Alien spaces: Planning, reform, and preservation on the Lower East Side, 1880-2002
Item
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Title
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Alien spaces: Planning, reform, and preservation on the Lower East Side, 1880-2002
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:4896d45aa8ec:12006
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identifier
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12716
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Creator
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Amato, Rebecca Ann,
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Contributor
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Gerald Markowitz
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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History | American studies | Civil engineering | Lower East Side | Manhattan | New York City | preservation | social reform | urban planning
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Abstract
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In this project, I trace the ways in which reform and urban planning discourses, shored up by a desire for ethnic and racial regulation, defined the Lower East Side as an "alien space," both removed from and problematic for the rest of New York City over the long twentieth century. I argue that this sustained discourse of "alienness" in the service of regulation - varying from Progressive reform efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to the racially-charged citizen participation efforts of the mid-twentieth century urban renewal era to the battle for community preservation in the face of increasing gentrification at the turn of the twenty-first century - had a direct impact on the built environment of the Lower East Side. This approach to the neighborhood's formation and development not only links language (the discursive production of the area) with action (its demolition, construction, reconstruction, and preservation), it also highlights the profound fissures that existed in liberal reform, particularly with regard to race and ethnicity. Even when ambivalence toward the Lower East Side's ethnic population was not readily apparent, as in the language of social science and the maps of urban planning, it was implied by ongoing questions about the fitness of Lower East Siders to determine the fate of their own neighborhood.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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History
