Built for Humans: Bryce T. Bauer interviews Sharon Zukin

2015-05-11T12:40:00-04:00

When you have every neighborhood looking the same, you know the city is at a danger point. And why should anybody want to live here, why should anybody want to visit here? A metropolis like New York or London or Shanghai is built on a strong sense of individual neighborhoods, and we are destroying that.

The sociologist Sharon Zukin on the role of the artist in gentrification, challenges to affordable housing, and the commodification of New York City’s loft lifestyle.

"I blame it all on New York magazine. In the late ’70s, early ’80s, New York, like other US cities, was just coming out of twenty years of middle-class flight. When Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she, of course, was a gentrifier, but she represented a minority view: “Aren’t cities great? Aren’t cities exciting?” I think, still, most Americans would rather live in homogenized, clean suburbs than live in gritty cities, certainly in gritty areas. But New York magazine upheld the good of cities. And from a certain point of view, you can’t complain that they were making city life look vibrant."

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Built for Humans: Bryce T. Bauer interviews Sharon Zukin