Design Proposal

Dear Prospect Plaza, can we gentrify your tenants instead of your site?

I want to rehabilitate the Prospect Plaza site and design an alternative future for this ‘tower in the park’, without gentrifying the land by pushing out the poor. I’d like to explore if it’s possible to gentrify the tenants, instead of the site. To do so, the area should be rezoned in favor of a new economy. An economical boost could be by the legalization of the illegal, already taking place

there...

The recently realised rental units are built in vision of demolition of the towers and gentrification of the site. Since the current status of prospect plaza site is heading towards a full neighborhood scale project any moment now. Therefore should I explore an alternative future from the present status or a past one? Which one would have more meaning as the punctual jumpstart project in the context of the Crown Heights site analysis?

The alternative future should certainly not decrease in density, and there should be a place for all of the former poor tenants. It should also conserve the ‘tower’. Why should we constantly erase every failed chapter in history? Like Interboro or Lacaton and Vasal, I want to explore ways of reintegrating this typology, instead of simply demolishing it.

Landbanking, the current value of public housing...

The 'towers in the park' are a problematic typology. They represent the failure of Modernism and are often associated with a high crime rate, violence, drugs and high concentrations of young and poor people. These sites with 'towers in the park' have certainly a need to be redeveloped.

Current approach is to demolish all these public housing towers and to replace them by the regular block of a more neighborhood-friendly scale. This is realized by federal funding programs like ‘HOPE VI’ and ‘Choice Neighborhood’. The city sells then it public housing properties to private developers to rehabilitate the sites. Due to this privatization these new neighborhood-scale projects become also mixed-income, since this is more profitable for the developer. These actions result in a serious decrease in the total amount of available units for the poor, since most of the new units are aiming at a higher income class. Many of the former tenants will thus most likely never be able to return. These tenants are simply pushed to other poor neighborhoods and ‘towers in the park’, making those even worse.

Such approach has the purpose of upscaling the neighborhood. Although  these new projects are undoubtly better for the neighborhood than the former towers, they ignore the former tenants. The city is here in fact provoking, supporting and controlling gentrification.

In what way is this approach different from the past Urban Renewal and Slum Clearance programs, since it is still removing the poor?

Crown Heights - Exploring the grid

This presentation is about the site Crown Heights, and in this analysis, we are exploring the grid. During our analysis we have seen a potential to improve the livability of the grid. That’s why we asked ourselves some questions related to these topics.

Our first approach was to define the borders of Crown Heights, between which we collected all kinds of data. But after a while we came to the conclusion that neighborhoods that are located in the grid don't have specific borders. The aspects that form these borders can change in a very short period of time. That is why we changed our area of analysis to a larger area, including parts of adjacent neighborhoods such as East Flatbush, Brownsville, Prospect Heights and Bed-Stuy.

Presentation made by Antrees Engelen, Koen Moesen, Pieter Van den Poel, Arnout Van Soom, and Sofie Verjans.