| This dissertation studies Battery Park City and New York City's bonus plazas to understand the relationship between space and social relations. Studies of bonus plazas---the public spaces surrounding office buildings---have already established that most such spaces are largely unused, but have never explained why that is so. This study does so. In identifying the goals of developers and similar decisionmakers as decisive in the quality of a public space, this study not only contradicts prevailing wisdom that blames architects or urban planners, but identifies the reciprocal relationship between space and social relations, as people seek to shape space, and space in turn shapes the people who use it. Exclusion is identified as a key axis along which to understand the design of public space, and through which public space can be characterized as private, filtered, community, or popular space.; As with bonus plazas, urbanists criticize Battery Park City's design for its exclusion. Sympathetic as I was to this critique, this study finds that the most significant exclusion comes not from the design of Battery Park City, but its programming as luxury residential and business space. Nonetheless, the design of the space has significant effects on residents.; As a frequently cited example of the "citadel" described in global cities and world cities literature, understanding the construction of Battery Park City further illuminates how macro-level changes in capitalism translate to the neighborhood-level changes global cities writing predicts.; Battery Park City, across the street from the site of the World Trade Center, is studied in the years immediately following the collapse of the towers on September 11, 2001. In studying residents' recovery, the development of community groups, and residents' involvement in redevelopment debates, the role of public space in community life, and the importance of space in defining a community, become clear. Finally, the comparison of this ethnography of Battery Park City to other ethnographies demonstrates that many of the conclusions drawn about poor and working-class communities are applicable to wealthier communities as well. |
