Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

e right to the resilient city: progressive politics and the green growth machine in New York City E. Melanie DuPuis 1 + Miriam Greenberg 2 Published online: 15 February 2019 © AESS 2019 Abstract We examine the post disaster history of a proposed resilience infrastructure capital project, the East Side Coastal Resiliency Project, part of a larger proposed resilience infrastructure design called "e Big U." is proposed ring of bermed parkland around the waterfront of Lower Manhattan won $335 million in the Housing and Urban Development Rebuild by Design competition. e purpose of the Big U was to make the Lower Manhattan coastline resilient against storms and provide green space amenities to neighborhood residents. e Bjarke Ingels Group proposal created the East Side Coastal Resiliency section of the Big U design through an inclusive process with local residents. Yet, 6 years since Sandy and 4 years since the HUD award, the project had not yet broken ground and the final design had not yet been approved. We look at this resilience project to ask the question: does this project reflect the right to the resilient city, that is, is it being designed in the interests of low-income neighborhood residents adjoining the project, creating a more resilient city for everyone? Or, will the final design of the project repeat the problems of unequal post-disaster redevelopment? Keywords Urban resilience • Climate change • Rebuild by design • Disaster redevelopment • Inequality • Community organizing • Green infrastructure • Green growth machine • Lefebvre • Right to the city Hurricane Sandy, which inundated New York City October 22–November 2, 2012, was the worst storm to hit the city since records were kept in the 1700s. Its impacts were massive: $19 billion dollars of losses to the city in 2012 (Letzter 2016), thousands of resi- dents displaced, and a consensus that New York City was among the large cities most vulnerable to climate change in the world (Aerts et al. 2013; NPCC 2010). Particularly hard-hit were the public housing resi- dences that had been built along landfilled waterfronts in the 1940s–1960s. To repair these neighborhoods, FEMA allocated $3 billion dollars, the largest amount ever awarded a single city for repairs. e city's larg- est concentration of these residences is on the Lower East Side (LES) of Manhattan, which experienced se- vere flooding that inundated heating and electrical sys- tems leaving residents without heat or light for many weeks, and with severe damage due to water and mold. Meanwhile, the LES public housing residences sit next to the Wall Street Financial District in Lower Manhat- tan. Heavily impacted by 9/11, the neighborhood had watched the redevelopment carried out through "pub- lic-private partnerships" that favored high-income residents and businesses. is experience had le LES residents wary of projects that would leave them out (Gotham and Greenberg 2014). Sandy created a new disaster-led redevelop- ment threat. However, in acknowledgment of, and in resistance to, these powerful forces, national and city administrations in 2014 proffered funding for a resilience infrastructure project, the East Side Coast- al Resiliency Project (ESCR), that would redevelop the riverside park that coursed between the public housing residences and the East River. Part of a larg- er award-winning project, "e Big U", the ESCR was based on intensive collaboration with LES neighbor- hood residents. Based on their input, the ESCR prom- ised to rebuild the park along the waterfront in a way that would form a protective barrier between the pub- lic housing and storm surges. e design, proposed by world-class design firm Bjarke Ingels, would also provide the kind of desirable green infrastructure and amenities generally reserved for public-private part- nership projects, like the one just across the river from the LES, Brooklyn Bridge Park, that had been fund- ed by private development and the building of mar- 1 Pace University, 861 Bedford Road, Pleasantville, NY 10570, USA 2 University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA 44

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