- Varun Patil
 |
| A scene from the film where the model of New York City’s progress is featured in the developer’s office.Photo: Glen Wilson / © 2019 Warner Bros. Ent. All Rights Reserved |
Before
we get on to those lessons, let me get the customary summarizing of the plot
done with. Our protagonist, a private detective, named Lionel Essrog played by
Edward Norton, is thrown away by the violent murder of his boss for blackmailing
influential figures of the city (always a bad idea). Norton’s quest to uncover
the truth after many deadly hoops lead him finally into our main female
protagonist. This young African American woman activist tells him and us, the
audience, that Moses Randolf, the powerful city planner, a bona fide racist pig,
is using his state authority to tear down mainly African American and poor
white neighbourhoods to build highways and parks to beautify it and make New
York city automobile friendly (thus boosting suburbanization as well as
property values of upper-class white neighbourhoods). The film soon gets into
China town level murkiness when Norton realizes that this is the same woman
whose secrets his boss was attempting to trade with Moses Randolf.
Hint:
Like in China town, the ugly truths are always as much personal as political.
The
film, based on Jonathan Lethem’s award-winning novel, is based on the actual politics
around the gentrification of New York City during the early part of the 20th
century by celebrated urban planner and autocrat Robert Moses, credited by many
for “reviving” the city. It may thus come
as a shock to many of us that the charming New York (the Central Park and Studio
apartments) we all so much love, the place where Harry met Sally, the place
where all our F.R.I.E.N.D.S hang out, the place where Woody Allen goes on his
long neurotic rants has a dark, violent history.
Yes,
sir, this is all great, but what does it have to do with the current raging pandemic?
Well sir, for starters many of those much urban
renewal projects which made those cities ‘charming’ came out of attempts to manage density or congestion to tackle
epidemics. The park building
exercises in New York by celebrated planners like Robert Moses and Frederick
Law Olmsted to create Lung Spaces for the city to free the miasma of a disease believed
to have been bought by the immigrant population[i]. David
Harvey notes the brutal remaking of 19th century Paris by Baron Haussmann by
tearing down squatter and working-class settlements in central areas in the name
of civic improvement to solve the surplus crisis of capital (Harvey, 2008)[ii].
Thus, the beloved wide walking boulevard of Paris, which gave rise to the
celebrated figure of the flâneur, who walks and consumes the city, has a brutal
history.
It
was not much different here in our own country.
The
colonial administration in India too often addressed threats from epidemics by
pushing violent projects of decongestion. Historian Janaki Nair looks at how
state planning authorizes in cities of Mysore and Bangalore attempted to
decongest native areas aftermath of plague outbreak by building planned
extensions outside the old city. These extensions were built along existing
caste lines and involved displacing the lower caste populations living in those
areas, lest they ‘pollute’ the new upper-caste residents (Nair, 2005)[iii].
Similarly, Sheetal Chabria looks at how the plague anxiety in Colonial Bombay gave
birth to the creation of a historical category of the slum, which has now
become a ubiquitous word in our vocabulary (2019)[iv]. She notes that out of the various types of
“informal” tenements in the city, only those in the central area were chosen to
be designated as ‘slums’ to provide legal backing to governmental interventions
to improve them. Most of the time, as Chabria notes, the existing tenants did
not get a place in the redeveloped housing complexes, thus reproducing the
existing hierarchies.
The
COVID-19 crisis has already bought in many discussions on how to manage
congestion and density in our cities. Though the crisis is largely the result
of the inadequacy of national health infrastructures to deal with the viral
disease load, many commentators are yet again blaming the congested nature of
our city living. The Mayor of New York, Andrew Cuomo tweeted that the density
level there is destructive (Cuomo, 2020)[v]. In
India, Dharavi as usual
dominated discussions in the media and state alike since the outbreak. Movies
like Slum Dog Millionaire have already made popular the image of Mumbai ‘slum’
as a hotbed of excreta, literally. R. Jagannathan writing in Swarajya magazine
argues that “In stages, the Dharavi slum must be erased and the same people
re-housed in high-rises that are well-managed by property maintenance companies
for moderate monthly rents and maintenance charges. COVID-19 has demolished the
case for allowing too many slums to fester.[vi]”
Given our competitive electoral democratic
politics, intense litigations over land and a shift in urban policy-making
towards ‘community participatory approaches’ in the recent urban missions,
large scale gentrification in our cities like the remaking of Paris or New York
would be a challenging endeavour to undertake. This must not make us complacent
as civic improvement projects in the name of decongestion have no doubt
received a fresh impetus with COVID-19. Motherless Brooklyn
then comes at the right time for all of us as a useful warning to remind us
about the violent legacy of such needless decongestion projects which end up reproducing existing social
hierarchies.
P. S 1: They should have really named the movie Brooklyn Nights!
P.S 2: If you do like movies about urban politics in India then do watch
Vada
Chennai by Director Vetrimaaran and actor Dhanush and Kaala by Director Pa.
Ranjith.
[i] https://placesjournal.org/article/frederick-law-olmsted-and-the-campaign-for-public-health/?cn-reloaded=1&cn-reloaded=1,
accessed on 7th August 2020.
[ii]
David Harvey. 2008. The Right to The City.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city,
accessed on 7th August 2020.
[iii]
Janaki Nair. (2005). The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century.
New York: Oxford University Press.
[iv]
Sheetal Chabria. (2009). Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in
Colonial Bombay. Washington: University of Washington Press.
[v]
https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1241750717939007490,
last accessed on 7th August 2020.
[vi]
https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/why-covid-19-is-an-urban-health-crisis-resulting-from-faulty-policy-priorities,
last accessed on 7th August 2020.
***
Varun
Patil is a Sociologist trained at Delhi School of Economics. He is a researcher
on urban and land issues and often moonlights as a filmmaker.
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