Where

Kaleidoscopic New York

2012-01-22T11:28:00.001-06:00

More fun with the Stereographic Street View hack. As it turns out, you can do a lot more than just make those cute little mini-planets. Long, low buildings, for example, can be fun to play around with. Here we are at Industry City in Sunset Park, Brooklyn:

And, up at Viñoly's razzle-dazzle-y Hall of Justice in the Bronx:

Skyscrapers are fun for the same reason. Here's Manhattan's GM Building (and Apple's famous Cube store):

And Long Island City's Citi Tower, warped into something of a crooked frame:

In fact, with the right site, these stereographic images can start to look like legit abstract art:

And then, of course, there's the straight-up kaleidoscopic stuff. Here's the old American Banknote Building in Hunts Point:

One of the covered sections of the High Line, near 14th Street:

Under the 1 tracks up in Kingsbridge:

Pier Luigi Nervi's magnificently weird bus terminal in Washington Heights:

Inside the Met (three cheers for Street View inside major museums!)

And last, but certainly not least, on the Brooklyn Bridge:

If anybody plays around with this thing and finds some more worth sharing, please do!

Stereographic New York

2012-01-21T13:42:00.002-06:00

Thanks to Brainpicker for alerting me to the presence of what may be the best Google Maps hack I've seen yet, Stereographic Street View. Now I know what I'm going to be doing for pretty much the rest of my life. Some early successes:

Under the Queensboro Bridge in LIC:

Then on down to Soho:

And Flatbush. The uniformity of public housing blocks makes for some really great stereographic images:

And speaking of uniform residential architecture, Fort Greene's Portland Avenue lends itself well to this format:

As does the Greystones block of 80th Street in Jackson Heights, Queens:

Then, on to fun with interestingly-shaped landmarks. The Bronx's Kingsbridge Armory:

The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint:

The New Museum:

The Whit:

And the Gugg:

The patchy quality of much of Google's Street View imagery means that a lot of stuff gets a little blurry around the edges, but the site is still terrifyingly addictive. If you enjoyed this post, stop back tomorrow for some more abstract fare...

A Year in New York

2011-10-29T18:18:00.003-05:00

A Year in New York from Andrew Clancy on Vimeo.

Goddamnit, this one's good. Also: clearly made by a Queenser. +1

Liveblogging the Tactical Urbanism Salon: Evening Presentations

2011-10-15T21:21:00.027-05:00

Evening Presentations

Introduction - Mike Lydon (The Street Plans Collaborative)

Early example of tactical urbanism: Paris book boxes along the Siene; interesting parallel between historic book box tension w/bookstore owners and contemporary arguments between foot trucks and restauranteurs
What we call tactical urbanism has been going on for hundreds of years
There has been an acceleration of TU in recent years; of 56 Open Streets initiatives in the US, more than 40 started within the past three years
Tactical Urbanism guide volume 2 will be available for d/l within the next few weeks!

Introduction - Aurash Khawarzad (DoTank:Brooklyn, Project for Public Spaces)

"Do Tanks" are more appropriate right now than "Think Thanks"
Do:Tank Brooklyn is intended to provide a platform for people to come together and work collaboratively on projects
Individual Do:Tank projects are less important than the conversation happening here tonight
We've done the smaller projects, now it's time to come together. Tactical Urbanism is not a trend, it's a movement. Let's be more organized about it and put forth a full-throated argument for why this is important in the field.
People are tired of the "talk-itecture." They're doing something about it.

New York City Department of Transportation, Andy Wiley-Schwartz

Times Square has supposed to be torn up and re-done for over a decade; it's been in the capital plan. People have just been arguing the whole time about how it should look.
In a lot of ways, the engineering for a project like this is easy; the hard part is making it a great public space. You've got to prove it.
Major lesson: Never leave a public space un-programmed, even for a minute.
Times Square Alliance helped buy chairs since city-ordered furniture hadn't arrived when DOT got go-ahead to close Broadway; w/in the hour of them going out, they were full. As a result, no one ever talked about "Can TS be a public space?" It was proven at the get-go.
There are detractors, but people are voting with their feet.
On to Putnam Triangle in Brooklyn: residents wanted to make a public plaza.
The places where different grids smash into each other are really the opportunity places.
If you're a citizen doing a tactical action you can just do something; if you're the DOT and the bus has to make a turn, that takes a lot of planning, and you can't get around it.
Bus re-routing at Putnam Triangle didn't really work at first; it took a few weeks to figure that out. You have to work hard to make this stuff work, and you have to prove it.
Eventually, somebody has to put the purchase order for the granite blocks, and the tables and chairs, etc.
First weekend Putnam was open, DOT had a huge party. You have to get people out in the space immediately.
Next stop: Jackson Heights, Queens: "I thought for sure the community groups who brought us in would take us to the main drag, but they didn't. They took us to 78th Street."
Jackson Heights is one of the most densely-populated nabes in NYC, and has one half-block park. Community idea: close the adjacent street on Sundays in summer. DOT did it! Community programmed it really thoroughly. Second year, community groups asked for whole weekends, and it went just as well. Next summer, groups came back and asked for the whole summer; community board said no because they didn't want to lose the parking.
Citizens flooded community board with supporters and won. They even got the street closed for all of September, too. Now, they've applied to the plaza program to close the street permanently. Last week, the city voted to approve the permanent closure. Also got the city to acquire a playground from a school next door and consilodate all of it into one space. This will more than double the public space in Jackson Heights.
"If that's not the most perfect tactical urbanism story, I don't know what is. The community did all of the work; all we [DOT] did was get out of their way. If they can get their act together, a lot can happen."
There are 54 plaza program spaces around the city in various states of permanence. DOT also now developing street cafe spaces now.
"One of the things I've been most surprised about since coming to DOT four years ago: if you'd have told me 25 different nabe groups would apply to close their main commercial streets over the weekends, I would have said you were crazy. But with very little marketing, we've had this happen dozens of times. This is the seed ground for these bigger ideas like 78th Street to grow."
Audience question: What happens when there's a new mayor? Andy: We're trying to build mechanisms people can still use; if the folks in Brownsville want to play chess in the street, we hope there are still ways for them to figure out how to do that. We hope that the power center goes beyond the mayor's office.
Audience question: How can the city better encourage engagement and programming from its citizens? Andy: I'd acually flip it around. Demand outstrips our capacity to regulate and approve this stuff--that's very cool. We document the process, we communicate very clearly that programming is important; it's up to other groups to encourage more of this type of stuff. Audience member: Maybe there's more of a role for groups like Partnerships for Parks. Andy: Bingo.
Aurash: How can people be flipped from fighting plazas to actually putting pressure on politicians to support it? Andy: Some people don't like the aggregation of power in any form; unless it's a form that they're controlling. We have to make sure that people support this stuff; the more we can do this and the more places we do it in, the more people hear this music and like to dance to it.

Cartopia, Kelly Rodgers

Issues in Portland (600,000 people) are very different from New York (8.3 MM people). Our food cart issues are very different; a lot of smaller cities have trouble just getting people out to support carts.
Many of the food carts are actually on private property in Portland. There are a few (maybe 16) mobile units in the city; we have close to 700 food carts operating on private property. It's doubled from 2006 to today.
How do food carts operate on private property w/o crazy regulation? Technically they are called "stationary mobile unit." As long as they can (in theory) move, they are indeed mobile, and are not subject to building code.
Same health & safety regulation as a restaurant. Same quality assurance level. But food carts were never planned by the city; there is no official food cart policy or regulation; it happened through coincidences and convenient loopholes.
Portland has a big food culture; as a result (and this is national, not just Portland) there is very high-quality food in the carts. Food reviewers in Portland do not distinguish between restaurants and food carts.
Great thing with carts: you're very small, so you can be creative and experiment.
Survey showed that food cart vendors value independence even higher than turning a profit.
First stage was food carts downtown; then food carts started taking over vacant lots and creating impromptu food cart courts; now, developers are actually bringing in food carts themselves (landscaping, power and water hook-ups, etc). The coordination improves as you go up in levels.
Some smart developers have actually laid infrastructure for food carts in ways that will be useful for buildings planned to occupy those sites in the future.
Jane Jacobs concept of "economic gardening" -- figure out where the entrepreneurial energy is and then target those areas with the resources to grow businesses. Many food cart operators in Portland do eventually want to open permanent spaces. How can we open spaces on a continuum in between food cart and restaurant to help people along?
Food cart model has shifted in PDX; other kinds of businesses are now opening in carts: salons, stores, etc.
Taxpayer-building: doing interim low-cost building that generates enough revenue to pay your taxes until you can afford to do something bigger. This is a role food carts now serve in PDX.

DePave, Ted Labbe

Project started about 4 years ago; since that time, proven to people in PDX that we can transform underused spaces at a grand scale.
Experimentation is an important theme; It would be very easy to over-design these projects, but it's fascinating to see how these sites emerge and evolve
Community that emerges from creation of these spaces. Would be easier to do with a back-hoe, but that's not the point.
Leadership is important. Officials have gotten engaged in many DePave projects. Leadership has also emerged through the movement. It's largely led by women.
Stewardship: people actively create these spaces, they understand where the water goes. "Big part of DePave for me is people reclaiming the headwaters."
Lots of Art w/DePave. "This isn't us coming in, doing design work, leading--we come in with tools and some assistance, but DePave's are very community-driven projects. About 10% of the work is done by people from organization. 90% of the people are from the site." Pavement is not permanent.
Another theme is Transformation. Easy to get caught up in Before & After pics, but the biggest transformation can be seen in the people who participate.
In Portland, there is a lot of nature close at hand. There is a lot of inspiration there.
In four years, DePave has transformed 19 sites -- around 150,000 square feet of impervious pavement has been removed. More than 2000 people have been involved, which is a lot in a small city of PDX's size.

Project for Public Spaces, Ken Farmer

PPS does Placemaking, making places where people want to be. Grew out of the work of William H. Whyte.
Whyte: "It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people; what is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished."
When you focus on place, you do everything differently.
What if we focus on building our spaces to be comfortable for 8 year olds and 80 year olds?
To create a space that really brings out the best qualities, PPS uses a community-driven approach; work with the 'zealous nuts' (term used lovingly!) to plan and manage spaces.
PPS version of Tactical Urbanism: "Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper"
Power of 10 is based around the idea that you need a fine-grained mix of uses to drive people back to a place again and again. Triangulation is how these things work together.
"If you seed an idea of a possibility for a space, it can be made real. It can be a source of inspiration in powerful ways."
Buffalo waterfront -- PPS working on redevelopment. After community input process, local paper proclaimed "It's now the peoples' waterfront."
Adirondack chairs are a big draw--people love them, they are a simple amenity that fill a space and get people to stop and enjoy.
How can we create platforms where there are organic opportunities for people to interact with the space? That's an exciting thing about this tactical urbanism movement.

CMG Architects, Kevin Conger

People will use whatever public space is available; they'll get creative.
CMG thinks about all of the many factors that are involved with space as vectors that intersect at different points in different spaces.
Intervention is a way of accrual
Do a lot of pro bono work w/Public Architecture; pro bono work is important, especially when starting out.
Starting to talk about "Tactile Urbanism" -- a riff on tactical urbanism.
At Golden Gate Park, put in a bandshell made out of salvaged car hoods and recycled bottles
There was a website where people could go throughout the summer that the bandshell was up where they could reserve time for programs; it was organically programmed
Treasure Island -- man-made island developed to be an airport, hosted a world's fair and navy base, airport never materialized. Now there's a major redevelopment underway.
CMG worked to develop a "non-hazardous" hybrid street type for Treasure Island to encourage pedestrianism

PlayLab, Archie Lee Coats IV

It's hard thing to do, propose and execute ideas without money! So we try to meet as many people as we can, as often as we can.
Work a lot with Dong-Ping Wong of Family Architects
Storefront for Art & Architecture launched a competition to challenge designers to re-think the traditional street fair tent. PlayLab won the competition with their "Worms"
Example of city orgs partnering with other orgs to make something new for the city.
Thinking about the East River now; have proposed a project called Plus Pool to allow swimming in the river. Idea is for pool walls to filter the river water to clean the East River. Not sure how this will work, but we proposed it anyway!
Created a lot of renderings to communicate the idea to people and start a discussion. We didn't know how to make a floating pool that would cost millions and millions of dollars, but we knew we could start a conversation and get people talking about it.
End of the first week of promoting this idea, got a call from the principal of the NYC office of ARUP! ARUP worked to help PlayLab design a filtration system.
We thought of this pool as a big Brita filter floating in the East River.
Started a Kickstarter campaign to try to raise $25K. Reached that in first week, wound up raising $45K to test the filtration system that they designed.
Went to Columbia to float the idea of testing the water; they helped with research. Got Parks Dept. buy-in, Columbia contributed a mobile lab and lots of researchers.
Next phase: trying to get the entire project funded. Want to test year-round; Mayor of Sydney wants it to happen down under.
Stoops are an important component of public space in Brooklyn; working to develop large mobile stoops to install in vacant lots.

Interboro Partners, Daniel D'Oca

Holding Pattern won MoMA PS1's courtyard installation in the summer of 2011 to provide seating and shade for the summer Warm-Up series.
We wondered: "What happens to all of the stuff when this four-month installation is over?"
PS1 is located in "most greatest, awesomest place in the world: Queens." [Editor's note: YES!]
While PS1 is great and energetic, it seems a bit isolated from the neighborhood around it.
The needs for Warm-Up seemed to overlap somewhat with community needs. Interboro talked to the museum's neighbors to find out what material needs they had and incorporated those materials into their design so that they could be donated after Warm-Up ended.
Community desires: mirrors, mulch, ping-pong table, rock-climbing wall, lifeguard chair, street furniture, etc. LIC tried to figure out what needs were both fun and in the public interest. Result: 80 objects and 84 trees.
Interboro considered this as a neighborhood improvement project in disguise.
Worked with Thumb Projects to develop a labeling system to show where each object was going and why. Also made a newspaper to show where materials would go.
Invited community orgs to program the courtyard. The library had artists read their favorite children's books to kids, Irish Center did quilting workshops, LIC School of Ballet did a performance.
Let the community take over the PS1 bookstore and choose what books would be sold.

72 Hour Urban Action, Nick Griffin

Development does not have to be a zero-sum game.
72HUA is a real-time design-build competition where 10 teams of 10 teams get a public site and have to imagine and implement a design intervention.
As Flux & Queens Creative Cluster work on their SumCity plan for the Dutch Kills neighborhood, 72HUA will work with them to re-imagine sites that are determined important through that plan.

Liveblogging the Tactical Urbanism Salon: Pecha Kucha Presentations

2011-10-15T15:56:00.002-05:00

Pecha Kucha

BroLab

BroLab used Q32 bus line between Flux Factory & Momenta Art to stage "Bench Press"; created a template & built benches along bus lines.
Project allowed people to see benches building built, get a sense of the work that went into them.
Did 12-15 live-build installations of benches at bus stops over the course of one day.

Vertical Theory, Karen Mackay

Wanted to find solutions for large-scale sustainability issues on a local level; looked at urban farms as a solution
Cities = limited horizontal outdoor space; how do we grow food here? Farmscrapers need lots of time & $, but VT looks at how do non-horizontal farming in a more DIY way
Looked @ hydroponics, wooly pockets, not nobody was doing these two things together; started doing prototypes to use piping in pockets to distribute water
Also working on creating prototypes in glass; harder to be DIY, but can still have an impact and get people thinking

TreeKIT, Sophie Plitt

Urban trees have many benefits: "Trees really make cities; although they're extremely ubiquitous, we don't always see them for how valuable they are."
NYC is relying on individuals, developing a stewardship model. Not really working yet.
TreeKIT hias developed a "Track, See, Collect" mapping model to increase stewardship. Currently collecting the data to allow people to track their stewardship.
Draw people [general public] into the data-collection process - "Participatory action research"

Bus Roots, Marco Antonio Castro

MTA has 4,500 buses: if every bus had a green roof, that = 35 acres of new greenspace (that's about 4 Bryant Parks)
It's a network of mobile parks that can go to the places that need them, "A network of moving gardens rolling around the city"
Prototype was built using a van; Castro developed it as part of an artist residency in New London; another was done on a small bus in Guadalajara

Bring to Light, Anna Muessig

Nuit Blanche events are one-night events that transform public space w/light from dusk to dawn; first Bring to Light happened in Greenpoint, BK, on Oct 1st 2011
Created a temporary public path along the waterfront (normally private space)--NYC has a long-term plan to make that path permanently public (example of using art to help people visualize change)
Had to work with private developers to gain access to a lot of places
Doing a nuit blanche is unique; uses industrial space, becomes more of a tactical intervention
Project increased public access to waterfront, changed the way people inhabited streets at night, and used art as a wedge to advance an urban agenda
De Certeau: Strategy is the tool of the planner, tactics is the tool of the pedestrian
Raise collective intelligence and cohesion of pedestrian

Tomorrow Lab, Ted Ullrich

Tomorrow Lab's idea: Small objects can lead to big change!
Industrial designers can help create things that shape cities; objects help to shape cities, every object is designed
Tomorrow Lab created downloadable instructions and DIY kits for creating hydroponic systems for urban environments
Want to flip the typical planning process on its head and make things
Three ideas behind Tomorrow Lab: Meet to Make (leave a residue when you meet); Communicate assembly instructions (if it can be repeatable, make sure that it is); Publish Online early, iterate!

Social Bicycles, Ryan Rzepecki

Challenge: Velib in Paris is amazing but very infrastructure-intensive
Rzepecki joined the NYC DOT around the time of the Times Square closure; founded I Bike NY
Filed a patent in June 2009 to build locking mechanism into bikes and track with GPS; low-intensity infrastructure
Gained exposure & support through the Pepsi Refresh crowdfunding project; as a result, stepped up prototyping efforts
Connected bikes to an app that maps available bikes nearby

Enabling City, Chiara Camponeschi

From urbanization to overconsumption--the way cities decide to address these issues and increase livability, we need to think about new ways of experimenting and being more curious
Who we include, variety of constituencies, makes a crucial difference
EC is a toolkit for creating enabling places of participation.
How can we engage our neighbors and work together to "create networks of urban solidarity"?
Cities need to open up spaces for public experimentation.
"If cities aren't 'enabling,' then what are they and who are they helping?"

Liveblogging the Tactical Urbanism Salon: Intro & Panel Discussion: Tactical vs. DIY Urbanism

2011-10-15T14:28:00.001-05:00

Introduction

Mike Lydon - The Street Plans Collaborative
Aurash Khawarzad - DoTank:Brooklyn / Project for Public Spaces

ML: Idea for the TUS was to look at short-term actions driving long-term change
AK: Old process of building communities is not working anymore; new more collaborative ways of doing things
AK: We want everything about today to be different; everything we do should be action-focused.

Panel Discussion: Tactical vs. DIY Urbanism

Tony Garcia - The Street Plans Collaborative
Chiara Camponeschi - Enabling City
Quillian Riano - DSGN AGNC
June Williamson - The City College of New York, CUNY

ML: New York seems to be a center of urban tactical innovation in the US; what can other cities learn from NY?
QR: NYC in particular attracts best & brightest because there's a lot of energy; but we can't ignore that these things have been happening elsewhere for a while now. A lot of these tactical actions elsewhere are done to kind of "shame" the public officials into action. And we're learning from that now.
JW: One of the factors to consider is the top-down leadership; compare that to suburbs, which have some of the most fractured governance structures in the US. Metro structures, kinds of innovation that happen here happen because, to some extent, of top-down model.
TG: Why wouldn't it start in suburbia? Urbanism in NY, SF, etc lend itself more to these types of tactical urbanism. Trying to choose areas that are more urban than not--pushing places that are almost there a bit further rather than starting from scratch.
JW: How do you find the mechanisms to make change? In suburbia, need to develop stronger relationships with private partners, developers, who own more of that landscape.
QR: We're doing tactical urbanism because of politics. We're doing these things to combat the slowness of govt. And in the suburbs, you don't have the concentration for a constituency. In the US, our own democratic processes are beginning to stifle innovation.
CC: Positive side of chaos--drives new, groundbreaking thinking. In suburbs, most of the time, the effort is to get rid of that layer of chaos and make a more quiet community. How do we form networks for people who really care about where they live? Chaos can be used in very positive way. You have to be comfortable with the unpredictable.
AK: Occupations around the country are a great example of how action can affect community planning; will discuss how to support movements like that in a bit. Question for now: What makes experience for people doing tactical projects is that we have to work with the public, a very broad group of people. A lot of people "get" tactical urbanism and understand the value in that. But many are skeptical; how do you address the skeptics?
TG: You don't convince anybody; you do the project in spite of the skeptics. When they see it in action, they'll understand. It's not about asking permission, it's about doing something and using the result of the action to convince the skeptics.
CC: Value is in creating these "aha" moments; engage in a conversation following the action. Filling the gap btwn the distrust and traditional systems, show the many ways to start getting engaged. Arts-based approaches create new opportunities for thinking about engagement and challenging traditional modes of engagement. Phrase things in positive terms; help people understand that their own creativity matters.
QR: Now, the designer is the politician, in many ways. Tactical urbanism is an alt. to New and Landscape urbanism, but it overlaps a bit with both. Example LU's hold up is Olmsted and the Emerald Necklace, Olmsted created a ground-up movement. Design was matched w/ a political, economic and social agenda and constituencies. Here, Chris Reed is doing this in Lowell, where he's creating constituencies. No one is ever 100% happy but if they're not against you these projects can move on.
JW: Tremendous power in visualization and being able to see changes. A lot of people have trouble imagining what change would look like. Even a pilot project temporarily shows alt uses; physical representation is important. Showing before & after images of retrofitted suburbia, is very useful.
TG: Suburban tactical interventions are more challenging exactly because the scale is different. Retrofitting a mall is much harder; goes beyond tactical. There is something to be said for visualization, here.
ML: What's fascinating about tactical urbanism and makes it different from guerilla tactics--it can scale to both large and small scales, from big projects to block-level actions. You're also starting to see corporations get involved in pop-up spaces--i.e. the BMW Guggenheim Lab. Panelists: can you speak to that continuum, from bottom-up to top-down?
CC : That's how you can move from a short-term action to long-term institutional change. I think tactical urbanism works best when those two worlds meet, create a conversation around participation. Citizens need to state values, push for co-design, have enabling policies to democratize access to funds. We can demand more flexibility from governance models. It's ultimately up to us to push for that.
JW: Connect this to the politics of public space. What is it, and who owns it? We have public spaces, privately-owned public spaces, de facto public spaces in shopping centers, etc etc. In suburban, partially-public spaces, there are levers that do come back to the physical form. Even if it's ersatz designed, once you put public streetscape iconography in shopping center, you're inviting people to act as citizens rather than consumers. We're operating at the blurring of the line; we have to bring private corporations into the discussion.
QR: Tactics implies that there is a larger goal we're trying to fulfill. In a democratic society, our tactics should be leading to something. Need to talk about strategy. The collective force in our society, the govt, should help set the agenda. People say it's actually a positive that OWS is happening in a POPS, since it's 24-hrs. But even if it were in a public park, we are the ones allowing it to close at midnight. The private space does not have to answer to us.
JW: But they do at some level if they're been publicly-funded.
QR: It depends on contracts, etc. But what is the end-goal of tactical urbanism?
TG: Government doesn't change or adapt fast enough to how people use public spaces. There's a lag-time there. Govt has to catch up and become that nimble, at least re: public space.
CC: What inspired me to write Enabling City is that blurring of the line between citizen and consumer. The idea that we can shop our way out of huge problems is really problematic. OWS shows that we can participate in ways that are not just about shopping. Commercial model excludes a lot of people. Challenging the privatization of participation is important.
JW: The shopping center I've been thinking about is in Silver Spring MD; there was an incident at a publicly-funded private dev where someone was prohibited by a mall cop from taking photos. Started a campaign on Flickr, had a big rally to put pressure on local govt to stop the private owner from blocking the use of the space as a public space.
AK: Community projects at DO:Tank are designed to help community but also to shock people into realizing that they are not engaged and can actually be. We have to ask now, though, why does this system where the public is so excluded exist? How did this system come to be? Can tactical urbanism change the underlying values system of how we develop and interact w/cities?
QR: Great time to ask; in the US we're starting to question a lot of things. There is a fear of power, a questioning of authority--there's a real sense that this has gone too far. TU at its best will be a thinking about how we collectivize America instead of the Tea Party isolationism. How do we come back together to produce and create together and use processes to agree on what cities should/n't have?
CC: The desire for a commercial competitive edge causes us to only celebrate values that don't allow us to think about how we want to collectively structure our cities; emphasis on individualism and consumerism creates isolation. Tactical urbanism shocks that, causes us to reformulate and reclaim public discourse for alt values to emerge.
TG: What's the value system of dev in cities? Right now it's megadevelopment. Complexity for developing property is insanely difficult--and it hasn't always been like that. Incremental development created urban fabric we love. We need to return to a tactical development model. This answers econ projects too. Ease the rules so we have smaller-scale development. That's the scale we want to build our cities at.
JW: There's an argument you can make about having a variety of scales diversifies risk; not everything has to be mega. Another question that I have is whether there are generational issues at work here? Baby boomers are moving into what they call the "senior tsunami." There's also the shrinking of the middle class, and social/econ anxieties that have driven this consumptive culture of "keeping up" with neighbors. We're going to have these people who can't drive occupying huge neighborhoods where you have to drive everywhere.
TG: Obv answer is the tech divide; digital natives here have grown to expect instant results, something we can react to. Parents' generation is more willing to wait and see the result of work. Technology is changing the way that we want to do things in the world.
CC: It's not just a matter of speed, but w/Web 2.0 values, transparency, openness--also values we want to see in the democratic process. Maybe the trust in govt is declining, faith and attachemnt to other values is growing. We see it w/digital platforms, movements like OWS, they really attract people, even w/o larger infrastructure behind them.
QR: I remember when Obama was running, there was a feeling like we were moving beyond the Baby Boomer values system. We've lived with a lot of meaningless; there's a sense were even getting tired of Web 2.0. We want meaning again. We want to think about what these things actually mean and what they do, more than improving Coca Cola's brand name on Facebook.
Audience question: Seems like, when people choose to do something rather than waiting for govt is that it offers room to fail! Can anyone talk about failed tactical urbanist moments and what that means?
QR: Was just at a conf of community design centers, and we did an entire panel on failure. Was called Fail Now Fail Often. Raises the issue of what our responsibility is to the city. If a software startup fails no one notices; if you fail in a city, it could actually hurt people. W/my own projects, I want them to fail. I want them to be so open, malleable. The failure is the game.
CC: Slogan--Try again, fail again, fail better. There is an attitide w/TU that allows for greater experimentation. If something isn't working, TU offers the opportunity to open it up to more diverse viewpoints.
TG: What's the metric by which you're measuring failure? That's an important question.
AK: We go into TU inverventions expecting to learn; there is no failure, no right way. Just go and get your hands dirty and learn over time, develop a set of principles that help us figure out what failure is.
Audience: We have to get rid of this concern with failure. The idea that there is a govt separate from people w/the answers is ridiculous. When you talk about failure, the biggest failure is when something is built exactly as you designed it. It's been imposed.
Audience: Do we really need gatekeepers? Are there examples where TU projects get shut down because they didn't get permission?
ML: Re: yarn-bombing--what is the long-term vision or goal? Is there one? Does every intervention have to have that? DIY keeps itself to small scale, chief difference with Tactical Urbanism is that there's a larger range of scales.
AK: It's important to network with gatekeepers if you want an action to have a life past your initial intervention. It's important to keep people engaged so that people actually know what you're doing. You have to work w/people who know how to get the message out. Imagery is a critical component. Can't just have images, can't just have intervention, need to have all of it to reach people who have power to make projects go beyond what you intended them to be. You'd be surprised how many gatekeepers actually do want to work with you and get involved.
Audience: Is there any way we're starting to evaluate and codify what we're doing, as a movement?
AK: One thing is the Tactical Urbanism Report that's being worked on now. Another idea from Dan Latorre @ PPS is to create a wiki where people around the world can share their experience re: action, success, failure, etc.
QR: I'm uneasy w/metrics, but stories matter, narratives are important. We need what architecture has traditionally had: critique. Talk about more than just form. Kimmelman @ NY Times is beginning to try to expand that. Focus more on critical discourse.
CC: There are a lot of efforts starting to track this stuff; more participatory research tools are starting to be used to track. Ultimately, this is tied into a conversation of metrics and expertise and the hard facts that currently influence policy-making and these arguments that w/o quantatitve data, projects are less valued. We need to figure out alternative narratives; there's a challenging but wonderful opportunity to talk about how we measure change. How do you measure empowerment? Can you?
JW: Have to get back to articulating what the strategies are. Do we debate strategic goals or do we assume that we all agree on what those are? As these actions begin to have larger effects, that discussion around assessment is important.

A Modest Proposal...

2011-10-15T11:04:00.000-05:00

A few years ago I made a series of hackmaps, using Google Earth to cobble together a few visualizations of alternate urban realities. I'd always planned to post some of the better ones to Where, and never got around to it. Recent events, however, made me think that there was one in particular that was worth sharing.

The image above was created in the fall of 2008, right as the financial meltdown was getting white-hot. The idea that the wizards of Wall Street should share their posh financial district with a Rio-style favela seemed fitting, given the number of people who were suddenly finding themselves homeless. Luckily, there was a huge hole in the ground right next door.

The site may have been overly ambitious, but it's good to see that some people have been feeling the same way.

MAS Context Issue 11: SPEED

2011-09-05T14:50:00.002-05:00

The new issue of MAS Context is out today, and you can read the whole thing online here, or buy a printed copy here. I've got an article on the effect of mobile, digital tech on the future of historic preservation, entitled On the Quickening of History. An excerpt:

These applications will eventually be used not just to find a good place for Thai food or to see where a bus route leads, but to interpret and alter the physical realm, as well. As augmented reality applications become increasingly ubiquitous, it will become impossible to separate the city from its digital self. This means that, in the not too distant future, digital layers will need to be thought of by preservationists in much the same way that buildings are today. And while it’s true that digital preservation is already a subject of discussion, that discussion is currently focused on the use of digital tools to preserve the physical world, or to preserve artistic or cultural projects that were created on digital platforms. The preservation of the platforms themselves is largely uncharted territory, regardless of the outsized impact that they have had on our lives.

Other great stuff from Candy Chang, Jesus Maria Ezquiaga, Andrew Clark, Antón García-Abril, and a slew of other great urbanists. Read on!

What Color is Your Favorite Architect?

2011-07-24T10:15:00.005-05:00

Oh joy, thecolorof works for architects, too! There are some fascinating results--so many, in fact, that you'll have to travel beyond the jump, as I don't want them mobbing the Where homepage, heh.

Corbu's swatch is, oddly enough, distinctly pastel. While the Frenchman was no stranger to the occasional burst of color, he generally opted for bold primaries. His is by far the most perplexing of this bunch, but it felt wrong to leave him off, so...

Next up is Peter Eisenmen; as it's about 800 degrees in New York right now I've found no reason to venture outside, I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon playing with thecolorof. Eisenmen's is my favorite swatch yet. It's angular, ethereal, and undeniably Eisenmen-y; more importantly, it's just plain lovely. There's an iridescence to it that I can't stop coming back to stare at. Digital happenstance at its best.

Gehry's swatch is ever-so-subtly swoop-y. There's a sense of vertical movement that I've often noticed in his buildings: they reach, as if straining to leave the ground. That comes through here nicely.

I love Gilbert's if for no other reason than the fact that the first thing I see when I look at it is the Parthenon. For such an devout Classicist, this seems totally fitting. It's almost eerie, actually.

Rem's is a hot mess, but it's probably one of the most fun of the bunch to look at. Once again: fitting.

Like Gehry's, Niemeyer's swatch feels very dynamic; curvaceous, even. The movement here is more horizontal, as if the colors are floating by.

Nouvel's is a testament to the power that one very public building can have over the popular perception of an architect's career. Well-known within the design world, Nouvel is hardly a household name. Millions of tourists visited his rufescent Serpentine Pavilion in London last summer, though, and the influence of that tiny temporary building on his public profile seems hard to deny, here at least.

The only landscape architect famous enough to generate enough imagery for a decent swatch, Olmsted's looks, as one might expect, like a Monet painting. It's quite serene, no?

It's not perfect, but there's a definite symmetry to Palladio's swatch--no accident when you've layered more than 50 images atop each other. As thecolorof sources its photos from Flickr, they can be taken at any number of angles; the fact that this swatch bears a sort of ghostly resemblance to an elevation of one of Palladio's buildings hints at the strength of the psychological influence that his work has on the viewer. Buildings do not need to be photographed head-on, and yet this swatch suggests that such behavior de rigeur for visitors to Palladio's villas.

There is a vaguely architectural feel to Rossi's swatch; as with Palladio above, you can almost see one of the architect's buildings emerge from the blur. It feels more postmodern and asymmetrical, but there's a certain structural quality to the blocks of color set against the blue sky at the top. The angles suggest a building viewed, catty-corner, from across an intersection: a whitish tower surrounded by a low-slung, reddish-gold block.

Sullivan's iconic, stylized decorative motif is undeniable in this terra cotta swatch; in the center is the hint of one of his flowering medallions, like you might expect to see running in a rhythmic strip of tile around an archway.

Van Alen's is almost too perfect, as if someone at thecolorof is secretly a die-hard, obsessive fan of the Chrysler Building, and stayed up late one night working on a special algorithm to make sure that the architect's swatch turned out just right. The strong Deco lines, the hint of the Chrysler's stainless steel crown to the right, and the Cloud-Room-mural-esque color scheme pack quite a visual wallop, in the blend.

Mies was known for his clean and simple blacks and whites, and yet his swatch bears more resemblance to the travertine floors of the Barcelona Pavilion than the bulk of his portfolio.

There's a ruggedness to Frank Lloyd Wright's swatch, and a rich, fiery tone that fits his infamously forceful personality. And, interestingly enough...

...it bears a striking resemblance to the swatch for Ayn Rand's fictional architect Howard Roark, reported to be based on the strong-willed Wright. Curious as to whether this was because many of the images sourced for Roark might actually be of Wright's buildings, I checked each of them individually. In fact, just one of the 56 photos used to create the Roark swatch had anything to do with Wright: a black and white interior shot of the Guggenheim.

We'll end with Minoru Yamasaki. The verticality of the World Trade Center architect's style is instantly apparent here. The cooler tone is also interesting to note, as the other two Modernists included above (Corbu and Mies) featured uncharacteristically warm palettes.

If you're wondering why I left out so-and-so, it's probably because their swatch wasn't very interesting; thecolorof results are pretty hit or miss. I tried dozens of architects that wound up on the cutting room floor, but you're welcome to give any name a try here. Have fun!

What Color is your City?

2011-07-23T18:34:00.000-05:00

I found thecolorof.com this evening (via Curiosity Counts), which layers recent images from Flickr sharing a common tag over each other to create swatches that resemble abstract impressionist paintings. Naturally, I spent a bit of time trying out various cities. Many wind up very similar--red/gold on the bottom, bluish on the top--which I'm guessing has something to do with the preponderance of skyline photos. But the results for some are spot-on, and even downright gorgeous. A few favorites:

What color is your city?

The Upside of Shrinking

2011-07-18T09:56:00.018-05:00

Photo Credit

Last month, Newsweek produced a list of "dying" cities in the US with "bleak" futures based solely on population loss over the past few decades. For the Love of Cities author Peter Kageyama made quick work of the dismantling of this rather lazy list over at The Infrastructurist: "As human beings," he notes, astutely, "we stop 'growing' in our early 20s, yet we hardly think of a 25-year-old as dying — still, at a cellular level, they are dying in the same way that these cities are dying. Losing population is not the same as losing hope, losing purpose, or losing life."

The loss of population does not guarantee a continued slide toward obsolescence. Conversely, an influx of educated creative types does not necessarily result in an economic boom. Everyone has the potential to be creative, but not everyone is cut out to start (and successfully run) a business. The entrepreneurial spirit is something that needs to be sparked, and then cultivated. On the list of things that can serve as that spark: watching an exodus from a place that you love. In the above-linked Burgh Diaspora post, Jim Russell shares a story about Doug Dwyer, a former First Data employee who chose to stay in Boulder when his employer moved to Atlanta. The decision to stay required Dwyer to "think like an immigrant," and he has since founded a company, Mocapay, that employs 20 people.

When it's possible for the upwardly mobile to leave, those who stay behind by choice are bound to be more invested in their cities. These passionate people are some of the greatest assets that a city can have, and the fact that there are fewer other people around inherently makes it more likely that these passionate residents will bump into each other, share ideas, and perhaps start something exciting--as long as shrinkage is managed through smart urban planning to maintain some level of density, and to preserve downtown areas as places of economic and intellectual exchange. Especially when large areas begin to empty out, it's important to think about how to encourage interaction.

In a recent promo video for the new book Living in the Endless City, Saskia Sassen was asked what makes a city successful. She answered that "It’s their incompleteness that gifts them their longevity. A city does not become obsolete." Population loss does not equal death: it's just part of the process of rebirth.

When Street Art Is More Than Street Art

2011-07-17T11:06:00.000-05:00

Photo credit

Some clever artist has plastered a series of stylized yellow protractors (or are they bridges?) around Pittsburgh, each with a (presumably) sequential number from one up into the hundreds. Apparently it's the talk of the town--so much so that, in a move truly worthy of the adjective "Keystone," the city's cops are trying to track the mastermind down so that they can charge him with a felony for property damage. In an awesome act of digital defiance, a blogger who was writing about and mapping the bridges has deleted the posts, refusing to allow his blog to be used by the authorities to bring down this gem of a project.

Moving past this dramatic and still-unfolding plot to the project itself: the simplicity of this project is a total joy. Talk about augmented reality these days focuses on digital applications, and it's so easy to forget that there are some very low-tech ways of re-framing the way that people experience the urban environment. In this project, the instigator has used some simple plastic decals and super glue to turn the entire city of Pittsburgh--already pretty fun to wander around thanks to its undulating topography and erratic street grid--into a game platform. As you chase around looking for all of the protractors, you wind up exploring the city, leaving no nook or cranny un-scanned in your quest for detection dominance.

This Pittsburgh project highlights the fact that you don't need mad app-development skillz to augment your city. While tech allows us the opportunity to tweak the urban experience in new wasy, a bit of ingenuity and some art supplies are all you need to re-engage people with the cityscape. On that note--if anyone else knows of some similarly clever interventions in other cities, please share!

Splashy Times Square Satellite View

2011-07-16T11:42:00.004-05:00

Woke up this morning to discover new Google Earth satellite imagery of Manhattan, complete with the fully-pedestrianized & mural'd Times Square. Great light too, Midtown usually looks so dark on G-Earth. Three cheers for Janette.

UPDATE: Just realized you can also get great views of a few other ped plazas. Click the thumbnails for full-sizers:

Union Square (with Greenmarket in full-swing!):

Madison Square Park:

(Also: whoever gets rid of these #$&#% borders that magically insert themselves around images on this blog when I've tried everything I can think of to turn them off wins a prize.)

On Stolen Towns, Cities as Brands, and Public vs. Private Visions

2011-07-06T09:42:00.000-05:00

Image by Flickr user philipbouchard

Revisiting a few posts that I wrote for Next American City a couple of years ago via more recent news items:

From Neighborhoods as Brands (March 2008):

Think about places in American cities that have a special cultural power. Now export them to a brownfield site one or two thousand miles away...New Orleans’ French Quarter could become one of America’s most popular exports. There could be one in Shanghai, one in Jakarta, one in Abu Dhabi, one in Zagreb, and another on the outskirts of Khartoum. These would not be theme parks, but fully-populated, 24-hour neighborhoods selling a lifestyle of jazz, street dancing, and easy living.

More recently, Der Speigel brought us news that Chinese officials have surprised residents of the Austrian town of Hallstatt by deciding to copy the entire town back east, brick for brick. Jokes about China's lasseiz faire attitude toward Western copyrights (particularly those of the intellectual variety) got tired years ago, but this latest news feels like a fresh pain. UNESCO is, hilariously, trying to determine the legality of this--as if they'll have any power at all to stop the copy from being built. What can be done?

In a country where they're building cities faster than they can fill them, it hardly seems surprising that a few would borrow heavily from existing, well-loved places, and Spiegel notes the existence of a scattering of Euro-themed suburbs near Shanghai. But while it's one thing to choose to export a place, seeing developers--from any part of the world--up and jacking a whole town should raise eyebrows. Imagine people on the other side of the world eating in a clone of your favorite restaurant, living in the bizzarro version of the apartment just above yours, listening to the kids playing handball in a counterfeit of the park outside your side window.

Then again, try as they might, Starbucks' store designers can't make a London shop feel that different from one in Chicago. That is to say, the places that we inhabit in globalized cities are already feeling like copies of copies. If the Hallstatt story has anything to teach us perhaps it's that it's better for cities to get out in front of this trend and start marketing their strongest neighborhoods to Chinese developers as blueprints. Within China itself, developers are starting to market entire neighborhood types within the same cities--what Ad Age Global refers to as "Cities in a Box." Better for Boston that those developers specialize in Beacon Hills instead of Bunds...assuming, of course, that Boston can be involved somehow.

All of this raises the issue of whether or not the people who inhabit a place have any inherent right to its built form. Indeed, it raises the issue of whether or not a place has a right to itself, in many ways. So I'll re-pose the question from that original NAC post: In the glocalized world, does any place belong to any one group, or does everywhere belong to everyone?

-----

Also, from A Vision For Detroit (April 2010):

If there is the political will and the financial might in Detroit to privately fund a light rail line (which would take a miracle in almost any American city, much less one with Motown’s reputation), there should certainly be enough energy to create a broad, forward-thinking vision for the region to tie various initiatives together into a narrative that the whole city can rally behind. Detroit has everyone’s attention; now it’s time for the city to decide what story it’s going to tell.

Now, just over a year later, the WSJ is reporting that all is not well in the Motor City, as the Bing administration wrestles with the Kresge Foundation to determine whose job it is to plot that storyline. The city says that it appreciates Kresge's cash, but can do just fine developing the vision to guide its own revitalization, thank you. Kresge begs to differ, with its suburb-based president Rip Rapson arguing that new ideas from outside the entrenched political system are desperately needed.

No matter which camp you fall into, it's certainly a fascinating read. With Kresge pulling out of critical projects like Detroit Works and the M1 light rail line, it may behoove Bing to acknowledge that Detroit's record, when it comes to city-led revitalization projects, leaves something to be desired; ceding a bit of control might not be the worst thing to ever happen to the city. You could call Kresge's new-found reticence fickle, or even extortive, but if the foundation doesn't believe that the city's long-term plans will allow their investments to have a lasting impact, they have every right to withhold.

That's not to say that citizens shouldn't have a say in what happens to their city, and Kresge would do well to be as clear as is humanly possible about what it is they'd like to see happen in order to build public support. Being a private foundation does not absolve you of responsibility to communicate with the public whose lives you'd like to improve. 2¢ from an outsider.

Thinking Before You Market Can Have Beautiful Results

2011-07-03T23:06:00.001-05:00

Natalia from Polis has already nerded out on the potential for apps to collect use-pattern data to aid urban planners as illustrated by the recent Nike+ 1000 Runs mapping project. Personally, though, I’m more excited about this as a social ad campaign than as an urban planning tool. It’s a pretty ingenious way of encouraging participation: it taps into Nike’s passionate base and invites their participation, using the individual pieces collected to create something new and pretty cool (and quite lovely) which, in turn, encourages more people to use the product in question. Thoughtful marketing is always fun to see, especially when it’s social (which begs the question: is it even possible to be thoughtful without being social in 2011?)

Oh, and let’s not forget the mega-bonus that it’s rooted in the pedestrian experience of the urban environment, which is always nice to see from suburb- and auto-centric Madison Ave. Round of applause.

WEEKEND READING: June 4-10, 2011

2011-06-10T08:47:00.001-05:00

Sylvan Terrace, one of my favorite sites of "urban delight" in Manhattan

This week was like a big traffic jam of awesome in the urban-o-sphere. No time for dithering introductions, on to the good stuff.

ITEM ONE: David Roberts wraps up his five-part series on great places at Grist with a post on urban delight, taking time to note both the suburbs' relative inadequacy in this realm and Bjarke Ingels' unstoppable charge toward architectural legend.

ITEM TWO: The tenth issue of MAS Context takes on the meaty subject of Conflict in urban environments.

ITEM THREE: Speaking of conflict, Maisonneuve looks at the violence in many video games and wonders whether urban AR gaming might make for more dangerous cities (thanks to an Anonymous commenter for sharing this link on Wednesday's post!)

ITEM FOUR: Meanwhile, SimCity creator Will Wright shares his insights about the relationship between playing and learning, and how about people actually engage with video games (nutshell: the violence a'int so bad, folks).

ITEM FIVE: Nicolas Nova suggests a design studio for locative media that would be centered on visualizing the bizarrely partitioned city at the heart of China Miéville's novel The City and The City. Now that, I've gotta see.

ITEM SIX: Springwise writes of an innovative new app that crowdsources geodata to predict when the next train or bus will arrive. (WANT)

ITEM SEVEN: Urban Omnibus interviews David Giles, lead author of the Center for an Urban Future's new report on the prominence and related power of the design sector in New York City.

Enjoy the reading, and stay cool this weekend!

Treasure Island, Approved & Revisited

2011-06-09T20:01:00.003-05:00

Just read this evening that SOM's plan for the game-changing redevelopment of the bay's manmade Treasure Island has been approved. I interviewed the lead architect, Craig Hartman, about the project two years ago, and thought it might be fun to repost. Here it is, parts One and Two.

This Just In: Far Rockaway Ironically Proves Itself to be Dull and Humorless

2011-06-09T06:43:00.001-05:00

Image from the NY Daily News

I try to keep Where fairly upbeat, but this one's got me too annoyed not to write about: apparently Far Rockaway's city councilman, James Sanders, threw such a spectacular snit fit about a McDonald's subway ad that he got the corp. to pull the campaign, which could not have been cheap. About the ad, Sanders whinnied (with stereotype-reinforcingly tone-deaf politician 'humor') that "clowning around at the expense of a community is not funny," and went so far as to demand an apology (which, sadly, he also got).

Here's the kicker: the ad does not actually poke fun at Far Rockaway at all. It features an image of a McDo's iced coffee being held up, cheers-style, by a disembodied hand, and reads "To not falling asleep and ending up in Far Rockaway. (Unless of course you live there)." Even in issuing their apology, the company rep explained what anyone with two brain cells to rub together could plainly see: "Our intention was to add humor to the situation of falling asleep on the subway, missing a local home stop and waking up at the end of the line." Because Far Rockaway? Is waaaay at the end of the line, in case you're not familiar. The punchline here is the hour-long ride back home, not the condition of the neighborhood that the last stop happens to be in.

In fact, the only disrespect I see here toward Far Rockaway is from this Councilman Sanders yahoo, whose own insecurity about his district is pretty blatant. If the person representing my district thought that their job was to run around looking so hard for opportunities to defend the 'nabe from people calling it boring that they'd go so far as to pull slights out of thin air, you can bet your ass I'd be on the phone letting them know that I'd much prefer they be looking for money to fund the subway rather than worrying about the ads inside the trains--much less getting them yanked! "What's your position on the recent fare hike, Councilman? What about reduced service? Oh, no, sorry -- you go ahead and finish your rant about that ad for coffee, first." Give me a freaking break.

The sad thing is, this guy's grandstanding cost all of the city's subway riders a clever ad that dealt with a shared urban experience (the fear of falling asleep and waking up at the end of the line). Even in a city like New York, one often encounters ads that reference the (imagined) national shared experience: back yards, apple pie, and cul-de-sacs. While I'm no great fan of McDonald's, I do appreciate it when major corporations tailor their ads to acknowledge the fact that, yes, we are in fact in a city. If we have to be bombarded with advertisements, at the very least they should reference a shared experience that we actually share.

But fear not, New York: Councilman Sanders will make sure that that doesn't happen.

Where's the Discussion on Urban AR Gaming?

2011-06-07T20:59:00.002-05:00

Image from Fast Company

Especially interesting in light of Monday's post: Fast Company reports today on Nintendo's new Wii U controller, proclaiming that "living room entertainment just got one step closer to having a true three-dimensional virtual environment." It seems implicit in this statement that the author believes video games to be the provenance of the virtual world; that to have an immersive game environment, one needs to be completely transported by interacting with a screen, rather than the screen modifying the true, four-dimensional environment that the player already exists in.

I've long found it perplexing that, while there is plenty of discussion and debate about video games, and plenty of hype around augmented reality, I very, very rarely come across any account (written, spoken, or otherwise) about augmented reality games that are simply layered over the world that we inhabit. Often, when I do, they're presented in broad strokes, as a far-off possibility: "we'll deal with that when we get there."

There have been a few notable exceptions (see: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Dan Hill's The Street As Platform) but on the whole, there doesn't seem to be much discourse around this subject and its enormous potential to change the way that we interact with our cities. Perhaps the technology just really seems too far off to people, though I've personally seen at least one AR application that could easily be retrofitted for geo-locative video games tomorrow in action. Or perhaps I just haven't looked hard enough; if that's the case, and you know of some great resources for reading about/discussing AR gaming (especially in urban environments), please share!

On Video Games, Urbanism, and the Future of Creativity

2011-06-06T09:08:00.001-05:00

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Last summer, Newsweek reported that researchers had identified an unnerving trend: American childrens' scores on creativity tests (a la the Torrance Test) were, for the first time since they started being administered in the late 1950s, starting to drop. The article's authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, identified two likely factors in creating this downward turn, one being the increasing standardization of school curricula and the lack of deliberate creativity development in classrooms. Calling for a revival of such development, Bronson and Merryman wrote:

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

I was struck the other day by a distinct echo of this statement in a post by LiftLAB collaborator Nicolas Nova about recent video games with which he'd been impressed. Writing about the game Superbrothers, Nova explains:

This combination of players’ interactions with “sound, music & audiovisual style” underpinned by a basic narrative and very low-key dialogues made me tick. More specifically, I am impressed by the rhythm of the game, which is sometimes super slow/contemplative and sometimes very quick/nervous in combat.

Bronson and Merryman's second major cause of the creativity slump in American kids was the increase in time spent plopped in front of the TV playing video games, but Nova's description of the rhythm and structure of Superbrothers highlights an interesting alternative: video games are uniquely positioned to serve as vehicles for creativity development. Players engage in a video games with long-format storylines over extended periods of time. Many games have immersive environments that are fun to explore outside of plot-focused action (I'm thinking, here, of classic games from my youth like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound, though there are no doubt newer examples). This means that players alternate between different modes of thinking: slower, self-paced exploration (divergent) and goal-oriented tasks (convergent).

The digital worlds in which video games take place also require the suspension of disbelief, and we have all been pretty well-trained to oblige. Real people don't double in size when eating mushrooms, but while playing Super Mario Bros., few question that occurrence. In the aforementioned Earthbound, players battle everything from zombies and sea monsters to a possessed circus tent and Dali's clock (no joke). When we're in gameplay mode, none of this seems out of the ordinary. We are ready to except non-traditional ways of thinking and, I'd argue, are primed to develop our own.

The good news for cities is that video games are increasingly being played on smaller and smaller screens. More recently, we've seen games that have begun to incorporate real-world geography, with episodic content that is tied to the exploration of actual places, as well as current events. Smartphones and handheld game consoles that make the original Gameboy look as technologically advanced a platform as a pencil and paper are increasingly ubiquitous, and they can be used to change the way that we see the world around us. The myriad public places that make up a neighborhood--parks, squares, streets, shops, libraries--could easily become 'levels' with various tasks assigned to them.

Using a Nintendo DS or a Droid phone, we could walk on a street we'd been down a thousand times and be prompted by a game to stop for the very first to look around and explore our surroundings. Designer Michael Wolff describes the creative process as requiring three muscles that must be exercised regularly: curiosity and appreciation, which together enable imagination. Video games already exercise the first two of these muscles; locating games within the context of a world that we recognize and understand allows them to encourage imagination that could actually improve the places in which those games are set.

As video games become tied to physical places (which has the added benefit, by the way, of getting players off the couch) the complexity of dense urban environments offers a distinct advantage: New York's Union Square or Shanghai's Bund are the Xbox 360s to the suburbs' Atari. According to one collective in Zagreb, "Augmented Reality promises to transform all points on the map into unlimited spaces that can be exploited for self-expression by anyone." In today's socially-oriented mashup culture, the rise of games that enable players not only to explore, but to impact their environment and share their interventions, as well as build on the creativity of players who came before them, seems inevitable.

Charles Landry wrote that “A creative city is a place where people feel they can fulfill themselves, there are opportunities. Things get done.” Video games offer plenty of opportunities to get things done and obtain a sense of fulfillment; location-based games that are designed to develop players' creative faculties present an opportunity to create a truly symbiotic relationship, developing inventive populations while simultaneously enriching the gaming experience. Leisure is important in any urban environment--and there's no reason that it can't be used to build a city up.

Mindrelic's Manhattan: The Urban Timelapse Video to End All Urban Timelapse Videos

2011-06-05T20:18:00.003-05:00

Mindrelic - Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

I've gotten kind of bored with urban timelapse videos since they've become A Thing, but this is head and shoulders above the rest. Really epic stuff. (Thanks Alex!)

WEEKEND READING: May 28-June 3, 2011

2011-06-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

That's a Wordle of the top ten words from the 50 items that were in my starred folder on Google Reader when I started putting together this post. The order is totally random...and vaguely poetic, no? In other news: how is it time for Weekend Reading again?? Where did this week go? Anyway...

ITEM ONE: Over at the IfUD, we've launched the By the City / For the City design competition, inviting designers, artists, and architects around the world to respond to one (or more!) of the 500+ ideas New Yorkers shared for improving their city. Check out the site at the former link, then register here!

ITEM TWO: Loved Marcus Westbury's article on crowdfunding in The Age. In fact, love everything I've read by this guy. Renew Newcastle is truly amazing. (via @unsungsongs)

ITEM THREE: The Urbanophile features a guest post by Where alum Drew Austin on digitally-tracked taxi cabs as "spandrels," providing data that, as a happy accident, can improve the flow of our cities.

ITEM FOUR: Urbanscale takes an eye-opening swipe at Augmented Reality (and makes promises about some very exciting-sounding upcoming posts). Especially salient point: at least for the foreseeable future, AR actually diminishes the urban environment rather than...well, augmenting it by providing incorrect, incomplete, and commercially-skewed versions of the city.

ITEM FIVE: Matias and Rahul re-post an article that casts a wary eye toward the flavor of the week in silver bullet slum saviors, the $300 House, over at Airoots.

ITEM SIX: The Pop-Up City catalogs some great urban games. Apparently there is one called "Farmville for Real," which is especially interesting given this

ITEM SEVEN: Rhizome points us to New Scientist's May issue on digital archiving and legacy. Your expiration date is now: infinity.

It was my birthday on Wednesday. Drink an extra one for me this weekend. I won't know that you did it, but I'll appreciate it nonetheless.

WEEKEND READING: May 21-27, 2011

2011-05-27T09:34:00.001-05:00

Photo credit: saracino

Heading into a much-needed long weekend. Memorial Day means extra reading time!

ITEM ONE: Anyone who's familiar with the unique joy of finding an easter egg in a video game will love this week's leader--check out Repudo, a new app that turns the city into one giant easter egg hunt.

ITEM TWO: Humans are just so darned clever.

ITEM THREE: The Space Liberation Manifesto is a call to arms for anyone who wants to see digital public space protected from the kind of every-flat-surface-gets-a-sign mentality that has turned public space in the physical city into one long commercial break. (via @bruces)

ITEM FOUR: Nicolai reviews Rem's Cronocaos show, which is on the Bowery until next Sunday. Choice quote: "In the realm of preservation, as in so much else, we seem to have become a world terrified of too much direct contact with reality."

ITEM FIVE: Michael Maltzan actually makes Los Angeles sound palatable in an essay excerpted from his new book No More Play over at Design Observer. (The Iwan Baan pics don't hurt.)

ITEM SIX: Caleb Smith, aka the man who walked every street in Manhattan, shares one of the most meaningful (and under the radar) historical sites for him on the island he knows so well.

Weekend Reading is very multi-media this week, I'm just realizing. So enjoy the reading...and watching, and listening! Back next week with more urban-y goodness.

Cartographic Diversion: An Illustration of Density

2011-05-25T14:20:00.000-05:00

With 166 people per square mile, Honduras is in the middle of the pack as far as national population densities are concerned. But what would it look like if you packed every single Honduran into one city? As it turns out, it might look a lot like New York: both contain approximately 8.2 million people. Below are images of the administrative borders of the five largest cities in the US mapped onto the nations that most closely mirror their populations, all at the same scale. No big point to be made...just an interesting distraction for a Wednesday afternoon. Enjoy...

New York City: 8,175,133 -/- Honduras: 8,249,574

Los Angeles: 3,833,995 -/- Congo: 3,686,000
Philadelphia: 1,526,006 -/- Gabon: 1,475,000

Chicago: 2,695,598 -/- Oman: 2,845,000

Houston: 2,099,451 -/- Lesotho: 2,067,000

Why Las Vegas is (Probably) Not the Next Detroit

2011-05-22T19:22:00.001-05:00

Photo credit: chepenicoli

A recent post at MarketWatch suggests that Las Vegas could be on its way to becoming the next Detroit, a metropolitan mire populated mostly by those who can't afford to leave. Indeed, the two cities share some striking parallels: both are industry towns, Detroit for auto manufacturing, and Vegas for gaming tourism; both cities experienced intense booms, Detroit at the start of the 20th century, and Vegas at the end of it; and both have been hit hard as their boom economies experienced extraordinary challenges, with Detroit facing the decline of domestic manufacturing and Vegas facing the decline of the domestic pocketbook.

But Las Vegas has a key advantage that Detroit does not share: it is dependent on an industry that is rooted in place. You can drive a car (or a factory) right out of Detroit, but Vegas succeeds because of its concentration of spectacle and excess. Vegas has long competed successfully with casinos in other cities. Atlantic City and Reno are one thing, but in the past couple of decades casinos have become popular plug-the-hole-in-the-budget schemes for cities around the US. (Even Detroit has put a lot of its downtown-revival eggs into the casino basket).

This competition has driven Vegas to become a center of innovation for the tourism and hospitality industries: it succeeds not because it is a center of glittering decadence, but because it is the center--the hub that other glitz-burgs model themselves after. The product here is a place-based experience, and that's a lot harder to outsource.

But MarketWatch also notes that Sin City has been well-trumped as the world's largest gaming center by Macau. While this fact is nothing to sneeze at, gambling tourism is not a zero-sum game considering the limits imposed by distance--that old, inconvenient truth that keeps Thomas Friedman up at night. Macau's new-found financial supremacy can be attributed more to the rise of Asian economies than a loss of interest in the Strip. Vegas remains the premier gambling center in North America, and it hardly seems likely that the good people of Omaha and Altoona will start hopping flights to the South China coast en masse any time soon.

A one-horse town will always be economically vulnerable, and the city should continue its efforts to diversify. Las Vegas' reliance on such an unstable industry played an undeniable role in magnifying the impact of the foreclosure crisis there (when your income shrinks, vacations are often the first thing to get cut from the budget). Still, don't bet against a comeback. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" turns out to be a surprisingly apt summation of how the city's economy functions. It may be tacky and garish, but that's part of the fun; Las Vegas is a city that cannot be separated from its Brand. The place is the product.

WEEKEND READING: May 14-20, 2011

2011-05-20T07:43:00.003-05:00

It's a week full of revivals. Weekend Reading is back. In truth, it should never have left. Apologies. My Google Reader is overflowing, so most of these are a bit older; we'll catch up soon enough. Anyway, let's get to it—

ITEM ONE: Top billing goes to a guest post by Utazó over at Polis (the ace blog run by former Wherebloggers Peter & Katia) on gentrification and demographic shifts in the Józsefváros district of Budapest.

ITEM TWO: The fabulous Nina Simon writes about Case by Case, an experiment by the San Diego Museum of Natural History that invites museum-goers to affix post-its with questions, comments, etc. to cases containing un-labeled historical artifacts. It gets the artifacts out on the floor faster and helps staff develop exhibits that are more responsive to visitors' interests. Would love to see someone develop an app for doing this in a public space.

ITEM THREE (& 1/2): Richard Florida presents new info supporting his argument that happier cities are more economically prosperous, while Jay Walljasper suggests that neighborhoods with common shared spaces are happier neighborhoods. Happier neighborhoods = happier cities; more proof that Americans need to re-learn the importance of sharing.

ITEM FOUR: Where's friend Mimi Zeiger (@loudpaper) writes at Places about the creative use of posters, pamphlets, and guides in activating the urban environment.

ITEM FIVE: Fascinating article in re:Place about public space in West African cities. Strikes me as especially interesting that the main form of urban social space in Accra is the street—this is also often said of New York. (Union and Madison Squares are nice, but the real action is on the sidewalks).

ITEM SIX: Edwin Heathcote slays ridiculous city rankings (a la Monocle's whitebread circus of a livability list) in The Financial Times. Certainly among the best articles I've read on the subject.

ITEM SEVEN: Flavorwire rounds up a "Retrospective of Interventionists and [Museum] Crashers." Not even the Met is safe from DIY/participatory urbanism. Bwahaha! (via @fastcodesign)

ITEM EIGHT: I've been doing analysis of the data from the @IfUD's By the City / For the City over at our project blog; add our feed to your RSS reader, there will be a lot of interesting stuff coming over the next couple of months.

Got suggestions for next week? Tweet them to @thewhereblog!

The City is Meant to be Experienced, Not Mourned

2011-05-16T09:11:00.000-05:00

As a very new New Yorker last summer, I took to spending extended periods perusing the Census of Places that Matter, a crowdsourced database of significant locations around the five boroughs. When I stumbled upon a promising entry for Florent Morellet's legendarily-eccentric, eponymous diner (founded in the Meatpacking District before it was The Meatpacking District), excitement quickly turned to disappointment when a Google search turned up a New York mag article written just before Florent closed in 2008.

In the article, Morellet is unapologetically forward-thinking. "I came to New York for the reason everyone comes to New York," he explains: "because it is the city of changes. People forget this is what they love about New York. They get old, they get grumpy. They get … nostalgic.” (The article's author notes that 'nostalgic,' here, is uttered "with the same distaste [Morellet] uses when talking about Republicans.")

It is hard to be nostalgic in New York, a city that contains such an intense agglomeration of people, filled with their own desires, beliefs, ideas, customs, and all of the expectations that come with those things. Density creates a permanent sense of ephemerality, and the pace of churn in New York grants the city its most unique characteristics while simultaneously earning it a reputation as a place that renders each individual totally anonymous. To try to hold onto a moment here could drive a person mad.

Still, people try. One can't help but raise an eyebrow upon finishing the article about Florent's closing and reading the first reader comment: "This is why I left New York. Because the great New York that once was is no more." New Yorkers, you see, bemoan their losses as frequently and passionately as they proclaim their love for the city.

I was reminded of Morellet's line about nostalgia by developer Jerry Wolkoff's recent announcement of his plans to raze the building that houses 5Pointz, Long Island City's graffiti mecca, to make way for two condo towers. As 5Pointz is one of my favorite places in the city, this was difficult news to hear. But Wolkoff has always intended to re-develop the 5Pointz building; the fact that such a place even exists in its current condition is a small miracle in post-Giuliani New York. And while I (and no doubt many others) would like to think I'd choose to preserve the more artistic and culturally-productive use of the site if I were in Wolkoff's shoes, we can hardly hold it against a developer that he is acting like a developer.

The 5Pointz team tweeted a response not long after the news broke that seemed to echo the sentiment expressed by erstwhile MePa scion Morellet: "This is nothing new to us. The show must go on!" And it will. New York has seen countless cultural icons rise and fall. The loss of a cherished community hub is nothing new here, and while it's easy to proclaim the death of the city as we watch individual sites crumble and fade, to do so inevitably robs us of some amount of time in which we could be enjoying the city as it is. While the 'right to the city' is well-discussed, we too often forget that we are not owed anything by the city. We are welcome to take part in it, but we can expect nothing more of it than what it happens to be. The city, as Beaudelaire wrote, "changes shape, alas, faster than a mortal's heart."

How can we ever expect a city to stay the same? It has been pointed out frequently enough that the preservation of the built environment often winds up pricing out the communities that were so strongly associated with them as to make them beloved in the first place. Does it not seem strange that, while we fight to preserve buildings, we experience the city much more intimately in individual stores, galleries, classrooms, temples, and other spaces that are virtually impossible to preserve? And that we then spend a great deal of collective energy mourning those places once they are gone?

Certainly, architectural preservation is not without significant importance. Nor is it possible to totally avoid missing a place that we loved once it is gone. Even the determinedly un-nostalgic Morellet must miss his restaurant and, more importantly, the community that it created. But it is an entirely different thing to miss a place than to mourn it. We can miss something swiftly, but to mourn takes time. The city is unsentimental; it does not mourn us when we leave. Demographics shift; people are priced out, and then back in; everything changes--and in New York, we're surrounded by everything, all the time.

If you focus on the city that was, you will miss the city that is. How we choose to interact with our cities is entirely up to us, but I believe that the city is meant to be experienced, not mourned. The scenery may change, but the show, as they say, must go on.

Whupdate

2010-04-06T09:00:00.002-05:00

Long time no see, friends. No, Where's not coming back, but I did start a new blog. This one is heavier on the images and lighter on the text...in fact, there really isn't any text. Just images. It's a photoblog called Eighths of a Mile. RSS-ize it! I promise that it won't suck.

Also, if you're looking for more Where-esque fixes, I'll be popping up twice monthly henceforth with more characteristically verbose fare over at Next American City. Post #2 just went up on Friday.

And finally, Where alums Peter Sigrist and Katia Savchuk's blog Polis continues to churn out awesome urbanist content (saw the recent Archinect nod - way to go, guys!) Amidst their team's top-notch writings, Where's long-dormant Urbanffffinds feature recently popped up again.

Pictures, words, and more pictures. If you still miss Where after this, you should probably talk to your therapist about it, because you may need professional help. Wink wink.

Tweekend Reading II

2010-01-15T08:30:00.002-06:00

Where's Twitter following grew by two thirds this week...an impressive jump, but I know there are still some stragglers out there. The site is extremely fun, and truly a very social form of the much-vaunted (but often-lacking) "social media"...there are many urbanism tête-à-têtes to be had. Come join! And if you're already following, I'd definitely appreciate it if you'd consider alerting your friends on this fine Follow Friday.

TWEET ONE: Just saw a forlorn banner for Chicago 2016. In this weather, makes me wanna go to Rio.

TWEET TWO: Best map of the year so far - Netflix patterns by city: http://bit.ly/4VY8tf Thanks @tombellino!

TWEET THREE: Urbanffffinds: http://bit.ly/8tnOb0 (Archive here: http://bit.ly/50Xa10)

TWEET FOUR: Great post on the importance of diversity in small groups; seems reasonably scalable http://bit.ly/8O2Nfz

TWEET FIVE: Hilarious/ridiculous promo vid for miami megascraper proposal. INNOVATION! CREATIVITY! lol... http://miapolis.com

TWEET SIX: Just found this review via @storefrontnyc's tweet archive: http://bit.ly/YUgCg Current status: salivating.

TWEET SEVEN: Streetviewing: These bldgs feel very contemporary...despite the fact that they are obvs from the 60s/70s http://bit.ly/6r11Lr

TWEET EIGHT: Deeply fascinating; secret Moscow metro?! Wow! > RT @atlasobscura Off limits: Places around the world you can't get into. http://is.gd/5ZPFp

TWEET NINE: Religion has always been good for architecture; I wonder if there are any lessons we can learn from that fact to apply to public bldgs...

TWEET TEN: 2010: A view from the past. http://bit.ly/6O43ur

That's all for this week, folks. If you have a Twitter account (or are thinking about creating one - do it!) you can follow Where @thewhereblog. If you're staunchly anti-Twitter but still want to keep up with Where's daily urbanist musings, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets. See you around!

Tweekend Reading

2010-01-08T08:30:00.002-06:00

Quite a few of you have begun following Where over at Twitter this week, and it's been great to see the response so far. Still, there are plenty of you who have yet to take the plunge...so for the next couple of Fridays, Where will be taking a ride in the Wayback machine and reviving an old tradition to promote a new venture. Weekend Reading is [temporarily] back in action. Bon appetite!

TWEET ONE: RE: http://bit.ly/8jcVQE - Chicagoland's share of $70 billion: $2,221,977,358. RTA+CTA combined budget shortfalls in 09: $145,000,000.

TWEET TWO: So brilliant and well-executed, it's almost frustrating: http://bit.ly/7qX4PD (Don't miss the map!)

TWEET THREE: Favorite trend of the moment: pop-up museums, a la http://bit.ly/KD71h and http://bit.ly/p3VDs. Anyone know of other examples?

TWEET FOUR: Reading about burbs of STL cannibalizing each other by giving free land to wal-mart. Ah, schadenfreude. Hello, old friend.

TWEET FIVE: Streetviewing: Darth Vader's playground http://bit.ly/6ieQUH

TWEET SIX: Ooooh, I wanna try this with city grids: http://bit.ly/8pldGL

TWEET SEVEN: Koolhaas is on Twitter! Too bad he never updates...I'd love a regular stream of architectural dadaist fortune cookie messages.

TWEET EIGHT: From http://bit.ly/5aRNUx: Prediction for 50yrs out - "Online communities start physical communities;" Cities of Common Interest?

TWEET NINE: Urbanffffinds returns! http://bit.ly/8jBAkB found via @urbanmatt. Archive here: http://bit.ly/50Xa10 (Find a great urban img, @ it over!)

That's all for this week, folks. If you have a Twitter account (or are thinking about creating one - do it!) you can follow Where @thewhereblog. If you're staunchly anti-Twitter but still want to keep up with Where's daily urbanist musings, you can subscribe to the RSS feed of my tweets. See you around!

Twittwhere

2010-01-04T08:00:00.001-06:00

Hi RSS-followers. I've been dragged, semi-reluctantly, into the Twitter arena...and it's turning out to be kind of fun. Consider this blog micro'd. The handle is thewhereblog. Tell all yo' friends.

That's All, Folks!

2009-08-31T12:00:00.003-05:00

After a pretty solid run of two years, five months, ten days, and 470 posts, the pull of new projects has forced my hand: it's time to say farewell to Where. I'm not much for long goodbyes, but I do want to thank all of this blog's longtime readers for their interest and their input. Perhaps, a few years down the line, it will be time to blog again, but for the foreseeable future, Where will be inactive.

For those of you still looking for a regular urbanism fix, several Wherebloggers will be continuing or launching their own blogging efforts elsewhere. To wit:

Peter and Katia will be launching a new blog today called Polis.

Mario will continue posting at his existing blog, Mañanarama.

And, while I'm not planning on doing any blogging, I'll be doing some behind-the-scenes work for the site MoveSmart.org, so I encourage you to check out that site as well.

Here we are at the end. Thanks again for a great run. Adios.

Dharavi III: The Rules of the Game

2009-08-26T18:34:00.009-05:00

This is Part Three in a series looking at Dharavi, a mostly informal township in Mumbai often referred to as Asia’s largest slum, and the government’s controversial plans to redevelop it. With billions of dollars on the table, tens of thousands of homes and businesses at stake, and the global spotlight shining bright, this case of contested urban space is worth a deeper look.

“The early residents of Dharavi recall that when they entered the area from Mahim station, they had to build an access path themselves as there was no road. People placed rocks on the marshy ground, covered it with mud, and created a dirt road… Today, that same dirt road has become Dharavi Main Road.”
―Rediscovering Dharavi by Kalpana Sharma, p. 25

"My vision would be that it would be transformed into one of the better suburbs of Mumbai – it will be forgotten as any kind of slum – there will be state of the art modern amenities and a lot of happy people living in Dharavi."
― Mukesh Mehta, “Slum in Way of Mumbai’s Progress,” BBC News, 21 March 2007

***

In my previous post, I brought up what becomes obvious to anyone who’s taken even a cursory stroll through Dharavi: that describing the area as one big “slum,” a term that is officially sanctioned and almost universally accepted, is deeply problematic given the ground reality.

Packaging Dharavi with this label is very convenient, however. Not only does it condemn the area as an unacceptable space, but one that needs emergency rescue ― an idea not-so-subtly reinforced in a slide Mukesh Mehta likes to feature in his presentations that shouts, “Support Our Slums,” emphasis on the “SOS.” Ostensibly, the Dharavi Redevelopment Plan is a “win-win” slum rehabilitation scheme that will provide slum dwellers with adequate housing and amenities subsidized through commercial development.

Up close, it’s clear that calling it a welfare scheme is a dangerous euphamism. In fact, the plan enables the government to repossess a luctrative piece of land occupied by a poorer population in order to efficiently clear and resell it, while affording those in the way the minimum possible space and benefits to make this politically feasible. This not only allows large corporate conglomerates to maximize the land’s commercial value (leaving a hefty profit for the state, of course), but also squeezes the poor out of a central piece of land to make room for middle- and upper-classes and “cleans up” Mumbai to make it attractive for upper classes and investors.

The decision to redevelop Dharavi as a township creates the regulatory and administrative conditions for this to take place efficiently. Although taking a holistic approach to Dharavi is necessary for planning things like infrastructure and transport networks, in this context it allows land appropriation to take place in one fell swoop, sets up an authority to organize the process, and makes economic exploitation maximally convenient by limiting contendors to big multinationals and dividing land into convenient pie slices – a “readymade project with a potential to net in excess of USD 1.5 BN” as Mukesh Mehta put it in his presentation.

Authorities have manipulated the rules and regulations governing the area’s development in order to maximize and facilitate commercial development. They have limited the population eligible for rehabilitation to those who can prove residence prior to 1/1/2000 (previously 1/1/1995) and live on the ground floor (70% of Dharavi homes have more than one floor, which means 35,000 families according to one informed estimate!). They abolished a clause that typically requires the consent of 70% of affected households for slum rehabilitation projects. They modified the Development Control Rules (DCR, 1991) to allow the project to demolish non-slum areas, like government-built housing and private property, in the service of a "public purpose." They declared Dharavi a "difficult area", on which basis they raised the Floor Space Index (Floor Area Ratio) to 4 from 1.33, meaning that developers can build for-sale space at a rate of 4 :1 relative to rehabilitation area. This represents a profit in the billions of dollars, while experts have proven that the project could be subsidized through development at an FSI as low as 0.25.

Dharavi was initially a marshy swamp. Over generations, those who inhabited it acted as land developers by gradually creating landfill, pathways, and residential and commercial space. This incremental development is the only reason that the area is habitable in the first place. Besides physical development, this homegrown growth has been a huge creator of affordable housing and jobs, not to mention cultural capital and social cohesion. Yet, rules and regulations are not amended to recognize this investment and functioning system or to support local economic growth. On the other hand, the rules of the game are happily and briskly changed when it benefits the other players.

Dharavi was ignored when it was on the periphery of the city (The city’s main water lines initially plowed right through Dharavi without serving residents. It was only to prevent nuisance and contamination when people understandably hacked into the line to access water that the government provided this basic service.) Now that the Bandra Kurla Complex has re-oriented Mumbai’s financial compass and land values are high, it’s a convenient time to want to help. It’s the kind of charity that comes with a price tag.

(Dharavi 2014 image from Mehta's presentation at the Urban Age conference, SOS image and sector map from his "Slum Free Dharavi" presentation.)

The Attraction fo Free

2009-07-24T04:37:00.001-05:00

Everyone likes to get free stuff, even when it's junk -- like brochures and keychains at a trade show, or a reusable bag from your local market. Retailers and businesses give out free things as a marketing ploy, to build rapport and disseminate information. Another form of free comes in the newspaper ads, with the buy one get one free coupon, or the holiday giveaways (think Black Friday.) These giveaways are designed to attract patrons to a certain retail location in hopes that they will spend more moeny, come back more often, and essentially support the business. It seems to work as my mailbox is inundated with these coupons nearly everyday.

So, with my tabletop covered in coupons and freebie offers, I began to think, how can Rustbelt cities and cities with declining populations use the idea of free to attract new residents. The goals seem similar, stores need people to come in and buy their assorted goods while cities need to attract people to come and start businesses, raise families, and pay city taxes. Perhaps these cities could create marketing campaigns targeting young creative entrepreneurs by offering buildings, land, space, tax breaks. After all, the Rustbelt is, if nothing else, is rich in land and space, just look at Flint.

There exists a whole class of creatives out there who would love to start their own businesses but can't due to the burden of large overhead costs especially in business hubs like NYC or Chicago. Rustbelt cities in conjunction with the internet's world wide marketplace offer very low overhead costs. However, in order to make these individuals pack their bags and move to a new city that they know little about and attempt to form some type of business, they need incentive. Businesses take time to start, and by offering entrepreneurs free rent, you are granting them time to learn the city, be inspired by the city, and establish their own business' in the city.

The real power of a program like this comes in the formation of a community. Once the idea catches on and creatives begin to take to he plunge into the Rustbelt, stronger and stronger creative communities will form attracting more and more people to the city. This can be seen in the reformation of the DUMBO neighborhood in NYC from a burnt out, unattractive block, into a vibrant community of artists and professionals. David Walentas, a NY developer bought up a huge portion of the Dumbo neighborhood in the late 90's then enticed an array of artists to take up residence by offering free rent for an extended period of time. The artists attracted the professionals and soon the neighborhood was bustling with a diverse group of New Yorkers. So the question is, can this work on a national if not global scale with the Rustbelt and other declining cities?

(Photo from icanhascheezburger, Corine Vermeulen-Smith, and NYT The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

The New High Line

2009-07-18T00:00:00.058-05:00

The High Line is an elevated park that runs along a portion of Manhattan's west side. It was once a railway, in use from 1934 until 1980. As vegetation took over, it became an informal and (not completely) inaccessible greenway above the streets. Neighborhood residents Joshua David and Robert Hammond started Friends of the High Line in 1999, hoping to save the structure from demolition and build support for the park idea. The city approved funding in 2004, and the lower section (from Gansevoort to 20th Street) opened in June.

The park was designed by James Corner Field Operations, Piet Oudolf, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It is made up of pathways that weave through the original train tracks, as well as diverse plants inspired by those that grew in the absence of maintenance. The city plans to continue the park along the Hudson Yards to the Javits Convention Center. According to Mayor Bloomberg, the first section has sparked considerable neighborhood development, with more than 30 new plans now in the works. The Whitney Museum is building an extension by Renzo Piano at the Gansevoort entrance.

On a recent visit, I was impressed by the High Line's varied landscape and playful atmosphere. It offers a different perspective on the city, where things come into view that are usually hidden from street level. The path moves along and through buildings, creating excitement in the discovery of new environments.

The architecture is kind of slick, but it also has a relaxed, inventive feel that plays well against the seasoned ruggedness of its surroundings. I really like the idea of including the original train tracks. This might be even better if their continuity could somehow be maintained. They currently seem like set pieces rather than historically integrated parts of the neighborhood. I loved the rolling chairs on tracks, and the vegetation is tough and beautiful. The spectator windows onto the street (or into the park) are an interesting concept, framing everyday life as entertainment. However, I'm not sure the frames and stepped seating add much to the view, and they seem to draw energy away from the path. These opinions, however, are especially inconsequential in light of the overall greatness of the park.

The High Line is a wonderful part of the city's changing ecology, one that builds upon the old in shaping the new. I recommend starting with the exhibition Mannahatta/Manhattan: A Natural History of New York City at the Museum of the City of New York. It includes detailed reconstructions of the island before modern development, giving a sense of how our current moment fits within the area's unfolding story.

(Photos by Peter Sigrist)

Coming Back to the City

2009-07-08T11:55:00.005-05:00

The American city has taken quite the rollercoaster ride over the past 70 years. For the half century following World War II, anti-urban sentiment managed to keep pace with the United States’ unprecedented affluence, creating glistening suburban landscapes that surrounded increasingly troubled urban cores. Eight of the ten largest US cities in 1950 recorded their historical population peaks that year (only New York and Los Angeles continued to grow after that census).

This trend has reversed itself in the past couple of decades, of course, and most cities have benefited from the newly widespread appeal of urban living. As Mark Twain reminds us, though, history tends to rhyme rather than repeat itself, and the rebirth of cities is no exception.

A few months ago, Marc described a phenomenon he called Earbud Urbanism. Contemporary technology as epitomized by the iPod, he wrote, now allows us to replace our actual surroundings with personalized content, one sense at a time. Kazys Varnelis made a similar point last week, just before the 30th anniversary of the Sony Walkman. The Walkman, he wrote, symbolizes the recolonization of US cities just as boomboxes (perceived as “sonic assault devices”) symbolized the height of urban tension and decay.

Why, then, did cities become more appealing in the 1980s and 1990s? Perhaps Earbud Urbanism contributed by making it easy to ignore the unsavory elements of urban environments. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, cities teemed due to lack of choice: If you wanted to do certain things you needed to be in the city. Now, our choices have increased exponentially, and comparatively few people truly need to be located at any one place in order to do something. Everyone’s loved ones are just a virtual arm’s reach away, consumer products can be delivered to some of the most remote places on earth, and one can practically run a business without rolling out of bed. The physical locations of jobs seem to follow people to where they’ve decided to live, instead of the opposite.

Perhaps the suburban fortess mentality of the postwar era gave way to a subtler kind of fortress mentality. The affluent who have chosen to return to the city have come back on their own terms, not the city’s. Many inhabit condos that are sealed off from the surrounding urban environment, with plenty of parking infrastructure to facilitate driving everywhere else. The same high-end chain stores, also with ample parking, have even filled in the formerly industrial spaces of many cities (Chicago’s Clybourn Corridor, for example). And when we do have to venture outside of our comfort zones on foot, of course, we have our iPods to keep us company.

(Photo from Flickr user fensterbme.)

Suburbs Survival

2009-07-04T12:45:00.000-05:00

Cities have been getting a lot of attention lately with the majority of earth's population residing in dense urban cores for the first time in history. There seems to be a growing consensus that cities are the way forward and that suburbs should burn in hell for destroying out beautiful countrysides, our farmlands, and promoting unsustainable lifestyles. So how do we resurrect the suburb or make it better? Are we planning on disassembling them and using the material to build new urban dwellings or are they going to become abandoned and sit empty? Is there a way to think about the burbs differently that will lead to a new lifestyle or a renewed sustainable energy?

To survive long-term, the suburbs will likely have to become more community oriented and organized. This century thus far has proved to be about social and sustainable movements. Two movements the suburbs can embrace to improve their chances of retaining and attracting citizens are intense car sharing programs, and intense community farm programs.

Typically, neighborhoods center around some type of public space, whether that be a park, an elementary school, or another type of community-oriented structure. These centers could act as transport hubs, where car share programs are initiated. Programs like carpoolconnect.com can help people find rides and coordinate with neighbors to accomplish errands and daily tasks. Perhaps it seems extreme, but if the suburbs want to kick their negative wrap, they are going to have to show they can compete with cities on transportation and social interaction.

Suburban farming has become a big thing as well. Though urban farming has attracted much of the attention because of its extreme conditions, many suburbanites have been converting their yards into mini-farms and, in some cases, turning a profit. Many organizations have popped up to promote the transformation of turf lawns to lush homestead farms, most famously Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates. His organization has inspired a new breed of farm and a new brand of agriculture. Companies are beginning to form around the country with the intention to lease and cultivate neighborhood lawns. Weekly neighborhood farmers markets could be held at the community center with the majority of produce and added value products coming from within the neighborhood.

When it comes down to it, the suburbs need to bolster their sense of community interaction in all areas of their citizens daily life from transportation methods to food choices to live/work arrangements. The suburbs aren't going to just disappear, so hopefully in the next few years we as a society will develop some new suburban living models worth promoting.

(Photo from The Shift Home and the author. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Informality, Enhanced

2009-07-03T09:33:00.010-05:00

Why is it that so many of the people out there studying/analyzing/writing about new urban trends, new technologies, new social configurations, etc. are either well past or fast approaching midlife?

xxx

Watching academics (or worse: bureaucrats and business gurus) try to keep up with the frenetic pace of our present-day spatial, cultural, social, etc. milieus can be a sad sight. Pro Thinkers struggle like parents or marketeers or morning TV hosts to stay current and swank and therefore (allegedly) relevant.

They are quick to embrace buzz working concepts, and just as quick to dump them.

xxx

To make matters worse, even regular people like you or me have a hard time upholding concepts, just like we do keeping relationships, tastes, personal aims, political allegiances and attention spans. We consume our concepts like we consume our everydayness.

xxx

The problem is that a number of these concepts could actually be useful and significant. They are unfairly — even irresponsibly – deemed tired, passé, fizzle; superficially exhausted and then dumped.

xxx

One of the poor bastards in this bunch is the notion of "informality". After a brief, guilt-driven stint of Western academic and media focus on the subject, at the moment informality sounds as old and worn as French Theory. Something to roll your eyes over.

xxx

I don't want to redeem anything or anyone here. I just don't think ideas should be treated as disposable objects. Ideas always linger and creep back up when you least expect it.

It's only fair that we're tired of hearing the same stuff from the same people, over and over again. OK. But that doesn't mean that everything that needs to be said has been said.

xxx

Right now, more than anything else, I have some basic, intuitive, poorly-shaped questions. I guess they're mostly questions for myself (given my comment track record on this blog):

- Can anyone actually pin-point "informality"? Or is the notion simply elusive and any attempt at this futile?

- Is the concept itself inadequate? Particularly considering there isn't an actual divide between formal and informal, that they are both the same thing: reductive categories that try to organize and make sense of functional and active by-products of our (Modern, global) development schemes and efforts.

- Do we really have to keep opposing the "informal" to the Western-developed-organized-etc.-etc. or can we maybe start understanding it as a mirror modernization, as the crooked limb of Modernity or its bad twin?

- Instead of considering it an absence of logic, can we accept informality as a logic in itself, with controls and hierarchies and orders and struggles and changes and growths?

- If we want to emphasize the historical breach and inequality of modernizing processes, why not simply try to analyze and describe how unequal types of development are crashing up against each other and invading each other as a result of globalization, instead of making it an Us vs. Them thing? There is no Us vs. Them. We've all been smeared.

- Beyond aesthetics, isn't informality ugly (scary even) because it reveals too much about our dirty, insecure, two-faced Modern selves?

- How about picturing an enhanced version of the informal? One that isn't primitive or picturesque or exotic, or at least not in its entirety. One that is inextricably related to whatever happens elsewhere: interconnected, active (sometimes aggressive), efficient and significant in its own right. One that we need not pity or fix, but understand.

Would anyone like to take a shot?

(Photo by Pablo León de la Barra. José Rojas at House of Gaga in Mexico City. From the Centre for the Aesthetic Revoluction).

Agricultural Education in the City

2009-07-02T00:00:00.031-05:00

A public school in Philadelphia is training students in food production and environmental care on an urban farm. The Walter Biddle Saul High School of Agricultural Sciences is a magnet program with 600 students from throughout the city. Located in the upper Roxborough neighborhood, it includes a 130-acre farm with livestock, greenhouses, crops, and pastures.

Saul offers concentrations in Food Science, Floriculture and Greenhouse Management, Landscape Design, Animal Science, and Natural Resource Management. In addition to the agricultural program, students take a full range of high-school, advanced-placement, and college-level courses. The results are impressive. Saul's average graduation rate is 95 percent, with 80 percent going on to college. Other students start their own businesses or are hired into skilled agricultural jobs right after graduation.

Amanda Forstater, a 2009 graduate, recently gave me a thorough and enthusiastic introduction to Saul. Students begin with an intensive summer program, which provides training and experience with the different areas of concentration. This helps incoming freshman select a major and understand the kind of work that will be expected of them. They usually have a particular agricultural career in mind -- from local farming to designing parks, managing athletic fields, and caring for animals.

During the school year, students work on the farm each day. Freshman and sophomores spend one and a half hours, while juniors and seniors spend two and a half. The jobs increase in complexity as the students acquire more training. There is a farmer who lives on-site and manages daily operations.

Students are encouraged to take on leadership responsibilities in school activities, internships, and the National FFA Organization (formerly Future Farmers of America, but renamed in 1988 to include all agricultural careers). Internships and job-training programs have been set up with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, the Philadelphia Eagles, Somerton Tanks Farm, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, J. Franklin Styer Nurseries, the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and many other local and national organizations.

Saul has established a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) partnership with Weaver's Way Cooperative. This provides the neighborhood with local produce as well as education and employment opportunities. Students are closely involved in the process. They can also work for the school farm over the summer. It is common to see them operating tractors, milking cows, and growing produce year-round.

Saul students come from urban homes with little if any farming experience. The program is helping to reestablish links with agriculture that have been lost through years of migration to cities. Along with the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences, Saul is among the few urban agricultural schools in the country. Visits are encouraged, and based on Amanda’s glowing account, it's very much worth the trip.

(The first two photos were provided by Amanda Forstater. The photo of students pruning trees is from the W.B. Saul website.)

Public and Private Space

2009-06-26T00:00:00.032-05:00

Having just returned from Russia, I’ve been thinking a lot about public and private space. The country has been experiencing rapid privatization since the early 1990s. Many aspects of urban life, from transportation to housing to recreation, are becoming less public.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Private space can encourage responsibility for quality maintenance. We’re usually more likely to repair and improve upon places we own than places we share with everyone.

According to the logic of privatization, public maintenance is best contracted to independent businesses. In a way this makes sense. It provides incentive for efficient work, and as long as high quality is a requirement, we should get intended results at lower costs.

So why do market efficiencies often result in low-quality public space? Strip malls, for example, or dilapidated waterfronts. I guess it has to do with our priorities, and how much we’re willing or able to pay. If public space isn’t valued, there will be little incentive for businesses to compete over insufficient funds allocated toward its maintenance.

We expect to pay more for higher quality cars and houses. But what about bridges, water, roads, and other public entities? Not that we should pay more than we get in return, but it seems that quality services indicate a well-functioning society. While I found the parks, trains, and streets of Moscow nicely maintained, I heard that some neighborhoods are filled with uncollected garbage, and that the metro system was built at the rest of the country's expense. It's important that the benefits of public investment are distributed fairly.

Supporters of privatization might argue that services should be purchased directly by those who benefit from them, so as to reduce the misapplication of public funds. In its most extreme form, this might involve gated communities providing their own infrastructure, tollbooths at every bridge and roadway, and people hiring private companies for protection from crime. This could be considered fair in the sense that services would be more closely related to the amount we pay. However, it is less fair that children from wealthy families should start out with such major advantages over other children in education, health care, and basic safety. While salaries in lower paying fields like teaching and the military might rise with private demand, their services would be controlled by those who could afford them.

In looking for ways of maintaining public space, Russia’s experience with socialism could offer useful lessons. While there are many aspects of Soviet rule that didn’t work, there are others that continue to benefit city residents. These include accessible transportation, parks, and cultural resources. It will be interesting to see if Russia can draw selectively from capitalism without losing the advantages of its socialist legacy. At the very least, we can study these advantages and see if they might work in other cities.

Is responsible maintenance of public space possible? Working on this would be a sound investment in our quality of life. Of course, the money for public investment has to come from somewhere. This is a question for economists, but it also has to do with where we place our values. If we care enough to improve upon the quality of our surroundings, we can make this happen. It will be important to figure out what improvement would mean and how to go about it. If we make this a priority, things could get better sooner than we think.

(Photo of the Four Horses Fountain by Miroslava De Abreu Coelho. Photo of Tsaritsino Park from Flickr user initsownway1701.)

Don't Miss: My Space @ NAC

2009-06-19T10:00:00.000-05:00

There's another Whereblogger-authored post up over at Next American City's Daily Report...I'm a little late getting this one up, as it went live over a week ago, but later is better than never, as they say. The post takes a look at three Chicago-based urban planning non-profit orgs' attempts at interactive websites, and their various levels of success at engaging users. Below, a teaser, and here, a link. If you're so inclined, do take a look!

In cities—especially densely-populated cities, where open skies are a precious commodity—getting people to use public spaces isn’t usually a challenge. But getting people to talk about public space is another issue altogether. These days, the Internet is allowing planners and architects to reach out to Average Joe citizens to generate discussions about the built environment in new and increasingly creative ways; in Chicago, a number of recent public space-related initiatives have used the web to get people talking about the city’s public realm—with varying degrees of success.

This past week the Metropolitan Planning Council launched a region-wide search for Chicago’s best public spaces. Placemaking Chicago challenges Chicagoland residents from southeastern Wisconsin all the way down the lakefront to northwestern Indiana to send in photos and videos hosted at Flickr, YouTube, and their ilk, in order to determine the metro’s most enjoyable and successful public spaces. MPC is offering users various prizes, and winners will be determined by several rounds of judging, including an MPC-selected panel and a final public vote...

Once more with that link.

(Photo from Flickr user John Zacherle. The original full-sized version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Networked Urban Politics

2009-06-18T08:08:00.014-05:00

"Participation is war. Any form of participation is already a form of conflict", says architect and activist Markus Miessen, following Chantal Mouffe: "It is very important to envisage the task of democracy in terms of creating the institutions that will allow for conflicts between adversaries." Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist, has theorized on the notion of a "conflictual consensus", in which only a minimum common aim (democracy, equality, justice, etc.) needs to be settled and agreed upon within a society. The means for reaching this aim and even the meaning of the aim itself, on the other hand, can and should be disputable.

Miessen is more concerned with the spatial effects and possible materialization of these conflictual consensuses, particularly by way of everyday urbanisms: "When participation becomes conflict, conflict becomes space. Re-inserting friction and differences into both the scale of the institution and the city bears the potential of micro-political forces that render conflict as practice. In this context, participation becomes a form of non-physical, productive violence. Micro-political action can be as effective as traditional state political action."

- - -

Technologies that enable participation have become a staple of contemporary life, overcoming distance, economic limitations and even political constraints. Teens in Ciudad Neza are glued to their cell-phones just like their counterparts in Midtown Manhattan (though they might be planning a stickup instead of a cocktail soiree). ICTs have become so important to the functioning of societies that mobile phones are being handed out by governments along with food stamps and the One Laptop Per Child project seems demure compared to the aggressive downward pricing spirals of the netbook market. Today, 24/7 global connectivity is closer to practical reality than to some outlandish fiction.

- - -

From the nineteenth-century barricades to the revolts of 1968 to the social disruptions of the early 1990s, The Street was always an ideal escape valve for urban tensions and the preferred site of high profile (spectacular) political and social demonstrations. The Street was the perfect set for frictions. But if, as we’ve said before, The Street has systematically been loosing relevance, doesn't it make perfect sense that The Web take its place in this sense too?

- - -

The political perceptions and consequences of The Web and networked urbanisms differ intensely according to specific geographical contexts.

Here in Spain — not quite the First World, but still — there is a bubbly enthusiasm over new technologies and the promise of what they might deliver: salvation from impending economic fallout, a new dawn of proactive citizenship, gaining a steadier foothold in the Developed Nations club (after the brick-setter, real-estate-speculator and tour-guide triad has been widely acknowledged to be a flop as far as development schemes go), etc. Lethargic institutions, burned-out public universities, covetous town halls and ailing private companies are all eager to jump on the digital bandwagon here. The government is lending money for laptops, funding mediateques and data centers, talking Citizenship 2.0, etc. Hopes are high and the atmosphere is cheery, but approaches remain largely superficial or are limited to insiders, specialists and bureaucrats.

This is not the case in the Third World.

- - -

My browser is stuffed with Tehran bookmarks. Just like Cuban bloggers sneaking into Havana hotels to post their thoughts and opinions on the web or massive reactions to government corruption cases prompted by unofficial on-line reports in China, web activists and connected common-folk in Iran are opening channels for a new understanding of urban (networked) politics — proving at the same time that networked urban realities are far from being pretty or easy to grasp. The Street (Web) resistance that is shaking Iranian cities along with our reductive and jaundiced perception of Iran (Remember the days when thanks to George W. Bush — and to a lesser degree, Sally Field — Iran rarely evoked something other than a helplessly closed and traditional society?) is one of those events that change people’s gut perception of history in the making. But there is an additional element here. Like the Obama election or the global response to the Swine Flu affair, the unfolding of these fundamentally urban episodes and our reactions to them cannot be separated from the presence of digital technologies.

(Photos from Flickr user misterarasmus. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Dharavi II: Does This Look Like a Slum?

2009-06-16T12:24:00.013-05:00

This is Part Two in a series looking at Dharavi, a mostly informal township in Mumbai often referred to as Asia’s largest slum, and the government’s controversial plans to redevelop it. With billions of dollars on the table, tens of thousands of homes and businesses at stake, and the global spotlight shining bright, this case of contested urban space is worth a deeper look.

“Dharavi is a black hole – something we should be ashamed of.”
-Mukesh Mehta, “Slum in the Way of Mumbai’s Progress,” BBC News, 21 March 2007

“Asia’s largest sprawl of squalor – the Dharavi slum – breathed below.”
-Aditya Ghosh, “Final plan for Asia’s largest slum ready,” Hindustan Times, 07 February 2008

“Dharavi has always been a permanent eyesore to foreign travellers flying to India.”
-“Blueprint for a new Dharavi,” The Financial Express, 17 June 2007

Dharavi is almost universally branded as a massive “slum.” This terminology is taken for granted in most mainstream media accounts, government designations and the popular imagination. In fact, the planning authority for Dharavi is the state’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority.

Even in the legal sense, this term is an inaccurate generalization. According to Sharad Mahajan of MASHAL, an NGO that managed GIS mapping and data collection for the government’s official survey of Dharavi, the 59,316 "slum structures" counted in the survey occupy around 396 of 590 acres. The rest of the area includes government-owned properties (including buildings developed under previous upgrading schemes), a Tata power station, a BEST bus station, Mahim Nature Park, a cemetery, railway facilities, private industrial and residential buildings, and streets (many paved by the municipality).

Koliwada, a historical fishing village that existed before Bombay did and has historical documents attesting to that, was never a slum — a fact finally recognized by DRP authorities in early 2009, when they agreed to exempt the area from the redevelopment plan. Kumbharwada, a community of potters who migrated to Mumbai after a drought in their native Gujarat, were afforded "Vacant Land Tenure," a unique tenancy arrangement, in Dharavi by the Bombay Municipal Corporation in 1932. There is also the Transit Camp, originally temporary structures built by the government for people displaced by infrastructure projects; decades later, this is a relatively well developed commercial and residential area. Matunga Labor Camp, has housed municipal sweepers for over 50 years. There are also chawls built by the Bombay Municipal Corporation prior to 1940. Many of these areas are now officially labeled slums, which seems legally questionable, even if it is permissible.

When you look beneath the surface at the parts considered "slum areas", the term seems equally problematic. Does the ICICI bank on 90 Feet Road count as a slum structure? What about the Sri Siddhi Vinayakar Temple, the 120-year old Dharavi Mosque or St. Anthony Church? Kala Killa, a fort built by order of the Governor of Bombay in 1737? The three-story Gurudutta Gym, home to one of Mumbai’s champion bodybuilders? The London-trained cosmotologist’s clinic, blood and X-ray labs, cyber cafes, lawyers’ offices? The air-conditioned stores selling gold jewelry and high-end electronics? The schools, the bakeries who stock stores across the city and 13 Compound, Mumbai’s unofficial but main recycling center? The offices of countless NGOs and associations of every creed and culture? The streets that look like the old city of Jodpur or any small town in India or Tokyo minus a few decades? With more than 80 distinct neighborhoods, over 600,000 people, and a "GDP" of USD 500 million, by all measures this slum looks suspicously like a city of its own.

This is not to say that Dharavi is without serious problems. Many parts of Dharavi are overcrowded and suffer the effects of a lack of provision of basic civic services and amenities. Many structures use recycled materials, reflecting owners’ poverty and lack of access to finance. Dharavi needs support to develop. But it should be obvious by now that the label "slum" is inappropriate.

"Slum" is not a neutral descriptive term, but a highly affective one. Sometimes – as in the quotes I introduced with – the biases are clearly spelled out. Even when there are no blatant stereotypes, "slum" is always shorthand for blighted, dirty, dysfunctional, unacceptable. The myth of Dharavi as a uniform slum is reinforced by cliché imagery of sprawling corrugated tin roofs and garbage-choked lanes, repeated on the government’s websites and presentations and most mainstream Indian papers. Rhetoric and images evoking Dharavi’s scale (“largest slum in Asia,” “sprawl of squalor”) further dehumanize it and inflate the “threat.” Middle- and upper-class Mumbaikers have no reason to dispute the term, likely never having set foot in Dharavi.

This is not a neutral misunderstanding — packaging Dharavi as one big slum serves a clear purpose. Although there is no single actor behind it, the PR campaign that brands Dharavi as such is so masterful that the inaccurate and loaded term is assumed to be a fact by most and has provided unquestioned justification for the government’s developer-driven redevelopment plan.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk. Photo collage of Dharavi and Tokyo by Matias Echanove (www.airoots.org/www.dharavi.org).)

The Urban Path

2009-06-15T20:23:00.000-05:00

Human navigation is a key component in the organization and form our cities take on. Whether we choose to walk, bike, take public transport, or drive, we are making choices that shape our experience of the city and that will transform the city itself over time. Two great examples of this are taking shape in New York right now: the opening of the High Line park and the pedestrianization of Times Square. Both show how infrastructure and space can be transformed over time based on the alternating use and neglect of transient spaces. As we move forward in a period of increasing transportation curiosity and alternate means of transport, these physical experiments become very relevant and thought-provoking. Everyone is eagerly anticipating billions of dollars for infrastructure investment and reconfiguration, but what kind of infrastructure changes should we really seek? Wider bridges and highways, more bike lanes, light rail, pedestrian access?

Alongside these physical experiments lie also a set of mapping or tracking statement experiments which aim to bring attention to the ways in which people use space and how they use that space. One is the Contrail project which aims to apply a line of chalk behind bikers, like a constant skidmark tracing their path throughout the cityscape. On a large scale this could reveal some very interesting patterns as well as draw attention to the number of bikes that actually occupy the roads. It might even encourage people to break out the old two wheeler and go for a spin. In addition to this hack like experiment there is an increasing amount of gps devices floating around our city sidewalks and roadways, all of which can generate useful information about how our current infrastructure is being used. Hopefully, when it really comes time to invest, the powers that be will heed these experiments and gather appropiate information to make informed decisions about the ways in which people will move over the next 50 years...

(Photo from Gothamist and Make. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Dachas and Local Agriculture

2009-06-12T00:00:00.043-05:00

According to Dmitri Orlov, Russian dachas (cottages outside of cities) helped people make it through the economic upheaval of the 1990s. Apparently, many were able to supplement their diets with food produced on small agricultural plots. Even given long winters, food products could be cured to last until spring.

From the air, the landscape surrounding Moscow is different from anything I've ever seen. Instead of almost grid-like plots covering most of the land, there are clustered houses, arranged organically, surrounded by small gardens. I think these might be dachas (see photo from Google Maps below).

On a recent train trip, I saw what I think were dachas more closely. I wonder if it is typical for them to be located near train lines? The majority had small agricultural plots. The countryside was a mix of cottages, forests, and heavy industry. Many of the industrial sites were abandoned. There were a few decaying cottages, but most appeared to be in use.

The woman from whom I rent my room is a retired chemist who lives at her dacha year round. So I guess dachas must help many pensioners supplement their incomes by renting out apartments in the city. In our place there are two students and a family of five living in three rooms.

Dachas are places for recreation and holidays as well. Their ownership seems less exclusive than summer cottages in the U.S. I'm not sure how they were distributed in the past, but they are very common and apparently not limited to wealthier citizens.

A Washington Post article on sprawl surrounding Moscow mentions the possible threat to dachas posed by expanding suburbs. Maybe people will choose these new developments, and small-scale food production will be replaced by giant agribusinesses. Are dachas to become relics from the past, like some of the industrial sites in the countryside?

With today's economic and ecological concerns, small farms could be part of our future. Hopefully this will happen by choice rather than necessity. It would be tough to establish them on private land, and experience with agriculture is increasingly uncommon. But foreclosed or abandoned properties in rural, suburban, and even urban areas might be used. There's no reason we can't learn to produce food. Not everyone will have time for this, and I don't think global agricultural trade should come to a stop. Still, Russia's experience with dachas appears to show that local agriculture can work.

Credits: Photo of a dacha from Vsam1.ru. Aerial photo of the outskirts of Moscow from Google Maps.

Making the Best of the Airport City

2009-06-09T00:01:00.007-05:00

Whether Mother Earth can cough up the fossil fuels needed to keep the airline industry flying is a matter of debate (and one that we really should be debating). While airports are primarily significant in their relationships with each other, the ground-level impact that an airport can have on a city is massive. John Kasarda has even coined the term “aerotropolis” to describe the economic activity that develops around airports.

Unfortunately, urban transportation systems fail to accommodate the aerotropolis. The problem makes sense in light of the transportation challenges that an airport creates for a city. Airports must lie far from the urban core by necessity—a dense urban core actually increases the likelihood that an airport will have to be more remote.

Meanwhile, though, successful international airports have spurred the construction of large-scale office parks, hotels, malls and even casinos. In Chicago, the O’Hare area is second only to the Loop in job concentration.

Chicago provides a perfect example of the aerotropolis’ accessibility conundrum. An old city with a historically strong center, Chicago now strikes a delicate balance between the transit-oriented past and the automobile-dependent present. In the midst of its shift toward the latter, Chicago happened to build the largest airport in the world (more recently surpassed by Atlanta’s airport). Another half century since O’Hare’s construction, Chicago still has a largely radial transit and road network that both center on the Loop and link the airport to the rest of the city with just a few spokes.

Not that Chicago’s planners are to blame for the situation. After all, most of the metropolitan area’s transit infrastructure predates O’Hare, as does much of the city’s residential and commercial development. A hundred years of booming development can’t be reproduced overnight. Furthermore, an airport-generated commercial area still needs to have the actual airport at its center, and airports don’t offer accessible or vibrant public spaces like many downtowns can. An airport is likely to generate a sprawling and automobile-dependent aerotropolis, and to some extent that’s unavoidable.

How to integrate the aerotropolis into the metropolis, then? Considering Chicago’s example, a dual-centered metropolis offers an opportunity to create a vibrant and dense corridor between the two hubs. The rail transit network in Chicago, as mentioned above, focuses on the Loop but connects it to O’Hare via the Blue Line. The path between the two offers an easy commute to either employment center and features exciting, walkable neighborhoods and commercial areas that have thrived since before the airport even existed. Thus, the aerotropolis may affect cities negatively in certain ways, but that second central business district might also produce distinct advantages for parts of those cities.

(Photo from Flickr user Wouter Kiel.)

Forest and the Fast Lane

2009-06-05T09:09:00.073-05:00

When it comes to transition, it seems there is a lot to learn in Moscow. I'm currently writing from there, after a day of walking around and taking a few pictures. The things that really stand out are the lasting marks left on the city from very different governing ideas: ornate metro stations, trees everywhere, aging apartment blocks, modernist masterworks, cars racing down streets that take an incredibly long time to cross. Everything Stalinist is gigantic.

Many public works have aged remarkably well. The metro stations are efficient and well maintained. The ones in the center of town have all kinds of architectural touches usually reserved for mansions, theaters, monuments, city halls, and museums. There is a basic sturdiness that prevents them from seeming too extravagant. Public green space lines the streets and fills the insides of apartment blocks. It’s very refreshing on summer days. Parks are full of young couples, new families, and elders reading or just watching people pass by. The ones I’ve seen so far have been clean but not highly manicured, which gives them a kind of wilderness atmosphere.

The trains and parks seem like lasting gifts from the past, although they’re surely changing with today’s frenetic market experimentation. The giant streets are much less successful from a pedestrian’s point of view -- like highways running through city neighborhoods. If they were narrowed and filled in with plantings, spacious sidewalks, and small businesses, the improvement for walkers would be significant. I can’t quite see this happening, as the young and wealthy seem to really love these roadways. They're good for drag races at night and 360 skids in the middle of the day. It all makes Moscow an interesting mix of values and ideas, like any city, but multiplied by something extreme.

(Photos by Peter Sigrist)

Change? What kind of Change?

2009-06-03T01:13:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, General Motors filed for bankruptcy and the US Government now owns a 60% stake in the largest American car company. Whether it be for better or worse, one thing is clear: the auto industry will not remain the same, and change is coming. Perhaps now, in the beginning of one of the largest economic restructurings ever, it is an appropriate time to talk about change.

There are 2 types of change: regulative change and massive change. One works to bring processes up to date and improve efficiency while the other creates a whole new logic, a whole way of doing things, thereby completely changing the way a system works. GM thought it could save itself by closing plants, streamlining processes, and attempting to create a leaner, more efficient manufacturing company. The problem is, the US automotive industry doesn't just need to be more efficient, it needs to be completely restructured. It is not just the processes that need to change; it's also the motivations, the way of thinking, and the image that drives the company. GM and Ford have resorted to making cartoon cars out of classics! Isn't that post-modernism in a bottle? Is that where we should be? Meanwhile, BMW is making concepts like the GINA which could inspire and rewrite the future of automotive technology. OK, end American Auto Rant.

America, and indeed the developed world, doesn't need regulative change, but massive change. Technology has vastly improved the way we communicate and connect with each other and yet we seem to take that at face value and fail to realize how these massive changes could rewrite the ways in which we operate as a society. The vast spread of information provided by the internet allows for and encourages experimentation. In a trying time like this, we should not hang tight to what we know, but venture out into the unknown to explore and grow, like the pilgrims, or like Lewis and Clark. Regulative change is like pioneering a new cassette tape when everyone has an iPod. In our cities, our landscapes, our businesses, and our buildings, we need to start seeing massive change that will bring us as a society up to the level of our technology.

The restructuring of GM is an opportunity to create massive change, to rewrite not only an industry but a country, and a mentality. If we want to be in a new age, we have to start acting like we are already there.

(Photos from ideo.ro and wikimedia. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Where is The Digital?

2009-05-31T17:38:00.011-05:00

Digging into the Where archive, I found Brendan asking himself:

As the internet becomes increasingly ubiquitous and reality moves toward the virtual, the emergent Cyberspace will almost certainly take on an urban form -- though it remains to be seen whether it will lean more heavily on the physical or virtual world. Either way, geography will become less and less binding as cities learn to connect in ever more complex ways, and we will likely come to understand urbanism as something very different from what it is now.

Only a couple of years later, we're already there. Maybe it's time we started thinking of ways to answer these questions. Here go my two cents:

1. Marshall Berman's All That is Solid Melts Into Air is a double ode to Modernism and The Street. The Modernist Canon includes Dostoyevsky and Joyce, of course, but also Jane Jacobs. Urban vitality is supposed to culminate Modernism. Despite Jacobs and her followers (sometimes because of them), today The Street keeps loosing ground, through stale, celebratory urbanities. The Street is not only displaced or attacked anymore; it is manicured, mercantilized, neutered, over-regulated. Today, The Street is no longer The Street. The Street is The Web.

2. The Web has not only added to Modernist/Urban Canon. It is constantly reworking and dissolving it. The Web Canon is nothing like the usual Canon. The Web Canon is not about authorship. It is about the dissolution of Authorship, swaying back to a wilder communal mode or spirit (or rather a bunch of different communal modes and spirits bumping against each other constantly). (This is one of those eras of cultural dispersion we're entering, like the days of oral tradition or pamphleteering or independent broadcasting). What is Canon one day is forgotten the next. Some Canon never makes the cut, until it does. The Canon swallows every Canon before it. The Canon is The Web itself.

3. Anything cyber — cyberspace, cyberpunk, etc — reeks of Future Anterior and has a bit of that nostalgic (conservative) retraction from reality, even when dreaming up alternative realities. Incursions into cyber-whatever (Second Life urbanisms, virtual reality, etc.) are as much the future of The Web as digital renderings, parametric design and Dubai are the future of architecture and urbanism. Depending on where you stand, this means either everything or close to nothing.

4. Even when embracing and exploiting and dwelling on The Digital, any Networked Urbanism should recognize itself as deeply entrenched in everyday, physical, political, social and cultural realities. It should also acknowledge that it has significant, explicit, lasting effects on these realities.

5. I don't think geography has become "less binding". On the contrary, it's probably only starting to reveal its complexities. This is a matter not only of physical geography or distance we're talking about, but also of political and cultural geographies and distances.

6. The Web Canon might seem Western, but it's definitely not.

7. In one of the hundreds of Web Canon Classics (someone should start collecting them), Kevin Kelly discusses the production and spreading of digital content. He states that the impact of digitization will likely be most significant not in the Developed World (despite the abundance of resources, technical knick-knacks and gadgetry) but in the Third World, in areas that are practically bookless, or at least don't have an Amazon branch.

Something similar might happen with Networked Urbanisms. In the Developed World, Networked Urbanisms' potential might very well fade out under the weight of control and commercialization. The Kindle and the iPhone are the McMansions of Digital Urbanity. Networked Urbanisms could certainly profit from the chronic instability, forced flexibility, selective implementation, DIY and everything-up-for-grabs mindset, creative reuse and living-off-scraps culture of Third World urban realities as much as it already does from its pools of skilled tech workers, cheap manufacturing and shady practices like piracy and copyright infringements. The “digital breach” doesn’t necessarily follow the North-South divide.

8. The Plaza Meave is a huge semi-formal electronics bazaar in the heart of Mexico City’s Centro Histórico, or Historic Quarter. It’s a piece of urban infrastructure straight out of Sci-Fi: an anonymous, damp, smelly and seemingly innocuous building where people hawk and hustle pirated software, stolen or scavenged electronics, tuned hardware, abandonware, orphaned technology, and any random techno-spoils you can imagine. The market often spills over onto the street, and the tech stands mix in with food stalls.

9. I hate the “digital skin” metaphor. There is no such thing as an ICT blanket that just comes and covers or supplants “traditional” urban dynamics. If you’re going to use the usual cheap organicist metaphor, why not say “digital lymphatic system” or something like that?

10. Most of us are too quick to associate technological change with the brave and the new. But to me, one of the most interesting aspects of the digital onslaught is the novelty with which it feeds the past into the present and therefore the future. The Digital has an uncanny historical bent. It allows for and thrives on richer, more intense and diverse readings of the past. We are unburying the marginal, the secondary, the almost forgotten, the populist, the failed, the ephemeral, the quaint, the curious, the quotidian, the small, the foreign, the frilled, and so on and so forth, and inserting everything into our steady and active forward marches. The Angel of History doesn’t have to fly with its back turned to the future anymore. It can just gaze at the past on its iPod.

(I don't remember if I got the photo from Flickr or from Mark the Cobrasnake. If it's your's, please let me know!)

Boredom in a Globalized World

2009-05-28T23:26:00.006-05:00

At the center of the city of Kashgar, on the far western edge of China, is a city of twisting streets lined by mud and brick buildings dating back centuries, to when Kashgar was a trading post along the Silk Road. The Chinese filled in a moat to create a ring road back in the 1980s, and built a highway through the middle of the historic center a few years later, but this historic urban core remained largely intact until recently. Today, Party officials in Beijing have issued a death sentence to historic Kashgar, citing earthquake-preparedness as an excuse for removing the largely Muslim population and leveling the neighborhood house by house as the residents leave.

I've never been to Kashgar; and yet, I find this news deeply disturbing. Reading a recent New York Times article about the Kashgar "redevelopment" on the heels of Katia's post about the planned clearance and "redevelopment" of Dharavi yesterday got me thinking about the effects that clearance projects have on the sociocultural fabric of our cities, and wondering what local changes might signal in the broader context of globalization.

China and India are the undisputed leaders of the pack in the developing world; anyone looking to learn about how globalization will affect cities in our rapidly globalizing world should look no further than the massive metropolises of these rising giants. Slum clearance is the name of the game in cities of all sizes in both of these countries; in places like Kashgar, such projects break up ethnic and cultural enclaves, spreading their tightly-knit populations across the sprawling, newer areas on the edge of the city. Drew's post on Monday pointed out the danger in not making room for smaller, less commercially-viable artistic and cultural scenes: when the grassroots scene dries up, the entire city's cultural cachet declines. Or, as Richard Florida likes to quote Jane Jacobs as saying, "When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave."

What happens to a globalized city when it becomes boring? Could the decline of cultural diversity eventually undermine growing economic centers? Looking beyond the effect of cultural shifts on cities, what happens to a country in a globalized world when that country becomes boring?

As they become more economically established, India and China are edging in on the cultural and economic dominance of the United States and the EU; what happens to the West once these two juggernauts are operating at full tilt? It's possible that everything will go smoothly. It's also highly unlikely. And with plenty of countries lining up for their chance at some record-growth years (think: Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Vietnam, Malaysia), it's the West that's getting increasingly "boring," to extend the metaphor.

Perhaps that's why the destruction of a place that I've never seen is so disturbing to me: in a globalized world where cities are the new neighborhoods and countries the new cities, the cycle of cultural turnover could eventually make entire regions irrelevant at a pace we've never seen before. It's important to remember that, while many cities are benefitting greatly from the effects of globalization, there is something to be said for keeping some aspects of culture local.

(Photos from Flickr users nakamamin and sake.vanderwall. The original full-sized versions can be viewed by clicking the photo.)

Dharavi I: A Tale of Two Cities

2009-05-27T15:31:00.017-05:00

You may have heard of Dharavi by now. This vast (largely) informal settlement in central Mumbai, which has seen a media blitz after being featured in Slumdog Millionaire, was already under a brightening international spotlight on account of being the focus of a multi-billion dollar government redevelopment plan and possessing the false moniker of being “Asia’s largest slum”. Adopted in 2004 and in action since 2006, the plan slices Dharavi into five sectors to be awarded to giant developer consortiums through a competitive bidding process. In exchange for re-housing eligible households in 300 square-foot flats and providing some requisite infrastructure, amenities and commercial space, developers win the right to build developments on the rest of the land for sale on the open market.

Architect Mukesh Mehta – who designed the plan and was appointed official consultant by the Government of Maharashtra (his previous experience was in luxury developments in Long Island) – has widely marketed the plan as a win-win solution: a model of slum redevelopment through public-private partnership to be exported around the world. Residents, local activists, and international critics have called it a thinly veiled land grab.

The project is ridiculously lucrative, owing to the high potential commercial value of the land. Once a no-mans-land on a peripheral marsh, 590-acre Dharavi has found itself in the center of globalizing Mumbai, surrounded by three major railway stations, a bus station and the two major east-west link roads. Most importantly, it is flanked by the Bandra-Kurla Complex, Mumbai’s new financial hub, where land values rival those of Manhattan and Tokyo.

It is also home to over half a million people, over 80 neighborhoods, and thousands of businesses of various scales. It recycles the great majority of Mumbai's waste and supplies everything from bread to leather goods to surgical thread across the city and the globe - producing USD 500 million in goods annually, according to The Economist. It continues to be the entry point for many of Mumbai's migrants and has been home to many families for generations. It has provided affordable shelter, economic opportunities and social mobility for countless people. I would venture that there are more languages spoken, festivals celebrated, and local organizations operating here than anywhere else in India in a territory of this size. With the exception of the 1992-93 riots, Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Buddhists, from all different states, live side by side in peace. Dharavi is home to waste-pickers, leather tanners, computer science students, embroiderers, body-building champions, bakers, potters, lawyers and doctors. There may be a reason Dharavi is shaped like a heart - it makes Mumbai tick in more ways than one.

A recent student presentation I saw called Dharavi a case of “contested urbanism.” It’s a case of contested everything: land, identity, power, aspirations, economics. The conflicts playing out in Dharavi are a microcosm and a test case of whether there will be any space for the poor in tomorrow’s global cities.

I have been lucky enough to have a front-row seat on some of the events related to Dharavi’s redevelopment over the last 1.5 years. I helped draft and field test the official baseline socioeconomic survey for Dharavi. I attended meetings of the now-official expert advisory group on Dharavi. I helped run two participatory design workshops in the area. I facilitated visits for Swedish Parliamentarians, the Governor of Sao Paolo, and a number of journalists and student and professional groups. I published two articles about it. Most importantly, I have walked there, eaten there, played tag, danced, made friends.

Over the next few months, look out for a series about various aspects of this “city within a city” and the visions (and nightmares) it has inspired.

(Photos by Katia Savchuk (not the satellite image - that's from Google).)

The Two Creative Classes

2009-05-25T23:58:00.004-05:00

Many of mankind’s greatest achievements are products of the urban cauldron. That the density, heterogeneity and social environment of cities leads to more rapid innovation and idea sharing should not surprise many, but it’s worthwhile to examine and understand the mechanics of the relationship between cities and their cultural products.

Richard Florida’s Creative Class thesis has garnered much attention since he introduced it in 2002 with The Rise of the Creative Class. That book’s main point—cities that manage to attract members of the “creative class” benefit economically and socially in comparison with cities that don’t—seems to dovetail nicely with the notion that cities are innovation hubs.

The relationship between the two ideas, however, may not be entirely harmonious. While the coffeehouses of early 20th century Vienna may have produced the likes of Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, those literary talents didn’t necessarily equate directly with Vienna’s economic vitality. Likewise, the music scenes that emerged from New York and Cleveland in the 1970’s came out of urban decay, and didn’t necessarily effect a change in those conditions.

The Creative Class, on the other hand, is expected to translate that same intelligence into economic activity. When civic leaders develop incentives to attract this demographic, their goal is generally not art for art’s sake—not that it should be. Municipal government should not be charged with giving a city an arts scene, but it’s reasonable to charge city leadership with creating economic activity. That, in short, is what the Creative Class program means for mayors and city councils.

So far, so good. City leadership can take a laissez-faire approach to the arts and a hands-on approach to the local economy. The trick, though, is not to stifle the former by attending to the latter. A city can attract plenty of creative types who will start companies and go out to eat four times a week, but the incentives employed to attract those groups might inadvertently extinguish the scenes that don’t pay and don’t spend. If it becomes too difficult to live cheaply in a city, the will to tinker or experiment on a minimal income might dwindle or vanish. The two aforementioned groups need not be mutually exclusive, however, and as planners and elected officials articulate their vision for a given city, they should remain conscious of what both creative classes have to offer and encourage each to exist in that city.

(Photo from Flickr user nickmickolas.)

Transition States

2009-05-23T00:00:00.132-05:00

Development, use, abandonment, reuse, demolition, redevelopment. Transition states. It seems that everything is in transition, but here I'd like to focus on the span of time between clearly defined places like factories and forests.

Development includes combining separate elements into new forms, like making something out of legos. Materials are assembled into buildings, which in turn form cities. This may fulfill a need or function based on reactions to things that came before. In this sense, new things embody the past.

When a thing no longer serves its purpose, it is often abandoned. At this point it can be reused in its current form, reassembled into something new, or destroyed. But it can never really be destroyed. Nearly imperceptible parts remain in circulation. They integrate with other things. They may haunt us in ways more tangible than the ways we haunt places. Smoke can be like a ghost that haunts us.

If left abandoned, things are said to return to nature. Not that they ever left, but they can again be transformed into something else. There is a period of transition. For a building, this may be when weeds start to grow around and within it, or when other life forms make it their home. Eventually it may be enveloped by a forest.

Plants are often considered therapeutic, like Mandela's prison garden. They are also zoned and regulated. We put them in our cubicles, malls, streets, airports, and they represent healthier locations. Why are the places we work not healthy in their own right? How did the real or perceived separation between healthy environments and work environments come about? What was the transition like? And how do we alter the resulting state?

We might consider what happens to the things we develop and abandon. Ideally they are reclaimed, reassembled, or disposed of with care. This is how we prevent a haunted world. Maybe this will help us improve the quality of work sites, or even change the nature of our work. As unhealthy places are abandoned, there is hope for transition. What will this transition be like?

In animation, creating a transition requires a momentary destination state. Maybe we can learn from this. If we envision a solution to each problem that confronts us, clearly defining our origin and destination, we should find improved transitions. Many people are doing this through ecologically oriented design, entrepreneurship, policy, architecture, education, activism, engineering, and other pursuits. Inclusive planning can help us work towards well conceived destination states. We'll still face the unexpected, but we can keep experimenting and solving problems as we move closer to where we hope to be.

(Credits: Photo of transitional space in Harlem by Camilo Jose Vergara of Invincible Cities. Photo of plants growing on an abandoned house from Houses of Tung Ping Chau. Photo of Nelson Mandela in his prison garden from City Farmer News.)

The New New South

2009-05-22T14:30:00.004-05:00

When our grandparents re-imagined the urban environment, we wound up with Pruitt-Igoe and the Parisian banlieues. As a result, popular opinion leans somewhat sharply in the negative direction when it comes to large-scale urban renovations. Still, it is largely accepted, among the current generation of urbanists and architects, that the suburbs are in need of a serious, large-scale overhaul. It's always important, when taking on a major project, to learn from the lessons of the past. But what exactly do the tower blocks and windswept concrete plazas of the latter half of the twentieth century teach us? On the surface, it's that tower blocks and windswept concrete plazas make for dire cities. But beyond that, these stark interventions illustrate quite plainly that it is almost never a good idea to rip down everything and start from scratch.

It's too bad, really, because starting a city from scratch is a very romantic and exciting idea. But cities are places that are used by millions of people, in millions of different ways; the longer a place is inhabited, the more people develop routines in and around them. Aesthetics aside, familiarity sets in, and even ugly places can become comfortable and familiar. Modernist urban renewal projects didn't just fail because they were severe and lacked a sense of human scale; they failed, at least in part, because they ignored the patterns and rhythms of the places that they replaced.

It's encouraging, then, to see that some of the cities considered the greatest offenders by anti-sprawl camp are starting not only to attempt to densify, but that they are doing so in ways that adapt rather than replace their built environments. Take, for instance, Miami, where a former car dealership is being redeveloped as a highrise urban district, or Charlotte, North Carolina, which has taken several steps in the past few years to actually start acting like a city of its economic stature. A new light rail has been built, for instance, with plans for considerable expansion; density has been encouraged along the transit lines; in one suburb, all new commercial buildings are required to have at least two stories. For a city with a population density of only 2,515 people per square mile (slightly less than that of Bangladesh), these are very promising steps toward urbanization. Better yet, there's been no wholesale removal of the city's existing fabric; just modifications.

Other sprawling cities are starting to take notice. Atlanta, the undisputed Capital of the New South since its rapid revival back in the late 1980s, has recently taken note of Charlotte's urbanization, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution calling the city "a feisty, undersized boxer [that punches above its weight]." No small words from the Rome of Suburban Postwar America. And as that same article notes (albeit in downplayed terms that any smart urbanist will snicker at), Atlanta is currently struggling under the weight of the obscene freeway system that grew as fast as the metro's population. The city is already saddled with several eight-lane freeways (that's eight in both directions, for a total of 16) and the Georgia State Assembly seems to be making transit decisions using a 1965-vintage playbook. With New Jerseyans now complaining about the gridlock in the Big Peach (which they actually do in the AJ-C article), Atlanta's mobility problems are looking like a very serious liability.

Charlotte, meanwhile, has half the population of Atlanta but less than half the congestion. It remains to be seen if Charlotte will ever catch up to Atlanta in terms of international economic stature, but even if it doesn't, Charlotte can lead the way as a slew of sprawling mid-sized Southern cities (the entire region is notorious for its sprawl, after all) seek to densify and re-work their urban fabric. By taking the lead on lifestyle issues, Charlotte could become the capital of the New New South.

(Photos from Flickr user wbwood1969 and The Daily Green.)

From Projects to Pediments

2009-05-21T20:30:00.000-05:00

Housing Projects have always been an interesting issue for urban planners, designers, and architects to discuss. The problem of poverty is a big one, and one that has yet to be solved. There have been many models, yet none of them have been hailed as wildly successful. So today, many older housing projects are being torn down, demolished, and replaced with mixed income housing and strip malls. Basically, the idea is to replace these vertical ghettos with low rise housing with a portion dedicated to low income housing.

For the past nine months or so, Chicago has been trying something a little different. The Chicago Housing Authority has taken their 16 building Dearborn Homes low income housing project on South State Street, and is attempting to "beautify" the structures with pediments and keystones. It isn't clear how the units will be doled out when finished, whether it will all remain low income housing, or if they will try to sell most of the units as luxury condos and leave a percentage for low-income housing.

The CHA website, under the clever heading that reads "CHAnge," provides video documentation with classical music and animations on many of their housing project developments. The Dearborn Homes link, however, simply goes to a brief information page that states:

"Dearborn Homes is currently operating as one of the CHA’s “relocation resources,” providing capacity for residents who have moved from other developments undergoing redevelopment or rehabilitation. Plans for the property’s future are currently under consideration. "

Whether these homes become luxary condos, or maintain thier public status, interesting discussion is sure to follow. Will people buy these units that were once considered slums? Will pediments and keystones solve the problems that exist in public housing? We shall see.

A New Urban Environmentalism?

2009-05-16T00:00:00.087-05:00

I'm not sure if there's anything left to say about Van Jones, the Obama administration's special adviser on green jobs. An article by Elizabeth Kolbert details his efforts to address urban poverty and global warming by putting people to work on green infrastructure projects. Jones explains his plans in a recent NPR interview. His work has captured the imagination of many, but does it represent a promising new form of urban environmentalism?

Jones is a political star. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1993, he moved to the Bay Area and began advocating for human rights in urban communities. He fought effectively to keep people out of jail, in gainful employment, and safe from police brutality. Jones traces his environmental interest to a talk by Julia Butterfly Hill, explaining that he admired and identified with her efforts to save a redwood tree. The two found common ground in helping people and things considered disposable.

At a meeting with Nancy Pelosi in 2007, Jones brought up the need for a Clean Energy Jobs Bill. The idea caught on and was included in the Energy Independence and Security Act less than a year later. He has since published a book called The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. In today's political climate of economic crisis and recovery, this concept makes environmental concern more politically viable. It has rallied unions, corporations, politicians, and local activists behind alternative energy as an agent for job creation.

Still, there is skepticism about the merits of combined solutions to global warming and poverty. Some see a lack of environmental concern among less affluent communities as a major impediment. Others point out that environmental conservation places disproportionate strain on people living in poverty. Some policy experts see the two problems as too distinct to be addressed with a joint solution. Jones responds by explaining the benefits of a holistic approach that encourages combined efforts. He considers poverty alleviation without environmental consideration a short-term fix, resulting in greater problems down the road. He adds that people living in poverty will support environmental causes that address their most pressing needs.

Jones looks for points of agreement and makes the most of them. He peppers his speech with clear and memorable phrases that express shared interests, often playing with different meanings of the word green. At the same time, he's not shy about applying pressure against powerful opponents (skills sharpened fighting police brutality in the 1990s). Of course, it will take more than consensus and coercion for his current efforts to succeed. The jobs will have to be efficient and provide better sources of energy. A certain amount of financial loss is acceptable in return for long-term gains, but the gains have to materialize. Given the widespread support for these ideas, the timing is right to make them work.

So, is Jones at the forefront of a new urban environmentalism? His work is different from environmental justice movements that have fought to improve ecological conditions in marginalized communities. Jones adopts the discourse of sustainable development, with a focus on poverty alleviation. He aims for consensus around human needs, rather than proposing a radical alternative to current forms of environmental management. As far as labels go, his ideas integrate three potentially conflicting -isms: social, capital, and environmental. His emphasis is clearly on the social, but only in the sense of prioritizing human concerns. If this renders him a socialist, then even Milton Friedman would be socialist. In reference to the urban, now that Jones is advising on green jobs for the entire country, his focus will have to expand to include suburban and rural communities. He has successfully articulated a vision that links inclusive economic prosperity with long-term environmental care. While this isn't new urban environmentalism, it is something more comprehensive and very worth pursuing.

(Credits: Photo of Van Jones from Green for All; Photo of Julia Butterfly Hill from Earthfirst; Photo of smoke stacks from the Hunter College Department of Geography; Photo of Milton Friedman from In Defense of Liberty)

Sense of the City Winner: Congrats ssales of San Francisco!

2009-05-14T20:50:00.001-05:00

It all came down to a close race between ssales' San Francisco, sallycat's Buenos Aires, and DeborahMcCoy's Chicago tours, which between the three of them captured a full 50% of the 99 votes cast in Where's Sense of the City Challenge at NextStop.com. The winner when all was said and done late last night was ssales, a "hoop goddess and aspiring lawyer" from the City by the Bay whose tour of her town struck just the right balance between quirky sights, hotspots, and parks to grab 22 votes and earn her the top spot bragging rights and a $50 Visa gift card from NextStop.

All of us at Where would like to extend our hearty congratulations to the winner, and to thank everyone who entered and voted. It's been fun to get a sense of how you experience your cities these past couple of weeks -- and what a mix of cities it was! The Sense of the City Challenge drew 17 entries from San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Prague, Sydney, Milwaukee, Vancouver, Gold Coast, the two Portlands (Oregon and Maine), Athens, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Austin, and Bali.

Thanks, also, go to the folks at NextStop.com, particularly Isabel, who set this whole shindig up, and Kevin, the programmer who built the nifty widgets that have been up on the Where homepage during the contest. The widgets will stay for a few more days for anyone who wants to swing over to NextStop to check out the Sense of the City entries (though voting is now closed) and any of the other challenges that NextStop is currently running. Bon appetite!

(Photo from Allposters.co.uk, by way of NextStop.com.)

Participatory Design in Poor Communities: Beyond the Rhetoric

2009-05-13T14:18:00.010-05:00

"Participatory design" seems to be the mantra of the current generation of urban practitioners working with low-income populations. There is growing consensus that local communities should be involved in projects that affect them, both for the sake of their efficacy and with an eye to inclusive cities and governance frameworks. You'd be hard-pressed nowadays to find a development agency pamphlet, municipal government plan, or urban design curriculum that didn't pay homage to "participation."

Although the rhetoric all sounds pretty, the way in which the concept is understood varies widely. In bare-bones cases, it may mean simply keeping users informed about a project. At other times, it may involve getting majority consent. in other situations, designers may study the needs of users and incorporate their interpretations into the project. Going further, there may be processes of community consultation of varying depth. Participation can also involve inclusion of civil society and, less often, grassroots leaders in advisory or decision-making capacities. Much less often, participation means working in-depth with local groups at some or all stages of a project, from design to implementation to post-construction work.

The model of participation employed hinges in part on design professionals' understanding of the role of the architect in such projects. Is it to innovate and present people with what the professional considers a better space? Is to study and interpret local conditions? Is to to balance user needs and desires with considerations of design, engineering, costs, regulations, etc.? Or is to facilitate a bottom-up process of design and implementation? Equally if not more so, the mode of participation possible depends on the ways in which the community itself is organized.

In Pune, India, the ground has been laid for a precedent-setting model of community participation in housing design and slum upgrading. There, a network of poor women's collectives known as Mahila Milan ("Women Together") are planning to mobilize around 700 families in 7 slums to participate in design and construction to upgrade their homes as part of an incremental housing strategy developed in partnership with SPARC, an NGO that supports their work (and which I work for), and an international group of architects led by Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson.

Upgrading is taking place under a scheme administered by the Pune Municipal Corporation that offers subsidies of Rs.300,000 (10% of which comes from a beneficiary contribution) to eligible households living in structures made of recycled materials for rebuilding 265 square-foot homes on roughly the existing footprint. The scheme also provides for improvement of infrastructure, roads and basic amenities. (Using government subsidies to promote incremental upgrading at the settlement level and preservation of well-developed structures is itself a landmark move by the PMC, and came in part out of negotiations and collaborations with SPARC and Mahila Milan over years.)

Housing designs and settlement layouts will emerge out of a participatory process facilitated by Mahila Milan, which has been active in the communities through savings activities and other community work for over a decade, in most cases. The strategy uses house models and other visual aids as tools for participatory design and promotes cluster development to enable consensus on rearrangements that will increase pathways and public space. A major aim is to create structures that will allow families to increment their homes over time and to maintain the existing settlement layout as far as possible to preserve social networks and the urban fabric.

In the project, Mahila Milan will also lead a community mobilization process, complete household and plane table surveys, secure consent letters, and help manage construction, which will be implemented through local labor. The idea is that the pilot project will be a springboard for Mahila Milan to explore this process in other locales that they work in across Pune and India and to manage as many aspects of the process as possible.

How is it that grassroots collectives of poor women can participate in the project to such an extent? To understand that, you need to look back to 1984, to the pavement slums of Mumbai. That was where a group of development professionals that formed an NGO called SPARC mobilized the first Mahila Milan groups organized around credit and savings activities. SPARC was aiming to develop new relationships with the urban poor and increase the participation of women in order to ultimately promote their mission of improving access to shelter, land and basic amenities for the urban poor.

Savings and credit increased financial assets, but more importantly, mobilized women into networks and built their confidence and financial and leadership skills. Savings and credit became the first core activity in a series of rituals that are both ends in themselves and means for building the capacities of the poor to proactively develop strategies and negotiate around issues of housing, land, sanitation and other basic habitat needs (these include slum surveys and mapping, peer exchanges, model housing exhibitions, demonstration construction projects, and more). Pune's Mahila Milan started with savings in 1997 , but gradually built their capacity to take on construction projects, large-scale surveys, and even a city-wide sanitation program in partnership with the government. It is only because of these decades of groundwork that Mahila Milan are poised to take on this project.

The type of involvement here is "empowered participation." Because Mahila Milan have a vast organizational base; skills in financial management, data collection, construction, and collaboration with government authorities; and staying power, they are able to lead a process in which communities are genuine partners rather than survey respondents or focus group members. Most importantly, Mahila Milan has the capacity to institutionalize and build on their learning from the partnership with design professionals to take work forward.

In the absence of a group like Mahila Milan, designers would likely be limited to talking with men, particularly those with local power, who would co-opt the process when a question of money was at stake. It would not be possible for designers to organize the community in a way that enables deep participation, and local people would not have the skills or systems for completing maps and surveys, collecting beneficiary contributions, and managing construction. Once the architect left at the end of the project, the process would end rather than being scaled up.

Because obstacles are the rule rather than the exception with housing projects in slums, it is not guaranteed that the project will unfold as planned. However, the conceptual groundwork has laid and partnerships formed give us a hint about how participation can genuinely become a reality rather than remaining a cute catch phrase.

Note: The third partner besides SPARC and Mahila Milan in what is known as the Indian Alliance is the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF). The Alliance works in 72 cities in 9 states across India and is an affiliate of Slum Dwellers International (SDI), a network in over 30 countries.

(Images by the team of Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson.)

Cities and the Big Sort

2009-05-12T01:09:00.008-05:00

Why do we love cities? One of the main reasons is surely that cities create opportunities to meet many different people, and many different types of people. The notion of a rural-urban cultural dichotomy has existed as long as cities have, and the distinction has always been characterized by the diverse social opportunities that cities offer.

Smaller towns undoubtedly provide more homogenous social climates than cities, partially because of sheer numbers—the fewer the people, the fewer the types—but cities have homogeneity problems of their own. The culprit: a phenomenon author Bill Bishop and the Economist have called the Big Sort. As a society, it seems, we are getting better and better at seeking out those who are most like us and surrounding ourselves with those people.

Kazys Varnelis writes on his blog that “mobility is leading individuals to cluster in communities of other like-minded individuals.” Communication technology, especially the Internet, certainly facilitates this sorting process. The mobility Varnelis describes finds its ultimate expression in the instant communities we form online, and the tools that help us comb through cyberspace allow us to hone in on exactly what we’re trying to find. In short, the Internet allows us to sort ourselves more effectively than cities ever could.

Christopher Alexander managed to get way ahead of this problem in 1977, viewing the Big Sort through the urban lens. In A Pattern Language, he acknowledges the value of some degree of societal sorting: a compromise between the two extremes of ghettoization and uniform heterogeneity, both of which stifle diversity. He calls this compromise the Mosaic of Subcultures and he describes it as follows:

“The metropolis must contain a large number of different subcultures, each one strongly articulated, with its own values sharply delineated, and sharply distinguished from the others. But though these subcultures must be sharp and distinct and separate, they must not be closed; they must be readily accessible to one another, so that a person can move easily from one to another, and can settle in the one which suits him best.” (Alexander 48)

Alexander’s solution makes perfect sense for a physical city, but given the layers of information and digital connectivity that overlay contemporary cities, it may not be so simple anymore. Yes, the Internet lets us move from subculture to subculture more easily than in the past—more easily than in the most vibrant and diverse city—but that same technology lets us ignore other subcultures just as easily. One of the virtues of the physical city is that it forces us to face others in realistic way, unpleasant though the experience may be. As long as this keeps happening, we'll remember how to live amongst those who approach life differently than we do. A true mosaic of subcultures, in other words, is an urban asset worth preserving.

(Photo from Flickr user wenstrom.)

Sense of the City Challenge - Only 2 Days Left!

2009-05-11T18:15:00.003-05:00

Attention all Wheresters: our Sense of the City challenge at NextStop.com is quickly coming to a close. Only two days remain in the competition, so if you haven't had a chance to check out the dozen entries posted by your fellow readers, make sure to get over to the contest page before midnight on Wednesday to check out personalized tours of cities around the world and vote for the ones that you think best convey a strong sense of place. The winner (who will receive a $50 Visa gift card for their top-notch e-tour skillz) will be determined entirely by public vote, and anyone can put in their two cents by registering at NextStop (which is simple, quick, and totally painless, scout's honor) and voting before the contest closes.

Also, the contest is still close, so if you think you can muster up your own personal fan base and underdog it, it's not too late to create an entry. That should serve as a reminder to those of you who have already entered -- get the word out about your contest entry and get your friends voting. You never know what can happen in 54 hours. Good luck to everyone! (Here's that link, one more time.)

Sitte in a Digital World

2009-05-09T00:00:00.046-05:00

Camillo Sitte thoughtfully explained the interior qualities of his favorite public spaces. Though generally open to the sky, they were surrounded by varied building types and furnished with stairways, arches, and sculptures. They were intimate and often irregular, with engaging views on all sides. He lamented the abandonment of plazas as daily life moved increasingly indoors.

Today life moves increasingly online, but the places we inhabit -- whether physical or virtual -- are no less important. Even looking out the window affects our state of mind. This is hard to measure, but it's fairly clear when we feel comfortable, depressed, inspired, fearful, or healthy in response to our surroundings.

Sitte envisioned outdoor space that didn't feel desolate. When we think of The Great Outdoors, we usually mean forests, mountains, rivers -- not cities. But in many ways forests have more in common with cities than with prairies or deserts. They are full of proximate activity, and contain many unique places. I wonder how cities might eventually be considered part of The Great Outdoors.

It would be a stretch to think of online places in Sitte's terms, unless we include video games. Many games offer convincing and imaginative environments. They might help us understand the way people interact with physical spaces before building them. Although it doesn't seem possible to get a feel for a place before it is built, studying people's use of virtual settings can inform key decisions. This sounds expensive, but could save money in the long run.

Whether physical, virtual, or somewhere in between, environments affect the quality of our lives. Considering the factors that contribute to positive experiences, as Sitte did, is of great value. His observations have inspired generations of architects, planners, and concerned citizens to create and preserve beloved places.

(Photo of the Piazza dei Signori Vicenza from Flickr user Albert dj; Drawing scanned from p. 378 of Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning, by George R. Collins and Christiane C. Collins)

Urban Afflictions. An Interview with Hilary Sample (Part Two)

2009-05-06T11:09:00.020-05:00

Urban outbreaks: SARS 2003

Urban outbreaks: A/H1N1 2009

Following up on our interview with Hilary Sample on the subject of global health crises in urban contexts, we've moved from the backdrop of her research and the specific responses she's studied to a more speculative perspective on the issue. If you haven't read the first part, scroll down or click here.

Where: You've identified a combined research/corporate drive behind the Biomed City phenomenon (those of you who haven’t, go download and read Hilary’s short essay on the BMC here). Due to current political and economic events, we see a tendency towards a heavier and more direct government involvement (particularly in the U.S., but in other places as well) in the different areas that are the backdrop for BMCs: economic policy, health care and infrastructural development. Do you see this affecting the nature of the BMC? For the good or for the bad?

Hilary Sample: We can look to Singapore as an example of the government-driven development, specifically in the Biopolis project. The masterplan was designed by Zaha Hadid, which had an extensive landscape and programmatically included a lot of public functions, along with connection to the subway system-extending it into the Biopolis. Subsequently not much of the public components have been built, but the project continues to grow with frequent announcements of new corporations renting space. It is a private interest project supported by the government. Singapore’s government does not place any restrictions on scientists working with stem cells, and this is one factor driving the brain gain and science boom in Singapore. Interestingly, universities such as Johns Hopkins, which have space problems at their campus rent space in the Biopolis. In this case, we see branding of health taking on new structures.

In the United States, it seems difficult to think that the private sector would begin to support innovation in terms of adopting a clear social agenda with respect to urban health development, even though there are tremendous needs and opportunities to rethink the way our cities could function with respect to health. The current moment does seem like an opportunity for government action, not only in terms of providing access to a better health care system, but for a complete reframing of the idea of health, at least in this country.

I think this could be supported by both Federal and city governments and inspire private developments. In my opinion, we need radical change in the way health care is promoted and in the physical spaces in which treatments and care are given. I’m interested in how architects and designers can rethink the city as we know it and develop new systems and forms that are civic, not just expanding the existing hospital building by adding to it. The image of the hospital from what it used to be has become unrecognizable. Hospitals are often referred to as cities in their own right, but in my opinion, they take the worst situations from cities as their examples. We need new paradigms, especially with the super hospital being developed as a mega-scaled building.

Biopolis, Singapore

W: Another revealing aspect here is the geoeconomic breach one perceives between "prepared" and "unprepared" cities. With the exception of China, maybe, BMCs are apparently limited to developed countries. At the same time, the cities that are most vulnerable and more exposed to health threats of this nature are those in underdeveloped countries. What do you think?

HS: Largely, I believe this is true; we have a huge division between prepared and unprepared cities. But the idea that Third-World cities are always unprepared or that First-World cities are prepared isn’t always the case. The SARS outbreaks showed us this exact problem. For instance, Hanoi — one of the poorest and least developed cities in terms of urban health developments — actually had one of the best responses to the SARS epidemic. It was the first city to get a hold on the spread of the virus. They basically did this by isolating all SARS patients to two hospitals on the outskirts of the city. In Beijing we saw the construction of a hospital in 8 days.

I wouldn’t say it is a regional trend, but in this one instance it shows that at a local level spatial practices worked well. I don’t think we can say it is an either or situation. The SARS virus was identified through the collaboration between many scientists in many different countries. The virus itself spread quickly, but so did the effort of scientists to find an answer, which relied on a spatial network of laboratories and governing agencies. The spatial organization of both are extremely important.

W: Do you think a different version of the BMC could arise in cities that don't have the funds or the resources to build huge hospitals and research centers? Maybe one that opts for networked, flexible, mobile infrastructures that could be deployed whenever and wherever needed, including the poorer cities of the South?

HS: This has been the subject of a graduate research seminar I taught at Yale called Design and Disease. An amazing feature of our interconnected world is that we are learning more and more about situations of impoverishment, poor health, and the lack of establishing life-sustaining infrastructures.

In the seminar, the students made a kind of index of building types in cities around the world, looking at hospitals from Hong Kong to Soweto, pharmaceutical companies (Roche vs. Novartis in Zurich) and the performance of architecture.

One of the most surprising instances we learned about is in Soweto. The Bara Hospital sees more than 2000 patients a day, with a large population of AIDS/HIV patients. It claims to be the largest hospital in the world, but this is a hospital that has been built within an aging British Army barracks, and in the context of limited access to resources, including electricity. Here a complementary support system would be a good option to support what little infrastructure and physically working buildings there are. So maybe flexible and mobile structures are more economical or efficient when you have nothing better, but really what all cities need are both permanent and mobile health support.

New York City is an example that has both some of the leading hospitals in the world, but also significant mobile infrastructures, from asthma vans to PODS (points of dispensing systems in the event of an epidemic). It’s significant that cities with permanent, large-scale buildings also have equally and burgeoning mobile systems, suggesting that both are truly needed. But how can we make these decisions as designers? In my opinion, it all comes back to the practice of understanding how cities perform at the most detailed level, and examining the diseased city is essential. Mapping activities of urban disease is essential.

Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto, South Africa

W: This last outbreak in Mexico generated an enormous amount of activity on the Web: everything that we’re starting to grow used to now (real-time reporting on Twitter, constant updates on Google News and recommendations delivered directly from institutional web pages) but also some fascinating tools we really hadn’t seen before (I’m thinking of the Google Flu Trends project). Do you think we will see more alert systems, diagnostic means, protocols, open-source and web-based strategies in the future, or, we could say, a “smarter” response strategy?

HS: We see scientists working with a kind of virtual epidemiology, and they’re doing this more than any designer or spatial planner. For instance, I have a case in mind in which researchers studied a hypothetical outbreak of smallpox in Portland, Oregon, trying to identify social trends in an urban disease situation. The study included specific maps of the transportation infrastructure, and looked at how people moved in the city. This is an extraordinary spatial analysis that would be a powerful tool for architects, planners, and designers. Portland is a city that has made interesting urban decisions tied with how to better access its health-care infrastructure, including the Portland Aerial Tram designed by AGPS.

By comparison, there are actually very few studies or projects that I have seen looking at the contagious disease in cities by designers. I can think of two important works that shed light on the SARS outbreaks. The first is the “SARS Atlas” by Fabrizio Gallanti and Francisca Insulza published by Domus in 2004, which indexically mapped disease hot spots in cities. The other is Julie Rose’s essay in Log, a description of the urban spatial shifts that SARS produced in Hong Kong.

The spatial and social consequences of a disease reveal the performance of a given city. With the recent 2009A/H1N1 outbreak, just five years after the SARS outbreak, it seems likely that we are going to see more frequent events of this kind. In the end, if hospitals fail in an actual emergency, then suddenly subways are empty, people are in their cars or at their family’s house in the suburb, the city fails, the economy fails and it takes years to recover. The way we design our buildings and cities should be rethought to include social spaces that work.

W: This last question is probably more abstract (even emotional), but I think it's just as relevant in terms of spatial effects. I would like to discuss this recurring issue of fear, not only in terms of the outbreaks themselves, but regarding measures taken to deal with crises as well. You mentioned something about this regarding the resistance some of these public health projects have met in cities. It’s interesting to see how these developments might generate suspicion in themselves and cause a stir, like a high-security prison or a nuclear plant probably would.

There is also a whiff of mid-century paranoia about the whole situation, the fear of the looming dangers of density and the city core (you mentioned that many of the projects are built in secluded and distant locations). In Mexico City lots of people actually fled for cities nearby over the weekend when the crisis was announced. What do you think of all this?

HS: There is no question that fear, like the virus, is an epidemic. And it does seem like urban disasters are on the rise, Katrina, SARS, 9/11. There are patterns that we can now begin to study and understand, which would in turn affect the way we design both buildings and cities. In general there are two trends emerging regarding what we’ve been discussing here:

First, the building-up of the urban core with super hospitals and biosafety labs, new transit connections between these centers, and the location of research laboratories within the city rather in remote suburban parks. In the U.S. many developers in the sector are abandoning the model of suburban corporate park in favor of building in the city. Some cities have begun to build their own biosafety labs. Some of these laboratories test deadly viruses, like the Boston case we mentioned before. Ultimately, it winds up being housed in a non-descript building sited within a hospital district, but the surrounding neighborhood is considered to be a low-income area. This raised many questions at the time of its construction.

The second trend, which we see mostly in South East Asia, is the building of remote hospitals, far from the city core, with architectural renderings that show them surrounded by green spaces.

In the end, both of these urban strategies are driven by fear.

It isn’t surprising that people fled from Mexico City; this was the same reaction in Beijing during the SARS outbreaks. How people react to crisis is unpredictable, and so, at least for designers, it seems we can only study what has already occurred. Again, here I think that the most significant spatial studies are being developed by scientists or artists, not architects or planners.

In 2005, researchers Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren, examined the video game "World of Warcraft” and the introduction of a virtual virus within a controlled environment. The virtual virus quickly and unexpectedly corrupted the virtual world, and learned that there were many similarities between the virtual and real life scenarios.

Christain Nold, an artist, has been working on a bio-mapping project that tests emotional responses of individuals in urban contexts. These studies result in maps that give us a whole new geographic perspective of the city. What I appreciate about this study is that we see a range of emotional responses that correspond directly to the built environment. Again here there are lessons to be learned about the performance of our constructed environments.

Protest against biosafety lab, Boston

W: Thank you so much Hilary, it’s been great talking to you! I think we’ve covered a pretty good spectrum. Now let’s hope our Where readers out there have more to add to the discussion.

(Maps courtesy of Hilary Sample. Photo from Flickr users askpang, srippon, and steph ps. The original full-sized color version can be viewed by clicking the photo.)