There is nothing inherent or natural about the way we experience the built environment. Those structures of feeling, thought, and action, of association and signification, that shape our perception of urban space, much like the buildings and infrastructure that make up a city, are determined by culture and politics. This insight is blindingly obvious, but few writers in recent times have done more to draw out this process than Owen Hatherley, and in his latest book for Repeater, Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC, he goes west, directly addressing the seat of American empire. This book is concerned with a certain way of seeing and thinking about cities that originated there, which he terms the “New York Ideology.”

What Hatherley calls the “New York Ideology” is, in simple terms, the mode of thinking about urbanism and development that has been dominant in the West for the past fifty years. Its origins lie in the New York of the 1960s, where a particularly overextended and corporatist state-planning model embodied by the megalomaniacal Robert Moses — with its racist “meat-ax” imposition of car infrastructure — was rightly challenged and beaten through community politics and organizing.

The totemic champion of that fight was Jane Jacobs, most associated with her community organizing, which saved a neighborhood of socially mixed, densely built nineteenth-century housing in Greenwich Village from the Lower Manhattan Expressway. For Jacobs, the expressway embodied a mode of modernist planning defined by large scale “projects” and blind to the granular, unplanned vivacity that defined a successful city. The campaign succeeded in saving the historic neighborhood, but that mode of politics had no program to resist the gentrification that followed and destroyed the social composition described in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Hatherley argues that Jacobs’s priorities have blinded us to the vital role that “projects” and modernist planning have to play in protecting a diverse and successful city, primarily through providing a bulwark of affordable housing so that working-class communities can still afford to live there.