Abstract
This book is an illuminating excavation of the many small struggles, step-by-step appropriations and forgotten dispossessions that form the backstory to New York City’s current ‘crisis of authenticity’. This crisis, argues Zukin, affects many world cities today and is manifest in an endless competition to out-invest each other in displays of homogenous ‘McGuggenization’. The book shows how in the case of New York these corporate urban landscapes embrace two contradictory visions – the urban village of Jane Jacobs and the corporate global city of Robert Moses. These are two sides of the same story of city elites’ relentless pursuit of development and wealth over the past century. In locations once derelict and now gentrified – including East Village, Williamsburg and Harlem – Zukin’s painstaking research shows how authenticity – ‘the look and feel of a place as well as the social connectedness it inspires’ (p. 220) – is always at stake in struggles over urban space and its symbolic and material ownership. Ultimately, it is exposed here as a ‘lever of cultural power for a group to claim space and take it away from others’ (p. 246).
Kairos is the Greek word for ‘a sense of the past that intrudes into and challenges the present’ (p. 101). Zukin documents how it is essential to the vision of an authentic and romanticised historic urban village which, by offering a bohemian alternative, itself lubricates the wheels of the high-rise corporate city. The changing fortunes of local stores, with independent, locally based retailers losing out to chains in high-end newly fashionable zones, or to independent selective venues owned by outsiders with resources to invest in more rarefied up-and-coming areas such as East Village, add up to much more than just an economic story. What fascinates Zukin, as in her previous books, is how the local ‘character’ that draws so many people to a neighbourhood is built through a self-fulfilling process fuelled by successive waves of middle-class experience-seekers: eating, drinking, talking, dancing and above all shopping their way to new ‘creative’ lifestyles and aspirations. However, they do so in a process that pulls the economic rug from under the feet of the same long-established and working-class inhabitants whose small-scale record shops and ‘mom and pop’ stores underpinned the place’s vibe in the first place.
The book’s fine-tuned analyses capture how a neighbourhood’s identity as locus for the happening ‘hipperati’ depends, or teeters, on a confluence of factors, like the cube sculpture balancing impossibly on its corner in East Village’s Astor Place. An area’s ‘interest’ or culture is always shifting, at any one time intricately bound up with the fortunes of a particular mix of past and present influences, older inhabitants and newcomers, working-class residents and gentrifiers, which create conditions for unusual stores to thrive, independent clubs and galleries to open and ethnic restaurants to prosper. However, these exact a price in terms of who gains and who loses. In East Village for instance, the current eclecticism and sociability of the area relies on the staying power of poorer residents in (rapidly contracting) rent-controlled apartments, living cheek by jowl with more affluent incomers who pay 10 times the rent and have money in their pockets to do ‘distinctive shopping’. However, as rents continue to be deregulated and smaller shops and poorer residents move out, the bedrock of street and edgy culture on which depends the area’s bohemian atmosphere erodes. At the moment there is ‘a balancing point between class worlds on which it, like the Astor Cube, is tenuously perched’ (p. 114).
The focus of the book is on the details of changes in consumption-oriented facilities and attractions; where you live and what you do in your leisure time. Hence, what Zukin pays attention to are shifts in urban identity in terms of food, cafes, restaurants, shopping and (to a lesser extent) artists, musicians, art galleries and museums, continuing her long-established interest in the symbolic economy of loft-living and lifestyle. She has a keen eye for the balance sheet of power and resources that shapes the cultural terrains of neighbourhoods as they move up and down in the endless monopoly game of urban winners and losers. The critique she makes of the city’s removal of the poor is a zero sum game in which the losses they experience are the pay off for the middle classes, a game defined primarily in terms of cultural and consumption gains: who gets to live where and whose culture predominates? The middle classes pay handsomely to live in erstwhile immigrant and working-class areas but they get what they desire: to sup at the new Settepani Bakery rather than slumming it in the previous old-style saloons.
This book presents a forceful critique of class-based inequities and exclusions but not through the lens of a class analysis or Marxian theoretical framework. Broader sociological questions of jobs lost and gained, industries developed and disinvested in, health facilities and schools growing or declining or the fate of other local services are not this book’s principal concern. It is the consumer lifestyle changes that interest Zukin and the conflicts over space that these engender. Often this gaze trained on consumption-clashes between old and new, rich and poor misses other parts of the story – how are young immigrant and working-class neighbourhoods forging their own responses to change? What cultures are emerging in those ‘other’ urban spaces to which poor families moved when the rents were raised? Part of the reason this is missing, perhaps, is that Zukin consciously aligns herself with the New York middle classes whose lifestyle choices she tracks, creating a ‘we’ subject-position moored in the new cultural oases, which does not travel out to dispossessed areas. Her sympathies are with the poorer groups who have to leave, but her data are mainly with the shop owners and store keepers, the consumers and the residents who are still hanging on. Perhaps this is why she eschews the term ‘gentrification’ (p. 221), since it suggests a single interpretation of systematic class-advantaging rather than the more ambivalent story told here – in which the middle-class search for ‘authenticity’ is both critiqued and yet also accepted. What she draws attention to are the losses and gains of the globalised city, making a powerful plea for neighbourhoods to include a social mix rather than pushing out ‘ethnic and working-class residents’. How do we solve the authenticity conundrum that the book reveals in such intricate detail, namely: greater aesthetic authenticity (for the few) = less social authenticity (for all)? It is hard to see the solution in the argument Zukin ultimately advances: that city planners must recognise how mixed neighbourhoods create a more truly authentic urban ‘soul’.