Category Archives: New York City

Gender and Democracy After Sandy

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How do we now adapt to the climate-changed world that Sandy has woken us up to? Do we continue to militarize the world and talk of “hard” or “soft” options, in a country where hard means tough means masculine means good? And crucially who gets to decide? Early signs are troubling.

Rockaways one week after.

Since the storm swept into New York City, a long-frustrated lobby for the construction of a sea-barrier has seen its chance. Touting the $10 billion cost against the $50 billion the storm has supposedly cost, the barrier is presented as a “hard” option that will keep the water out. Except that it will do nothing for the barrier islands that suffered most. And if sea level rise is anything like what has been predicted, then even these barriers will be over-topped if and when a full-blown hurricane hits the region.

Alternatives have been proposed, such as the restoration of wetlands, the natural barrier to storms. We might try and restore shellfish like oysters to New York Harbor, where they used to grow in their millions, as a form of living reef. We can soften the waterfront with wetter and more absorptive environments. And we might have to stop living on the barrier islands, at least on a permanent year-round basis. That might make for cleaner water and beaches.

According to a widely-quoted geologist named Robert Young, however, in the United States:

Retreat is a dirty word.

Why designate a sensible life-protecting and ecological decision as a retreat? Why make the urban decision into a war?

In a long piece in today’s New York Times, the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman offers storm-destroyed communities a choice of futures but also unspecified responsibilities. It’s hard to see what this means in practice, as the costs involved in restoring services and roads are far beyond the reach of increases in local taxation, which is what I take “responsibilities” to mean.

As he thinks this through, Kimmelman gets more and more concerned. He starts thinking about Robert Moses, whose brutalizing pro-auto policies did so much to damage New York and against whom Jane Jacobs campaigned. Kimmelman notes:

His biographer Robert Caro wrote in the 1970s that Moses “bent the democratic processes of the city to his own ends to build public works,” albeit “left to themselves, these processes proved unequal to the building required.”

“The problem of constructing large-scale public works in a crowded urban setting,” Mr. Caro added, “is one which democracy has not yet solved.”

And it still hasn’t.

And out of the eye of the storm, which we were told so often did not discriminate, returns the spectre of Plato and his hatred of democracy.

In fact, the storm has mixed things up in an interesting way. Occupiers have been in discussion with cops and firefighters in Staten Island. National Guard have worked alongside community groups and FEMA has been notably receptive to comment. A democracy is happening. People haven’t had time to get to what’s next. I’ve heard every kind of idea from rebuild to retire or restart the urban idea altogether. There’s no consensus yet. Anyone looked at our supposed leaders, unable to agree on what day it is?

And yet for some, the new normal is just like the old normal, the white guys get to call the shots, pretend its a war and declare themselves winners. What do you expect from a country that still has gladiators?

 

Today the General Strike, Tomorrow the Jubilee!

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Today there was a general strike across Europe. From Spain to Portugal, Greece, Italy, Belgium and the UK. Hundreds of thousands rejecting austerity for the attempt to create social control by fiscal policy that it so clearly is. Tomorrow in New York, we declare victory for the Rolling Jubilee. Before we have even begun the event we are in a position to abolish $2,750,000 of debt and that rises every second. Can you feel it?

Amazing scenes, including surely the best banner drop ever, from the Leaning Tower of Pisa:

No one believes the Troika any more. The Spanish government claimed the strike was not being well observed. Here’s the Gran Via in Madrid, like Broadway in New York:

The police tried to distract attention from the issues by provoking violence in their usual way but this cannot be beaten away.

Here’s Charles Dallara, head of the Institute of International Finance,  the policies of austerity in Greece:

It is time to recognize that austerity alone condemns not just Greece but the whole of Europe to the probability of a painful and protracted era of little or no economic growth. This would be a tragedy not just for Greece and for Europe, but for the world.

It’s a global movement now. in Venice protesters draped a bank with banners reading:

You are making money out of our debts

National Theatre of Spain on strike

Currently, extended families support people in Greece.

“But when that dries up, and it will with these latest measures, there will be no reason not to descend en masse onto the streets,” said Kostas Kapetanakis, a young sociologist holding a banner demanding free education, health and welfare system. “There will be a revolt because we will have absolutely nothing to lose.”

We are not as far gone here in New York but tomorrow will be a day of jubilant revolt and mutual aid. You can follow the Telethon live on RollingJubilee.org. I hope to be in a condition to report on it for you by Thursday. Tomorrow join hands and hearts and:

Strike Debt!

Unprecedented, Not Unpredicted

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It was dramatic, you have to give Sandy that. About eight last night, a dramatic set of explosions with pink and green flashes was followed by a bright white pulse. And then the lights went out. Water started rising rapidly to the west of us, crossing Tenth Avenue and to the East, reaching as far as Avenue B. It was all over the FDR, down 34th St, 14th St, 4th St. There was a time when you began to wonder if it would reach us in the middle of Manhattan (just by Washington Square Park in the NYU housing). Then at 10.30pm Twitter reports indicated the water was falling back. We turned off the phones to save batteries and went to sleep.

Daylight revealed a plethora of problems. No power means no water in an apartment block like ours. No elevators of course. And we’re on the 14th floor. A look outside the door revealed that the exit signs and emergency lights on the stairs weren’t working. A long walk down revealed that all of downtown was without power. Long Island–one alternative destination for us–was just as bad. It became clear that solutions were days away. While we had many containers of water, it turns out that a manual flush uses a lot. Time to leave. Right now, I’m occupying New Haven, CT, where there are plenty of trees down but the power is still on.

And also to ask questions. From the radio, we learned that NYU Langone hospital had a defective back-up generator, leading to an emergency evacuation last night. As we drove past it today, a fleet of private ambulances with yellow stickers indicating that they had been commissioned by FEMA were lined up outside. No other sign of FEMA by the way. Why was so basic a safety system insecure? Why did the expensive and noisy building of the NYU Co-Generation plant not protect at least the water supply for its residences? And so on. All those infrastructure dollars shaved off budgets over the neo-liberal expansion years now stand revealed as essential, not dispensable.

The real bottom line of the hurricane is, as you know, that all the warnings and predictions so many have made about the game-changing effects of climate change. You can measure this from one simple figure. In 1821, the highest water level previously recorded at New York was 11.21 feet. To be prudent, Con Ed, the local electricity company, builds its facilities to be capable of withstanding not just this flood but one two feet higher. Only last night we went clean over 13.5 feet and the electric grid went down.

So much about Sandy is unprecedented, but none of it was unpredicted. There was very little rain by hurricane standards in New York. The wind was fierce certainly but it was a tropical storm, not even a hurricane. These events are about water level and water temperature. Sandy kept energy all the way to New York because the Gulf Stream is abnormally warm after the hot summer. The water levels are higher due to the ongoing effects of climate change. With the massive melt in the Arctic this year more water is liquid in the Atlantic than usual. As we saw in Japan last year, relatively small rises in sea level when compressed in high sea level events by wind or other forces result in extraordinary high waves, tides and storm surges.

The only surprise for anyone who has followed climate and ocean change news reports, let alone the scientific literature, is that it’s happening somewhat faster than expected. As I have observed on several occasions in this writing project, at some point the debate over Zuccotti Park would become academic because it would be underwater. Given that Wall Street was reported flooded last night, I’m assuming that happened last night. And from a New York-centric point of view, we dodged the real bullet yesterday because New Jersey took the worst of the storm.

Governor Cuomo has been talking extensively about the changed weather pattern but only  in terms of how to defend and prepare. We’ll have to do that of course. But unless we change the patterns of our existence, none of it will matter. A long, dreary clean-up is ahead. Let’s make the emergency into the emergence of a new pattern of everyday life that works on the understanding that there’s a new normal.

 

A Walk on the West Side

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New York is a very parochial city. You tend to stay where you feel comfortable and move in a set of familiar patterns. Today I was out of my comfort zone all over the West side, observing a new corporate district emerging and engaging in some rehearsals for a performance at the end of the week.

Today began with a walk back down the High Line from 30th Street, where I left my car to be fixed with a great group of guys from Côte d’Ivoire. They got a huge kick out of the fact that I speak French, which is apparently not common in their usual clientele of South Asian taxi drivers and New York City officials. It was a place that I fetched up at because of Yelp!  As is not uncommon in global cities of the South, this shop actually fixes things, albeit in an improvised fashion. I usually feel wildly out of place in US car places, where it is really obvious I don’t do mainstream masculinity at all well. Here was fine, we talked about the European soccer championships and made fun of people in French.

The casual improvised feel could not be more removed from the High Line. It has extended Chelsea’s art district north and allows for walkers to see works displayed in non-traditional spaces. So there was a large portrait by JR, the French art-ivist, as he calls himself on the back wall of a house. Usually I love JR’s stuff but one piece by itself seemed out of place, just another commercial display. Even early in the morning, the High Line crawls with people, mostly tourists, all taking extensive photographs.

At the north end, there’s a massive building project going on over the West Side railyards. Two full city blocks are being converted into the usual mix of offices, high-end apartments and retail outlets with one or two affordable places in undesirable locations thrown in as a sop. One site is being developed by our old friends Brookfield Properties. This site, which they are calling Manhattan West was announced on September 2, 2011, just two weeks before OWS moved into Zuccotti Park. It stretches from 31st to 33rd Streets and from 9th to Dyer Avenue. It’s huge. When you see the scale of all this, it’s amazing to think that Occupy has had any impact at all.

From there I had to go up to Columbia University to rehearse for what is being billed as a performative lecture on debt in the series Debt! hosted by undergroundzeronyc, a theater festival. The project brings together directors from Eastern Europe, with performers and lecturers from New York. Our project, “Yours In Debt!“, is being co-ordinated by Ida Daniel, from Bulgaria, whose work, so far as I have seen it, seems very much influenced by Brecht and behind him Kafka. The performance we’re doing has an Expert and Assistants, and the latter were very important characters in Kafka.

Kafka

Just as in Kafka, the Assistants are really in charge of the performance, not because of the way it is structured, so much as because they really are performers. Working on exits and entrances, thinking about cues and so on, you realize how glib the academic use of performative often can be. Applied to ourselves, it means that we do what we do anyway but now with a sexier name. Actually performing feels much harder, even though the topic is one with which I am now only too familiar.

Or is it just rehearsing, trying to work out how to work with people in a space whose dynamics are new? Put like that, it starts to seem more familiar. There is a curious dynamic here by which I began writing about the performativity of Occupy and now I am doing a performance about Occupy. This is what happens if you venture onto the West Side.

In search of protest past

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So I had this idea for Memorial Day weekend that it would be interesting to look back at past protest literature from the New York area and see what could be learned, in the manner of all those op-eds about nineteenth-century presidents and Greek wars. I looked again at Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities. For all the obvious differences, there’s one clear similarity: the NYPD were awful even then.

Carson’s very title depends on a conceit that I don’t think still works very much. It comes from the idea that because of bird death resulting from the use of the pesticide DDT, there might be a spring without bird song. Although I did have a friend go back to England because he missed the song of the thrushes (a small brown bird), I’m not sure that most of us would register the difference now. I rarely notice birds singing, except when starlings are massing for migration. As we now mostly travel in sealed vehicles, more often than not with ear-buds in place, that interface is less vital than it once was.

DDY being sprayed in 1948

On the other hand, Carson mentions that after the village of Setauket on the north shore of Long Island was sprayed with DDT, a horse drank from a trough in the high street–and died immediately. The toxicity of DDT was its selling point and Long Island was doused with it to try and eradicate the gypsy moth to no avail. In the years since there has been a notorious breast cancer hotspot on the Island. DDT is said not to be a carcinogen and all the studies made have failed to show a link between pesticide use and cancer–except it might be said for the one in real women’s bodies in real space. Rachel Carson died of breast cancer shortly after her book was published in 1962.

But if you Google Carson and DDT, half the entries you will see accuse her of being a murderer. The bizarre conceit is that malaria in the dominated world could be more effectively eradicated with widespread use of DDT and the fact that is not is Carson’s fault. There is a perfectly effective way to prevent malaria, which is to give people treated mosquito nets. It works, it’s cheap and it has no side-effects. But giving money for that would not have the fun of “demolishing” an environmental pioneer.

Jane Jacobs (center) in The White Horse, Hudson St

The New York City described by Jane Jacobs is perhaps even more remote than the world of horse troughs and bird song in Carson’s book. It’s a place where you can leave a key for a visiting friend at the local deli and everyone has an eye out for the kid in the street. In fact, this culture of what she directly calls “surveillance” is a bit creepy: when people encircle a man who is trying to get a child to follow him, it turns out he is her father. She talks off-handedly of a neglected park in Philadelphia becoming a “pervert park,” meaning a place for same-sex assignations in the era of the closet. There’s no street politics in this book, rather a permanent watchfulness that takes its pleasure in seeing that “all is well.”

Jacobs’ view of the mixed use, high density urban space has become canonical now, even if her follow-up thought that “slums” should be left alone has not. Much of her argument against the Le Corbusier influenced city planner now seems a bit slow-going, so thoroughly has the view reversed. On the other hand, she’s completely right when she says:

that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact – they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

You could apply this insight to see why Bloomberg et al. originally left Zuccotti alone to transform itself into Liberty Plaze: because it simply never occurred to them that anyone would be interested, still less want to join in or follow the Occupiers’ example.

Jacobs waged her campaigns by local petitions that she would then take to the Board of Estimate, a land-use body composed of the Mayor, the Comptroller, the Council President and the Borough Presidents. It met once a week and could be petitioned by citizens, until the Supreme Court abolished it in 1989. If this sounds like a democracy gone by, that’s certainly the case. On the other hand, look what happened to Jacobs in 1968:

Jane Jacobs, a nationally known writer on urban problems, was arraigned in Criminal Court yesterday and charged with second-degree riot, inciting to riot and criminal mischief. The police had originally charged that Mrs. Jacobs tried to disrupt a public meeting on the controversial Lower Manhattan Expressway. ‘The inference seems to be,’ Mrs. Jacobs said, ‘that anybody who criticizes a state program is going to get it in the neck.’”

— The New York Times, April 18, 1968

Now that sounds familiar enough: being charged with rioting for trying to express an opinion at a public meeting. So it turns out that some things never change.