Urban Renewal for Negro Approval: The Skyrise for Harlem plans, designed by June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller

Happy fall!! I wanted to repurpose something I wrote for class last year into a bit of urban design criticism; read on for an exploration, and critique, of a 1960s proposal for Black urban renewal.

Many a writer has been tasked with ‘responding’ to the latest social or state conflagration; Black writers in the United States especially so, pressed to offer backward-looking context to explain our present times. In the wake of police shootings, white supremacist terror, and slow genocide, our literary institutions seek askance from luminaries as if the written word alone can guide us toward salvation. I earned my first freelance check from such circumstances (I was commissioned to write a piece for Noema Magazine and took the opportunity to justify righteous looting in the face of centuries of disinvestment and state-sanctioned theft), in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minnesota, and amidst pandemic-induced economic precarity.

June Jordan, famed Black poet and essayist—whose work has been cited most recently in response to the ongoing and quickening genocide in Palestine—took advantage of such an opportunity 60 years ago to instead look forward, and to plan a new world; her rejoinder to Esquire’s request for her coverage following the 1964 Harlem rebellions against racist police brutality entailed instead a visionary new plan for Harlem’s built environment. Jordan took on the neighborhood’s design head-on as a means toward encouraging built environment development, social well-being, and healthier communities—she was interested not in one death, however meaningful, nor in the action which followed, and focused her brilliance on attempting to redress Harlem’s material conditions, the physical circumstances which allowed/encouraged the act of police murder and which enabled the perpetual, slow genocide of Black folk.

Jordan’s ruminative poetry, often concerned with environmental design, informed this masterplan redesign of Harlem published in Esquire (under her married name, June Meyer), which would have instantiated fifteen “curvilinear” rounded towers that call to mind nuclear facilities—the plan is a high-modern imposition (read: of a design movement most prevalent in the early-to-mid-20th century that emphasized top-down planning of both the built environment and its use cases) that sought to build a new skyline for Manhattan’s northeastern-most neighborhood; it was thus aptly titled, Skyrise for Harlem (although Esquire published the plans under the title, “Instant Slum Clearance”; check out the whole pdf of the article here (and note that it might take a second to load)). In the midst of a half-decade of praise and re-evaluation of these plans, which have been lifted up from the archives as an exemplar of Black imaginative urban design, it feels fruitful to assess, or re-assess, their merits—and failings.

Designed in partnership with Buckminster Fuller, Jordan’s utopic, technofuturist vision is inspired; drawing from Le Corbusier’s basic principle of density and from Fuller’s own prior work in fantastical urban design solutions, Skyrise’s planned towers were to be sites for creative cultural engagement and protection, while further flights of fancy (like water barriers over the whole of Harlem) attempt to harness the natural environment to accommodate urban systems in a sort of cyborg city arrangement. New, beaming, broad roadways would foment connection between Skyrise towers and the city at large, and would even comprise the main means of travelling between towers.

Jordan made use of the essay, and Fuller the illustrative drawing (produced by one his assistants, Shoji Sadao), as a form to bring to life the urban imaginary; the actual production/realization of the plan would have come via “assembly-line manufacturing of all its parts…undertaken by an industry willing to convert, for example, from the furnishings of war to the furnishings of peace” (Jordan). This specific note of technofuturism characterized by assembly-line production is tinged more by Fuller than by Jordan; Fuller’s approach to design work relies heavily on Henry Ford’s mechanized labor/capital innovation, making use of heightened production speed and precision to realize large-scale plans. It is clear here that Skyrise’s fabrication plans were influenced as well by the post-war boom in manufacturing, fueled by a war industry that easily retooled itself towards mass consumer/commercial production and economic progress among the waged and employable. Skyrise for Harlem adopts a progressive stance regarding the enhancement of humanity through (urban) technologies; Jordan indicates a sort of intelligent-design-by-way-of-humankind, concluding her plans in prophesying that “if man is to have not only a future but a destiny, it must be consciously and deliberately designed.”

Jordan and Fuller presented a proposal that attempted to renew Harlem without removing its residents: Skyrise would have been constructed over top of the existing built environment so no residents would need to move or be temporarily/permanently displaced; once development is completed, residents can choose to move up into the conical edifices. Jordan and Fuller propose that “the lower depths will [then] be cleared for roadways and park space. The design will obliterate a valley of shadows: Skyrise for Harlem means literal elevation of Harlem to the level of Morningside Heights;” how this would have occurred was left unclear, and as yet no urban renewal project has succeeded in ensuring zero displacement—to build something in place of what exists, what exists necessarily must move (or cease to be), and it’s not clear how Harlem residents would have continued daily life while their entire neighborhood sat underneath the construction of its replacement.

The plan clearly saw Harlem’s ghetto-like conditions and deep inequities at the time of writing as keys to its detriment; Jordan explained that “Following the Harlem riots of 1964 a profusion of remedies for what was at last accepted as a critical situation appeared everywhere; nowhere, however, was environmental redesign given prime emphasis. Yet it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern and quality of living experience.” She continued that, “[p]artial renovation is not enough. Piecemeal healing provides temporary relief at best and may create as many problems as it cures. A half century of despair requires exorcism.”

Jordan and Fuller planned to construct a new neighborhood that is responsive to Harlem’s conditions, but their conceptualization failed to be responsive to Harlem’s community members, who were not consulted in the planning process and who have no real voice in these designs. Advocacy planners, planners who supported community-led planning (and counter-planning) initiatives, were actually present in Harlem at the time, and would come to the fore just three years after the Skyrise in Harlem plans were published. ARCH (Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem), a firm based in Harlem and led at first by white architect C. Richard Hatch, later by Black architect J. Max Bond, worked with grassroots organizers to assert claims on how city spaces were being produced or reproduced via redesign (collecting input from community members and providing technical assistance with the designs themselves)—while this approach did not produce many, if any, new material realities, it did emphasize community control, and even a form of “Black power urbanism” according to urban historian Daniel Matlin—and this work helped reorient some of New York’s plans for Harlem’s redevelopment towards a self-determinative approach. Further, ARCH’s proposals were grounded in what existed in the neighborhood, and in a Black—at times, Afrocentric—sense of place and neighborhood, arguing specifically against fanciful, new, high-modern designs, but instead for the preservation of the street and of historical brownstones and other architecture which came to typify Black Harlemites’ housing stock. The problem, for ARCH and for the communities they worked with, was not that Harlem was designed poorly—it was that Harlem was not able to exert itself in its own destiny.

While much less design-oriented, movements and organizations would follow later in the decade that shared such a creative attitude as applied to Black polities and communities, solving not just for the immediate problem of police violence but for improving the overall conditions: the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords, both born out of self-protective urges against white/police violence, greatly expanded their remits into housing advocacy and healthcare (with the Lords going so far as to occupy churches and hospitals, taking command of extant space to repurpose it for community needs and fomenting the basis of “insurgent” planning, or planning efforts made by the people against the state). However, these examples constitute bottom-up, organizing-based plans for justice (and do no overtly or principally concern themselves with physical design), where Jordan’s topdown vision instead constructs from within the confines of intellect and is preoccupied with design as the solution. Notably, in comparison to the Lords and Panthers who were acutely aware of and responsive to safety concerns, Jordan and Fuller’s plans also fail entirely to address policing, the heart of the issue at hand—while architecture can indeed refer to the creation of environment, the enforcement/governance of said environment plays just as crucial a role in outcomes and lived experience, and Jordan and Fuller elide this entirely in favor of reshaped facades and water collection methods.

Further, economic development—often a key concern of planners, and certainly a concern for Black communities suffering from over-policing and incarceration as they simultaneously faced mass un/underemployment, which made them more vulnerable to the police state, to eviction, and to wealth deprivation—is not accounted for whatsoever in Jordan and Fuller’s plans. Neither the Black ascensionist mode embraced by Henry Lyman Morehouse, W.E.B. Du Bois’ NAACP, or the Urban League, supporting Black leadership and integration into white economic structures; nor the Black self-determinative mode put forward by Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, George Schuyler, Malcom X and the Nation of Islam, or The Republic of New Afrika, holding for Black cooperatives and small businesses supported by local Black communities, are incorporated into Skyrise—not even a simple jobs guarantee for Harlem residents in the construction of the new Harlem.

Jordan and Fuller, in their modernist zeal and in the context of highway planning emerging as the primary method of organizing transit in the midcentury United States, included highways as direct mechanisms to facilitate transit between and outside of the planned towers, at the expense of all other modes of transportation (including train usage, biking, and pedestrian activity, all of which were and are more dominant modes of movement for Black and working class residents of New York City)—this, again, fails to be responsive to actual conditions. The Cross Bronx Expressway rift asunder communities of color in the nearby Bronx just a decade before the Skyrise planning began, and introduced high levels of noise and environmental pollutants; Jordan and Fuller would have opened Harlem up to such nuisances and health dangers had their plan been implemented, and may have instantiated community loss within the neighborhood of Harlem. 

Skyrise for Harlem’s central failing is this: design alone cannot address, or even outline, problems better circumscribed by addressing capitalism and racialization on their faces through organized struggle. Redesigning highway infrastructure does not resolve that highways themselves were and are harmful to pre-existing communities. Installing rain shields over a whole neighborhood introduces a host of new ecological problems in the service of attempting to reduce an anthropocentric hydrological problem. New housing towers with new recreational spaces do not address cities disemploying Black youth and subjecting “surplus labor” to underground labor markets in hustling, wheeling, and dealing in current recreational spaces. You cannot hide Black people from the police behind new facades.

Notably, Jordan and Fuller’s designs were not connected to a discrete set of politics at all, where many of their aforementioned counterparts and contemporaries were at the least commmunalist, if not anti-capitalist/anti-racist—perhaps this was intentional, to not erect a roadblock against implementation. Another notable writer from the same time period, Amiri Baraka (well-known for his foundational participation in the Black Arts Movement, and a luminary who at one point called for “a Black Nation. In Harlem, where 600,000 [sic] Black People reside”), would plan a housing development deep across the Hudson River in his home city of Newark, New Jersey, just 5 years later; called the Kawaida Towers, Baraka hoped to lead the charge of building new housing alongside Black cultural nationalists (and in fact, was working with a spiritual/philosophical movement for whom the towers were named) but was stymied at every turn by white pols who called him a racist and felt this development was a play for spatio-political power.

However: vis a vis implementation, herein lies the rub: Skyrise for Harlem also never got off the ground. The well-laid-out plan put forth by the pair fell folly to individual ambition, stalled by Buckminster Fuller’s backlog of other projects; this is just as well, for it is unclear what good would have come of this plan. Just urban futures must take their environment, and their politics, into serious consideration; if the planning for such futures doesn’t come from whole communities themselves, community members must retain power and privilege in the design and implementation for renewal to truly remain in their interests. Design cannot be first and foremost among our concerns, at least not in the traditional sense of physical design: overhauling policing, reorienting transit systems, and addressing underemployment and alienation must come first.

These qualms I raise were likely not new or unfamiliar to June Jordan; she was a true political and artistic forebear, demonstrating for myself and many others to how to operate as an artist in the midst of revolution. She also has passed more than twenty years prior to this essay being published, and has lived a life full of action and commitment to liberation; so this criticism serves not as a rejoinder to her design practice, but moreso as a warning of what can be possible when we plan without coordinating with those who are being planned for—what is possible when we plan for, instead of planning with. While Black imagination is critical, it is ultimately collective Black imagination which must be platformed and supported, above and beyond any individual (no matter how committed to our causes they may be). Our imagination must serve our needs, and draw as its inspiration a commitment to a shared sense of place.