REVIEW SYMPOSIUM
Matthew Gandy Concrete and Clay
Guest Editors: Noel Castree and Erik Swyngedouw
From Concrete and Clay to Planning in
the Service of Capital Accumulation:
Reworking Matthew Gandy’s
Conceptualization of Urban Form and
Resistance in New York City
Michael K Heiman
Department of Environmental Studies, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, USA;
[email protected]
Although I now reside in Pennsylvania, I still consider New York, where
I was born, raised, and went through my most endearing social transformations, as my city—indeed, “The City,” as though Philadelphia
was just a distant suburb. Later, when I moved on to California and then
back east, my love of New York only deepened. On an intellectual level,
this led to a treatise on the political economy of regional planning in
the metropolitan region (Heiman 1988), and on an emotional level,
to pilgrimages at every opportunity. Where I once considered the
Port Authority’s World Trade Center as an egregious commitment of
surplus revenues from millions of commuters designed to benefit
downtown business interests, inadvertently precipitating the office
glut crisis of the 1970s, later I eagerly anticipated the twin towers as the
first visible symbol of “Skyscraper National Park” when approached
across the industrial heartland of New Jersey. As with other New
Yorkers, the blow on September 11, 2001 was visceral, an attack on our
beloved city that washed away—at least temporarily—any misgivings
about the path of urban transformation.
New York, no doubt, has its share of adoptees. Among geographers,
the British have been at the fore. Here Matthew Gandy stands out as
a seduced lover and most astute observer. Through his book, Concrete
© 2003 Editorial Board of Antipode.
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and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, Gandy displays a
remarkable ability to uncover the complex history of New York’s
transformation, delivered through exhaustive scholarship and backed
by numerous references (Gandy 2002). The five case studies, ranging
from public water systems and parklands to landscaped roads and the
politics of pollution and resistance, are well done, in particular the
study on the city’s water system, an ongoing project that has received
insufficient coverage in the literature.
Gandy (2002:5, 7) professes to emphasize the “crucial role of capital
in shaping urban space” while avoiding a “crudely materialist interpretation of the urban process.” Solid empirical work notwithstanding,
his analysis emerges as a collection of contending neoliberal ideas,
rather than any structured understanding of the process of capital
accumulation and the specific interests served, as the requirements of
various interests shaped the events described. Such an understanding
would recognize the various manifestations of contradiction engendered,
which, in turn, gave rise to social-protest movements, as well as the
need for state intervention through urban and social planning. This
occurs, for example, when the expansion of new forms of capital
accumulation physically and spatially interfere with the defense of
space given over to consumption and social reproduction set aside
from an earlier period of accumulation. The demolition of worker
housing in Lower Manhattan during the 1920s, or the intrusion of
Robert Moses’ highways into residential neighborhoods starting in the
1930s—making way for and servicing the banks, brokerages, law firms,
and insurance industry so critical to the circulation of capital—are
vivid reminders of the transformation required and the resistance
engendered.
Gandy (2002:7) approaches the transformation of urban nature—
the stated object of analysis—as a mediation between nature as
“a biophysical fabric” and nature as “a cultural representation of
imaginary landscapes.” This amalgamation fails to adequately
acknowledge the vested interests behind change. Here I am not
referring to Moses and the city’s political leadership, but rather to the
powerful business interests that created the climate wherein these
agents of change—including the “Power Broker” himself (after Caro
1975)—could operate. Chief among these was the Regional Plan
Association of New York (RPA), with its influential regional plan
appearing in the 1920s. Thus, while Gandy (2002:54) might claim that
by the 1980s “[T]he role of planners, engineers, and public policy
advocates had been increasingly eclipsed by bankers, lawyers, and
bond underwriters determined to redirect urban governance toward
the needs of business,” in practice, the capture of liberal urbanplanning reform (eg the City Beautiful Movement under Frederick
Law Olmsted, Sr) had already been ongoing since the Progressive Era
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at the turn of the twentieth century, not just in New York City but
in other major metropolitan areas as well. Each had its own behindthe-scenes, business-oriented “public interest” regional planning
and good government organization, be it the Commercial Club of
Chicago, the Citizens Committee on (a) City Plan for Pittsburgh (later
the Allegheny Conference on Community Development), or the
Commonwealth Club of San Francisco (joined in the 1950s by the Bay
Area Council).
In this manner, so-called public servants were already in the service
of capital some sixty years earlier than identified by Gandy. Moses
was the prime example, even if his ego could not acknowledge this.
Like Marshall Berman (1982), Gandy accepts Moses as the master
architect. However, while it may not have been as simple a matter
as having Moses pour concrete on the dotted lines, as Robert Fitch
(1977) has suggested, the RPA, lacking authority and public power on
its own, appealed to those who possessed influence, and here the most
influential of all was Moses. As a result, Moses became the prime
agent in the process of capital accumulation, as he removed the
congested industrial landscape and immigrant housing from an earlier
cycle of accumulation and helped transform the city into a center for
business transaction in a national, and later a global, economy—
precisely the agenda of the RPA.
What happened in the 1980s was that capital interests became much
more bold and were no longer afraid to hide their faces behind this
facade of various nonprofit, public-interest research groups such as the
Russell Sage Foundation, the RPA, and David Rockefeller’s Downtown
Lower Manhattan Association. The current mayor, Michael Bloomberg,
was the prime example when he came right out and proclaimed in his
campaign that business leaders are in the best position to actually
govern the city.
While Gandy acknowledges the existence of the RPA, he (2002:136)
suggests that “[T]he real power of Moses and the Regional Plan Association was actually remarkably weak in relation to the underlying
dynamics of urban change.” However, if we take a look at the 1929
Regional Plan, with its highways, parks, and redevelopment schemes
stretching out for miles in all directions, and compare it with the
landscape of the metropolitan region as constructed between 1930
and 1960, it appears that Moses and the plan were remarkably
successful at the time. The contradiction for capital interests occurred
when Moses—who derived his popularity and power through middleclass consumption of the beaches and suburbs his parkways connected
—presented barriers to further accumulation. Thus, solutions in one
era of capital accumulation become dysfunctional in the next. With
the curved underpass parkways, for example, Moses quite literally
froze racial and income class demarcations into stone. This eventually
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led to much higher production costs for central city as well as suburban
capital, due to auto congestion and a lack of low-income housing and
connecting mass transit to the newly industrialized suburbs. In the
1950s, the RPA’s Second Regional Plan was actually designed to
address problems arising out of successful completion of the first.
In chapter 4, Gandy examines social resistance to urban transformation, using the Young Lords as a case study. Here, too, an analysis of
the requirements for capital accumulation would be useful. For example,
Gandy claims that women have benefited from the Young Lords’
activism, as they are closer to consumption issues such as health and
day care, food, clothing drives, and so on. However, servicing these
consumption issues, often through the no-wage labor of women, also
benefits capital interests, as it lowers the reproduction cost of labor.
Once we understand the social requirements of capital accumulation,
we are in a much better position to understand the significance of the
social movements observed and to consider whether they present
barriers to or opportunities for the next stage of accumulation.
Moreover, I think it is an oversight to date the environmental justice
movement, represented here by the Young Lords, as arising primarily
among people of color in the 1980s. Rather, we can trace the concern
with public health, safety, food, and other requirements for a secure
environment to the first real social campaign in American to make
public health an issue—and it was even led by women. I am referring
here to Jane Addam’s Chicago Hull House in the 1890s and the later
work of public-health scientist Alice Hamilton. Both were early
leaders of the environmental-justice movement, at least as its agenda
is portrayed by Gandy. Hull House focused on some of the very same
issues that the Young Lords first organized around—namely, provision of basic social services, including community playgrounds,
garbage collection, access to clinics, elimination of typhoid and other
infectious diseases, and provision of safe drinking water. Moreover,
Hull House was also involved with local politics, combining solid
research with grassroots activism, as the Young Lords did some ninety
years later.
The final chapter, on Rust Belt ecology, brings Gandy’s survey up to
date. He is on track when he notes that the “garbage crisis” may have
been overblown now that cheap landfill capacity is open in neighboring
states. Having been a technical consultant to some of the community
groups involved with the garbage battles in the early 1990s, I believe
that the Toxic Avengers seemed to get a disproportionate share of
media attention, while other groups—for example, the Polish Community in Greenpoint that led the fight against an existing incinerator
and expansion of the city’s huge sewer plant—may have been overlooked. Moreover, I consider the “fair share” program—where the
noxious land uses that no one wants would now be spread out across
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the city—not as a milestone in environmental justice and deserving of
an award, but rather as an attempt to protect the status quo, where the
focus is on managing waste and finding more backyards in which
to dump, instead of making a commitment to toxic-use reduction
and pollution prevention. New York’s recycling program is widely
acknowledged to be among the nation’s worst.
In conclusion, the core of Gandy’s analysis resides in the realm of
ideas, from modernism and Fordism to post-modernism and postFordism. These are presented without sufficient attention to the
persons who had these ideas and, more significantly, to the material
interests served. While it is one thing to avoid “a crudely materialist
interpretation” (Gandy 2002:7), it is not sufficient to acknowledge the
“diverse array of social scientists, planners, urbanists, architects, and
engineers” (Gandy 2002:130) responsible for drawing up the regional
plans without also considering just who belonged to the sponsoring
organization and what interests were served. In this sense, Gandy
is himself a captive of the liberal planning ideology he so forcefully
presents. Here, conflict is seen between contending ideas held by
urban reformers, rather than between the class interests sponsoring
those reformers. What we have here is a wealth of neoliberal and
even some neo-Marxist ideas presented, with none having sufficient
primacy to tie together and explain the case studies presented.
Gandy provides a rich foundation of empirical work that deserves
close attention on the parts of all of us who love “The City.” Standing
alongside that of Caro, Berman, and other eminent urban historians,
his contribution may yet inspire a reworking by critical theorists to
give it a more lasting shape.
References
Berman M (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. New York: Simon and Schuster
Caro R (1975) The Power Broker. New York: Vintage Books
Fitch R (1977) Planning New York. In R Alcaly and D Mermelstein (eds) The Fiscal
Crisis of American Cities: Essays on the Political Economy of Urban America with
Special Reference to New York (pp 246–284). New York: Vintage Books
Gandy M (2002) Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press
Heiman M (1988) The Quiet Evolution: Power, Planning, and Profits in New York State.
New York: Praeger