SoiferI VtP Annotation: Reading Places

The relationship between Columbia University and the residents of the Houses have historically been articulated through racialized and classed differences, persisting despite Columbia’s insistence that its new Expansion will seek to integrate the community in its planning via a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA). I am interested in examining local knowledge practices of activists residing in the housing developments to comprehend the nature of the relationship of Columbia with the community. In addition, I am interested in how administrators and professors at Columbia theorize about the University’s relationship with the local versus global, particularly their utilization of the legal system (eminent domain) to fulfill their perceived role as stewards of the “greater good.” Not only do these varying perspectives hold potential for theorizing town-and-gown relationships, but they serve to depict the forms of epistemological injustice and hegemonies that universities such as Columbia perpetuate, taking on forms akin to colonial domination.Mainstream depictions of the Manhattanville Expansion on the University’s website and news articles assert that the “community” is to be included and that Manhattanville, originally an industrial zone, needed revitalization. These narratives concealed more than they conveyed, silencing the fact that Community Board 9 had sought to develop a mixed-use development in Manhattanville based directly on feedback from the community. Columbia silenced individuals such as Michael, one of the activists I interviewed at Manhattanville Houses who affirmed that Columbia only fulfilled the “baseline,” if even that, of their CBA promises. He theorized about the relationship between Columbia and the rest of the community as a “Junior-Senior relationship.” He depicted it as a hierarchical but mutually-informing, shaping and potentially empowering relationship between the “Senior” (the institution, with ideological and material tools) and the “Junior” (residents of the Houses), asserting that each maintains a responsibility for the other, but that the relationship is largely unequal.