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Thesis Presentation
Monday May 16, 2011
"Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen
very carefully you can hear her breathe."

- Arundhati Roy,
from her Confronting Empire speech given at the
World Social Forum in Porto Allegre, 28 January
2003

Introduction

A sense of optimism and alternatives has been missing from much of the

discourse and practice of city planning and urbanism the past few decades. Margaret

Thatchers repeated invocation that There is no alternative to the neo-liberal world has

been seen as an unchallengeable statement of truth, a description of the world as it is and

always will be. Why? How did this happen?

This paper attempts to trace the paralysis that emerged in the early 1970s and

offer a way to challenge and imagine another world to the neo-liberal city through the

forgotten concept of utopia. The paper is divided into two sections. The first section

explores the concept of utopia and its disappearance from the discourse after the 1960s. I

define utopian thinking as both an attempt to imagine other worlds and a critique of the

currently existing one. It has had an integral role in the histories and practice of urban

planning as a tool for re-imagining the industrial city since the 18th Century, but it was

lost in the 1970s. It is my argument that this disappearance is intimately connected to the

paralysis many have felt recently and is a result of the various turns happening

economically, politically and culturally at this moment the postfordist, neo-liberal and

postmodernist turns, to be precise. This restructuring led to a resurgent and hyper-mobile

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capital, a weakened State and Left, and a sense that resistance was futile to this market-

driven world.

Not coincidentally, one of the major concepts that was critiqued and abandoned in

this shifting landscape was the notion of utopia, seen as a totalitarian concept, more often

producing dystopic worlds like the Soviet Union than the paradises promised. The

concept was taken off of the table in urban planning theory in the wake of the critique of

Modernist planning projects and their top-down authoritarianism. In its place, the

discipline became obsessed with process and communication, unable to imagine any

response to our changing cities. This has had devastating consequences for those

interested in challenging the inequities and ills of neoliberalism, leading to a profession

that has had little say in the debates over urbanism and what our future cities should look

like and how they should operate. It has lead to the all-too-familiar scene of cities and

planners stuck in a pattern of policy aimed solely at attracting capital through public-

private partnerships, competing with other cities for businesses and tourists and creating

the same series of development projects convention centers, sports stadia and

downtown destination.

Now is the time to recover utopia in order to remember that there is a way out, but

it will take imagining and experimentation. I put forth the concept of micro-utopias, taken

from the writings of art theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, in an effort to recover the valuable

concept of utopia for planning and to provide a space for new urban experiments. Micro-

utopias are real world spaces created by their users in order to provide a place for

alternative practices and economies. It is an idea that acknowledges the valuable critiques

that postmodern planning theory leveled at the Modernist utopian projects, without

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slipping into a fetishization of process, as much of the dominant planning theory of the

past few decades has.

The second section tells the history and struggles of two such micro-utopias, ABC

No Rio and Bullet Space, both on the Lower East Side of New York City. Both exist as

art gallery-cum-community centers that began as squatter insurrections, emerging in the

early 1980s out of the disinvestment and deindustrialization that hit the neighborhood in

the 1970s. They offer an alternative vision of the art space, one unconcerned with profit

and the market, in direct contrast to the many other galleries that called the Lower East

Side home at the same time. Through the words of those involved and archival research, I

hope to explain this improbable journey of how two anarchist squats - home to Saturday

matinee punk shows, Food Not Bombs and experimental art exhibits - have been able to

survive for three decades, despite the relentless push of gentrification in the surrounding

neighborhood and the hostility of numerous city administrations. By telling their

histories, I hope to determine if there are any lessons that similar ventures can learn in

seeking to claim a part of their city for radical, experimental activities. Keeping in mind

the notion of utopia and the perpetual tension between this ideal world and reality, I have

focused on the compromises and strategic choices that have happened in order to allow

these experiments in the notion of the gallery and organization to last so long.

By knowing of and understanding these spaces, progressive planners, architects,

designers and organizers can begin to learn how to establish other worlds and interstices

against the suffocating neo-liberal world today. By recovering the concept of utopia, I

hope that the breaths of another world can become louder, more captivating and more

powerful.

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Part 1: The Death and Life of the Great Western Utopias

Defining Utopia

Sir Thomas More brought the term utopia into the English language, using it as

both the title and subject of a book he published in 1516. It is an invented word, created

by the fusion of the Greek adverb ou (not) and topos (place) or no place. It is also

the homophone eutopia in English, fusing the Greek eu (good) with topos and

introducing its other potential meaning of good place. As Moses Finley wrote, there is

an inherent pun in the word itself, which is normally and mistakenly overlooked. The

initial letter u stands for the Greek ou (no, not) and hence Utopia is Nowhere.

But by the exercise of a little imagination the u can also stand for the Greek prefix eu

(good, well) and then we get good place, ideal place. (Finley: 3) Mores book

would not shy away from this double meaning, as it chronicles the perfect but fictional

island of Utopia through the narrative of More himself, recounting a tale told to him by a

traveler named Raphael Hythloday. Mores vision of the island nation imagines a land of

abundance, communal property, shared work and strict rules on behavior. It would gain a

good deal of success after its initial publishing, achieving a fourth edition as early as

1518. Perhaps most tellingly, while it was not the first work of literature imagining a

better society, the term Utopia would forever after be used to describe this type of work

and project.

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 Today, the Oxford English Dictionary defines utopia as an imagined place or

state of things in which everything is perfect. Merriam-Webster defines it as a place of

ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions. These give an

excellent sense of the two central aspects of utopia projection and critique.

Its imaginative side is well known. While the term utopia was coined with Mores

book in 1516, the concept of imagining an ideal city had been around for centuries. This

task can be traced back to the ancient Greek philosophers who have had such a profound

influence on our thinking in philosophy, politics and aesthetics. Many look to Platos The

Republic as the first attempt to conceive of utopia, although the philosopher never quite

comes to a concrete vision of the city in spatial terms. Rather, for Plato, the goal is to

imagine the ideal city in political and economic terms. He describes a city that is a self-

contained and self-sufficient entity, assuring its independence through a lack of need or

debt. The population is divided up into three classes: a ruling class of philosopher-kings,

military guardians and producers.

More would be the first to provide a strong spatial sense to the imagined city. He

describes its physical layout in an early section of Book 2. While More inspired many

other writers to create literary Utopias, his vision also proved influential on architects and

planners, who put their visual dreams of an ideal city onto paper as well. A series of

French architects, from Claude-Nicolas LeDoux to Tony Garnier, would create ideal

cities in drawings that would never be built but would have profound influence on the

way people imagined our cities looking and functioning. Charles Fouriers vision of an

ideal communal society was centered on a new type of building, called a phalanstre, re-

imagining the royal palace for average citizens. (Brisbane)

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 Later, in the early 20th Century, three architect-planners Ebenezer Howard,

Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier would also re-imagine the city through drawings,

models and manifestos. Howards Garden City concept would prove hugely influential,

offering the vision of smaller, greener, decentralized cities, a far cry from the crowded

teeming slums of that time. He envisioned a regional development plan that still serves as

a goal for many planners. Corbusiers Radiant City concept was born in his drawings, a

prototype that he envisioned remaking any city in the world. The image of towering

skyscrapers in the midst of parks is an unforgettable one, a dream of a better city through

technology. Wrights Broadacre City was nearly the complete opposite, a vision of the

suburbia before it existed. Never built, it would exist only in the drawings and models

that accompanied the traveling exhibition Wright organized to showcase his vision of the

ideal city, but it would help shape future generations vision of what housing and their

cities should look like.

Robert Fishman has told a definitive history of these three men and their work

with Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. As he wrote of the three visionaries,

Many people dream of a better world; Howard, Wright and Le Corbusier went a step

further and planned one. Their social consciences took this rare and remarkable step

because they believed that, more than any other goal, their societies needed new kinds of

cities. They were deeply fearful of the consequences for civilization if the old cities, with

all the social conflicts and miseries they embodied, were allowed to persist. They were

also inspired by the prospect that a radical reconstruction of the cities would solve not

only the urban crisis of their time, but the social crisis as well. (Fishman: 3-4)

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 It is important to keep in mind that utopia is not just a projection and imagination

of an ideal society; it is also a critique of the existing one in which the author, architect or

planner is living, As Moses Finley argued, That element of analysis, of criticism, is what

brings the important Utopias back from Nowhere to reality in a way that the purely

private, not to mention the lunatic, fantasies do not. (Finley: 5) Criticism grounds utopia,

providing the blueprint for what the imagined space must change.

It helps to return again to the text that coined the term, Thomas Mores Utopia, to

show that utopia was born as much out of critique as projection. More wrote this book in

1516, telling the tale of an ideal society that exists on an island in the Atlantic Ocean.

Through their customs, laws and beliefs, they have created a society of abundance and

happiness, where no one is lacking in necessities of food, shelter and clothing. More lays

out the laws, customs and geography of Utopia in Book Two. It is easy to forget that it is

preceded in Book One by a critique of the European political and economic system of

Mores day.

That critique is surprisingly radical in both language and ideas, even in our day.

Raphael Hythloday, the man who visited Utopia and wishes to tell More of what he saw,

offers a vitriolic critique of their society, the early mercantilist one of Europe. His

thoughts on the concept of private property and the injustice of the enclosure of the

commons are unflinching. Thus so that one greedy, insatiable glutton, a frightful plague

to his native country, may enclose thousands of acres within a single fence, the tenants

are ejected; and some are stripped of their belongings by trickery or brute force, or,

wearied by constant harassment, are driven to sell them. One way or another, these

wretched people men, women, husbands, wives, orphans, widows, parents with little

8
children and entire families (poor but numerous, since farming requires many hands) - are

forced to move out. (More: 19) He wonders aloud about the impossible situation these

people find themselves in. When that little money is gone (and its soon spent in

wandering from place to place), what finally remains for them but to steal, and so be

hanged justly, no doubt or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are

jailed as idle vagrants. (ibid) In these lives, he sees a stinging rebuke of society and the

economic system emerging, which we now realize were the first breaths of capitalism.

Certainly, unless you cure these evils it is futile to boast of your justice in punishing

theft. Your policy may look superficially like justice, but in reality, it is neither just nor

expedient. If you allow young folk to be abominably brought up and their characters

corrupted, little by little, from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for

committing the crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is

this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it? (More: 20)

As George M. Logan notes in his Introduction to the book, The social analysis of

Book I is also distinguished by its passionate intensity, its pervasive moral outrage at the

status quo. The treatment of the problem of theft constitutes a scathing indictment of a

system of justice in which the poor are driven to the awful necessity of stealing and

then dying for it. The root cause of this situation lies in the pride, sloth, and greed of the

upper classesThe practice of enclosure (fencing common land as pasturage for sheep)

deprives farm labourers of their livelihood and sets them to wander and beg or to steal

and be hanged. (More: xix-xx)

He later directly critiques the concept of private property. But as a matter of fact,

my dear More, to tell you what I really think, wherever you have private property, and

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money is the measure of all things, it is hardly ever possible for a commonwealth to be

just or prosperous unless you think justice can exist where all the best things are held

by the worst citizens, or suppose happiness can be found where the good things of life are

divided among very few, where even those few are always uneasy, and where the rest are

utterly wretched. (More: 37) Thus I am wholly convinced that unless private property

is entirely abolished, there can be no fair or just distribution of goods, nor can the

business of mortals be conducted happily. (More 38) Not surprisingly, Utopia, the

perfect island society that Hythloday describes in Book 2, does not allow for private

property. In fact, money in the form of gold and silver is seen as being far less desirable

than tin, a material that serves everyday needs.

It seems to get at the heart of the essential problem and injustice at the heart of

capitalism as it emerges out of feudal society, centuries before the Industrial Revolution

has hit England. The historic role of utopia as a critique of capitalism is clearly seen in its

history, particularly in its connection to the radical anti-capitalist movements of the past

two centuries that emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the

United States. Two of the best-known utopian schemes of the 19th Century emerged out

of the socialist and anarchist movements of the time. In fact, it seems that the rise of the

Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s created the conditions for increased production of

utopian thinking and plans as much as for consumer goods and industry.

Peter Hall notes that twentieth-century city planning, as an intellectual and

professional movement, essentially represents a reaction to the evils of the nineteenth-

century city. That is one of those statements that are numbingly unoriginal but also

10
desperately important: many of the key ideas, and key precepts, cannot but be properly

understood save in that context. (Hall:7)

Utopia served a crucial role in urbanism and city planning in the late 19th and first

half of the 20th Century, as many of the biggest names in the profession dreamt of

building and planning new cities that would put an end to the horrors of the Industrial city

of the 19th Century. Chicago planner and architect Daniel Burnham summed up the

utopian spirit of the age with his famous maxim, Make no little plans. They have no

magic to stir mens blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Le Corbusier,

Frank Lloyd Wright, Ebenezer Howard and Robert Moses are just a few of the thinkers

responsible for imagining new models for the city. As Hall notes, The greatest period of

visionary idealism, in which physical designs for ideal cities were propounded, dates

from approximately 1880 to 1940. This short span of only sixty years includes Sorias La

Ciudad Lineal, Fritschs Die Stadt der Zukunft, Howards Garden Cities of Tomorrow,

Garniers Cit industrielle, Le Corbusiers La Ville radieuse and Wrights Broadacre City

as well as many other less well-known examples. (Alexander and Gill: 190)

Progressives and radicals have not properly appreciated utopias value as both a

critical and imaginative tool over the past few centuries, all too often using it as a

derogatory term to denote an unrealistic or unscientific project. Interestingly, it was Karl

Marx and Friedrich Engels, in fact, who perhaps have had the most profound influence in

turning the concept of utopia into a pejorative and negative term on the Left. Their

attacks on the French socialists of the 19th Century, in particular Paul-Joseph Proudhon,

did just this, as they classified these thinkers as utopian socialists in The Communist

Manifesto and other works for their desire to transcend class struggle. Marx and Engels

11
believed that these utopianists wished to avoid the dirty work of class struggle through

their imagination. As they wrote in the Manifesto, The significance of Critical-Utopian

Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In

proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic

standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and

all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in

many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary

sects...They still dream of experimental realization of their social Utopias, a founding

isolated phalansteries, of establishing "Home Colonies," of setting up a "Little Icaria" --

duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem -- and to realize all these castles in the air,

they're compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they

sink into the category of the reactionary conservative Socialists depicted above, differing

from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical superstitious belief in

the miraculous effects of their social science. (Marx and Engels: ) Engels would later

contrast utopian socialism with the Marxist approach, which believed that To make a

science of Socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis. (Engels: ) While the

previous discussion makes clear that utopia was placed upon a real basis, I believe that

Marx and Engels lost sight of the important potential for these castles in the air to

provide for spaces of experimentation and resistance to the capitalist system they so

brilliantly described and critiqued.

The concept of utopia would enjoy one last moment in the 1960s, as the concept

still held value for a group of architects and activists working in the West. I do not

believe that it is a coincidence that this would also serve as the final burst of energy and

12
protest for the Left, a time when revolutionary changes still seemed possible (and

imminent in May of 1968).

That explosive year of 1968 cannot help but bring to mind Paris and the various

political groups organizing and agitating for change in the city. One group in particular

stands out for its attention to the spatial dimension of capitalism and its potential to bring

about a new world. The Situationists Before Constant and the Situationists were creating

New Babylon in models, drawings and paintings in Paris.

American architects, influenced by Buckminster Fuller and the hippie movement,

built communes such as Drop City, which rejected the materialist, conformist culture of

the suburbs and attempted to get back to the land and a different notion of property.

What happened to utopia? Why has it been bracketed out of the discourse of

planning, architecture and urbanism since the end of the 1960s? Were there larger

changes that happened at this time that can help explain its disappearance?

The Turn Post Fordism/Liberalism/Modernism

In order to better understand the fate of utopia, it is essential that we look at the

political, economic and intellectual context in which utopian thinking prospered.

In the early 1970s, a restructuring began for both the economy and the world of

the intellectual that continues to be felt today. The guiding ideas that had organized

economic, intellectual and cultural life in the United States and Europe had lost their

hegemonic status and were being challenged and altered rapidly. Edward Soja provides

an excellent definition of the concept of restructuring: Restructuring is meant to

13
convey a break in secular trends and a shift towards a significantly different order and

configuration of social, economic and political life. It thus evokes a sequence of breaking

down and building up again, deconstruction and attempted reconstitution, arising from

certain incapacities or weaknesses in the established order which preclude conventional

adaptations and demand significant structural change instead [] Restructuring implies

flux and transition, offensive and defensive postures, a complex mix of continuity and

change. [Soja, quoted in Brenner and Theodore, 101]

Before we mark out the shift that occurred in the 1970s, it is helpful to describe

the world that was coming to an end, one in which the concept of utopia played such an

important role. Borrowing Giovanni Arrighis phrase, there were three hegemons three

dominant forces - that defined the West and its industrial, cultural and intellectual

production from the turn of the century, through the onset of the Great Depression of the

1930s to the close of the 1960s: Fordism, Keynesianism and Modernism.

Many scholars have come to accept that, beginning at the turn of the century and

lasting until the early 1970s, a distinct economic system emerged out of the Industrial

Revolution, one centered on new methods of mass production, mass consumption and

centralized management. At its core, it was a system predicated on the mass production

of consumer goods, high wages to foster mass consumption and a high level of state

regulation. Fordism has come to serve as a moniker for this mass-production, mass-

consumption economy in the United States and Western Europe in the 20th Century. The

name was derived from the influential figure of Henry Ford, the man who started the

Ford Motor Company and would turn the automobile into a consumer good that everyone

could afford and own. In particular, two aspects of the way Henry Ford ran his factories

14
made him influential enough to be associated with an entire economic period. First, he

established an assembly line system at his Ford motor plant in Highland Park, Michigan.

Its moving conveyor belt and extreme division of labor allowed for just-in-time delivery

of parts and assemblies. This had the benefit of reducing the time of production

enormously, so that by 1927, the plant could put out a Model T every 24 seconds. (Long)

As Ash Amin notes that The driving force of Fordist intensive accumulation is

claimed to be the mass production dynamic, pioneered by the United States and reliant

upon the intensification of work, the detailed division of tasks and mechanization to raise

productivity, and various forms of monopolistic regulation to maintain this dynamic.

(Amin, 9) This quote is a good reminder that while Fords name became synonymous

with this economic regime, it is the figure of Charles Taylor who lurks behind these

developments. In fact, some describe this economic period with the term Taylorism.

Taylor created a theory of production dubbed scientific management, which brought the

notion of the scientific method to industrial production. He developed four core

principles: develop work methods based on scientific study of the tasks, train each worker

in these methods, cooperate with the workers to ensure these methods were being utilized

and divide work between managers devising the methods and workers putting them to

use. Henry Ford would adopt these principles in his factories and would achieve an

efficiency that forever altered the way industry worked.

Perhaps more important than the innovation on the assembly line was the new

outlook Ford brought to labor and wages. In 1914, around the same time as these new

assembly line innovations were being introduced, Ford announced that he would pay a $5

a day wage for all workers and also reduce the workday from 9 to 8 hours a day. These

15
decisions were not the result of a suddenly radicalized Ford; rather, they were done for

business reasons. As Ford presciently understood, better-paid workers with more free

time meant more consumers who could afford to purchase the product, the automobile, he

was making. This overall attitude that compromise would lead to growth for all became

an influential idea, one that would be picked up on by a British economist during the

darkest days of the Great Depression.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes provided much of the intellectual

basis for this new economic and political model that prioritized stability, cooperation and

steady growth. Keynes was a Cambridge-educated economist who worked in the British

civil service and Treasury before beginning a career as a professor of economics.

Keynesianism argues that private sector decisions sometimes lead to inefficient

macroeconomic outcomes and therefore it advocates for active policy responses by the

public sector, including monetary policy actions by the central bank and fiscal

policy actions by the government to stabilize output over the business cycle. The state, in

a sense, assumed a responsibility for bringing national economies out of the downturns

that occur in capitalist cycles. Keynes and his followers argued that the state must pump

money into the economy during these economic recessions through infrastructure

investment, in order to add jobs, increase demand and in turn re-invigorate production

and consumption. This initial investment, combined with a lowering of interest rates,

would trigger a series of events that would trigger more and more, until production and

consumption were back up to optimal rates.

This stable and ever-growing economy became increasingly dependent on an

activist and interventionist state after the Great Depression brought the country to the

16
brink. This was the various forms of monopolistic regulation that Ash Amin

mentioned. The state was seen as instrumental in helping to balance out and lessen the

cyclical nature of capitalism, a response to the structural flaws that lead to the

Depression. As Charles Waldheim and Alan Berger describe it, This era was associated

with a high level of state regulation, infrastructural development, and social investment

through the mechanisms of the welfare state. This regulation and development emerged

from a belief that the laissez-faire free market doctrine that had reigned for decades was

neither just nor feasible. In fact, without some planning and state intervention, an

unfettered market would create its own demise in the form of another Depression or by

empowering those advocating for a non-market based approach to the economy.

All of these concepts converge nicely in the discipline of urban planning.

Planning became an essential tool for this wave of capitalism, with its need for

coordination between competing interests and the desire for a stable marketplace for

businesses. In fact, it has been argued that city planning emerged as the means to make

capitalism possible in the urban centers of the United States. (Boyers: 65) An adherence

to growth and capital can be traced back to city plannings earliest days in the late 19th

Century. Robert Fishman, in his review of Jon Petersens The Birth of City Planning in

the United States, 1840-1917, asserts that its earliest days grew out of the Progressive

movement: For the City Planners represented the urban wing of the great search for

order that defined middle-class Progressive politics at the time. American civilization

must move, as Walter Lippmann put it, from drift to mastery, eliminate the waste and

chaos created by too-rapid growth, and create a powerful public sector to counterbalance

17
the power of the corporate behemoths like United States Steel and Standard Oil.

(Fishman: 110)

I believe that Fishman overstates the progressive aspect of this shift to planning in

cities, as it was essential for capital and private development to continue to prosper. The

state had to intervene in order to maintain the effectiveness of the capitalist system, not to

provide a counter-weight, to overcome its systemic weaknesses where private land

development could lead to less-than-optimal location of key infrastructure. As Christine

Boyers notes, In the long run private land uses stood as a major impediment to the

rational allocation of collective infrastructure facilities. This opposition proved to be a

regressive force, retarding the general rate of capital accumulation, throwing up road

blocks in the process of profitable urban investment, and augmenting the economic crises

and disinvestment cycles that lay embedded within capitalist development. (Boyers: 65)

Like an early version of Keynesianism, city planning was a product of the state seeing the

need to intervene in the market in order to save capitalism. As Boyers goes on to detail,

the behavioral aspects of the city and how planning could maximize the utility of this

spatial arrangement became a dominant themethe nature of the city is to be a functional

tool, a machine useful to the process of production. To increase the utility of each parcel

of land, to fix their uses and regulate their development means to infuse the whole with a

disciplinary order: constant assessment of changing land patterns, classification of these

uses, and a distribution over time to obtain in the future a more rational whole. (66)

This rationalist, productive vision of the urban becomes even more explicit in the

next major period for urban planning: the post-World War II era. During these two

decades, city planning would participate in its most massive projects the interstate

18
highway system and urban renewal. At the core of both concepts was an attempt to make

capital more productive. Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn detail clearly in their book,

Downtown Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities, how the initial impetus for reshaping

urban space came from the demands of downtown business leaders. As they write,

While the mayors commissioned plans, downtown revitalization as a practical matter

was virtually invented by the business community.

Their money and influence were impossible to ignore, especially in light of the

intense competition cities were facing from their suburban rivals for tax revenues.

These initial forays at downtown revitalization would eventually blossom into the

urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s. Again, business leaders were

instrumental in bringing this to fruition. Real estate interests had argued for a federal

program that would help private enterprise convert run-down areas of cities into

profitable developments. (22) Their interests would become the interests of the planners

and city officials who had the power to carry out this renewal; this often meant

illegitimate declarations of blight, massive evictions and the wholesale destruction of

working class and poor neighborhoods.

One must note, however, that cities also were able to implement policies that did

not coincide with economic development, that there was a sense that alternative policies

could happen as long as they did not upset the alliance between the state and capital.

Alexander von Hoffman lays out one such an alternate path in his essay, A Study in

Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949. This essay details

how this act not only promoted urban redevelopment but also highlighted the need for the

government to provide affordable housing and a decent home and suitable living

19
environment for every American family. (von Hoffman: 309) This meant an investment

in public housing; Title III authorized federal loans and grants to build 810,000 new

low-rent public housing units over the next six years. (310) While this goal was not met,

it emphasizes that the notion of growth has not always seemed the only option for cities

and their officials in their resource allocation. There was a belief that the state could also

invest in projects that benefited the middle and lower classes exclusively without

worrying about the reaction of businesses.

This would all change at the end of the 1960s, as an arrangement that once

seemed stable and productive was soon attacked as a straitjacket stifling growth and

freedom. The economic boom in the West that had begun at the end of World War II

came to an end in the late 1960s. A sharp recession began in 1973. The Keynesian social

contract, which had assured peace between labor and business, was being seen as a

hindrance to success of the economy. David Harvey succinctly described the problems

that existed in the capitalist system as the 1960s came to an end and the 1970s started out

with a devastating recession and oil embargo:

More generally, the period from 1965 to 1973 was one in which the inability of
Fordism and Keynesianism to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism
became more and more apparent. On the surface, these difficulties could best be
captured by one word: rigidity. There were problems with the rigidity of long-
term and large-scale fixed capital investments in mass-production systems that
precluded much flexibility of design and presumed stable growth in invariant
consumer markets. There were problems of rigidities in labour markets, labour
allocation, and in labor contracts (especially in the so-called monopoly sector).
And any attempt to overcome these rigidities ran into the seemingly immoveable
force of deeply entrenched working-class power hence the strike waves and
labour disruptions of the period 1968-1972. The rigidities of state commitments

20
 also became more serious as entitlement programs (social security, pension rights,
etc.) grew under pressure to keep legitimacy at a time when rigidities in
production restricted any expansion in the fiscal basis for state expenditures.
(Harvey, 1989: 142)

As profits lessened and inflation rose, capital got increasingly restless. The bargain it had

agreed to with the state and labor no longer provided enough in the way of benefits. In

fact, it was increasingly felt that Behind all these specific rigidities lay a rather unwieldy

and seemingly fixed configuration of political power and reciprocal relations that bound

big labour, big capital, and big government into what increasingly appeared as a

dysfunctional embrace of such narrowly defined vested interests as to undermine rather

than secure capital accumulation. (Harvey, 1990: 142) That embrace came undone

quickly, as capital began to seek out new opportunities and profits that were not burdened

by any such commitments.

Some immediate effects of capitals increasing mobility and desire to escape the

influence of governments and unions was the move of industrial production out of the

heavily unionized Northeast and its cities to the non-unionized Sunbelt and foreign

countries with non-existent labor laws and unions.

As a result of these economic changes, the state found itself on precipitous

ground. With capital becoming more mobile, the state was forced on the defensive. Jobs

and industry were on the move, as businesses sought cheaper labor, less regulations and

lower overheads. No longer was it an equal partner with business. As the 1970s unfolded,

government was increasingly under pressure to both retain capital and to operate more

like a business.

21
 The theory of neoliberalism argues for a new conception of the role of

government. It emphasizes the role of the market, argues against social expenditures and

pushes for deregulation of industry and the privatization of publicly owned companies

and utilities. It is a specific rejection of the Keynesian economic model and its belief in

state intervention. As Jason Hackworth defines it, Neoliberalismis an ideological

rejection of egalitarian liberalism in general and the Keynesian welfare state in particular,

combined with a selective return to the ideas of classical liberalism, most strongly

articulated by Hayek and Friedman. Both Hayek and Friedman argued that government

should be used only sparingly and in very specific circumstances, rather than interfering

within the marketplace. (Hackworth: 9)

As Miriam Greenberg notes, Thus weakened by fiscal crisis and austerity, these

cities became opportune testing grounds for experimental new forms of urban

governance. Under pressure of creditors, bond rating agencies, and local elites, cities

jettisoned their long-term managerial approach, geared towards sustaining the welfare

state, and turned instead to short-term strategies of entrepreneurial development,

through which urban space and resources served as a motor for rapid capital

accumulation. (27)

Perry Anderson provides an excellent look at both the dominance of neo-

liberalism and the paralysis of the Left in his essay, a stock taking for the New Left

Review in 2000:

For the first time since the Reformation there are no longer any significant
oppositions that is, systematic rival outlooks within the thought-world of the
West; and scarcely any on a world scale either, if we discount religious doctrines
as largely inoperative archaisms, as the experiences of Poland or Iran indicate we

22
 may. Whatever limitations persist to its practice, neo-liberalism as a set of
principles rules undivided across the globe: the most successful ideology in world
historyVirtually the entire horizon of reference in which the generation of the
sixties grew up has been wiped away the landmarks of reformist and
revolutionary socialism in equal measure. (Anderson: 13)

It is an essential snapshot at the end of the 20th century of the general feeling of a world

without alternatives that emerged in the 1970s with the postfordist and neo-liberal turns.

It is a perfect complement to Margaret Thatchers oft-used phrase to describe the benefits

of capitalism and privatization There is no alternative.

At the same time as these economic and political changes were unfolding, there

was a similar amount of upheaval in the intellectual and artistic worlds. Modernism was

under attack from all sides artists, philosophers, architects and urban planners, to name

a few prominent ones. In the wake of the events of May 1968, when university students

in Paris and other major cities around the world took to the streets in protest, occupying

buildings and demanding an end to an oppressive society, the academy became a focal

point for a whole generation of scholars.

While postmodernist theory may have begun in the throes of rebellion, it soon

found itself vacillating between a deep political paralysis and a desire to revel in the

fragmentary, hallucinatory aspects of consumer capitalism. On the one hand, there was

structuralism and poststructuralism, theories that traced the networks of power ensnaring

individuals and decentered and destabilized the subject. Political projects seemed less and

less possible. A quick look at a few of the major theorists who have been labeled

structuralist and post-structuralist will help illuminate the general sense of paralysis and

pessimism that I believe pervades the postmodern turn in theory and culture.

23
 As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner note, Both the positive and negative

theorists were responding to developments in contemporary capitalism though rarely

conceptualizing them as such which was going through an expansionist cycle and

producing new commodities, abundance, and a more affluent lifestyle. Its advertising,

credit plans, media, and commodity spectacles were encouraging gratification, hedonism,

and the adoption of new habits, cultural forms, and lifestyles that would later be termed

postmodern. Some theorists were celebrating the new diversity and affluence, while

others were criticizing the decay of traditional values or increased powers of social

control. (Best and Kellner, 15)

One particular aspect of the postmodern critique - its attack on totality and

totalizing explanations - Fredric Jameson traces tellingly to a fear of Utopia. (Jameson:

51) As Reinhold Martin argues, In architecture as elsewhere, the active unthinking of

Utopia is among those practices that distinguish postmodernism from modernism. This

activity cannot be explained merely as a reaction to earlier, modernist excesses. Instead,

under postmodernism, cultural production has been repositioned as a laboratory for auto-

regulation, wherein power is redefined as control, and especially self-control. For a

discourse caught in a net of double binds, structural transformation of the status quo

becomes increasingly unthinkable, and not merely unrealistic. Thus appears another

hallmark of postmodernism: the sullen withdrawal from engagement, or (what amounts to

the same thing) the preemptive, exuberant embrace of the status quo. (Martin, xiv) This

unthinking would extend to architectures urban partner, planning.

Postmodern Planning Theory

24
 In the postmodern turn, urban planning and its theory suffered a crisis just like

every other discipline. Planning as much as any discipline was identified with Fordism

and Modernism, with its emphases on central planning, rationality and progress. The

reaction against the perceived authoritarianism of the planners obsession with ends

brought the concept of means and process to the forefront in planning theory in its own

postmodern turn. The image of vibrant, low-income neighborhoods being destroyed to

foster some planners vision of redevelopment was a powerful critique.

The vision of planning and the role of the planner that emerged in response as the

dominant theory and model in the profession during the 1980s is referred to as

communicative planning theory and is most closely associated with theorists like Patsy

Healey, Judith Innes and John Forester. Drawing on the writings of the American

pragmatist John Dewey and German theorist Jrgen Habermas communicative

rationality, this concept emphasizes democratic procedures, dialogue and rational

discourse. Patsy Healey laid out its fundamental emphases as (1) all forms of knowledge

are socially constructed; (2) knowledge and reasoning may take different forms,

including storytelling and subjective statements; (3) individuals develops their views

through social interaction; (4) people have diverse interests and expectations and these

are social and symbolic as well as material; (5) public policy needs to draw upon and

make widely available a broad range of knowledge and reasoning drawn from different

sources. (Healey: 27) The planners role was to facilitate this process of an open

dialogue where all voices were heard and respected.

25
 The idea of the mediating planner would develop in reaction to this uprooting and

brutal Modernist world. Susan Fainstein concisely lays out the basic tenets of the theory:

Within communicative theory, the planners primary function is to listen to

peoples stories and assist in forging a consensus among differing viewpoints.
Rather than providing technocratic leadership, the planner is an experiential
learner, at most providing information to participants but primarily being sensitive
to points of convergence. Leadership consists not in bringing stakeholders around
to a particular planning content but in getting people to agree and in ensuring that
whatever the position of participants within the social-economic hierarchy, no
groups interest will dominate. (Fainstein, 2003: 175-176)

Clearly influenced by the concepts of postmodernism, it argued for the end of totalizing

theories, emphasized the fact that all knowledge is socially constructed and placed a

premium on the subjective. No longer should one idea or one voice dominate, as

everyone could contribute in his or her own unique way. This allows for a de-emphasis

on scientific research and a greater respect for different forms of knowledge, such as

storytelling. (Healey as quoted in Fainstein, 2003: 176) This new vision for planning

laudably tries to make the field more responsive to the people and institutions of the

cities, bringing all stakeholders to the process and striving for each voice to be heard

equally.

As Susan Fainstein notes, however, Although the concern of communicative

rationality planning theorists is with public officials who have the responsibility for city

planning, they do not discuss the merits of actual policies for cities but instead dwell on

the interactions among planners, politicians, and stakeholders. (Fainstein: 19) The

decision-making process becomes the sole focus, which is unfortunate since it has such

an idealistic, some might say nave, view on the power of speech and communication.

26
The communicative theorists believe that speech can negate the influence of the current

power structures and the biases that have created the current moment; as Fainstein notes,

its opponents seem to forget the economic and social forces that produce endemic social

conflict and domination by the powerful. (Fainstein: 176) Purcell notes that one of its

leading theorists Judith Innes admits as much:

While she believes power differences around the table can be equalized by
facilitators, she freely admits that preexisting power relations are untouched by
consensus-buildingConsensus-building is not, in any case, the place for
redistributing power (2004: 12). (Purcell: 157)

While it is great to espouse the benefits of a public sphere, it is worthless if one does

nothing to give everyone equal access and standing.

Mark Purcell accuses the communicative theorists of actually serving as

buttresses of neoliberalization. (Purcell: 148) As he writes, communicative action

tends in the long term to reinforce the current status quo because it seeks to resolve

conflict, eliminate exclusion, and neutralize power relations, rather than embracing them

as the very terrain of social mobilization. There is a lack of concern about ends and

results and the theory and practice only provides limited scope for or evidence of

delivery.

It is only recently that other planning theorists most notably, Fainstein (2010)

and Purcell (2003) - have begun to challenge the communicative turn and demand that

planners re-engage with the outcomes of their decisions and think about what kind of

cities they create. Fainsteins Just City model and Purcells counter-hegemonic theory

suggest the tentative re-emergence of a search for alternatives.

27
 Planning in the Neoliberal City

The state of planning practice in the neo-liberal city gives an excellent sense of

the impact of this theory, notably in the lack of alternatives to the predominance of the

market. Increasingly, planning has become inextricably linked with economic

development, as a city department whose sole goal is to foster growth and to attract

capital. Cities themselves have faced a bleak situation for decades. Increasing poverty

among its residents has coincided with massive losses to the suburbs of more affluent

residents, jobs and businesses. The federal government has increasingly withdrawn its

financial support of its cities, which has only increased the burden on cities to come up

with ways to pay for basic services and infrastructure.

Bryan D. Jones and Lynn W. Bachelors study of the interaction between Detroit

and its largest corporate citizen in General Motors Searches for Sites gives a clear

sense of the way in which cities are stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes

to dealing with corporations and the private sector. It details the search for a site for a

new assembly plant in Detroit in the early 1980s and the often brutal tactics that

corporations engage in with local communities, pitting one struggling city against another

in order to extract the greatest benefits. As they state, Murphy [GM chairman] felt that

obtaining the approval of Detroit would be no problem, because the company, as usual,

was considering sites in Michigan (in the Detroit suburb of Livonia) and out of state

(primarily in Indiana). This strategy of site selection had several advantages: it allowed

full consideration of engineering, transportation, and labor-force aspects of the proposed

28
facility in a variety of settings; it decreased land speculation; and it allowed maximum

leverage in extracting benefits from state and local officials. The threat of moving out of

state was almost always enough to gain the acquiescence of the community that would be

losing the facility, even if the company might have to tolerate some posturing on the part

of the city council. (Jones and Bachelor: 79)

From this precarious position, cities have been forced to behave almost like a

private corporation, competing for jobs and opportunities for growth and revenue.

However, there is one key difference between the two entities that makes it inevitable

that cities are and will be at a perpetual disadvantage with regards to capital. Capital is

completely mobile, able to move quickly and without regard to geography; cities are

fixed entities, contending with populations that also lack mobility, both for financial and

emotional reasons.

The sense that there is no alternative for planning is best seen in the use of

entertainment and tourism as development strategies. In particular, one could not help but

get the feeling that cities had completely internalized the notion of competition,

mindlessly pursuing any strategy that another city had succeeded at. Donald Judd sums

up the mood perfectly:

Because cities compete so vigorously with one another, it may be said that they
are entangled within a system of coerced production: the status quo is not an
option; they have to run just to keep up. As a result, urban leaders feel that they
have little choice but to invest in all the components that make up the tourist
enclave. (Judd, 39)

As noted, this limited set of options for urban growth leads to immense competition.

There are only so many conventions each year, so a city must do whatever it can to attract

29
them. Judd offers the example of Kansas City and the Future Farmers of America; the

group demanded that the city give it cash subsidies, lower hotel rates, and other

incentives to continue meeting there. It mirrors the situation Detroit faced in regards to

the plant location. The city couldnt risk losing their yearly business, so they acceded to

the groups demands (Judd, 44), just as Detroit couldnt afford to lose a corporate tenant

and its tax revenues. This sense of city competition runs throughout Stickball in San

Francisco, Stephen J. Agostini, John M. Quigley, and Eugene Smolenskys history of

the city of San Franciscos efforts to build a new stadium for their Major League Baseball

team. Not only did the San Francisco Giants end up in California as a result of this

competition, it also factors into the entire history of the teams search for a new stadium.

Cities are completely enmeshed within the capitalist structure, where competition

produces the best prices and costs. It does not necessarily lead to the best cities, however.

Theres a growing sense among academics and citizens that the last group that

matters for a city is its own citizens and residents. Bernard Frieden and Lynne Sagalyn

reference the complete reliance for current urban development on convention centers,

stadiums and arenas for professional sports teams, festival retail malls, redeveloped

waterfront areas, casinos, performing arts centers, museums and aquariums. (Altshuler

and Luberoff, 19) All of these are meant to attract outsiders: nearby suburbanites, out-of-

state businesses and conventions or international tourists.

One could understand this obsession with enticing outsiders if the results were

impressive; one look at the literature on the efficacy of these mega-projects dispels any

thoughts that they are. Convention centers and stadiums are rarely successes and never

meet the grand expectations that are advertised in the selling of the plans. They dont

30
create permanent, good-paying jobs, raise incomes or increase local tax revenues. Writers

like Judith Grant Long have detailed to no end that they are awful investments. As a

result, they spend the limited funds that cities have and therefore take other public

projects off the table, like infrastructure improvements, school funding or better wages

for public employees (to name just a few). Yet, despite the lack of benefits and

underperformance, there is no dissent from U.S. cities and their leaders; they seem

resigned to this situation.

The only way to breathe life back into these city officials, to inspire them to find

alternative, more effective strategies for development and growth, is to recover the idea

that another way is possible.

The Recovery of Utopia

If you listen closely, utopia is breathing again in the intellectual world. There has

been a surge in thinking about utopia and issues of justice in regards to the city. In

architecture, Reinhold Martins Utopias Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again

is the most explicit and most recent example (2010), but writers like Felicity Scott, Larry

Busbea and Tom McDonough have revived the concept in their returns to the radical

architecture collectives and individuals of the 1960s like Archigram, Superstudio,

Archizoom and the Situationist Internationals Constant. In sociology, Erik Olin Wright

wrote a full-length book on the subject last year, Envisioning Real Utopias, and put

together the Real Utopias project that has set up shop in various graduate schools around

the United States since 2004.

31
 A few theorists more closely related to urban planning have also proposed a

return to utopian thinking as a means of bringing a more just and equal city to reality.

Susan Fainstein is perhaps the only planning theorist to have provided a new vision of the

ideal city with her notion of the Just City. In the introduction to her book on the topic, she

states: The relating of politics to vision, of policy to justice, constitutes the form of

realistic utopianism that is the purpose of this book. (Fainstein: 20) Interestingly,

Reinhold Martin proposed the concept of utopian realism in a short essay from late 2004.

Fainstein notes that another planning theorist has begun to proclaim the importance of

utopia: John Friedmann (Friedmann: 104) presents a utopian vision and relates it to

critique: Moral outrage over an injustice suggests that we have a sense of justice,

inarticulate though it may be. If injustice is to be correctedwe will need the concrete

imagery of utopian thinking to propose steps that would bring us a little closer to a more

just world. (Fainstein: 20)

Marxist geographer David Harvey has also begun to explore the topic of utopia in

his recent work, which have begun to seek ways and spaces of resistance to the current

neoliberal, capitalist order. He puts forth the idea of dialectical utopianism in his book,

The Spaces of Hope. He describes the concept as a dialectics able to address spatio-

temporal dynamics openly and directly and able also to represent the multiple intersecting

material processes that so tightly imprison us in the fine-spun web of contemporary

socio-ecological life. It then entails a willingness, if only in the world of thought, to

transcend or overturn the socio-ecological forms imposed by uncontrolled capital

accumulation, class privileges, and gross inequalities of political-economic power. In this

32
way, a space for thought experiments about alternative possible worlds can be

constructed. (Harvey: 199)

He later makes the key point that these insurgent practices and spaces must be

prepared to take an equally speculative plunge into some unknown, noting that it was

a speculative spirit of merchant capitalists that helped bring about the beginnings of

this new economic and social order. (Harvey: 255) This acceptance of failure and the

need to take risks is an essential lesson that progressives need to come to terms with

moving forward. As David Riesman put it, without great plans, it is hard, and often quite

self-defeating, to make little ones. Such utopian thinking requires what I have termed the

nerve of failure, that is, the ability to face the possibility of defeat without feeling

morally crushed. Without this sort of courage, any failure implies a personal defect, and

brings feelings of intolerable isolation; to avoid this fate, people tend to repress their

claims for a decent world to a practical point, and to avoid any goals, personal or

social, that seem out of step with common sense. (Riesman: 173)

Why Recover Utopia?

While it is interesting that so many writers from different fields have picked up on

the notion of utopia again, one may stop to ask what is so valuable and important about

utopia? Why does it need to be recovered? I turn to another discipline, anthropology, to

answer this question and give a sense of the importance of utopia and the active thinking

of what another world looks like.

33
 The recent writings of Steven Shukaitis have been influential in clarifying the

importance of utopia and re-thinking it after the postmodern critiques. In Shukatis essay

An Ethnography of Nowhere: Notes Toward a Re-envisioning of Utopian Thinking, he

argues that if one wants to seriously put forward the idea of revolutionary social change

one has to move conceptions of how such an alternative arrangement might work out of

the realm of inconceivable thoughts and into the realm of possibility. (Shukaitis, 2010:

6) This alternative arrangement is utopia; without a rough idea of how such an

alternative social arrangement might work it would be extremely difficult to convince

others that such is desirable or achievable. (ibid) As Niki Thorne describes Shukaitis

concept of utopian thinking, it is not used in the sense of abstract imaginings that are

messily applied to any given situation. Rather, the role of imagination is considered in

grounded terms: Being able to imagine alternatives is a prerequisite to bringing them into

being. Imagination is of critical importance to the task of social transformation. (Thorne)

Shukatis and Thorne have hit on the essential mobilizing power of utopia, one

that, I argue, that the Left and its adherent in urban planning have forgotten. Criticizing

current conditions is important, but without an ability to describe what could come next,

those critiques will go nowhere. Quite simply, without some answer to the question of

what the world looks like after neoliberalism (or capitalism, Peak Oil, or any aspect of

the way things are), it is impossible to gain supporters and create a lasting movement for

change. Without it, there is no way to move beyond critique and in a new direction.

Interestingly, an understanding of the political importance of utopian thinking and

imagination was already present in Mores book in 1516. Near the end of Book 1, when

More expresses doubt at the possibility of this perfect society existing, Hythloday says,

34
Im not surprised that you think of it this way since you have no image, or only a false

one, of such a commonwealth. But you should have been with me in Utopia and seen

with your own eyes their manners and customs, as I did for I lived for more than five

years, and would never have left, if it had not been to make that new world known to

others. (More: 39) The vision is an act of mobilization, in that it can both provide an

endpoint and inspire peoples daily struggles and resistances by giving hope that

something better is possible.

Micro-Utopia

However, the old notion of utopian thinking, where one individual dreams up a

perfect city and then imposes it from a position of power, is unacceptable. This paper is

not a Habermasian project, which Jameson says, seeks to rescue and

recommemoratethe essentially negative, critical, and Utopian power of the great high

modernisms. (Jameson: 58) The critique of the rational, centrally planned utopian vision

of Corbusier and others by Jane Jacobs was legitimate and must be incorporated into this

new sense of utopian thinking. Clearly, however, I do not think that the utopian baby

should be thrown out with the Modernist bathwater.

As one potential possibility, I want to put forth the concept of micro-utopia as a

means of recovering utopia, while acknowledging those valuable critiques offered by

post-structuralism and post-modernism.

Micro-utopia is an idea first put forth by the French art critic and historian Nicolas

Bourriaud in his book, Relational Aesthetics. As he wrote, Rather than speak of

35
intermediary spaces, I prefer to speak of interstices. Marx gave a particular value to that

word, as the assembly of islets of resistance The interstice presents the possibility of

functioning differently. In a world more and more homogenized and subject to a single

law, it is important to support spaces which try other things, especially as there is not

today a united global discourse presenting an alternative to the system. It is the problem

of current radical politics. The experience of community in the 1970s carried a particular

message. Currently, the majority of the political struggles are sectoral fights which relate

to micro politics and micro-utopias, to borrow Felix Guattaris phrasing. From there

it is important to privilege these small islands that are apart from the system, or which

form a dam around the reigning system. The more we multiply these points of systemic

divergences, the more we multiply the possibility of another dialogue emerging one day.

(Bourriaud, web entry) The interstice becomes a central part of art practice and

resistance, a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly

into the overall system, but suggests other possibilities than those in effect within this

system. This is the precise nature of the contemporary art exhibition in the arena of

representational commerce: it creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts

with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that

differs from the communication zones that are imposed upon us.

These interstices contain the potential to combine and grow into something

greater, something that pose a more serious challenge to status quo. This strategy brings

to mind one of the readings of Antonio Gramscis writings that Fredric Jameson offers in

his recent book, The Ideologies of Theory. In the chapter entitled Architecture and

Ideology, Jameson describes Gramscis enclave theory of social transition, according to

36
which the emergent future, the new and still nascent social relations that announce a

mode of production that will ultimately displace and subsume the as yet still dominant

one, is theorized in terms of small yet strategic pockets or beachheads within the older

system. (Jameson, 2008: 359) Jameson too notes the passage in Marxs Capital that

Bourriaud quotes, where Marx notes how capitalism began to breathe in the interstices

of the ancient world. (Marx quoted in Jameson, 2008: 358-359)

One appealing aspect of spatializing the concept is that it brings to light a series of

already-existing spaces that offer experiments and alternatives to current practices in the

fields of housing, development, production and more. Their small scale and bottom-up

approach are reflections of the postmodern critique, forcing utopia to emerge from the

world rather create a new city by destroying the old one. They are not trying to force the

vision of the few onto the lives of the many. Rather, they are made by and for small

communities who wish to live differently.

While Bourriauds concept was originally focused on the gallery space, I want to

take it out into the real world and bring it into contact with the neo-liberal city. What

makes the microutopian concept especially interesting and exciting is that through its

smaller size, it is both more actionable and more susceptible to the outside world. In other

words, it is far easier to bring a single gallery space to fruition than the building of an

entirely new city. But, this limited scope and existence in reality means that these spaces

will not escape the world they criticize; these are not newly built cities hovering above

the old ones on pilotis nor the fortress-like phalanxes. While this need to engage and

negotiate with the very world being criticized is not ideal for radical change, it is a

37
condition that any transformative project must acknowledge and adapt to in order to

prosper.

These spaces must engage in a dialectic of utopia, in which critique and imagining

work in a perpetual loop driving each other on. These micro-utopias are processes,

adapting their vision to the circumstances and achievements. As the Uruguayan novelist

and journalist Eduardo Galleano said, Utopia is on the horizon: I walk two steps, it takes

two steps back. I walk ten steps and it is ten steps further away. What is utopia for? It is

for this, for walking. (Shukaitis et al: 33) As Jameson argued, It isthe limits, the

systemic restrictions and repressions, or empty places, in the Utopian blueprint that are

the most interesting, for these alone testify to the ways a culture or a system marks the

most visionary mind and contains its movement toward transcendence. Micro-utopia

offers a new blueprint, where failure is built in and accepted. Utopia becomes a perpetual

struggle and emergence, an open-ended idea and space.

The artists that Bourriaud grouped under the term relational aesthetics was onto

this idea, most notably in their group project Utopia Station for the 2003 Venice Bienalle.

The station was a building for gathering where artists would come As Natilee Harren

observes of their re-defining of utopia, Instead of an over-there, it becomes a working-

toward the over-there. They situate utopia in the place of immanence, changing its

significance from noun to verb, a concept to work with rather than a place of which we

can dream but never reach. (Harren: website)

As Utopia Stations organizers Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit

Tiravanija wrote in their essay What Is A Station?: We use utopia as a catalyst, a

concept most useful as fuel. We leave the complete definition of utopia to others. We

38
meet to pool our efforts, motivated by a need to change the landscape outside and inside,

a need to think, a need to integrate the work of the artist, the intellectual and manual

laborers that we are into a larger kind of community, another kind of economy, a bigger

conversation, another state of being. You could call this need a hunger Whether it

comes as a catalyst or fume, the word should be pronounced. And so we start. (Nesbit,

Obrist and Tiravanija: website)

This thesis is an attempt to start as well: to start to think again about alternatives

and another world. We start now by taking a journey to the recent past, to the moment

when: utopia had receded and been taken off of the agenda, the grand narratives had

disappeared, and alternatives seemed impossible. This is a journey to discover two micro-

utopian spaces, formed in the ruins of deindustrialization. It is in this difficult moment

that a group of artists came together to reclaim spaces of the city abandoned by capital,

and to prove that another world was possible. This is the history of ABC No Rio and

Bullet Space, micro-utopias on New Yorks Lower East Side.

PART 2: ABC No Rio and Bullet Space A Journey to Micro-Utopia

1. Introduction

This new conception of the micro-utopia offers a means of recovering utopian

ideals without the baggage or mistakes of its authoritarian Modernist version. However,

the only value to this recovery is in bringing the concept into the real world. To do so, I

39
have chosen to identify current spaces that offer themselves as micro-utopian case studies

in order to explore the tension, difficulties and lessons learned from establishing spaces

of resistance in the neoliberal city. Their existence helps alert us to the fact that, while

utopia disappeared in discourse, this did not mean that people stopped trying to imagine

another world. Utopia was still breathing; it just got smaller, more bottom-up and more

flexible.

If you were listening closely over the last three decades, you could hear another

vision of the Lower East Side attempting to breathe, in spite of the hostility of the city

and landlords and the paralysis of the local residents. I have chosen to tell the histories of

two spaces, ABC No Rio and Bullet Space, which have been at the heart of that struggle

to breathe. Both spaces, blocks apart, began in the Lower East Side neighborhood of New

York City in the 1980s; they reclaimed abandoned buildings to imagine a new type of

gallery, one that provided a space for experimental works in art and life. Both still exist

today in those same buildings, having been awarded by the city the right to buy their

buildings for $1 nearly two decades later. Long after the other spaces of resistance to the

disinvestment and gentrification have disappeared, they continue to exist in their original

homes. It begs a simple question: How did this happen?

To answer this simple question, we must tell the complex histories of both spaces,

starting amidst the ruins of New York City in the 1970s, moving through the battles over

gentrification in the 1980s and into the revanchist 1990s and 2000s. This journey will

illuminate the critique and new vision that both spaces offered, while also showcasing the

tension that both groups experienced by being embedded in the neo-liberal city. The

attention on the tensions that both spaces have encountered over the past decade will help

40
us better understand how micro-utopian spaces survive long-term and the compromises

and tensions that these spaces experience. Finally, I conclude by looking at the future for

both these sites and the concept of micro-utopia.

2. Critique The 1970s

Before we look at 2011 and beyond, let us return to New York City of the 1970s

to discover the critique that shaped ABC No Rio and Bullet Space. If David Harvey

defines the postfordist turn through the concept of flexibility, it seems just as accurate to

describe the New York City of the 1970s through that of abandonment. No city

experienced the pain and destruction caused by the postfordist and neoliberal turns more

explicitly than New York City did in the 1970s. As John Mollenkopf remarks, during

the 1970s, the U.S. system of cities crossed a watershed. New York led other old,

industrial metropolitan areas like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo into

population and employment decline. (Mollenkopf: 213) The city that had once been a

center of commerce, industry and culture found itself unable to pay off its debts, as the

effects of deindustrialization and loss of population to the suburbs took their toll.

The numbers are staggering. According to the US Census Bureau, almost one-

third of New Yorks total work force in 1950 was engaged in manufacturing. By 1970,

this proportion had declined to one-fifth of the total. The number of machine shops in the

Lower East Side alone declined from sixty in 1950 to only eight in 1978 (Zukin, 1989:

41
23-33). The traditional working-class unionized jobs that had sustained New York City

disappeared rapidly, fleeing to less union-friendly areas like the suburbs, Southern and

Sun Belt states and foreign countries.

As jobs left, the need for social services increased. The liberal social contract that

had governed cities and the nation since World War II tried to provide the resources to

ease the pain of this restructuring, but the demand exceeded the citys ability to fund

these services, particularly as wealthier residents continued to flee to the surrounding

suburbs. The effort to ease the social and financial pain brought the citys finances into

ruin, with bankruptcy looming as a real possibility. At a time of increasing need and

demand for social services, the city was less and less able to afford them.

Help was not forthcoming, as urban problems increasingly were seen as

unsolvable. The federal funds that might have offset this process had been diminishing

throughout the 1970s. In 1975, President Fords unequivocal veto to requests for a federal

bail out to prevent New York from filing for bankruptcy made New York a national

symbol for the fate of older cities under his administration. (Rose in Farmer et al: 84)

This rejection lead to the unforgettable New York Daily News article and headline

proclaiming, Ford to City: Drop Dead. (Van Riper) The city had been abandoned.

The city and state eventually negotiated a federal loan, but one that carried with it

deep service cuts and brutal repayment terms. This fiscal crisis became a chance for its

ideological opponents, now in charge, to also abandon the Keynesian, welfare state,

which was most visible in the large East Coast cities of the 1960s and 1970s. As Jamie

Peck argues, this fiscal crisis necessitated a protracted period of budgetary restraint, but

it also played a role as a potent symbol of the effective exhaustion of the welfarist status

42
quo. New York City had become ungovernable, so the argument went, because

together, the poor, programs for the poor, deliverers of programs for the poor, and

political advocates of programs for the poor had suffocated the city with unsustainable

financial and social commitments. Businesses and middle-class taxpayers would return to

the city, the new conservative orthodoxy dictated, only if tax bills and the social state

were simultaneously downsized. (Peck: 684)

City planning had a central role in this abandonment, in the form of a new policy

proposal known as planned shrinkage. Formulated and announced in 1976 at the New

York City Housing and Development Administration by its head, Roger Starr, it was a

policy that advocated the withdrawing of essential city services (such as police, fire,

garbage, street repairs) from neighborhoods suffering from urban decay, crime and

poverty. The New York Times explained Starrs idea on February 3, 1976: Under this,

the population losses occurring in certain slum areaswould be accelerated by public

policy. The aim of such a policy, in the opinion of Roger Starr, the Housing and

Development Administrator, would be to hasten the population decline already begun in

these neighborhoods so that, ultimately, further cutbacks in city services could be

concentrated in a limited number of areas. (2/3/76 p. 35)

Roberta Brandes Gratz summed up the brutal cycle that this policy initiates in her

1991 book, The Living City: Instead of a healthy consolidated city, an urban extremism

emerges: increased abandonment of weaker neighborhoods on the one hand and

accelerated investment in choicer areas on the other. Bad gets worse and good gets better.

Existing residential communities, with whatever degree of cohesion and socially useful

networking they experience, are either destabilized by an overheated real-estate market

43
fueled by shifting public resources or abandoned as unredeemable. New human and

economic costs for the larger society result, with the most visible manifestation of those

costs in the homelessness epidemic that was barely in evidence a decade ago plaguing our

cities today. (Gratz: 181) In the simplest terms, city officials attempted to choose which

areas and people were to be abandoned to save the city and its finances, ultimately

deciding on the winners and losers of the neo-liberal city.

The sense of crisis and disorder was pictured and reinforced throughout popular

culture, providing more justification for the abandonment that the city and landlords had

begun in this decade. Movies like Martin Scorceses Taxi Driver provided vivid scenes of

the seediness of formerly iconic and glamorous New York City sites like 42nd Street and

Broadway. Gone were the images of the classic movies of the 1940s and 1950s, when

Broadway was portrayed as the center of the world, full of lights, prestige and

sophistication. Movies like The Warriors and The Out-of-Towners provided scenes of

roving New York gangs and criminals, fighting amongst each other in the case of the

former, and victimizing innocent midwestern tourists in the latter. The emergence of the

urban revenge movie, best exemplified by Charles Bronsons role in the 1974 film

Deathwish, came to signify the abandonment of the hard-working, middle class citizens

in the city.

As Christopher Mele argues, Symbolic representations of the city in the 1970s

not only produced hyperbole about the state of urban affairs but also a powerful discourse

of despair that influenced the types of real estate actions and state urban development

policies enacted during the decade. The phrase urban crisis, frequently mentioned in the

1970s, came to represent middle-class hopelessness and apprehension toward a city

44
perceived to be unsalvageable and filled with impoverished, threatening, and mostly

minority residents. Urban crisis was not merely a discursive reflection of the white

middle-class fears, it offered a cultural means to legitimize and explain the exodus of

people and capital from the city and the incapacity of urban policies to deal with the

consequences. (Mele, 181) Increasingly, outsiders and people in power came to see the

people in these neighborhoods as the problem, depicting them as inhuman rather than

victims of an economic restructuring.

All of this was captured poignantly on live television the night of October 10,

1977. During the World Series game between the New York Yankees and Los Angeles

Dodgers at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, the television cameras captured a fire burning

at a nearby school. Announcer Howard Cosell, broke into the telecast with his infamous

The Bronx is burning comment that would brand both the neighborhood and city as lost

causes in the imaginations of a nationwide audience. Less remembered are Cosells

subsequent comments. As Marshall Berman recalls, Whats wrong with these people?

Howard Cosell barked on national television during the 1977 World Series at Yankee

Stadium, as the camera from the Goodyear Blimp showed a building on fire less than a

mile from the field. Cosell asked, in a tone that supplied its own answer, Dont these

people have any self-respect? What a relief it must have been to think of the fires as

something these people were doing to themselves: then you wouldnt have to worry

about whether the Bronxs troubles were somehow your troubles. [Italics in original]

(Farmer et al: 72) That is what these cultural images conveyed to the rest of America -

these neighborhoods were part of another world, inhabited by criminals and people with

an almost-inhuman lack of self-respect. They deserved to be abandoned.

45
 The effect of these changes on certain New York City neighborhoods was

devastating. One such neighborhood targeted for shrinkage and decimated by the de-

industrializing labor market was the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the area in the

southeastern part of Lower Manhattan, bordered by 14th Street to the north, the East River

to the east, Canal Street to the south with Broadway as the western border. A

predominately working class neighborhood since the 19th Century, it has served as the

citys welcoming area for newly arrived immigrants from its earliest days. It is perhaps

best known as a center of Jewish-American culture from the end of the 19th Century to

the middle of the 20th Century. For more than half of a century, the neighborhood would

serve as an initial point of entry for newly arriving Jews, most coming from Eastern

Europe. During the 1950s and 1960s, Puerto Rican migration to New York increased

rapidly; most ended up in the Lower East Side and they would become the public face of

the neighborhood for the next few decades. Its history of cheaper rents and radical

activism, along with its role as a first-stop for immigrants, made it both a home for the

less well off in the city and placed it in a precarious position when the economic changes

began to unfold in the 1970s.

This situation of abandonment became most evident in the housing stock of the

neighborhood. Christopher Mele has written extensively on this aspect of the Lower East

Sides history. He sums up the devastating state of housing as a result of the widespread

abandonment by property owners and landlords in the Lower East Side that began in that

decade:

Beginning in the early 1970s, many of those who owned properties in Loisaida
began to walk away from their buildings, leaving uninhabitable and often burned-
out shells that soon transformed the landscape into a haunting and scarred urban

46
 war zonein the 1970s residential abandonment was so concentrated and intense
that it reached epidemic proportions within a few years. The contagion of
abandonment proceeded exhaustively in Loisaida, even prompting owners of
healthy buildings to disinvest and abandon buildings. Within a decade nearly
half of Loisaidas residents were displaced. (Mele:181-182)

The city was forced to foreclose and take possession of these abandoned properties. The

bulk of the citys in rem housing stock had been acquired during the wave of owner

abandonment in the 1970s. Bu 1987 in the Lower East Side alone, an estimated 500

buildings and lots were in the administrations hands. (Sites in Abu-Lughod, 1994: 200)

Accompanying this housing abandonment was a staggering level of human

displacement. 1980 Census records for a six square block area between Avenues B and

D, between 3rd and 6th Streets alone, a block from where Bullet Space would call home,

show a population drop during that decade from 7799 to 2721. (Bowler and McBurney:

52)

Three buildings abandoned by landlords during this period - 123 Delancey Street,

156 Rivington Street and 292 East Third Street are the main characters of our story.

They would provide the future homes of two groups of artists, who wished to challenge

the official policy of abandonment and hopelessness.

Amidst this neighborhood of ruins, ABC No Rio and Bullet Space challenged the

official stance of neglect, the feelings of powerlessness for those caught in these areas

and the existence of unused buildings. Both spaces saw this abandonment as both an

indictment of those in power and as an opportunity to re-think the way that society views

property and housing. They would join with the large and defiant squatter and

homesteading movements that would serve a key role in stabilizing the neighborhood in

47
the 1970s and 1980s. As Robert Neuwirt writes, New Yorks squats were born from the

flames of arson and abandonment. Landlords deserted swaths of structures in the 1970s,

and the city began foreclosing en masse, taking thousands of buildings at a time. Almost

immediately, people began moving into the vacant buildings, rescuing them from

destruction and decayFor some, squatting was a political act, a way to reclaim unused

and blighted property for the people where the government had clearly failed. (Neuwirt:

website)

It may seem unlikely that two art galleries would have much to say about housing,

planning and development, but a look at the two spaces early days make clear that they

were born of a critique of a city, government and economic system that would allow

productive spaces to go unused for profit and ideology. These were the driving forces

behind the first audacious, inspired steps of emerging micro-utopias.

The story of ABC No Rio begins at the end of the 1970s and the first days of the

1980s. It begins, in fact, without a vision of an ABC No Rio. It first emerges with a

provocation called The Real Estate Show. This show emerged out of the work of a

radical artist collaborative known as Collaborative Projects, better known as Colab, a

group of disparate artists who had come together to reclaim the political nature of art in

the 1970s. David Little describes the fundamental aspects of the group as members'

desire to create and distribute "collaborative work" under the umbrella of an artist-run

organization, their focus on new media versus traditional art objects and their openness to

a range of aesthetic styles that would meet the "needs of the community-at-large." They

had gained their first and most celebrated attention for a show called Times Square, in

48
which they talked a landlord into giving them a storefront in Times Square for free for a

month.

A group of artists affiliated with Colab, calling themselves the Committee for the

Real Estate Show (CRES), began to meet and concoct a plan to occupy one of the many

abandoned buildings in the Lower East Side to mount a two-week exhibit. Their original

intention was to rent a space on Delancey Street, at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge

for the month of January 1980, but it soon became clear that this was not possible.

Instead, on December 30, 1979, a small group entered the factory building at 123

Delancey to prepare the space for the exhibition, entitled The Real Estate Show. A

history of the New York City art scene during the 1980s reflected on the show, saying

that after the unfinished lofts and that cruddy storefront, the location of the Real Estate

Show in a two-story abandoned factory showroom on Delancey Street, in the heart of the

Lower East Side, was only logical. What was not as readily anticipated was how the

committee had secured the derelict building for their exhibition. They broke inFor

once, a Colab manifestation did not simply decry the powers and circumstances that be: it

disobeyed them. And it provoked their wrath. (Frank and McKenzie: 32-33)

As the statement by the organizers would later detail, they first glass-waxed the

windows and began clearing trash from the room. A plumbing line in the basement had

burst during the frost of the previous week; this was repaired. The heater was turned on

and a radio plugged in. Throughout the day and into the night, artists arrived with their

work for the Real Estate Show. (Statement by the Organizers of the Real Estate Show,

January 5 (?), 1980, ABC No Rio web site) The work of thirty-five artists was on display

inside the old factory and outside on the faade. Those participating included many of the

49
Colab members, along with an assortment of other young New York artists connected to

the group. Some, like sculptor John Ahearn and video artist Ann Meissner, have enjoyed

acclaim in the ensuing decades.

The following day, the space was opened for a private preview of the show for

friends, fellow artists and critics. The Real Estate Show officially opened the next day

on January, 1, 1980 - to the general public, ushering in a new year and a new decade with

a radically different take on how urban development should happen.

What those in attendance saw was a radical critique of gentrification, urban

planning and private property through the medium of the visual arts. The flier advertising

the show proclaimed in capital letters: A building is not a precious gem to be locked

boarded hoarded. It described itself as an art show celebrating insurrectionary urban

development. The East Village Eye, in a January 13 article, described it as being all

about the way that money controls where and how people live in New York City in

general, and the Lower East Side in particular. Artworks in every conceivable medium

dealt with facts such as arson in the neighborhood, local alternate energy proposals, and

the media blackout on what exactly the city is doing to low-income neighborhoods. (The

East Village Eye, Jan. 1980) The artwork offered a critique of the existing Lower East

Side, while the show and space offered a vision of something different, a Lower East

Side that was reclaimed by its residents for art and community. As Kevin Erickson wrote

in The Nation, During the 1970s, thousands of buildings in New York City had been

abandoned by their landlords, became property of the city through foreclosure, and sat

vacant and neglected. The art exhibition on Delancey Street entitled The Real Estate

Show was a provocation: why should these spaces sit idle? (Erickson) Or as Lehmann

50
Weichselbaum wrote in the East Village Eye, the besieged empty storefront is typical of

countless such properties throughout the city standing abandoned eminently habitable, as

officials wave never-to-be-realized renewal plans in one hand and the wrecking ball in

the other. It is precisely this problem that CRES addressed. Explains Alan Moore: A lot

of people are tired of getting the short end of the stick in the real estate world because of

the forces they dont understand but that always amount to money. (Moore and Miller:

53)

The show opened on New Years Day to the public and would be over less than

twenty-four hours later. That night, the citys Department of Housing Preservation and

Development (HPD) came and padlock the building from the inside because the artists

had illegally occupied a city building. 10 days later, HPD police would enter the property

and destroy the artwork on display.

The citys immediate response proved aggressive and clumsy, confirming the

communitys sense that the city had no plan or vision for the neighborhood beyond

upholding the property rights of absent landlords. As a local journalist wrote in response

to the citys decision, the shows basic ideological premise that artists, working

people, and the poor are systematically screwed out of decent places to exist in could

not have been brought home with more brutal irony. Their initial rationale was that three

merchants already had a claim to the space. This excuse would soon be supplanted by an

announcement that the building was part of a much larger site that was scheduled for

demolition in preparation for a large-scale project that would include a combination of

low-income housing project, shopping mall and senior center. (East Village Eye, ibid)

51
 The citys ham-handed response provided an opening for the group that they took

full advantage of. CRES organized a protest and press conference for January 8th, which

attracted reporters from The New York Times and the now-defunct Soho Weekly

News, as well as famed German artist Joseph Beuys. (Trimarco: website) Kevin

Erickson describes what happened next: The story could have ended there, had the

artists conceded defeat instead they chose to fight. The citys reaction seemed

overboard, and it quickly became an embarrassment as artists mounted a protest

campaign. Articles also appeared in the media discussing the art show and the issues it

raised, including the citys failure to provide basic improvements to the neighborhood.

Fearing further negative publicity, the citys Department of Housing Preservation and

Development eventually relented, and granted the artists a month-to-month lease for a

storefront space a block north on Rivington Street, in an abandoned beauty parlor.

(Erickson: 2) The city, in fact, had provided the group with a list of available, abandoned

properties to choose from, and in return the artists agreed not to re-open the Real Estate

Show. (Trimarco: website)

This space at 156 Rivington Street would become the space we know today,

deriving its name from the sign across the street that had once read Abogado Con

Notario, Spanish for Lawyer/Notary Public. The sign on the abandoned building had

decayed and lost many of the letters, leaving only AB.. C.. No..rio behind. As one of

the CRES artists, Peter Moenig, said at the time, Now the work begins. (quoted in

Weichselbaum) That work was to build a vision of this new space they had achieved

through negotiations.

52
 A number of blocks north and east of ABC No Rio, in the area known as

Loisaida, Alphabet City or the East Village, Bullet Space would also begin as a squatter

action; unlike ABC No Rio, it would remain so until it would receive official sanction

from the city in 2002. In fact, before being called Bullet Space, the building on 232 East

Third Street was known as the 6 OClock Squat for a brief time after its establishment,

indicating that that this was much more linked to the squatting movement than ABC No

Rio.

As Colin Moynihan wrote in the New York Times last year, When Andrew

Castrucci moved into a tenement on East Third Street in 1986, he arrived not with a real

estate agent and a new set of keys but with two accomplices who stood watch as he used

a 10-pound sledgehammer to smash through cinder blocks filling a rear door to the

derelict building. Property records said that the abandoned structure, between Avenues C

and D, belonged to the City of New York. But a handful of squatters, including Mr.

Castrucci, assumed practical ownership. They cleared out thousands of pounds of rubble,

repaired the roof, replaced broken water pipes and lighted the rooms with pirated

electricity. They called the place Bullet Space, after the name stamped on bags of heroin

sold on the block.

The Bullet Space website provides a succinct history of the gallerys formation:

The center was founded in the winter of 1985 and was part of the squatter movement

and reconstructed with or without the formal sanction of the city, invisible officialdom.

The ground floor of the building is open-like, a bulletin. "Bullet" first originated from the

name brand of heroin sold on the block known as bullet block, encompassing the

accepted american ethic of violence; "Bullet Americana" translating that into the art

53
form as weaponry. (web site) Their manifesto makes clear that the reclamation of

abandoned property was at the heart of the spaces mission: Art is for liberation, for life,

or it is for nothing. Like the building we struggle to reclaim & rebuild. (web site)

The most famous exhibition that has emerged from the space makes all of this

clearer, Your House Is Mine. Numerous artist-activists, including David Wojnarowicz,

ACT-UP and Chris Burden, gathered at Bullet Space in 1993 to print out various posters

for causes they were active in. 300 posters were printed, half of which ended up in the

neighborhood, the other half of which ended up in a limited-edition book. There would

also be a newspaper, detailing the work and the causes. The slogan is telling; it was

commonly used in the squatters movement of the East Village during this period and the

name of an album by local hardcore band and squatter activists The Missing Foundation.

The editors of the book, Andrew Castrucci and Nadia Coen, describe the book as a

collection of images and texts concerning the broad and essential issue of housing on the

Lower East Side." Prints from the book, in turn, were made into posters that were pasted

up all over the neighborhood and carried around on posts during protest marches.

(Anderson) It has become a defining document of art and artists that fought against the

forces of intolerance and apathy.

ABC No Rio and Bullet Space began with a compelling critique of the neo-liberal

city. This is only half of the story though, as they would spend the next decade working

out a new vision of the art gallery that struggled against the forces of speculation and

redevelopment.

54
 3. Vision The 1980s

This abandonment of the Lower East Side by the city and real estate interests

turned out to be the very condition that would lead to massive profits and a rebranding of

the Lower East Side as a hip neighborhood. It is a complicated transformation, one that

cannot be explained by a single factor. I do want to highlight, however, one particular

aspect of the gentrification of the Lower East Side the role of artists and galleries. A

young generation of artists found inspiration and cheap rents in this neighborhood of ruin

and decay, as galleries, clubs and other sites of cultural production began to flourish at

the end of the 1970s. Graffiti, punk music and fashion, No Wave and other radical

subcultures found a space to experiment and develop. As Christopher Mele notes, In the

late 1970s, the East Villages profusion of underground subcultures offered an

environment where artists could exhibit work that was experimental, untried, and,

consequently, ill-suited for the established corporate art market centered uptown and in

Soho. (Mele: 227)

Beginning with the openings of Fun Gallery and 51X in the fall of 1981, the East

Village would soon begin to develop the institutions that turned this experimentalism into

a commodity. By 1984, a full-blown art scene and sensation had exploded into focus after

a series of laudatory articles in the art press, describing a new avant-garde art movement

emerging out of the ruins of the Lower East Side.

Interestingly, this setting of abandonment became the essential selling point of the

art being produced, as the edgier, rawer aesthetic emerging could be connected to the

55
open-air drug markets and ominous streets of the neighborhood. It was then sold as a

product of those streets, packaged as uncorrupted street culture. (Mele: 229)

A group of journalists and art critics became the major champions of the art scene

that developed in the East Village in the early years of the 1980s. The description of the

East Village scene by two of its biggest champions, Robinson and McCormick, is most

telling. As they wrote in Arts in America, the scene was a unique blend of poverty, punk

rock, drugs, arson, Hells Angels, winos, prostitutes and dilapidated housing that adds up

to an adventurous avant-garde setting of considerable cachet. (Robinson and

McCormick: 135) The lore that developed and circulated in the leading art magazines

claimed that there were no demarcations between the sprawling on brick walls and the art

product; the boundary between the street and the gallery was eliminated.

Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. The galleries of the

Lower East Side were connected to the more established, wealthier ones uptown and in

Soho through the circuits of capital and media. As Mele points out, These features

relegated the East Village galleries to stepping stones on an artists path toward success

(as measured by international exposure and huge sales); the art scene was a kind of

finishing school for young artists who later graduated to the major leagues. (Mele: 231)

Rosalyn Deutsche and Cara Gendel Ryan were the first to pick up on this

complicity of the galleries in exploiting their setting and would eviscerate this scene and

its champions in their seminal 1984 essay for October, The Fine Art Of Gentrification.

They dissected the ways in which the galleries and artists were implicated in the

gentrification and displacement that was intensifying in the early 1980s.

56
 In particular, they picked up on the ways in which artists treated the neighborhood

as a tabula rasa, a space without residents or a past history and culture. Deutsche and

Ryan quote Marisa Cardinale, owner of Civilian Warfare, an East Village gallery on 3rd

and C: This neighborhood was always like starting over. Ive lived here a long time and

there was nothing here. As the authors note, There were, in fact, over 150,000 people

living in the area, thirty-seven percent Hispanic and eleven percent black. The median

income for a family of four living in the neighborhood in the 1980s is $10,727, while that

of an individual is $5,139. The fact that more than forty percent of the total population

lives in official poverty might account for the high rate of invisibility. (Deutsche and

Ryan: 103) A look at some of the gallery names gives a sense of the defensive attitude

these newcomers had towards their new surroundings Civilian Warfare, Beirut, Nature

Morte.

Neil Smith would later pick up on this role of the artist as pioneer and the

disturbing notion of the Lower East Side as a frontier. As he noted, there is the culture

industry art dealers and patrons, gallery owners and artists, designers and critics, writers

and performers which has converted urban dilapidation into ultrachic. Together in the

1980s the culture and real estate industries invaded this rump of Manhattan from the

west. Gentrification and art came hand in hand, slouching toward Avenue D, as art

critics Walter Robinson and Carlo McCormick put it. Block by block, building by

building, the area was converted to a landscape of glamour and chic spiced with just a

hint of danger. (Smith, 1996: 18)

ABC No Rio and Bullet Space have existed in opposition to and criticism of this

gallery world from the beginning. While both existed in the 1980s as traditional gallery

57
spaces, hosting the work of artists for limited-time engagements in their main space, they

envisioned a new type of gallery and a new type of artist. They have pushed the

boundaries of what an artist space could provide and how much of the city outside to let

in, while also pushing back against the increasingly non-political and commodified art

world.

ABC No Rio, in particular, came to stand as an alternative model for artists,

gallery owners and critics. It is referenced in the two seminal essays about this moment,

Deutsche and Ryans The Fine Art of Gentrification and Bowler and McBurneys 1991

response, Artists, Arts and Gentrification on the Lower East Side. As Bowler and

McBurney argued, Critically, ABC No Rio, along with Collaborative Projects (Colab),

Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PADD) and Group Material, represent

groups of East Village artists whose expressed values and practices run divergent, if not

directly counter, to those generally valorized by the art and mass media. Similarly,

alternative exhibition and performance spaces like ABC No Rio which continue to

survive in the area represent a radically different construction of cultural terrain, where

patterns of cultural production and consumption are less likely to be organized according

to the dictates of the art commodity and principles of acquisition or profit. (Bowler and

McBurney: 70) The circuits of capital did not make it into the decrepit storefront and

basement of ABC No Rio during this decade. It received no mention in any of the

laudatory articles that emerged in the early years of the East Village scene, despite the

presence of well-known artists from the Co-Lab collective. As artist and No Rio

volunteer Vicki Law would say, No Rio doesnt play that art-world game where you try

to become a superstar. (quoted in Trimarco: website)

58
 That vision of a different type of art space has been achieved by opening ABC No

Rio up more and more to the community it resided in, the Lower East Side. From its very

first communication with the world in the form of the Committee for the Real Estate

Shows Manifesto or Statement of Intent, there was no doubt of this group of artists

view on the role of the artist in the neo-liberal city. The intention of this action is to

show that artists are willing and able to place themselves and their work squarely in a

context that shows solidarity with oppressed people, a recognition that mercantile and

institutional structures oppress and distort artists lives and works, and a recognition that

artists, living and working in depressed communities, are compradors in the revaluation

of property and the whitening of neighborhoods. (Moore and Miller: 56) As a

demonstration of this solidarity, the manifesto was plastered on the padlocked door of the

Delancey building in both English and Spanish, a gesture of respect to and

communication with the predominately Hispanic community living there.

This desire to engage with the community rather than profit off of its decay and

seedy reputation resounded with the surrounding community. After the Housing and

Preservation Department police padlocked the Delancey building from the inside,

preventing any entrance to the space and closing the Real Estate show, there was a clear

sense in the press that the actions of HPD were not just an affront to a rogue group of

artists. They were an affront to the people of the Lower East Side, which these artists

were a part of.

It is interesting to note the reaction of a local businessman quoted in a New York

Post article that appeared on January 3:

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 Merchants in the area say the city is dragging its feet on a 10-year-old
revitalization program and is deliberately refusing to provide the neighborhood
with basic improvements and services.
Big business uptown and the city are in a conspiracy to kill us businessmen on
Delancey St.," said Gershon Mamlak, an interior decorator on the street. (NY
Post, January 3, 1980)

It is a clear indication that the people of the Lower East Side were aware of the

citys indifference in the face of the rampant abandonment. From the first day of

preparation, local children had joined in, drawing on the walls and creating movies of the

installation work, a far cry from the openings at other East Village galleries, which

increasingly drew art collectors and fans from uptown. As Lehmann Weichselbaum wrote

of the early ABC No Rio artists, Rebecca Howland considers herself and her friends part

of a post-gallery movement. What theyre after ultimately is not just another art space,

but a citizens center, where the line between the esthetic and the social blurs into

meaningless. (Moore and Miller: 53)

This desire to break down the gallery walls metaphorically has morphed into one

to bring the outside world into the gallery. Over the ensuing three decades since the Real

Estate Show, ABC No Rio has increasingly come to be viewed as a community center as

much as a gallery space. Perhaps the first major shift came in the late 1980s, when it

began to host Saturday afternoon punk and hardcore matinee concerts. From the

beginning, these shows have featured a policy of not booking any racist, sexist or

homophobic bands. It was a deliberate effort to create a different type of venue and scene

for punk music, in reaction to the increasingly bigoted music and violent shows

happening at older venues in New York City, like CBGBs. As Steven Englander recalls,

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a lot of these kids, because the scene had gotten so violent, wanted to create something

here. And some of them were gay. They wanted to create a place where gay kids who

were into punk would feel comfortable, a place where the girls would feel comfortable,

and a place where the black and Hispanic kids who were into that music would feel

comfortable. (Kirwin: website) The shows were all-ages, providing a space for those

fans under-21 unable to get into concerts at bars. These polices are still in effect today

every Saturday afternoon, twenty years later.

ABC No Rio has been an incredible resource, providing a space for punk and

hardcore shows, a base for the NYC chapter of Food Not Bombs, a place for unknown

artists to show their work, a zine library, silkscreen workshop, darkroom, computer room,

a place for political groups to meet such as Zapatistas Support Network and Eviction

Watch. Basically its an essential part of our community here in the LES and an essential

part of the punk community in general. (Patterson: 217)

The building on Rivington, which began as a single gallery space on the first

floor, has become a multi-floor venue, with each room providing a different service for

anyone who enters. There is still the art and music space on the first floor. The second

floor features meeting spaces, which have hosted meetings for groups including the New

York Committee for Democracy in Mexico, the Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, the

National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee, Direct Action Network, Food Not

Bombs, Books Through Bars and much more. These spaces are available for any group to

use, with a suggested, but not always received, $5 donation requested to rent them. There

is a free computer room, a dark room, a printing press and multiple rooms for group

meetings.

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 A look at some of the testimonials in a recent ABC fundraising handbill gives a

good sense of the spaces community center aspect and the passion, commitment and

appreciation that this role engenders. Lower East Side resident, artist and illustrator of the

graphic novel World War III, Seth Tobocman, writes, I use the ABC No Rio Computer

Center about three times a week. So do a lot of other people. It would be hard for me to

do everything I have to do without using computers, and I dont own one. There are a lot

of other people in the same position, either because of lack of funds, because they are just

travelling through town, or because they may be homelessThe ABC No Rio Computer

Center is an invaluable resource. (handbill)

Photographer and activist Andy Stern discusses another important room in the

building: As a documentary photographer and political activist, I have utilized the

darkroom to print entire bodies of work for exhibit in various shows, which would have

been impossible for me had I been forced to work at a commercial darkroom. Because of

No Rios commitment to a do-it-yourself ethic they are able to keep costs low or free and

provide services that are increasingly difficult to find without spending a lot of money.

He later adds, More importantly, ABC No Rio functions as a community space where

independent artists, activists, musicians, youth and other community members can gather,

work together, exchange ideas and resources, and create meaningful relationships based

on mutual aid and support. At a time when more and more public spaces have become

privatized, No Rio truly is a gift and important resource for the entire community. In

many ways, before Bourriaud and the relational aesthetic artists referenced earlier, No

Rio broke down the gallery walls to the real world outside, providing a place where

people could come together and share ideas, resources and moments.

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 As they explain in their mission statement, We seek to facilitate cross-pollination

between artists and activists. ABC No Rio is a place where people share resources and

ideas to impact society, culture, and community. We believe that art and activism should

be for everyone, not just the professionals, experts and cognoscenti. Our dream is a

cadres of actively aware artists and artfully aware activists. (website) The Rivington

Street building has become the micro-utopian space where artist and activist meet,

experiment and transform.

Bullet Space has also expanded the notion of the gallery by opening itself up to

the city and the political movements outside. It has a far stronger connection to the

squatter movement of the East Village and has always been known as much for its stance

on the housing debate as for any aesthetic debate. As Annia Ciezadlo said of Bullet Space

in her compendium of legal squats in Alphabet City for City Limits, 292 East Third

Street, aka Bullet Space. A haven for artists and musicians with a gallery on the ground

floor. A very low-income building; at one point, the person with the most stable job was a

waitress. Residents: 10. Estimated cost of rehab need: $211,750. (Ciezadlo)

It has provided a much more frontal assault on the increasingly commodified

gallery scene and non-political work that the East Village scene exemplified. Neil Smith

noted, The unprecedented commodification of art in the 1980s engendered an equally

ubiquitous aestheticization of culture and politics: graffiti came off the trains and into the

galleries, while the most outrageous punk and new-wave styles moved rapidly from the

streets to full-page advertisements in the New York Times. The press began sporting

stories about the opulence of the new art scene at least for some: Dont let the poverty

of the Lower East Side fool you, was the message; this generation of young artists gets by

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with American Express Goldcards. (Smith, 1996: 19) He provides one counter-example

to this world Bullet Space, specifically their Your House Is Mine exhibit and book.

(Some artists were also squatters and housing activists, and a lot of subversive art was

displayed as posters, sculpture and graffiti in the streets or in more marginal gallery

spaces.)

As Alan Moore, former Colab and ABC No Rio founder, writes of Bullet Space,

Bullet is like a crime museum, but these crimes were ideological, necessary, with

positive outcomes. Its not a show of relics of aberrant individual acts, but relics of

collective action. All the things in Bullet seem to have evidentiary weight. Its all

evidence, dangerous remains as the show of squatter artifacts at ABC No Rio put

together by Fly and Steven Englander at the turn of the century was called. Maybe its

like an old socialist revolutionary museum (I saw one in East Berlin in 86, a weird dim

mix of pride and paranoia) evidence from some forgotten place outside the neoliberal

paddock of global capitalism.

He was speaking of the recent Bullet Space retrospective exhibit, The Perfect

Crime: Andrew Castrucci & the Bullet Space Archive 1983-2008, which provides an

excellent reminder of how the space has served as a site of artistic resistance. Objects on

display were a mix of political items (like the Property of the People of the Lower East

Side Not For Sale signs once affixed on squatted buildings), objects directly connected to

the founding of the squat (including the sledgehammer used to break in) and designed

objects by former squatters, including the blacksmith work of Robert Parker. The New

York Times described it as part retrospective of the experience of squatting and part

history of the building and the people it has housed, including both squatters and

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unknown inhabitants from previous centuries who left traces of their lives hidden behind

walls or buried in the ground outside. (Moynihan, 2010) These were not items for sale,

but rather objects with deep histories and ones painstakingly crafted by skilled artisans. It

reflects the spaces aesthetic, which Moore eloquently describes. What has been crafted

is an aesthetically convincing brief for an anti-property ethos an argument for energy,

for political intention. (Moore: website)

4. Negotiation The 1990s and 2000s

Having established their micro-utopian spaces in the 1980s, the following two

decades for ABC No Rio and Bullet Space are a period of negotiations, both literal and

figurative. The period would feature moments of crisis and maneuverings, and end with

both spaces achieving official recognition by the city and the deeds to their properties. It

is essential to look at how the micro-utopian aspects have led to their continued existence

and open up possibilities and lessons for other experiments and alternatives.

The histories of both spaces feature prominent moments when they come into

contact with the neo-liberal city. Each space has chosen different tactics at different

moments,

ABC No Rio exists because of a mixture of aggressiveness and compromise, a

mindset and lesson that runs throughout the spaces history. More than a decade after its

beginning, in 1993, after remaining under city officials radar, ABC No Rio again found

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itself in jeopardy, this time because of a series of escalating disputes over building

conditions. It is important to keep in mind here that ABC No Rio was not a squatted

space; the group paid rent to the city each month for use of the building. The city,

suffering from a perpetual lack of funds, was unable to perform the basic upkeep of the

properties they owned, including ABC No Rio. After an increasing number of complaints

about conditions, the city stopped cashing the groups rent checks.

This was an ominous sign to those connected to ABC No Rio, particularly in light

of the citys war on the squatters in the neighborhood over the past five years. There was

a growing, and correct, sense that an eviction notice was coming. As Steven Englander

remembered, these disputes made the people who were involved in running the place

rightly nervous that the city was going to try to evict them again. So they then invited

people to move into the upper floors of the building as squatters to defend the building in

case the city tried to do a lockout. As Alan Moore reminds us, Defense is a necessary

stage of the negotiation between squatters and city officials. (Moore: website)

One of these squatters explains what it was like at ABC No Rio during these

years, in Resistance anthology:

The city was always trying to get in, and if they did, they would immediately start
punching holes in the walls or doing any damage they could so that they could
then declare the building to be unsafe. Eventually they broke into my space one
weekend when I was away in DC and stole all my stuff and put a big new
deadbolt lock on the door. I remember hanging out the window from the third
floor on a chain ladder trying to break the shatter proof windows and when that
failed it took me about three hours to break through the lock. I never did get my
stuff back from them. They wanted $500 or some such idiotic amount for a stack
of books, tapes, journals and some ratty old clothes. (Patterson: 217)

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 Steven Englander, one of those who squatted in the upper floors during these

tense years, recounted how there was a need for coordination among the residents. At

least one person needed to always be on the premises, so that they could foil any padlock

the city put on the entrance. (interview with the author)

This defensive squatter initiative was coupled with an offensive campaign of

protest and direct action. This involved gathering more than 2,500 signatures on a

petition supporting No Rios right to the space and getting hundreds of people to write

letters of support to city officials. Protests in support of the space happened as far as

away as Prague, where a group protested outside the American Embassy there.

The key action in retrospect, however, was the occupation of the office of the

Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, by a small

group of supporters. The sit-in at the office of then-HPD commissioner Liliam Barrios-

Brown proved shockingly effective. There they found an unlikely ally: a former radical,

Barrios-Brown had been at the Tlatelolco massacre the Mexican Kent State, where the

army killed hundreds of leftist student protestors in Mexico City in 1968. Instead of

calling the police, she invited protestors to a conference where they were offered a deal:

if they could raise the money for renovations themselves, the city would sell them the

building for $1. (Sunshine) The New York Times reported at the time, as part of the

tentative agreement, a half-dozen squatters living in the ramshackle building at 156

Rivington Street will leave to allow the center to renovate and expand. Ms. Barrios-Paoli

also said ABC NO Rio must come up with a financial plan to refurbish the building and

raise at least $100,000 for the project. (Jacobs)

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 Ironically, this salvation brought about a whole new crisis, this time in the form of

becoming official and what that meant. What the agreement meant most of all was that

the collective would have to raise money and become comfortable with fundraising and

all that that entails. As Robert Kolker wrote in Time Out New York in 1997, shortly after

the deal was made, Barrios-Paoli asked ABC No Rio to pull off three feats it had never

before attempted: raise $100,000 (to show a commitment to keeping a long-term lease),

fully renovate and, perhaps most painful, kick out the 13 squatters who live upstairs in

the building. (Kolker)

Steven Englander explained to me that this agreement was a source of contention

for members and supporters. There was criticism leveled at the space for agreeing to kick

out the squatters and to establish a more traditional non-profit board of directors. These

were conditions of the deal; for some, they seemed to go against the anarchist spirit that

lay at the heart of the space. As Englander recalls, there was a little bit of grumbling

about itSome people would have just preferred there was no unconditionally

surrendering to us, right? That wasnt going to happen. So there were people who are still

upset that we just didnt go out on principle as martyrs. I mean, we wouldnt have died

but that we stood our ground and just lost. (Kirwin)

However, as Steven explains it, most felt that it was better to maintain, improve

and expand this community space than to become martyrs. As Englander told Liz

Kirwin, We legally had their permission to occupy these units and do what we wanted

so we had to figure out what do we want to do with this whole building. So were making

the jump from gallery storefront space that just did public events programming to the

opportunity to to do stuff. (Kirwin) This stuff would be hashed out through a series of

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open meetings in which any one in attendance could propose an idea or offer a comment

on the spaces future direction. Eventually, an expanded program of uses and services

was chosen as the future course of the space. This included the creation of a print shop,

computer center, dark room, and a zine library, modeled on one in the Bronx.

Of course, the space had to make real concessions in order to fulfill their end of

the deal with HPD. This included creating an official governing structure, hiring a full-

time director and entering into the world of non-profit fundraising. All of these ran

counter to the anarchistic and spontaneous philosophy that had been perhaps the most

powerful experiment of all. Englander notes that one major source of funding, the New

York State Council of the Arts (NYSCA), demands in funding requests to have the

programming schedule for the year ahead. Increasingly disappearing are the days of

spontaneous shows and events, which do not fit well in the arts funding world. In regards

to programming, once you have to start raising money to do it, whether its from a

governmental agency or private foundation, you actually have to youre contractually

obliged to do it.

But, as Englander explains it to me, We have kept a core set of principles off-

limits, which we are not willing to compromise on. Those principles were the collective

nature of ABC No Rio and complete freedom of expression for anyone entering the

space. They were willing to hire a director and become more corporate, but only to

assuage the fears of those in power. The collectives remain in charge of the various

programs, with the Board of Directors only making decisions when the collectives are

unable to reach one.

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 The spaces ability to do all of this and keep the heart of its mission alive

collectives, democratic decision-making, open access, affordable services and events is

the lesson that ABC No Rio provides for future micro-utopias. As Englander says, a lot

of people understood we could claim that compromise as a win and we could because this

was like a scene where its like all that ends is evictions. You never get to win, you know.

It doesnt happen. So even thought it was a compromise we could claim it as a win and a

lot of people were savvy enough and for everybodys self-esteem to claim it as such.

(Kirwin)

Bullet Space also experienced the process of negotiation and compromise, but in

far less visible way. In fact, there is very little information available about the space in

the surviving literature and press of the time or in retrospectives about the battle between

the city and the squatters.

A small incident in 1998 picked up by the New York Times makes clear the value

of invisibility for microutopian spaces. A fire started in a first floor bedroom at Bullet

Space on the night of Saturday November 7, 1998, which forced the residents to call the

Fire Department to put out the flames. The fire would ruin the room, but the damage did

not spread to the rest of the building. Neighbors pitched in to help to renovate and rewire

the room that night, creating a spontaneous gathering that one participant described as

having the feel of a barn-raising. This would seem to be a wonderful example of the

power of community and a sharing ethos.

However, as Edward Lewine wrote the following Sunday, there is some fear

among art lovers and neighbors that the fire may bring unwanted city attention to this

local attraction, which began in 1985 in an empty building the concern, which no one

70
connected to Bullet Space would discuss, is that in the wake of the fire the city may now

start taking an interest in the building. (Lewine)

The micro status, it would seem, allowed for the possibility of being unseen, of

invisibility, which enables a space to have the time to establish itself and to evade being

shut down by higher authorities responsible for enforcing the laws. It has been an

important aspect for Bullet Space and a clear difference of approach between the two

spaces over their histories.

Bullet Space emerges back into view in 2002, when it is awarded along with 11

other Lower East Side squats the right to purchase the property for $1. As Annia Ciezadlo

reported for City Limits, Umbrella House, Serenity, C Squat, Bullet Space: These and

seven more of the Lower East Sides last squats are about to come in from outside the

law. For the first time since the real estate boom of the 1980s, the city has agreed to turn

renegade tenants into perfectly legal co-op owners. (Ciezadlo, 2002: web site) The deal

was put together through an intermediary, the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board

(UHAB), who negotiated with the city. The city agreed to sell the buildings to UHAB,

who would take responsibility while the buildings were brought up to code and pay the

initial costs for these upgrades, estimated at $4.9 million. The squatters, in turn, would

agree to hire architects to renovate the buildings and organize c (Neuwirt: website) The

now-former squatters would pay an up-front fee of $250 dollars to a tenant cooperative,

which would own and run the buildings. After that,

Robert Neuwirth, in his short history for City Limits of the squatter movement of

the Lower East Side during our time period, provides an explanation for why some have

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survived and others have not. O quote an extensive package, which elucidates the

similarities between the successful squatters and successful capitalists:

The squatters who thrived did so by engaging in what might be called self-help
opportunism. Interviews with successful squatters show that they actually have
quite a bit in common with their sworn enemies, real estate developers. For
instance, just as developers often to look to take over valuable buildings that may
have fallen into city hands, many squatters who took over their buildings in the
early 1980s took advantage of a controversial city program called Operation
Pressure Point, a paramilitary police action against the drug trade that forced
heroin addicts and dealers to abandon many buildings that served as shooting
galleries. When the dealers and addicts moved out, the squatters moved in,
figuring their actions might not be noticed while the police were otherwise
engaged. Successful squatters chose their takeover targets carefully. One
particularly savvy local activist advised them to identify a building slated for the
citys cross-subsidy program a compromise plan allowing developers to do
high-income construction in exchange for creating a certain number of affordable
apartments. Because the program was controversial, even among housing
activists, the squatters figured the cross-subsidy building they found would be
mired in political red tape for years, and that their occupation might fly under the
radar. It did, and today that building is the squat called Umbrella House. When
gentrification became the new threat on the block, canny squatters fought it. But
they also put it to work for their buildings, pilfering from every neighborhood
dumpster and construction site, scavenging joists, plywood, rebar, toilets, tile,
pipes, plumbing. Others combed the neighborhood for materials, even hauling
perfectly good used toilets out of the trash when buildings were required by law to
install new water-saving low-flow models. Through it all, the squatters
maintained a relentless focus on making their buildings habitable. Though many
squats started with an interesting blend of communitarian and libertarian values,
the squatters quickly realized that if they were going to build something

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 permanent, they couldnt run their buildings like Dodge City. They would need to
lay down laws, too. (Neuwirth)

David Harveys notion of dialectical utopianism springs to mind in this discussion of the

period of negotiations.

That sense of an opening is captured nicely by a local activist in Clayton

Pattersons Anthology of Resistance: It was liminal space, says David Boyle, reflecting

on the bombed-out landscape that he encountered on the Lower East Side in the early

80s. The property was neither here nor there. It wasnt quite controlled by the

government or contested by the landlords who walked away from it. Thats the space in

which change takes place, the kind of space thats important for revolutionary ideas to

come forward. (Patterson: 163)

This willingness to compromise and exploit the system was not without

controversy. A scan of punk zines from the 1990s provides numerous articles and letters

declaring ABC No Rio sell-outs for enacting rules and enforcing them. This critique

even emerges from an aesthetic perspective in Frank and McKenzies history of the NYC

art world of the 1980s when they comment that it is perhaps because the group now has

a base, and is committed to maintaining and servicing it, that none of the events Colab

has sponsored since the Times Square Show have matched its daring, intensity, or

influence. (Frank and McKenzie: 33) While this disappointment and criticsm is real and

perhaps even justified, it begs the question of an alternative.

In order to assess the value and effectiveness of this flexibility, entrepreneurialism

and openness to compromise, it is helpful to compare the outcome for other spaces from

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this same period and neighborhood that critiqued the abandonment and offered a new

vision of housing the militant squatter movement in the East Village.

The decade features a series of clashes between the city and the squatters. On

May 31, 1995, The New York Times reported on the takeover of two squatter

settlements, 541 and 545 East Thirteenth Street: With a show of force befitting a small

invasion, the Police Department seized two East Village tenements yesterday,

overwhelming a defiant group of squatters who resisted city efforts to retake the

buildings for nearly nine months. (Kennedy: B1) A few years later on April 27.1999, a

similar scene unfolded at the Dos Blockos squat on 713 East Ninth Street: Squatters

chain themselves to the fire escape, cement the doors shut, block halls and stairwells with

refrigerators, air conditioners, and washing machines, and hurl bottle rockets at riot-clad

cops to keep them out of Dos Blocks. It doesnt work; Emergency Services workers drill

a hole in the brick wall, and power-saw through the chains. The building is reclaimed by

the city and sold to a private developer soon after. (Ciezadlo: website) These

developments were the end result of years of increasingly violent rhetoric and tactics by

the more militant squatters.

Andrew van Kleunen quotes one Lower East Side resident and housing activist

turned squtter, Dave Tompkins, discussing the stance of the most militant squatters in the

neighborhood and the battle over Tompkins Square: Look at the latest flyer that came

out [about re-opening the park.] It depicts violence. Now how are you going to get the

Lower East Side, the regular folks and I know, Ive been one of the regular folks to

come out in response to that kind of message? Thats not the waySo what you have to

do is address each persons fear. Its a multi-pronged thing. But when the revolutionary

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anarchists want to do their thing, they want you to know straight up, This is how I want

you to see it. They want to beat you over the head with it. They might be right about

whats going on! But you have to entice people to get involved. (van Kleunen in Abu-

Lughod: 364)

This stridency and inability to adapt their critique and vision to the circumstances

proved deadly. As William Sites writes about the demise of the 13th Street squats, The

most striking aspect of the conflict was not the defeat of the squatters, nor even the

remarkable show of force that had been mounted to subdue them, but the near-total

absense of community support on their behalfNotably absent were dozens of Lower

East Side housing organizations and their members. Most of these groups, following a

decade of internecine conflict, supported quietly the removal of the squatters, who in any

case had often alienated potential supporters. (Sites: 130)

Being embedded in the world, as micro-utopias are, proved an insurmountable

obstacle for many of the squatter spaces of the neighborhood. As Tompkins says, their

critique was accurate, but it seems that they were unable to offer a vision of another

world that was better than the one that most residents in the Lower East Side lived in.

Sure, the gentrifying Lower East Side was more expensive, but it also was safer, more

predictable and afforded a better quality of life for those who stayed.

Their lack of flexibility, their unwillingness to compromise and their lack of a

better vision kept them from making connections with the larger community. This proves

disastrous; Coupled with their visibility, it is unsurprising that these micro-utopias are

only a part of history.

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 5. Future 2011 and Beyond

Spencer Sunshine describes the current Lower East Side: The Lower East Side

(LES) is one of the trendier and pricier neighborhoods in Manhattan today. Tucked

between the East Village, Chinatown and SoHo, the LES is packed with moneyed

hipsters and culture workers who swamp the swanky cafes and bars that inevitably

accompany such a locale. In the last 6 years, storefront performance spaces like the

House of Candles, Todo Con Nada, The Piano Store, Expanded Arts, Surf Reality and the

Present Company Theatorium have all been forced out by rising rents. The last holdout

on Orchard, the collectively-run Collective Unconscious, is waiting for the guillotine to

fall this summer. Rumor has it that its one-story building will be demolished to make way

for high-rise luxury apartments. In the midst of all this, a few blocks away on Rivington

Street between Suffolk and Clinton, is one of New Yorks most unlikeliest holdouts of

fervently anti-commercial community activity: a building adorned with a brightly colored

mural and the words ABC No Rio. (Sunshine)

On a warm spring day in April, ABC No Rio is alive and buzzing on Rivington

Street in the Lower East Side section of Manhattan. In the downstairs gallery space, a

group of poets are setting up chairs for their weekly reading. The spaces director, Steven

Englander, is in an intense conversation with two young artist-activists who are in the

processing of starting up a cooperative in Brooklyn and looking for advice on the ideal

structure for group decision-making. The whole scene is soundtracked by a video art

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work running on a perpetual loop as a part of the current exhibit. Upstairs, in one of the

many small rooms in the building, Food Not Bombs is preparing a vegetarian salad and

other dishes for an upcoming potluck event. The Zine Library is opening for the

afternoon on another floor, as one of the volunteer librarians sits watch, ready to help

visitors find the publication they need.

Perhaps most amazingly, the collective has raised nearly 100% of their

fundraising goal of $5+ million for a new building, defying the odds that seemed stacked

against them when the city offered them the Rivington Street building in 1997. The run-

down, former tenement which houses all of these activities is in its final days; soon, it

will be demolished to make way for a brand-new, state-of-the-art green building. The

new building will be bigger, cleaner and easier to work in, widening the circle of people

who want to get involved and allowing them to use the space for more hours of the day.

And it will be ecologically sustainable, bringing No Rios energy consumption in line

with the politics of community for the first time. (Trimarco: website) That community

will continue to be structured as a collective of collectives and committees in which

each active member as a vote on issues, assuring that decision-making is decentralized

and responsibility and autonomy is given to subcollective and committee members.

(ABC No Rio website)

Bringing the story full circle, the architect who designed the building is Paul

Castrucci, brother of Bullet Spaces Andrew Castrucci, former squatter himself and the

architect for the former squats that have gained official recognition. ABC No Rio is in

talks to share space and collaborate on an exhibition at Bullet Space in 2012.

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 It is hard to believe that anyone in 1985, including the people who established

these two spaces, would have imagined that they would be collaborating on a project

nearly 30 years later in a space owned by one group, while the other waited for their

brand-new $5 million building to be completed.

The micro aspect of ABC No Rio and Bullet Space is obvious, as each exists in and calls

a single building home. The basic facts and official descriptions of ABC No Rio and

Bullet Space can provide a similarly obvious sense of the utopian aspects of these two

spaces, their existence as something alternative and different. The notion of two

anarchist, collectively run art spaces outlasting Ed Koch, David Dinkins and Rudolph

Giuliani and thriving in the hip Lower East Side neighborhood of 2011 sounds about as

far-fetched as the most fantastical utopian dreams. Yet, it is not a fantasy. Not only have

they survived, both spaces have achieved official recognition from the city, earning the

right to buy their buildings for $1 and become official parts of the citys landscape.

Neither official status nor time has lessened the radical nature of their stated

missions. ABC No Rio describes itself in a mission statement as a community

committed to social justice, equality, anti-authoritarianism, autonomous action, collective

processes, and to nurturing alternative structures operating on such principles. (website)

It is synonymous with the local anarchist, squatter and punk music scenes. They have

organized this community and space in committees, in which every member has a vote

and decisions are made as a collective. It is a radically different understanding of

organization, one derived from the anarchist principles that the group espouses.

Bullet Space is even more explicit in its self-description, calling itself in the

About section of their website as an act of resistance. A community access center for

78
images, words, and sounds of the inner city. (website) It too is run collectively, although

it has far smaller group of members and volunteers, reflecting its much narrower mission.

Both have provided homes to the most politically oriented and outsider art of the past

three decades from New York City and the world.

One valuable and underappreciated aspect of these long-standing micro-utopic

spaces is that through their continuing existence they offer a body of knowledge and

serve as inspiration for others. While the concept of temporal spaces has emerged as an

important idea in design culture recently, I believe that these spaces, despite the fact that

the temporal nature could lead to much more radical interventions and sloganeering, they

do not serve any long-term purpose.

Two moments in my discussion with the Director of ABC No Rio, Steven

Englander, brought this point home vividly. First, upon arriving for an interview on a

Sunday afternoon in April, I found Mr. Englander engaged in a discussion with two

younger people. I was able to surmise that these two guests were talking with Englander

to gain advice on determining rules, if any, for decision-making in the cooperative they

had established in Brooklyn recently. It was a moment just like the ones he mentioned to

Kurt Gottschalk. I do frequently receive queries from others, primarily young people,

asking for advice on how to initiate similar projects and Im always happy to share with

them the knowledge Ive gained working here. (Gottschalk)

Later, during our interview, Englander and I discussed the situation at ABC No

Rio in 1993, when the city attempted to evict ABC No Rio from the Rivington space and

sell the property to a Chinatown non-profit. This move triggered immediate acts of

resistance by members, most significantly in the form of a small group of people who

79
began to squat and live at the Rivington space, while another engaged in a sit-in at the

office of the Housing Commissioner. As Englander recalled, This action would not have

been possible without that history and community

Both actions were the result of ABC No Rios three decades of existence. By

existing that long and staying true to the mission statement, it has built up both a history

and a following outside of the immediate members and users of the space. In the case of

the two young cooperativists who came to talk with Englander, they do so because he has

done what they are trying to do. No Rio gives them the confidence to take a chance, to

experiment, to breathe.

As Stevphen Shukaitis writes, While neo-liberals like to pretend that the market

is autonomous and self-supporting, working off of principles inherent to itself, such

conceals the inventory of ideas, practices, and values which underlie it and allow it to

adapt to continually changing circumstances. Similarly, the long-term success of building

movements against the state, capital, and all forms of oppression, is to create those

reserves of knowledge, experience, and ideas that will enable us to constantly redefine

the specifics of non-hierarchical organizing based upon the changing circumstances of

time and place. (Shukaitis: 9) Both No Rio and Bullet Space are living, breathing

reserves of knowledge, experience and ideas on how to create spaces of non-hierarchical

organizing, having maintained collective spaces for more than three decades.

Of course, they have had to make compromises along the way, entering the power

structure by giving up their outsider status of illegality. They have become property

owners and fundraisers, enmeshed in the world of bureaucrats, donors and lawyers. One

could slip into the pessimism and nostalgia of Sarah Ferguson, who writes, For relative

80
old-timers like me, there is a sense that the spirit of the Lower East Side has been

hollowed out, deconcentrated. The old romance of the East Village as a harbor for

outcasts, fuck-ups and artists was defeated by the militaristic incursions of the Giuliani

administration, followed by the ethos of market efficiency embodied in the Bloomberg

administration, for whom even smoking cigarettes in a bar or catching a nap on the

subway is a ticketable offense. (Ferguson in Patterson: 163) What does this accomplish,

though? This pessimism and backwards-looking vision accord well with Margaret

Thatchers mantra that there is no alternative to our current world.

Instead, it is helpful to consider the words of ABC No Rio board member Dave

Powell, speaking about the recent news that the old, decaying Rivington tenement

building would be demolished to make way for the new one: Its not like were

watching some developer take a building and smash the hell out of it and turn it into

luxury condos. Were surviving that shit. Were going to come out of it alive as an

institution, alive as a cultural force, and with a piece of real estate that nobody can take

away from us. (Trimarco: website) The same is true for Bullet Space.

These two micro-utopias are alive, breathing as strong as ever today, proof that

alternatives do exist and prosper. There is no message today more revolutionary than that

one.

81
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