Money jungle: Race and real estate in 'The New Times Square' (New York City)

This dissertation explores issues of culture, power and social space in the ongoing "revitalization" of New York City's Times Square. Beginning in the mid-1970s through the present day, this much-debated project has combined changes in zoning laws, "defensive" architecture, "order maintenance" policing and social "outreach" organizations. The result is a physical and cultural engineering program---a complex collaboration between various public and private organizations aiming to reshape the built, legal, economic and social environments of the Times Square area.; The chapters of the dissertation address particular sites of my fieldwork in and around the institutions that constitute the revitalization project. Chapter topics include: the cultural politics of real estate in the history of Times Square; the ways in which developers use architecture to define social life in the area's new public spaces; and the role that subjective experience and emotion play in the policing and rehabilitative institutions that target what some perceive as Times Square's entrenched criminal subculture. The connections between these sites illustrate the contradictions inherent in the revitalization project's attempts to impose "order" on commodified urban space. Times Square's revitalizers disavow the ways in which the project exploits socially destabilizing mechanisms of fear and desire. Instead, they blame the "blight" that they claim threatens Times Square on "undesirables": "the homeless," prostitutes, hustlers and, implicitly, Latinos and African-Americans in general, and they seek to exclude signs of social difference from the area's newly "revitalized" public spaces.; I conclude by examining the ways in which academic critiques of power and urban space help to reproduce the same cultural and political systems they claim to oppose. Reflecting upon my own complicity in the revitalizers' expert practices of producing spaces and subjects, I propose a new perspective on issues of power, citizenship and urban space. Rather than relying on the scapegoating of symbolic enemies, we must acknowledge the ways in which we are entangled in the complex and ubiquitous workings of power in our society.