Contested City: Collaboration and Change at the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani Buscada Studio

For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in 1967, displacing thousands of low-income people of color with the promise that they would return to new housing—housing that never came. Over decades, efforts to keep out affordable housing sparked deep-rooted enmity and stalled development, making SPURA a dramatic study of failed urban renewal, as well as a microcosm epitomizing the greatest challenges faced by American cities since World War II. It is now the site of the mega-development of “Essex Crossing.” This presentation builds on the author’s forthcoming book (details removed for peer review) to address the five year Layered SPURA project, which emerged after the presenter was invited by community activists to enter this tense community to support new approaches to planning, using collaboration, organizing, public history, and art. This collaboration between community organizers, a professor, and more than fifty college students created four exhibitions and a series of guided tours as part of larger campaigns for community-based planning at SPURA — all of which provided crucial new opportunities for dialogue about the past, present, and future of the neighborhood. This presentation addresses the history of inequity and displacement in one neighborhood and makes space for discussions of its future -- in a development uneasily incorporating both luxury condos and affordable apartments, some of which are home to tenants displaced fifty years ago. Bridging topographies, it also asks what other neighborhoods can learn from the past and present of SPURA for their own futures, as well as what’s at stake in highly contested neighborhoods when community activists, artists, and university professors and students seek to make something together.