VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York
Abstract
Disadvantaged neighborhoods continue to experience systemic economic violence as a result of historical housing segregation policies such as “redlining” and a persistent national shortage of affordable homes. These policies rely heavily on contemporary zoning, which also steers the majority of development practices. The results, however, imply that zoning and its supportive policies preserve and restrain the emergence of critical spatial morphologies, leading to an even more uneven distribution of spatial resources. In addition to being exclusionary practices that perpetuate systemic geographical inequities, these representational policies impose a form of spatial scarcity. Spatial and reparative justice concerns continue to play increasingly important roles in numerous disciplines. Through a case study of Harlem, New York, the paper will examine how policy reform coupled with emergent spatial morphologies of housing might help shape and materially negotiate concepts of spatial and reparative justice. The paper will propose an enlarged role for these justice concerns within the discipline of design—a role guided toward incentivizing meaningful policy debate and the regeneration and redistribution of spatial resources aimed at offsetting or slowing forms of gentrification.
Shawn L. Rickenbacker is a trained architect, urbanist, and urban data researcher. He is currently the Director of the J. Max Bond Center for Urban Futures where he directs the center’s sponsored and partnership research and is an Associate Professor of Architecture at The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture. His research and work at the Bond Center directly confronts the complex urban intersection of spatial equity and the social and economic impacts of place-based policies, programs, and design through the lens of urban data, forensic and design research.