Please join Arvind Sohoni for the next Jane Jacobs Lecture, In the depths of the Great Depression, New York City launched the most ambitious housing program in the nation’s history. Against the background of rampant unemployment and the sight of thousands of New Yorkers living in shanties in Central Park, the New York City Housing Authority set out in 1934 to provide low-cost housing to the lowest third-income band of New Yorkers. In the 90 years since the Housing Authority has housed millions of New Yorkers in its portfolio of massive brick towers. Dotted across each of the five boroughs, Housing Authority complexes are unmistakable for their modernist architecture, institutional feeling, and physical isolation from the surrounding city.
Within the complexes, though, are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers living otherwise ordinary lives. They go to work, raise children, love, grieve, play, and persevere in an endlessly frustrating system. The agency’s meteoric rise, from uncertain but resolute beginnings to a two-decade, post-war construction boom the city had never experienced before, halted in the late 1960s as the federal government limited the business model and started the slow, brutal march of disinvestment. During the program’s ascent—led from the shadows by Robert Moses—several critics, most notably Jane Jacobs, noted the social challenges these developments posed. A categorical dismissal of “eyes on the street,” New York’s modernist behemoths were labyrinths of indefensible and insular space. Despite the name, public housing traded publicly visible space for a set of highly private spaces that often became dangerous, dirty, and inaccessible to many residents.
This lecture will evaluate Jacobs’ critiques—and the advocacy of others like Catherine Bauer, Lewis Mumford, and Edith Elmer Wood—against the reality of New York’s Public Housing experience over 90 years. The lecture will address the central question of the American urban future—can a vibrant and affordable city exist?
This lecture is sponsored by Marywood University’s School of Architecture, the American Institute of Architects of Northeastern Pennsylvania, and Columbia University.
AIA CEU Credit is available for this lecture.
This event is an in-person and virtual—in-person lecture that will be held in Room 114 of Avery Hall - located at Columbia University's Morning Side Campus (116 Street & Broadway, Manhattan). Register here for the online stream Space is limited but the event will be recorded and available on our website and YouTube channel afterward.
