URBAN_disLocation_Small

The year 2016 has so far been one of surprises,
disappointments, and a series of bewilderments. The
unabated flow of forced migrants throughout the world,
seen most palpably in the case of Syrian refugees, continues
to demonstrate the fragility of our political creations, as
does the impending end of Europe and the new-found
congeniality between the United States and Iran and Cuba.
The ongoing destruction of Aleppo, on the heels of the
leveling of Palmyra, demonstrates the fragility of our urban
and cultural creations. The upheaval in Dilma Roussef’s
cabinet speak to a new conception of (ir)-responsibility
toward those we know, while the Rohingya people adrift
in the Bay of Bengal signal a renegotiation of our (ir)-
responsibility toward a humanity which we may not. The
rhetoric emanating from the discourse of the current
presidential campaign appeals, it seems, to an amalgamation
of all of these.
The current issue, (dis)Location, attempts to locate some of
these changes and uncertainties in the space of concern
for planners: the city. Drawing on the multitude of
realities of living in the city, (dis)Location seeks to present
experiences, histories, and provocations of those awkward,
uncomfortable, or secret spaces and actions that, perhaps
more than anything else, define the city. At the same time,
it tries to examine the roles that such concepts as power,
materiality, and positionality play in planning practice and
thought.
The urban world is an ever-changing one. Perhaps, in fact, change is the defining characteristic of urbanity. (dis)Location looks
at these changes and the new spaces they produce, in both a physical-temporal sense and a psychological-experiential sense, as a
way of presenting different urban realities and calling for greater reflectivity and sensitivity in planning. We humbly offer these
pages with this in mind.
Love,
URBAN
Vicente Arellano introduces the notion of (dis)Location by
exploring his reactions to the New York around him and
the uncertainties and distrusts that invade his imagination
in the process. Michael A. Phillips then explores a similar
uncertainty through the lens of parking and the effects that
the physicality of parking has on our cities. Liz Marcello
then discusses with theorists Laura Lieto and Robert
Beauregard their latest ideas and publications about the
ways in which things and materiality interface with humans
and our experiences in the city. Laura Cipriani and Leonardo
Zuccaro Marchi follow this with an examination of some
of these very things and materiality, exploring the idea of
“error” and how it, often quite deliberately, shapes how we
move and live.
In a similar vein, Abdulla al Shehhi presents the imposition
of a grid in Abu Dhabi and the social upheaval that such
a seemingly straightforward planning choice can cause.
John Robert Darcey reflects on what it means to practice,
or even think about, planning from a context wholly
different from that of the community in question, drawing
on his recent experiences carrying out research into the
Liberian refugee community in Staten Island. Finally,
musings on gentrification strike again. Gabrielle Peterson
questions whether efforts at neighborhood improvement
have to mean the implementation of gentrification and
displacement; Lance Freeman, in reviewing Sylvie Tissot’s
recent book on the matter, offers a response.
LETTER FROM THE EDITORS
( d i s ) L o c a t i o n

SNEAK PEEK
12 In Praise of Errors: Erroneous Landscapes of Passages
Essay
Laura Cipriani and Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi
2 The Alchemy of the City: Locating the Imagination as Urban Planning Activity
Essay
Vicente Arellano

6 Park-itecture, Planning and Preservation
Essay
Michael A. Phillips

8 Planners, Pigeons and Cellphone Towers: An Interview
Book Discussion
Elizabeth Marcello with Robert Beauregard and Laura Lieto
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S

22 Dislocating the Masses: The Social Aspects of Abu Dhabi’s Divisive Grid
Essay
Abdulla al Shehhi
26 Reflections on Practice: Positionality and Research on the Park Hill Liberians
Essay
John Robert Darcey

29 Is “Better” Synonymous with “Gentrification”?
Essay
Gabrielle Peterson
33 Book Review: Good Neighbors: Gentrifying diversity in Boston’s South End
Book Review
Lance Freeman
SNEAK PEEK
TA B L E O F C O N T E N T S
A dispersed photo essay, Lines and Voids in Old Shanghai by Jack Darcey, accompanies these contribu-
tions. The photos depict an old abbatoir, build in Scotland and transported to Shanghai at the beginning of the
twentieth century. It was designed such that cows could easily move mong different levels and different stages of
processing. It is now a shopping mall.

In the city’s material forms and fits of natural expression,
there is latent knowledge to uncover: I am reading the
language of the birds, portals, and systems into altars and
into the region of ideas; I seek to find where city and fable
dissolve, where the region we imagine teases the region we
map.
I
The aerial tramway, like the hand of an urban god, scoops
me up from the East Side of Midtown and cradles me in
my ascent over the East River to Roosevelt Island. Rising,
I am floating through spaces between buildings, oversized
sculptures, monuments to commerce, life. On Roosevelt
Island, the glimpses of the Manhattan skyline command
the real estate entities to unmake ruin and erect future
archaeologies: $4,000 each month for a picture frame.
Suitably-placed pieces of nature wind around the Small Pox
Hospital, intertwining with paths and walls and the great
Instagrammable centerpiece itself. Stark white slabs and
an arboreal axis lead to the south. Here, barges and traffic
horns and skylines and mini-skylines and the teetering box
of the United Nations headquarters is Emanation: the
very material of the earth arranged to house a particular
form of consciousness, an agglomeration of the impulse
for peace on Earth. Black-glass river heads to the sea. Out
there, perhaps a hundred miles, New York City dumps the
collected municipal feces of millions for reclamation by the
primordial depths. The city tells us that Discordia reigns
over a devastated elsewhere and we are fortunate, huddled
together in civic achievement.
The fear is that this is not so. Demiurge means “public
or skilled worker” in Greek, leading one to argue that the
city and its planning is the work of the material, less-than-
perfect aspect of creation. When I see the skyline I exclaim
with Joy: “Look what we have made!” I bask in our majesty.
Just a short while later: grief. In doubt of this achievement,
I remark that the buildings are merely the material container
for the human bio-house of a darker emanation. Here,
activity is the work of breaching from the center.
II
Further lamentation. Is it simply enough to have
“Knowledge of Higher Worlds”? What is it I do with this
knowledge? What about Action Guided By Knowledge?
THE ALCHEMY OF THE CITY:
Locating the Imagination as Urban Planning Activity
Marion Mahony and Walter Burley Griffin were guided
by their faith in a grand narrative and by the impulse of
right action. Add to that any modernist, universalist,
visionary, actualizer, manifester: Doxiadis, Bucky Fuller,
Hundertwasser, Beuys, Rothko. What do I do? What do
I do? I must insist that, being located in time later than
the names before me, I am made to feel less secure in my
belief in a right and a good that is as clear from wrong and
bad as day and night are from each other. Socrates is said
to have remarked: “By far the greatest and most admirable
form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities
and human communities.” Delving into the field of urban
planning, I’d like to think my work in the world will be
more meaningful than one would imagine the activities
of city planning could be. Emerson’s essay, “Civilization,”
mentions that a civilized person utilizes evil to produce
benefits. Civilization is generally understood to mean
cities and city-makers and city-inhabitants, in primordial
opposition to our rural and agrarian cousins. Neil Brenner
and Henri Lefebvre, among others, suggest – insist – that,
in fact, the entirety of Earth is urban, and that urban is an
activity rather than any material state of being. The city is
the physical manifestation of the accumulation of utilizing
evil to produce benefits. The treasures of the world’s
past, plundered and presented in the museums for our
consideration and enlightenment, are this: Impulses and
entities made material, frozen, and displayed in exhibitions.
They are records of a moment in time.
E S S A Y
BY VICENTE ARELLANO
2 | URBAN | (dis)Location
Bridge Entity, Central Park; photo by Author, 2016

III
In the January/February 2016 issue of Foreign Affairs,
Pierre Rosanvallon argues that a society of equals would be
founded on three principles of equality as embedded in the
structure of society:
1) recognition of people’s singularity
2) organization of reciprocity
3) constitution of commonality1
He is not telling us anything new. In fact, he is describing
what is largely extant from Modernist thoughts and
Classical Grand Narratives and meta-narratives. With gains
in the LGBT and other marginalized communities’ rights, is
the United States not already expanding its recognition of
people’s singularity? Is social security not an embodiment
of Rosanvallon’s second principle, and any nation’s
constitution indicative of his third? He tells us what we’ve
already done over centuries to attempt a society of equals.
And yet this issue of Foreign Affairs was dedicated to
precisely the increasing inequality in the world. Plato writes
in The Republic, “The society we have described can never
grow into a reality or see the light of day, and there will
be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed, my dear
Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become rulers
in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really
and truly become philosophers, and political power and
philosophy thus come into the same hands.”2
In the wake of disasters, graffiti emerges on walls: “Hope is
not a plan,” it says in bitterness. I agree, but I would modify
the message to say: “Hope is prerequisite to a plan.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Vicente Arellano is a first year urban planning student originally
from Los Angeles. His interests include the cultural life of cities and
psychogeography.
dis(Location) | URBAN | 3
Pierre Huyghe @ The Met; photo by the Author, 2015
Peter Lamborn Wilson’s Driftmap of Aleister Crowley’s Hudson Valley Camp; Photo by the
Author, 2015
Central Park from Columbus Circle; photo by Author, 2015
1
Rosanvallon, Pierre. “How to Create a Society of Equals: Overcoming Today’s
Crisis of Inequality.” Foreign Affairs Vol. 95 (No. 1). (Jan./Feb. 2016.)
2
Plato. Republic. Book 7.

Urban parking and modern culture interact in a perplexing
relationship. We often think about parking only when we
are in pursuit of it, not when we have commenced our
day in the workplace, unless we are counting down the
minutes to when we need to move our car. Seinfeld’s George
Costanza described his “system” for finding the perfect
spot as first looking for the dream spot right in front of
the door, then slowly expanding out in “concentric circles.”
Dr. Tobias Fünke of Arrested Development, in his quest for
a spot at the airport, simply gave up his search for parking
and drove the Bluth Family Stair-Car onto the tarmac itself,
finding a spot close to his gate. Paul McCartney was so
moved by a “meter maid” who gave him a parking ticket
outside Abbey Road studios in 1967 that he immortalized
her in his work “Lovely Rita.” Joni Mitchell, of course, has
been the most explicit, lamenting the state of a society that
“paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Whether we are
conscious of it or not, parking plays, without a doubt, a
significant role in our nation’s culture.
Today, there are about 315 million Americans in these
United States and approximately 500 million parking
spaces for them, a figure, which increases every year. In
many places, people see a lack of parking as a “problem.”
However, the creation of more parking to accommodate
visitors to a location often works to destroy the very urban
form and fabric that first enticed such visitors to begin with.
William Whyte in City: Rediscovering the Center wrote
“in some American cities, so much of the center has been
cleared to make way for parking that there is more parking
than there is city.” Topeka, Buffalo, and Houston have each
cleared away so much of their urban fabric they have lost
the appeal that originally people there in the first place. The
problems are palpable: a local Buffalo newspaper opined,
half in jest, that “if our master plan is to demolish all of
downtown, then we’re only halfway there! There will be
lots of places to park – there just won’t be a whole lot to
do there!” When communities simply add parking to fit a
perceived demand, it often changes places into foreboding
spaces, detracting from urban character and desirability of
the area. Planners, communities and elected officials must
work together to explore alternatives to haphazardly adding
“more parking” to their downtowns.
Parking Therapy and Parking Surgery
If you have a back problem, the chiropractor usually
recommends physical therapy before signing off on surgery.
If physical therapy doesn’t work, then you can begin a more
PARK-ITECTURE, PLANNING AND PRESERVATION
serious course of treatment. In planning, and particularly
transportation planning, the first solution is “parking
surgery,” a desire to build something to make the problem
go away. This means to make physical changes: to build
freeways, widen roads, and construct parking structures and
surface lots, often requiring large amounts of money to be
spent and large parts of our cities and towns to be forever
altered in pursuit of what will turn out to be an undesirable
outcome. It is time, instead, for cities to consider “parking
therapy.” Perhaps sharing the existing parking supply to
fulfill parking needs and using dynamic pricing strategies to
manipulate supply and demand could somewhat alleviate
“parking problems” in many communities. Only after a
community has exhausted all of potential alternatives for
parking efficiency, should it consider the more drastic
action of building more parking.
If communities ultimately choose to construct additional
parking, new structures should neither diminish nor destroy
community character nor facilitate the formation of dis-
locations. Rather, they should contribute positively to the
urban design, drawing from and adding to existing urban
form and serving as a collective benefit for a community.
There are a number of innovative design concepts around
the world that negotiate the tension between the inherently
functional use of a parking structure and the positive
contribution architecture can make to the city’s value. Some
of these concepts include façades that provide artistic
value to the community: Herzog and de Meuron’s Miami
parking block is only the most high profile of these. Other
successful examples can be seen in the Veranda Park House
in Rotterdam (with perforated aluminum and glass façades);
the Charles Street Park House in Sheffield, England (with
an angular façade constructed from identical elements
oriented at different angles that give rise to amazing light
reflexes); Miami’s Ballet Valet Parking (which is completely
covered in vegetation, with a shopping mall on the first
floor); and 15th and Pearl in Boulder, CO (which hides the
parking structure behind the façades of what looks like
mixed-use buildings).
In addition, future-oriented parking garages often employ
innovative car storage or circulation concepts. In Eureka
Tower Park House, in Melbourne Australia, the garage
is bright, friendly and comfortable with large “graphical
pointers” in the form of oversized words to help orientation
within the entire complex. Another circulation concept
comes in Park House Plaza in Cajnovas Spain, where
the architect used an assemblage of colors, letters, and
E S S A Y
BY MICHAEL A. PHILLIPS

low-powered lighting to contribute to improved vehicular
navigation while, a the same time, prioritizing pedestrian
movement. Some structures attempt to take the vagaries of
human navigation out of the parking process altogether, as
in Lyon’s Parc des Celestines, where a machine arm raises
and lowers vehicles into their spaces or at Volkswagen’s Car
Towers, two 48-meter tall, class-encased robotic vehicle lifts.
Light, especially, is important: Len Tsupros, the president
of Carl Walker Construction, a design firm specializing in
parking garages, writes that “people tend to feel vulnerable
in parking garages so an effort to incorporate light and
open space (into the structure) is ideal.” The Parkhaus
Engelenschanze in Stuttgart features an all-glass exterior,
glass curtains, and an inner courtyard with a waterfall and
creek in an effort to foster something akin to joy.
Obsolescence and Opportunity
Not only are parking structures becoming “changing
places” in their physical and architectural manifestations;
they are undergoing changes in their very uses as well,
particularly with a view towards a less car-dependent
future. Tom Fisher, Dean of the College of Design at the
University of Minnesota, proclaims that “if we’re going to
build these [parking garages], let’s design them in way that
they can have alternative uses in the future. With just a few
tweaks, that’s really possible.”
If a community does make the choice to build more parking
supply, it should be possible for that structure’s long term
use to be changed in phases in accordance with a decrease in
parking demand. The key elements for an adaptable garage,
according to Fisher, are “flat floors, comfortable [11-12
foot] floor-to-ceiling heights, and enough loading capacity
[in other words, strength] to support another structural use”
and have exterior openings for future windows. Cities can
mandate these minimal adaptability requirements in their
zoning codes to compel developers to meet these phased
obsolescence requirements.
A few examples of former garages that are already being
adaptively reused in phases are St. Anthony Falls Parking
garage in Minneapolis (77 low-rent apartments), the Rayette
Building in St. Paul (88 apartments), and Herzon and de
Meuron’s above-mentioned 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami
Beach (office space, apartments, a rooftop restaurant, and
glassed-walled cosmetics, coffee, and fashion boutiques).
More systematically, students in the Savannah College of
Art & Design recently attempted to “explore concepts for
urban ‘micro-house’ living by constructing a tiny pop-up
village inside on of their campus’ central parking garages.
This can be a way to intelligently plan for the future,
without the costs of a speculative, singular-purpose piece
of parking infrastructure. Such design standards can both
accommodate a perceived higher parking demand in the
short term while entertaining a future in which the existing
structure can be repurposed. In other words, parking
structures should be designed with a view towards their
eventual adaption and reuse.
Our challenge as planners is to adapt to the present, be
mindful of the future, and avoid the often irrevocable
errors of prematurely committing to damaging structural
changes. In the process, we must strive to create locations
that are unique, full of local character, and worthwhile to
create and maintain. People don’t choose to visit places
because of the parking; they are drawn to locations because
they have been made places by something else. If a place is
sacrificed for a space to park, it undermines the very essence
of that location’s existence. Parking lots and garages will
continue to be an omnipresent part of the American built
environment as long we are still driving (and parking) our
own cars, yet sensitive, future-oriented design and planning
can help steer our cities away from a congregation of dis-
locations and towards something more cohesive. For much
of the past century, it appears that planners have adhered
to a convenient iteration of Descartes’ maxim, cogito ergo
sum: I park, therefore I am. It is time now to disentangle
the primacy of parking from the conception of place and
enable Descartes, and all of us, to experience and enjoy the
city beyond the parking lot.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael A. Phillips is a second-year student of urban planning
whose interest in planning stems from early proposals to transform
Manhattan’s grid into concentric and interlocking traffic circles. Recent
research has been on the present and future of parking.
(dis)Location | URBAN | 7

PLANNERS, PIGEONS, AND CELLPHONE TOWERS:
An Interview on the New Materiality
I N T E R V I E W
ELIZABETH MARCELLO WITH ROBERT BEAUREGARD AND LAURA LIETO
that what matters in planning is only what humans do.
Humans never act alone; they always act with technologies
and tools and nature. This is a central tenet of the new
materialism that pervades both books. Focusing on
individuals (whether humans or not) as the sole agents in
bringing about change or stabilizing the world is also wrong.
Humans are always a part of networks of other humans
and non-human things. A planner hoping to increase the
supply of affordable housing has to be willing to join
forces with census data, methodologies for calculating
affordability, vacant lots (and the rodents that live there),
financial statements, and government regulations as well
as elected officials, developers, public housing tenants, and
community boards. The planner is one of many actors who
must become entangled for the city to change.
LL: I would say, also, that the new materialism offers the
possibility of returning to the physical city with which
planning has been historically concerned. The idea is to
open a new perspective on how cities and regions work.
Given my architectural background, this is quite attractive
to me.
EM: What would you say are the key ideas of the
books?
LL: Three ideas were critical. One is that humans and things
always act in concert in the city. The second concerns the
formal/informal divide on which planning normativity
has been traditionally based; it has to be rejected in favor
of a mutual relationship of the two spheres. And, the
third is that things – both as material objects and, more
abstractedly, as matters of social concern – are always the
effect of complex assemblages within which they make
sense and through which they affect change.
RB: Equally as important, we see planning as a political
activity, rather than a strictly technical one, infused with
the values of the various groups (including planners) who
contend for resources and attempt to imprint themselves on
the city. In Planning Matter, I also focus on how planners
think about the city and about themselves and their
interactions with others. My interest is in how a collective
imagining of the world leads to acting together.
In early April 2016, Elizabeth Marcello, a first-year doctoral student
in Urban Planning at GSAPP, interviewed Robert Beauregard
(Professor, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning, and Preservation) and Laura Lieto (Professor, Federico II
University of Naples) about their recent books, one of which they co-
edited. Their books consider the objects that planners encounter, along
with the people and places for whom they plan. The interview that
follows is a condensed version of a longer conversation.
...............................................
Elizabeth Marcello: Can you tell us a bit about the
books you just published?
Laura Lieto: Planning for a Material World (Routledge, 2016),
the book that we co-edited, and ‘Does Actor-Network
theory help planners to think about change?,’ a chapter
we co-authored, are both about our common effort to
rethink planning from a new perspective, inspired by actor-
network theory and assemblage thinking. They both can be
considered a theoretical as well as practical endeavor, that
is, one that delves deeply into cases and examples. Planning
for a Material World grew out of an agreement between the
School of Architecture at Federico II University in Naples
and GSAPP. The first project of this agreement was a
conference held in Naples in the summer of 2013. The
book was an offshoot of that.
Robert Beauregard: In addition to the co-edited book,
I just published a set of essays on planning practice and
planning theory. The essays were written from a perspective
that recognizes how planners are embedded in a world of
things from cell phones to railroad viaducts and wetlands.
The intent was to reflect on planning as a material activity
that involves not just humans but non-humans as well.
These themes are part of the co-edited book also. My book
is titled Planning Matter (Chicago, 2015) with the subtitle
“Acting with Things.”
EM: The titles of your books both refer to the “material
world.” This suggests that you are drawing on some
of the same ideas. Could you comment on that?
RB: There is a good deal of conceptual overlap between
the two books. Both books recognize the error of assuming

EM: To this extent, how have you influenced each
other?
LL: Well, this a very small, mutual admiration society. Bob
hasinfluencedmewithhisLatourianwritingsaboutplanning
and helped me explore neglected or unacknowledged
sides of planning. He has encouraged me to think of my
‘practical skills’ as valuable in my work as a theorist.
RB: Laura has given me a greater appreciation for the
way in which formal and informal entities and activities
intersect and overlap. She also introduced me to trading
zone theory and the notion of traveling myths (an issue
directly connected to “best practices”).
EM: Who else has had an influence on your work?
Whom do you read?
LL: Bruno Latour, of course, the main proponent of
actor-network theory, but also John Law and Jane Bennett,
from different perspectives. Law, for his ethnographical
explorations of assemblages as well as his work on
translation; Bennett, for her striking analysis of the
ontology of vibrant matter. And, in the background, Michel
Foucault, whose work on power and knowledge has deeply
influenced me.
RB: Like Laura, I would list Bruno Latour first. Many
of the ideas I work with in the book – the falsity of the
human/culture divide, non-human actors, assemblages,
stabilization – come from his writings. On issues of social
justice, I always return to the work of Iris Young, have
never abandoned my interest in neo-Marxism, and continue
to grapple with American pragmatism. In addition, I
[continue to] read in the science and technology literature
(for example, Anique Hommels’s writing on obduracy and
the built environment).
EM: How do these books speak to planning practice?
RB: I wrote Planning Matter mainly for graduate students
to help them think about planning. Specifically, I want
them to see planning as a political and normative activity
that entails collaborations with nature, built forms, and
technologies and thus places them in the material world.
The most important skill a planner can have is the ability
to understand a planning situation. Acting without such
reflection is simply a waste of good planning time.
LL: Both books are fully committed to planning practice.
They try to be in tune with the ‘real world’ and thus draw
upon cases and examples to raise more general issues about
planning as a practical and political endeavor. They speak
to practitioners with their experimental tone, and their
open-ended mode of inquiry, sensitive to the concrete (and

materialist approach to planning. I suspect that
students did not think that they would be encouraged
to consider pigeons and light standards, in addition to
people, in their work as planners.
Planning for a Material World. Laura Lieto and Robert A.
Beauregard, editors. Routledge. 180 pages. $160.
Planning Matter: Acting with Things. Robert A. Beauregard.
University of Chicago Press. 264 pages. $30-$90.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Marcello is a first-year Ph.D student at the Graduate
School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia
University.
Laura Lieto teaches urban planning theories at Federico II University
in Naples, Italy.
Robert Beauregard teaches urban planning at the Graduate School
of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University,
where he also directs the Ph.D program.
sometimes surprising) possibilities of planning.
EM: What about planning theory and planning
education?
LL: As for planning theory, we tried to overcome the
idea that planning matters most as a ‘word affair,’ as a
communicative practice. We thus included non-human
things in the big picture and acknowledged their theoretical
role. As for planning education, these works can contribute
to integrating courses within a program.
RB: Again, it’s all about perspective, a way of seeing oneself
in the world. As regards planning theory, almost all of it is
either non-materialist (assuming that humans rule the world,
alone) or materialist in a Marxist sense, maintaining the
divide between humans and techno-nature. As for planning
education, what one learns in planning school, whether as a
Masters student or a doctoral student, is how to think. All
that GIS, regression, zoning, and environmental knowledge
is secondary. Of course, without the latter one doesn’t have
anything to think about or say.
EM: What comes next? What are your next projects?
RB: I am just finishing a book on the contemporary U.S.
city which argues that what defines the city is its capacity to
nurture the contradictions of social life: the simultaneous
presence of wealth and poverty and the juxtaposition of
tolerance and intolerance being just two. It’s tentatively
titled Ambiguous Achievement. I also continue to write in
the new materialist vein: Laura and I are writing a paper on
the idea of an object-oriented (rather than human-oriented)
case methodology and I am working on the next iteration
of a piece on the decay of buildings and decline of cities as
a form of material disentanglement.
LL: I’m working on deepening my practical understanding
of assemblages and things in urban research. I’m mainly
involved in informal urban practices, and working on
different cases as the empirical basis for my theoretical
research. One is about the canners in New York City,
emerging figures of the informal economy of waste; I just
recently joined an inter-disciplinary mapping project about
discarded goods’ trajectories using digital technologies.
The other is about illegal/irregular settlements in Napoli
urban region, with a particular focus on the assemblages
of humans, things, natural elements, building technologies,
and the norms underpinning them. This fieldwork will
contribute to a book project about planning normativity and
urban informality using a new materialistic interpretation.
EM: Thank you both for taking the time to speak
with me about your new books and about the neo-

There is no art which has not had its beginnings in things full of
errors. Nothing is at the same time both new and perfect.
Leon Battista Alberti
To rise from error to truth is rare and beautiful.
Victor Hugo
History has seen plenty of erroneous spaces and – more
rarely – anomalous discoveries: from architects to engineers,
from navigators to cartographers, multiple passages and
routes were found by unplanned oversights.
Since contemporary cities are made up of socially and
physically disjointed parts, the passage occupies a crucial
role in connecting the urban fragments and making a
significant impact on the quality of movement and social
life in the urban space (Smets, 2014). Facing the existing
urban landscape condition, we intend to speculatively re-
interpret the idea of passage as a product of error. We are
interested in both re-conceptualizing error as a potential
catalyst for passage and in reconsidering the different
possible types of errors in the city landscape and their
relationship with spaces of physical connection. From
structural to administrative, functional to material, design
to digital/technological, we are particularly interested
in investigating case studies wherein error is the force
behind relevant spatial transformations, either in the urban
landscape or in the social structure, and, even more, when it
is reinterpreted with a new and positive purpose.
The word ‘error’ comes etymologically from the Latin
error, the verb form of which, errare, translates into
‘wandering.’ Error is thus both explicitly and implicitly
connected with the idea of a path, a route, a passage with
neither boundaries nor endings nor directions. In Italian
errare still retains its double meaning: on the one hand, it
refers to a mistaken route; on the other, to walking about,
roaming, and wandering. The error itself can therefore be
re-conceptualized as a kind of undefined promenade: an
ambiguous, dynamic passage that does not conform to any
set of rules.
Error is therefore understood as a creative act. Looking for
new roads, risking creative responses, taking the road “less
traveled,” making mistakes in order to create something
IN PRAISE OF ERRORS:
Erroneous Landscapes of Passages
that breaks the routine of daily life: such negotiations are
the main intent of this short essay on erroneous landscapes
of passages.
Error potentially hides an opportunity to see the birth of
a new story, but nothing would exist if it were not for the
novelty of arriving at an unexpected and unpredictable
E S S A Y
BY LAURA CIPRIANI AND LEONARDO ZUCCARO MARCHI
Bartolomeo and Christopher Colombus, ‘Christopher Colombus map,’ Lisbon, c.1490
Bibliothèque Nationale de France (CPL GE AA 562 RES)
‘Claude Shannon and experimental mouse maze constructed of relays demonstrated machine
learning,’ 1952

result, occasionally following an unprecedented and
seemingly absurd path. In times of economic, political,
environmental and imaginational crisis we believe that there
is a need for design that recalls the desire to imagine a new
way of life behind the apparent absurdity, that we need a
vision to imagine a world that knows how to create through
the elaboration of the error. All types of errors – whether
grammatical, structural, functional, or physical – are
considered for their potential, even though these different
perspectives are usually categorized as being ‘wrong.’
For example, Cristopher Columbus’ arrival in the so-called
New World was the result of a series of geographical
misconceptions. His notion of reaching the East Indies by
sailing westward and therefore establishing a new westward
spice trade route was fundamentally correct as an idea,
yet he mistakenly believed that Europe and Asia were
separated by less than 3,000 miles and had no knowledge
of the hulking landmass and its inhabitants that lay in the
way. Nonetheless, instead of reaching Japan as he intended,
Columbus landed in a New, and unexpected, World.
Contemporary cities, like Columbus’ world, are made
up of fragmented parts that often do not communicate
with each other. Planned passages or corridors can patch
up disjointed pieces but, occasionally, unintentional
routes allow for a different method of joining parts. The
grammatical error in the urban plan is an important aspect
of our contemporary urban condition, affecting the text
of the city as well as our reading of it (De Certeau, 1980).
In cities, even ecological corridors were mostly unplanned
for a long time; today, only open spaces from the leftovers,
from errors of some kind, take on ecological value. In
urban semiology (Barthes, 1967), the grammatical error
of the city goes beyond the prefixed ideas of our reality.
Error establishes new relationships inside the physical
and representative fragmentation of the twentieth and
twenty-first century city, where each singular fragment or
part is juxtaposed or reinterpreted in new laws, similarly to
Schönberg’s contemporary classical music (Viganò, 2000).
Error is also a method of latent learning, as explored, for
instance, by Edward Tolman since the 1930s. Our living
in the city is similar to that of hungry rats in a labyrinth
or maze where, through test and error, they learn and
memorize the right route. Paying full attention to the
subjective experience of the city, the cognitive maps from
the 1950s and later (Kevin Lynch, the Situationists, etc.)
derive from behaviorist and cognitive psychology based on
experiments on the errors of animals as well as those of
men (see ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men’, Tolman 1948).
Tolman’s maze is therefore one of the most important early
prototypes of passages of error in the city and calls for a
comprehensive reconsideration.
Etymology
PASSAGE / PASSUM
ERROR PASSAGE / ERRARE
PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIC
PSYCHO-GEOGRAPHIC
LYNCH
COGNITIVE
ADMINISTRATIVE
Above: ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE COVATTA.

Among the different types of errors in the city, the
administrative error became an important source of
inspiration for many, including the well-known artist
Gordon Matta-Clark. In the 1970s, Matta-Clark acquired
fifteen small lots of land in New York which were the
result of errors of zoning, measuring, and lazily supervised
development of the city. These very tiny residuals of
land were anomalies and glitches in-between two or more
administratively correct lots. These weird micro-zones were
of different dimensions and proportions: they could be
many meters long but narrower than 30 centimeters, similar
to long narrow corridors. They were the administrative
and physical gutter passages of error, the forgotten voids
of errors, separating one property from another. Their
odd and nonsensical presence was hidden from and in
contradiction to the rationality and rigidity of the urban
grid’s rules. These liminal and sometimes inaccessible
landscapes of error became potentially astonishing sources
of inspiration as well as physical supports for the artistic
ideas of Matta-Clark. His Fake Estates, put together in 1973,
turned administrative and zoning error into an intriguing
source of artistic expression and a sharp critique of the
ways in which urban space is conceived and used.
In other cases, passages are affected by the refusal to make
room for real estate development. In China the so-called
钉子户, or ‘nail houses,’ are homes whose residents refuse
to leave in order to make way for new construction. Photos
show how these houses intersect multiple infrastructures,
such as highways and public plazas, representing a physical
symbol of protest and condemnation of the administrative
appropriation error. The result is an anomaly of both
the passage whose flow is interrupted by the house and
the private living space, which is absorbed into the new
infrastructure’s unnatural context. What is interesting is that
the route, the passage, is not completely affected; instead,
the presence of the obstacle generates the possibility of
going around it.
Error can also be the product of a deliberate design
decision. Multiple bridges and passages have been planned
as twisted, distorted, and broken paths meandering between
two points. Error, in such contexts, is the result of the
architect’s design will. Japan’s Friendship Bridge, located
over a spring near Kyoto, draws a suspended circular route
between the water’s banks. If a line usually represents the
shortest direction between two points, this ‘erratic’ path
allows for a rounded wandering above the river. The ring-
shaped structure of the Laguna Garzon Bridge, designed
by Rafael Viñoly in Uruguay, is not justified by any regular
vehicular reasons. Neither crossings nor rotatories are
needed since the street is suspended over the lagoon without
any interactions or interruptions. The error is designed on
purpose in order to reduce the speed of cars and give the
driver, as she meanders, the opportunity to visually enjoy
the landscape.
‘Reality Properties: Fake Estates,’ Gordon Matta-Clark, 1973.
‘Nail houses in China,’ Wenling, Zhejiang Province, REUTERS/China Daily, 2015.
‘The Friendship Bridge,’ Hiyoshi Springs Resort in Nantan, Japan, 2009.

result, occasionally following an unprecedented and
seemingly absurd path. In times of economic, political,
environmental and imaginational crisis we believe that there
is a need for design that recalls the desire to imagine a new
way of life behind the apparent absurdity, that we need a
vision to imagine a world that knows how to create through
the elaboration of the error. All types of errors – whether
grammatical, structural, functional, or physical – are
considered for their potential, even though these different
perspectives are usually categorized as being ‘wrong.’
For example, Cristopher Columbus’ arrival in the so-called
New World was the result of a series of geographical
misconceptions. His notion of reaching the East Indies by
sailing westward and therefore establishing a new westward
spice trade route was fundamentally correct as an idea,
yet he mistakenly believed that Europe and Asia were
separated by less than 3,000 miles and had no knowledge
of the hulking landmass and its inhabitants that lay in the
way. Nonetheless, instead of reaching Japan as he intended,
Columbus landed in a New, and unexpected, World.
Contemporary cities, like Columbus’ world, are made
up of fragmented parts that often do not communicate
with each other. Planned passages or corridors can patch
up disjointed pieces but, occasionally, unintentional
routes allow for a different method of joining parts. The
grammatical error in the urban plan is an important aspect
of our contemporary urban condition, affecting the text
of the city as well as our reading of it (De Certeau, 1980).
In cities, even ecological corridors were mostly unplanned
for a long time; today, only open spaces from the leftovers,
from errors of some kind, take on ecological value. In
urban semiology (Barthes, 1967), the grammatical error
of the city goes beyond the prefixed ideas of our reality.
Error establishes new relationships inside the physical
and representative fragmentation of the twentieth and
twenty-first century city, where each singular fragment or
part is juxtaposed or reinterpreted in new laws, similarly to
Schönberg’s contemporary classical music (Viganò, 2000).
Error is also a method of latent learning, as explored, for
instance, by Edward Tolman since the 1930s. Our living
in the city is similar to that of hungry rats in a labyrinth
or maze where, through test and error, they learn and
memorize the right route. Paying full attention to the
subjective experience of the city, the cognitive maps from
the 1950s and later (Kevin Lynch, the Situationists, etc.)
derive from behaviorist and cognitive psychology based on
experiments on the errors of animals as well as those of
men (see ‘Cognitive maps in rats and men’, Tolman 1948).
Tolman’s maze is therefore one of the most important early
prototypes of passages of error in the city and calls for a
comprehensive reconsideration.
DESIGN
STRUCTURAL
LANDSCAPE
DECEPTIVE
TECHNOLOGICAL-DIGITAL
Above: ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE COVATTA AND LAURA CIPRIANI

As such, it is not so much an error as it is a destination
in itself. The Atelier Bow-Wow, has recently reinterpreted
and juxtaposed the wandering and chaotic experiences
of Piranesi’s Carceri and the Circus. Their experimental
project, presented at the inaugural Chicago Biennial in
2015, is a public artwork which enhances social interaction
through different kinds of paths, passages and promenades
in a narrow courtyard. In the Russian countryside, the Half-
Bridge of Hope forces the idea of a missing, endless passage
with no practical purpose. This abortive connection with its
intentional error assumes a symbolic connotation of hope,
constructing, and forcing, a brand new point of view and
relationship with its surrounding landscape.
In 1980s Russia, a group of young architects founded
an informal movement called ‘Paper Architecture’ which
took elements of broken passage to further extremes.
The Minotaur Bridge, designed by Mikhail Belov in 1987,
pursued a reinterpretation of the ancient Greek myth by
transforming the direct and linear passage of the bridge
into an impossible labyrinth. In this case, the error is both
the wandering experience on the bridge itself as well as
the closed passages which inside the Minotaur’s mythical
maze itself. Similarly, Belov’s 1987 proposal for the Bridge
over the River Rubicon was a radical expression of error as
wandering, indecision and ambiguity: only by turning back
toward the starting place, negating the first action toward
the other side, can the end of the passage be reached.
Error sits at the center of countless other design proposals,
too. Peter Eisenman, with the project Moving arrows,
Eros and other Errors (1986), interprets the story of
Romeo and Juliet in architectural form, intersecting the
oppositional Capulet and Montague castles in an erotic
error of juxtaposition and interpenetration. Defensive
walls, necessary to protect the two feuding families from
one another, here become passages from one property to
the other in an homage to the doomed lovers’ commitment
to one another. In Eisenman’s hands, Shakespeare’s
manuscript collapses itself into a synchronic error of its
physical reinterpretation.
The Tianjin Eye in Tianjin, China, is a passage over the
Haihe River that encompasses the idea of the erratic
circular wandering. The bridge, which carries six lanes of
traffic across the river, incorporates a Ferris wheel with
passenger capsules.
Rafael Viñoly, Laguna Garzòn, Uruguay, 2015
‘Tianjin Eye,’ Hai River in Tianjin, China, 2008
‘The Half-Bridge of Hope,’ Russia, 2007
Tetsuo Kondo, ‘A path in the forest,’ Tallin, Estonia, 2011

‘The Bridge over the river Rubicon,’ Mikhail Belov, 1987 (Top)
‘Plate from Box 3 – Moving Arrows, Eros and other Errors - An Architecture of Absence,’
Peter Eisenman, Published by Architectural Association in London, 1986
‘Walk On,’ Zalewski Architecture Group, Gliwice, Poland, 2014 (Right)
‘The Infinite bridge,’ Gjøde & Povlsgaard Arkitekter, Aarhus, Denmark, 2015

In the world of landscape, error passages often endeavor
to involve nature in the erratic experience of movement.
The poetic Infinite Bridge in Aarhus, Denmark, designed
by Gjøde & Povlsgaard Arkitekter in 2015, seeks to
establish a relationship between the city and the endless
landscape of the bay through its perfect circular form.
Error in this case is the act of walking in circles, a physical
and spiritual revolution which allows people to meet and
emotionally connect in contemplation of the natural
panorama, free of the decisions of navigation as well as
from the definitiveness of arrival. Similarly, architect Tetsuo
Kondo’s floating footpath, entitled A Path in the Forest,
preserves the natural integrity of the forest while also
incorporating certain woodsy elements, such as ivy, into
itself. Installed in Kadriorg Park in celebration of Tallinn,
Estonia’s designation as the 2011 European Capital of
Culture, the erratic passage enables people to gain different
experiences and perspectives of the natural environment.
At the opposite extreme, the Zalewski Architecture Group
imagines a green, tortuous, suspended pathway above the
courtyard of a building in Gliwice, Poland. The concept was
conceived on a summer’s day when the architects, looking
out their office window, were desperately longing ‘to go for
a walk’. The grass and gravel covered path leaps out from
a window and ends up, after a few twists and turns, in the
next window over, reminding us that the error, the creative
evasion, has lead you back to reality.
The historical list of failures of infrastructural passage is
very long and often descriptive of epochal shifts in the
paradigm of passage. The collapse of the first Tacoma
Narrows Bridge, a suspension bridge south of Seattle, is
an example of how error can facilitate new construction
and engineering knowledge. On November 7, 1940, four
months’ after its inauguration, the passage dramatically
collapsed as a result of self-propelling vibrations, called
aeroelastic flutter, caused by the wind. The event is an
example of what, in physics, is known as elementary forced
resonance: the wind provided a periodic frequency that
matched the natural structural frequency of the bridge,
encouraging the further rotation of the bridge’s span.
This construction failure boosted research into the fields
of bridge aerodynamics and aeroelastics, research that has
greatly influenced the designs of all the world’s great long-
span passages built since 1940.
The error passage can also be extreme, endless and
imaginative. In the afore-mentioned Carceri (1745-1761)
of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the space has neither
centrality nor order in its mix of anguish, the irrational,
and the sublime. Piranesi’s destruction of the center
and the lack of rules or directions transform the total
disorder into an infinite wandering. In contradiction to the
later conceptions by Bentham or Foucault, the complete
freedom of movement in any direction without any
limits or destinations turns the structure into the most
anguishing prison. In Escher’s Relativity (1953), the total
Piranesian disorder is imbued with physical and theoretical
paradigms which flustered the entire twentieth century. The
physical and perfect geometric composition is upset by the
presence of multiple gravitational forces. These latter allow
mannequins to wander in any direction, folding reality and
the physical rules into a distortion, an error of the normal
physical rules and of common sense.
‘Relativity,’ Maurits Cornelis Escher, 1953
‘Security,’ John Quentin Hejduk, Oslo, 1989

Extreme error passages have also been sagaciously
envisioned in John Hejduk’s moving masques. Some of
his movable staircases are interrupted architectures: these
iron passages, trying to resemble engineering construction
errors, surprisingly allow unusual viewpoints, thereby
becoming destinations themselves.
In the book ‘Mask of Medusa’ Hejduk writes: ‘The wall...
[is] the moment of greatest repose, and at the same time
the greatest tension. It is a moment of passage. The wall
heightens that sense of passage, and by the same token, its
thinness heightens the sense of it being just a momentary
condition... what I call the moment of the present’
(Hejduk, Shkapich, 1985). This is why, in Hejduk’s sketches,
these transportable staircases transform incessantly into
something else, mutating into erroneous and incongruous
architectural metamorphoses, assemblages of passages
confronted with stasis and obstruction.
In the present age of media in which we live, errors can also
be the product of a technological and digital distortion. The
artist Clement Valla started collecting Google Earth images
in which he discovered odd and misrepresented passages
of the Earth’s surface. The distorted bridges and passages
are the absolute logical result of the system revealing how
Google Earth software works. Images are represented
through automated data collection from a myriad of
different sources that are constantly updated and endlessly
combined to create a unified illusion. ‘Google Earth is a
database disguised as a photographic representation. These
uncanny images focus our attention on that process itself,
and the network of algorithms, computers, storage systems,
automated cameras, maps, pilots, engineers, photographers,
surveyors and map-makers that generate them’ (Valla,
2014). As such, that piece of the internet that we have all
become accustomed to trusting as the farthest-reaching
representation of our reality is yet another manifestation of
error, requiring the mind, in its transmigration from screen
to understanding, to negotiate the distorted passages of
technology. It thus stands that the notion of error is all-
encompassing, definitive of all experiences of the urban,
natural, and digital world. We believe that we need a new
vision to imagine a world that knows how to create and
compose through the elaboration of error.
The visual passages of Piranesi and Escher materialize
in the apparently endless spiral of the Dutch architects
NEXT. This passage brings you to nowhere in particular: it
is a sculpture in a green landscape, a folly of impossibility
which recalls Richard Serra’s large-scale assemblies of
sheet metal. The path is walkable only in one direction,
transforming the endless error passage into an impossible
visual illusion.
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapsing, November 7, 1940
‘Postcards From Google Earth,’ Clement Valla, 2012
Right: LAURA CIPRIANI AND LEONARDO ZUCCARO MARCHI

The Micro-Manifesto of the Erroneous/Erratic Passage
1.The passage of error allows us to wander (‘errare’) and
to explore.
2. The passage of error is a creative act. The opportunity
to see the birth of a new story potentially inhabits every
error.
3. The passage of error sometimes brings you to an absurd
path. Without foolishness we do not have a new vision.
4. The passage of error can be explorative, cognitive,
administrative, design-based, structural, and technological-
digital.
5. The explorative passage of error leads to new routes.
6. The cognitive passage of error leads to new learning.
7. The administrative passage of error establishes new
social and spatial relationships between art and the city and
between the living space and infrastructure in the city.
8. The designed-based passage of error is a fake error and
it is the product of the architect`s will.
9. The landscape passage of error allows us to connect
emotionally to nature.
10. The structural passage of error improves our scientific
knowledge.
11. The extreme passage of error makes us reflect on reality
and on illusion.
12. The technological-digital passage of error leads us to
not trust maps, cartography and digital media.
References:
Barthes, R., ‘Semiology and the Urban.’ in The City and the Sign: an
introduction to Urban Semiotics. Gottdiener M., Lagopoulo A. (eds),
New York, p. 87-98.
Harvey D. (1990). The condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, London.
Lefebvre H. (1974). La production de l’espace. Ed. Anthropos, Paris.
Lynch K. (1959). The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Piranesi G.B. (1973). The Prisons (Le Carceri ): the Complete First and
Second States. Dover Pubns, New York.
Sadler S. (1998). The Situationist City. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Shkapich K. (ed.) (1989). John Hejduk: Mask of Medusa - Works
1947-1983. Rizzoli International Publications, New York.
Tolman E.C. (1948). “Cognitive maps in rats and men.” The
Psychological Review, 55(4), 189-208.
Viganò P. (1999). La città elementare. Skira, Milano.
Smets M. (2014). “Passages. Transitional spaces for the 21st-
century city”, 1-20 (http://passages-ivm.com/sites/default/
files/smets-passages-thematic-text_2.pdf)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Laura Cipriani is a visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture
and Urbanism at IUAV University of Venice and the Politecnico
di Milano. Having received her M.Des from Harvard’s GSD
and her Ph.D from IUAV, Laura cofounded the research firm
Superlandscape.
Leonardo Zuccaro Marchi is visiting Lecturer at TU Delft and a
Postdoctoral Fellow at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm.
With a Ph.D from both TU Delft and IUAV, Leonardo was named
one of the “Best 40 under 40 European Architects” in 2010.

Of all of the booming cities in the non-white world, Abu
Dhabi stands today as a unique conflagration of traditional
centers of commerce, fishing, and pearl diving with a series
of imperial efforts and the world’s present frenzy for oil.
A product of British colonialism, the capital of the United
Arab Emirates grew out of exclusive treaties that variously
conceived of the island as a British protectorate and
sought to capitalize on the 1958 discovery of petroleum.
These treaties would later prove to be the foundation of
the geographical and political stratification of the future
nation, especially given that the treaties applied to the
sheikhs who signed them and their descendants. The
effects of the treaties were two-fold: the first was to draw
and formalize the geographic boundaries between the
different emirates, which previously lay along the lines of
intricate tribal politics. The second effect was to legitimize
the tribal leaders whom the British colonials selected as the
hereditary rulers of these emirates (Elsheshtawy, 2004).
Intheaftermathof theformationof theUAE,anewlyforged
national identity began to surface. Responding, at different
moments to Portuguese trade, British interventionism, and
regional (largely Iranian) power projections, Abu Dhabi’s
ruling class sought to legitimize their rule through patronage
of the local culture and heritage. By sponsoring events
linked to local culture, such as camel races, and fastidiously
broadcasting such patronage in local media, the city’s rulers
crafted an image of benevolent patriarchy that continues
to this very day. Simultaneously linking such events to a
semi-imagined “past” while also drawing sharp distinctions
between present-day comfort and the strife and hardship
by which they defined their city’s history, the ruling class
pushed a new-found pastime of leisure made possible by
the oil trade.
In light of this, Abu Dhabi has undergone two major
transformations in its recent history: the first was prompted
by the discovery of oil in the late 1960s; the second was
in the wake of Sheikh Zayed’s death in 2004. Prior to the
discovery of oil, Abu Dhabi was merely a small fishing
village, composed of some mud huts and bungalows,
with a fort built in the early 1760s to defend the precious
water supplies of the island. Oil facilitated a massive
transformation into the future’s gleaming metropolis.
Guided by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, who ruled
DISLOCATING THE MASSES:
The Social Aspects of Abu Dhabi’s Divisive Grid
Abu Dhabi from 1966 to 2004, the city grew out of the idea
that the past, and anything associated with it, represented
suffering, toil, and misery and had to be planned away
and built over. Sheikh Zayed’s plan for Abu Dhabi ranged
from statues of the material symbols of heritage to the
construction of excessively wide highways and boulevards,
suitable for the political capital of a young and rich nation.
(See also Naypyidaw, Brasília, Abuja, and Washington, DC.)
What Sheikh Zayed endeavored to achieve was to flee
the crowded and huddled city of the past toward an oasis
spread out in the desert with light, air, and distance from
the struggles of the past.
Far from being mere collections of structures and spaces,
cities are living, breathing organisms that thrive on the
oxymoronic juxtaposition of order and chaos. New York
City, where the rigid order imposed by the grid undergirds
a sense of crazed chaos unceasing in its tumult, stands as
the common example of this intertwined dichotomy. Abu
Dhabi, on the contrary, relied almost exclusively on the
overwhelming reign of order, constructed according to
rationalist ideals that sought cures for the urban “disease”
and spared no room for necessary, natural urban chaos
(Dempsey, 2014).
Pushed by the example posed by its desert cousin, Dubai,
Abu Dhabi embarked on a path towards development that
necessarily relied upon outside suggestions. Given the post-
colonial monomania of blindly following models deemed
‘global best practices’ that the region favors, examples
from all over the world were copied and pasted onto the
blank slate set out in the desert. In particular, Abu Dhabi
latched on the Singaporean example, adopting the efforts
of a tiny nation lacking natural resources yet nevertheless
governing itself with the same rationalist rigidity that Abu
Dhabi favors. Not only has this rigidity created a spatially,
architecturally, and socially divided city, it has also imprinted
this division into the psyches of the indigenous people.
For centuries, the towns and villages dotting the southern
coast of the Persian Gulf followed the same vernacular as
other old Arabic villages, with houses clustered together
amidst winding alleyways and situated according to tribal
connections and loyalties. In today’s Abu Dhabi, only
one of these neighborhoods survives, serving to house a
group of powerful Emiratis in a contemporary mimicry
of historical housing. The new, and imported, system
of housing is largely due to the influence of Aramco
E S S A Y
BY ABDULLA AL SHEHHI
This article is adapted from an earlier work entitled A Socio-Spatial Comparison Between the Grids Regulating Abu Dhabi and New York City.

The proliferation of such housing compounds ingrained a
certain expectation into the Emirati psyche: every Emirati
deserved a private villa, and the public housing program
should be their provider. This expectation, in becoming
reality, certainly yielded larger houses, yet also worked to
disintegrate Abu Dhabi’s long-ingrained social mores. The
cohesion of the old Emirati community was partially based
on the proximity between houses; in an environment where
people live in structures separated by hundreds of feet of
emptiness, this proximity – and the society it engendered
– was no more. Moreover, given the large construction
booms and the rapid development of the young nation,
coupled with the rapid influx of foreigners, the artificial
identity carefully constructed for the Emiratis began to
buckle. Whispers of anger began to surface: the royal class
was blamed for this cultural erosion as members of the polis
acknowledged the simulacra upon which their society was
based. Of course, such dissidents, as they were branded,
were quickly relegated to an ever-expanding prison system
(HRW, 2013).
The translation of the grid’s foreign ideology into an
otherwise conservative, socially cohesive urban fabric
served to cement the government’s complete control of
Abu Dhabi’s built environment, wherein physical change
remained, under penalty, the remit solely of the state.
developments built in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s, defined
by American-style villas imprinted onto the Saudi Arabian
desert landscape (Citino, 2006). Rather than learn from the
shortcomings of the Aramco compounds, the UAE quickly
adopted the same villa-style of housing, the emirate’s
vernacular architecture swallowed by oversized compounds
of sand and scrub, presenting an obvious display of wealth
that contradicted the humble ideals of generations past
(Dempsey, 2014). Also adopted was that most rational of
planning apparatuses: the urban grid.
Abu Dhabi’s corniche in 2014. Note the large boulevard, overt greenery, and many glass-
facades. Source: almrsal.com
Abu Dhabi’s corniche in the 1960s. Note the old fort in the center (c. 1760) and the clusters of huts and bungalows amidst a newly appearing asphalt road. Source: St. Josephs Cathedral, Abu Dhabi.

References:
Ballon, H. (2012). The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan,
1811-2011. New York: Columbia University Press.
Clune, M. (2015,). “Little Bangladesh – Mapping Abu Dhabi
exhibition opens in New York City.” The National. Retrieved
from http://www.thenational.ae/uae/heritage/little-bangladesh-
-mapping-abu-dhabi-exhibition-opens-in-new-york-city
Dempsey, M. (2014). Castles in the Sand: a City Planner in Abu Dhabi.
Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company,.
(2011).“AlHosnPalace:AbuDhabi’sBeatingHeartandHerLiving
Heritage.” Al Ittihad. Retrieved December 16, 2015, from http://
www.alittihad.ae/details.php?id=100862&y=2011&article=full
Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New
York: Random House.
Khalaf, S (1999). “Camel Racing in the Gulf. Notes on the
Evolution of a Traditional Cultural Sport.” Anthropos, Bd. 94, H.
1. /3. Pp. 85 – 106.
“Modern Architecture in Abu Dhabi, 1968-1992.” https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=tjbbPZlWzbk
Muhaissen, E. (2015). “The Simplicity and Difficulty of Life in
the Emirates in the Past.” Emarat Al Youm. Retrieved December
16, 2015, from http://www.emaratalyoum.com/life/four-
sides/2015-05-17-1.784576
Whyte, W. (2001). “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.” New
York: Project for Public Spaces.
https://lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com/2010/04/08/slums-of-
new-york/
Elsheshtawy, Y. “Redrawing Boundaries: Dubai, an Emerging
Global City.” in Elsheshtawy, Y, ed.(2004) Planning Middle Eastern
Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World.
CIA World Fact Book
Sankar, A. (2014, August 20). Say no to bachelors’ campaign in
Abu Dhabi. Retrieved December 18, 2015, from http://gulfnews.
com/news/uae/general/say-no-to-bachelors-campaign-in-abu-
dhabi-1.1374351
Human Rights Watch reports on the UAE
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Abdulla Al Shehhi is a second year urban planning student. His
interests include urban and economic development, and the mobility
of sexual minorities.
The grid came to serve, also, as an effective tool of
segregation. With no program of low-cost housing or
provision for multi-family housing complexes in place, the
poor and the rich tend to live at opposite ends of the city,
kept apart by the spatial rules imparted by the logic of the
grid. Further exacerbating Abu Dhabi’s extreme segregation
is its long history of racial homogeneity: what once may
have been the consequence of sitting in the middle of a
vast desert is now due to laws reserving certain areas for
Emirati citizens, with other spaces dedicated to foreigners.
(Finance-based segregation, of course, is reproduced,
perhaps even amplified, in the spatial situation of foreigner
districts.) The citizen/non-citizen divide is so strong, in
fact, that, in 2014, the government launched a campaign
to evict non-Emiratis from Emirati-only neighborhoods
(Sankar, 2014). The mechanism was novel: certain areas
were decreed single-family-unit districts: bachelors and
other living situations not conforming to the government’s
traditional ideal were almost exclusively non-Emirati.
In a climate of such rigidity and control, that attempts at
environmental modification and adapting public space into
individualized social space causes great wonder. Yasser
Elsheshtawy, an associate professor of architecture at the
United Arab Emirates University, shines a bright light on
phenomena of this kind, having undertaken a study of
informal public spaces under the title Little Bangladesh
– Mapping Abu Dhabi. Evoking William Whyte’s
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Elsheshtawy
documented Abu Dhabi’s Bangladeshi community and
its informal (unsanctioned) use of a small urban space as
a public gathering area. Notably, the use of the space by
the Bangladeshi community – a group largely consisting
of adult males – fundamentally altered its usefulness to
other segments of the population while also laying bare
the city’s ever-present social divides: women and children
would only leave their homes and utilize the space when
the Bangladeshi social gathering was cleared, with no
interaction between the two groups. The complicity of the
grid in creating scarce spaces of gathering in an extremely
segregated society only serves to bolster divides while also
taking away opportunities to meaningfully enjoy the Abu
Dhabi’s public spaces.
Today, Abu Dhabi remains conflicted about how best
to pursue planning for its future. In an effort, perhaps
to bring back the social life of the past, the Abu Dhabi
Urban Planning Council (UPC) has recently released a
neighborhood planning brochure, which calls for the
construction of courtyard housing and the planning
of neighborhoods to evoke the vernacular of the past.
Interestingly, the UPC also published a brochure named
Emirati Housing promoting the same villa-style form of
housing that they seemingly combat with the first brochure.
With such confusion, the social situation in Abu Dhabi may
continue to worsen unless these two extremes are brought
together.

We think about what interests us and we try to understand
what we do not know about. That is how we learn new things
and create new ideas. What is unknown, what is apart from
our own experiences, what is “other” is precisely what we
should strive to become familiar with and informed about.
That which intrigues does so because it offers, behind a
veil of ignorance and inaccessibility, something to learn. At
least, these are the things that I told myself as I ventured to
Park Hill Avenue.
I do not know if what I am doing is really “urban planning.”
Certainly, it is “urban.” It looks at people and things in the
city. It tries (I think) to ponder how this assemblage of
people and things connects to the physicality of the city at
large and, maybe more importantly, to the idea of “city.”
Talking to people, listening to people. Trying to say the
right things, to walk the right way or to wait until a quiet
moment to snap a photograph, in order to convince the
neighborhood that there was a point to my presence, that
I was not just some type of voyeur of despair. And yet
that was exactly what I was. And that is exactly what the
whole premise of this project was based upon, was it not?
My plan was to learn about this place called Park Hill, this
supposed bastion of refugees perched on Staten Island’s
North Shore, but I had already decided what it should be
like. And I had already come up with the emotions that the
Liberians should feel. I did not want to be surprised.
Here is what a typical research outing was like for me: The
1 train, the 2 or 3 train, the 1 train again. I would wait in the
ferry hall with hundreds of other passengers, wondering
what they all could be doing out and about on a winter’s
day. I would see people wearing West African cloth and
speaking in inflected English. Until I learned that West
Africans from many different countries lived in all of New
York’s corners, I simply assumed that the people I saw must
be Liberians, must be part a part of “my story.” But not
everything is what I think, and not everything has to be the
story that I tell.
The ferry. I would find a seat upstairs, and glue my eyes to
the window. I would look at the churches and gantries of
South Brooklyn, marvel at the barges and container ships
lounging in the harbor, gaze at the creative immensity of
REFLECTIONS ON PRACTICE:
Positionality and Research on the Park Hill Liberians
Manhattan’s skyline. And then the Lady would appear,
hundreds of yards to the west and yet somehow right
above our heads. Hoisting high her lantern of welcome,
holding in her hand the very best of America’s promises of
opportunity, the lady would hold me in her green gaze. Her
eyes were fixed upon the far horizon, but I began to think
that they might be peering toward the heights of northern
Staten Island, toward a place where it seemed like the
newest huddling masses, the crowds banished from their
Liberian homes for a new kind of life on Park Hill Avenue,
were still yearning, ever yearning, to breathe free.
The bus, S74 or S76. Crowded and raucous, the bus led
me away from the brief stateliness of St. George, through
the bustle of small-town Stapleton, and into the more
desolate roads of Clifton and Park Hill, where I would get
off and walk across the street to Park Hill Avenue, always
with a host of six or seven others. It seemed like everyone
on the bus had a friend, someone they were bumping into,
someone with whom to chat about the latest gossip on the
block, someone they knew from work or school or church
or family. I had no one. I felt out of place, sitting quietly and
wondering if anyone was going to ask me what I was doing
there. They never did, of course, but I always made sure
that some questionnaires or some sketched-out maps were
accessible from my bag, ready to be shared and explained as
a way to justify my journey.
I felt the same way on Park Hill Avenue its housing blocks,
waiting to be questioned on my presence and always aware
that I was an outsider. Was it my whiteness? Park Hill
Avenue is overwhelmingly black, both African and African-
American, and this reality is palpable as soon as one steps
onto the street. This is not a place of diversity, where
people who look different live together and interact. This
is not a place that offers its culture as a commodity, either,
to be consumed by all types of people from all types of
places. This place, with its succession of brick blocks and
its assortment of parking lot bleakness and its smattering
of shuttered storefronts, is one where you are if you have
nowhere else to go. My body, I was aware, sent a message:
I was there to get something. My pads of paper and my
two green clipboards and my digital camera slung across my
shoulder only offered further confirmation of this.
E S S A Y
BY JOHN ROBERT DARCEY

Deleuze, in conversation with Foucault, says of the latter, “...
you became aware of the necessity for confined individuals
to speak for themselves, to create a relay...”1
This project
and the way in which my findings are presented is informed
by that idea: I have attempted, as much as possible, to use
direct quotations from the refugees I spoke with and then
to organize the ideas contained within those quotations
around a certain collective narrative. I conceived of the
project as a way to use my pages to place the voice of
the Park Hill Liberians within the realm of planning as a
discipline.
At the same time, however, this process places me – white,
male, educated, non-poor, American – in the role of arbiter
of the message, as the regulator of information coming
from people very different from me in many respects:
black, often female, less educated, poor, refugee. I have
allowed myself to become of the owner of these words,
even as I have tried to give over the page fully to the words
as I recorded them. But I am the one who decided how to
use them, on which pages to place them and in support
of which of my arguments to employ them. As much as
I can try to use paragraphs like these to reflect upon the
legitimacy of myself as a sensitive planner and present my
work as activist scholarship, I cannot fully escape the reality
of my location within the hegemon.
The inescapability of being who I am goes beyond my
ownership of a downtrodden population’s words, of course,
and extends to the process of carrying out research as the
very obvious outsider that I am. Speaking to people on Park
Hill Avenue meant saying, “I am a student at Columbia
University and I am doing research.” It also meant asking
people who I did not know to open up to me, to tell me
about their concerns and experiences and emotions, most
of which were not easy or comfortable. I have never been
to Liberia, and I have never studied the history or sociology
of its conflict in any great detail. I have never known war.
I have lived (briefly) as an outsider in another culture,
but always with access to choice and opportunity and the
chance to change my existence. I fall, quite admittedly, into
that group about which Spivak says the “Other as Subject is
inaccessible...”2
Negotiation, psychological and otherwise,
was inevitable; the “truth” that I present is what they felt
comfortable sharing with a stranger largely unfamiliar with
the local and personal dynamics at play who was carrying
out a research endeavor with no likely practical outcomes.
So why would anyone on Park Hill Avenue open up to me?
Why should I be the one to tell this story?
What I learned cannot be definitive or even suggestive
of “a refugee experience.” It cannot be definitive or even
suggestive of “a Liberian experience.” What I learned is a
photograph of a particular community in a particular place
experience some very real problems and largely ignored
by decision-makers and power-brokers. As with any
photograph, I am the one who pointed the lens, controlled
the exposure, set the aperture. And as with any photograph
that is also a portrait, a degree of posing is bound to
have occurred: simplification, omission, and distortion –
resulting, certainly, from the distance between my subjects’
experiences and my own and the very real differences in
our potential futures – color what I write and (re)present.
I would like to make a claim to exhaustiveness and to
universality, but I cannot.
The role of planners in working toward meeting the needs
of the future demands a firm understanding of the realities
of today. If planning is to face real challenges and attempt
to redress inequities, then it needs to know, first, what those
challenges are and who is affected by those inequities.
Often, this means drawing underserved and downtrodden
populations into planning as active participants aware of
their agency and confident in their voices. My aim is to
begin that process for a group of New York’s refugees
who have very much been left out of planning efforts that
affect their lives; at the very least, I attempt to raise this
population to greater visibility and offer a first step toward
comprehending societal problems that too often elude the
realm of planning. This attempt stands, admittedly, upon
my positionality as a white, male, educated, non-poor
American privileged enough to pursue an education in this
field: I hope, through the words on these pages, to provoke
the field of planning to engage more fully with the refugee
population.
1
Deleuze, Gilles and Michel Foucault. “Intellectuals and Power.”
in Bouchard, Donald F., ed. Bouchard, Donald F. and Sherry
Simon, trans. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews by Michel Foucault. (Ithaca, NY: 1977). p. 206.
2
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in
Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture. (Urbana and Chicago, IL: 1988). p. 282.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Robert Darcey is an urban planning student and writer in New
York City. He is particularly interested in exploring the cultural-
physical-social urban interface, particularly as it relates to migration
and movement both spatial and psychological.

Gentrification has become a (too) popular word. From aptly
describing the process by which a particular (disadvantaged)
demographic is displaced to colloquially referring to any
sort of aesthetic improvement, this phenomenon, at least
nominally, seems almost universally applicable. Indeed,
gentrification has become a pervasive praxis over the last
half-century, riding the coat-tails of post- war American
consumerism and the neo-liberal ideology that followed.
As Americans turned their expectations of resource
infrastructure away from the government and towards
private entities (read: for-profit companies without the
collective good in mind), a more narrowed path of
opportunity and accessibility was created. The term
“collective good” soon became “individual responsibility”:
the disintegration of the Keynesian model paved the way
for the reality of extreme private profit and concentrated
wealth.
This economic trend found it could thrive in an urban
context pending some reconfiguring: big box stores and
major corporations could downsize, setting up shop
in smaller city quarters; companies could alter their
advertising strategies, catering their marketing campaigns
toward city dwellers. This process continues today, with
ever-predictable results: small, locally grown businesses are
being driven out, be it by the large corporate migrants or
trendy artisanal shops, both infiltrating forces either seeing
the potential profits to be made in disinvested or blue-
collar neighborhoods or jumping on the bandwagon after
efforts have already been made to “clean up” a somehow
deficient neighborhood. Gentrification, society is finding, is
stimulated by the urban environment’s promotive stance on
infilling rather than expanding.
Although gentrification can begin with a number of factors
(among them: the cultivation of an artistic community, the
influx of young professionals), the presumed perpetrators
(thatis,thosewhoactivelyseektotransformaneighborhood
and destabilize its identity) are generally developers and
real-estate mongers, builders and sellers of the expensive
and larger-than-life residential and commercial complexes
that often announce their presence with an architecture at
once out-of-scale and unimaginative. They set the stage: the
wealthy are invited to play.
IS “BETTER” SYNONYMOUS WITH “GENTRIFICATION”?
What, however, of those who are hired by the city to
simply improve community spaces or redesign streets and
sidewalks? If you are an agent for aesthetic improvement
and tasked to “revitalize” a downtown area or district, are
you just as complicit as the usual suspects in facilitating
gentrification? By making a community better, are we
necessarily readying it for gentrification?
These questions introduce a conceptual distinction between
improvement as an aesthetic exercise and improvement as a
socioeconomic exercise. Can improvement exist in a purely
cosmetic realm, without an evaluation of the multi-tiered
implications that have been known to follow? Can visual
“improvement” (with all the subjectivity that the term
implies) still be considered such if it has adverse social
effects on the very community it initially aimed to serve?
Kevin Clark, Associate Principal of Chicago-based urban
planning firm The Lakota Group, believes in the specificity
of improvement. He explains that the goals of revitalizing a
community, although manifested and most easily identified
as physical alterations, seek more than just to better the
physical nature of the neighborhood. In fact, design
speculations can possess great value in pondering ways
in which the environment might more efficiently serve
community members, considering everything from the
local economy to cultural and social restoration. By nature
of a design being specific to the individual community’s
context and in many ways driven from a grassroots level,
community improvements can be accomplished for the
people and, in many cases, by the people.
In addition to this more inclusive model of design, market
studies are often conducted during the course of such
projects, analyzing the demographics, spending potential,
and development capacity of the designated community in
order to determine the optimal and most realistic future
land use and development type. Though these measures are
robust and designed so as to specifically avoid neighborhood
detriments like gentrification, it is nearly impossible to
predict market forces with complete accuracy: regardless of
intent and research, any plan to improve a neighborhood
may ultimately be no match for the power of the dollar-
holder.
E S S A Y
BY GABRIELLE PETERSON

Community improvement, of course, is not limited
to simply streetscape or signage modifications or an
investment in new or restored architecture. An engagement
process between planners, community organizers, social
advocates, and residents is a tool that many communities
utilize in an effort to achieve positive change. As the story of
gentrification that in Boston’s South End tells us, however,
the simple creation of a discursive community forum
does not always lead to an inclusive transformation. Sylvie
Tissot, in her Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in
Boston’s South End, recalls that the titular neighborhood’s
identity is strongly rooted in community activism, brought
about initially during the 1960s when different ethnic
groups banded together to protest plans that would have
cast aside their homes in favor of an urban renewal scheme.
Beginning with a flurry of community organization efforts,
this activism initiated “the establishment of neighborhood
advisory offices that gave neighborhoods a means of
voicing their concerns on planning issues.” (See Lance
Freeman’s review of Tissot’s book on page 21). Many of
these offices were established by the City of Boston itself,
allowing for a direct channel of communication to flourish
between the neighborhood and the city. Consequently, and
after years of rich influx, wealthier community members
amassed far greater influence over the direction of the
neighborhood than poorer long-time residents.
Gentrification and improvement are not one in the same:
improvement to a neighborhood, regardless of whether
made cosmetically or through community building, does
not on its own cause gentrification. Of course, it does
not prevent gentrification either. With the unpredictability
of market forces, in addition to the increasing appeal of
“disinvested” communities to corporations and middle-
class individuals and families seeking a less expensive
lifestyle, gentrification seems to embody an unavoidable
byproduct of urban growth. With revitalization plans
seeking to maximize neighborhood efficiency, and
community engagement processes aiming to unite and
strengthen residents’ grasp on neighborhood politics, it is
time, perhaps, to consider new models of neighborhood
growth and development that work for the existing
residents themselves.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gabrielle M. Peterson is a Chicago-based writer and urban-space
enthusiast. She received her B.A. in studio art and creative writing
from Carleton College.

Central to the concerns one hears about gentrification are
long term residents’ feelings of being “pushed out.” This
fear goes beyond a fear of physical displacement from their
neighborhood to also include long time residents’ feelings
of loss of belonging in and loss of control of their own
neighborhoods. This loss would appear to motivate much
of the cynicism long term residents often voice about
neighborhood change. It is common to hear of long term
residents complaining about new bars, restaurants, and
the ubiquitous locally-roasted coffee shop opening; when
changes occur in their neighborhood, it often feels that
such changes are not for them. There is a palpable sense
that gentrification brings about improvements that are
intended not for long term residents but, rather, to entice
newcomers with money.
Sylvie Tissot’s recently published book, Good Neighbors:
Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End (Verso) shines
a bright light on how one neighborhood experienced
gentrification in such a way that low income minority
residents and even the early gentrifiers of the neighborhood
came to be marginalized in their own neighborhood – that
is, “pushed out” even while physically remaining in the
neighborhood. A sociologist and Professor of Political
Science at University of Paris-8, Tissot spent several
years gathering material to form the basis of this well-
researched book. She conducted seventy-seven interviews
with neighborhood residents, engaged in several years of
participant observation, and studied archival documents to
paint a picture of how later and more elite gentrifiers came
to take control of the neighborhood.
Tissot’s is not a story of greedy self-absorbed property
buyers taking over the neighborhood for themselves and
foisting their mores and perspectives on hapless old timers.
In many ways, the context in which gentrification occurred
in the South End portended an example of “good”
gentrification. First, the South End neighborhood had a rich
history of activism dating back to the 1960s when blacks,
Puerto Ricans and whites banded together to stop urban
renewal plans in their neighborhood. These activists helped
usher in the new era of community engagement in Boston
with the establishment of neighborhood advisory offices
that gave neighborhoods a means of voicing their concerns
SYLVIE TISSOT
Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End
on a great number of planning issues. Such activism and
community engagement is sometimes held forth as a means
to stop gentrification. In the case of South End, however,
the institutions put in place by the City of Boston to better
engage with neighborhood activists in the 1960s and 1970s
paved the way for more affluent gentrifiers to shape, in
ensuing decades, the redevelopment of the neighborhood
according to their tastes.
Second, the South End neighborhood has a long
history of diversity, being a haven for gays, people
of varying races and ethnicities, and low-income
residents of rooming houses. Indeed, the diversity
of the neighborhood is what drew many affluent and
educated residents to the neighborhood in the first place.
B O O K R E V I E W
BY LANCE FREEMAN

Over time, this diversity tended to wither as the
neighborhood became more homogenous in terms of race
and class: the gentrifiers, it turns out, valued diversity, but
only to a certain extent and in a form they could control.
Finally, the early activists of the 1960s and 1970s were
successful in having affordable housing a requirement for
any new construction. As Boston’s economy increasingly
drew white collar professionals to the city, the South End
became steadily more exclusive. As with their tolerance for
a certain level of ethnic diversity, the new residents of the
South End allowed for the maintenance and development
of lower-rent housing, provided that the number of units
was kept relatively small.
Thus, the South End neighborhood would become the
playground of affluent whites. Tissot seems to disapprove
of these changes and often writes mockingly of the
gentrifiers and their habits. For example, she found the
gentrifiers’ penchant for having dogs as pets and treating
them as family members “slightly ridiculous” in a
neighborhood with very real human needs. In the end, the
changes brought about by the gentrifiers are interpreted
by Tissot as a “conquest” of the South End, whereby the
gentry have achieved “hegemonic” status. As she puts it,
this conquest was accomplished subtly and not violently,
but her use of these terms to describe the change make
clear her interpretation of the gentrification process is
tinged with a critical perspective.
In a book about how the gentrifiers exerted their will to
reshape the neighborhood, the voices of long term and
remaining working class residents are, for the most part,
absent. She notes that except for a blog that “railed against
the yuppies’ arrogance…and a few newspaper articles,
hostility to gentrification had little collective expression.”
Protests or any other type of community activism intended
to blunt the forces of gentrification seem not to have
arisen. The reader would be correct to question the extent
to which long-time residents would have shared Tissot’s
interpretation of the changes occurring around them.
That question, unfortunately, is left unanswered by Good
Neighbors.
Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End does,
however, answer the question of how a neighborhood
experienced a transformation from a relatively poor one
with flop houses, seedy bars, and frequent scenes of public
drunkenness in the 1960s and 1970s into a place described
by the New York Times in 2006 as a “…vital neighborhood
that has officially emerged with engaging new restaurants,
bars, shops and condominiums, and brownstones”
(Gardner 2006). Tissott’s critical history therefore makes
Good Neighbors an engaging new book well worth a read by
planners, urbanists, and students of neighborhood change.
Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South
End by Sylvie Tissot, translated by David broder and Catherine
Romatowski. Verso Books. 288 pages. $26.95
References:
Gardner, Ann Marie. 2006. “36 Hours in the South End of
Boston.” New York Times, June 30, 2006. http://www.nytimes.
com/2006/06/30/travel/escapes/30hours.html?_r=0.
Tissot, Sylvie. 2015. Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s
South End. London: Verso.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lance Freeman is a scholar of gentrification and neighborhood
change and author of the book There Goes the Hood: Views of
Gentrification from the Ground Up. He is the current director of
the urban planning program at the Graduate School of Architecture,
Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University.

Cover : Dislocating, Ahmedabad, India (Mehak Sachdeva 2015)
Inside Cover : Dislocated Shanghai, China (Jack Darcey 2013)
BEHIND THE SCENES
CONTENT EDITOR
Jack Darcey
Have a story you would like to share? Have any photos you want
to show the world? We are always looking for new and innovative
submissions and materials.
urban.submissions@gmail.com
PUBLISHING EDITOR
Logan Clark
GRAPHIC EDITOR
Mehak Sachdeva
URBAN Magazine
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New York, NY - 10027
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