Creative Destruction: Memory, Public Finance, and the State in New York City
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Creative Destruction: Memory, Public Finance, and the State in New York City by Keerthi Choudary Potluri A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Samera Esmeir, Co-chair Professor Michael Watts, Co-chair Professor Trinh Minh-ha Professor Thomas Laqueur Fall 2014 Abstract Creative Destruction: Memory, Public Finance, and the State in New York City by Keerthi Choudary Potluri Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Samera Esmeir and Professor Michael Watts, Co-chairs This dissertation demonstrates how the neoliberal state marshals public finance and public memory to incorporate itself into the contemporary urban landscape. It investigates sites in the built environment where the state deploys public funds to subsidize private construction projects that are fiscally unsound, using the institutional form of the public authority to covertly mediate between itself and the private sector. Combining discursive analysis of news media, funding allocation records, and the sites themselves, it looks at the World Trade Center reconstruction, a bus depot in Harlem, and Freshkills Park in Staten Island, a former landfill, and examines the effects of these projects both on urban space and public memory itself. The dissertation argues that the state uses public funds to inaugurate sites of memory in the city’s cultural and political landscape in order to assert its ethical and political legitimacy in a moment when that legitimacy is bound up in its relationship to private capital. This is an unexpected manifestation of what Marx and Schumpeter describe as “creative destruction” – the destruction of capital necessary to the continuation of capitalism – but what the dissertation shows is that this process not only sustains capitalist economy, but also removes democratic participation from planning the built environment while regenerating the state’s failing legitimacy in times of fiscal crisis. The dissertation employs historical and archival research on public authorities, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and qualitative research, such as personal interviews with project planners, neighborhood residents, tourists, state officials, and activists. By showing that state projects of memorialization are central to mediating between private interests and the capitalist state, it contributes to scholarship in state theory, urban planning, and material culture. ! 1! TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments….…………………………………………...ii Introduction………………………….………………………....iii Chapter 1: Destruction/Construction…………………………...1 Chapter 2: Unmeasured Authority………………………….....23 Chapter 3: Wounded Landscapes………………………….…..51 Chapter 4: Fresh Kills..…….….………………………………83 Conclusion: Burial Grounds………………………………….103 Bibliography…………………………………………………..113 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank the U.S. Department of Education, the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department, and the UC Berkeley Graduate Division for their generous funding of this project. Thank you to my dissertation committee – Samera Esmeir, Michael Watts, Trinh Minh-ha, and Thomas Laqueur – whose support for the project gave it wings, even when I had my doubts, and whose keen insights gave it a depth I could not have discovered without them. Samera, thank you for pushing me at all the right moments, and for encouraging me to pursue the work that moves me, even as it confounds me. To Ben Lempert, Mark Minch, Hyaesin Yoon, Anand Vaidya, Soo Lee, Paul Nadal, and Alisa Sánchez, so much gratitude for your careful readings and generous conversations throughout the writing of this work. Talking through my ideas with you is what gave this dissertation momentum and life. Thank you to the faculty and colleagues in the Rhetoric Department who have read and commented on chapters in the departmental dissertation workshop. Thanks especially to Michael Masusch and Michael Wintroub for the encouragement throughout. The friends and family that kept me afloat during the writing process were vital to these pages being here at all. Thank you in particular to Daniel Hoffmann, Urmi Desai, Tracy Kwon, Shreya Mahajan, Gabe Milner, Lilian Pascone, Michelle Ty, IK Udekwu, and Irene Yoon for showing me all the vital forms unflagging support can take. Most of all, thank you to my parents, who have lovingly waited to see this through to the end. ii INTRODUCTION Urbanism … might be defined as the instrumental theory and practice of constructing the city as memorial of itself.1 Since the New Deal, we have come to think of public building projects as embodiments of civic spirit and a benevolent state. Today it could be said that the reverse is true, as the visibility of similar public projects in the U.S. has diminished. With the growth of public-private partnerships, the boundary between the two blurs. Given these changes, to what extent do the way new things are built with public funds constitute a reflection of general interest and public good, as argued about the New Deal era? Does this reflection persist amid the conflicts over space and place that characterize the contemporary global city? What work does the neoliberal state accomplish when it finances such projects? If the general interest is no longer central to financing public projects, what work does the state accomplish when financing them? And might this fiscal activity be constitutive of the state itself? In the midst of an economic recession and active warfare, domestic construction projects in the United States continue to slowly advance, such as levee-repair in New Orleans, work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the building of a bicycle boulevard in Austin, TX.2 Recent U.S. history includes such controversial projects as the Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” made famous on the 2008 presidential campaign trail, which proposed building a $233 million bridge to serve between a town of 8,900 and an island of 50 people and 1 airport. Notably, some of these projects are built on sites of ruins and historical injuries. Yet, the state justification for such public constructions cites an ethical commitment to the public good. The U.S. is in an infrastructural crisis from which New York City, the setting of this dissertation, is not exempted, with serious threats posed by such things as the aging water drainage pipes in the subway system. Though it is the largest city in the world’s largest national economy, it also has the highest income gap of any other U.S. city and contains the poorest county in the country, the Bronx.3 Building in New York City – one of the most densely- populated and unequal cities in the U.S. – has the potential to serve either the highest capital interests or public interest, often within the same block. Therefore, the funding decisions the state makes also indicate its ideological priorities. This dissertation investigates the nexus between the state, finance capital, public memory, and the urban built environment of New York City. It probes how the state rhetorically harnesses immaterial categories like ethics and memory to renew itself politically and economically, particularly in times of fiscal crisis. Each chapter identifies sites where the state’s legitimacy is called into question and points to the ways “creative destruction” operates as a state-preserving strategy. Creative destruction is typically understood to be the process by which 1 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 179. 2 The Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) were New Deal-era agencies established to stimulate the American economy in the midst of the Great Depression, existing until 1939 and 1943, respectively. The legacy of the New Deal and these agencies can be noted throughout New York City, but I will be focusing on present-day projects that resemble those taken on by the PWA and WPA. 3 1% of the city’s population earned 45% of its income in 2007, versus 23.5% nationwide. About 1 million households in the city earn $10,000 per year. Statistics from “City’s extreme rich-poor divide” by Bill Sanderson and Amber Sutherland, New York Post, Jan 19, 2011. iii destruction is instrumental to the regeneration of the economy. The dissertation reveals this process to be regenerative of the state. Ira Katznelson has most recently argued that the contradictions of contemporary liberalism are rooted in the compromises struck during the New Deal.4 The championing of a public good is central to state legitimacy yet the pursuit of it runs counter to neoliberal political economy today. Bringing the public authorities borne of the New Deal into the neoliberal present is the goal of this dissertation. I focus on New York City because it offers several sites that bring together such institutions, finance capital, and urban palimpsests of memory, particularly as they call up notions of a commons. It is also the site of exceptional projects, like the National September 11 Memorial Museum, the most expensive museum in human history, constructed amid urban austerity measures, as well as everyday battles for public memory, as at a city bus depot in Harlem. The project demonstrates how the neoliberal state marshals public finance and public memory to incorporate itself into the contemporary urban landscape. In particular, I investigate sites in the built environment where the state deploys public funds to subsidize private construction projects that are fiscally unsound, using the institutional form of the public authority to covertly mediate between itself and the private sector. Combining discursive analysis of news media, funding allocation records, and the sites themselves, I look at the World Trade Center reconstruction, the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a bus depot in Harlem, and Freshkills Park in Staten Island, a former landfill, and examine the effects of these projects both on urban space and public memory itself.