The Accidental Playground: Brooklyn Waterfront Narratives of the Undesigned and Unplanned

Abstract

The undesigned and the unplanned are the subject of Daniel Campo’s The Accidental Playground, and a perennially difficult topic for designers and planners to engage. The more value ascribed to such ad-hoc, DIY or insurgent spaces, the more difficult it is to define the role of urban professionals in creating or safeguarding them. In recent years, a spate of theories has highlighted the value for cities and their citizens of self-built and self-organized spaces. Design theories of everyday urbanism (Margaret Crawford), insurgent public space (Jeffery Hou) or loose space (Karen Franck) build on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel De Certeau or. more recently, anthropologist James Holston. This tome, among the more concrete and practical-minded, takes the form of an ethnography of space. Our guide is a former planner for the city of New York turned planning educator, whose experiences inform his foray into and observations of his subject. The playground in question is a neglected space along Brooklyn’s post-industrial waterfront, the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT)—an industrial freight yard turned leftover and contested space in Williamsburg’s dramatic redevelopment and gentrification saga of the 1990s and 2000s. There, Campo reveals a multi-layered, multi-functional space that offered freedom, access to nature, and community for a number of marginal populations. As the neighbourhood changed, the mainstream wised up, planners and official institutions got involved, and ultimately everything was ruined. What happened at BEDT and how it went wrong are the two poles of the story—both a nuanced appreciation and a cautionary tale. The result is as much a portrait of fin de siècle New York as it is a story of the park.