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With lively exhibitions and a tongue-in-cheek walking tour, the Center
for Urban Pedagogy urges individuals to actively shape their city.
By Carly Berwick
The Metropolis Observed
February 2002
The lofty-sounding Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is actually a small room
in a converted industrial building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, cluttered
with city maps and leftover flyers for a recent exhibition at New York's
Storefront for Art and Architecture. For Building Codes: The Programmable
City, the collective of young designers, architects, and urban theorists
who make up CUP brought together contributors famous and obscure--
including SHoP, Martha Rosler, and the 210 Stanton Street Tenant Organization.
Storefront's narrow space was recreated as an imaginary city, with street
markings on the floor, scaled-down Plexiglas apartments, and noisy
debates over urban development priorities summed up on wall posters. A Web
project based on Building Codes and produced with the graphic-design firm
Honest will launch this summer at tenement.org. Carly Berwick talked with
president Damon Rich in CUP's office, itself in a quickly gentrifying
neighborhood.
Carly Berwick: How did the idea for Building Codes come about?
Damon Rich: We realized that it was the 100th anniversary of the Tenement
House Act of 1901, and codes fit in this category of things hidden
in plain view. They're something that anyone could look up, but few people
know--even though everyone lives among them.
What's so significant about the 1901 Tenement House Act?
It's become sort of a mythical narrative. First, there's this whole story
of the heroic middle-to-upper-class reformists--people like Jacob Riis and
Lawrence Veiller--seeing the impoverished Lower East Siders and launching
a campaign to lift them up and bring them into the American fold. There's
still this myth that while you want to help people you also want to dehumanize
them. There was this giant gap between the reformers and the people they
were trying to reform. It would be silly to say the act wasn't progress,
but at the same time we're able to criticize it.
Offsite:
After reading the interview with CUP's Damon Rich, find out what the
zoning rules are at the New York City Department of City Planning
homepage,
www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/home.html, with particular info on
Long Island City, the Unified Bulk Program, and Brooklyn Loft
Legislation. PS1's Web site is
www.ps1.org; the Storefront for Art and
Architecture is at
www.storefrontnews.org.
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You picked only a few laws to be in the show: the Tenement House Act, the
1929 Multiple Dwelling Law, and the 1961 Zoning Resolution.
In terms of legal history, we decided early on in the design of the exhibition
that there was no way it could be comprehensive. This is also part of the
whole CUP thing. On the one hand, you want to be very clear for people and
give them useful information--phone numbers to call, et cetera. On the other
hand, we're wary of letting people think that going to an exhibition can
be a substitute for actually being politically involved.
Can you talk about the walking tour you held at PS1 Center for Contemporary
Art?
The Italian architecture collective Gruppo A12 did an installation of their
Web-based project Parole, a dynamic dictionary of the contemporary city.
They asked people to do adjunct projects. We thought it was especially fortuitous
that Gruppo A12's project was about using the Web to chart cities in new
ways: it just so happens that there's a committee in Long Island City right
now called Cybercity@LIC that is giving out seed money to bring e-commerce
businesses in. It's obviously not very important that these companies are
Web-based or whatever; it's important that they're going to be driving up
property values. That goes along with zoning reforms in the area--buildings
becoming two to three times taller than they could before.
So we posed as developers. Well, CUP codirector Oscar Tuazon posed as a
developer; I was a business booster for a local development corporation.
We gave PS1 patrons a tour of the neighborhood, pointing out exciting real
estate ventures going on. We tried to make the point, in less and less subtle
ways as the day went on, about PS1's connection--high culture's connection--to
escalating property values and problems of displacement, both of manufacturing
and of lower-income residents.
What sites did you point out?
We visited the Fun Factory, which is an older cultural institution that
contains a nonprofit that lets graffiti artists use the walls.
The building is slated to be demolished and replaced by a 30-story office
tower. We visited the Citibank building, which is the tallest in New York
City outside of Manhattan. We visited the subway station directly underneath
Citibank, with the point being that one of the ongoing mantras of most developers
of Long Island City is that it's not really in Queens, it's basically in
Manhattan, since it's one subway stop from the Citicorp building on the
east side of Manhattan to the basement of the Citibank building in Long
Island City.
Did you ever blow your cover?
Some people seemed to take us at face value and asked how they could get
on waiting lists for new developments and condos. Other people tried to
put up a fight and said this doesn't seem very fair, it seems to benefit
those who are already rich at the expense of the community. You know those
PS1 patrons--it's hard to tell what they really think sometimes. We didn't
do any exit polls.
You're also doing work with kids at a city-run shelter in the Lower East
Side. How does that relate to projects like Building Codes and the walking
tour?
Working with the students is important to what we do--both aesthetically
and in terms of the tools that we try to use, which are very much taken
from this tradition of community-based education that had its beginnings
in the 1950s and '60s. Instead of using books, which are disembodied knowledge,
you could take students out into the neighborhood.
With kids is it more of an irony-free zone??
Well, we don't put them on, but kids are pretty ironic. Among the buildings
in Building Codes that the students created, there's a house just for millionaires
that has a bank on its first floor.
You're following the debate in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, over whether the
loft laws should be extended to many buildings in that community. What are
you tracking in terms of the effort to get work/live zoning for industrial
buildings there?
It has to do with charting ongoing relationships between culture and economic
development. The issues really have to do with how class plays itself out
on different turfs throughout the city. For example, the people who end
up making the biggest noise about displacement often are people who displaced
an earlier community.
It's a difficult issue. In this neighborhood you have the Polish community
and various Latino communities, who aren't very comfortable with what's
going on--yet they aren't for kicking people out of their homes because
they've had to fight for housing too. You're raising questions of capital,
cost, culture, and whether people who are presenting themselves as artists
should have special housing or not. According to city laws that are still
on the books, they should. I think it's interesting how much the situation
with the bourgeois bohemian has changed since the late 1980s.
In that the bourgeois bohemian has become a more common species than it
used to be?
It definitely seems that it's a common thing today. There are a lot
of people who can be living bohemian lifestyles and still be making a lot
of money. What used to be gritty and appealing to a smaller segment of the
market now has become those things to a much larger segment.
So do gentrification and neighborliness inherently clash?
In the loose way that we're using the word gentrification now it means
a kind of conflict that's inherent, that has to do with certain groups
fighting for space and resources with other groups, which would seem
to take away from a certain kind of neighborliness.
How do young urban professionals move to a poorer neighborhood without gentrifying--or
is that impossible?
I think the most important point is that it's never a question of individual
goodwill. The point is to learn to see how you, wittingly or unwittingly,
play into much larger social and economic currents.
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