Abstract
For a city rediscovering its estuarine shoreline, Fluid New York offers readers so many insights about green urbanism, and such compelling discussions of “the Green imagination at work” or of the Dutch coastal legacy in the post-Superstorm city, that the reviewer has almost too many thematic options to pursue. May Joseph is a professor of Social Science at the Pratt Institute, the renowned Brooklyn school of urban planning. A theater artist as well as an astute observer of the city’s ever-changing social scenes and landscapes, she personifies E. B. White’s New Yorker of the third category, not the commuter who “gives the city its restlessness,” or the stolid native who takes it for granted and “insists on its continuity,” but one of the settlers “who give it passion.” A migrant to New York from California in 1992, much of her passion is devoted to the consequences for the city and its inhabitants of major environmental catastrophes like Hurricane Sandy.
Joseph pursues “a singular question: What is the vision shaping New York today?” She argues that “a culture of fluid urbanism is under way. Water, as a literal and metaphorical principle, is influencing how New York harnesses its maritime pasts to a once neglected, now persistent, reassessment of its water-bound boroughs. New York’s growing interest in water ecology and sustainability is here to stay.” Part memoir, part interpretive social commentary, and part urban ecological history, Fluid New York may break no new empirical ground, but it does pull together a great many aspects of green ecological thought and politics in one highly readable volume. Since the author and this reviewer shared the experience of being flooded and blacked out during and after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, I will comment briefly on lessons we each came away with from that experience.
May Joseph was living in the West Village, in lower Manhattan near the Hudson, when Sandy’s storm surge flooded her neighborhood and so many others throughout the city’s low-lying coastal plain. Her husband was seriously injured in a fall that left him in a coma “of many weeks.” Their life, Joseph writes, “came apart, as we struggled alongside thousands of other New Yorkers seeking medical help at a time when some of the city’s major hospitals located downtown were shut down due to flooding.” She was “stunned to realize that our well-heeled building of twenty floors, with fancy carpets and a well-designed roof garden, did not own a generator to keep at least one elevator active after the first few hours of emergency lighting. Such an obvious oversight was incomprehensible” (p. 210). Readers never quite learn how the Joseph’s ordeal ended, but the author signals the help of people in her family’s social world over those dark days without light and heat and during her husband’s months of hospitalization. “Neighbors and friends opened up their doors and hearts, offered to walk my dog, care for my child, shop for my groceries, as I spent long hours in the intensive care unit.” For Joseph, “This convivial urban sociality of formal and informal intimacies which makes cities livable, opened up a layer of New York that is the reason many choose to brave the terrible storms that lie ahead” (p. 210).
In his influential New Yorker article, “Adaptation” (January 7, 2013), about responses to Hurricane Sandy, sociologist Eric Klinenberg also emphasized the ways in which resilience in the face of ecological disasters depends on the strength of neighborhood social networks. “Thousands of people whose homes were damaged by Sandy,” Kleinenberg observes, “live in neighborhoods that lack strong support networks or community organizations capable of mounting a large relief effort. They tend to be poorer and less educated than typical New Yorkers, with weaker ties to neighbors and to political power brokers.” Building up neighbors’ “social capital” by strengthening networks and linking people to others who will be devoted to offering help in the next storm becomes the policy of choice for many contemporary social scientists. But the hopes that Joseph, Klinenberg, and others pin on civil society, on voluntary efforts and ad hoc groups mobilized through social media, too often neglect or take for granted the essential actions and responses that people expect from their institutions of government, especially at the local level.
The beach town where I have a family home is just minutes east of the New York City limits at East Rockaway Inlet. Like the Rockaways, our small city of Long Beach, NY, was devastated by the October 2012 storm and has not fully recovered. Yes, the boardwalk was rebuilt, but we lost our hospital. The emergency room is no more. Hundreds of low-income male and female hospital workers never regained their livelihoods. Like most of our neighbors, when the evacuation order was lifted two days after the storm, we found our house flooded with over three feet of water sloshing around everything in the basement. We had bought a generator after Hurricane Irene, the year before Sandy, but with the pumps we had it would have taken three days or more of steady pumping to empty the water. All the local tradespeople, also our neighbors, were out of commission. Trucks from distant companies equipped with large pumps and wide hoses appeared in town. Their drivers offered to pump out basements. One driver asked for $3,000 to empty our basement immediately. We ended up paying $1500 and saving our furnace at least temporarily. Gouging like this was rife; looting a constant (if exaggerated) fear. Along with the real kindness of strangers and neighbors came far less admirable interactions. These tend to get forgotten in the one-sided accounts of neighborly helping.
Immediately after Sandy struck and the waters began receding, throughout the flooded areas of the New York metropolitan region, and along the ruined Jersey Shore, people of all social classes began disgorging ruined furniture and possessions onto the streets, often with the help of neighbors. No one seemed worried about what would happen to all that dripping stuff. We just had to remove it immediately from our private dwellings—so it went out, onto the public space beyond the sidewalks. And indeed within a short time large trucks with grappling arms began taking away the private trash to pile it up on other public lands. At the vast Riis Park parking lot in the Rockaways, for example, now part of Gateway National Recreation Area and critical federal property on the Queens oceanfront, the trash piles grew into a craggy mountain that eventually went into landfills “somewhere else.” All the logistics and costs of creating and carting off these mountains of formerly private stuff were borne by our local governments, with eventual emergency funding from our state and federal tax dollars. This was done to restore communities to pre-storm conditions as quickly as possible. Planning for new infrastructure to cope with rising waters, debates about “soft (marshes) or “ hard” (sea walls and flood gates)” approaches to storm surge abatement or about depopulating the urban barrier islands, or the many aspects of green imagining that Joseph mentions, await more funding for research and for new initiatives.
Fluid New York is an admirable study and I recommend it to readers who are interested in the green future of coastal cities. As one of E. B. White’s stolid natives, however, I do wish it offered less passion and more critical analysis of how our political institutions and leaders are dealing with the challenges posed by global warming and related disasters like Hurricane Sandy.