required reading: gentrification, preservation and King Canute

whose neighborhood is it anyway?
Fascinating (short!) piece in next month’s Atlantic Monthly, available on-line, Gentrification And Its Discontents, in which Benjamin Schwartz not so much reviews but exposes two recent books on Manhattan, Sharon Zukin’s Naked City and Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. Like any good discussion of gentrification, the original Manhattan loft neighborhoods of Soho and Tribeca are considered, though the principal lens for the discussion is the West Village.

Of course he, and they, have to deal with that colossus of Modern Urban Studies, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which he rightly describes as

Read the whole piece. I happen to agree with him, but there’s a lot to chew on here whether you agree with him or with Zukin or Sorkin. Not to spoil anything, but here is Schwartz’s coup-de-grace:

 h/t Matt Yglesias (himself a great chronicler of all things urban)

© Sandy Mattingly 2010