Introduction

Students in the Urban Studies program at Lang and Schools for Public Engagement examine the complex cultural, governmental, physical, and social ecosystems of the modern city. They focus on geography, history, culture, public policy, planning, politics, activism, and development both in the local context of New York City and in cities across the country and the globe. The projects here were developed in the Urban Studies Senior Seminar, a community of practice in which students complete a project of their own design in a medium of their choosing, including qualitative, quantitative, participatory, and visual forms.

Through close collaboration with professor Dr. Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, students develop, iterate, and test an idea, crafting research questions, undertaking a robust research and analysis from grappling with that idea, synthesizing theory and practice, and creating an original piece of research that honors each student’s unique capacities. The seminar consists of weekly group meetings, individual sessions with the instructor, and peer-review workshops. Group meetings are devoted to discussion of the research process, methods, ethics, trouble-shooting, critical reflection, and to sharing work in progress. Individual sessions and peer review workshops are devoted to reviewing drafts and revisions. Here, we present short summaries of their unique and wide-ranging work.

When people think of coming to America they think of the American Dream, an underlying belief that America is a country full of freedom that can provide opportunities to pursue economic prosperity and success, not to mention an expectation of higher social status and overall happiness. This concept assumes that all of this can be accomplished with very few barriers and a ton of hard work. In reality, this country was built and still operates on racism and prejudice towards specific groups of people. The American Dream promises freedom and equality but is not available to the entire population.

To achieve the “American Dream”, one needs to generate some type of wealth. Wealth is the value of the assets owned by a person, and is measured by the total assets subtracted by the debts. And to ensure that your family is financially secure for generations to come one needs to develop generational wealth. Generational wealth consists of financial assets that are passed on and built upon with each generation within a family, is particularly important to future financial security. It’s the foundation for opportunities and access to better education, health, and jobs. In other words, generational wealth is having financial stability and income that can be passed down from generation to generation. Black generational wealth is a significant concept that is often overlooked--too often within the Black race many people are living at or below the poverty line, lacking access to the information, opportunities and resources that would help build wealth. This led me to ask the question, how can people attain wealth when they are struggling to find income?

In my thesis, I shed light not only on generational wealth but also the historical barriers Blacks have endured when striving to achieve it, understanding that the racial wealth gap starts with the American history of institutionalized racism, discrimination, bias, and restriction from information and opportunity. As a counter to this history, and as a way to move forward, I discuss models created to help people of color get on the path to gain wealth--from entrepreneurship training non-profit organizations, to coalition-building strategies, and to the ways in which Madame CJ Walker, the first prominent Black millionaire, brought training and support back to her community. Finally, I propose my solution to create a Black marketplace that addresses the lack of funding and support for Black-owned businesses and allows business owners to connect with each other and generate income collectively.

My thesis considers the identity of bodegas in and along a stretch of Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn. By using historical analysis, as well as interviews with bodega owners and workers, I conducted an in-depth case study of one bodega, which I use as a jumping off point to explore how and when bodegas serve as extensions of their neighborhood, and adapt to various socioeconomic and cultural changes in Bushwick’s hyper-gentrifying landscape.

Through this work I have looked in-depth at the development of the uniquely New York corner store--the bodega--rooted in Puerto Rican immigration beginning in the 1920s, evolving over time as a means of building upward mobility in many immigrant communities. These histories show us how bodegas have, along with the neighborhoods they serve, changed over the past 120 years. As day-­to-­day spaces, bodegas become emblematic of economic and class struggles, urban crime and renewal, and the power and strength of communal relationships. Over the past few years I have seen bodegas come and go, and change. I once asked my friend David what he would do if his landlord decided to sell his father’s bodega. He replied, “we’d look for another building....If he comes and wants to change it, then that’s it. We’ve done our time.”

It is a sad truth that many bodegas do not last, and it has nothing to do with their business practices--but owners focus primarily on their everyday lives and community relationships. David helps run his father’s business, but he is also an important part of the Bushwick community, in a business based on reciprocity. “The last time my brother went home for vacation,” David explains, “then we started looking for someone Spanish to work here. A couple of days later someone showed up looking for a job. So we said yeah.” By hiring this man from the neighborhood, David and his family develop new connections outside of their own family. Likewise, the new worker now knows that he can look for work in David’s store. This without a doubt, creates a bond and a friendship that will reward the bodega with a kind of merit that any of the newer gourmet delis could ever achieve in a lifetime of selling Bacon, Egg and Cheese sandwiches for $8.00 (yes this happens).

My own experience has led me to understand enough of the complexities of David’s workplace to know that he nor his his family will be vacating anytime soon. Similarly, David’s insight brought me a new perspective on what it means to thrive. The city’s policies may be predatory, but bodegas and their customers are not simply prey. Throughout this project I have gained a true appreciation for everything that is bodegas. Although I will never entirely grasp the subject, I have learned what bodegas are for me, and that is all that I could ever hope to achieve.

Please talk to your bodega man, you just might learn a thing or two.

Living in Havana for a semester opened my eyes to a problem the city has had for decades. Walking down the streets in the neighborhoods of Havana Vieja and Centro Habana everyday forced me to look at the city’s housing crisis and to ask how it was possible that families were living in such unsustainable conditions--with regular building collapses killing families across the city--and how out of this crisis Havana inhabitants still found ways to meet their needs, altering colonial-era houses in Havana in ways not previously imaginable. How did a country that considers housing to be an integral component of the country’s revolution and welfare system come to have a housing crisis? I wanted to understand how to honor the labor and resilience of people living in this housing crisis, and their capacity for creating their own space, while still critiquing and seeking to change the crisis that has created the need for people to live under unsafe and unsustainable conditions.

In 2019, I traveled back to Havana to conduct informal interviews with Havana residents in the municipalities of Centro Habana and Havana Vieja and made images of housing conditions, structure, and infrastructure. Traveling back to Havana helped me better understand the housing crisis in Cuba and residents' views on something that impacts everyone in this country. From interviews and photography as well as a thorough literature review, I was able to write a thesis that highlights the struggles of Cubans and how people find solutions to an issue they shouldn’t have to had to solve on their own.

Despite the government’s monopoly, architects and services provided by the government since the revolution in 1959 haven’t succeeded in providing housing for the growing population, and a second market has arisen. Informality as a means to survive the various challenges of the Cuban reality has given rise to a uniquely Cuban phenomenon described by Cuban artist Ernesto Oroza as an “architecture of necessity.” For over three decades, inhabitants of Havana have intervened, using their own resources and reclaimed materials, on their houses and the adjoining public and private spaces in order to adapt them to the new needs. Much housing in Havana is in former colonial mansions, dating from the early 19th century, featuring high ceilings and huge courtyards. The scale of these spaces made possible alterations including creating new floor plans, closing apertures, building divisions, and adding spaces; and the occupation of public, communal or otherwise empty areas. These spatial alterations demand new entryways, windows and balconies, new hydraulic installations and electrical systems, along with an infinite array of architectural modifications, such as the use of protection bars to mark the new limits of the property. For example, in the middle of what used to be single rooms, its inhabitants build “barbacoas,” makeshift mezzanines born from subdividing the original high vertical spaces of the house into two or three other rooms. In this way, properties originally designed for 9 or 10 members of an elite family and their servants now accommodate more than 50 families.

Informal alterations have allowed Cubans to stay in place and have a roof over their heads through generations. Yet, the alterations done to buildings in Havana show the weak side of the revolution. They offer unique, informal, and under-funded people’s solution to a problem the government can’t, or won’t, fix.

Julia’s apartment provided a warm respite from the cold February day. She invited me in with a friendly smile and asked if I would like some tea. As she made tea, I looked around the apartment. Bikes and bookshelves, with nonfiction tied to New York, lined the hallway. Clean hardwood floors led to the living room. To the left was a balcony, and straight ahead was a picture window showing a view of the lawns and trees of Penn South toward 9th Avenue. Through her window was a cross section of Chelsea. The carefully landscaped order of Penn South laid opposite London Terrace, the city’s first luxury apartment complex, where some older residents still clung to rent control, next to the tenements that were not unlike those that had been bulldozed to build Penn South. And, overlooking the High Line, gleaming new development cut off Penn South cooperators’ view of the Hudson River, just as they cut off all but the most wealthy from moving in to Chelsea.

In my thesis I tell the story of Penn South through archival photos, historical maps, my own observations, and most critically, interviews with Penn South cooperators. As a limited equity co-op of 2,820 apartments, Penn South provides quality housing at below-market prices through collective ownership and control. In my research, I struggled to reconcile the Penn South of today with its history. Built in 1962, Penn South is, in the words of cooperators, the “last bastion of socialism” and a “safe space,” or “enclave,” in an increasingly unaffordable city. However, it was an urban renewal project that displaced thousands of families, predominantly people of color and immigrants. Protests against the clearance of a large section of Chelsea and the displacement of lower income households to construct Penn South contrast with its current existence as below-market homes for middle-income households.

The limited equity cooperative model has historically been a solution to housing issues, since units are taken out of the speculative market and governed collectively, ensuring higher quality of life than in other housing types. Penn South is one example of non-commodified housing that works. Cooperatives are a form of housing where each resident buys a share in the building, and runs the building through democratic decision-making with other residents, unlike condominium owners. “Limited equity” means that residents, more accurately called cooperators, collectively own their apartments, but cannot sell them at market rate. Instead, a cooperator who sells can only make back the money that they put in to buy their apartment, give or take a few thousand dollars with interest or repairs.

The cooperators I spoke to had a multitude of close connections with their neighbors, from feeding each other’s cats to helping with childcare to playing bridge together every week. The diagram below locates spaces within the complex that have facilitated connections between people at Penn South.

A prominent fear among cooperators I interviewed was that Penn South would go market-rate. Many other limited equity coops built in New York City by the same developers to house non-affluent New Yorkers have since gone market-rate. These decisions threaten the affordability of housing that was originally intended to serve people who could not pay for market-rate homes. It is critical that the city preserve and create below-market housing, not destroy it. What is needed is more places like Penn South, where people live in safe, permanent homes that are within their budget. The sense of community and affordability of Penn South should not be the exception to housing in New York City.

There was a green rusted car with two venus signs and a lopsided smile on the bumper. that drove through my mom’s old neighborhood of Lorain, Ohio. I remembered this before I knew what the intersecting venus signs meant because my mom loved to dance to the Rick Springfield song that was usually playing from the radio as they drove by. This image doesn’t encompass all parts of the Ohio I grew up in, but it is the future I imagine.

What if the Midwest became the face of a queer landscape? For many people living in and outside the Midwest there may be a disconnect between understandings of the region and an association with queer experience. In my thesis, I argue that the midwest already contains within it a rich queer history, present and future. Midwestern history is built upon the capitalist value of extraction, a story of intensive processes of transformation of the natural world into a capital good, and then the inevitable fallout. Yet, through my research I have conceptualized queerness as a social force that continuously creates tension in the relationship between the people who labour within the systems of extraction and capitalism in its many forms.

The revitalization that the Midwest seeks has already taken root in the space that queer people, in all their forms, have created. Queer communities have made a flexible and intergenerational culture that serves as a respite from post industrial sorrow.

I have studied a wonderfully wide range of topics and found comfort in urban studies. In this thesis, I have been inspired to create a piece of writing that argues a unique perspective on an important policy topic, a topic that feels deeply personal, and plays on my desire to live in a fairer world, and is conscious of the needs of all people.

The New York City public schools’ gifted and talented program of my day gave me an escape from a failing system, not because teachers favored me, but because they truly believed in my abilities and needs for accelerated and advanced schoolwork. I believe that there are children out there, of all races and classes, all across our city, who need an advanced curriculum to succeed at their potential, but that it is not a privilege or an elite status to be earned solely through testing, it is a real necessity for these students. I believe that by defining “gifted” students as an elite group we do a disservice to students in genuine need.

The gifted and talented (G&T) program in New York City public schools is meant to educate gifted children in specialized classes to best serve their needs. Unfortunately, due to a decade old policy change, the G&T program now primarily serves white, Asian and affluent students in public schools, rather than a diverse group of gifted children. Where the program was once directed and implemented by individual school districts, mayoral control has centralized the implementation of most public school programs across the city. That policy change, which led to the creation of a standardized admissions process in which children as young as four years old must test for seats, was intended to create greater racial and economic equity in the education of gifted children. Instead, the G&T admissions process has only added to the distinct and visible racial and economic segregation in the public school system.

In this thesis I introduce key concepts critical to thinking about gifted education in New York City public schools. I provide background on the G&T program for those unfamiliar with it, and describe the two iterations of the program in schools. I also provide an analysis of segregation in schools caused by the program in its current state. This analysis touches more than just race, however, as I believe this is an understated issue in the media around the program, and encompasses issues of geography, race, income and special populations and student performance which merit study. I discuss integration, the movement towards greater equality in schools and how that has led me to a new look at gifted education through a reframing of the definition of giftedness in public schools. Finally, I discuss this reframed definition and evidence for it from research on giftedness in children and the need for schools to provide specialized services for them. I conclude with take away points from this research and what I hope readers will understand about gifted education.

Until we identify students in a manner that considers their “giftedness” a condition needing alternate or additional services, and not an elite label or reward, we won’t be able to assess the G&T program flaws, like the failure to standardize their curriculum, their access to resources, lack of funding, inequity in program locations, etc. We have to stop using G&T as a means to a “better” education, because we cannot say for sure that the gifted are actually being served in the current system. Read the whole thesis at: http://b.parsons.edu/~quirm123/

It was when I was able to make connections to the lived experiences of my community members and I to larger systemic issues that life became more real, heavy and urgent. Joining the Youth Power Project at Make the Road NY, a community based organization in Bushwick, provided me the space to vocalize my experience and to see that my experience is not just one, but one of many. As we politicized and worked with the words and tools to dismantle systems and reimagine another world, there were often moments of hopelessness and feelings of burnout. Gentrification was rapidly occurring in Bushwick; we were experiencing slum lords, expensive new developments, hyper-policing, a flow of people who did not look like us and did not respect existing livelihoods, an increase in discrimination, and disruptions in what we knew and now miss.

For historically marginalized communities, existing is a struggle in itself. I have learned with age that resistance comes in many forms; existence is resistance. The spaces community organizations have provided, and the way communities claim and transform that space is a form of community resistance. In the midst of this there are moments worth celebrating. The way people create and repurpose spaces with their presence is something worth analyzing. Amongst change that makes communities vulnerable to displacement, it is community identity and practices geared towards survival, practices essential to one's livelihood, that are important. It is for this reason that, focusing on my own family and on youth of color in Bushwick, my thesis explores the practices that underserved communities have developed and passed down that play an essential role in the way communities’ survive, thrive and resist.

Sometimes these practices don't seem to do such important work; they might be minute, normal and embedded into one’s everyday life. Yet through a series of photographs, mini-ethnographies, and interviews my work distinguishes and reveals the practices that make up community resilience. People do beautiful things every day that deserve to be recognized and empowered. It is critical to archive what community power looks like, in order for folks to understand, reproduce and protect these practices and systems. In the larger scheme, this is important to all who are interested in urban planning, community organizing, sociology, history, and anthropology. Like informal communities, what we are calling survival practice can serve to distinguish solutions to processes that cause disruption, imbalance, and displacement in the lives of many.

My research began with an investigation of the ecosystems of wetlands in Manhattan and their benefits to the city as green infrastructure. I decided to explore the topic by analyzing the city’s colonial past and the specific urban decisions that were taken to ultimately eradicate the vast majority of the city’s wetlands. The only saltmarsh on the island named Muscota Marsh is located at the tip of Manhattan on Spuyten Duyvil Creek in the Harlem River. It is adjacent to the Shorakapok Preserve of Inwood Hill Park, the last remaining naturally forested area on the island. The value of Inwood Hill Park and Muscota Marsh lies not only in their natural beauty, but also in their function as an educational and environmental resource for the city. What can we learn from the history of Inwood Hill Park’s development in order to enhance current principles of urban planning in New York City and move towards a more sustainable and equitable ecological future? To answer this, my work moves through an exploration of Manhattan’s colonial past and its development throughout the 21st century, focusing on Inwood Hill Park and Muscota Marsh, in order to examine the role of parks and wetlands in New York City in providing ecosystem services such as mitigating flood damage and promoting biodiversity.

The colonial man’s attitude towards the land was one of control and ownership. Swamps and marshlands were inconveniences that had to be removed for development to occur. It is fascinating to examine the history of Inwood Hill in the context of Mannahatta’s redevelopment since the park’s history is so densely intricate, and the conflict it faced between conservation and development speaks to a larger story of the city. In addition, it is important to evaluate New York City as a culturally and biologically diverse urban space. While New York City is often associated with imagery of skyscrapers, crowdedness, Times Square, sirens, chaos, it is also a space rich in biodiversity hosting over 2100 different plant species and 300 different bird species. A great benefit that is rarely discussed about biodiversity is its ability to illustrate the history of a space by linking the origins of species to a larger story of colonisation, inhabitation and immigration. We see this story very clearly through an analysis of Inwood Hill Park’s historical ecology as well as through a study of plant origins on the rest of the island.

With the progression of industry and urban development came a loss of natural habitats for the wildlife that had been rooted in Mannahatta’s identity for so long prior to colonialism. Urban planning ideologies have historically favored technological and infrastructural advancement instead of focusing on the wellbeing of the environment and the needs of the local residents. We have also seen the clash between the urban planner and a residential community countless times, especially in the context of New York City, where the first’s motives do not align with the latter’s goals. We must consider the construction of green infrastructure such as wetlands and salt marshes around the peripheries of the city in order to protect fragile coastal communities and conserve the city’s biodiversity.