Planning iconic Coney Island: an encounter in planning rationalities

Planning Local Uniqueness: Drawing the Line between Development and Loss

“…The City saw and operationalized Coney Island’s uniqueness as a world-famous brand that might help catalyze the revitalization of the neighborhood through outside investment (Rivero 2017a). Accordingly, the City felt comfortable relying on referential nomenclature to link new development to the neighborhood’s famous legacy, and it saw little need to address SCI’s preservationist concerns or to consider the experiential qualities that, according to the group’s members, had historically set Coney Island apart.…”

“…The Coney Island representations highlighted by the advocates centered on the neighborhood’s history as an amusement destination (Rivero 2017a). These included: its pioneering role in fostering a culture of collective recreation; the originality of its early amusements and attractions; the size and diversity of its crowds; and its unconventionality (e.g., its freak-shows, fanciful architecture, and local characters).…”

“…The City then reconciled the image of historic Coney Island with these results, operationalizing it as a brand that might enhance the development necessary to modernize the district. While this brand related to features associated with Coney Island’s history as a diverse and quirky outdoor amusement park, it did not arise from the experience of the neighborhood (Rivero 2017a). As a result, it often lacked a connection to elements regarded by advocates as key contributors to Coney Island’s uniqueness and indeed would instead eventually attach to development that, in their view, undermined the character of the place.…”

“… 1. Interview with advocate, April 9, 2013 (This quote was used in a different context in Rivero 2017a) …”

“A marketplace of schools”: race, power, and education reform in the Detroit region

“…Hackworth, 2009;Peck, 2012;Soederberg, 2019). For example, in this journal, a special issue recently highlighted how market rationalities have become "a dominant framework for planning and making urban space" (Rivero, Teresa, & West, 2017, p. 174) through examining cases of Tax Increment Financing (Teresa, 2017), market-led planning strategies (Rivero, 2017), and the modelling of congestion pricing . Concurrently, economic geographers and sociologists have increasingly used new approaches to study how markets are shaped by social systems, technologies, and the specific geographies of the places markets occupy (Berndt and Boekler, 2011;Christophers, 2014a;Cohen, 2018;Fields, 2018).…”