Seminars

Self-help Housing: Incremental Approaches to Shelter since 1965 traces an intellectual history of “incrementalism,” an approach to the provision of shelter that relies on residents — often low-income populations facing housing insecurity — to help build, adapt, and customize their homes long after any formal design process has concluded. Between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s, this approach was adopted in distinct contexts by different disciplines: architecture, international development, and housing policy. Examples of incrementalism in all three fields spring from a single intellectual origin which remains insufficiently examined among contemporary scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. This talk will summarize fieldwork undertaken in incremental neighborhoods in Lima, Mumbai and New York City, tying together an international constellation of ideas, assumptions, and implementation strategies with much to offer our present global housing emergency.

Dr. Susie J. Pak will present the introductory chapter of a manuscript that studies university storytelling or the stories that universities tell about themselves. Its focus is the history of St. John's University, a private Catholic school that was founded in the City of Brooklyn in 1870 and has been based in Queens County since 1955. The chapter introduces an untold story that the University does not tell about itself and an aspirational story about its origins that it does, analyzing the meaning of its interpretation of the history of the people of the Cities of New York and Brooklyn. The chapter also studies the University's response to stories told about its history that contradict its own and the implications of the University's desire to identify as an U.S. institution of higher education, which is evident in the way the University repeats stories told by and about the American nation-state as its own.

Using the case of Prince George’s County, Maryland, the local jurisdiction with the highest concentration of Black middle-class people in the United States, I will discuss why suburban Black middle-class counties cannot consistently fund high-quality public goods and services. I argue that the political economy of metropolitan areas enables majority-White suburban counties to hoard the conditions necessary for sufficient tax revenue. Three social processes underpin jurisdictional inter-dependence, and ultimately the reasons majority-Black jurisdictions subsidize majority-White jurisdictions: (1) the contemporary and cumulative weight of anti-Black policies and racial capitalism, such as federal government underwriting policies prior to the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which did not cover Black homebuyers and neighborhoods; (2) embeddedness within the raced and classed sorting of people, and raced and classed flows of public and private investments into local jurisdictions’ neighborhoods; and (3) inadequate state and federal funding transfers to support local government public goods and services provision.

J. Max Bond, Jr. pursued his profession as a tool in the long struggle for racial justice and civil rights. With his work, he rebuked an elitist field whose complicity in the unequal reshaping of U.S. cities had proven inarguable by the 1960s, most evident in the monumental modern projects that had displaced myriad majority-Black communities. Bond, one of few Black architects and one of the most influential, shaped a career—and a life—that instead centered the needs and desires of such communities: for freedom, self-determination, and the chance to make a world in their own image. He did so by decentering the architect and the heroic mythology the profession had cast. Focused on projects Bond and his collaborators designed in Harlem, Mississippi, and Atlanta between the 1960s and 1980s, this talk will explore Bond’s understanding of the architect as only one player in the long life of a building. Experiments with grassroots participation in planning; flexible designs shaped by residents; and the histories and expertise embodied in construction labor all addressed Bond’s desire to create more just places. “In the life of a building our moment is brief,” Bond once wrote. His long view offers a vision equally relevant to the present day, as well as a measure of work still unfinished.

After 20 years in the cultural heritage field working in a variety of organizations including a hands-on preservation nonprofit, a community-focused house museum, and even a mayoral residence, she brings a unique viewpoint to her joint roles as Director of Historic Houses at NYC Parks and Executive Director of the Historic House Trust of NYC. Join Meredith in discussing how to stay relevant in an ever-changing cityscape while remaining dedicated to the preservation of New York City’s built environment.