Peter Nauffts

I’m drawn, for mostly personal reasons, to the housing research group. My childhood (and still current) home is a rather small, rent-stabilized apartment in New York City (on the Upper West Side). Who lives in a neighborhood—and who can afford to live in a neighborhood—seems as clear a way to elucidate socioeconomic patterns of exclusion and inclusion as any. Housing prices dictate so many of our expectations for a neighborhood, from quality of education to safety, as well as the kinds of public spaces and infrastructure that the area provides. This is something I perhaps took for granted as a child growing up in New York.

I am particularly interested in the dimension of time as it relates to housing. How fast is a neighborhood gentrifying can be seen in many places, but housing seems as good as any a barometer. I have watched my neighborhood change rather dramatically over my 21 years of existence. Broadway is now mostly an arbitrary (and excessive) collection of banks, Verizon stores, Starbucks’, and banks. Is this simply the natural life (or decay) of a city—the mark of progress? Is stasis an option?

I take from the Dolores Hayden the interesting if brief discussion of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of economic production and social reproduction and space.[1] There is always a powerful nostalgia, or so it seems, in my parents voices among many others when they talk about the way the neighborhood used to be. Yet Lefebvre makes me wonder if in fact we have in all these spaces what we deserve: banks for wealthy people to conveniently withdraw and spend money, Starbucks’ for the type of service or more abstract labor that the denizens of this neighborhood engage in.

As far as smart cities go, I have to admit that I have never considered smart technology’s applicability to housing. I admit, too, I don’t own an iPhone—but still, I think it would be fascinating to consider smart technology in relation to this problem. Perhaps its applicability is not so well suited to an app, as a public space project might be. It does seem to be well-suited to mapping, however. I would be fascinated to watch, over time, the sort of tidal rise in housing prices as it consumes a city, spreading outwards slowly but surely. And less directly related, I am sure there would be a strong correlation between housing price and the demand for more high-tech security—Rio style—that Townsend speaks of.[2]

[1] Hayden, Dolores. 1997. “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and Politics of Space.” In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, 18-19. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

[2] Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia [Anthony Townsend]. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1evCV6_e8Q&feature=youtube_gdata_player