Abstract
Cities aiming to re-invent themselves often look to New York for inspiration. As a laboratory for urban innovation, mapping New York City’s transformation is crucial for understanding global trends in urban development. Naked City: The Life and Death of Authentic Urban Spaces, by Sharon Zukin, examines the evolution of New York’s urban renewal, from the massive housing and infrastructure projects of the post-war era to the contemporary development and marketing of urban cultural niches. To this end, Zukin contemplates the legacy of the mid-century community activist and architecture critic, Jane Jacobs, asking: why has New York City lost its soul, despite the clear reverberations of Jacobs’ vision of a human-scale ‘urban ecology’ in the neo-liberal era? She traces how the local cultures that Jacobs once fought to protect went from being obstacles to modernisation to being part of an emerging urban political economy centred on the commodification of uniqueness. Building on sustained inquiry into processes of gentrification, consumption and cultural production (Zukin, 1989, 1995 and 2004), Zukin sets out to map the complex interface among planners, developers and residents as they transform urban space and life.
Naked City tells the stories of six neighbourhoods, each undergoing its own uneven renaissance. The theoretical thread that unites these case studies is ‘authenticity’, for which Zukin discerns two distinct meanings. The first is autochtony, or ‘origins’, as she puts it. Under this definition, Brooklyn’s post-industrial grittiness (ch. 1), Harlem’s “blackness” (ch. 2), East New York and Red Hook’s patchwork of recent immigrants (chs. 5 and 6), Union Square’s history of working-class protest (ch. 4) and East Village’s bohemia (ch. 3) all serve as a rich cultural ‘terroir’: the precious raw material out of which urban entrepreneurs fashion new consumerist spatial experiences. The ‘origins’ are what give neighbourhoods their distinctive flavour, but they are also the traditional residents and businesses displaced by new commercial activity.
Nowadays, everyone from young artists and Salvadoran street vendors to big-box stores strive to harness the symbolic value of ‘authenticity’. Of course, valuing ‘origins’ is nothing new. Jacobs’ movement originally grew out of upper-class historical preservationist societies, concerned with saving the city’s patrimony from the bulldozer and wrecking ball, and her activism spawned a recession-era counter-culture that valorised New York’s “grit and grunge” (p. 15). What is new, Zukin argues, is that ‘uniqueness’, a seemingly inherent, inalienable and irreproducible quality, has been transformed into a commodity. Residents, tourists and entrepreneurs buy into and cash in on neighbourhood's cultural repackaging, exemplifying Zukin’s second definition of authenticity, which she terms ‘new beginnings’. These cultural actors often leave only visual markers of the neighborhood’s past as they set about creating new cultural landscapes that consist of refurbished lofts, sidewalk cafés and IKEA.
Echoing Herbert Gans’ famous accusation that Jane Jacobs espoused a ‘fallacy of physical determinism’ (Gans, 1962/1982), Zukin shows that Jacobs, in her condemnation of city planners, failed to account for the socio-economic factors that contribute to the vitality of urban neighbourhoods. Contemporary forms of gentrification, displacement and erasure are evidence, not of the Jacobs’ failure, but, perversely, of her success. Middle-class tastes, as Gans noted, not just the zeal of modernist urban planners, helped to choke off the lifeways of the urban underclass and the idiosyncratic “ballet of the street” that Jacobs so admired (Jacobs, 1961/1993, pp. 65–71). However, Zukin pushes beyond the limitations of Gans’ social-psychological model, electing a materialist lens that accommodates broad political-economic shifts—the transition from industry to services, the hegemony of privatisation, new forms of capital investment—and reveals the dialectical relationship between the production and consumption of taste. Zukin shows that, while consumer preferences certainly influence the urban form, entrepreneurs also play up their cultural and historical milieu in order to stoke consumer interest. The ‘place’ provides a cultural context for the ‘product’, fostering the notion that, by buying a vintage vest from an East Village boutique, one is partaking in the neighbourhood’s bohemian past. The pleasure of such an experience does not necessarily derive from a pre-existing taste, but perhaps from the awakening of new, unrealised consumer desire.
Ultimately, Zukin brings to life such practices of urban consumerism, transformation and resistance, skilfully melding the analysis of cultural texts (films, literature, foodie blogs, etc.) with the kind of intimate ethnography that could only come from being a New Yorker. I found particularly illuminating her explanation of how hybrid public/private initiatives (i.e. the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone, the Business Improvement District of Harlem and the Union Square Partnership) mark a new mode of urban governance in which investors and entrepreneurs not only take on public services such as security and sanitation but also administer public funds for neighbourhood development. Zukin highlights the precise mechanisms by which new legal, political and economic entities become invested in and profit from the cultural legacy of given communities.
At times, however, the book’s main point gets lost amid Zukin’s ‘insider’ zeal for details, leaving me wishing that the big-picture framing that arrives in the conclusion had been more consistently woven into ethnographic passages throughout. Moreover, on a theoretical level, Zukin’s use of authenticity does not address the positivism contained within the concept: namely, the assumption a ‘real’ authenticity lingers and contrasts with any contrived and commodified ‘experience’ of authenticity. In places, I felt Zukin herself was bogged down by the term and stumbled to distinguish between ‘origins’ and ‘new beginnings’; they are both ‘real’, after all. I remain unconvinced that tarrying with the analytical shortcomings of authenticity was even necessary, finding other terms, especially terroir, much more precise and evocative. In the end, however, these criticisms do not detract from the value of Zukin’s project, which provides a compelling account of the agents, both formal and informal, that traffic in the cultural uniqueness of iconic New York neighbourhoods. Because New York is an exemplary city, a global reference point for urban renewal policy and practice, Naked City offers a forecast of how its model will proliferate and be transformed as it is implemented in different contexts.