The island of Manhattan is slowly tilting toward Hudson Yards. When completed, the project will have added 17 million square feet of residential and commercial space, 14 acres of public open space, 100 shops and restaurants, a cultural space, luxury hotel, and public school.1 We’ve grown familiar with the ingredients that go into making this kind of urban development soup: sustainable design, infrastructure upgrades, and a mixture of retail, commercial, and residential space. And of course, no description of the new development’s impact on the urban economy is complete without detailing the amenities offered back to the city’s residents: open space, affordable housing, and a self-aware carbon footprint.
Discrete development projects like Hudson Yards continue to pepper the urban landscape, manifestations of privileged infrastructure systems and accompanying capital flows that reshape the city into “splintering urbanism.”2 Such revitalization projects rely on the myth of the ideal city as economically vigorous, perpetually growing, and self-sustaining. “Urban competitiveness,” David Wachsmuth writes, “is a key phrase describing entrepreneurial urban governance oriented toward attracting globally mobile capital investment as a means of economic survival.”3 4 The city—described by Wachsmuth as an ideological construct as much as a site where this kind of financial exchange takes place—demands its piece of the global capital pie. Constructing the image of the city rests on an economic framework. As the state continues to implicate itself in entrepreneurial governance in order to stake a competitive edge, one might ask: Who’s governing whom?
There is much to be discovered in the space between what design is intended to do and what it actually does. Related Companies, the main real estate firm behind the Hudson Yards development, “is staunchly committed to sustainable design.”5 What then, exactly, is sustainable design? And how does sustainable design fit into other discourses on sustainability in the city? The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognizes that sustainability must move beyond environmental and energy metrics. Of the seventeen goals listed, its first five include “no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, and gender equality.”6 At times overlapping with, and at times a substitute for, terms like resilience, green design, adaptability, urban ecology, and environmental responsiveness, among others, sustainable design is as complex as the context out of which Hudson Yards is now emerging.
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