In 1959, New York City announced a “slum clearance plan” by Robert Moses that would displace 2,400 working-class and immigrant families and dozens of businesses from the Cooper Square section of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Guided by the belief that urban renewal should benefit—not displace—residents, a working mother named Frances Goldin and her neighbors formed the Cooper Square Committee (CSC) and launched a campaign to save the neighborhood. Over five decades, they fought politicians, developers, white flight, government abandonment, blight, violence, arson, drugs, and gentrification—cyclical forces that have destroyed so many working-class neighborhoods across the US. Through tenacious organizing and hundreds of community meetings, they not only held their ground but also developed a vision of community control. Fifty-three years later, they established the state’s first community land trust—a diverse, permanently affordable neighborhood in the heart of the “real estate capital of the world.”
How can we organize local activism to protect neighbourhoods from unwanted public and market investments?
The screening of the opening film is supported by DANU.
Greetings from DANU to the 16th Architecture Film Days! 2024’s theme, “The people behind” and their quality of life is our greatest task. We are grateful to work on improving this through engineering and design, using three decades of expertise and the latest technologies, for a better environment, from pixels to cities.
