questions for 09 October quiz

In the quiz of 09 October, at least one of the following questions will be asked... the answers are following the questions... and (always) be ready for classical questions such as "what does this (Berman's) text tell us in terms of planning?" or "what was the main message behind this text". 

+ you will also have a vocabulary quiz from the words of Harvey and Berman's texts... you can study the words of the two texts by clicking the quizlet page link in the menu

1) (Gizem &Songül) According to Berman, (by giving reference to Harvey) what is the ideal type of relationship between Modernism and urban planning? 

Although Harvey states that the residents of a city has the right to shape the environment they live in, Robert designed the city with symbolization and huge roads by ignoring the residents in the name of social order and expropriation. Modernism destroyed social institutions, environment and moral values until today and created again the cities. If Modernism and urban planning works together, this system serves only to economic and politic efforts.

2) (Gizem & Songül) According to the reading, how did construction projects of Moses affect residents?

These projects effected negatively residents,especially low-income groups and labours. Residents did not need roads also they have not a themselves cars but Mosess built expressways and parkway. The conclusion of these projects the most people migrated another cities and were disspossed.

3) (İpek) Can physical design be used for social discrimination? Give an example from Moses

"Moses’ parkways could be experienced only in cars: their underpasses were purposely built too low for buses to clear them, so that public transit could not bring masses of people out from the city to the beach. This was a distinctively techno-pastoral garden, open only to those who possessed the latest modern machines, this was, -remember, the age of the Model T – a uniquely privatized form of public space. Moses used physical design as a means of social screening, screening out all those without wheels of their own."

4) (Nihan) + (Nicola) "These projects (Bridges, parks, roads, tunnels, dams whis are built in 1930's) were planned around complex and well-articulated social goals." What are these goals?

These projects were planned around complex and well-articulated social goals. First, they were meant to create business, increase consumption and stimulate the private sector. Second, they would put millions of unemployed people back to work, and help to purchase sociale peace. Third, they would speed up, concetrate and modernize the economies of the regions in which they were built, from Long Island to Oklaoma. Forth, the would enlarge the meaning of "the pubblic" and give symbolic demonstrations of how American life could be enriched both materially and spiritually trough th medium of pubblic works. Finally, in their use of exciting new technologies, the Great New Deal projects dramatized the promise of a glorious future just emerging over the horizon, a new day not merely for privileged few but for the people as a whole. Moses was perhaps the first person in America to grasp the immense possibilities of the Roosvelt administration's commitment to public works. 

5) (Giacomo) What are the effects of the modernization on the everyday life? Give an example from the text. 

As I saw one of the loveliest of these buildings being wrecked for the road, I felt a grief that, I can see now, is endemic to modern life. So often the price of ongoing and expanding modernity is the destruction not merely of "traditional" and "pre-modern" institutions and environments but-and here is the real tragedy-of everything most vital and beautiful in the modern world itself. Here in the Bronx, thanks to Robert Moses, the modernity of the urban boulevard was being condemned as obsolete, and blown to pieces, by the modernity of the interstate highway.

6) (Onur) How did Moses convince mass public?

It is easy to dwell endlessly on moses’ personal power and style. But this emphasis tends to obscure one of the primary sources of his vast authority; his ability to convince a mass public that he was the vehicle of impersonal world-historical forces, the moving spirit of modernity. For fourty years he was able top pre- empt the vision of modern. To oppose his bridges, tunnels, expressways, housing developments, power dams stadia, cultural centers, was – or so it seemed- to oppose history progress, modernity itself. And few people, especially in New York, were prepared to do that. There are people who like things as they are. I can’t hold out any hope to them. They have to keep moving further away. This is a great big state, and there are other states. Let them go to the Rockies." Moses struck a chord that for more than a century has been vital to the sensibility of New Yorkers: our identification with progress, with renewal and reform, with the perpetual transformation of our world and ourselves-Harold Rosenberg called it "the tradition of the New." How many of the Jews of the Bronx, hotbed of every form of radicalism, were willing to fight for the sanctity of "things as they are"? Moses was destroying our world, yet he seemed to be working in the name of values that we ourselves embraced.

7) (Rahmet Nur) What’s Moses first sucsess achievement for the city at the end of the 1920s? 

Moses' first great achievement, at the end of the 1920s, was the creation of a public space radically different from anything that had existed anywhere before: Jones Beach State Park on Long Island, just beyond the bounds of New York City along the Atlantic. This beach, which opened in the summer of 1929, and recently celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, is so immense that it can easily hold a half million people on a hot Sunday in July without any sense of congestion. Its most striking feature as a landscape is its amazing clarity of space and form: absolutely fiat, blindingly white expanses of sand, stretching forth to the horizon in a straight wide band, cut on one side by the clear, pure, endless blue of the sea, and on the other by the boardwalk's sharp unbroken line of brown.