Naked City by Zukin Sharon

Author:Zukin, Sharon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Something was brewing near Union Square on Wednesday afternoon. Witnesses said about 50 teenagers, congregating near a McDonald’s, seemed to be waiting for something to start—and suddenly it did.

—New York Times, December 8, 2006

Despite the best efforts of either a Business Improvement District or the U.S. government, public spaces cannot escape their messy origins in confrontation. On a December afternoon in 2006 at Union Square, high school students from Brooklyn met up with students from nearby Washington Irving High School, and the two groups fought “with things like sticks, knives, belts and a cane.” The fight was provoked by a dispute that had occurred the week before, between a girl who attended Washington Irving and a boy who hit her. Her brother and his friends came from Brooklyn to defend her honor and to seek revenge. A seventeen-year-old student was stabbed in the chest and died; two other teenagers were injured, the first casualties at Union Square in years.39

Incidents like this contrast with the area’s recent pacification. Security and surveillance, on the one hand, and festivals and shopping, on the other, help to keep the square open to broad public use. But which are the most important factors that make Union Square, unlike the World Trade Center site, a truly public space? Is it the falling rate of crime throughout the city, or the BID’s financial resources, or the ability of the park’s users to keep an eye on others? Or is it perhaps a calming vision of social order in which a contentious public yields control to the benevolent power and authority of the private sector? The conflicts over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site, the way the state shut the public out of the decision-making process, and the fortifications around the place do not suggest a better alternative.

The paradox of public space is that private control can make it more attractive, most of the time, to a broader public, but state control can make it more repressive, more narrowly ideological, and not representative at all. Our willingness to fight the violence of terrorism and crime with more violence takes us far beyond the capabilities of the urban village’s microsocial order. The scale of public interactions today demands a degree of trust among strangers that we no longer command. One democratic alternative to both private control and control by the state would create different systems of stewardship. These would encourage collective responsibility for public space among ordinary city dwellers rather than corporations, and small businesses and stores rather than commercial property owners or city agencies. Improbably a model for this kind of stewardship comes not from powerful stakeholders in Manhattan but from the immigrant food vendors of Red Hook Park.

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