Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

ers, especially those dependent on public housing, his initial election was hailed by the New York Times as part of "A New Era for Progressives" (Bellafante 2013) expanding hopes that all New Yorkers could share the right to the city. e next section will look at the prog- ress of the ESCR as an attempt to build an equitable yet resilient city. We will look at the history of this project, from its first participatory planning processes in 2013 to its current status in 2018, to ask the following ques- tions: In a place which has experienced disaster, and post-disaster organizing, and at a time of a progressive mayoralty, have experienced neighborhood commu- nity organizations been able to reclaim their right to a voice in resilience planning? How do groups orga- nize to demand inclusion in project design? Do low- er-income groups pursue "just green enough" strate- gies, in order to downplay project amenities so as to avoid green gentrification? Or does the participation in a state-of-the-art design project mean that even lower income communities have the right to demand the best urban green amenities? And can a city admin- istration respond to those demands? In other words, can strong community organizing enable non-elites to claim a "Right to the Resilient City"? The east side coastal resiliency project Responding to Hurricane Sandy, the Obama Admin- istration's Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force in 2013 initiated Rebuild by Design, a competition to fund resilience projects that would provide state- of-the-art infrastructure projects to protect places against future storms. Led by HUD, the Rockefeller Institute, the Van Alen Institute, and New York Univer- sity's Institute for Public Knowledge, and with HUD funding and private, national and global support, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were award- ed $1 billion to build seven projects, one of which was the Big U. To understand the evolution of the ESCR re- quires a look at the evolution of the Big U design from its inception in 2013 to the third design, announced in September, 2018. In 2013, the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) carried out collaborative, iterative, and stake- holder-intensive processes, combining international design expertise with an inclusive effort at community engagement. e design emerged from a series of com- munity workshops managed by landscape architecture firm Starr Whitehouse (2014). e stated goal of the competition was to become a model for how to build more resilient cities in an era of rising waters and larg- er storms. Despite being a global financial center, the lower part of the island south of 14th Street has been historically characterized by great income diversity. In some Lower East Side neighborhoods, 30% of resident households have incomes of less than $19,000 per year. is neighborhood also contains the largest amount of public housing in New York City. Other neighbor- hoods in this part of the city have remained strongly middle class (BIG Team2014; Collier et al. 2016). Low- er Manhattan also has a diversity of neighborhoods with their own character and range of cultures, like Chinatown and the Latinx "Loisaida." Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) is a global design firm responsible for a number of other high-profile building projects in New York City, including a major office tower in Hudson Yards, several others through- out the world, and even a design for a city on Mars (Mairs 2017). It is a young firm, headed by the young Ingels, who has been described as the "stararchitect du jour," (Plitt 2018) and a "larger than life" "rock star" who is "reshaping the world as we know it" (Bailey 2018). BIGs award-winning design features an "em- erald necklace" of berms, walls, and other protections against rising waters embedded in a high-amenity park, from 57th Street on the West Side around Low- er Manhattan and up the East Side to 23rd Street. e design was lauded by architecture and other trade as- sociations. e US Urban Green Council, for exam- ple, described the project as "visionary" (Urban Green Council 2017). e initial design was very much a product of the Bjarke Ingels approach to architecture, which he describes in both his 2011 TEDx talk (Ingels 2011) as well as in a more recent 2018 interview at the Atlantic Cities Festival (Ingels 2018) as disrupting architecture's two-dimensional design thinking and creating "human ecosystems." As the Big U proposal states, "e team's approach is rooted in the two concepts of social infra- structure and hedonistic sustainability. e Big U not only shields the city against floods and storm water; it provides social and environmental benefits to the com- munity, and fosters an improved public realm." In his TEDx talk, Ingels defines "hedonistic sustainability" as the ability to both foster ecological sustainability while still "having fun." Ingels proposes to abandon what he calls the "Protestant" version of sustainability in order to create "hedonistic" projects that are sustainable ur- ban ecologies. He builds upon this idea in the Atlan- tic Festival interview, arguing that architecture can be both practical and utopian, and that sustainability does not have to mean giving up the good life. In this vein, 49

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