As snow fell heavily on the pavement, a small crowd assembled at the steps of the Museum of the American Indian in Lower Manhattan. Signs were distributed, reading “Housing Justice for All” on one side and pictures of developers encased in dollar notes on the other. Some had written in, “Greedy Landlords,” “Stop Kushner,” or “Cuomo’s Housing Crisis.” While the crowd expanded, organizers formed a circle filled with makeshift drums, calling out chants: “One, two, three, four—I can’t pay my rent no more! Five, six, seven, eight—Cuomo works for real estate!” Continue reading “The Call for Affordable Housing Means Housing Justice for All”
Arielle Hersh
Migrant Squatters in Berlin Fighting for the Right to the City
The Gerhart-Hauptmann Schule was already empty when police arrived to clear the building on the morning of January 11, 2018. A small crowd of around 100 protesters gathered in the dreary cold and marched solemnly to commemorate the end of Refugee Strike House. The ten remaining refugees and migrants who had been occupying the building had left voluntarily the night before after securing a deal with the Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain district council.
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Discussing the Legacy of Jane Jacobs
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City directed by Matt Tyrnauer was release in the spring of 2017. The film details the life and work of the author and activist Jane Jacobs. After seeing Citizen Jane at IFC this summer, Gallatin Students and Urban Democracy Lab Student Advisory Board members Arielle Hersh and Luis Aguasviva sat down to discuss the film and the contradictory legacies of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. The film can currently be watched on Amazon Video or iTunes.
Luis Aguasviva (LA): Let’s begin by addressing the narrative presented in Citizen Jane Jane: The Battle for the City of Jane Jacobs (the hero) vs. Robert Moses (the villain).
Arielle Hersh (AH): Yeah, it’s very prevalent.
LA: It was framed as a David vs. Goliath story. The film directly attributes Robert Moses’s “demise” to Jacobs’s organizing efforts that stop Moses’s building projects in Washington Square Park and the West Village.
AH: I definitely agree that it oversimplifies what’s going on and breaks it down into that dichotomy, but at the same time I felt like it was a really good lens for someone coming to this story for the first time. It’s kind of the way I was introduced to urban planning – I remember hearing the story and seeing it set up as “Moses bad, Jacobs good, they go to battle, Jacobs wins, now we have planning.” We know that that’s not really what happened, but if you’re framing it for someone who isn’t really familiar with the story or with Jacobs, then it seemed like a good primer.
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