narrow perimeter , but because of the pretext offered to a small group of citizens to meet and share their stories, building collective awareness, reclaiming their time and their lives.

Transcalar conditions of labour: a dialectical approach. Labour is not simply a subject of research, an entry point to observe and describe the socio-spatial dynamics interesting Sunset Park. Because of labour the story of M. as the story of many other Mexican citizens in Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, in New York, in any part of the world is a story framed in between two scales: on one hand the geopolitical scale where her condition of “illegal”, migrant worker is defined, supported at the same time by silent cooptation and prohibition. On the other hand the scale where her daily life happens, the space of her relational constructions, where her gestures and biorhythms still register the consequences of that decision. M. migrated in the United States because of the promised work opportunities, in their turn determined by the changing economic paradigm in New York City and the consequent, parallel agreements with Mexico. Labour is an important part of our lives, not simply a means to bring home a salary, but a realm where everybody should be able to express interests and skills, a realm through which to individually contribute to the construction of society; a realm providing the occasions for personal growth. But work is also a tool of domination and exploitation, engendering inequalities and establishing the parameters of exclusion and inclusion. As realm including the conditions in which work is performed and the dispositifs through which it is engineered – from the workspace to the forms of contract – labour is part of the modes of production. As part of these and in relation to labour, space has a crucial role being a primary factor to optimize the exploitation of resources: raw materials, workforce, strategic positioning. Space organizes on one hand the platforms of production, on the other hand the reproduction of labour force. Implying the interrelation between these two different spatial realms, labour thus gives the possibility to explore them singularly and to highlight their interdependency, as complementary parts of the modes of production. In order to observe the different 41

spatial domains of labour it becomes essential a continuous transcalar movement, from a daily environment to the transnational level at which this has been predisposed. A dialectical approach seems to be suitable to navigate among the different levels: the research has thus been developed through a questioning process that in the end proved to be useful to consider and to correlate all the themes necessarily touched by the research. Within this perspective the socio-spatial and economic dynamics interesting Sunset Park have been framed in the context of the transformations happening in New York during the years of the economic shift from Fordism to post Fordism. The diagrams presented in the following pages, Geopolitical and Social framework and (In)visibility of Labour, have been used in order to organize, to represent and to elaborate the knowledge developed in the course of the research, concerning many different levels affected by the mentioned change in the modalities of production. The diagrams can be conceived as layers (containing further sub layers ) within a larger scheme concerning the evolution of the conditions of labour, which makes visible parallel and interconnected transformations, occurring both at a material and immaterial level, from the scale of the workplaces to the scale of global dynamics of power. I will briefly try to render the specific and general relevance of their contents and to introduce the transdisciplinary, unifying perspective required for their reading. The diagram Geopolitical and Social framework through different strata describes the strategies organized at the geopolitical scale where global cities and corporations - more than States - decide about their economic future together with the future of other cooperating/supporting territories. In the reorganization of space these actors have a crucial realm of their strategies, as shown by dynamics of delocalized and fragmented production, questioning and pushing to redesign relevant areas of the contemporary city. At a microscale, neoliberal policies and postfordist forms of production produce a fragmented space, supporting and requiring overspecialization and flexibility, engendering risk tolerating mindsets, fueling a society of control based on fear and insecurity. The diagram highlights how the fragmentation of the space of production affects the possibility of the workers to organize and to reclaim their rights : the weakening of the representative power of Unions is clearly the consequence of lack of commonalities and motivations going in parallel with the exaltation of free lance formulas and the attitude to flexibility. A crucial layer â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the second diagram - is thus needed to describe the shift from visibility to invisibility. The increasing condition of invisibility is fueled by precarity and is fundamental to understand the shift from fordism to post fordism as a technology of hegemonic1 power ( Mouffe ). Precarious workers implement previously existing categories of invisible workers: invisible in the sense of non recognized workers, lacking of rights and (syndical) representation. In the Fordist conditions of labour, workers could at least share the same spatial framework, engendering relations and awareness, within given schedules programming work and time for rest. 1 Hegemony is a class alliance by means of which one, leading [hegemonic] class assumes a position of leadership

society as a whole. In 1985, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, reactivated discussion of hegemony with their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in which they used semiological and structural-linguistic ideas to introduce the idea of hegemony as a system of concepts which recognises the social functions of different strata while stitching all concepts into a more or less closed system, capable of regulating social life while making any â&#x20AC;&#x153;outsideâ&#x20AC;? impossible to talk

however, the concept of hegemony is in fact quite consistent with the concepts of class and class struggle, even in the expanded meaning given to it by Laclau and Mouffe.

Within the realm of immaterial work and post fordism, more and more divided, non represented by the traditional forms of Unionism, unable to organize because of the lack of time and the spatial conditions, workers are being slowly dispossessed of their lives. Putting in relation the two diagrams, an effort is done to render at the same time the chronological evolution and the transcalar relations among - in some cases - apparently independent phenomena. As mentioned, the dialectical approach has guided and pushed the research through many different strata, reconstructing the connections and the parallel evolutions, mostly showing the relevance of space as a realm for top-down policies and geopolitical strategies to materialize and to intersect. Throughout the research the questions pointing at the relation between labour and space will thus concern the role of space in order to organize and to engender awareness: spaces to reclaim the political and what will be defined as bio-authoriality. Consequently, the role of architects and urban planners will be concerned, as actors contributing to activate the mentioned processes and to support their development. In the following chapters I will go through a more detailed description of the dynamics depicted in the different layers, specifying them within the framework of New York City and Sunset Park.

From the assembly line to the desk It is not possible to fully understand the life conditions of a Mexican non documented citizen working in New York without tracing the map of geopolitical reasons and the spatial related transformations regulating the status of its citizenship and the daily rhythms of his life, conditioning the range of rights and opportunities. Applying a dialectical approach, the narratives of the interviews collected among the inhabitants of Sunset Park pushed the research to reconstruct the overall scheme of socio spatial dynamics of production, in particular following the changes occurred in the passage from Fordist to post-Fordist conditions of production and the parallel reinforcement if neoliberal policies. The period of time considered begins with the late Fifties - Sixties and ends with the past decade. The shift from Fordism to post Fordism or better, the crisis of the traditional modes of production, becomes relevant and its consequences undeniable at the beginning of the Seventies. The progressive delocalization of production in order to reduce costs at the same time fueling consumption affected also the economy of New York City, where a growing number of sheds and factories progressively became vacant, in a high number of the cases fueling various forms of real estate speculation. Soho and Brooklyn have been particularly interested by these dynamics: the old red brick buildings are today part of a precious architectural inheritance, increasingly at the center of urban renovation and gentrifying interventions. Some episodes can also be observed in areas delimiting Sunset Park at North, as for example Slope Park. Specifically the economic relevance of the Port Area of Sunset Park started to decline with the end of the Second World War, with the interruption of the military activities and the rise of truck-based freight shipping and the functioning of new docks in New Jersey. Part of the manufacturing activities was displaced in Mexico, where the number of maquilladoras â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the platforms of industrial production â&#x20AC;&#x201C; started to grow along the frontier. Relevant movements of internal migrations were determined in between the Seventies and Eighties by the progressive decay of area â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to which notably contributed the construction of the Gowanus

A1.GEOPOLITICAL AND SOCIAL FRAMEWORK Fordism 1960

1970

1980

crisis of welfare need to open markets

1973 Oil crisis

1964 Coup in Brazil 1964 end of Bracero Program

1973 Coup in Chile

rapid expansion of maquiladoras

1990

technological / production evolution web DELOCALISATION high terziarization speed lower development costs of production 1979 Energy crisis

1982 USA bails out Mexico from bank crisis

1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act

1975, Martha Rosler. The Semiotics of the kitchen

1935 National labour relational act

increasing wages, decreasing profits

Feminization of work

expansion of social right movements/organization 1954 Unions first peak adherents 44

1955 AFL–CIO

1979 Unions’ second peak adherents 21 milions

Post-Fordism 2000

1990

Exclusive dispossession / accumulation 1995-2000 Dotcom bubble Structural change and Development of Neoliberalism

1990 oil crises

Gulf war

hi gh rates of unemployment, 13%, the double than the national

economical peaks of crisis 1994 NAFTA 47% increased maquiladoras

Mexican immigrants account for about 20% estimated 9.3 million of the legal immigrants undocumented living in the USA immigrants in the United States as of March 2002

political peaks of crisis

Mexico - USA

reduced municipal revenues

1995 Giuliani Welfare and workfare reform New York

NO PROFIT strong development

increasing demand domestic work

labor policies

1992 5 in USA

-30% enrolled members in the Unions

organizing labor

2010 160 in USA

Increasing number of workers centers

VACANCY

The M1 district is often a buffer between M2 or M3 districts and adjacent residential or commercial districts. Light industries typically found in M1 areas include woodworking shops, auto storage and repair shops, and wholesale service and storage facilities. In theory, nearly all industrial uses can locate in M1 areas if they meet the more stringent M1 performance standards. Offices and most retail uses are also permitted. Certain community facilities, such as hospitals, are allowed in M1 districts only by special permit, but houses of worship are allowed as-of-right. In M1 districts space in an industrial building can often be converted to dwelling units, provided a specified amount of floor area is preserved for particular industrial and commercial uses. In M1-5A and M1-5B districts mapped in SoHo/NoHo for example artists may occupy joint living-work quarters as an industrial use in loft buildings.

vacant industrial buildings vacant lots vacant buildings

Expressway in 19411 . Citizens of European origin, having been living in Sunset Park for generations, started to abandon the neighborhood ( white flight ) moved by fear and feelings of mistrust generated by the changing composition of the population; Chinese waves of migrants intensified only after 1997, with the end of the Hong Kong’s status as a British colony, while Mexicans started to increase their presence around the end of the Eighties, attracted in this part of the city by the cheaper costs of housing and living and by the opportunities of work, even if illegal or low-waged, mainly in the construction and services sectors. While in the previous decades the activities related to the Port Area provided work and means of support to a great number of migrating individuals, at the beginning of the Eighties the economy of New York was overridingly tertiary: New York has been one of the first cities in the world to face this epochal change, experimenting some new technologies of labour management and strategies of consumption. The crisis of unemployment determined by post-Fordism was balanced by the explosion of an actually not new need: care related and domestic works. A new generation of careers requiring flexibility, communicational and organizational skills, elegant presence and a basic expertise concerning ICT opened the doors to a massive number of female – mainly American – workers: who suddenly had no more time to take care of their children, husband or partner and house. As it has been remarked (Morini, Cartosio), this did not provide the occasion to redistribute traditionally female duties and responsibilities among new members of society. Simply, waged women under the regime of services were now in the position to buy their reproductive role, hiring other women, in their turn having to rely on networks of solidarity and kinship for the care of their family and house, nevertheless working up to twelve hours per day to fulfill the expectations of flexibility. In the mean time, on the background and at a geopolitical scale, the United States bargained the continuous multiplication of maquiladoras on one hand providing their help in the Mexican bank crisis; on the other hand granting amnesty to three million of illegally migrated citizens2 , required in the United States to support the tertiarization of the big cities. Through the decades here observed, precarization of work increased enormously, for several reasons every time rooted in a particular set of circumstances: in order to support the growing tertiarization and as an effect of this in the Eighties; to absorb unemployment in parallel containing the human resources’ costs of the administrative machine in the Nineties. The reform of welfare and the massive development of workfare initiated by Giuliani in 1995 perversely used the formula of voluntary work to cover with non waged work a high number of administrative tasks: Workfare is the practice of requiring recipients of public aid to work for their benefits…[ Under Giuliani’s administration in 1995] the expansion took WEP [ Work Experience Program ] from being a program requiring under 10,000 welfare recipients to work, actively look for work, or to be enrolled in education and training

1 Sunset Park residents maintained a close relationship with their waterfront throughout the Thirties –largely thanks to jobs in industry, warehousing, shipping and freight operations but also through ferry services. This changed in 1941, with construction of the Gowanus Parkway on the pillars of the old BMT line above Third Avenue. The Parkway, which was considerably wider than the elevated train structure and bore a continuous flow of vehicular traffic, increased the amount of shadow, noise and air pollution along Third Avenue, directly contributing to the decline of this vibrant retail district, dividing the neighborhood into east and west, severing the community from its industrial roots and from the waterfront upon which it was founded. Source: Sunset Park 197-a Plan 2 The Immigration Reform and Control Act , defined in 1986

A2. (IN)VISIBILITY OF LABOUR

Fordism

gen t ri fic

ati on

empty factories are opportunities for real estate speculation. Soho and Brooklyn exemplify these ization processes. delocal

Maquiladoras in Tijuana, along the frontier with United States

Enterprises combine local advanced specialization, externalized production and head quarters in the city centers

unemployed

f ra gm ent atio n of ms for

Head quarters of the enterprises move in the core business districts or engender new centralities. The surrounding space is organized according to the paradigm of the societyy of services.

ization organ

ates United St

W Workers shared the same workplace daily, thus having the w possibility to organize in order to p reclaim their rights. In 1979 the number of members enrolled in the Unions reached tthe peak of 21 milions.

Residential street in Sunset Park, mixing row houses and small sheds

geopolitical scale transformations in the space of the city labour force

visibility 48

Mexic o

post Fordism

for the workers of maquiladoras wages are so low that they cannot pay for their own car. Transport is organized by bus

low cost workforce

inv isi ble

y waves migrator

Labour is defined at a geopolitical level, where powerful economical actors determine favourable strategies of production, tics and institutional national politics policies.

wo rk

fem ale

wo rk

churches

Feminization of work has increased the number of invisible / non represented workers. The places where their condition becomes visible and activation becomes possible belong the realm of the reproductive city, often spaces managed within the institutional welfare.

precarious work

invisible workers

functio care work, dom estic work: waged reproductive

courtyards, community gardens, sport fields

parks

ns The new Worker C Centers are hybrids, combining elements of differe different types of organizations. Some features are suggestive sugges of earlier U.S. social movements, civic institutions aand unions. Other features are suggestive su ugg g estive of the ccivic traditions of the home countries from which many of these immigrants came.

invisibility

programs, to being one requiring nearly 40,000 welfare recipients to perform work for City agencies and contracted nonprofit agencies. At first, only recipients of New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s program for single adults were required to work in exchange for their benefits. Since 1996, mothers of children have been compelled into workfare assignments as well, causing serious obstacles for them in a city with acutely inadequate childcare provision. ( Krinsky, 1998 ) Not only workfare did not improve the conditions of the welfare recipients: it worsened the general conditions of the workers increasing precarity and diminishing their professionalism, thus making them more vulnerable in the labour market and non defendable by the traditional forms of Unionism. I will return on this issue in a few lines. The word feminization is often used in order to describe these transformations of the labour conditions, interesting many levels and occurring in parallel with the unfolding of other non spatial and spatial neoliberal policies (Sassen). The word describes more than the transformations of the modalities of work in itself: it implies some relevant connotations, meaningfully concerning the history of labour and the history of the related social movements. The term does not simply refer to the increasing amount of female workers: it highlights the institutionalization of some conditions of the work traditionally done by women and systematically engineered by precarization. Flexibility and sense of adaptation to other peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s schedules and continuously changing conditions; communicational skills; emotional approach and investment in the execution of the work, in particular in the Nineties 3; ability to combine and perform a number of different tasks and even different jobs - often implying overspecialization and fragmentation: all these can be considered as requirements highly sought by headhunters, notoriously depicted as advantaging qualities on any curriculum vitae. In the framework of this research It is not possible to deeply deal with the etymological reasons of this term, nor to trace a larger framework of its sociological and spatial implications: I will simply quote Morini for a more precise definition, while for a broader treatment the reader should refer to the final bibliography. [ feminization of work can be defined as] a restructuring of work that appropriates a number of characteristics in the past normally associated with typically female work, performed only by women. Work is redefined as literally feminine or feminized, independently from the fact that are men or women doing it. Being feminized means being in a condition of extreme vulnerability. It means to be disassembled and ri-assembled, exploited as spare workforce, being considered more as slaves than as labourers, working without consideration about time schedules, being waged and unwaged.

Industrial landscape in Sunset Park.

Fulfilling unique combinations of skills and availability, fitting in unique conditions of labour more and more workers were and are being conveniently pushed towards unsecured and unprotected freelance careers, becoming managers of their risks, misunderstanding isolation as autonomy, often deprived of solidarities, non representable by traditional Unionism. On the foreground, where the processes of construction of our society unfold, this logic currently fuels a growing defection towards public welfare structures.

3 Morini again: As in the case of care work, the injection of an emotional element has enabled bio-capitalism to gradually transform the knowledge work towards an increasing gratuity. The pleasure and love for the work done thanks to mental and relational skills make difficult to neatly separate work and life, while making acceptable the gratuitous dimension of work.

Concerning space, as already mentioned, the shift from the assembly line to the desk, from the shed to the domestic walls - which very often also provide the space of work - is only a part of the story: in the name of flexibility and efficiency high speed means of transport are increasingly crossing the skies and the earthly geographies. But most importantly, together with the lack of common reasons of struggle – given the above mentioned vocation to specialization, putting into question the existence of a workers’ class - the lack of a Common space, a shared physical space to build resistance and to organize, has been paid in terms of a weakened unionism, defected because unable to represent categories of workers, to begin with given impossibility to identify those categories4. A process which is still in course and which is finally questioning the sense of any universalistic approach, both in the realm of welfare and in the realm of unionism. At the beginning of the Eighties the amount of people enrolled in Unions decreased of a 30% compared to the peaks moments reached in 1954 and 1979. In parallel, a new generation of organizations started to develop: the worker centers. Next chapter will deal with the shift from visibility to invisibility characterizing the conditions of labour: a shift to which the fragmented space of post- Fordist production enormously contributed.

Forms of visibility and invisibility of labour. Precarity is this form of exploitation which, by operating only on the present, exploits simultaneously also the future. (Papadopoulos, Tsianos ) The space of the city gives the possibility to directly observe the consequences of a delocalized production: along canals or concentrated in the areas best served by disused infrastructural systems – waterways and railways – a growing number of sheds is becoming vacant, providing a crucial potential on one hand to be reclaimed by citizens for new housing or new public spaces; on the other hand by different forms speculative dynamics. Something similar has been observed through the years also in Sunset Park, whose fortunes, since its beginnings , have been strictly related to the activities organized in the port area. As previously described, the containerization and the organization of the new docks around determined the progressive collapse of its activities, thus affecting the lives of the families installed there for the cheapness of life and the proximity of work places. 4 In a recent interview, a community organizer in New York City spoke of his group’s efforts to organize workfare workers in the city’s Work Experience Program (WEP): “All of us came to the conclusion that WEP organizing was very difficult, that it was substantially harder than we’d originally expected-for a lot of reasons: primarily that WEP workers aren’t really workers, and they know it, and they don’t want to put energy into improving their conditions on the job, because it ain’t a job. They don’t want to be there ... It’s important to organize them as a worker, that’s the strength, but, basically, the problem is that the lowest-paid service worker wants to organize to get better conditions and get better pay. The WEP worker doesn’t want to organize around job issues because they want a real job, and that’s the fundamental thing; they want a real job and they know that WEP is not a job. So the key political strength of WEP organizing is as workers, but at the same time it’s a strength, it’s a drawback, because WEP workers don’t identify themselves-they don’t have firm identity of themselves as workers. And so it’s a very long process, to get them to identify themselves as workers, and then to organize them as workers. It adds a couple more steps to the organizing.” ( Krinsky, 1998 )

Despite the different efforts made to revitalize the area – as the conversion and rehabilitation of the building of the American Machine and Foundry by The Lutheran Medical Center in 1972-1977, the area never regained the same level of productivity and vibrancy. Today precisely the noisy presence of the Gowanus protects the area from a spreading gentrification, which is already interesting some nearby areas as Slope Park.5, slowly beginning to occupy some of the empty sheds along the waterfront, low cost rented by Jewish developers for the startup of artists’ studios, clubs and small workshops; as well in the sudden appearing of high rise hotels along the waterfront. The visibility of labour – and the progressive shift to invisibility - concerns more evidently the level of the spatial transformations above described, thus stressing the undeniable relation between the way in which productivity is engineered and the way in which the physical space is consequently organized. 6 But probably, most importantly, visibility or invisibility concern and end up at the level of the daily, physical dimension in which work is performed. In the fordist conditions of production workers daily shared the same space during defined time schedules , thus having the possibility to build solidarities, engender form of commonality, organize resistance inside and outside the space of production. In other words, having the possibility to be visible. The delocalization and the forms of flexibility implied in the shift to the post fordist conditions of production define and are defined by a spatial fragmentation whose workability is supported by technological advancements concerning ITC. This fragmentation is installed as part and as cause of a regime of precarity, and is the necessary condition of invisibility. Even if globalization could be considered as a condition able to stimulate the emergence of new forms of commons – based on intellectual resources and creativity -, able to overcome dividing categorizations and to promote the aggregation of the multitude ( Negri ), it is undeniable the loss of power of syndical organizations and unions starting from the Seventies, happened in parallel with the progressive dismantling of the fordist conditions of production, as described in the sociospatial conditions of labour. Invisibility is a consequence and a form of precarization and flexibilization and engenders lack of representativeness in the realm of worker’s claims: how could it be possible to claim for rights when contracts are inexistent or project based or temporary? Which rights are we talking about, when lacking stable positions, workers accept any form of regulation, unbearable amounts of hours, low wages fearing to be replaced by the thousands of individuals obliged to the same feeling of insecurity and risk? Because work – in order to become productive – becomes incorporated into non-labour time, the exploitation of workforce happens beyond the boundaries of work, it is distributed across the whole time and space of life (Neilson & Rossiter, 2005). Precarity means exploiting the continuum of everyday life, not simply the workforce. In this sense, precarity is a form of exploitation which operates primarily on the level of time. This because it changes the meaning of what non productivity is. The regulation of labour in Fordism was secured in an anticipative way independently of its immediate productivity. The protectionist function of the welfare system is 5 Symptoms about the growing interest of the City towards this area of Brooklyn have to be captured in rare spots of activities and organizations belonging to the realm of creative industries ( Source: Brooklyn Arts Council ) 6 The shift to post Fordism is based on organizational new needs deriving from the need to manage far away located assembly lines, cheaper because of the low wages of the workers concerned. So the assembly line has not actually disappeared: it simply has been moved in less developed countries.

The embodied experience of precarity

The embodied experience of precarity is characterized by:

vulnerability: the steadily experience of flexibility without any form of protection; hyperactivity: the imperative to accommodate constant availability; simultaneity: the ability to handle at the same the different tempi and velocities of multiple activities; recombination: the crossings between various networks, social spaces, and available resources; postsexuality: the other as dildo; fluid intimacies: the bodily production of indeterminate gender relations; restlessness: being exposed to and trying to cope with the overabundance of communication, cooperation and interactivity; unsettledness: the continuous experience of mobility across different spaces and time lines; affective exhaustion: emotional exploitation, or, emotion as an important element for the control of employability and multiple dependencies; cunning: able to be deceitful, persistent, opportunistic, a trickster.

( Papadopoulos, Tsianos )

a time management: it works by anticipating and securing the periods when someone becomes non-productive (accident and illness, unemployment, age). In post-Fordism this form of time management disappears. Not so only because future is not guaranteed, but also because the future is already appropriated in the present. From the standpoint of the labourer, work takes place in the present, which is, though, incorporated into his or her whole lifespan as a worker. (Papadopoulos, Tsianos) It is relevant to highlight that precarious work incredibly expands the condition of invisibility to an high number of workers, historically already including domestic workers – especially but not exclusively, that of housewives - care work, illegal work and day labour. Transversal to these – and to visible categories as well – is the immaterial labour, by definition universal and invisible, non representable because continuously performed and indistinguishable from the great majority of activities, waged and non waged, from work to any consumption related activity. In order to enter the complexities of this realm, a more supporting sociopolitical background would be required: thus unfortunately this research does not provide the circumstances. Coming back to space, the places where work is performed are thus more and more fragmented and isolating, also in consideration of the development of information and communication technologies, supporting the exchange of data elaborated miles away and replacing physical presence with images and video communication. Despite these conditions, other spaces continue to be available, the spaces where people move and perform other actions, far from their productive routines and more related to their reproductive life. Spaces of care – self care and care of the others -, spaces of comfort, spaces where the forms of daily life are negotiated or simply collide. Spaces hacking the regime of isolation and invisibility. Part of the research has been devoted to identify those spaces in which the condition of invisibility of some workers is weakened by a temporary visibility. Spaces in which unexpectedly people meet in the course of their daily routines and out of their isolation they build relationships, they exchange knowledge, they build awareness. Laundries, parks, churches, public spaces, the courtyard of a school or of a kindergarten, community gardens, sport fields, etc provide precious occasions of encounter for an high number of people segregated by their labour routines. Spaces where very often, based on the grouping of individuals having similar needs, initiatives and actions could suddenly begin to bloom, giving voice and political presence to citizens not regularly documented or non representable for a number of other reasons. Spaces in which everybody represents specific interests and building consensus is not even an imaginable project. Some of these spaces are part of that realm normally regulated by welfare policies, hypothetical spaces of comfort, neurotically based on schemes of compulsory consumption and conceived as devices for healthcare, promoting education but often according to income based logics of exclusion. The latency of institutions – whether premeditated or not – opens a wide realm of research and critical reflection, questioning the ways in which inhabitants appeal to institutions, their role and a possible redefinition of welfare beyond the long time prevailing universalistic schemes.

Welfare reclaimed: under the political When we accept that every identity is relational and that the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determination of an ‘other’ that is going to play the role of a ‘constitutive outside’, it is possible to understand how antagonisms arise. In the domain of collective identifications, where what is in question is the creation of a ‘we’ by the delimitation of a ‘them’, the possibility always exists that this we/them relation will turn into a relation of the friend/enemy type; in other words, it can always become political in Schmitt’s understanding of the term […] The political cannot be restricted to a certain type of institution, or envisaged as constituting a specific sphere or level of society. It must be conceived as a dimension that is inherent to every human society and that determines our very ontological condition […] Once we accept the necessity of the political and the impossibility of world without antagonism, what needs to be envisaged is how it is possible under those conditions to create or maintain a pluralistic democratic order. Such an order is based on a distinction between ‘enemy’ and ‘adversary7. It requires that, within the context of the political community, the opponent should be considered not as an enemy to be destroyed, but as an adversary whose existence is legitimate and must be tolerated. We will fight against his ideas but we will not question his right to defend them. ( Mouffe, The Return of the Political )

Flexibility and mythologies about iper-efficient performances are often the choice workers opt for in a society controlled by fear and risk to escape poverty and exclusion. Often not being aware that the more flexible they accept to be, the more interchangeable and professionally weak they become. Individual awareness about this state of things would be thus the first condition to create resistance and begin to change the modus operandi1. As mentioned, the new generation of workers centers is orienting its action more and more in this direction. In their most meaningful and orthodox spirit, still expanding, worker centers operate on a more transversal level, most importantly with their action trying to develop individual and collective awareness, empowering personal initiative and increasing technical knowledge concerning rights and duties, developing tools to improve the workers professional profile , thus reducing the margins of their interchangeability ( Fine ). Promoting flexibility, the ultimate effect and result of neoliberal policies - of which labour condition are expression at geopolitical and local scale – is the dispossession of time. Time subtracted to personal growth, to (self) care, to the construction of society, to the relational exchange that produces individual and political awareness, to the organization of new forms of resistance. Because of the post Fordist modes of production, space contributes not only in terms of physical segregation, but also in terms of distances taking time to be crossed, multiplied by our flexible schedules: again, time subtracted to the core needs of our lives.

1 Concerning this, as proposed by Castells ( 2012 ), the real, most important and unifying contribution of contemporary movements claiming for a wide range of different rights – from Occupy Wall Street to the students of the Arab Spring – is the mental change triggered globally by the different actions, independently from their specific and immediate achievements.

And if it is true that thanks to technological advancements different forms of communication can overcome geographical barriers and support new networks of solidarity ( Negri, Castells ), still space as physical dimension is relevant and needed. What it is possible to observe above all is that people meet and build trust in the physical spaces of their everyday routine: more and more not coinciding with workplaces. Out of the domestic environments nannies meet the nannies in parks and in the courtyards of the schools; students meet freelance workers in laundries and restaurants; community gardens attract very diverse inhabitants having in common the need to reclaim their time and share their stories. We need to reclaim space in order to reclaim time: both time and space provide the necessary conditions for people to express themselves as individuals and politically, giving shape and specifying their claims, as the right to the city must be specified ( Mouffe, Marcuse ) in order to be acquired. The spaces above mentioned are the spaces of the reproductive city, regulated by the policies of welfare which can be seen as a bridge between the strategies of growth of a given territorial and economic system on one hand and human lives as part of modes of production on the other hand. Designed to produce comfort but also working as part of controlling technologies, at the same time these spaces provide the environment in which, reacting to injustice, according to patterns of resilience or resistance, relationships and different forms of reciprocity organize, often as alternative practices for the citizens excluded by the politics of welfare.

Vacant areas along the waterfront

Consequently, in these spaces it is often possible to observe the multiple forms in which well being – which cannot effectively fulfill a variety of needs when conceived in general terms, but must be specified according to given exigencies - is redefined: spaces as in-between margins where policies of welfare and the spontaneous practices based on forms of solidarity collide; spaces in which the inefficacy and latencies of the former explain the opportunities for action provided to or reclaimed by the latter; spaces that crucially allow conflict, negotiation, cohabitation, requiring the activation of citizens and thus empowering their political role, as an alternative to less relevant forms of participation and delegation. Thus, from the reading of the microcosms in which policies of welfare are redefined or contested, within a bottom-up perspective, it will be interesting to reshape institutional welfare in infrastructural terms, reconceiving the realms and the scales of intervention. An infrastructure to be defined and completed at those levels where the diversity of citizens and the needs of their bodies determine requisites of comfort and guide towards the possible means to satisfy them: resulting from the specificity of urban micro-ecologies that just a couple of blocks away it would be almost impossible to seize. But at the same time an infrastructure able to assure forms of distributive justice, taking care of those citizens that for some reason - for choice of for necessity – are excluded by the domains of social construction and political expression. Perhaps a relevant work of imagination will be required to transform a system of welfare conceiving it as a common good, substituting forms of regulation of accessibility with infrastructural frames; designing spaces as a sort of listening devices, where people meet and discuss, act materializing the conditions and the tools for their well being, on the basis of individual balances, between the need of independence and the need to share. I use the word imagination to evoke the kind of power necessary to overcome fixed formulas and the ideological schemes according to which we create expectations concerning ‘who has to do what’, making us predictable for neoliberal strategies voracious of any alternative expressing resistance.

FRAGMENTING PATTERNS OF PROPERTY Housing as a right Living models and social fragmentation Ownership and shrinking of the ‘Public’ Alternative spatial patterns of sociability

CD 07 300

NYC

250 200 150 100 50 0

1974

1980

1990

2000

2011

Housing prices for 2-4 family appreciated faster between 2010 and 2011 than in any other community district in New York City except for one. While prices for this property type decline in the city as a whole, have increased and are at an all-time high.

Due high rates of undocumented citizens living and working in Sunset Park, informal rental conditiond characterize housing market whitin Asian and Latin community.

Rows of two-three floors family houses characterize Sunset Park urban area.

House as a right What is a house? A house can be defined as a place where people gather together, find shelter and where sociability is produced, it is the foundation of people’s lives. It fulfills personal needs by providing a sense of personal space, privacy and in many societies it also fulfill economic needs. A house contains, within its very constitution, the premise that living together in equality and security is a right to be afforded by all members of a democratic society. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living and as a basic human right1. The access to adequate housing is the right of everyone to acquire and sustain a secure home and community in which to live. The fact of shelter as a human need does not imply that governments must provide each one of their citizens with a house but it rise the question on what governments should do to help people exercise their rights and obtain housing. Citizens should be able to achieve the satisfaction of their rights and have the means for the achievement of a satisfactory standard of living. Scholars and professionals often oppose the right to good standards of living to homelessness conditions and poor quality of living. The United Nations estimates that there are over 100 million homeless people and over 1 billion people worldwide inadequately housed. In New York City today, there are almost 40,000 individuals living in homeless shelters, including up to 10,000 whole families and children. During the last four years the number of homeless in New York is doubled, due foreclosure related to sub-prime mortgage and loans. Over 500,000 households are paying more than 50% of their incomes for housing, saving less for clothing, food, care and other basic need, at the same time thousands of units of housing are kept off the market for speculative and profit purpose. The basic contradiction in our cities is that what is the foundation of people’s lives, their home, is also the source of business profit for the real estate industry and the primary form of accumulating assets for people themselves. While there is a shortage of affordable housing, people suffering and worsening of quality of living in low income neighborhoods, there are thousands of units of housing which are kept off the market in excess of several months or years, often as results of speculation by owners and developers that adopt profit strategies2. 1 UDHR states that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control” 2 For more details see Picture the homeless ‘Banking on vacancy. Homelessness and real estate speculation‘ and The right to the city alliance ‘People without homes and homes without people: A count of vacant condos in select NYC neighborhoods’.

Middle-class

Prospect Park

Green-Wood Cemetery

Sunset Park

Brooklyn Army terminal

Chinese community

Full dmolition 2010-2012 Partial alteration 2010-2012 New building 2010-2012

Latin community

High property value Vision Plan Administrative Boundary Re-zooning Plan 0

500

1000

2000 m

During the driving group with La Union we test the incidence of rents on family income within community members providing the diagram. All members spend at least more than 30% and more than half almost 50% for house rent confirming City’s statistics.

Yearly Income extremely low income

very lowincome 20k

30K Asian MFI in Sunset Park

$500

36K

moderate income

lowincome 40k

60k

Latino MFI n Sunset Park

$1,000

$1,500

76.8K80k

Median Family Income Metro NY Area

$2,000

30% of Monthly Income = Affordable Rent

Affordable housing prices compared with median family income

Such ‘legal’ practices are are unjust, lead to social-economical disparities and should not be allowed. Picture the Homeless a local organization, founded and lead by homeless people living in shelters, produced together with Hunter College a document on the availability of vacant building in New York. The count have been done by members together with students and volunteers, the document report that in one third of the city there are enough vacant buildings to house three times the number of homeless people in New York. Also in Sunset Park, a neighborhood which more than 30% of inhabitants spending about half of their income for rents, we documented during the fieldwork, that keeping property vacant is a common praxis. Owners tend to keep their properties empty waiting for the good moment to invest and develop or sell it. High commercial profit push owners to use mixed residential and commercial buildings only for commercial purpose allocating the facade for advertisements. A second common praxis besides windows billboard is the removal at ground floor of the stairs to allow the maximum capacity of the display that affect commercial rents. Along the 5th Ave between 45th and 55th street, we have counted and mapped vacancy above the shops in more than 40 commercial building. Several thousands square meter of residential buildings are are left in state of abandonment and kept empty. In proximity of the Gowanos Highway between 50th and 60th street several lots are vacant, left in a state of neglect but heavily fenced to avoid the entrance to visitors. Owners are waiting to develop their land in a neighborhood inhabited mainly by low-income groups, where housing is generally not affordable and there is a great need of public space this practices push housing far from the possibility of several low-income families. Housing prices for 2-4 family properties appreciated faster between 2010 and 2012 than in any other community district in New York City except for one, while prices for this property type declined in the city as a whole, they increased by 26 percent in the area and are at an all-time high. Latin community that don’t tend to own the apartment where their live, risk to be displaced and forced to move to New Jersey where they find better rent conditions extending the already long time of commuting to workplace. With the dismantling of military port and industrial activities the waterfront become an occasion for investments and development. The Waterfront Redevelopment Project, part of Major Bloomberg strategy to redevelop the city, if on one hand it claim to provide better condition of living and work possibilities on the other risk to foster process of gentrification. increasing property value and fostering the already unaffordable housing condition. According Jeremy Laufer District manager of Community Board 7 ‘the waterfront redevelopment project will speed up property value and it will result in a huge job losses for local residents3. Described as the capital of real estate4 housing prices and rents have risen significantly in recent years, pushing access to housing in New York out of reach for most families . Housing affordability is becoming 3 Notes from an interview with Jeremy Laufer District Manager Community Board 7 in NY on 15.03.2012. 4 Angotti T., 2008 New york for sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, published by M.I.T. Press, MA

vacant building interstitial space vacant lots mixed buiding residential building

oversized billboard

interstitial space 45

potential element

landlord - owner

tenants - owner oversized bill board

closed windows

stairs removed tenants

need of good living conditions

shop owner need of display surface

closed window

an increasingly urgent concern in the city as whole and low-income neighborhoods are facing a serious housing shortage. Over the last ten years, New York City has lost over 200,000 units of housing that were affordable to low and moderate-income families. In the same period, the city has seen a large increase in the number of luxury condominiums being developed in low-income communities. This construction has often occurred despite the objection of local residents who fear new development will gentrify working class neighborhoods with the risk of displace low income groups. Moreover market also jeopardizes the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s large stock of subsidized housing, as owners are tempted to convert to market-rate status when affordability agreements and subsidies expire. As one of New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods, Sunset Park is once

professionals and artists who can no longer afford neighboring Park Slope are settling in once dilapidated areas near Greenwood Cemetery and pushing the geographic boundaries of new neighborhood formations into the northern sections of Sunset Park. A second gentrifying force is mobilized by an immigrant growth coalition comprised of Chinese developers, realtors and ethnic banks in the development of condominium projects scattered throughout the neighborhood. The working poor Latin community who did not abandon the neighborhood and the immigrant groups who helped revitalize its local economy are increasingly at risk of displacement.

empty floor area

max display surface

Living models and social fragmentation

entrance removal shop entrance

closed window closed window closed entrance

empty apt empty apt shop storage in basement

closed window closed window max display surface

Sunset Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social diversity and building typology results from the strictly relation with the productive vocation of the area and the need to house workers that found occupation in maritime related economy. Many residents worked on waterfront docks and nearby factories, bolstered by the construction of Bush Terminal since 1890. During a period of industrial and urban growth between 1940s and 1950s the industrial waterfront was

! " # # $ % and Irish that found in the area an opportunity to settle. The construction of the Gowanus Expressway and its expansion in the 1940s, an infrastructural connection implemented to provide a fast connection between Long Island suburban area and Manhattan produced a strong physical barriers that severed the waterfront from the rest of the neighborhood. Since late 19th century two and three story brownstone and limestone row-houses dominate the character of the neighborhood. The largely 2 and 3 story houses typology is related to social composition and family structure of e working class neighborhood. Generally arranged in rows est-west along the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;streetsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; a row &

second nuclei of the same family. The backyard garden and the front yard visually part of the public street, become spaces for sociability, where people can meet and interact with different level of privacy with the pedestrian in the street or towards the interior family garden. Row-house typology in principle allow people meet and casually socialize, but in practice social interactions are limited beyond familyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s relations. 67

Mainly along north south â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;avenuesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; apartment buildings are maximum six stories tall. Built to maximize the square footage often apartment have no room for communal area or anything that is not directly leasable. Oriented to low-income groups they are often built with cheap methods and low quality of construction. Usually lacking sound insulation and construction quality nowadays most of this buildings offer an inadequate quality of living if we consider that almost 10% of Sunset Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Buildings don not have heating and most of them are this typology. Grouped together with many other apartment buildings, in areas lacking public spaces or restful open spaces, as in the case of Sunset Park, this do not contribute in producing sense of communality. Since there is usually limited place for people to gather and meet in a pleasing setting, usually stairs and entrance become the only opportunities for socialize. With the introduction of new shipping technologies, such as containerization and declining international competitiveness of domestic manufacturing, led to a massive de-industrialization and consequent shrinking of employment. Losses of job opportunities coupled with a growing immigrant population where the condi ( ment and decay, loss of property value and price of rents. After Second World War begin the migration of middle class to suburban areas, towards more racially ho & $ the need of connecting with a sort drive time Long Island suburban areas to Manhattan that the Gowanos highway is implemented. The car infrastructure becomes essential for the achievement of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;American Dreamâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, a single family house with private garden and a car in the low density city. Usually labor intensive to maintain and despite of the fact that there are always people around, single family houses provide a limited sense of community and often owners tend to be isolated from their interpersonal personal relation and look for communality away from their houses requiring use of cars or other mode of transport.

PROPERTY SPATIAL FRAGMENTATION 1850

Founded during mid 1880 Tuxedo Park in Orange County is considered one of the most exclusive New York gated communties.

Apartment building mainly located along north south 'avenues' are maximum six stories tall. Built to maximize the square footage often built with cheap methods and low quality of construction, usually do not have room for communal area

as rban are to subu

unemployed

In 1920s Finnish workers established in Sunset park the first housing cooperative in the City

to su bu rb an ar ea s

Since 1890s Brooklyn Army terminal, industrial and port related activity attracted flows of workers mainly Finnish, Italians and Irish.

m fro

Brick, limestone and brownstone row houses typology associated to the family structure of working class neighborhood largely characterized neighborhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s building typology.

n to ctio u d pro

Among others Levittown, one of the largest mass-produced suburbs, quickly became during 1950 a symbol of postwar â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;suburbiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

2012

Long Island Mega Mansion neighborhood

The communities of Breezy Point, on the western end of the Rockaway Peninsula are protected as much by their gates as by their isolation.

Manhattization opposed to Suburbanization. Car based infrastructure allow living in suburbs and work in downtown.

Condominium typology during the last period has replaced the new construction of the small multifamily houses, as it has proven more profitable to the developers.

my ono c e e vic ser

m fro

s itie un m m m niu co mi d o e nd gat co to s to e s u ho ily fam

Over the last years gentrification pressures intensify due socioeconomic trends. Young white professionals and artists who can no longer afford neighboring Park Slope are settling in in the northern areas near Greenwood Cemetery nowadays redevelop with high condominium.

Two and three floors traditional row house is organized according the need of the family. A third floor usually housed a second nuclei of the same family. The backyard garden and the front yard where spaces for sociability. Nowadays developer thent to tranform the building, fragmenting the tipology in small apartment for middle class single or couple.

It is since this period that the worldwide sprawl of suburbs and gated residential neighborhoods, promoted in name of safety conditions and freedom become a model fragmenting existing housing models producing increased privatization and segregation.Together with industrial decline and urban disinvestment, the loss of property value in the area offer a vast affordable housing stock, a convenient public transportation line to Manhattan. Beginning from 1970s notable numbers of Portorican and later Latin and Asiatic groups settled in Sunset Park contribute with their activity to revitalize the area. )

white professionals and artists who can no longer afford neighboring Park Slope are using the empty building in the port area for workshops or other activity and settling in once-dilapidated areas near Greenwood Cemetery nowadays redevelop with high condominium in the northern section of Sunset Park. A second gentrifying force is mobilized by an immigrant growth coalition composed of Chinese developers, realtors, and ethnic banks in the development of condominium projects scattered throughout the neighborhood. Condominium typology which has been on the rise in popularity during the last real estate boom period has for the most part replaced the new construction of the small multifamily houses, as it has proven more $ of membership fees but the prices of condos have risen to the levels of single family house prices, thus excluding social diversity since space for sociability are very limited. Contemporary society has been on a steady path of fragmentation and the spatial policies in place today are enforcing that it will continue on this course.

Ownership and shrinking of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Simplistically it is possible distinguish between two forms of property ownerships, public and private. If we *

is any property that may be under the control of a single person or by a group of persons jointly. Within debate on housing provision controversial position argue for the effectiveness of public against private and vice versa capacity to satisfy this basic need. +

# do not explicit that very few families can afford to pay the full price of a home with only their own earnings. Housing market is subsidized by a government guaranteed-mortgage market that secures the investment for / housing market would not have been viable5 + ment banks bailing, having the government absorbing the debt together with massive foreclosures and high unemployment rates. On the contrary welfare state provision of mass scale housing failed to achieved its proposed goal, producing often homogeneous-segregated neighborhoods and promoting standardized qual

+ are the main reasons for the raised distrust in Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capacity to provide mass housing. Westâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s diminishing support of welfare state and recourse to private market in housing, is contributing in ; !

! <==> ? @ F K ) % V $ tional Affairs vol.62 page 187-212.

*" X &

Z # access to housing to the low-income groups. Among other forms the worldwide sprawl of gated residential neighborhoods represent a form of privatization of public space, their promotion in name of conditions of security are producing increased segregation

*" X The increased disaggregation of the public in last years is contributing in assigning a residual role to the social support to housing provision. It is in this sense that housing can be considered a frame to discuss the notion of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, how it is changing, being divided and privatized. But it is based on a renewed-revamped notion of a community network of social ties and resource sharing that we could advance some hypothesis and envision different forms of habitat that include a renewed notion of Public. K # of living models able to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;house the socialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, models that are affordable but also afford forms of sociability, collectivity and equality6. In opposition to any form of ownerships, occupation and squatting can be considered a form of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;self organizationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; approach to housing and communality containing a rejection of any form of State and as protest to state of welfare failure. Squatting is a practice in New York since late 1970s when the city loss more than 800.000 inhabitant and # \ ^ ! % # ? " *_ & % _ X

& helps community members that can not afford a house to squat abandoned buildings. According the organization squatting mean â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;occupation, renovation and defense of vacant space, abandoned, in order to create housing to help people that can not afford a houseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, the organization is involved in the organization to enter and renovate the vacant space, creating the necessary solidarity within the neighbors7.. % `{>| _}_ * X % # ? X illegality of the action because for him â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the crime is to have vacant houses when there are homeless people. Owners should be criminalized to leave apartment empty for speculation when there is people suffering and in need of a houseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. During the last decades policy have been progressively criminalizing squatting activity reinforcing de facto the right of owners on their private property. ~ & ( % # ? (

Doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t seems possible to reconstruct the condition of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Publicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; rejecting any form of State and without recognizing the role of institutions and considering the political role that grassroots associations can play as agents to change the current conditions. Since agricultural models based on work exchange to Paris Commune and more contemporary forms of exchange several models have been produced, some have failed some have provided interesting alternatives. The general hypothesis is that itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s necessary to restart from this examples to envision alternative model of living and that it is fundamental consider the ongoing rising of an alternative culture based on non-capitalistic modes of exchange and sharing8. 6 Erdemci F. and Phillips A.,2012 Actor, Agents and Attendants. Social Housing-Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice, published by Sternberg Press. And SKOR, Amsterdam. Â&#x20AC; % # ? Â&#x20AC; # `; =Â <=`< % www.o4onyc.org 8 Castells M. 2012, Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis, published by Oxford University Press, UK.

Several models of ownership not fully private nor public based on forms of co-habitation that take advantage by sharing and forms of solidarity, among others cooperative housing is one of the oldest. Oriented + Â&#x192; ! Â&#x20AC; # @ % # ! " # % ! ^

limits to this approach in Brooklyn have been recently described9. Aware that narratives that contradict both state and private housing provisions and the notion of alternative forms of shared housing bring the risk to fall into an autonomous â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;village-communeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, ending up being another enclave in the compendium of enclaves that have atomized the city into isolated and fragmented parts. We believe there is an acute need for a new dwelling typology associated with the culture and functions of the 21st century city that take in consideration recent solidarity and social needs. In our perspective, to

Alternative patterns of sociability Drawing on the idea that affordable housing should also forms of sociability and collectivity new social forms need to be defined based on contemporary forms of living. In addition to sharing a living space, there are many types of resources that can be successfully shared as services, food, clothes, transportation and energy as well as social and emotional matters such as giving each other company, sharing laughter and sorrow, protests and celebrations. The study of existing models implies the possibility to infiltrate in existing institutionals protocols and negotiate modest alteration. It is at neighborhood scale that that stealthy bottom up urban resilience can become a device to transform top down policy. Communities have the possibility to participate in the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;constructionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; of a new political agenda. Situating this idea in the 21st century context we find a variety of possible way that community can participate in the debate becoming a political influential agent. With people today involved in a dense network of activities, sharing home, labor and space what needs to be created is an easy organizational structure that facilitate theses formal and informal networks of shared resources. Current web-based social spaces are good tools networks can contribute but social cohesion need also shared space10. For the most part, these forms of communal association donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t require a change in spatial policies, nevertheless they would greatly benefit from a change since fragmented space tends to create a fragmented social structure. Thus we can reverse the process, creating by design more cohesive spatial patterns that will help amalgamate and solidify social structures. The issue arises of the compatibility of people sharing a space in a culture that is deeply individualistic, the possibility of sharing keeping personal diversity. It does not go without tensions, and rules must be established and enforced if necessary. But by opening the possibility of shared living may reuse the built housing stock adapting it to the means and needs of people. The sharing of this space in the conditions of today may provide a partial answer to the housing crisis on the condition that it goes hand in hand with a cultural transformation. 9 Maxwell N.P. 2007, Bargaining Brooklyn. Community Organizations in the Entrepreneurial City, published by The University Chicago Press, Chicago and London. 10 Castells M. 2009, Communication Power, published by Oxford University Press, New York-Oxford.

76 76

THE PROCESS OF RESEARCH AS DESIGN Participatory action research A block with a view : La Granja Looking for agon: where is agon?

777

Participatory action research with La Union

It would have been impossible to learn the same amount of things we learned without the intense engagement of the inhabitants of Sunset Park we had the chance to experience during the four months of our research in New York City. In parallel, an incredible amount of knowledge has been produced thanks to all the moments spent to review and discuss with our colleagues and teachers the materials collected, the visits in Sunset Park, the feedbacks received from the citizens. Being a research proposed in the framework of an Academic program, the methodology has been clearly introduced from the beginning, perhaps bearing the consequences of a scheduled time in terms of openness of the process and in terms of relational construction. The fact that 2012 is meant to be the first of a five years lasting project, thus leaving good possibilities to respect the continuity of the process, anyway cannot avoid the turnover of the groups of students engaging with the community, thus interrupting relationships and forms of empathy.

The view on the private backyards and gardens of the block of la Granja. The inhabitants of the block have in their garden an important space for their private life. One of the mexican families has used the garden to build an extension of their house.

The methodology adopted is defined participatory action research, a dialectical process of research characterized and structured by a rhythm of continuous expansion and contraction, the former corresponding to a phase of collection of the information and production of knowledge, the latter being moments of speculation and reflection, also developing new knowledge, necessary before starting a new phase of expansion. The moments of contraction usually corresponded to assemblies, held within the classroom and involving students and teachers; or held in Sunset Park and open to the local Community and the members of La Union in particular. For this second case of assembly a driving group was organized, basically made of the representatives of each group of research and a couple of teachers. This participatory approach engenders a situated knowledge, which is the knowledge specifically related to a situation. Bringing together formal knowledge and social knowledge, the situated knowledge is continuously opening to new questions, as scientific and technical propositions of the former will be always questioned by the pragmatism, the abilities and the daily experiences which are part of the latter. Three main phases have organized the different materials collected, progressively characterized by an increasing level of interaction with La Union and the Mexican Community of Sunset Park. In the phase of the documentary research different bibliographical and scientific sources have been collected, dealing with Sunset Park from the given entry points of the research1 . 1 The entry points framing the part of research here presented are labour and property. The other themes were: education, health, mobility and citizenship.

LA UNION Granja Los os Colibries La Unión is a non-profit organization for social justice based in the neighborhood of Sunset Park. It is a grassroots organization of people of the global south working to advance the social, economic, and cultural rights of the communities where they now live and the communities they left behind. The 600 members of La Unión are predominantly from the Mixteca region of Mexico and immigrants from across

Lutheran Family Health Center Center

Latin America and even though its member base is large, the organization operates in a very precarious situation. The usual lack of funding and member disorganization hunts La Unión on a daily basis, but this has not stopped it from developing a small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), working on fixing the current broken immigration system through comprehensive immigration reform, improving public education for immigrant families through parent and student organizing, and fighting for various environmental and social justice issues such as safe housing and access to healthy foods. What is stopping La Unión is their nomadic status and the impossibility of acquiring a permanent or temporary space for its operations. Today, La Unión moves from Church to Church, from Community Center to Family Clinic to the Street, nomadism has its benefits but the type of militant work that La Unión focuses on urgently requires a base.

Community unity Board d

74$#0 '%1.1); 5705'6 2#4- 5%*'&7.'

Schedule of the research process throughout the semester of the Transdisciplinary Design Program at Parsons.

In the second phase the interviews were collected, concerning people, civil society and Institutional representatives, meant to provide information of primary level, but also to reconstruct the dynamics of power and its perception embedded in the Community. Finally, the last phase was characterized by the proposal of tools meant to be useful concerning the main issues emerged from the interaction with the community. These tools have been conceived more for the continuation and the empowerment of the social and relational processes already in act in the community than to the abrupt introduction of spatial â&#x20AC;&#x153;solutionsâ&#x20AC;? , not really reflecting the real needs of the people involved and the spatial scale concerned by these. The three phases have been characterized by the dialectical rhythm: the assemblies organized punctuated the whole process thus giving the possibility to continuously reconsider the contents and to prepare the advancements of the research thanks to the feedbacks and the exigencies manifested by the members of La Union. The whole process, especially its relational development, has been considered as design, meant as the continuous shaping and production of knowledge and the continuous evolution and growth of the relational realm: any particular artifact â&#x20AC;&#x201C; having spatial implications or not - proposed in the course of the research was not ending in itself but finalized to empower the relational processes in course. At least three important aims motivated the choice of the participatory action research. The first is to build a relational form of knowledge, through which the social knowledge and the formal knowledge are being continuously re-written questioning each other, by transgressing traditional disciplinary boundaries, thus always embedding to the complexity of reality. The second aim is to blur the distinction between subject and object of the research, usually implying the regulating presence of structures of power. This happens given the commonality and reciprocity of the process of knowledge, enriching any participant involved, overcoming the definition of initial roles. Third aim is to trigger change through the action implied in and engendered 81 by the same process of knowledge production: the research provokes action via the knowledge produced,

LA GRANJA

Cleaned by some of the most active members of the organization, this long and narrow lot separating two buildings of the residential block between the 33rd an 34th Street, facing the entry lot of the Green Wood Cemetery, today represents a meaningful and important site for the history and the identity of La Union. A part from representing a small fragment of the Mexican material culture, the orchard and the henhouse provide more the pretext to build a sense of commonality and of community â&#x20AC;&#x201C; than a meaningful contribution to the food system of the Mexican population of Sunset Park.

continuously fueling new questions. The discussions developed in the classroom could not be divided from what happened during the moments of fieldwork, the questions of the research being constantly formulated by the community or updated by their feedback. The whole research is generally oriented to empower the role of the community involved and to trigger the emergence of their discourses and their needs. Interacting with the citizens of Sunset Park intensively and continuously operating on the basis of their feedback, we have been using different approaches, complementary, differently able to build trust, to produce knowledge and to increase awareness, to bring to light conflicts and different perspectives. Among some specific tools, in particular the sociogram and the spiral have been used. The sociogram, especially used in the realm of social analysis is drawn to describe the relations of power among different members of communities and small groups eventually having some common goal. The aim of the interviews finalized to this diagram is to compare and to frame the official roles and positions of power of main actors or common citizens with the perceptions and the actual roles concerning them, according to the members of the community. One of the diagrams for example was realized collectively, directly involving some members of La Union and other citizens of Sunset Park, identifying individuals belonging to power structures, civil society and people; describing the relations among them in terms of weak, normal, strong or conflicting. The process of drawing the diagram gave the possibility to visualize and share with all the participants real and perceived relations of power: a crucial layer implied and hidden in the daily patterns as a conditioning factor of the discourses, the initiatives and the potentials for action. The spiral diagram gives the possibility to imagine narratives about the process of change. Based on the research done, some relevant categories are visually organized with a spiral lay out: threats, resistances, frailties, strengths, actions, possibilities. Also in this case, different spirals have been drawn involving different groups of people, thus bringing to light different frameworks for action. For example, for one of them both members of La Union and of the Making Worlds Group - also part of Occupy Wall Street - were involved: a part from being an exceptional moment of reciprocal contact and meeting of the two groups, it was also the occasion to confront self-perceptions of the group with those from outside, in particular from other groups, thus situating the discussion also on the level of inclusive and exclusive dynamics unconsciously in act for both of them, enriching everybody with the new perspectives and approaches for action. Concerning the interviews, in general these have been realized according to a semi structured formula, combining the free emergence of information in the discourse of the interviewee and the presence of guidelines concerning the topics to deal with, not revealed to the person involved. The transcription of the interviews has given the possibility of a detailed analysis of different levels of speech, crossing them with83 the

FIGURES OF POWER

Randy Peers, Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow The demographic of sunset Park is : the Latino Community, which has shifted from 2nd to 3rd generation, Puerto Ricans to the Central and South Americans; and the fastes growing group which is the Chinese. And the gentrifying whites. That gets a lot of play, but the real pressure in the community is the growing dynamic between the Chinese Community which is rapidly expanding and the Latinos, who are feeling the pressure. In Sunset Pak we never had our own school… four years ago we opened up Sunset Park High school. Probably overtime, my gut is, you’ll have lower dropout rats just because you have proximity. Of all things I’ve done on the Community Board , that has been the thing I am most proud of. We had a community process…made up of all the different stakeholders, community groups.. We wanted a comprehensive high school…with three themes: health careers, business and the performing arts. I think the trend will be positive over time…not because of demographic shifts, but because we have an Institution within the Community we can call our own.” 4

R. Yo he estudiado derecho en México y había comenzado a trabajar en un estudio haciendo las bodas y los casos civiles y separaciones, pero no me pagan bien... Un amigo estaba en Nueva York, así que decidí mudarme con mi novia, para intentar una vida mejor 2 Tuve diferentes trabajos.... siempre hay necesidad. El primer trabajo para la supervivencia, sin embargo, no era lo que me imaginaba…el comercio de drogas y armas....Tam la situación es más estable, he encontrado un trabajo en una fábrica para hacer las cubiertas de las lámparas de la calle, y piezas de plástico.... es un trabajo que tengo 2 o 3 Los Estados Unidos de América no gastar mucho dinero para nosotros ..... No por el sistema de salud, y también no por la seguridad social a pesar de que pagan impuesto tener en esta condición de non documentado para la mano de obra barata. Y una empresa privada paga los gastos médicos de para que los trabajadores sanos que trabaja

3 5

6 1

Vanessa Bran Golden Steps certificate and to learn how

4 5

.Llegué a Sunset Park y encontró trabajo como constructor, trabajar en los sitios de los proyec construcción y no tiene otros sitios tiene que buscar un trabajo como "jornalero". para nosotros, los trabajadores indocumentados son pocas las organizaciones que se ocupan d protección de la salud, una defensa en el caso de abuso, etc. ... El problema general, sin embargo es que lo que la organización hace visible la condición de no vida, soportando a veces inaceptables condiciones de trabajo y salarios por debajo de la media nuestros derechos, no tienen seguro médico y la posibilidad de una vida mejor son pocos ....

3 2 Aida

Y yo quando crucé la frontera yo no sabía que estaba ilegal. Es bien peligroso cruzar la frontera. Los que tienen dinero trabajan con Visa, están más adelantados yo creo, pero un leí del 45 que si tu entrabas ilegal tenias que pagar una penalidad de 1000 dólares y te casabas, pero en 92-93 Clinton ha hecho otra leí .. Si tú entras ilegal tienes que irte p pero la mayoría tiene esto problema, o sea, no tienen visa. La organización se enfoca más en la justicia social, la Unión básicamente hace eso, justicia social e no es de servicio…porque hay muchas organizaciones que hacen servicio p piensa que tenemos consciencia, que tenemos que hacer un cambio y hay mucho mas beneficio en esto que en los servicios…Leticia se ha puesto l’objectivo de la comunidad

Interviews distributed among member of different levels of power reveal something about the conditions of rights of the citizens living in Sunset Park. The discourses of institutional representatives focus on expanding opportunities and on the institutional achievements through the years; Mexican non documented citizens on the contrary highlight still relevant limiting conditions affecting their daily life, mostly depending on the fact of not having identity documents.

mbién trabajé en una fábrica que produce los ganchos para el cabello. Ahora 3 años os y las muchas horas de trabajo contribuyen al crecimiento del país…se debe an...

The level of awareness concerning the dynamics of power and exploitation of non documented citizens emerges almost in all the interviews with the inhabitants of SP. The unfair balance between their contribution to the economy of the Country and the rights and opportunities they dispose in exchange is constantly highlighted. Also relevant, the firm purpose to engender awareness as a fundamental condition for the effectiveness of any action and any process of change.

nsburg, coordinator Center for Family Life s just finished a 12 week training program, which included business planning, learning the skills of the job, a graduate d building a coop. CFL is an incubator: we house a project until it goes off on its own. we act as consultants, helping them to make business decisions. There’s very low overhead because it is service-based

ctos tienen diferentes tiempos.... a veces se trabaja por 3 meses ya veces hasta 2 años……y cuando se termina la de la condición de "trabajador del día", por ejemplo, la organización de la oferta y la demanda de los trabajadores, la osotros invisibles indocumentados y esto nos expone a multas, las críticas y temores … Trabajamos durante toda nuestra a nacional, que contribuyen al crecimiento de este país, pagamos impuestos, pero no podemos votar, podemos hacer valer

Power 1. Community Board 2. City Council 3. Church 4. Lutheran Medical Center

Civil Society o nosotros no criábamos de estar aquí…Había ara México de toda forma. Yo tengo papeles, pero tienes que tener seguro social… Leticia d.

1. We can Do it 2. La Union 3. Center for Family life 4. Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow 5. Labour Unions 6. Cooperatives People

DRAWING THE SOCIOGRAM WITH LA UNION

The process of drawing the diagram gave the possibility to describe the relations among the different actors in terms of weak, normal, strong or conflicting; to visualize and share with all the participants real and perceived relations of power: a crucial layer implied and hidden in the daily patterns as a conditioning factor of the discourses, the initiatives and the potentials for action.

observations concerning also the body language – tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions, posture, etc. which is considered to convey relevant parts of the information, especially those contents which for different reasons cannot be expressed by words. If these have been some specific tools introduced in the course of the research through a precise definition and in specific moments and phases, a number of less codified forms of interaction emerged and took shape through all the period of research, less conceived as part of the research process and more based on the natural relational evolution of the relationship with some specific members of La Union. Next chapter will specifically focus on the value of these moments and on their rich contribution to the research meant in its deepest and most truthful sense as research finally affecting ourselves: a process providing fundamental findings not only on Sunset Park, labour and the living conditions of its inhabitants, but also concerning ourselves, our role as individuals and as urban planners or architects, questioned by the active involvement in the differently important moments of the real and specific lives of M., R., M., in those occasions first of all representing themselves and of their stories, more than a “community”. Finally, an extended reflection - which in the framework of this research can just be suggested - would deserve the theme of the forms of representation able to describe the complexity of the materials collected. This does not mean that other forms of research and their related representations are simplistic or not concerned by the complexity of reality: it means that in the course of this specific research both revealing complexity and representing it, in order to discuss and share the contents with everybody, were a major goal – perhaps more important that the findings in themselves, in their isolated form. This is one of the main implications of the dialectical approach and requires a transdisciplinary perspective in order to seize and describe the technologies and the devices constantly at work in a control based society. Maps and diagrams are often combined in hybrid representations – as for example the exploded axonometric views – which try to render the indivisibility of the spatial transformations from the actors who determine them or are affected by them; the processes and the synergies on which these are based; the transformations and their temporal dimensions. The technique is often mixed, combining technical drawings and handmade drawings, thus breaking the rigidity of traditional projections in order to better describe some immaterial contents such as the relational realm embedded in the space of a street or of a common garden. Digitally generated renderings and photomontages are avoided on purpose, especially in the phase of research by design, limiting as much as possible any visionary effect while giving more importance to the strategies, the actors involved and their feasibility as directions to activate existing spatial potential, engendering new urban 87 ecologies.

A1.EMERGING NEGOTIATIONS AND CONFLICTS

La Granja has been a window open on the interior landscape of an urban block: showing tensions, conflicts and different forms and negotiation.

A block with a view: La Granja. La Union has no fix physical site where activities could be developed. This could be considered as an opportunity to involve different parts of the city and different groups of citizens, suggesting also an interesting direction for all those associations initially having to struggle with the need to pay a rent. But as already mentioned this could also represent a problem, altering the continuity of the activities in logistic terms thus eventually creating difficulties for those citizens having to struggle with the schedule and the spatial patterns of their day. The importance of a physical site to which the activities of a group could be associated â&#x20AC;&#x201C; thus contributing to reinforce their presence and to acknowledge the right of their actions seems to be confirmed by the role presently performed by a small community garden especially managed by a few members of La Union, officially named Los Colibries but better known as La Granja. Spontaneously cleaned by some of the most active members of the organization, M. and R., this long and narrow lot separating two buildings of the residential block between the 33rd an 34th Street, facing the entry lot of the Green Wood Cemetery, today represents a meaningful and important site for the history and the identity of La Union. A part from representing a small fragment of the Mexican material culture, the orchard and the henhouse provide more the pretext to build a sense of commonality and of community â&#x20AC;&#x201C; than a meaningful contribution to the food system of the Mexican population of Sunset Park. Not necessarily representing the interests of every member, the activities happening at La Granja give the possibility to the citizens involved to express themselves; to enjoy a friendly common space out of the often segregating and overcrowded conditions of their houses, to have a personal dimension of escape from their daily routines; to meet other citizens, building new knowledge and awareness, consolidating solidarities. Remarkably, through years of voluntary work an abandoned space attracting drugs and bad reputation individuals has been transformed in a green corner showing to the children of the closest schools the wonder of growing plants. Introduced to this space in the course of the fieldwork activities, it would be a poor acknowledgement to say that the time spent in La Granja together with some of the members of La Union, was simply related to the fieldwork. On the contrary, it would be important to say that our presence there was often the result of a spontaneous relational interest, developed through the different moments of the research, thus effectively erasing the distance normally separating the subject and the object of the research. As previously mentioned, we probably learnt more about ourselves than about their condition. The natural relational development has given the possibility to build trust and friendship, thus creating the conditions to enlarge the framework of our discourses to the neighborhoods, enriching the research with discourses which, thus, slowly started to grow, grafting the needs and aspirations of the inhabitants of the block into those expressed by the members of La Union, fueling feelings of commonality but also of diversity and self-preservation. A common green space crossing the block, the common laundry, the kindergarten; another lot to implement the existing surface of la Granja; the works to improve the space of the street; the possibility to create a nursery or to involve in some form the nearby Public School: all these specific requests gradually emerged from the words and the imaginaries of the inhabitants, triggering interest and activation, but also encountering resistances and revealing existing conflicts. La Granja has been a window open on the interior landscape of an urban block: showing tensions, conflicts and different forms and negotiation. La Granja has revealed the fundamental relevance of space as a dimension in which inhabiting is co-habiting, necessarily teaching about the non essentiality of a harmonious coexistence of diversities. 89

Different moments of our research with some members of La Union.

The first great lesson of la Granja is about the opportunity provided by space in terms of political expression, embedded and at the same time deriving from what I would define bio-authoriality: the authoriality concerning one’s own life as a preliminary step to reach individual and /or collective awareness as a precondition of the processes of social construction. This can also be meant as not so far from Foucault’s thought according to which the only possibility to escape bio-power is by creating new cultural and behavioural frames, thus escaping the dispositifs of power. In the perspective of these fundamental, interrelated objectives, the appropriation of the site and the work done by the members of La Union put them in an approximately equal position than the one of the other inhabitants of the block, American documented citizens. As these, they can enjoy their free time with gardening activities or with a barbecue, they can use this space to build knowledge and to organize any sort of initiative, reclaiming their lives, thus contributing to the construction of their and the society, despite their invisibility2. It has been thanks to this small garden, as a point of reference that we had the possibility to spontaneously meet several times not La Union, but some of its members, counting on the fact that each Sunday some of them were somehow taking care of the space. La Granja reclaims and gives back time, thus providing the conditions to overcome fragmentation, lack of relational construction and isolation as major aspects of the contemporary conditions of labour and living; to engender awareness and mental shifts necessary to any person to grow and to improve her/his life conditions; to perform the political and to organize for any given purpose. The Mexican citizens involved in that space certainly still have to deal with prejudices concerning their cultural predisposition for the party and leisure time, for example: but as small, daily struggles these have to be acknowledged more as an epiphany of diversity than as effects of a deeper hostility or sense of antagonism. Diversity which anyway is irreducible in any sort of community, independently from the ethnical composition and can be managed through delicate balances, without being comphletely erased. A young American couple living in the block, despite being deranged by the late talks of the Mexican occupants of the garden, still leaves them use their hosepipe and asks for their help in some carpentry works for their house. La Granja seems to show that coexistence of diversities is possible and space not only creates the conditions, it also challenges the whole society to take charge of them and to manage them: the second lesson. The real foundation of a democratic society is not consensus but the acknowledgement and the acceptance of diversity: an acknowledgement that does not necessarily imply an harmonious coexistence, but certainly a respectful acceptance of the right of expression of the ‘other’, thus advocating not an antagonistic society – based on the need to eliminate the adversary – but an agonistic model, characterized by an equal confrontation of parts, without any implied form of judgment (Mouffe). La Granja as agon – the space for agonistic confrontation - shows the opportunities and the rights unfolding in an agonistic society. Given these premises, the role of Institutions is strongly questioned, not as an homogenizing actor, simplifying the issue of wellbeing through the use of universalistic models, thus flattening diversities and creating conditions of exclusion. Institutions are required to support the bottom up efforts aiming to reshape welfare: efforts done to formulate precise requests, showing their relevance for the whole community and suggesting their feasibility. The crucial issue here is to not renounce to the possibility of political action and expression of diversity deriving exacting from the forms of latency of Institutional welfare. If this could be considered 2 The experience of exclusion is not only about sorrow, separation producing resistance and thus strength. Also the oppressed, not only the oppressors within their communities build relationships that will be crucial at the moment of the fight, building solidarity and situating the group on a ethically superior level. Cartosio, 2012

as part of the devices through which bio-power is enounced and made effective, then the occasions of its absence – more or less intentional – are precious gaps to be infiltrated by bottom up initiatives, especially when these come from citizens condemned to invisibility because of their lack of regular documentation but visible in terms of fiscal contribution. Wherever available, space, dispossessed and fragmented by labour conditions, is clearly the place where to start, from reclaiming time to organizing and proposing specific programs. Any space giving voice to diversity is an opportunity to reclaim the political. More than a lesson, this an invitation to question some a aprioristic convictions, concerning who has to do what and how to guarantee an equally distributed wellbeing. Since this does not necessarily correspond to real social justice and since it is possible observe on multiple fronts the failures deriving from the attitude to delegate, then maybe this is the moment to take advantage of the Institutional weakness reconfiguring their powers and reshaping the forms and the procedures of welfare. Exodus is not an alternative, simply creating new occasions for the empowerment of the dominant system. Engagement is necessary, but not enough. The critique and disarticulation of the Institutions must be followed by a phase of re-articulation thus avoiding the simple reconfiguration of the previous power structures. The practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed, are what we call ‘hegemonic practices.’ Every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices […] It is always the expression of a particular structure of power relations… Every hegemonic order is susceptible of being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices which attempt to disarticulate it in order to install another form of hegemony […] The process of social critique characteristic of radical politics cannot consist any more in a withdrawal from the existing institutions but in an engagement with them in order to disarticulate the existing discourses and practices through which the current hegemony is established and reproduced, with the aim of constructing a different one. ( Mouffe ) Considering the case of La Union a careful reading of their activities or of the initiatives of the single members reveals their interest in looking for the institutional support, any time for specific reasons defined by the context in which their presence is required. The Mexican citizens involved in the activities of la Granja would like to officially involve the local Public School because this would legitimate their activities, thus increasing their credibility and fueling trust in the neighborhood. M. is an active, voluntary promoter of an educational program supported by the Lutheran Medical Center: acquiring the status of regular citizen for her would finally imply the official acknowledgement of her activity and of her role by the Hospital. She still considers a challenge of her life the possibility to enter the building of the municipality without having to hide her illegal condition.

A2..EMERGING NEGOTIATIONS AND CONFLICTS

La Granja seems to show that coexistence of diversities is possible and space not only creates the conditions, it also challenges the whole society to take charge of them and to manage them.

Looking for agon: where is agon?

The whole process of research showed that La Union – despite the difficulties and its weak points – as collective subject and its members are engaged actors, aware and capable of different forms and grades of entrepreneurialship; citizens appreciating the value of time and declaring their need. Surely through the process everybody learned something, eventually increasing awareness which sometimes is engendered through the efforts done to frame roles and identities. Certainly questions arise concerning the role of architects and urban planners. If our presence was important for the Community to narrate itself ; if the research led them to measure limits and potentials of their actions, the relevant aspect is that similar processes would probably have happened and will happen again with any kind of interlocutor, not necessarily architects and urbanists. Then what is our role? Which specific contribution could we bring, given the relevance of space in supporting the organization of actions and the proposal of alternatives, under a political paradigm? If as we previously said the space of agon, the space of the emergence and the confrontation of diversities has to be considered as a right, as an opportunity for the affirmation of a political dimension, no more based on representation, but on direct activation, thus accessible also to those citizens in a condition of invisibility, then as architects and urbanists we must look for agon. This means that our concern should be first of all in identifying those urban situations in which agon is already emerging or latent and creating the conditions to empower its expression as a right to a political action/critique. The shift between acknowledgement and empowerment is neither immediate, nor simple. It implies different phases through which our role is differently specified.

Vacant plots in the blocks between the Third and Second Avenue in Sunset Park.

Engaging with a community or with a group of citizens is the first crucial step. Building trust is important not only for a stable and durable relational construction, but is also necessary to obtain a precise framework of the spatial conditions within which the group operates, the internal and external dynamics of power concerning, among other factors that condition the expression of rights and the fulfillment of their needs. On this bases it would be essential to identify the potentials to exploit, recognizing three different categories. As according to our perspective, framed between property and labour, there are very good reasons to reclaim space – as directly showed by the case of La Granja – , then the first level on which potentials and opportunities must be recognized is spatial. From vacant lots to temporary available surfaces, from shared spaces to areas gained through bargaining: any of these could provide the basic conditions to organize or to inhabit, in any case to reclaim the previous mentioned bio-authoriality. If M. and R. spontaneously occupied 95

a neglected lot, it is part of our role to contribute with more precise mapping of the availabilities and the identification of the formulas for their accessibility. This leads to the second level, where the identification of possible ways to claim space should go beyond improvisation and risky attempts â&#x20AC;&#x201C; especially risky for non regularly documented citizens â&#x20AC;&#x201C; highlighting all the gaps and possibilities defined as part of the planning and ownership regulations. The case of New York City becomes particularly interesting in this sense, on one hand apparently acknowledging relevant opportunities for participated forms or community based planning, inclusive both in terms of processes and in terms of spatial justice; but on the other hand creating wide margins for speculation. If to this ambivalence we add the fact that groups and / or individual citizens are not always in the condition to understand and to access the relevant information, then it is clear that a technical contribution could help to embed a given setting of conditions and opportunities in scenarios depicting possible evolutions together with the strategies for their feasibility. Crucial part of these strategies is the actors. The spatial related conditions sought in order to organize or to directly put into practice new urban ecologies cannot be easily obtained without a collective effort, implying the participation of different actors, from the individual citizens to the organizations of the civil society and the Institutions. Cooperatives and Community Land Trusts clearly exemplify the strategy of empowerment pursued by their action, directly proportional to contribution of a number of actors. Particularly interesting has to be considered the involvement of Institutions, important for several reason. As previously mentioned, the dismantling of the current logics of power cannot be obtained via defection, but requires a strategic engagement, able to suggest alternatives configurations of power and the paths to realize them. This is a first essential reason to involve institutions from the beginning of any long term action. Another relevant motivation is about the legitimating and empowering role they can assume especially when the concerned actors are in a condition of invisibility, often impeding the accessibility to resources and procedures. Considering the case of the Mexican community of Sunset Park, the Church could be an interesting partner, not only inconsideration of the social relevance of its role and the special value for the whole Community, but also for an initial availability of physical sites which could support the further organizations of the groups and their activities. In part this is already happening: one of the members of La Union is a non active catholic priest and the space of St.Jacobi church in Sunset park is often used for the assemblies of various organizations and groups in Sunset Park, partially related to the activities of La Union. Finally, another important reason to involve institutions is related to the need to intersect the activity of a given group or association with the life of the neighborhood and of the city, thus avoiding the risk of an isolated self-referencing community, increasing the number of occasions for trust building. Schools for example could be part of educational programs based on the contribution of the members of the local community on one side, but on the other side opening to the rest of the city because of their specificity. The following section of research is meant to suggest the potential for the emergence of new urban ecologies in Sunset Park and to test through design which could be limits and possible scenarios both in terms of spatial reconfiguration and in terms of engineering of actors, procedures, forms of solidarity.

White page to reclaim time.

THE PROCESS OF RESEARCH AS DESIGN OF THE RELATIONAL REALM AND GENERATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Jessie Leticia

meeting at school 10.02

introducing methodology

Margarito

1st driving group

Magda

16.02 25.02 25.02

Serjo

meeting Magda

29.02

meeting Serjo

29.02

Rojelio

walk and meeting

04.03

Rodrigo La Granja. seeding plants

10.03 17.03

interview with Rodrigo and Margarito

23.03

interview with Randy Pears

26 03 28.03

interview withAdriana review with Teddy Cruz

30.03

barbecue

31.03 01.04

interview with Aida

06.04

Juan

07.04 La Granja. building raised beds

13.04 14.04 2nd DG: sociogram of La Union

15.04

ideas about the block

18.04

fieldwork with Civic City

19.04 realizing the cabine

21.04 22.04

performing the question about invisibility

23.04

spiral drawing

27.04

talk with Jeanne Van Heeswijk

27.04 29.04 01.05

Aida

= assembly

Isabel

The diagram shows the development of relationships on the base of the different activities unfolded during the process of research â&#x20AC;&#x201C; on the left, a calendar is shown. Different groups have been involved and finally entered in a reciprocal relationship, as for example La Union and Making Worlds group, also part of Occupy Wall Street.

Adriana

Making Worlds

Forum on Commons meeting the neighborhood

Luis Begonia

Alex y su familia

OWS 60 Wall Street

Making Worlds

Left Forum Occupy Queens Randy Peers Teddy Cruz Alex

Yippie Club. MW weekly meeting

Maria Bick

Adelin Leticia Jelena new ideas for the block

Juan Babilonia

Making Worlds spiral drawing on Occupy talk with Juan Babilonia

May Day

Occupy Wall Street Occupy Sunset Park

RESEARCH BY DESIGN

The political nature of ecologies Open finale

101

102

The political nature of ecologies.

Do not crave to construct in the space for which you think that it lies in the future, that it promises you some kind of tomorrow. Realize yourself today, do not wait. You alone are your life.â&#x20AC;? Fernando Pessoa The political emerges as the space for the institutionalization of the social ( society ) and equality as the foundational gesture of the political democracy. Erik Swyngedouw The drawings and design hypothesis presented in the following pages are based on the assumption that dealing with space as inhabited realm, where diversities emerge and are reciprocally defined, an ecological approach is needed to engender the conditions of the political, based on the identification of the structures of power and their complementary forms of reaction. In fact, ecologies result from the interplay between hegemonic technologies and forms of resistance reacting to them, able to continuously reorganize in order to reach a just distribution of resources and opportunities â&#x20AC;&#x201C; just taking in consideration the differences of the starting situation. For this reaction to unfold, some conditions must be configured. First of all, the availability of space and time for agon, the equal confrontation and identification of the parts involved. Secondly, the possibility for an active role of the different actors, not more according to schemes of delegation and participation, but pursuing a direct involvement, as the only way to express and form the diversity of needs and to specify rights. The socio-spatial ecologies here introduced are developed and based on the convergence of inclusive schemes of property and of spontaneous grouping of actors and citizens, coagulating to improve their specific living situation, making sense within and arising from the diversity of the microcosms continuously reshaped and originated by the containing macro-ecology of the city. The design is based on the need to reclaim space as a right in itself and space as a condition to reclaim time, based on the (re)organization of activities in the short term or/and in the long term, as a result of initiatives of re-configuration of the dominant structures (initiatives which in their turn require an immediate availability of time in order to be organized). The strategies and the activities proposed are oriented in this direction, towards bio-authoriality as the foundation of the political.

103

R7A: FAR 3.45-4.6* 2 stories

1 story

4 stories

Proposed Zoning District Boundary Existing Zoning District Boundary R7A

Open Space

* inclusionary housing

M1-2D

100% coverage

R6B

25% coverage

FAR is the ratio of the allowable built floor area of a building to the area of the lots it sits on. The above examples are of 1:1, or 1.0 FAR.

Green-Wood Cemetery

R6A: FAR 3.0

R7A

50% coverage

Lot SF 10.000 (100x100) 10.000 (100x100)

FAR 1.0 4.0

Allowable Bldg SF 10.000 SF 40.000 SF

M1-2 R6A

M1-2D

R6B

M1-2

Sunset Park R6A

R6A: FAR 3.0

R6 R6A

M2-1

R6B

M1-2

R7A

R6B

C4-3A

non-contextual zone (e.g. R6)

contextual zone (e.g. R6A)

height factor building

quality housing building

R6A R6B R6A

R4-1 R6A

R6A R6A

R7A

R-6

R6B

stre et stre

R7A: FAR 3.45-4.6* FAR 4.60

5 4 3 2 1

Surface plot 300mq Lot coverage 60% Surface plot 300mq Floor Area 1035 mq

H max 24.40 m

FAR 3.45 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Surface plot 300mq Lot coverage 60% Empty lot 40% Surface plot 300mq Floor Area 1380 mq EXTRA Floor Area 345 mq Inclusive Floor Area 276 mq NON Inclusive Floor Area 69

TOT Inclusive Floor Area 69 mq TOT NON Inclusive Floor Area 1311

104

Sunset Park zooning tools In early spring 2007, a development proposal for a twelve-story residential development stirred community uproar about continuous out-of-context development on a residential block two- and three-story residential row houses. To protest a community coalition composed largely of white home owners and Latino resident quickly formed and proceeded to gather hundreds of signatures for a petition calling for zoning protections. A few weeks later NYC Department of City Planning Director announced an expedited contextual rezoning study for Sunset Park with an end of the year completion deadline. Current zooning has been utilized to preserve neighborhood residential quality the existing character of the low-rise row houses on Sunset Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side streets, while upzoning commercial avenues accommodating growth and new highrise developments along commercial avenues and near transportation nodes. The zooning contain regulation for Inclusionary Housing offering an optional floor area bonus in xchange for the creation or preservation of affordable housing, on-site or off-site for low-income households. The Inclusionary Housing Program requires a percentage of the dwelling units within a building to be set aside, or new or rehabilitated affordable units be provided off-site within the same community district or within one-half mile of the bonused development. All affordable residential units created through the Inclusionary Housing Program must remain permanently affordable. Affordable apartments may be rental units or, under modifications made to the program in 2009, available in an ownership plan. Even though the production record for affordable housing premised on bonus densities is mixed, the current Sunset Park rezoning discussion has not generated any substantive provisions to prevent displacement or to preserve the neighborhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s multiracial, multiethnic, working-class qualities. Whereas the neighborhood has long been a place where many working-class and immigrant households could find safe, adequate, and affordable housing, this is less and less the case as people being priced out of more expensive areas such as neighboring Park Slope have begun to discover relatively affordable rent levels in Sunset Park.

105

SPATIAL AND INFRASTRUCTURAL POTENTIAL

Grid infractructure

Vacant lots, parking and underused Spaces

Parks and open spaces

Institutions and amenities

106

Green Wood Cemetery

Sunset Park

Vacant lot Industrial vacant building Institutions 0

250

500

1000

Vacant space above shop

107

SPACE BECOMING TIME

108

109

EMERGING ECOLOGIES: SPACES AND ACTORS INVOLVED

110

[1]CLT established by the community organizing temporary housing engendering forms of social exchange and common activities. New inclusionary housing take advantage by the extra volume proposed by the zooning. [2][3]Worker Center support the cleaning service start up of a cleaning service cooperative in collaboration with Lutheran Medical Center [4][5] Educational program in collaboration with P.S.506 School and Lutheran Medical Center are organized by the Worker Center. [6]Temporary spaces are rented by the community for market and other temporary uses

Market Product Exchange

Lutheran Medical Center Healt and care related

Brooklyn Army Terninal Start-Up partner

Workshop

[3]

[11]

COMMUNITY LAND TRUST Housing [1]

[2]

[6]

Worker Center

[4] [10] [9]

Housing

[9]

COOPERATIVE

[6] Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church as leading partner act as guarantor in the accress to forms of credit and legal aspects. [7] [8]P.S.506 School and professionals support the housing program in the development of inclusionary housing taking advantage by the extra volume proposed by the zooning. Spaces and workshops within the cooperative becomes accessible for after school programs and student recreation. [9][10] The Brooklyn Army Terminal support the start-up of maintenance service cooperative trading maintenance and cleaning of the commercial and light industrial space.

[8]

[7]

[5]

P.S.506 School Educational and training support [6]

Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church leading partner

[11] [12] The community renovate, as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;work exchangeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; a vacant industial building for temporay use. The workshop driven by cooperative members is oriented to wood and metal craftsmanship and building renovation.

111

worksh

10 112

100

workshop and market

Worker Center

Temporary T e housing

C Common activities

Common activities

workshop

hop workshop

inclusionary housing

craftsman learning center

Common activities

educational spaces

Brooklyn Army Terminal

113

workshops and market a space managed by the community for workshops, temporary activities and a weekly market, thus involving the rest of the city

CLT supporting the creation of new common spaces: a community center, a kitchen, a kindergarten. Forms of temporary housing are provided for any citizen in need. The development of spontaneous solidarity networks is thus supported on many levels by the availability of these spaces.

workshops Temporary housing typologies realized within the Inclusionary Housing Program, as part of a CLT.

Worker Centers promoting educational programs in collaboration with the Lutheran Medical Center and the local school. Spaces for workshops are provided by the Community, with the economical support of the Municipality. 114

Vacant lots are used not only to provide affordable housing, but also to improve the quality of the public space, redefining the grid with common spaces and public passage crossing the blocs. The section of the streets is redesigned: some become pedestrians, others allow one sense circulation. The rhythm of the neighborhood is thus redefined, giving more space to children and to any other form of daily relational construction. The shift from public to private happens gradually, through different degrees of commonality.

worker center

temporary housing

common kitchen and kindergarten

community center

115

Workshop

Work shop

Brooklyn Army Terminal

A vacant industrial building is refurbished and used as temporary workshop for handicraft and building construction.

Work shop

0116

100

56th Street

57th Street

The cooperative provide affordable housing and new public space alterating the traditional grid structure. Within the new buildings community spaces allow the promotion of educationl program oriented to promote alternative forma of collaborative entrepreneurship.

59th Street

117

118

119

Open finale

M: … so we were saying that fragmentation does not imply the expression of diversities but at the same time any process that tent to recompose contain the risk of simplification... V : no, not at all. A fragmented state is a state of weakness, of lack of solidarity, of invisibility..which means absence of rights and vulnerability... M ...given the fact that our lives get increasingly fragmented how is it possible to recompose this condition?.....surely social networks and technological virtual worlds influence and contribute to reconstruct social networks and personal relation... V: I do not agree… not only they don’t help, but they increase our emotional frailty, creating an illusion of being connected, while on the contrary we are simply adapting ourselves to our segregating lives, unable to organize, our time being stolen in many ways, most of them related to our permanent obsession for flexibility, for ubiquity.... M: ...at the same time I think space still plays a fundamental role for sociability. People continuously establish relationships in the physical space and build trust on the basis of bodily sensations. We need to meet, to talk together, socialize and share…think about recent forms of exchange and solidarity ….. What lack is a space that fosters this practices... V: …. the space where this happens is the space normally concerned by Institutions, by welfare… then of course you could say that this space is part of the conditions of production - in terms of reproduction - but it’s up to us to infiltrate the gaps, to reclaim our political role and to critique the way in which Institutions operate…and again it’s up to us to propose alternatives... M:….participative models have always been there.. New York has a highly participative system but it is not enough effective, just consider the limited participation in the case of Sunset Park rezoning or the valuable resources as community based plans that are not effectively implemented and slightly scratch the surface of political system... V: what I think is that we need to go beyond participation and representation, as they are based on consensus, on creating homogeneity… while I think the future will be not about defining forms of agreement, but about creating the conditions for diversities to express themselves…an equal confrontation, which does not necessarily imply a happy ending.. we simply have to learn to respect and to need “the other” as occasions to question ourselves, to learn about ourselves.. In this perspective Institutions should provide an infrastructural support while the citizens should be motivated in specifying any service according to their needs..

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ANGOTTI, Tom, 2008 New York for sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate, M.I.T. Press, MA. BURGESS Ernst, PARK Robert, 1925 The city, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. CARTOSIO Bruno, 2012 I lunghi anni sessanta, Feltrinelli Editore, Milano. CASTELLS, Manuel 2012 Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Polity Press, Cambridge DOWD HALL Jacquelyn, 2005 The Long Civil Right Movement and the Political Uses of the Past, The Journal of American History, Vol. 91, No. 4, Organization of American Historians Stable. ERDEMCI Fulya, PHILLIPS Andrea, 2012 Actor, Agents and Attendants. Social Housing-Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice, Sternberg Press and SKOR, Amsterdam. FINE, Janice, 2005 Worker Centers. Organizing communities at the edge of the dream, Economic Policy Institute HARDT, Michael, NEGRI, Antonio 2009 Commonwealth, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge HARVEY David ,2012 Rebel cities. From the right to the city to the urban revolution, Verso books, New York City KRINSKY John, 2007 Constructing Workers: Working-Class Formation under Neoliberalism, Springer Science KRINSKY John, 2007 The Urban Politics of Workfare: New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Welfare Reforms and the Dimensions of Welfare Policy Making, Urban Affairs Review, Sage Publications LEFEBVRE Henry, 1974 La production de lâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;espace, Anthropos, Paris. MARWELL Nicole, 2005 Bargaining for Brooklyn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. MITCHELL Don, 2003 The right to the city. Social Justice and the fight for Public space, published by The Guilford Press, NY. MORINI Cristina, La femminilizzazione del lavoro nel capitalismo cognitivo, Economic Policy Institute. MORINI, Cristina, 2010 Il lavoro di cura come archetipo del biocapitalismo. Altre ragioni per il diritto al reddito, Swarm, Barcellona, MOUFFE, Chantal 1993 The return of the political, Verso, London PAPADOPOULOS Dimitris, TSIANOS, Vassilis, 2006 Precarity. A Savage Journey to the Heart of Embodied Capitalism, European institute for progressive cultural policies SASSEN Saskia, 2011 The Global Street: Making the Political, Globalizations, Routledge, London SOJA Edward, 2010 Seeking Spatial Justice, University of Minnesota Press, MN.

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