"Late at night, just befiore the stillness came, he scaled condemned fire escapes and explored the roofs and skylights, lay on the sooty grass behind the Underground station, sat on swings and sang, climbed trees in the dark squares, screamed until the dawn went misty with tears, raced like an animal through the dying streets."
The quote is from Martin Amis's 1974 novel Dead Babies, but it could very well apply to 21st century New York. Though changed, most of the streets still contain vague reminders, telescoped suggestions of what has been, of what was there, and of what might have been.
This is Bellow, in Mr Sammler's Planet:
"On Second Avenue the springtime scraping of roller skates was heard on hollow, brittle sidewalks, a soothing harshness. Turning from the new New York of massed apartments into the older New York of brownstone and wrought-iron, Sammler saw through large black circles in a fence daffodils and tulips, the mouths of these flowers open and glowing, but on the pure yellow the fallout of soot already was sprinkled. You might in this city become a flower-washer. There was an additional business oportunity for Wallace and Feffer."
The business of flower-washing is an apt one for New York. A wry smile barely glances the countenance of those who walk past hospitals for cowboy boots while public services - particularly in the areas of health and housing - disappear into the aether. New York is a city intent on honouring the liberty of the individual at any cost.
At a Starbuck's in Union Square, the warmth from the cafe's ducted internal conditioning.
It became the strategy of many municipalities during the end of the twentieth century to employ former social movement organisations in the devlopment and implementation of (alternative) social and cultural services, of housing provision, and local economic development.What emerged were self-organised initiatives centered primarily on housing, groups formed arouund social and economic problems manifest in sepecific local places. Most of these groups have honed a synergistic structural relationship with the local state.
Banana Kelly on Prospect Avenue in the Bronx is a community organisation which emerged from squatting and militantly defending houses in the 1970s, went on to rehabbing these houses, and is now managing hundreds of low-income houses, helped along by a variety of municipal programs funding sweat-equity and tenant management and the like. It is part of the South Bronx, one of the highest concentrations of Puerto Ricans in New York, and an area that was extensively re-invested during the mid-nineties, a turning point in the history of cities like New York that had seemed to have gradually but irrevocably changed between the fifties and eighties.
The synergy is not only between the government and such organisations, but businesses. In search of an investor, Banana Kelly found a Swedish firm to set up a large paper mill for recycling Manhattan's enormous output of office paper.
The establishment of alternative renewal agents and sweat-equity programs, and the fnding of self-help and social serivce groups was in most places a long and contested process, but since the late 1980s municipal social and employment programs everywhere have been making use of the skills, knowledge and labour of such movement groups. Simlarly, many cultural projects have become part of the "official city", and many youth and social centres play acknowledged roles in integrating "problem groups" and potential conflict.
This sort of post-war arc - from the optimism of the fifties to the unravelling of the sixties and seventies, the cynicism and decadence of the eighties and the final tired going-back of the nineties feels like a pattern that occured across the entire Western world. The transformations during the seventies, eighties and nineties were, to a great extent, accelerated by municipal, state, and national programs, in Western Europe also by supra-national programs of the EU. These programs, which were first launched in the U.S., were far from coordinated, far-sighted adaptations of regulation mechanisms; rather, they were disparate and uncoordinated reactions to the pressure of tenant groups and community organisations on the one hand and to the financial crisis of American cities, the renewal problems of decaying neighbourhoods, and the threat to social integration posed by minorities and impoverished populations on the other. Beginning in the early 1970s, the North American programs focused generally on neighbourhoods and community-based organising. In NYC, for example, the Community Managemnt program (launched in 1972) and the Sweat Equity Homesteading Program were not coordinated until 1978 in one administrative unit, the Division of Alternative Management programs, within the Office for Urban Renewal. All the different DAMP programs required the self-labour ("sweat equity") of the tenants. Soon the municipal subsidy for this kind of self-help and self-organisation proved "successful" for the city, as rent payments went up and the rate of privatisation was accelerated (Mayer/Katz 1985). This perhaps is the crux of the synergy now taking place in the 21st century, and referred to by many New Yorkers as gentirfication.
"A Perfect Silence", 1995, by Alba Ambert, from Growing up Puerto Rican:
"Blanca was taken to live with Conchita, her new guardian, inspected and licenced by the city to care for children in crises. She took antibiotics provided by the city for stubborn infection and wore clothes provided by the city. Blanca, whose life was continually regimented by municipial fiat, perceived that an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient being must surely reside in the mayor's office, sitting in front of a great citymap and pushing pins with coloured heads. One of those little heads, red maybe because it was her favourite colour, represented Bianca. She felt calmer knowing she was taken care of by this faceless, amorphous being."
No comments:
Post a Comment