West Side Stories: Situating the Settlement House in 'Smart' Urban Design

Gregory Donovan (Fordham University)

This paper considers how smart urban design shapes modes of knowing and belonging in two Manhattan developments (the Amsterdam Houses and Hudson Yards) and how the settlement house provides a space for intervening in such shaping on behalf of dispossessed communities. Established at the beginning of the 20th century, settlement houses are internationally networked multi-service neighborhood centers committed to building and strengthening the collective assets and capacities of a community so as to facilitate both social work and social change (Koerin 2003). An ongoing educational ethnography of a undergraduate community-engaged learning course is drawn on to analyze an area of Manhattan’s West Side previously redeveloped by Robert Moses and now undergoing what Sassen (2004) has described as “urban agglomeration in the digital era.” While Hudson Yards is an affluent development infused with proprietary platforms and algorithms that enroll tenants in a "quantitative community," the predominantly Black and Hispanic residents of Amsterdam Houses continue to experience increased policing, segregation, unemployment, and threat of displacement. In 2011 alone, police frisked 754 people in and around the Amsterdam Houses—quantifying this community in a radically different way than Hudson Yards. The course thus engages students in participatory work with a settlement house attached to the Amsterdam Houses so as to imagine how a city designed for social justice could help re-present and re-work uneven flows of wealth, power, and privilege. Extrapolating from open data, field notes, and community-based workshops, this paper situates the settlement house as a space for building countertopographies that unflatten the differential effects of smart urbanism and can inform the design of more just and sustainable modes of knowing and belonging among dispossessed communities.