Teaching and Learning Anthropology

Government developers have put up yet another portion of Harlem’s 125th Street for redevelopment. After a 2012 government-sponsored call for development proposals, state developers selected the National Urban League (NUL), a civil rights and urban advocacy organization that serves African Americans and other underserved communities, and Hudson Companies, Inc. for a $242 million development project—the Urban League Empowerment Center (ULEC), which will include the NUL as the lead tenant and will be accompanied by various retailers, other nonprofit organizations, and housing units. In this student showcase essay, I reflect on my experience writing an opinion piece in an urban sociology course about the construction of the ULEC and the story of cross-sector urban development behind it. By bringing primary source documents and relevant course readings into conversation with each other, I was able to revise my understanding of the hidden layers of urban development and the actors that were involved in these processes. Additionally, writing an op-ed that put these sources into conversation allowed me to reflect on my own positionality and relationship to the processes of neighborhood development under study.