Daniel Campo, The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned, Fordham University Press, New York, 2013, 292 pages, $32.00 cloth, ISBN 9780823251865.

Daniel Campo’s The Accidental Playground is the result of an ethnographic action-oriented analysis focussed on the life course of a waterfront at Williamsburg’s Northside (also known as the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal, BEDT). The context of the study is related with the redevelopment of its neighbourhood during the New York’s revitalization programme launched in the early 1990s. More precisely, the book is concerned with the various informal ways in which a 20-acre rail-marine trans-shipment yard, which was closed down and vacated in 1983, has been occupied by different groups of “ordinary” people and transformed into a creative niche of activities and recreational social space, just before its metamorphosis into a state park in 2007.

As the subtitle suggests, the story of the waterfront is narrated from the perspective of the users. These include skateboarders, fire performers, music bands, artists, itinerant labourers, as well as groups of local residents. The goal of the author is to identify the profile of the users of the Williamsburg waterfront, as well as to document the activities and narratives related to its awakening and to its last moments of dormancy. Campo wants “to understand why so many came here and what they were looking for on this vacant swath of the East River.” He is also wondering “how a place like this could provide inspiration and guidance for formal urban design and development” (page 8).

Forms, functions and organizations of cities constantly change over time. The transformation of the Williamsburg waterfront represents a typical phenomenon of our time. Vacated sites such as brownfields and BEDT represent characteristic features in the landscape of the so-called post-industrial cities. As revealing signs of deindustrialization processes, they emerge through factors such as the restructuration of the system of production, the delocalization of the infrastructure of production, as well as technological development, population growth, urbanization, and the need for more space. In such context, the increasing number of sites vacated through the transformation of brownfields constitutes a physical, social, economic and ecological challenge for regional urban politics and people living in cities. Studying the life trajectories of ordinary people and understanding the creative ways they relate practically and symbolically to such sites is crucial to better face this challenge.

Today, the life trajectories of brownfields are well known. Scholars such as Charles Ambrosino and Lauren Andres (2008) identify three main stages: i) l’ “avant-friche” (the moment before the awakening of the brownfield), ii) le “temps de veille” (the awakening time of the brownfield) and iii) “l’après-friche” (the moment after the awakening of a brownfield). The first moment expresses a sign of weakness of industrial activity and a progressive abandonment of the land. The second stage of the mutation is characterized by the transformation of the physical frame and social life of the abandoned area. This transformation is caused, on the one hand, by the effects of natural forces and, on the other hand, by informal exploration and occupation by diverse kinds of groups of ordinary people.

The beginning of institutional zoning, planning and designing marks a new step in the mutation process of brownfield areas. At this stage these are often reduced to a “wart in stand-by” in urban politics (Lacour, 1987). They are treated by professional urban experts as zones sitting in the margins of urban dynamics until they are formally redeveloped through institutional plans. This leads to the transition to the third moment, “l’après-friche”. This is the moment just after the brownfield has been vacated and is often characterised by conflicts of interests, negotiations and power relationships among all various actors involved in the process. This is precisely what happened with the Williamsburg waterfront.

By tracing the story of the life course of the waterfront from its “awakening” until its transformation into an official state park, Campo offers an insightful ethnographic study of the everyday life of a vacant brownfield.The Accidental Playground provides a great contribution to emerging debates on vernacular creative city dynamics. In particular, it offers a critical view on urban politics in relation to the design and planning of parks and other public spaces. Addressed especially to students, scholars and urban entrepreneurs, the book advocates taking vernacular practices and knowledge of non-specialists (“ordinary people”) in local revitalization projects more seriously. The author also encourages us to give further consideration to the role of the “informal” in creative production, as well as to the potential of “undesigned”/ “unplanned” in urban development. By these notions the author refers to “spatial practices that are carried out absent professional design or planning, or those practices that subvert the intent of designers and planners or subvert the governance or established patterns of use of urban space” (page 28). The author argues that these practices are especially vital in urban contexts such as the formerly vacant Williamsburg waterfront. He notices that “they stimulate our imagination and excite our innate desire for exploration, play, surprise, and animate interaction with the physical and social worlds that draw upon all of our sense and instincts” (page 28).

The crucial contribution of this book, however, does not lie in its criticism of the “top-down” planning approach itself, but rather in its attempt to reconcile professional urbanism practices with socio-geographical sensibilities. These two ways of thinking seem to have been in tension since the emergence of the debate related to “the right to the city” generated in particular by the critical works of Henry Lefebvre (1968; see also: http://societyandspace.com/material/interviews/interview-with-lukasz-stanek-about-henri-lefebvre-toward-an-architecture-of-enjoyment-and-use-value-of-theory/). According to Campo, unplanned/undersigned practices “can be sustained and intermingled with or adopted by professional urban development” (page 29).

The critical approach adopted in this book is related to the author’s professional and academic experiences in urban planning. Indeed, Campo is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, at the Morgan State University in Baltimore and a former city planner who used to work for the New York City Department of the City Planning for many years. He started to be interested in the informal activities in the vacated Williamsburg waterfront when he decided to pursue a PhD in city planning at the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. At this time he had given up his function of planner in order to take distance from the “top-down, political-economy approach” of his employers. This book takes up and completes his doctoral dissertation project (Campo, 2004).

The book consists of a prologue and nine chapters. The first pages of the book are illustrated by a recent sketched map of Greenpoint and Williamsburg (2013) and two other satellite maps of the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal and Northside waterfront showing the sites at two different significant moments of their evolution (2001 and 2012). Throughout the book, a number of black and white pictures illustrate the text. Two sections of full pages with color photographs complete the visual documentation (the first section begins in chapter three, the second in chapter six). The profusion of visual documents gives the reader/viewer powerful impressions of the waterfront environments. While the maps help localize the activities described in the text, the pictures give a “face” to the protagonists of the story. While the black and white pictures evoke nostalgia, the colored ones provide lively scenes.

The Prologue contextualizes the subject of the study. In this section, the reader learns more about the main events of the formal history of the vacated Williamsburg waterfront from the moment it became an object of public interest for different actors (State Office of Parks, Trust for Public Land, City Council, The New York University, Department of City Planning, International Olympic Committee, neighborhood organizations, etc.). Here Campo presents a brief chronicle of the struggle of Williamsburg residents who reclaim their waterfront from “trash haulers, government agents and developers who wanted to build multiplex cinemas, big-box stores, a large power plant, or residential high-rises and then build a park to serve multiple and sometimes conflicting constituencies on this same swath of the East River” (page 5). Focusing on the “untold history” of the same waterfront from the perspective of the people and groups who occupied it, the author subsequently explains his attempt to better understand what happened both in situ and at the institutional level.

In the first chapter, “Discovering and engaging a vacated waterfront,” Campo gives us a first impression of the atmosphere of the waterfront by providing rich information concerning the materiality, the social life and the landscape he discovered while starting his field observations. We also find out how the author got in contact with the people who were using this place and considering it as “fairly safe do-it-yourself recreation site where residents did the thing people do when they go to parks” (page 13). But in contrast to official parks, the place used to be an informal niche without explicit and constraining rules, which allowed people to relax, recreate, socialize, and enjoy the water and the spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Above all, the site provided an alternative and “vernacular” recreational site in contrast to the institutionalized city parks. By “vernacular”, Campo refers to the fact that the waterfront, at his awakening time, “had no professional planning, design, or maintenance” (page 13). The waterfront was also vernacular “in the sense that its physical condition or ‘design’ was often and spontaneously (re-)created, modified, or shaped by the people. Due to the lack of legal constraints and the empowering effects of ‘make your own environment’, many people engaged the landscape in a way that was impossible or prohibited elsewhere” (page 14).  Even if the vacant waterfront was also an ideal site for drugs traffic and prostitution, people generally engaged in peaceful activities and in the making of an innovative self-made park. Overall, this chapter can be considered as the lens chosen by the author to apprehend the multiple interrelated narratives accounted in the following chapters.

The chapter also offers some insights into the methodologies used by Campo. The data that are used to tell the stories of the people who appropriated the vacant waterfront, we are told, were gained through the combination of various ethnographic methods: “hanging out” with occupants of the waterfront, observing their everyday life, interviews, site photography, video recording of conversations and activities, and visual and textual analysis (mainly of maps, satellite images, tax records, sites pictures, and press reports). It would have been nevertheless useful to have more explicit information on the use of Campo’s “operating methods.” These often appear to be part of an inductive approach, rather than of a proper “unplanned” or “undersigned” research method.

Chapters Two to Six tell the stories of the social life of the waterfront and show how and by whom this place has been transformed into a recreational social space and creative niche. Chapter Two, “The Rise and Fall of Shantytown Skatepark,” retraces the story of the creation of a skatepark that used to be a famous spot in the international scene of skateboarding and its eventual demolition by the state. Chapter Three, “March and Burn: Practices, Performance, and Leisure without a Plan” tells the story of the activities of a local marching band that enjoyed the advantages given by this place to play music loud at anytime and introduces us into the activities of a group of fire performers that transformed the waterfront into their rehearsal spot.Chapter Four, “Outside Art: Exploring Wildness and Reclamation at the Water’s Edge”, explores the environment of the waterfront area and how a few artists made use of its raw materials in order to create sculptures, and installations that they finally exhibited. Chapter Five, “Local Tales: Hanging Out and Observing Life on the Waterfront”, tells the story of a group of middle-aged working-class men from the immediate neighborhood who used the waterfront as their daily “informal social club”, where they came to hang out, drink some beer, smoke cigarettes and joints, read, listen to music, while enjoying the ambiance of the waterfront.Chapter Six, “Residential life: Hardship and Resiliency on the Waterfront”, documents the story of a group of homeless people living in the waterfront who established their camp by assembling constructions debris and other found materials.

The next two chapters bring us to the level of negotiation processes between local residents who fought for the maintenance of “the people’s waterfront” and the city administration plans. Chapter Seven “Neighbors Against Garbage: Activism and Uneasy Alliances on the Waterfront” is concerned with the local activists’ fights against the garbage haulers and the city administration that planned to install a massive waste transfer facility at the waterfront. The project had finally to be abandoned, not least because of the immense public pressure. Chapter Eight “Unplanned Postscript: Dogs, Sunsets, Rock Bands, and the Governance of a Waterfront Park” illustrates the city’s rezoning of the Williamsburg and its neighborhood into a state park with condominium towers, luxury lofts conversions, and formal leisure spaces regulated by lots of laws and rules. Moreover, this chapter gives us an impression of the varied and ambivalent reactions of the former users of the waterfront.

The concluding chapter, “Planning for the Unplanned,” offers an invitation to reconsider urban planning in a way that recognises the potential of the vernacular. It advocates for a better understanding, appreciation and incorporation of the “unplanned” and “undesigned” in order to subvert conventional ways of building and maintaining urban space and therefore to foster unconstrained experiences and creative expression. Urban leadership and professional city planners are invited to reconsider their understanding of marginality, urban aesthetics and nature as well as their risk assessment concerning public space. Finally, the author also turns to the citizens, whom he encourages to reclaim their city.

In sum, through a rich and lively narrative style and profuse illustrations, the author allows the readers to immerse themselves in the waterfront’s atmosphere, and to discover peoples’ various and creative ways of revitalizing a waterfront. As the author emphasises, what happened to the Williamsburg waterfront is similar to many other places in the world where people occupy vacant urban areas. The stories related to the life course of the Williamsburg waterfront are thus helpful to better understand the complexity of the creative dynamics of undersigned/unplanned spaces. Despite taking clearly the position of the people defending their “right to the city”, this book moves beyond a critical view towards urban planning. It attempts to build a bridge between the global prospective logics of professional urban entrepreneurs and the pragmatic logics of local urban subcultures in the name of sustainable creative cities.

Nevertheless, conceptual terms like “unplanned”/“undesigned”, “informal” could have been used in more reflexive and critical ways. To define this place as “unplanned”/“undesigned” and “informal” reveals a functionalistic perspective of the urban professional/academic elite. For the users themselves, the occupation and use of the waterfront was probably more a step-by-step “planned“/“designed“ approach based on their know-how and interactions (as in the case of the building of the skatepark, for example). Furthermore, breaking the framework “formal”/”informal” would give scope to further reflexivity and therefore allow us to go beyond what can be called “methodological institutionalism”. 

References

Ambrosino C and Andres L (2008) Friches en veille: du temps de veille aux politiques de l’espace. Espaces et société 3 n.p.

Bochet B and Andres L (2007) La mutabilité à l’épreuve de la durabilité ou comment relire la réutilisation des territoires urbains délaissés sous le couvert de la ville durable. XLIIIème colloque de l’ASRDLF. Grenoble-Chambéry.

Campo C (2004) On the Waterfront: Vernacular Recreation at Brooklynn Eastern District Terminal. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Lacour C (1987) La réinsertion urbaine des friches industrielles: la ville redécouverte. Revue d’Economie régionale et urbaine 5 769-83.

Lefebvre H (1968) Le droit à la ville. Paris: Éditions Anthropos.