Sharon Zukin

On her book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places

Cover Interview of December 15, 2009

Editor’s note

Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline

“Can we consume the city without destroying it?”

We highlighted two quotes.

On the first page:

“Is the idea of authenticity only a means of preserving a city’s elite cultures? Or can it be used to ensure everyone a right to stay in the place where they live and work?”

On the second:

“I have been both exasperated and enchanted by the New York City’s gilt and dross, brutal honesty and flagrant self-promotion and ability to inspire dreams.”

art / sociology / architecture / new york city / urbanism / social mobility / consumption / food / brooklyn / gans herbert /

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011