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The Manhattanville Project: Teaching Planning Law Amid University-Driven Racialized Dispossession

by Stefan Chavez-Norgaard

5.5 x 8.5, 100 pgs., $18

ISBN 978-1-962365-02-4

Forthcoming in 2025.

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Whether they currently work in academia or practice, urban planners across the United States take academic coursework in “Planning Law.” A major Planning Law topic is the use and abuse of eminent domain—possessory or regulatory "takings" of private property in the name of a public purpose. Academics, activists, and community members familiar with this topic might recall mid-twentieth century urban highway projects that bisected Black neighborhoods across America and that were justified using eminent-domain logics; these projects were often implemented without residents’ consent. Yet controversial takings projects are not just a relic of the past. Indeed, in 2010, Columbia University received a major judicial victory when 17 acres of West Harlem, a neighborhood with industrial buildings and working-class residents’ housing, were declared “blighted,” opening the door for the university’s Manhattanville Campus Expansion project. First launched in 2003, the project underwent a controversial urban planning process and is now under active implementation. The project involved intensive negotiations and private settlements between Columbia and West Harlem landowners, sustained student protests, including a 10-day hunger strike, and a novel $150 million Community Benefits Agreement. To date, the project has razed several blocks in the heart of West Harlem and Columbia students and community members alike are divided about the project’s multiple impacts.

Written by a recent Columbia University graduate student who taught “Planning Law” sections to Urban Planning master’s students for four years, The Manhattanville Project raises thorny issues not solely confined to the subjects of eminent domain and takings. The book explores American universities’ roles in furthering various forms of exclusion and dispossession, particularly of the poor and of people of color and particularly of neighbors living on universities’ doorsteps. The book also interrogates the critical Planning Law curriculum taught at Columbia and elsewhere: how ought a critical-theoretic approach to Planning Law navigate the praxis of campus-community relations? At times, the author finds, Columbia’s Manhattanville project has galvanized students and instructors, pedagogically and otherwise, to respond to the complicity of their very own institutions, and not merely in injustices of settler-colonial landed-property arrangements more abstractly. Alternatively, an overly insular focus on campus-connected injustices misses numerous seizures of “real property” occurring across American cities. The Manhattan(Ville) Project pairs seminal urban theory and Planning Law scholarship with participant observations and class field trips in West Harlem, informed by in-class discussions with Planning Law students over four years of teaching. The Manhattan(Ville) Project uncovers a troubling disjuncture between the academy’s critical theoretical discourses and actively occurring institutional practices.

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