Learning to See SPURA

Reflections on urban displacement, art, and community praxis

For forty years, as New York’s Lower East Side went from disinvested to gentrified, residents lived with a wound at the heart of the neighborhood, a wasteland of vacant lots known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA). Most of the buildings on the fourteen-square-block area were condemned in ...
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Learning to See SPURA

When SPURA and Visual Urbanism Meet

An interview with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, a new book by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, charts the long, dispiriting, and complicated history of the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (SPURA) on the Lower East Side of New York. Over five years, Bendiner-Viani walked ...
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When SPURA and Visual Urbanism Meet