Money Jungle: Imagining the New Times Square

Chapter 3: The New Spaces of Times Square: Commerce, Social Control, and the Built Environment

48 CHAPTER THREE The New Spaces of Times Square Commerce, Social Control, and the Built Environment L ike anyone involved in creating or transforming urban spaces, Times Square’s redevelopers were faced with two seemingly incompatible ideas of the purpose of public space in the city. On the one hand, there was the ideology of democratic access and enjoyment . Part of the ideology of “public” space is that it must embody inclusive democracy. These spaces must seem open to all, without prejudice . The redevelopers could not openly select people for inclusion or exclusion. On the other hand, there was the impulse toward imposing respectability and control, in order to guarantee profit. To make the real estate of Times Square appeal to high-profile corporate tenants and mainstream tourists, the redevelopers felt that they needed to impose a new public face on the area, one that kept the brand identity of Times Square as a space of heterogeneity and excess intact, but under control enough to appease conservative sentiments and to guarantee safe investments. This was a difficult dichotomy to reconcile. To deal with this contradiction, the redevelopers found ways to use the built environment as a technology of social order. They made R4305.indb 48 R4305.indb 48 6/11/07 7:57:41 AM 6/11/07 7:57:41 AM THE NEW SPACES OF TIMES SQUARE 49 order and social control radiate from the makeup of urban space itself. In some ways, their new spaces resembled Jeremy Bentham’s plan for a Panopticon prison, in which convicts would police their own behavior, by dint of the power of the prison’s architecture to suggest that its inhabitants were under constant surveillance.1 The redesigned spaces of Times Square were meant to accomplish a concrete goal: to achieve a vision of urban social order, marketable diversity, and free-floating desire, all within the limits imposed by corporate aesthetics. The people who built and oversaw the new public spaces of the revitalized Times Square—planners, developers, managers , architects—imagined themselves to be fighting a war against crime and fear. By strategically opening and closing lines of sight, and by saturating these public spaces with icons of legitimate desire, the redevelopers sought to block what they saw as the intrinsically criminogenic properties of urban space and (some) urban denizens.2 To accomplish this, the redevelopers deployed brilliant, elaborate aesthetic tactics of the street—a strategic, selective deployment of color, art, beauty, comfort, and fun. By means of these aesthetic tactics, the redevelopers sought to transform the Times Square area as a whole into a space that was, in the words of one real-estate developer, “more open to more people.” But if it was “more open” to some users and uses, it was also inherently “more closed” to others. Specifically, the redevelopers meant to make Times Square a place where specific, individual identities and experiences of consumer desire and spectacle would be possible, but where specific other forms of community and experience that had formerly found a place in Times Square would be impossible to sustain. The redevelopers’ aesthetic tactics of redefining the built and social environment of Times Square and Forty-second Street were part of a much larger social shift—a rethinking of the very concept of “order” in urban space, one that follows the cultural logic of neoliberal ideology . Traditional criminological approaches to issues of social control in urban space focused on identifying evil or maladjusted individuals, or “deviant” social groups. By contrast, this new perspective on space and order rarely makes explicit references to individual criminals or “undesirables.” Instead, it replaces these with talk about the production and management of civil social space; specifically, spaces that do or do not foster criminality.3 This is a discourse of environmental censorship. It mobilizes expert knowledge in the service of socioenvironmental censorship, to block crime before the fact. R4305.indb 49 R4305.indb 49 6/11/07 7:57:41 AM 6/11/07 7:57:41 AM 50 MONEY JUNGLE This project of creating spaces that advertise a friendly sense of order and control is a curious one in a city like New York, where, as one reporter for the New York Times told me, breaking laws and stretching rules is “the basic planning principle.” The city has always relied on granting exemptions from zoning codes and letting developers break the law in order to keep...