Introduction: In search of the Anthropocene

Anthropologist Sean Smith (Reference Smith2023:5) urges us to map how the Anthropocene, or that newly proposed, geological epoch marking humans’ irreversible impact on the planet, is semioticized, to gain more insight into space and place. In this article, we explore how political economy is discursively mobilized in everyday ‘Anthropocenic’ consciousness in the context of urban change. We develop our concept of everyday Anthropocenic consciousness following scholarly work on everyday legal consciousness, which shows people’s ideologies about how the law functions to solve their conflicts (Conley & O’Barr Reference Conley and O’Barr1990; Merry Reference Merry1990; Ewick & Silbey Reference Ewick and Silbey1998; Snajdr & Trinch Reference Snajdr and Trinch2018). Here, we suggest that people also have beliefs regarding human impact on the planet that are not formulated within scientific frameworks, but are instead expressed through other, more familiar environmental concepts. In our earlier work (Trinch & Snajdr Reference Trinch and Snajdr2020) on signage and other semiotics of redevelopment and gentrification in Brooklyn, we show how implicit systems of textual representation not only indicate who is in place but also encourage the transformation of place for different users. Importantly, these registers of placemaking are operating on all of us right before our very eyes. Our data suggest that visions of the Anthropocene are similarly ‘right in front’ of us but expressed as proxies which reveal an understanding of this epoch through a range of everyday semiotic devices regularly deployed as larger cultural concepts of utopia and dystopia. For this case study, we also use the tools of Linguistic Landscape studies (Gorter Reference Gorter2006; Thurlow & Jaworski Reference Thurlow and Jaworsk2011; Lou Reference Lou2016) to reveal the semiotic devices involved in evaluating, constructing, and transforming dystopic and utopic places.

Drawing on participant-observation, interviews, surveys, mapping, and cyberethnography, our focus is on pro- and anti-redevelopment narratives emerging in Brooklyn’s multi-billion-dollar Atlantic Yards project. We examine in particular texts and renderings, as they have evolved with the conflict. We consider how the employment of visual and discursive interventions, as forms of semiotization, shape subjectivities that are, on one hand, acquiescent to extractive systems of capital accumulation (Sultana Reference Sultana2022), and on the other hand, promoting sustainability. Furthermore, in studying activists’ writings on ‘blight’ and their manipulations of the developer’s architectural renderings as forms of samizdat (self-published texts), we show not only how people resist ostensibly hegemonic messages about space but also how climate and environmental concerns get deployed to undermine the developer’s totalizing representations. Both the developer and activists’ renderings and texts suggest social experiences, perform as political action, and incite community mobilization and resistance.Footnote ¹

Ultimately, however, representations of space and of environmental concerns about this large-scale redevelopment, whether utopian or dystopian, are grounded in a neoliberal framework that favors individual achievement, property speculation, and profit. That is, both utopic and dystopic visions are not only human-centric, but also what we might call mytopic, or individualistic perspectives on the future of place, private property, and private profit. Such individualistic perspectives deploy semiotic spatial fictions to compete for the developing landscape as indexes of everyday notions of the Anthropocene, with images and text serving to create or limit visions of a sustainable city within the context of a global system where extracting more value for personal gains from the land is a foregone political-economic conclusion.

Context: A battle in Brooklyn

“These guys fought this thing from behind their computers!” bristled Patti Hagan, a Prospect Heights resident and one of the first opponents of Atlantic Yards. When announced in 2003, Atlantic Yards was the largest redevelopment plan the city of New York had seen in five decades. This ambitious redevelopment scheme proposed to build a professional sports arena and sixteen high-rise residential towers in the center of low-rise Brooklyn. Patti delivered this criticism over the phone while we were trying to arrange an interview. As we pursued further fieldwork, we realized that she was partly correct. Much of what had been articulated, circulated, and contested by a staunch and enduring resistance movement to Atlantic Yards framed it in the cyberworld as an unfolding man-made urban disaster. At the same time, Hagan’s street-level activism included organizing protests, creating posters, brochures, and graffiti, painting murals, and other forms of consciousness-raising. Both forms of resistance would not only come to be important in the conflict but would also suggest how everyday understandings of the Anthropocene are constructed and presented through language and image.

The battle over Atlantic Yards began in 2003, when developer Bruce Ratner, of Forest City Ratner Companies (Forest City or FCRC), announced plans to construct the project over a Long Island Railroad rail yard, which overlapped the four Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, Boerum Hill, and Park Slope (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Diagram of project footprint (image credit: Brooklynspeaks, https://www.brooklynspeaks.net/atlanticyards).

Forest City insisted that their plan differed from other kinds of redevelopment, because it sought to include, rather than remove, the surrounding community. Additionally, Forest City claimed to create both the traditional ‘public good’ benefits of affordable housing and jobs, as well as the intangible benefit of civic pride. The developer acquired property from dozens of local residents and entered into Community Benefits Agreements with ACORN, an affordable housing advocacy group, and with several other labor, religious, and civic organizations.Footnote ² Forest City’s plan was also supported by many local and state elected officials, including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Governor George Pataki, and former Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

Project opponents contested Atlantic Yards on a variety of levels and included local residents as well as famous actors and best-selling authors, many of whom lived in one of the neighborhoods surrounding the site. One Prospect Heights resident, Daniel Goldstein, refused to be ‘bought out’ by Forest City and remained the sole inhabitant of a thirty-one-unit, eight-story building adjacent to the rail yard. The other thirty residents in his building sold their condos to Forest City in 2005. Goldstein, and many other anti-Atlantic Yards activists, sued the developer, the city, and the state for abuse of eminent domain.Footnote ³ Eminent domain is the government seizure of private property for the public good. While much of the struggle moved forward in the courts, the controversy began to unfold publicly online. Ultimately, the conflict was reduced to a legal decision over the taking of private property—arguably, itself an extractive notion—for what activists claimed was not, in fact, a public good (Snajdr & Trinch Reference Snajdr and Trinch2018).

Shortly after Forest City announced the project, they put up an official website explaining the benefits of the plan for the local community. But there was little on Atlantic Yards.com with which to engage (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Pages from FCRC’s first Atlantic Yards website (image credit: authors’ archive).

The opposition quickly organized internet-based efforts, such as the website of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) led by Goldstein. This broad group of activists also initially included Patti Hagan, the first person to alert the community about the arena project, but who found herself, and her old school activism, sidelined by the digital approach of younger activists. Indeed, DDDB’s website, with dozens of links to documents, video-clips, and almost daily updates of the fight, was much more engaging and sophisticated than the developer’s site.

By 2010, however, after a host of court settlements, Forest City broke ground on the project. In 2012, the Barclays Center Arena opened and in 2014, the developer renamed the project Pacific Park.

Rendering a dystopian present

When Forest City announced plans to build, they suggested the actual site of the project—in brick-and-mortar Brooklyn—was ‘empty’ space. McDonogh (Reference McDonogh, Rotenberg and McDonogh1993) reminds us that empty space is a particularly vulnerable condition of place and is generative of conflict. He notes that ‘such spaces do not define a vacuum, an absence of urbanness, so much as they mark zones of intense competition’ (McDonogh Reference McDonogh, Rotenberg and McDonogh1993:13). Knowing the site was not empty, Patti Hagan immediately began gathering a grassroots census documenting that 800+ people lived and worked in the project footprint. Despite the current residents and businesses, Forest City attempted to define this space as dystopic by calling it blighted.

The word blight originates in the plant world, and it is used for diseases that plague plants, causing them to discolor, wither, and die. So, on plants, blight is an illness that manifests itself visibly as decay. Blight can be avoided, controlled, and eradicated in various ways. But proper sanitation is a key to stopping the spread of the infestation.Footnote ⁴

The term blight was taken up by urban renewal advocates to describe American cities deemed in need of improvement. Its definition remains dynamically vague. For example, in the late 1920s, Herbert Hoover’s federal Building and Housing Committee defined ‘a blighted area’ as a place that ‘due either to the lack of a vitalizing factor or to the presence of a devitalizing factor, the life of the area has been sapped’ (Pritchett Reference Pritchett2003:18).

Before 1936, in eminent domain cases, courts would consider whether a public benefit would result from state land seizure. But in the 1936 case of New York State Housing Authority v. Muller, the court deemed ‘slum removal’ a ‘public benefit’. Because urban blight was seen as an uncontainable precursor for areas being called slums, courts began deciding that the taking of blighted property was a positive action. In cases following this decision, blight was considered an urban path to pollution, disorder, criminality and even ‘injurious to [people’s]… morals and welfare’.Footnote ⁵ ‘Urban renewal’ promised order, an adequate population size, safety, and cleanliness.

Through this plant pathology discourse, urban planners still today continue to use these biological definitions and metaphors to attach meanings to urban areas. Arguably, such meanings tend to fall within what linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill calls a moral geography. Sociolinguist Gabriella Modan (Reference Modan2007:90) defines ‘moral geography’, as an ‘interweaving of a moral framework with a geographical territory’. Judgments of right and wrong, order and disorder, and cleanliness and filth get inscribed onto land and communities undergoing change (Douglas Reference Douglas1966; Chesluk Reference Chesluk2004). Through ‘various discourse strategies and themes, community members position themselves and… [others] within an… abstract moral “grid”… for their neighborhood’ (Modan Reference Modan2007:90).Footnote ⁶

In the Atlantic Yards conflict, two competing moral geographies of humanity are created through semiotization. The first, a dehumanization strategy that diminishes the value of human agents already on the scene makes arguments of devitalization or lifelessness in the area, which effectively devalues the existing neighborhood to establish a case to seize, condemn, and demolish it in order to rebuild it for more (valuable) humans. The second, through discursive processes of humanization and personification, imbues the neighborhood with vitality (i.e. liveliness), and thus creates the reasons to preserve and improve the existing neighborhood for the people and the buildings already there.

In 2005, Forest City hired Allen, King, Rosen, and Fleming (henceforth, AKRF), a private consulting firm, to conduct a ‘blight study’ as part of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). To condemn property, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the developer’s state partner, needed a finding that ‘the area… is a substandard or insanitary area, or is in danger of becoming [one]… and tends to impair or arrest the sound growth… of the municipality’ (Atlantic Yards Arena and Redevelopment Project—Contract Scope for an Environmental Impact Statement, p. 1).

The document defines blight quite thoroughly. Blight includes ‘physical deficiencies (insanitary/substandard building conditions, building/housing/fire code violations, site vacancy or underutilization), economic deficiencies (building vacancies, low rents, high rental turnovers), or other deficiencies (incompatible land use, multiple ownerships that hamper assemblage of properties, traffic congestion, pollution). And it says: ‘Taken together, these characteristics may demonstrate that the area under study is substandard, insanitary or deteriorating’. In other words, the area blighted is to be considered critically filthy and injurious to people’s health.

In July of 2006, AKRF delivered its findings to ESDC. The eleven-section study consists of a total of about 370 pages, and it begins with the following sentence: ‘This report finds that the twenty-two-acre area proposed for the… Project… is characterized by blighted conditions that are unlikely to be removed without public action’.

To counter this finding, activist Patti Hagan prepared a twenty-three-page rebuttal to AKRF’s study and sent it to ESDC in late September of 2006. Hagan introduces her study with a cover letter that states: ‘I have lived in Prospect Heights for twenty-seven years and watched the neighborhood… come totally alive by the hard work and passion of those who call these streets home. AKRF seems to have REVERSED every development that has contributed to our renaissance into… a blight characteristic’. She ends by saying: ‘The Blight Study makes sense only as a tool of Forest City Ratner… to condemn, seize and build because of “Blight”’.

Below we show just a sample of entries from AKRF’s study and Hagan’s rebuttal. Here is how AKRF describes a single-family home in the blight study:

In the text above, the property is almost devoid of humans, literally dehumanized. The information AKRF presents focuses on the utility of the property for the city, not for the current owner. The owner is mentioned in a passive construction that foregrounds the property and backgrounds the person who occupies and owns it. There is nothing ‘unsanitary’ to report, but the numbers and figures are used to suggest that the lot is being under-utilized by the city, which, AKRF states, is not even receiving the taxes owed on the under-utilization, let alone the prospective taxes that it could collect if fully utilized. According to AKRF’s analysis, the individual potential of the property is not being maximized.

Here is how Hagan describes the same property:

In Hagan’s description, the lot has an address and becomes a multi-species site as she mentions plants—both current and future—but centers the humans. The homeowner is named, identified as having come from somewhere and as having created his private property into a home for generations of his family to come. In Hagan’s description, the single-family structure is given a date and an architectural style (1835 clapboard)—locating it in a historical time period and design. She also focuses on the property’s garden, and the way humans can, if they so choose, make plant life flourish. Hagan also notes that it belongs to a family that emigrated from Barbados, a detail possibly included to purposely indicate ‘race’ and the diversity of the neighborhood. Adjectives of positive affirmation like ‘charming’ and ‘lovely’ accompany a refutation of unpaid taxes.

In a description of a lot with an industrial building, AKRF writes the following about the property:

AKRF’s report also suggested that trash found around the building might have been left by ‘homeless persons’ who may be using the site.

AKRF writes about the building as if it were a cold and desolate place with little potential. Again, the owner is cast in a passive construction, but this time, the owner is Atlantic Yards Development Corporation (AYDC), an amalgamation of the very corporate development group (Forest City) that proposed building on the site. Interestingly, AYDC becomes the subject in the subordinate clause, and as the active agent in that clause, the reader is told that AYDC has maintained the building in the same condition as it was upon purchase. The grammatical construction erases the building’s history and prior use by dating it back to only the last time it was purchased, as if AYDC were not the reason for the very EIS we are reading. AYDC gets written about like any other owner of a block and lot in the project footprint. The description strips the structure of its historical importance, uses, and architecture. It highlights the building’s boarded up windows, large cracks, and graffiti to create a story of decay and neglect of an ailing structure.

Hagan, however, gives a very different account. She writes:

• • ‘RATNER SUCKS’

• • ‘RATNER IS A POVERTY PIMP’

Hagan’s writing re-humanizes the structure by referring to the people associated with it, giving the building a past (a place to make and sell bread), a present, and a future. She describes the building as a ‘magnificent’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘classic’, and ‘well-built’ landmark, situating its features in a global context (Greece, Rome, Brooklyn) to suggest both the building and Brooklyn are worthy of widespread attention. Hagan argues that converting the building into a boutique hotel could offer visitors a ‘world class’ place to stay, create jobs for locals, and increase taxes for the city.

In the second paragraph, Hagan critiques AKRF’s study for misleading readers into thinking the building and the area are in ruins, pointing out that the revitalization of Brownstone Brooklyn is due to local residents restoring such buildings. She essentially describes the work of gentrifiers who invested in low-priced properties and contributed sweat equity to revitalize the area. Hagan calls AKRF’s characterization of Ward Bakery an ‘insult’. However, we might argue that the real injury comes from the endless cycle of wealth extraction through the dispossession of others, which is what led Forest City to target the site in the first place. In the third paragraph, Hagan counters AKRF’s view of graffiti as an essentialized dystopian symbol, framing it instead as anti-developer messaging in ‘RATNER SUCKS’ and ‘RATNER IS A POVERTY PIMP’. She presents a vibrant portrayal of the building with a glorious past and a potential for a glorious future. Her position is not anti-development, but anti-large-scale development and anti-dispossession of the community’s history.

Hagan builds her moral authority as a twenty-seven-year resident with strong social ties to the area. While AKRF’s blight report is based on brief site visits, Hagan’s descriptions are informed by years of firsthand experience. Her main argument is that the area is not lacking vitality, as it has been undergoing revitalization through local efforts for years.

Pointing out that some of the blighting conditions identified by AKRF were actually created by Forest City, Hagan describes in detail what AKRF calls ‘blighting conditions’—such as chain-link fences, rubble, and scattered debris—were actually created by Forest City’s purchase of a (much needed) neighborhood auto repair shop/gas station in Prospect Heights. She ends by personifying the auto-repair shop, suggesting it was unfairly imprisoned.

Hagan also shows where the city and state of New York have been negligent in the upkeep of their own property, especially the rail yard.

These few examples indicate that blight is in the eye of the beholder. But more importantly, they illustrate how language is used to semioticize two very different moral pictures of the same place. AKRF did not conduct a structural engineering study, so in some ways, their assessment is not substantively more informed than Hagan’s. Rather, the AKRF narrative takes an institutional, report-like approach. Every property description follows a template and is discussed in terms of its location, use, square footage, and zoning. Lots are often described as if they were uninhabited and uninhabitable. These technical terms presented uniformly lend the report authority. When people are mentioned, the document suggests there are not enough of them or that they are the wrong people (i.e. ‘homeless’). Properties with weeds, sidewalk cracks, and unpaid bills are made to look neglected and their inhabitants, negligent and delinquent. In short, AKRF’s report format diminishes the vitalizing forces by writing entries with few if any reference to the humans who populate them. It is interesting that AKRF chose a semiotics of ‘blight’ over a more ‘honest’ one that could have suggested, as Patti Hagan did, that the area had already undergone substantial investment and re-valuation, therefore making it very attractive as a ‘safe’ and ‘profitable’ place to build an arena and a high-density neighborhood.

These discursive moves on the part of AKRF align with broader analyses within political economy that articulate a relationship of accumulation by dispossession—a logic vital to capitalist exploitation (Harvey Reference Harvey2003). Here, the developer establishes this relationship discursively by dispossessing the property from human connection. Such language goes beyond conceptualizing land targeted for development as described by Neil Smith (Reference Smith1996) as the urban ‘frontier’—that is, untouched or even ‘wilderness’—to characterizing the property as degraded and abandoned by humans, in order to revalue it for utilization by a corporation.

Led by Daniel Goldstein, anti-Atlantic-Yards activists sued the developer for a new EIS. Goldstein described the original blight study as the developer’s PR campaign to win public and political support for their project. But even when judges agreed with the petitioners’ challenges, they noted that changing the interpretation of blight was not within their jurisdiction. One judge stated, ‘It may be that the bar [for determining blight] has now been set too low’, but added that such changes should be addressed by the legislature, not the courts (Goldstein v. ESCD 2009 NY Int. 180). Goldstein concluded that the developer’s moral geography then got embedded in the legal record:

In Hill’s (Reference Hill, Tedlock and Mannheim1995) moral geography study, she examines the oral narrative of a Mexicano peasant man’s journey. His pueblo resides at the center of all good things and the further he ventures from it, the more dangerous business transactions he encounters. Hill finds that for peasants, evil is associated with capitalism and individual profit and gain. The anti-Atlantic-Yards activists, while clearly incorporated in a capitalist system, seem to share this sentiment. But for them, evil is the state’s involvement in the transfer of land from many private citizens to just one billionaire developer. The devil is not in capitalism itself then, but in the details of the state’s giveaway of both private and public lands to a corporate capitalist. And ‘blight’, they argue, is the discursive tool that makes it possible.

Rendering a future utopia

While the developer characterized the project’s footprint as blighted, it framed what was to be built there as a utopia. Elsewhere (Snajdr & Trinch Reference Snajdr and Trinch2018) we analyzed FCRC’s promotional flyers for Atlantic Yards, which made clear utopian references to the project. In their first flyer, we found Forest City borrowing from a New York Times headline, ‘A Garden of Eden Grows in Brooklyn’, about their proposed development, to frame the information it shared with the public. With this headline, Forest City suggests that what they imagine for the community will be a nearly perfect place, through important intertextual links to authoritative media (the New York Times), historical and literary texts (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and even spiritual works (The Bible). Here, we analyze the architectural renderings of the buildings themselves as further instances of their campaign to convince Brooklyn that they were about to be part of a utopia.

A centerpiece for Forest City’s plans for Atlantic Yards included the brainchild of world-renowned architect, Frank Gehry. Gehry’s renderings were introduced to the public, first in June 2005 and then again in May 2006, at packed press conferences at the developer’s Atlantic Center Mall near downtown Brooklyn. While Gehry’s models of the plan included the basketball arena and several residential buildings, its signature feature was a sixty-two-story tower he named ‘Miss Brooklyn’ (Figures 3 and 4). The press reported that Gehry said he and his team, when visiting Brooklyn, ‘came upon a wedding, a real Brooklyn wedding, and we decided that “Miss Brooklyn” was a bride’ (Gehry, as quoted in Kuntzman Reference Kuntzman2006).

Figure 3.

Rendering of Miss Brooklyn July 2005 (image credit: Gehry Partners).

Figure 4.

Rendering of Miss Brooklyn, May 2006 (image credit: archived at https://urbanomnibus.net/2024/05/watch-this-space/).

These early designs presented the building against a black background with a spotlight, making it appear like a heavenly work of art, devoid of context. The central structure in Figure 4 seems illuminated with an almost limitless light, contrasting with the darker surroundings. The circulated images accentuated the building’s verticality, promoting its ability to ‘lift’ the area to greater heights and value (Järlehed Reference Järlehed, Jansson, Melander, Westberg and Falk2024). Gehry’s use of ‘Brooklyn’ in the building’s name, ‘Miss Brooklyn’ was a semiotic claim of regional identity and territoriality. In Trinch & Snajdr (Reference Trinch and Snajdr2020:88), we argue that gentrifying storefronts often adopt the borough’s name to convey both localness and an appeal to outsiders interested in Brooklyn’s commodified identity (i.e. a bakery called ‘Brooklynbread’ and wine bar called ‘[brook “vin”]’). This naming practice contrasts with those of older neighborhood storefronts where stores often referred to specific local places, such as ‘3rd Avenue Deli’ or ‘Fourth Avenue Bakery’.

In analyzing renderings deployed in NYC’s recent Hudson Yards project, anthropologist Julian Brash (Reference Brash2012) argues that such images impart a deeper ‘cultural or narrative function’, whether ‘clarifying or obscuring’ a development agenda, renderings ‘implicitly establish a particular narrative’. Building on these approaches to study Gehry’s renderings, we can read ‘Miss Brooklyn’ as a cultural narrative in the remaking of the borough. First, Gehry’s use of personification, deployed in the name ‘Miss Brooklyn’—as a bride—transfers a human quality to the proposed building, which then transforms the image itself as not a decontextualized architectural feature, but a culturally emplaced ‘individual’ engaged in a ceremonial rite of passage. While marriage itself may not suggest utopia, wedding celebrations, cross-culturally, often do, with their focus on youth, promise, idealism, and fertility. The building’s name, ‘Miss Brooklyn’, is cast, not as a wife, but as a perpetual ‘bride’. Weddings are commitment-making ceremonies that define an important relationship between people. The ‘partner’ in this union evoked by the name ‘Miss Brooklyn’ is the public, who is being asked to take a vow of support. As part of this personification, the gendering of this rendered character, as a bride, also feminizes the future urban space of the project site, creating a fictional and arguably utopian ‘love story’ between the place and the possessor of the place—future residents, business-owners, in-coming users of the project, and of course the media. Press coverage of every step of the project’s progress during Gehry’s tenure as head architect made much of this gendered semiotic move of personification. For example, when the project was down-sized in 2007 (Figure 5), its height reduced from sixty-two to thirty-four stories and some of the structural features trimmed away, one journalist wrote that ‘Miss Brooklyn, the cornerstone of… Atlantic Yards’ had to undergo “plastic surgery”’ (Witt Reference Witt2007). Notably, this sardonic choice of words still bought into and maintained for public consumption the idealistic, matrimonial relationship.

Figure 5.

Frank Gehry’s reduced Miss Brooklyn office tower (image credit: Atlantic Yards website archive: http://www.atlanticyards.com/html/footer/new_images/gehry5.html).

Dorst (Reference Dorst2011) notes that personification in discourse serves many communicative and affective functions. In this project, the personified tower was not to be feared but to be honored, embraced, cared for, and loved. The words ‘Miss Brooklyn’ serves as a nickname, replacing the building’s function and creating what Agha (Reference Agha2007) calls an ‘emblem’, signaling familiarity and intimacy (Dickey Reference Dickey1997). This gendered naming creates an informal social persona, and as Reyes (Reference Reyes2013:181) suggests, it establishes group distinction, positioning borough residents as suitors of this human-like structure.

Gehry’s personified renderings of ‘Miss Brooklyn’ presented a utopia, ignoring any of the larger population’s Anthropocenic concerns. The semiotics of words and images depicted positive transformation, progress, and prosperity through a metaphorical wedding of place and the public. However, in this case of semiotization, personification obscures the capitalist, extractive processes beneath, shifting focus from land as capital to the building on it as a humanized partner.

Rendering a dystopian future

For a time, Gehry’s renderings defined the public’s understanding of Atlantic Yards, as most early press coverage featured images of Miss Brooklyn. However, on June 19, 2006, 12:14 PM EST, renown Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem published an ‘Open Letter to Frank Gehry’ on Slate.com. Lethem begins as an artist appealing to another artist, with exclusive understanding of art and the sensuality of life. But Lethem also later appeals to the starchitect ‘as one citizen to another’, framing himself and Gehry as members of the broader population. This dual voice of engagement is precisely the tack that Czech dissident Vaclav Havel used in his 1975 Open Letter to Gustáv Husák, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia during its oppressive period of normalization following the Soviet crackdown on the 1968 Prague Spring. Writing ‘Dr. Husák’ as a ‘citizen of this country’, Havel, as does Lethem, appeals both to the common identity of citizenship and to his recipient’s intellectual training with the title ‘Doctor’ (Vladislav Reference Vladislav1986). The open letter format is a powerful tool, alluding to, but transcending the private conversation and directing the message toward a public audience.Footnote ⁷ Havel challenged the communist leader by saying to him ‘consider seriously the matters to which I have tried to draw your attention… that you assess in their light the degree of your historic responsibility, and act accordingly’ (Vladislav Reference Vladislav1986). Lethem used a similar strategy to approach Gehry, writing, ‘I find a pervasive mood of resignation… among local friends and neighbors… they fear engaging in a hopeless struggle’. But he also challenged the famous builder to stand by his own principles and ‘walk away’ from the project. Writing in this way, Lethem attempts to magnify for Gehry the doom and powerlessness locals felt, arguing, it seems, not only was this terrible mistake of a project in Gehry’s hands, but that the well-being of the community was as well.

But unlike Havel, who had to rely on words alone, Lethem included vivid critique from Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn’s (DDDB) website that utilized FCRC’s original renderings of the scheme. In Figure 6, for example, one of Gehry’s renderings, emplaced within the context of ‘low-rise Brooklyn’—where diverse neighbors were living in two- or three-story row houses—had been manipulated to show the six parallel shadows cast over the area by the proposed buildings.

Figure 6.

Rendering with shadows added to neighborhood near project footprint (image credit: uncredited image from Norman Oder’s (2005) Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report; see https://atlanticyardsreport.blogspot.com).

DDDB used this image as well as others to demand a better and more accurate EIS of the plan that would bring quality of life, access to sunlight, and other environmental issues such as traffic, population density, infrastructure strain, and security issues to the forefront. Figure 7 shows another anti-Atlantic-Yards image included in Lethem’s slide show. In the left a graphic of children playing in a cozy playground on a partially cloudy day is juxtaposed to a graphic on the right with an image of the same children threatened by Gehry’s looming residential towers blocking the sky. Throughout our ethnographic research, beginning in 2003, we heard newcomers who had moved from Manhattan talk about how they loved Brooklyn because they could see the sky—which is often obscured in Manhattan by its skyscrapers. Here, a dystopic rendering suggests, at the very least, a light-deficient dystopic environment.

Figure 7.

Dean Street Playground with added images of Atlantic Yard project towers. Brooklyn Street image (image credit: uncredited image from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report).

In Figure 8, another graphic depicts pedestrians happily walking in leafy Prospect Heights. But in Figure 9, a reproduction of the same photograph includes a large portion of Gehry’s rendering of ‘Miss Brooklyn’ photoshopped into the background—blotting out the sky and creating a possible sense of claustrophobia.

Figure 8.

Brooklyn Street image (image credit: uncredited image from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report).

Figure 9.

Brooklyn Street image with rendering of Miss Brooklyn added (image credit: uncredited image from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report).

Finally, in Figure 10 we see images combining both the playground setting and renderings of the structures to convey the project as a towering imposition over their once sunny Brooklyn. By reframing these renderings and reposting the images online, activists represented the project as an impending urban disaster. Atlantic Yards became a looming, Godzilla-like, larger-than-life monster that could destroy the little people and their spaces on the ground, beginning with the borough’s most vulnerable residents: children.

Figure 10.

Dean Street playground wide view with renderings of towers added (image credit: uncredited image from Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report).

These manipulated images of the developer’s plans suggest an ominousness in the future cityscape, and they were circulated not just from Lethem to Gehry, but also on opposition websites such as DDDB.org, AtlanticYardsreport.org, and other activist websites and blogs. Lethem’s assessment was that the Atlantic Yards project was a terrible mistake for humanity. At the same time, the activists’ renderings depict the opposition’s focus of concern on how people will take up the development and how it will affect people in place. In this sense, it becomes clear in their critique that ‘people’ for the developer are interchangeable.

Rendering new forms of samizdat to broaden expressions of development crises

Lethem’s Open Letter, the recontextualized renderings created by the opposition, and Patti Hagan’s grassroots EIS blight rebuttal can be viewed as new forms of samizdat—a Russian term meaning to self-publish. Samizdat refers to the genre of grassroots, often hand-printed, and largely clandestine publications that emerged under communist regimes.Footnote ⁸ During the Soviet period, producing samizdat was a way to challenge totalitarian power, which controlled the press and publication industry, and thus freedom of expression. It began with hand-typed texts, circulated secretly among readers. Under communism, this type of grassroots publishing was very dangerous, as materials were seized and its authors and distributors arrested and interrogated (Snajdr Reference Snajdr2008). But as samizdat developed, its authors utilized the very elements of the state itself to challenge it as parody or critique. For example, in Slovakia in 1987, Bratislava/nahlas was published as an unofficial ‘report’ on the city’s dangerous environmental conditions of the period. Around the same period, Slovak dissident Jan Budaj put up posters advertising a concert by ABBA, a popular international musical group, that would never take place, because the band was forbidden to perform in the country. Budaj called his texts cultural fiction, emphasizing not only the sad state of what was, but the sadder condition of what could not be (Snajdr Reference Snajdr2008). While no longer illegal or clandestine, activists in contemporary Slovakia continue this tradition to critique authority (Snajdr Reference Snajdr2012).

In a similar way, anti-Atlantic-Yards grassroots generated- and disseminated-renderings critique the limiting discursive representations put forth by the developer under the sociopolitical order of a state enacting neoliberal policy. In studying samizdat, Komaromi (Reference Komaromi2004:604) recognizes Derrida’s (Reference Derrida and Spivak1976) concepts of the trace and play ‘between the physical form and the ideal content, between the signifier and the signified’ and collective and individual authors, and notes that ‘this spirit of “play”’ in all senses strongly infused samizdat from its inception. We find co-constructed texts on websites such as NoLandGrab.org or Brownstoner.org with posts and comments to posts by anonymous authors. Like Soviet period samizdat writing, which created a collective counter-authority as it was circulated and consumed, these anti-Atlantic-Yards renderings, as digital texts, cultivate a playful but highly critical engagement with official authoritative texts.

All of these renderings show variations of engagement with or resistance to urban redevelopment aimed at controlling both the place in question and the semiotics circulating about the site. From Hagan’s blight study to the manipulated renderings of the architect’s designs, space is reconfigured as personal and human. The activists’ semiotic devices are meant to challenge what they viewed as false information presented by the developer about the past, present, and future reality of the area and its people, in a way akin to what Vaclav Havel attempted in his samizdat writing as a call for ‘living in truth’ (Vladislav Reference Vladislav1986). For Havel, and the anti-Atlantic-Yards activists, as is apparent in their contemporary renderings, living in truth was the perspective of representing an author’s reality regardless of the official representation on the part of a political and economic regime.

New renderings of mytopia

As the opposition to Atlantic Yards grew, their criticisms were countered by the developer with a new semiotization of the project. While the developer’s first project images were devoid of any context, their second set of renderings of a revised plan was more sophisticated in their emplacement. At a public meeting we attended in 2010 at Boro Hall—Brooklyn’s local seat of government—Forest City unveiled a revised version of the sports arena and one high-rise building, then known as B1. By this time, Frank Gehry was out of the project, and SHoP architects, a new kid on the architectural block, had taken over the project’s design. SHoP architect Greg Pascarelli presented a PowerPoint filled with renderings of what he called ‘the plaza’—a ‘public space’ plan—that would be the new signature feature of the arena’s entrance. A centerpiece of his presentation was what he called the ‘oculus’—basically a hole in a ceiling, but within which was included a curved digital screen (Figure 11). In his presentation, Pascarelli linked this structure to the ancient architecture of the Pantheon in Rome, and he touted it as a design that would ‘surely one day be an iconic marker of Brooklyn’.

Figure 11.

Barclays Center rendering: SHoP Architects image still from presentation (image credit: https://www.behance.net/gallery/6105749/Barclays-Center-by-SHoP-Architects).

Because this project would be using public funds, and the developer promised community benefits, Pascarelli presented the ‘programming possibilities’ for local people. In addition to providing space for high school and college graduations inside the arena, he said outside, the ‘plaza’ afforded possibilities to create ‘an outdoor café, or a green market, or even a fashion show’. In all earnestness, Pascarelli said local residents could organize ‘maybe a movie night which… would be fantastic! People could come out with chairs and blankets, and lay them out, and actually project a film on the inside of the oculus’.

At one point SHoP’s renderings became animated, but they showed the site with a lone bus and a couple of cars gliding slowly down Flatbush Avenue alongside the arena. As this image came on the screen, Patti Hagan, who had been sitting next to one of us in the meeting, whispered not so softly, ‘Where’s the damn traffic!?’ Again, she had a point. All of SHoP’s renderings left out many of the contextual realities of Brooklyn, amidst its high population density and heavy traffic (Figure 12). These fictional spaces of near emptiness are reminiscent of Jaworski & Thurlow’s (Reference Jaworski, Thurlow and Jaffe2009) study of the elitist stance of emptiness to sell ideas of place to upscale consumers. In Figure 13, we see real-life representations of traffic, including substantially more pedestrians and cars, on Flatbush Avenue.

Figure 12.

Barclays Center rendering: SHoP Architects image still from presentation (image credit: https://www.behance.net/gallery/6105749/Barclays-Center-by-SHoP-Architects).

Figure 13.

Barclays Center Traffic (image credit: Corbis—Stock Photo).

Pascarelli countered Hagan’s criticism by saying he ‘didn’t specifically put a lot of cars into this animation because, for one it’s not easy to do’. Instead, SHoP ‘focused on the architecture and design’. So, to be more realistic, he told the crowd: “imagine that it’s seven in the morning on Sunday!” Some people laughed at this remark, but the renderings and the animated clip still circulated widely among the public via the internet.

SHoP’s renderings privilege a fictional perspective from nowhere. The paucity of car traffic, the limited people, and the drone’s eye view all lack definition and details of other buildings and businesses. The viewer does not have to acknowledge crucial elements of place. SHoP’s renderings accomplish the mission to re-value the land for a particular audience—one looking for their own experience of place. In the process, they erase the majority of the local population of thousands of Brooklynites living and working in the neighborhood. This erasure extracts the value of place through semiotic displacement of the elements already there. The effect is akin to Sean Smith’s (Reference Smith2025) notion of discursive extraction, whereby tourists in Myanmar’s off-the-beaten-path spaces configure what they interpret as highly valued intimate experiences with locals. These engagements become commoditized in value hierarchies ‘collected’ through ‘authentic’ tourism in marginalized geographies.

Note how in both of SHoP’s renderings, the additional buildings, yet to be constructed, appear as gossamer, rather than solid imposing structures that blot out the sky. Where people are included, we do not ‘see class conflict’ but tableaus of peaceable multiculturalism and ethnic harmony (Brash Reference Brash2012:13). Sultana’s (Reference Sultana2022) work on overdevelopment in the Global North comes to bear here as well. Anti-Atlantic-Yards activists were very concerned about population density, large influxes of visitors several times a week, and asthma rates among children—already high in the area—increasing because heavier traffic in the area would inevitably bring more pollution. SHoP’s renderings of near emptiness disguise the eventual reality in a way that almost ‘admits’ that if people saw how crowded space would be, they would not find it appealing. So, the renderings do not look like over development, they make the space look serene, ample, and if not silent, much quieter than they are in real life. We argue that this utopian perspective is designed for a neoliberal audience, or, in other words, for a group of individuals relating to a semblance of space that allows them to engage with it primarily on ‘their’ terms rather than relating to the difficult and complex realities of social life. We found evidence of this notion of the creation of a utopia for the individual onlooker/buyer/renter inscribed in the linguistic landscape on a building near the Barclays Center. The advertisement for rental apartments reads www.RentYouTopia.com, where the letter ‘u’ of ‘utopia’ is replaced with the second person singular or plural pronoun ‘you’ in the advertisement (Figure 14).

Figure 14.

Signage on new condominium building in downtown Brooklyn near Barclays Center (image credit: authors).

Such semiotics—both the explicitly written words ‘YouTopia’ as well as the SHoP’s renderings—invite viewers to see only themselves in ‘place’. The images put ‘you, the viewer’ at the center—creating a feeling of control that invites them to take the ‘you’-topia on offer, possess it, and make it their own, a ‘my-topia’.