Rebecca Choi

By reconsidering the Watts Urban Workshop’s architectural proposals for funding from President Johnson’s Model Cities Program, part of his 1964 War on Poverty, this microhistory outlines feasible architectural visions of reparations in 1970s Watts, Los Angeles.

While most histories of the War on Poverty consider Johnson’s concept of “maximum feasible participation” as a driving force of self-help programming for poor communities to be more of a gesture than a call, a consideration of the Watts Urban Workshop’s goals to teach self-determination and community participation shows how Black practitioners were thinking about reparative futures in ways that have not been registered by architecture, urban planning, or history.

How does the work of poet and activist June Jordan contribute to the discourse on housing justice in the Lower East Side of New York City? What insights does June Jordan offer the discipline and practice of architecture regarding architecture and urban planning’s role in housing justice? By examining Jordan’s writings on housing justice in the Lower East Side during her involvement with the social organisation Mobilisation for Youth, this workshop and symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars who have dedicated the past decade to studying Jordan’s urbanist writings from the late 1960s.

In 1976, Chicago developer Charles Shaw bought nearly one million cubic feet of air above the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art for 17 million dollars, relieving the Museum of their debt problems. Bought under New York City’s Transfer of Development Rights, Shaw used his rights to air space in the construction of a 56-floor apartment tower on 53rd Street. Mayor Beame hailed the “self-help project” a success, claiming that the transaction showed “how government and the private sector can cooperate in achieving the common goal of improving lives in the city.” Transfer of air rights was not new, however the relationship between architects, Harlem, and MoMA in presenting experimental, bureaucratized architectural visions to the public is specific to the late 1960s. This talk discusses these visions and the context of Harlem, where a range of surreptitious and highly choreographed mechanisms of abstraction were tested out and exhibited at MoMA in a demonstration plan for the neighborhood in 1967.

"Ain' Even Been Planted Yet": Visions of Harlem in 1965

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