Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects
Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC
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A walk through the remnants of a social democratic America, and an argument about its future.
Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects is an insightful exploration of the remnants of a social democratic America and a thought-provoking argument about its future.
The book traces the rise of a 1960s urban ideology that celebrated bottom-up, organic city development while criticising state-led planning that resulted in lifeless, sterile "projects." Using walking as a method, the author tests these ideas across New York City, with a brief interlude in Washington, DC, examining a wide array of urban developments.
Key areas explored:
- Cultural complexes in Manhattan
- New Deal-era public housing in Brooklyn, Harlem, and Queens
- Roosevelt Island’s social experiment
- Communist housing co-operatives in the Bronx
- Union-led rebuilding of the Lower East Side
- DC's Metro system
By walking through these spaces, the book reveals that, despite their flaws, fragments of a more equal society were built in the past and continue to thrive today. Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects asks what lessons a new generation of American socialists might learn from these surviving social democratic enclaves as they envision a better future.
Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley was born in Southampton, England in 1981. He received a PhD in 2011 from Birkbeck College, London, for a thesis on Constructivism and Americanism. He writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review, Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books: Militant Modernism (Zero, 2009), A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso, 2010), Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero, 2011), A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain (Verso 2012), Across the Plaza (Strelka, 2012) and Landscapes of Communism (Penguin 2015). He also edited and introduced an updated edition of Ian Nairn's Nairn's Towns (Notting Hill Editions, 2013). He lives in Woolwich and Warsaw.
More by Owen Hatherley
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