Glossary

action level

The reading at which monitoring requires something to be done. On this site’s construction monitoring the fifteen-minute time-weighted average action level for PM-10 dust is “100 ug/m^3 greater than upwind”, and the stop-work level is “150 ug/m^3 greater than upwind”.

administrative violence

Harm produced by the ordinary operation of administrative systems rather than by anyone’s decision to do harm. Spade argues that “administrative norms or regularities create structured insecurity and (mal)distribute life chances across populations”, and that systems which classify people “invent and produce meaning for the categories they administer”, so that those categories manage both the population and the distribution of security and vulnerability.

Such systems, he writes, “often appear 'neutral'”, especially where discrimination has been framed as the bad intent of individuals.

after-hours work variance

Permission from the Department of Buildings to do construction work outside the hours the City allows it. The Department requires one for “construction activity before 7:00 am, after 6:00 pm, or on a Saturday or Sunday”, and an applicant “may request an AHV permit for any number of days within a window of 14 consecutive days”; days beyond that window need a separate application.

alternative noise mitigation plan

A plan the Department of Environmental Protection approves when after-hours construction is authorized on grounds of undue hardship. Under Administrative Code §24-223(e)(5) the hardship may rest on “unique site characteristics, unforeseen conditions, scheduling commitments and/or financial considerations”, and the plan sets out “the activities and devices that will be used for such after-hours construction”. A construction noise mitigation plan must be filed first.

Article 78 proceeding

New York’s proceeding for challenging a decision of a government body or officer in court. The Civil Practice Law and Rules sets out the questions it may raise, among them “whether a determination was made in violation of lawful procedure, was affected by an error of law or was arbitrary and capricious or an abuse of discretion, including abuse of discretion as to the measure or mode of penalty or discipline imposed”.

It also reaches “whether the body or officer failed to perform a duty enjoined upon it by law” and whether it “proceeded, is proceeding or is about to proceed without or in excess of jurisdiction”.

brownfield

A category in State law, not a description of a place: land where a contaminant exceeds the State’s cleanup standards for the use the property is reasonably expected to have.

The statute defines a brownfield site as “any real property where a contaminant is present at levels exceeding the soil cleanup objectives or other health-based or environmental standards” the department adopts, and excludes land already carried on the State’s registry of inactive hazardous waste disposal sites.

carceral continuum

Foucault’s name for the carceral as something wider than the prison, read here in Schept’s gloss: the continuum “refers not only to the seepage of logics from the prison into other structures of society but also to the physical continuities between the institutions” — the list Foucault gives runs from public assistance to the orphanage, the reformatory and the prison, and from the school to the almshouse.

Schept uses it of a site where a jail, a juvenile facility and a work release center were to stand with food pantries, housing assistance and shelters in their orbit, as points on one continuum of care.

carceral devolution

Miller’s name for “a set of interrelated policies that transfer carceral authority — in this case the authority to rehabilitate and supervise prisoners — from federal and state-based institutions to local ones”. He describes the shift as geographic and conceptual at once: rehabilitation “outsourced and privatized, moving from within prison walls and into the therapeutic spaces, church basements, and community centers of the inner city”.

carceral humanism

One of the forms taken by what Kilgore calls the re-packaging of mass incarceration: it “recasts the jailers as caring social service providers”, so that carceral expansion is presented as the provision of care. He names mental health as its cutting edge, and notes that some call it “incarceration lite”.

carceral non-profit

Kurti and Shanahan argue “that the defining feature of carceral non-profits is their role in steering radical change towards piecemeal liberal reform, and the promotion of carceral expansion under the guise of decarceration” (p. 597).

They put the term to work on the plan to replace Rikers Island: “the demand to build supposedly humane prisons nationwide signals a new development in the involvement of what we call carceral non-profits in the reconfiguration of mass incarceration” (p. 599). Such organizations, they write, “actively campaign for, and even design, sites of human caging” (p. 600).

carceral spillage

The spread of carceral forms of management and operation beyond the prison, into the institutions and ground around it: fixed terms of stay, conditions of residence, monitoring, and removal. The term describes forms that appear in the record. After Michel Foucault’s carceral continuum, as read by Judah Schept.

community land trust

A nonprofit that holds land out of the market on a neighborhood’s behalf.

South Bronx Unite: “A community land trust is a tool that allows a neighborhood to remove land from the speculative market and hold it permanently for public good. It shifts land from being a commodity to being a shared responsibility.” It acquires land, holds it in perpetuity, and governs it democratically.

duration

How long a record runs between its start and its end, or, where no end is recorded, until now.

E-designation

A mark on a tax lot recording an environmental condition attached to a zoning action.

The designation (E) shows that “environmental requirements pertaining to potential hazardous materials, noise or air quality impacts have been established” with an amendment or action under the Resolution; the requirements themselves sit in the CEQR determination, listed in Appendix C.

economic rent

What is charged above what a thing costs to produce.

“Price is what people have to pay. The margin of price over and above real cost value is called economic rent.” Hudson adds that “classical value theory isolated this economic rent as unearned income”, and gives the case of landlords whose land rose in value because the City built a subway: “unearned because the Upper East Side landlords didn’t do anything themselves to increase the value of their property.”

emergency declaration

The instrument that removes the judicial step before a City demolition. Demolition by the City would ordinarily require a court precept first; under the Administrative Code the Buildings commissioner, on finding a structure in imminent danger of collapse or serious injury, may direct another agency to perform the demolition instead, and the City’s expenses then become a lien on the land.

floor area ratio

How much building a lot may carry, as a ratio.

“'Floor area ratio' is the total floor area on a zoning lot, divided by the lot area of that zoning lot.” Two buildings on one zoning lot are added together.

gap

A place where an instrument was required to produce a record and did not, or produced one that contradicts its own source. It is an attribute of the instrument.

Five kinds appear in this project — an obligation with no measurement in the public record; a measurement incapable of testing its own limit; a threshold with no stated provenance; a dataset that disagrees with the document it represents; and an absence in an archive mistaken for an absence in the world.

The last kind is the project’s own.

inclusionary housing (designated areas)

The older of the Resolution’s two inclusionary programs, kept alive for sites already in it. The current text provides that a generating site subject to a regulatory agreement as of 5 December 2024 “shall continue to be subject to the Inclusionary Housing Program as set forth in Sections 23-154 and 23-90, as such Sections existed prior to December 5, 2024”.

instrument

A thing the City does that leaves a record: a designation, an order, a violation, a charge, a lien, a permit, a variance. Each has a name, a legal basis, a form, and an effect that can be traced to a parcel.

invited and invented spaces of participation

Miraftab’s distinction between two kinds of space in which people act. Action within the invited spaces, however inventive, “aim[s] to cope with existing systems of hardship and [is] sanctioned by donors and government interventions”. Within the invented spaces, “grassroots actions are characterized by defiance that directly challenges the status quo”.

She stresses that the two are not mutually exclusive: the same people move between them, using whatever is effective at a given time and place.

lien (expense lien)

The debt the City’s own work leaves on the land. Where the Buildings commissioner finds a structure in imminent danger and directs another agency to demolish it, the City’s expenses become a debt recoverable from the owner and a lien on the land, ranking ahead of every other lien except taxes and assessments.

managed time

The project’s title and its subject. What the record holds is a difference in duration: a vacate order has no expiry; a designation requiring affordable housing sits on a lot that has not been built on; an emergency shelter has been given a closing date.

Time is the thing being managed, and it is not managed at the same rate everywhere.

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing

A requirement attached to the map: in an MIH area, new housing must include affordable housing.

In a Mandatory Inclusionary Housing area “no residential development, enlargement or conversion from non-residential to residential use shall be permitted unless affordable housing” is provided, except where the Board of Standards and Appeals permits a reduction. The Resolution states the purpose as promoting affordable housing “for residents with varied incomes citywide”.

manufacturing district

Any district whose designation begins with M.

“A 'Manufacturing District' includes any district whose designation begins with the letter 'M.'” The number and suffix that follow carry the regulation.

noise

Sound that someone has judged unwanted. On this site that judgment is usually the City’s: noise is sound measured against a limit, at an hour, under a permit. What the City does not measure, such as children in St Mary’s Park or music on East 149th Street, is sound but not noise.

non-conforming use

A lawful use that the district’s rules no longer allow.

“A 'non-conforming' use is any lawful use … which does not conform to any one or more of the applicable use regulations of the district in which it is located, either on December 15, 1961, or as a result of any subsequent amendment thereto.”

non-reformist reform

A reform that shrinks carceral capacity rather than legitimating it. Schept ends his book on “nonreformist reforms, or abolitionist alternatives”, which he describes as “expressly committed to decarceration and to shrinking (and ultimately ending) our reliance on incarceration”, and sets them against the reforms he found in his case, where reform and expansion were mutually constitutive.

progressive punishment

Schept’s study of a county that rejected mass incarceration in its politics and expanded its jail anyway. Progressive punishment is that condition: neoliberal ideology naturalizing carceral expansion into the political common sense of a community reeling from deindustrialization and urban decline.

property speculation

Buying, holding or selling land for the gain expected from its future value rather than its present use.

“Real estate speculators choose to invest in a particular location because they identify a gap between the rents that land currently offers and the potential future rents it might command if some action were taken, such as evicting long-term tenants, renovating neglected or unstylish properties, or demolishing and reconstructing buildings.”

real estate state

Stein’s name for “a political formation in which real estate capital has inordinate influence over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics and the lives we lead”. He presents it as one expression of government among others, alongside the carceral, warfare and welfare states, and as most firmly grafted onto municipal government, because that is where the state’s physical planning is done — which puts planners at its center.

reformist reform

A reform that expansion feeds on. Schept sets his abolitionist alternatives against “the way expansion and reforms were often mutually constitutive” in the county he studied: the reforms and the jail growth made each other.

Its opposite is the non-reformist reform, which he describes as “expressly committed to decarceration and to shrinking (and ultimately ending) our reliance on incarceration”.

relocation

A City record that moves people, or an institution, from one place to another on the City’s schedule: detention to be moved from Rikers, a closure, an order to vacate. The term names the administrative act.

scheduled

A record that fixes when something will happen: an approval with a completion date, a permit with a term.

Special Mixed Use District

A district where manufacturing and residence rules are mapped over the same ground.

“In Special Mixed Use Districts, an M1 District is paired with a Residence District, as indicated on the zoning maps.” The chapter’s purposes include “to promote the opportunity for workers to live in the vicinity of their work”.

special permit

A discretionary permission written into the Resolution itself, granted case by case.

The Board of Standards and Appeals may “grant special permits for specified uses in specific districts” and “permit specified modifications of the use or bulk regulations of this Resolution”. The City Planning Commission holds the same power over the permits assigned to it.

the corridor

The run of tax lots on Concord Avenue between East 141st and East 145th Streets, which the city’s Zoning Resolution placed in an M1-1 manufacturing district in December 1961. It is the ground ZONED follows, and the lots on it are the ones this project traces through the zoning record.

transferred

City land moved from one agency or public use to another by an instrument with a date.

use group

The Resolution’s classification of what may happen on land; a district permits by Use Group.

Uses “have been classified and combined into 10 separate Use Groups with similar characteristics”.

vacate order

An order requiring the occupants of a building, or part of one, to leave and not return.

Under the Housing Maintenance Code the posted order stands “until such order is revoked”: the department may revoke it or extend the time for compliance, and the article sets no date on which it ends. A Buildings order is a different instrument: its written order must state a certification date, and rescission is discretionary and conditioned on payment of penalties.

variance

Permission from the Board of Standards and Appeals to depart from the Resolution, on hardship.

Where strict application causes “practical difficulties or unnecessary hardship” the Board may “vary or modify the provision so that the spirit of the law shall be observed, public safety secured and substantial justice done”, and only on making every finding the section lists.

zoned

A designation the City maps onto land; on this row, the manufacturing designation first mapped in 1961.

zoning district

A mapped district, named on one pattern: a letter for the land use, then numbers and sometimes a suffix.

“Each zoning district is designated by a letter indicating the general land use classification – R for Residence, C for Commercial and M for Manufacturing – followed by one or two numbers and, sometimes, a letter suffix.” In manufacturing districts the first number sets the intensity of permitted uses and the second the bulk and parking.

zoning lot

The unit zoning measures, which is not the same as a tax lot.

A zoning lot is “a lot of record existing on December 15, 1961”, or a tract within a single block held in single ownership, or contiguous lots of record under single fee ownership when a permit or certificate of occupancy is filed for.