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theses

This dissertation examines the origins of a planning controversy over the redevelopment of Coney Island, a world-famous, historic, seaside amusement district in Brooklyn, New York. In 2009, the Bloomberg Administration passed a major rezoning of the neighborhood in an effort to attract development to the area. This measure inspired opposition from individuals who felt that the proposal did not honor the neighborhood's history. My research focuses on the hegemonic rationality that shaped the City's plan and on the competing logics and desires that inspired its opposition. Wide agreement about Coney Island's heritage value and foremost attributes - its diversity, authenticity, and historicity - masked profound disagreement about the proper uses of the district and about the plans for its future. To explore this disconnect, I trace it back to an interplay between divergent sets of images and experiences of the neighborhood, as mediated by its materiality, and then show how these divergences helped shape the planning process. Viewed through this lens, qualities like diversity and authenticity become not points of agreement, but windows for examining sources of contestation. They help us explain why neighborhood physical structures dismissed by the City as obsolete and disposable were regarded by others as useful and historic. In this way, my project points planning practice beyond the question of which places matter and toward questions of how and why they matter. This focus on subjective experience facilitates a deeper understanding of people's relation to places, making possible the formulation of more responsive and equitable plans. It also allows us to envision forms of conflict resolution based not on zero-sum adversarial trade-offs, which invariably favor the powerful, but on a negotiated reconceptualization of a place and of its future.

ETD_7509

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Juan Jorge Rivero Souss

doi:10.7282/T34M96VN

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.