The Battle of Brooklyn: World City and Space of Neighborhoods

Observers have long suggested New York City is undergoing a vast transformation. Between globalization, hyper development and accompanying homogenization, the city's neighborhoods are being remade in front of our eyes (Sites, 2003). Increasingly, even the borough of Brooklyn, New York, is experiencing this phenomenon. "Brooklyn is booming," wrote Kennth Brown (2007, 1) in the business glossy Brooklyn Tomorrow. "In a decade, it will be vastly different, packed with more parks waterfront destinations, glittering residential towers with Manhattan style views." The "facelift of Coney Island" and the Atlantic Yards Project "will change the heart of Brooklyn," (p.l). Others wonder what of it will remain. Two centuries after the 1776 Battle of Brooklyn, the landscape of Brooklyn is being remapped anew in a struggle over what it will become.Independent of the other four boroughs of New York City, Brooklyn would be the fourth biggest city in the United States. Today Brooklyn is experiencing both the benefits and limitations of its experience as a world city. While urban spaces are thought to magnify the democratic possibilities (Glasser, 2010), their development tends to expand social inequalities (Smith, 1990). Yet, the people of Brooklyn have long resisted elements of the homogenization steamroller - including big box stores, chains, and high-rises - exorbing other cities including their Manhattan neighbor, which is currently coping with its own brand of suburban urbanism (Hammett and Hammett, 2007). For decades, the people of the borough fought to preserve their brownstones (Osman, 2011). While many revel in the borough's vast cultural history (Hamill, 2008; Hughes, 2011), others lament patterns of displacement, pollution, and environmental disrepair which follows patterns of uneven urban development (Eviator, 2007; Smith, 1990; Witt, 2006). Throughout Brooklyn, regular people are fighting off negative dynamics of the globalization experience, including speculative gentrification, displacement, and police brutality. The battle over these transformations is a struggle over the contested nature of globalization in Brooklyn.The Battle of Brooklyn is an effort to help keep what is distinct and rich about Brooklyn, its streets, distinct neighborhoods, and people. While certainly some of the renaissance taking place in Brooklyn is a good thing, growth is paradoxical (Mooney, 2011). Today, the battle is a struggle against the sea of identical details, stadiums, out of place buildings, and displacement. With the foreclosure crisis on the rise (Witt, 2006), some wonder if the borough is a space for displacement or democracy? What is the future of Brooklyn's neighborhoods once they have been rezoned? And can there be a new model of sustainable development for a world city? In highlighting the ways Brooklyn residents, groups, and neighborhoods are experiencing urban development and the strategies activists have employed to address the issues of displacement and homogenization of urban space, we consider alternative models of urban development in which the poor are not pushed from neighborhood to neighborhood, the character of streets is not blandified, and community space is supported rather than squeezed from public view.BROOKLYN AS GLOBAL CITYWhy did Brooklyn lose the Dodgers and work on the waterfront in a matter of years a half a century ago? 60,000 jobs and a beloved home team were lost with containerization (Freeman, 2000; Levinson, 2008). Brooklyn has long coped with the ravages of displacement and deindustrialization, forces many describe as features of globalization (Sites, 2003)."Brooklyn will be the City," argued George Templeton Strong on March 18, 1865 (Burns, 2001). "Manhattan will be the suburb." The borough of Brooklyn has long been considered a unique geography, even as one of the five boroughs of New York City. Yet, unlike Manhattan, it is a space which extends deep into the horizon. Today, it is a space for social and cultural capital, mass transportation, and policy innovation (Freeman, 2000, Mooney, 201 1). …