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.

This year's class faced the immense challenges of our quarantining, dispersal, and switch to online work due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the middle of the Spring semester. This cohort supported each other in incredible ways, and the crisis we all face highlights the ways the questions their projects ask are even more critical for our future. Here, we present short summaries of their unique and wide-ranging work.

In 2006, twenty-one Industrial Business Zones (IBZs) were created by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in an attempt to protect remaining industry in New York City’s outer boroughs. Over the past fifty years, the City government has published various iterations of similar vision plans to preserve industry. Some of the most recent plans include the “Resilient Industry” and “10-Point Industrial” plan under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Despite minor recognition in City-led vision plans that industry and manufacturing areas are beneficial to the city’s economy and need to remain part of New York City's fabric, a much higher priority is placed on residential development. This has caused a lack of progress in the remediation of Newtown Creek through a superfund clean up overseen by the EPA, to the detriment of the industries and workers in the area, as well as the residential communities surrounding these manufacturing districts. In contrast, spaces such as those around the Gowanus Canal, which are planned as residential developments, are given more priority for cleanup because it is seen as more profitable to both the city and private property owners. Other previously contaminated brownfield sites along the East River in Williamsburg and Greenpoint have been rezoned and cleaned up for residential uses, resulting in the loss of many manufacturing zones that provided surrounding communities with thousands of jobs. Gentrification and displacement within these previously industrial areas is sparked by inappropriate zoning regulations and policy meant to protect the industrial zones. An attitude of “not in my backyard”, or NIMBYism, is strong in our city regarding public/ private services, giving a bad reputation to, and a desire to look away from, manufacturing districts.

With private property owners choosing renters over industries, this thesis asks whether manufacturing can continue to exist in New York City or if private commodification of property and land will lead to the extinction of our crucial industry. To address this, I explore what needs to change about policy and regulations for these industrial areas to thrive in a healthy, safe and economically sound environment. Using the history of Newtown Creek as well as rezonings and development of the Gowanus area and Williamsburg-Greenpoint, I show how the North Brooklyn, Maspeth, and LIC IBZs have been forced to become resilient and offer ways to understand Newtown Creek as a vital part of the larger system of New York City. We must move away from asking Newtown Creek’s industrial area to be “resilient”, and should instead change policy to better meet the needs of industrial areas—and to protect the health and jobs of the many people who work in them.

Central, unimportant, complicated, and uneasy 14th Street has been a landmark throughout my five years of life in New York City. We are used to valuing collective landmarks: the Empire State Building is probably the most famous in NYC. Its history and architecture have made it an icon - something we all recognize. In contrast, I started chronicling 14th Street in the fall of 2019 because of how meaningful it is to me. I once had a panic attack in front of The Beauty Bar. I discovered The Nugget Spot because I saw they had cable TV through the window and I wanted to watch the Emmy’s. I worked on a public art festival that happens all along the street every year. It’s become part of who I am because of the memories I’ve made there.

Yet 14th street hasn’t held meaning for just me – I’m interested in looking at the mundane and the quotidian, like this street, as a site of knowledge that many people produce. I wanted to work on a project that started from the ground. Inspired by Rebecca Solnit and Kevin Lynch, I began to walk the 2.2 miles of the street and document my walks through photographs, maps, and voice memos.

As an illustrator, I began to represent elements that stood out for me from my walks, conversations, and research as a series of collages and short statements. Through this visual process, I was able to capture the layered nature of the street, joining both the individual and collective stories that have made up these layers. I turned a selection of these illustrations into a set of six postcards that I planned to distribute along 14th Street with the intention of people using them to continue archiving and chronicling the street more collectively.

In looking at what I’d made from my walks, I realized that although I had been physically present on 14th Street, I had often created meaning in my surroundings in relationship to memory and hope. In the words of Tim Ingold, we are always “emplaced”; we collect and embody history as we navigate our lives, always attached to where we are.I identified individual landmarks which, like their collective counterparts, exist not only in space but in time and are vital to our understanding of cities as well as our own identities.

When in March 2020 COVID-19 began distancing us from each other and limiting our ways of being out in these everyday public spaces, I had to stop chronicling 14th Street. I started mailing the postcards and receiving notes back on the blank postcards I'd sent, creating an archive that asks what memory and place mean when we’re kept at home. I have thought of being quarantined as a form of displacement, but have found it doesn’t remove us from creating attachments to places, even those we don’t have access to physically.

The 14th Street Landmark Postcard Project is ongoing. If you are interested in participating, please sign up here!

Despite growing up in a suburb of what we’d call “the city,” I spent my summers going to camp in Oklahoma City and each summer noticed that it seemed different, without the understanding that I was witnessing gentrification. Oklahoma City interests me as an example of urban change not only because I grew up there, but also because of the unique history of both the city and the state. The grids from the original land run lots are still intact on the outskirts of the city, which has resulted in an urban area with incredibly low density and predominantly single-family housing. A car is a necessity for all residents as bus routes run infrequently, and the light rail only opened in 2018, leaving much of the sprawling city underserved by public transportation.

Through this research, I sought to understand what happened to transform my quaint hometown “city” into a place that almost feels properly ‘urban’. After discovering that it was not exclusively the acquisition of the Oklahoma City Thunder that gave the city national recognition, I focused on what Forbes magazine once deemed a “model public-works program” - the four iterations of the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS), and the messaging that surrounded them. Oklahoma City proved somewhat challenging to research, as most writing about the city focuses on the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, so outside of academic literature, I looked to local journalism as well as the city forum page and other social media to understand local perception about the changes in the city.

The original MAPS project was initiated in 1993 after the city lost a bid for business with United Airlines. The proposal was to collect a voter-approved sales tax to attract private investment that would jointly fund the development of a commercial district to be known as Bricktown. A newspaper headline from the morning of the bombing, as displayed in the Memorial Museum, indicated that much of the early MAPS efforts were stalling prior to a need to rebuild the city. It looked risky to invest in real estate in Oklahoma City in 1993, because not only was the local economy still recovering from an oil bust in the 1980s, but also because property in Oklahoma simply wasn’t a commodity whose value appreciated rapidly as compared to the rest of the country. But a need to “heal the city”, for its residents as well as the nation, attracted the funds to build the baseball stadium Bricktown needed. MAPS also benefited the oil companies - when Oklahoma City lost the United bid in 1993, it was because United didn’t feel OKC offered the same quality of life for their employees as Indianapolis even though their bottom line would have been lower in OKC. If oil companies were willing to invest in revitalizing downtown areas they saw to be blighted, they’d find more success in recruiting college-educated hires from out-of-state.

2008 was the next huge year for Oklahoma City, with the arrival of the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team, and the beginning of construction on what would become the one and only skyscraper on the skyline, the Devon Tower. A few local millionaires purchased the team after seeing the local excitement of hosting the Hornets after Hurricane Katrina. Devon would move their headquarters from Houston to Oklahoma City in 2012, investing heavily into various MAPS 3 projects. This was the same year the city hosted a few games of the NBA finals which brought a huge spark to the local economy. Year after year, excitement about the city, from both residents and tourists, seemed to grow, along with investment and development. When I moved away in 2015 I thought it seemed crazy that I had friends willing to pay the same rent there as I paid in Austin, Texas. Now I think it’s ridiculous that people are paying there what I pay in Brooklyn!

I began a geospatial analysis to understand trends across the city in income and property value as they’ve changed over time, and looked at a new neighborhood called the Wheeler District which is the focus of MAPS 4. This neighborhood was of interest because it was framed as a gateway district to connect the currently fragmented areas of the city. The homes available in this community are listed for more than 3 times the median sale price of homes in the city, and almost 10 times as much as homes in the immediately adjacent neighborhoods. This is government sanctioned gentrification is branded as the modernity the state has been lacking for a century. MAPS 4 was approved by voters in December of 2019, but the future of the state’s economy seems just as uncertain as everything else. If the sole industry powering the state deflates, what does that do to these plans? The state has always existed in cycles of boom and bust, but what are the implications of this bust if it follows a boom exponentially greater than any before?

The term ‘food systems’ encompasses more than just ideas about food itself, but also takes into consideration nutrition, health, community, agricultural, and development. Through examination of food systems, and more specifically urban food systems, one can learn what a group of people, whether on a national scale, or a local one thinks about food, how they interact with it, and what their struggles are within their current system. There has been an increasing amount of research done by not only urban planners, but also those in the environmental, health, and community organizing fields that studied food systems all across the world. While each field of academia has their own focuses, they have all recorded changes in the current food systems of the world, and the trends throughout them. Some of these trends include new food movements such as the food sovereignty movement, the alternative food movement, an movement that focuses on the importance of fresh organic food, and movements within communities that sometimes blend the ideas of the formerly listed movements to create a better life for their residents. As an individual, we might not notice the large scale operations of these movements, however we can see their small effects in the way that people change their food habits, such as starting a new trendy diet like keto, or completely changing their relationship with food, such as becoming vegan or vegetarian, and focusing on the importance of organic foods that have not been treated with pesticides.

While multiple studies have noticed and made remarks on the new changes in food systems, they have all also found a component in the food system that has seen very little change over time; food deserts. A food desert is an area where it is difficult to buy affordable or good quality fresh food. Within food deserts, there is less access to fresh, healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant food due to the lack of grocery stores, long distances to the grocery stores that are in the area, lower incomes of residents, and higher prices of food. Many researchers have noted the problems that residents face within food deserts such as poor nutritional diets and more severe health risks. While a multitude of researchers have addressed the food desert phenomena, and some have researched interventions within food deserts, the food desert is still an issue that millions, if not billions of people must deal with on a daily basis. This raises the question, why have we not eradicated the food desert yet? Why is it that researchers have all noted the negative effects these food deserts have, but have not done anything to solve the problem? And for those that have attempted to mitigate some issues faced in a food desert, why do many of these interventions fail?

In this thesis I argue that the term ‘food deserts’ is problematic due to the fact that it ignores the racist structures and regulations that have led to the intentional formation of these spaces, and that the term does not accurately encapsulate what this environment truly looks like, thus leading researchers to solve a problem that they do not truly comprehend. Through an independent study of two neighborhoods, I examine how an area known as a food desert may not truly be one, but that the residents are facing other issues that are masked by the assumption that they live in a food desert. Through this study I prove that future research needs to be conducted at a smaller scale to truly understand the struggles of a community, and that researchers must step back as academics to truly partner with communities in order to initiate changes within them. Through this research I also prove that the term food desert does not accurately describe the community, and in comparison the second community that is viewed as food secure with an abundance in access is not as perfect as it seems, with many residents facing problems with food availability. This thesis aims to call on all fields academica, governments, and communities to work together to begin understanding our food environments on local scales, and how to initiate change that will last and redesign these food environments. The problem of a food desert is not the sole responsibility of one person, or one body of academia, and as long as we treat it as one group’s problem, we will never eradicate them.

Many scholars bemoan the demise of queer spaces. They point to the mass closings of gay and lesbian bars, and to gay neighborhoods like the Castro District in San Francisco evicting historic queer culture and activism to become state-sponsored tourist hotspots draped in rainbow flags. They point to gentrification, assimilation, social media and dating apps as the causes of gay space disappearing.

Last summer, I attended a pick-up soccer game for queer and trans people, organized by a group called Dyke Soccer. It felt like I was participating in something revolutionary. I saw proof that queer spaces are not at all in decline or losing significance. The thirty sweating and smiling queer and trans people I ran around with that day are proof that queer life is still thriving, it has just begun to take a different shape. Not a bar, not a neighborhood, but something different, something mobile, fluid, and flexible; something I will refer to as a pop-up.

Dyke Soccer can be classified as a pop-up event. It blossoms for just a brief period of time, and it is able to easily move its location when necessary. In my research, I use Dyke Soccer and Hot Rabbit, a mobile queer dance party, as case studies to support the two central claims of my thesis: pop-ups produce community spaces where queer sexuality and gender are freely expressed and explored, where intersectional needs are recognized and addressed, and in which queer participants feel a sense of belonging, safety, and community. Queer pop-ups are created in direct contrast to brick and mortar queer spaces, which are often perceived as inaccessible, unwelcoming, and inadequate for meeting community needs.

I use ethnographic and participatory research methods in my study of Hot Rabbit and Dyke Soccer. I interviewed event organizers to understand the impetus that led to the founding of each event; additionally, organizers spoke on the vision and goals of their pop-up, and successes and challenges they’ve faced in achieving them. To learn about the actual impact that events have, I interviewed participants. Altogether, I conducted interviews with eight people.I also drew on my own personal experiences with these events.

An analysis of the data suggests that the pop-up format, enabled by key characteristics such as spatial mobility, the resultant flexibility of events, responsiveness to community needs and interest, and deliberate and vocal intersectionality, afford organizers and participants a degree of self-determination that is conducive for creating anti-normative environments where participants feel a sense of belonging, empowerment, and safety.

In the midst of the pandemic, the need for queer community is more important than ever, and pop-ups are finding creative ways to be responsive to this need. One potential new direction for research on pop-ups lies in the relationship between physical transience and online, digital communities. This relationship is especially salient right now as we see organizers of queer pop-ups moving their events online to accommodate social distancing.

With the possibility of bars and clubs closing as a result of the financial strains of the pandemic, pop-ups are already poised to successfully bounce from venue to venue as needed while continuing to mediate consistent and meaningful experiences. While the loss of physical, in-person queer community is painful right now, pop-ups remind us of the long lineage of creative, adaptive solutions that we queers have created in order to thrive and be in community with one another.

This thesis explores the impacts, implications, and future of public space in modern cities, specifically exploring the turn away from informal or “loose” spaces toward neoliberal and consumption-oriented urban planning. It may seem obvious, but in order for a space to be truly “public,” it must first be accessible to said public. Yet, many of our “public” institutions are not actually public by nature of their exclusion of or deterrence of marginalized minority groups, poor people, and “deviants” of all sorts. To understand this critical issue, I will be focusing on the common practice in American cities of developers creating “privately-owned public spaces” (known as POPS), in return for greater floor areas and fee waivers.

Loose spaces are urban areas in which unsanctioned activity occurs through people’s willingness to use a space for their needs without regard to the spaces original intentions or the desires of government officials. These are important to our cities, adding a wellspring of culture, diversity, innovation, and radical expression, but are rapidly being replaced in New York City with neoliberalized urban spatial planning practices, epitomized by the POPS program.

Through my research, I hope to contribute to a better understanding of POPS and their effectiveness/ accessibility to the public. A detailed evaluation of hostile architecture and design within them will contribute a greater general understanding of their efficacy, so that appropriate changes in policy can be made to reflect the failure of private actors to uphold their obligations to the public, and possibly halt our ongoing destruction of the urban commons. I also briefly explore parallels between this scholarly field and that of the online commons, which are similarly threatened and violated in our current planning system.

The wider context in which I want to situate my research is that of ill-advised, neo-liberal urban planning, which threatens to homogenize the world’s most culturally significant urban environments, and suburbanize them into obscurity.

In this thesis, I grapple with the ethical implications of urban growth. To analyze this issue, I have looked at the development of the Link light rail in Seattle, the Pacific Northwest city that has been rapidly growing over the past two decades to accommodate the burgeoning digital and biotechnology industries in the region. Understanding the historical trends of public transportation infrastructure has been a cornerstone of this thesis. Looking at how Seattle has responded to different opportunities and the context in which decisions were made paint a clearer picture of how the city became the car-centric city that it is today.

Seattle has seen many iterations of development, most recently the inclusion of light rail transit. Through each phase of light rail development, the city has faced a different set of strengths and challenges. Before 1996, there had been several proposals for rail transit, however they were continuously turned down in favor of increasing bus service. In 1996, Sound Move was passed as the first plan for rail transit. This project entailed a single spine connecting the University of Washington to Sea-Tac. After overcoming its own set of challenges, two more phases, Sound Transit 2 and Sound Transit 3, have since been approved which will total over 100 miles of light rail connections.

Through incorporating rail transit in the transit model, Seattle has made great strides in addressing the issues of sustainability and congestion that comes with single occupancy vehicle use. This thesis explores what more can be done in terms of equitable growth. In highlighting what the different iterations have been, I have come up with a solution that has the potential to lower the barriers to the city for those who have been displaced, and make the city more accessible for future residents of the region. Providing free transportation could be one way to make development better for all, including those who have been displaced, by keeping the barriers to the city low.

In the early 1900s, Seattle had a comprehensive streetcar system that connected the city center to the surrounding suburbs. Seattle has found success in many industries. As cars became the primary mode of transportation in the middle of that century, the streetcars were removed. Also due to cars gaining popularity, congestion increased significantly. Over the next several decades into the 1990s, the city struggled to combat the issues at hand as the solutions seemed like mere bandaids over bullet holes.

Flash forward to the present day and we are still having similar conversations. As businesses continued to develop, the population continued to increase. Today, the Puget Sound Region is home to Amazon, Microsoft, the Bill Gates Foundation, and many other digital and biotechnology companies.

Through the different phases of growth, issues that are common in all urban centers have presented themselves. Sustainability, affordability, and displacement all come into question in the conversation around urban growth. Long term planning has been a large hurdle in the Puget Sound region in the past, and in the last two decades as rail transit has been reimplemented, long term planning has become part of the city's model for growth. The most recent light rail package, Sound Transit 3, will provide interurban transit reaching through most of the Central Puget Sound region, addressing the need for more connectivity and rapid public transit.

I looked at several other cities that have implemented free, or pre-paid, transportation to figure out what has worked and what hasn’t to see if this is a feasible policy solution. In making free fare part of this long term plan, the wellbeing of all residents could be increased. While this is not the only solution, it could be a step in the right direction in terms of compassionate and sustainable policy and planning, with all residents well being in mind.