Hasta La Ideas

Festival of Ideas for the New City

Members: Vito Acconci, Jonathan Bowles, Rosanne Haggerty, Suketu Mehta
Moderator: Jonathan F.P. Rose

The panel discussion on the Heterogeneous City brought together five different accounts of heterogeneity in New York City in terms of history, culture, zoning policies, industry demographics, and its public spaces and architecture.

The panel kicked off with Jonathan F.P. Rose’s remark that humans in the city tend to view their surroundings in either the individualistic “Me” map or the colllectivist “We” map that is more aware of social networks.

Suketu Mehta, professor of Journalism at New York University, credits the “generosity and the reduction of personal space” as necessary cultural shifts to be made by inhabitants of ethnically diverse megacities facing population booms and infrastructural lag. Mehta makes an especially articulate and passionate appeal for a New York that in its current Disneyfied state could also accomodate the quality of a city that is “unpredictable and many-splendored,” and praises (or eulogizes) a kind of citizen that might be long gone: the “good New Yorker”—one who in the past decades, remained in New York even when it didn’t make economic sense to do so.

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