“It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the airplane for modernist thought and planning.” The ability to see from above, writes James Scott, introduced a sculptural ambition into urban design. Geometric clarity demanded behavioral order too: behavior that was disturbing – in every sense of the term – was deemed illegible and out of order.  In this Abstract Map, the city is made intentionally illegible as the abstraction of geometric order gives way to the abstraction of porosity and disorder.

Many threads connect a city, but in 1960s Newark, urban planners focused mainly on the city’s financial ties, arguing that a strong economy would expand the city’s employment options, tax base, and vital services. They regarded prestigious urban renewal projects, like the Newark Plaza shown here, as serving the city by supporting upper income residents and business interests that would boost the economy. The relationship between the Central Business District and the city was, in their view, reciprocal, symbiotic, and therefore equal, as represented here by the threads running out from the Newark Plaza. In reality, though, the Newark Plaza distorted the relationship between city and CBD: while workers were drawn to work in the CBD from all over the city, that workspace was small and restricted, which pressed the city into service of an isolated elite. Rather than spread employment throughout the city, urban renewal funds were used to concentrate power in the hands of the business elite, creating distortions in commuting, food deserts, and gentrification for other residents. This distortion of scale and purpose is represented by the second set of threads, running from all across the city to a tiny spot at the heart of the CBD.

Spirit House. Kawaida Temple. CFUN Headquarters. So many of the spaces and places where Newark Poet, Playwright, Activist, Professor, Father, Husband, Leader, Amiri Baraka changed his city and from here, changed the world, are gone. Urban renewal. Institutional expansion. These rhetorical staples of urban planning are meant to sound anonymous, unbiased, evenhanded, but the erasure of Amiri Baraka’s spatial legacy seems anything but accidental. The great artist who spent his life fighting for justice in Newark’s Black community deserves to be memorialized here. This map is a preliminary patchwork, pulling threads from the archives to imagine such a tribute.
             

What is a map? A document of observation, maybe. I like to think of a map as a musical score. It provides a set of guidelines for the performance of movements in time and space. Each performance has its own dynamics, which operate around, through, and beyond the temporal and spatial logics we construct (1).

This map is a notation of movements performed around and within the parameters of what, out of a continuous, ongoing landscape, has come to be defined as “Newark.” The arrangement of the notation is my own, as is every map—a reflection of subjective observations. It allows, I hope, for spontaneity—in the ways I look at the landscape as it passes by the train window, in the conversations I have at the market or the coffee shop on Halsey Street. With an embrace of spontaneity, creativity, experimentation, contradiction, and difference, I resist the tendency for a map to become entirely stable or uniform. Part of this resistance is an acknowledgement that my map is one of multitudes, a number of lines in a vast polyphony of routes. This map attempts to document an intensity of attention. Images taken in and around Newark exist under the overlaying image of a tree. Train tracks and foot steps laid down become indistinguishable from the tree’s bark. The images dissolve into a rhythmic dynamics. The logic of the lines and the meter becomes irrelevant. The map is re-created every time.

1: Larry Richards, “The Anticommunication Imperative,” inCybernetics and Human Knowing (2010).

A dark future, a hideous vision of eternal technocracy...what if the old guard of Newark had seen their visions through in an uninterrupted, untrammeled reign from the post-war period to the Year 2000? Would this be the "Newark millennium"?

Since 2019, Newark Penn Station has been undergoing a ‘modernization process’ funded mainly by the State of New Jersey and NJ Transit. The indoor spaces of the station have been filled with warning signs, directive panels, hostile architecture, and physical thresholds, pushing those who experience the space to act as appropriate ‘paying passengers.’ This map indicates where those controlling elements are positioned, distinguishing between those that dictate which behaviors are accepted as ‘appropriate’ in the environment, and those that identify spaces that are physically barred to subjectivities who differ from the ‘proper passenger.’ The discourse of safety that underpins these acts of control and exclusion took on a very different complexion in the gay scene of the 1960s and onwards: people in the community often recall Newark Penn Station as a safe space for sociability and cruising, at a time when they were otherwise excluded from open participation in public sociability.

The soundless city of Newark’s urban planners negated and neutralized the existing community. In the planners’ imagination, the city needed to be cleared out so that proper populations, sounds, and behavior could replace the improper ones. In the planners’ words, they would replace blight with high culture. The city was already full of sounds, though. In these two maps, the voices of those living in neighborhoods repopulate the barren urban renewal map with waves of human sounds.

“But when the workday is over, and between 300,000 and 400,000 in-migrant workers desert Newark for their suburban sanctuaries, the city becomes a place bereft of culture and interest.” With these words, the Urban Land Institute sought to justify a sweeping urban renewal program in 1960s Newark, even more immense than the one undertaken by the Newark Housing Authority. The NHA’s plans, which would have displaced 20% of city’s population (80,000 people) was too cautious and contained for the ULI, which advocated further clearing for cultural institutions that would attract white suburbanites to live or play in the city after working hours.

Culture as a tool for colonization, through the erasure of existing residents, was thus central to official efforts to wrest the city’s meaning away from its (unwelcome) inhabitants. To resist this erasure, the Place in Progress map layers its meaning on top of the Soundless City map to amplify the city’s residente cultures in another way. It asserts that every city is a work in progress created by its residents in spontaneous ways, whether through formal artistic production or the exuberance of street art like graffiti.