I recently spent the better part of five days sitting on a cinderblock in the courtyard of Museo Experimental el Eco, listening to various creative people, mostly from Mexico, talk about their work. I am not entirely certain why I did this, but I am glad that I did. The event, Postópolis, is described as “a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design.” I applaud the premise: to celebrate and take stock of the extent to which sophisticated discourse and debate about design and urban culture (and the creative forces which influence them) have migrated to online formats. And I appreciate the method: to instigate “a Ponzi scheme of ideas,” in which the organizer (Storefront for Art and Architecture) invites a set of bloggers to descend upon a particular city, each of whom then invites a set of individuals from that city to discuss their work in front of a live audience.

But I am not clear on the outcome. Certainly, as an audience member, I am today more informed of about the dizzying amount of creativity and innovation at the heart of Mexico City’s cultural life than I was pre-Postópolis. But I am at a loss as to how exactly the wealth of information and ideas I witnessed might be put to work. What comes next? Of course, the event was more esoteric snapshot than representative sample. But even then, if the point is to spotlight the fact that serious dialogue about cities now takes place on the internet and to apply that serious dialogue to a real time and place, then shouldn’t that attention and dialogue lead to some kind of action about how best to understand, represent or intervene in urban life?

Eduardo Terrazas | Photo by Cassim Shepard

What attracted me to Postópolis was the opportunity to experience the improvised and extemporaneous formation of a collective portrait of the creative energies defining a city at a particular moment. I did not participate in the first two incarnations of Postópolis — in New York in 2007 and in Los Angeles in 2009 — but I am told that what emerged were studies in contrast. How could a sophisticated portrait of a city be anything else? As I said in my own introductory speech on the first day, the complex challenges of urban portraiture define my own work as a documentary filmmaker and as the editor of Urban Omnibus. In both roles I rely on the evocative power of juxtaposing diverse fragments to tell stories that resist the tendency to reduce urban complexity into facile essences or prescriptions, with the goal of telling stories that amount to more than the sum of their parts.

But portraiture requires a kind of coherence that the frame alone — in this case the conceptual frame of Postópolis and the physical frame of the Museo Experimental el Eco — struggled to provide. Instead of coherence, we got a diffuse and diverse sense of Mexico City, composed of disparities. The unlikely juxtaposition of the opening presentations — Fernando Romero shared 100 hundred slides of his slick architecture and Ali Gadorki discussed the messy fusion of punk, cumbia and queer identity politics — telegraphed beautifully the primary lesson of Postópolis: that portraying Mexico City (or any city) requires engaging the stark contrasts within its creative community. Romero was invited by Sam Jacob, an architect based in London. Gadorki was invited by Daniel Hernandez, a Mexican-American journalist from L.A. who has spent the past few years infiltrating and documenting Mexico City’s various subcultures. Over the course of the following days, the audience was treated a similarly dizzying diversity of voices. To name just a few: we heard from Raúl Cardenas, one of the forces behind the excellent Tijuana-based research and design collective torolab. We heard from Julio Cou Cámara, a scuba diver charged with maintaining Mexico City’s sewer system. We heard from Captain Remigio Cruz, who directs the efforts of the Mexican military’s museum of narcotics to educate soldiers on the army’s “successes” in its war on drugs.

Derek Dellekamp | Photo by Ariette Armella

At root, Postópolis asserts that some sort of affinity or relationship exists between curatorial practice and blogging practice — between the institutions that select and present creative work and the individuals who offer commentary on whatever interests them — but the nature of this relationship remains unnamed. To be sure, it is still in formation; and Postópolis offers a good first step toward identifying how these two practices might inform each other.

Bloggers are often considered diarists, but I prefer to think of them as foragers: most blog posts take something that already exists — from the internet, popular culture or lived experience — as a point of departure for reflection that combines elements of essay, anecdote, news, analysis and speculation. That’s why bloggers make good portraitists, even if they don’t see themselves as such. The vantage of the scavenger/storyteller speaks well of her ability to inform a collective image of a city. As someone who directs an editorial website that has dozens of authors and advisors, is based at an established institution (the Architectural League of New York) and sticks to a weekly publication schedule, I felt slightly disingenuous masquerading as a blogger. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Urban Omnibus is an interdisciplinary index of innovative ideas conceived to make New York City smarter, greener and fairer, it also functions as a kind of ad-hoc portrait of the creative energies currently shaping urbanism.

Jose Castillo | Photo by Ariette Armella

Of the 70 or so presentations at Postópolis, one in particular resisted Mexico City’s tendency to splinter and fragment the moment anyone tries to define it. From the moment I was invited to take part, I knew that at the top of my wish list of speakers would be Eduardo Terrazas, the architect, designer and artist behind the Mexico ’68 identity program for the 1968 Olympics. In part, I wanted Terrazas to speak because I suspected that most of the other bloggers would be inviting practitioners from their own generation. But more than wanting to include mature voices, I also wanted to hear more about the historical moment (a decade before I was born) when all eyes were trained on Mexico City. I wondered: “How can a designer develop and establish a coherent identity for a place as complex as Mexico City?”

Terrazas was a young man when he got the massive job, in 1966, to use the tools of design — the job included everything from a logotype for the Games to an urban-scale communications and wayfinding system, from public transportation logistics to public art projects — to present Mexico’s varied and singular culture to the world. He explained how he found inspiration for the graphic identity in the Sierra Madre Huichol Indians’ use of parallel, curvilinear lines; how he carefully evaluated the balance between Mexico’s past and its future; how he found an ideographic system that was both distinctly Mexican and universally legible; and how the legacy of the work is forever intertwined with the tragedy of the Tlatelolco massacre, ten days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Derek Dellekamp, Pilgrim Route, State of Jalisco, Mexico | Courtesy of Dellekamp Arquitectos

Eduardo Terrazas, Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, Lance Wyman, Mexico '68 Identity | Image courtesy of Hespánica

Clearly, a great deal fed into that project, and great deal came out of it. But Terrazas did not confine his presentation to work from the late 1960s. He went on to describe several art exhibitions he organized about the material culture of Mexico City. He showed some of his paintings. He shared his proposal for jurisidictional reform that would expand the city’s current and outdated political limits — the borders of the Distrito Federal — to encompass its larger metropolitan region. And he showed one of his current architectural projects. He left out international highlights of a career that includes urban design and planning in Tanzania, Pakistan and India; teaching in Berkeley and New York; and art exhibitions in Paris, St. Petersburg, Caracas and Santiago. But he managed to detail a career trajectory that at every point critiqued, challenged and expanded the role of the architect.

The two other architects that I invited to Postópolis, Derek Dellekamp and Jose Castillo, also presented work outside the traditional understanding of what architects do. In Dellekamp’s case, this meant discussing social housing in Oaxaca and a pilgrimage route in Jalisco. In Castillo’s case, this meant discussing the architect as public intellectual. The expanding role of the architect — as analyst, as storyteller, as urbanist — is certainly a theme I wanted to pursue at Postópolis (and why I invited Dellekamp, Castillo and Terrazas). To be honest, when I arrived in Mexico City, I was not thinking about the role of the architect as urban portraitist. Yet now that I am back in New York and again engaged in identifying and sharing good ideas for the future of New York’s built environment through Urban Omnibus, I suspect that the long-ago case study of Mexico ‘68 and the recent experience of Postópolis each offer, in different ways, lessons for how to communicate what’s going on in a particular city. Once we have grappled with what those lessons might be, then we can start the messy process of how to use that kind of communication — that kind of portrait — to the greater urban good.


Cassim Shepard is the director of Urban Omnibus.

Last Thursday night, a relaxed and candid Dan Doctoroff joined Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker, for the second of the Architectural League’s “Conversations on New York.” He discussed, with palpable affection for the city, some of the big plans he initiated while Deputy Mayor for Economic Development between 2002 and 2007.

Goldberger began the conversation by asking whether Doctoroff’s focus “on the physical city” as a strategy for economic development was a matter of administrative policy or a personal interest, and why that emphasis seems less strong since he left his position. For Doctoroff, the answer is both: he and Bloomberg came into office three months after 9/11, inspired by the extraordinary responsibility — and opportunity — to “remake the city.” His primary map for this remaking was the Olympic plan, developed by NYC 2012, an organization Doctoroff founded before joining City government. While the bid was unsuccessful, Doctoroff repeated throughout the event that many of the plans developed under the auspices of the 2012 bid have been set in motion anyway. The agenda underlying the Olympic plan was to use the event to catalyze the development of areas of the city that had suffered in the transition to a post-industrial economy, including the west side of Manhattan, the Brooklyn waterfront, Coney Island, the Queens waterfront, Flushing, the South Bronx and Harlem. He credits Alexander Garvin (the subject of the first of the League’s “Conversations on New York” last month) with making a workable urban plan that did not concentrate all Olympic activity in one part of the city, as is the case in London, which won the Olympics for 2012.

Alongside these physical objectives, Doctoroff stated that his desire to win the Olympics for New York was rooted in his deeply held belief in the symbolic power of the city. Invoking both the city’s singular diversity and the increasingly competitive global race in which it finds itself, he saw hosting the games as an “opportunity to remind the world what New York City means to the world.”

Some of Doctoroff’s most ambitious visions, such as the West Side Stadium and congestion pricing, fell afoul of the working processes of a tangle of municipal, state, regional and federal governance structures. With respect to the stadium, in addition to the opposition of state legislators and the extravagant lobbying efforts of Cablevision, Doctoroff admits that he failed to communicate what he saw as an essential argument for the project: it was to be more than a stadium; it was to be a state-of-the-art update to a woefully outdated Javits Center; it was to create a new neighborhood, a new boulevard, a new subway line. With respect to congestion pricing, Doctoroff remains optimistic that it will come up for discussion again.

Doctoroff emerged from his years in city government as a fan of the City’s uniform land use review process (or ULURP), stating that every project that went through ULURP benefited from it. He even evinced some regret that the plan for Atlantic Yards did not go through ULURP. Atlantic Yards, for Doctoroff, is an example of a project with a perceived “purpose for the city” that was “much bigger than the immediate community.” In this case, the purpose was the need for affordable office space in Downtown Brooklyn to counter the migration of back-office functions to New Jersey and elsewhere. When Goldberger asked him about the “Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs dialectic,” Doctoroff replied that he does not believe that community consensus and bold urban visions are mutually exclusive. And, perhaps more than anything else, he believes in the need for long-term planning, building constituencies around plans that transcend any one political administration.

Perhaps the most significant legacy of his tenure is, in fact, a long-term plan, PlaNYC, which grew out of the simple observation, in 2005, that for even the most banal municipal land use needs like salt piles and tow pounds, no sites seemed to be available. Given New York’s projected population increases over the coming decades, Doctoroff went about finding ways to accommodate the growth and turn it into an asset for the city. He cited a list of successes — hybrid cabs, a million trees, stormwater management interventions – and one major disappointment: congestion pricing. Doctoroff’s belief in long-term planning, in counter-cyclical investment, and in bold visions with broad constituencies, underpin his most powerful asset in helping to create the conditions for this future city to thrive: his passionate belief in the openness, tolerance, diversity and symbolism of New York itself.

UPDATE: A podcast of the event is now available on the League’s website. Click here to watch Doctoroff and Goldberger in conversation.

The third of the League’s Conversations on New York, with New York City Commissioners Adrian Benepe, Amanda Burden, and David Burney, in conversation with Paul Goldberger, will take place on Tuesday, July 20 at 7pm. For more information or to buy tickets, click here.

Cassim Shepard is the Project Director of Urban Omnibus.

Corail-Cesselesse, © Jake Price

The framework for the afternoon of panel discussions and spirited audience involvement was the Action Plan for the National Recovery and Development of Haiti, which was presented at the March 28th, 2010 Donor’s conference at the United Nations. After journalist Gary Pierre-Pierre provided some social and political context for Haiti’s past 25 years, Leslie Voltaire, Haiti’s Special Envoy to the UN, presented the government’s action plan. The rest of the day consisted, in one way or another, of reflections on the prospects and premises of this plan in terms of parallel work currently underway in Haiti and in terms of precedents from such places as post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Indonesia, post-earthquake Pakistan, and post-hurricane New Orleans.

The participation of Ambassador Voltaire distinguished the symposium. This was not a discussion of how best to think about the disaster in Haiti; it was a discussion of how best to act. And the selection of speakers — particularly Ami Desai of the Clinton Foundation, Chris Williams of UN-Habitat and Haitian anthropologist Louis Herns Marcelin — revealed the Institute for Urban Design’s admirable belief that beneficial action must not ignore the dangerous inefficiencies and redundancies symptomatic of dependence on the aid work of 10,000 uncoordinated NGOs. Beneficial action must involve the Haitian government. Voltaire represents the government, but he does so in the capacity of a liaison between the administration of Rene Preval and a community of international donors. Trained as an architect in Mexico and an urban and regional planner in the United States, Ambassador Voltaire has held a variety of ministerial positions within the Haitian government over the past twenty years. The candor, gravitas and humor with which he shared his wide-ranging expertise made the Institute for Urban Design’s stated desire – to begin the long process of matching the skills of an international community of urban designers to Haiti’s redevelopment needs – seem actionable.

The disciplinary ethos of the day’s proceedings, however, rested much more comfortably in the domain of urban planning than in urban design. I can’t speak for the audience assembled in Rose Hall of Cooper Union (presumably comprised largely of architects and designers), but I found this focus on planning principles – the integration of environmental standards and workforce development initiatives, the emphasis on deconcentrating the population of Port-au-Prince, the urgent need to discover who controls which parcels of land (PDF), and, most of all, creating mechanisms for coordinating the efforts of donor countries and 10,000 NGOs – both refreshing and essential. The work of urban design, the symposium’s structure seemed to suggest, must not precede in-depth analysis of how the form of Haiti’s built environment might reflect the complex conditions of the ground in social, physical and political terms. Many people reiterated that what Haiti needs is not reconstruction; it needs construction. But this refrain, even in the context of so much devastation, did not seem pessimistic. On the contrary, it suggested that the crisis presents opportunities not only to replace what has been lost, but also to reimagine the ways the built environment might one day reflect Haitians’ broader aspirations for their country. It also might suggest a role for urban designers in which form follows not only function, but also supports a holistic approach to solving problems that include public health, land reform, political devolution and basic service delivery.

Petionville, © Jake Price

Corail-Cesselesse, © Jake Price

Photographs by Jake Price. Taken in April 2010 in the IDP camps of Corail-Cesselesse and Petionville, these photographs also appeared in the program for “Rebuilding a Sustainable Haiti.” Price shared his motivations for contributing his work for use in the symposium: “I see the photos as a bridge between the architects who want to build in Haiti and the people who live there. In order to build in a place one must have a little sense of how life is currently lived, how the culture moves and breathes and through these photos perhaps just a little bit of understanding achieved.” See more of his work at jakeprice.com.

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.

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UPDATE 6.9.10: Check out the complete Postópolis! schedule and watch a livestream of the event on both Domus and postopolis.org.

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It should come as no surprise that I love to talk (some might say, can’t shut up) about cities — problems, solutions, and the innovative problem-solvers who work on them. And I think I can speak for the whole Omnibus family when I say that we’re grateful for the opportunity Urban Omnibus affords us: to help share the back-stories and speculative futures of some incredible ideas about cities — some tried and tested in New York, others initiated elsewhere and applied here. With that in mind, I’m psyched to announce that I will soon get to bring this zeal for identifying and introducing good, design-based approaches to urbanism to one of the most interesting large cities in the world: Mexico City. So if anyone has occasion to be in Mexico around the second week in June, come join me and a storied bunch of urbanists, technologists, designers and bloggers for the third installment of Postopolis! — a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about the built environment and the various design cultures that influence it.

Postopolis LA, 2009, on the roof of the Standard Hotel

The first Postopolis! took place in the gallery of Storefront for Art and Architecture, here in New York, way back in 2007. The second held forth in Los Angeles in 2009. Omnibus readers will recall the brilliant recap of that event by Rachel Abrams and Alissa Walker, in which they ruminated on what it means when bloggers come out from the aether to  introduce, in person and face-to-face, their favorite innovators in the worlds of design and urbanism. Once again, Storefront — in collaboration with sponsors Museo Experimental El Eco, TOMO and Domus Magazine – has convened a group of people who wax poetic on the internet and asked each of us to invite thinkers and practitioners in Mexico City into discussion.

I have invited Eduardo Terrazas, the architect, artist and urbanist responsible for the masterplan for Mexico City’s 1968 Olympics; Juan Carlos Rulfo, director of the award-winning film En el hoyo; Professor Martha Schteingart, a internationally renowned expert on urban poverty, segregation and housing; Derek Dellekamp, an architect known for his wide-ranging collaborations with artists, engineers and environmentalists (and selected as one of the Architectural League’s 2009 Emerging Voices – a podcast of his presentation is available on the League website); and Jose Castillo, whose architecture and urban research include intimate residential spaces as well as urban-scale housing and transportation systems. I’m thrilled to be bringing these voices into this conversation. And I cannot wait to consume the insights from the participants invited by the likes of Intersections (Daniel Hernandez), DPR Barcelona (Ethel Barona Pohl), Toxico Cultura (Gabriella Gomez-Mont), Mudd Up! (Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture), Tomo (Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa), Edible Geography (Nicola Twilley), We Make Money Not Art (Regine Debatty), Strangeharvest (Sam Jacob), and Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall).

The Courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco, where the presentations and discussion will take place

Here’s the official info:
Postópolis!DF
June 8, 2010

From 8-12 June 2010, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in partnership with Museo Experimental El Eco, Tomo and Domus Magazine, will host the third edition of Postopolis!, a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design. 10 world-renowned bloggers from Los Angeles, New York, Turin, Barcelona, London and elsewhere will convene in one location in Mexico City to host a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, presentations, films and panels fusing the informal and interdisciplinary approach of the architecture blogosphere with rare face-to-face interaction.

Each day, the 10 participating bloggers will meet in the magnificent courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco, designed by Matthias Goeritz, to conduct back-to-back interviews of some of Mexico City’s most influential thinkers and practitioners – including architects, city planners, artists and urban theorists but also military historians, filmmakers, photographers, activists and musicians. The talks will be conducted in either Spanish or English, and translations will be available. Each day of talks will end with an after-party hosted by some of Mexico City’s most influential music blogs.

The first Postopolis! took place in the gallery space at Storefront for Art and Architecture during the summer of 2007, and a second edition was held in Los Angeles in 2009.

Participating blogs:
Urban Omnibus (Cassim Shepard)
Intersections (Daniel Hernandez)
DPR Barcelona (Ethel Barona Pohl)
Toxico Cultura (Gabriella Gomez-Mont)
Tomo (Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa)
Mudd Up! (Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture)
Edible Geography (Nicola Twilley)
We Make Money Not Art (Regine Debatty)
Strangeharvest (Sam Jacob)
Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall)

Location
Museo Experimental El Eco
Sullivan 43, Col. San Rafael, CP 09470 Mexico City, Tel. 5535 51 86
www.eleco.unam.mx

Participants list in formation: please check www.postopolis.org

Twitter: @postopolis, #postopolis

Partners
Museo Experimental El Eco
TOMO
Domus Magazine

Sponsors
Mexicana
British Embassy
Urbi VidaResidencial
UNAM
Difusión Cultural UNAM
Museo Experimental El Eco
Cityexpress
XXLager

Organizers
Daniel Perlin and the Storefront Team

Click here to download the press release.
Presione aquí para descargar el boletín de prensa.
www.postopolis.org

Front Page of the London Evening Standard, Thursday April 15th, 2010

For the past few days, something has been missing from the urban landscape of London. A quick scan of the city’s streets – red busses, black cabs – shows nothing amiss. Beneath them, the Underground proceeds apace through tubular tunnels. A glance upwards, however, reveals an unmolested sky. Cloudless and blue may not be what we expect from an April afternoon in London, but this is different: no passenger planes have crossed British airspace since Thursday. For me, what was supposed to be an hour’s routine layover has turned into six days of going nowhere, fast. And it has me wondering a few things about aviation, international connection and the future of cities.

London is one of many European cities to find itself under a massive cloud of volcanic ash, bereft of air travel. The disruption has started chatter of what the volcano might mean for the interconnections and interdependencies on which our global economy relies. After all, it’s not just executives, tourists and migrants who fly into Heathrow daily; it’s also courier packages from the US, cut flowers from Kenya, and bananas from Costa Rica. On a normal day, all of these journeys compete for an airspace whose closure has raised questions about who is calling the shots: national transport ministries, European and international aviation regulators, airlines, airports, central governments. The ash cloud provokes questions about our individual dependencies on air travel, too. Everyone knows that we fly at a huge environmental cost, yet many of us – myself included – have trouble reconciling our desire to be green with our desire to be anywhere in the world we want, at any time.

I spent a sunny Saturday in London with fellow volcano strandee Richard Sennett, an urbanist whom Omnibus readers will remember from the walk he took with us around the West Village last year. During that walk, somewhere around the West Side Highway and Perry Street, Richard mentioned that he had been thinking recently about renunciation, about making do with less. This topic came up again as Richard and I pondered our volcanic-ash-induced predicament together. One of the ways we measure progress is through a constant increase in the possible connections between people, places and things – a constant expansion of social, spatial and commercial networks enabled by the Internet and by international transport and trade. What happens when the system, defined by so many dependencies, disrupts? Are we equipped to plan for a future characterized by unpredictable constrictions on the supply of on-demand access to those people, places and things outside of our immediate, physical grasp? Probably not. But, wait, isn’t this the future that the climate crisis promises? Most definitely.

In our metropolitan areas, we may well be moving towards a planning regime that leverages new technological opportunities to identify efficiencies within existing systems. This shift is what the Regional Plan Association explored in its Regional Assembly last week (an event we’ll look at in greater depth on the Omnibus next week). And part of this effort to make cities smarter grows from an impulse to waste fewer resources (natural and capital alike), to get more out of what we already have. This is a good thing. But the ash cloud is making me wonder how long we can consider “more” to be the exclusive measure of progress, much less the determinant of quality in planning and design.

In an article in Wired last year, Omnibus advisor Andrew Blum explored the design of the airspace over New York City (see graphic above) and what he found out about the massive traffic jam above northern New Jersey suggests that perhaps, um, some updates are in order. I know nothing about the design of European airspace or travel routes, but if the leadership structure in a crisis can be as piecemeal as the response to the volcanic ash incident has been, then it’s probably safe to assume that the design and management of European airspace could be more coordinated. I certainly don’t want to disparage the efficiency of an aviation system that moves millions of passengers around the world and enables historically unprecedented amounts of migration, travel and trade. But I do want to question whether we are prepared, in our quest for greater efficiency, to employ a design logic rooted in an ethic of scarcity.

Because, as it turns out, the desire for efficiency does not necessarily herald an end to building new systems out of whole cloth to compress time and space. A few feet from where I’m sitting now, enjoying a bookstore café’s free wireless as if a convenient internet connection were my inalienable right, the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street – otherwise known by the skyscraper named CentrePoint – is all torn up. The construction is to accommodate Crossrail, a massive infrastructure project that will connect Heathrow Airport in West London to Brussels- and Paris-bound Eurostar trains in central London to the site of the 2012 Olympics in East London. Looking ahead to my pathetically indirect journey home via the AirTrain (assuming I ever make it to JFK), I’m already jealous as it is of Heathrow Express – which connects the airport to the center of the city in fifteen minutes. And now with Crossrail, there will be an even faster, even more efficient way to get across London. But as I daydream about a future for New York that might include the kind of innovations in high-speed, intercity rail that are already commonplace in Europe, I am reminded that today, with all airplanes grounded and even with train frequency increased by 60%, the wait for a seat on a Eurostar to Paris is still over ten days long.

In this week’s Omnibus feature, Vishaan Chakrabarti reminds us that the building of new, greener buildings is, by itself, unequal to the challenge of climate change. And yes, part of what must be done is to rethink how we get ourselves around. But part of it is also, surely, to remind ourselves that we need not intervene exclusively in the name of efficiency. Perhaps, we can intervene in the name of patience. Which is why I think I am going to go spend some time with one of history’s grandest and most important routes of transit, commerce and cultural exchange: I’m going to go take a leisurely walk along the Thames.

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Postscript: Heathrow opened this morning. But flights to JFK were either still canceled or fully booked through next week. So I booked myself on a flight to Los Angeles and managed to talk my way onto a flight to Chicago. How’s that for efficient intercity travel?

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He is currently en route back to New York City.

New York Times Headline. March 13th, 1888.

122 years ago today, on March 11th 1888, it started snowing. When the snows finally came to a stop three days later, over forty inches were reported in New York and New Jersey and some snowdrifts grew as high as 50 feet. All major cities between Washington and Montreal were completely isolated from each other. The damage was so severe – collapsing wires caused fires, melting snow caused floods, at least 400 people lost their lives – that as soon as New Yorkers dug themselves out of what came to be called “The Great White Hurricane” they went about ensuring that no future weather event would cause as much injury, death or destruction to property and livelihoods. One of this legislative regime’s longest-lasting legacies is its effect on mass transit.

The Great White Hurricane of 1888. The New York Historical Society

Among the laws enacted that year, one prohibited catenary in Manhattan, meaning no more overhead lines were permitted to transmit electricity to trams, trolleys and buses. Some argue that the storm is what pushed Northeastern cities to finally move ahead with plans to start building public transit underground (Boston’s subway, the first in the nation, opened nine years after the storm). That law is still in effect, which still hampers the City’s ability to install light rail or certain kinds of electrical bus systems.

Over the past few months, the City has been looking at a number of different options – including light rail and streetcars – for improving mass transit service in Midtown Manhattan. And in last week’s roundup, we relayed the news that the DOT plan for Midtown includes dedicating a bus lane, or transitway, along 34th Street river to river. By invoking the precedents of Curitiba and Bogotá, we implied that this move signifies Manhattan’s first foray into the world of Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT. Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic has a comprehensive analysis of why, for better or worse, BRT is not the most accurate way to characterize the transitway, and he also makes reference to the 1888 law about overhead wiring. To be sure, the plan will speed up the journey considerably. But the project says more about the priority DOT places on improving pedestrian experience of the street than it does about the DOTs willingness to experiment with more efficient modes of transit. “Despite the fact that the DOT has been on an all-out crusade to improve bus service, has no money for more subways, and has demonstrated little interest in light rail or streetcars, it evaluated all four in its recent study for the 34th Street corridor.” Its recommendation to create a dedicated bus lane, which is cheaper than the alternatives (”between $30 and 125 million, versus $250 million and up for light rail or several billion for a full-scale subway line”), is not about making bus service rapid. “With 13 stations end to end — roughly every 800 feet — buses will average a miserable six miles per hour, hardly faster than a person can walk the route.” It’s about improving “the streetscape for pedestrians, who until recently have been put in last place by New York City decision-making.”

Earlier this week, the Omnibus continued its look at how standards and codes, inflexible by nature – such as the code prohibiting living units in cellars – may be developed in the public interest but are often enforced at the public’s expense. In other words, if we don’t continuously evaluate how technological, cultural and demographic shifts change the way people live, urban development will continue to outpace governance. I’m not saying we should insist on a return of overhead wires. But we should certainly arm ourselves, as concerned urban citizens, with the knowledge of where the laws that limit urban innovation originate.

Map of proposed bus transit along 34th Street, from New York City DOT.