Nicholas Dagen Bloom

Learning From New York

Problem, research strategy, and findings: High-rise public housing has been entirely discredited in the United States as a legitimate affordable housing planning strategy because of notorious failures in large cities such as St. Louis and Chicago. Missing from the planning literature is the long-term achievement record of Americas largest operator of high-rise public housing, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), which still operates 2,600 buildings primarily in modernist tower-in-the-park superblocks for 403,995 authorized tenants. This article assembles and analyzes historical and contemporary materials to create a portrait of functioning American tower-block public housing. The article discusses both contextual factors (New Yorks transit network, density, and diversity) and successful long-term management in three areas (daily operations, tenant selection, and lobbying) as key to the NYCHAs preservation of public housing. Takeaway for practice: In operations, NYCHA has maintained large front-line staffing on project grounds that play a critical role both in maintenance and social order. In tenant selection, administrators for decades have maintained greater social mixture and better finances by recruiting and retaining working families and, at the same time, enforcing social control through heavy policing. In politics, NYCHA has successfully lobbied for additional federal and city support. Long-term challenges to project preservation and current challenges in New York are also discussed. The findings raise the possibility of high-density urban towers for low-income residents in strong market cities, provided that sufficient attention is paid to design, tenancy, financing, and social control. Research support: None.

Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York

Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables is one of several texts that addresses the complex and proliferating humanitarian infrastructure that is increasingly prevalent in regions of the world besieged by violence and displacement, but his work stands out as particularly important and innovative. Agier addresses some of the central questions facing our world today: belonging, personhood, and the ability of those most cut off from political power to speak for themselves and shape their own lives, and he does so in a way that combines passion and keen observation. In doing so, his work should be of interest to a broad range of sociologists who study social inequality and the structures (even those built from the best of intentions) that perpetuate it. In this volume, Agier explores the concept of humanitarian government, the political apparatus set up during emergency situations that takes responsibility for the life and death of individuals no longer protected adequately by a state. For as Agier shows, a refugee camp is far more than a place of shelters and emergency food aid. They are places in which someone decides who gets plastic sheeting and who does not, who receives food rations and for how long, what social programs should be put into place and who should be in charge of them, and what barriers need to be constructed (barbed wired, armed guards, cinderblock walls) to ostensibly protect those inside but also to protect the local population from incursions of these displaced ‘‘undesirables.’’ Further, these ‘‘camps’’ are hardly temporary shelters; many have existed for decades, taking on the appearance of towns and cities with entrepreneurs setting up small businesses and political elites emerging from the post-flight chaos. And yet, the camp is a hybrid social form, taking the shape of something entirely new from what existed before in the lives of its inhabitants, and as Agier convincingly argues, it exists in a state of exception, outside the bounds of the political and social life that humanitarian law and human rights ostensibly guarantee. Agier uses his ethnologist’s eye for culture to analyze observations he made during fieldwork in refugee camps in Kenya, Zambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea between 2000-2007, accessing the camps through Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF; in English, Doctors Without Borders). His affiliation with MSF gave him a level of flexibility and independence (particularly from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees) that allowed him sufficient time in the camps to not only observe humanitarian government at work but also the response of the refugees under its purview. He combines his observations with detailed histories of different migrations, explaining the historical and geographic paths that led different groups of refugees to the camps that he studied. Agier demonstrates the discursive power that humanitarian organizations have over defining and categorizing the displaced individuals in the camps; defining a person’s status as a refugee leads to acceptance into the camp and the security that brings, but the denial of such status leads to rejection and often deportation back to life-threatening circumstances. Once determined as a refugee, a person’s suffering and vulnerability come to define their place in the camp and the world, with moral hierarchies created around different definitions of vulnerability with different access to resources provided by the humanitarian organization. This process, Agier argues, de-socializes refugees; they lose their individual personhood and either become ahistorical, pitiable masses that the charitable-at-heart seek to keep alive, or potential threats to order and the safety of the non-displaced that must be managed or