Neighborhoods have always fascinated me. Growing up in New York City, I saw that every neighborhood has a distinct (yet variable) reputation. Interestingly, neighborhoods and their reputations are almost entirely defined by the residential demographics of particular urban areas. Though exterior indicators of a neighborhood’s ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural makeup are what we see when exploring the city as pedestrians, housing and habitation influence the type of businesses, communities, and issues that exist in a given urban space. As Hayden notes,  dwellings’ “social history includes the builder, and also the owner or developer, the zoning and building code writers, the building inspector, and probably a complex series of tenants.”[1]

Walking through Portland and New York alike, the fluidity of transition between neighborhoods is truly astonishing. Not unlike the close proximity of Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Spanish Harlem, Portland’s West Bayside neighborhood is surrounded by commercial and residential wealth, yet remains the poverty center of the city. This was made especially clear by our experience at Preble Street, where Portland’s homelessness manifests poignantly just steps away from a Whole Foods, luxury condos, and major commercial thoroughfares. This ghettoization has everything to do with affordable housing, commercial real estate, and concentrated areas of low-income.

Project-wise, Hayden’s framing of housing as representation particularly intrigued me: “most can be learned from urban building types […] that represent the conditions of thousands or millions of people.” [2] In my research I would be excited to address the trends that can be gleaned from housing, while also grappling with the exceptions to those trends. For example, while the majority of data on a residential neighborhood might indicate a concentrated low-income immigrant population, the beginnings of gentrification may manifest in seemingly anomalous real estate or demographic data. Additionally, the example of formerly homeless men living in a historic India Street home through Preble Street’s Housing First initiative is another residential exception that is worth exploring.

I want to explore the ways in which neighborhoods become more or less desirable for different groups of people by examining urban diversity in all its forms. As for how smart city technology can play a role, I think I will have to revisit Townsend’s lecture to glean more specifics of how tools from companies (like IBM, Cisco, and Siemens) typically used for infrastructural purposes could help in the housing sector. Additionally, the role of individual developers as sources of housing innovation is worth exploring further, given their impact on the technological presence and efficiency of the MTA. [3] Tackling a rapidly growing population with the housing limitations that exist in both New York and Portland will undoubtedly require the aid of organizational technologies and efficient tools for finding housing.

1. Hayden, Dolores. “Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and Politics of Space.” In The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, 14-43. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.

2. ibid.

3. Townsend, Anthony. “Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia.” Lecture, from New America Foundation, Washington, DC, October 8, 2013.