Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 7:00 PM
NYPL South Court Auditorium
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street / Enter at Fifth Avenue

$15 general admission; $10 library donors, seniors and students with vaid identification. Tickets available online...

Marshall Berman, Professor of Political Science, City College and the Graduate Center; Mindy Fullilove, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and Public Health at Columbia University; Tom Angotti, Professor of Urban Affairs & Planning at Hunter College; and Brian Berger, photographer/blogger, will discuss the use of eminent domain and how urban renewal is changing the cityscape of New York City. Filmmaker Michael Galinsky will moderate.

After a summary of how the use of eminent domain is shaping our City, an open discussion with the audience will address what all of this means for the future of NYC.

What is the American Dream? Does it mean having a "better life" by creating a home and a community, living together for generations, building and tending relationships to one another and to a place? Or do we create a "better life" by moving up, moving out, removing the old, replacing with the new?

Between 1949 and 1973 urban renewal, a program of the U.S. government, bulldozed 2,500 neighborhoods in 993 American cities and dispossessed one million people. Roots got cut, neighbors and families became separated, languages and cultures were destroyed, and social bonds were broken.

The current exhibition at The New York Public Library, Eminent Domain: Contemporary Photography and the City (through August 29), features the work of five contemporary New York–based photographers - homas Holton, Bettina Johae, Reiner Leist, Zoe Leonard, and Ethan Levitas - whose works intersect and resonate with current concerns about the reorganization of urban space, and its public use, in New York City. Artist Glenn Ligon offers the literal narrative of his own housing in the city. In addition to proposed regulations that threaten First Amendment rights to photograph in public places thus becoming a form of privatization of public space, questions also arise with the current private/public arrangements that characterize much of modern urban development, particularly the legal power of eminent domain, or the taking of private property for public use.

The Atlantic Yards, a hotly contested developer driven project in Brooklyn, will serve as a focus through which the evening will begin. A short trailer from the film *Battle of Brooklyn*, directed by Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley, will portray the arguments of some of the main players in this current eminent domain debate.