After a two week hiatus, we’re back to wish you a happy new year — and to toast the beginning of the fourth year of Urban Omnibus!

A lot has happened in the past year, and there is a lot more coming. Our features have allowed us to explore the sweet shops and courtyard homes of Jackson Heights, the plazas of Midtown, and the public art of the subway system and Times Square. They have introduced us to the strategic assessment of urban agricultural activity across the city and the first undergraduate degree program in urban design. And they have exposed us to a wide range of urban art, ecology, infrastructure and, of course, design. In the weeks to come, look out for features that reveal original perspectives on urbanism from photographers, acoustic engineers, sociologists and more.

2011 was also a year full of special projects: our 50 Ideas for the New City (posters are still available as a gift with donation!), our series of videos on complex urban systems, and our partnership with the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Council on a project about housing regulations in New York.

Our first special project of 2012 is a competition for original, evocative writing inspired by the Manhattan street grid. The deadline is less than a month away, so get cracking! Also coming up, we are planning more live events and field trips, starting with our second annual party and art auction — now christened The Urban Omnibus BlockParty 2012 — on February 28th. Like last year’s shindig, this event will be a fundraiser for Urban Omnibus, but it’s also a chance for our local readers to connect with us and with each other, to hang out with other creative people for whom the physical city is a passion.

That passion is why Urban Omnibus exists: to bring together insights from the wide range of perspectives on interpreting or improving the built environment of New York. But passion alone can’t sustain the hard work that makes this publication possible. Now, more than ever, we rely on the support of readers like you to keep us going.

In addition to donating, there are other ways to participate in helping us shed light on good ideas for the future of cities, conceived in the public interest, executed across disciplines, and tested in the five boroughs. We are always on the lookout for new projects and perspectives; get in touch here if you are up to something and you think we should know about it. And even if you don’t have a specific project in mind, we also want to hear from you about topics that you’d like to read more about. Our goal has always been to bring original thinking from across disciplines and neighborhoods together into a common conversation about urban architecture, infrastructure and environment. And in order to do that, we need to hear from you about projects and perspectives that you think present a new way of looking at the city around us.

It has been an extraordinary first three years. We look forward to 2012, sharing more of the projects, insights, ideas and voices redefining the culture of citymaking today.

This past winter, I had the opportunity to teach a Visual Studies workshop at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation entitled “Montage City: Filmmaking as Urban Observation.” The point of the workshop was to encourage students of architecture to engage with the collection and arrangement of moving images as an exercise in interpreting the existing conditions of urban space. As a formal strategy, cinematic montage — the juxtaposition of distinct moving images to form a cohesive whole — is uniquely suited to the study of urbanism, particularly for designers learning how to propose sensitive and sophisticated interventions in the landscape.

11 students went out and documented New York locales far and wide, from City Island to Roosevelt Island, from Willets Point to the Inwood Railyards. While the methodological framework of the workshop invoked site analysis, the sites in question were not bounded in the terms of a real or imagined architectural or urban design project. Rather, the focus was on a slightly larger scale: the scale of experience that corresponds roughly to the size of a small neighborhood; or, the scale at which New Yorkers are typically able to identify a particular look and feel for a particular place.

Students were encouraged to investigate these ineffable essences in repeated visits, by shooting video of people doing things (such as shoveling snow or fixing bait to a fishing pole), of people moving through space (such as commuting on the Roosevelt Island Gondola or driving over the Brooklyn Bridge), and of details of the built environment (such as housing stock or streetscape design). Some of the sites, like Willets Point, Coney Island or Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, are facing large-scale redevelopment; others, like City Island or 138th Street in Harlem, are buffeted by subtler and slower forces of urban change. All of the sites students chose to document are undergoing some form of transformation, yet these videos are less about preserving a moment in time than about interpreting what makes a place feel a certain way.

Check out three of the student videos below:

Coney Island by Julie Jira
Julie Jira’s exploration of Coney Island opens with a subway journey to the end of the line that literally and figuratively frames her gaze on a storied landscape defined by the interaction between natural and built components: gulls alighting on docks, fishermen preparing for a catch, children playing along the shoreline. The video manages to resist the visual clichés of Coney Island without abandoning careful observation of the neighborhood’s icons: the boardwalk, the rides, the beach.

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Willets Point by Andrew Kim
For his video, Andrew Kim lit out for Willets Point and captures a mundane task we can all relate to, digging a car out after heavy snow. In the Iron Triangle, however, with its concentration of auto body shops, scrapyards and potholes and its lack of sidewalks, sewers or the kind of stormwater drainage systems found elsewhere in the city, the rhythms of daily life are highly specific. With a subtle and consistent approach to sound as a formal element, this video sketches a brief portrait of a unique urban context and repeatedly refers to the neighborhood’s points of contact — trains entering, cars leaving, airplanes flying overhead — with the city and world beyond its borders.

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Brooklyn Bridge by Alok Shetty
In Alok Shetty’s paean to a beloved landmark, the architectural iconicity of the Brooklyn Bridge coexists with its functional role as a vital part of the city’s traffic system. By cleverly switching between these two modes of looking at the bridge, underscored by his use of timelapse videography and music, his video articulates both the crucial necessity and the timeless indeterminacy of infrastructure.

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These days, most use of moving images in architectural practice seems to prioritize illustrating a potential future: the proposed result of a design project as visualized by an animated fly-through or 3D massing diagram. “Montage City” was intended to get architecture students thinking about how to use the craft of nonfiction filmmaking to look closely at what’s there already and to represent aspects of urban form and experience that are not always captured in traditional site analysis: the actions and interactions of individuals; the relationship of light and shadow; the interplay of texture, shape, pattern and line; the inextricability of the social and physical attributes of the urban fabric.

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Cassim Shepard is the editor of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Top image: Row 1 (left to right): Ji-Hye Ham (Hunters Point), David Anderson (City Island) | Row 2: Julie Jira (Coney Island), Mary Calvani (Roosevelt Island), Cristina Nguyen (Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard) | Row 3: Alok Shetty (Brooklyn Bridge), Kooho Jung (Inwood Railyards), Rachel Barnard (138th Street) | Row 4. Andrew Kim (Willets Point), Seungwon Song (Inwood Railyards), Irene Brisson (Columbia University Campus)

Break out the bubbly: this week marks the beginning of our third year online! What does 2011 have in store for us? Lots.

In the next few weeks, we’ll take a look at the urban implications of everything from neon signage to the streetscapes of immigrant enclaves, from a nationwide effort to mine the “intelligence” of cities to a homegrown tech invention that’s kind of like the lovechild of a community development meeting and Grand Theft Auto (trust me, you’ll know what I mean when you see it).

But that’s just what’s on deck in the weekly features you’ve come to know and love. There’s a lot more in store for regular riders of the Omnibus, including some original, longer-form videos that spring from partnerships we’ve formed with with IBM’s Smarter Cities Initiative and the Citizens Planning and Housing Council, and a street art campaign that will be pasting Omnibus-quality ideas on an underutilized scaffold near you come springtime.

We also have more live events planned: meet-ups, field trips, and more to get us out into the physical city to explore its weird, wonderful and under-appreciated spaces. We’ll get back out onto the city’s streets and public spaces once it’s a little warmer, picking up where we left off on Roosevelt Island, the Atlantic Pacific subway station and Newtown Creek.

But first, next month we are planning to shake off the February doldrums with a kick-ass party. Because we want to celebrate our assertion that we — the people whose passion for cities extends into action, into creating new ways of looking at or new ways of intervening in the built environment, into inventing better ways to dispose of our trash or to generate energy or to express creatively some overlooked aspect of the urban condition – are a community. And, like all communities worthy of the label, we want to hang out with each other: to share ideas, opportunities and maybe even a few beers. (And when we say party, of course we also mean fundraiser. Because, as you know, Urban Omnibus is a publication of the Architectural League, a non-profit organization, and we depend on the support of readers like you to keep on bringing you the best ideas for the future of cities, tried and tested right here in the five boroughs of New York.) Stayed tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

But that’s just what we have planned so far. What do you want to see, hear and read in 2011? In our continued efforts to serve our readers better, we ask for just a few minutes of your time to tell us:

• a) Who you are (Where do you live? What do you do for a living?)
• b) What you want to see more of — or less of
• c) When and how you tune in to the Omnibus (At work? At home? When your subway is crossing a bridge?)
• d) Whatever else you think we should know (What is your favorite feature?)

Answering this survey will help us deliver the content that you find interesting, inspiring or useful. And it will also help us to assess the extent to which we are accomplishing our goal, to redefine the culture of citymaking. What I mean by the culture of citymaking is this: we seek to show, through the selection and presentation of good examples, that improving urban life and landscape is not exclusively political or commercial, but also practical, creative and cultural. If that’s not reason enough, one lucky survey respondent will win a $50 gift certificate to McNally Jackson Books! UPDATE: This survey is now closed. (February 17, 2011)

If the city is the sum of individual choices made by politicians, designers, engineers and citizens – and we at Urban Omnibus contend that it is – then we want to show you the good ones. Crucial to what we do is the steadfast belief that each of these types of work – contemporary visual art alongside urban policy polemics, interviews with urban explorers next to architectural proposals – is an equally valid way of engaging with the urban environment and advancing public understanding of cities. Individual examples of this diverse array of work have more in common than is recognized by traditional media outlets or cultural institutions.

So, that’s why we are here. Tell us why you are, and what you want to see next. We look forward to many more years of bring you the very best in creative citymaking.

–Cassim Shepard
Editor, Urban Omnibus

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As we head into 2011, the Omnibus will be reviving our field trip suggestions, leading into a fun season of meet-ups and group explorations of the city in the spring and summer. But the Flea Market is one fascinating urban destination that won’t be around in the new year. We’ll be following this story to see if the vendors are successful in finding a new location, and what the urban design challenges and opportunities for any such location might be. In the meantime, listen to a one-minute excerpt of the market’s rich combination of sounds in the clip below:

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Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Yesterday, a group of urbanists, technologists, designers and urban planners gathered at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation to discuss the future of the crowdsourced city. Four presentations focused on forecasting the benefits, tensions and pitfalls of mining the data that humans generate as they go about their daily lives at a variety of scales — global, national and urban.

First was a summary of a report, “The Future of Cities, Information and Inclusion,” authored by the social sector office of the global management consultancy McKinsey & Company, that offers a survey and taxonomy of how cities around the world are making progress in urban informatics. The second explained a “map” produced by the Institute for the Future, entitled “A Planet of Civic Laboratories,” that illuminates the “innovations that will harness urban data to reduce poverty and promote inclusion.” The third delved into a couple of case study projects of the Spatial Information Design Lab that use various kinds of data to reveal those invisible geographies that link the social city to the physical city. In the final presentation, Clay Johnson raised some of the political and managerial challenges to realizing the potential of technological advances to deliver more efficient and effective governance.
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BENJAMIN DE LA PEÑA: 5 EXABYTES OF DATA EVERY TWO DAYS
Before the presentations began, Benjamin De La Peña of the Rockefeller Foundation set the context by referencing the Foundation’s long history with funding new ways of responding to urban change, from giving an unknown Jane Jacobs a grant to finish the book that would become The Death and Life of Great American Cities to investing in innovative economic development programs in the Global South.

He cited UN Habitat’s ubiquitous urbanization statistic – that over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas – and then quickly re-contextualized this over-cited figure by juxtaposing it with a sobering stat from the world of information technology that bears huge implications for how we will deal with urbanization in years to come: Between dawn of humanity and 2003, roughly five exabytes (an exabyte is one billion GB) of information were created. Now, we generate that amount every two days. With that amount of information produced by an incalculable number of sensors embedded in the material of everyday life, from toll booths to cash registers to cell phones, the Rockefeller Foundation and its co-presenter, CEOs for Cities, want to know: how will this information affect how we perceive and manage cities? And in what ways might any of this benefit the poor and vulnerable?
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McKINSEY & CO: BENEFITS AND BARRIERS
The McKinsey people performed like impartial social scientists: explaining their methodology (reviewed published literature! Interviewed 65 experts! Classified 200 examples of current deployments of urban informatics around the world!) and categorizing their findings into neat categories of benefits and barriers. Their examples ranged from mobile electronic systems integration in Istanbul that speed police response to electronic handsets used by New York City’s Department of Homeless Services.

The first question the report asks is, who benefits? Seems like just about everyone. Citizens can profit from direct economic and social benefits, some of which are tailored to local needs, and some of which might empower citizens to engage and participate more fully in public life. Policymakers and administrators can rely on good data for better operational decisions and increased transparency. Nonprofits can expect greater efficiency and effectiveness, while at the same time playing new roles in increasing digital literacy and access. And the private sector can capitalize on talent and infrastructure advantages and rely on cities as important customers and as demonstration opportunities for new devices and applications. Every sector benefits because the benefits themselves are so broad: urban informatics can provide faster and cheaper services and improve coordination between planners and service delivery through data sharing, centralized analysis and the reduction of redundancy and transaction costs. Furthermore, the information itself is not just more abundant but is also of higher quality. What exactly defines higher quality was never made explicit.

The final stated benefit brought the ideas back to the stated keywords of the event – crowdsourcing and inclusion – by asserting that urban informatics provides new opportunities for collaborative problem-solving and engagement. Bringing in new pools of problem-solvers not only strengthens the process itself but also increases the likelihood that solutions will reflect the priorities of stakeholders.

OK, so everybody wins? Not so fast. The barriers are manifold. For these benefits to be reaped, certain mindsets must be overcome: tech developers lack a familiarity with cities’ needs; municipal agencies are risk-averse and are plagued by a structural incapacity to coordinate across siloes; and citizens’ groups are traditionally slow to adapt to new technologies. And then there are the resource constraints: funding, talent, infrastructure and access. The access issue is not just about affordable devices, of course. Digital illiteracy will widen the digital divide and accelerate exclusion. And the speed of technological change will only accelerate the isolation of certain cities and individuals as urban informatics becomes more and more central to the functioning of government, commerce and society at large.

The presentation ended with some suggested principles and actions that were simultaneously encouraging and obvious: put citizens first, multi-faceted approaches work best, etc. The context they provided of what is currently going on in world of urban informatics set the stage for the second presentation, in which a Rockefeller-funded report on the future of cities, information and inclusion outlined what we have to look forward to, and to fear, ten years down the road.
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ANTHONY TOWNSEND AND RACHEL MAGUIRE: A PLANET OF CIVIC LABORATORIES
Anthony Townsend and Rachel Maguire, both from the Institute for the Future, began by claiming that the experimental period in urban informatics that we find ourselves in is likely to continue for the next decade. This condition results in what they, somewhat optimistically, label a Planet of Civic Laboratories, where the urban poor of the Global South roam through slums with smartphone supercomputers in their pockets and global technology is adapted to meet local needs.

They structured their presentation (zoom into the embedded version above) in the same matrix format as the report they were summarizing, with “scales” on the x-axis – people, networks, environments – and “drivers” on the y-axis – commons, markets, design and planning and governance. This format, and its striking graphic design, demonstrated well the simultaneity of major realms of advance (i.e. the good news for the inclusion and justice folks) and key tensions that will bedevil the realization of these forecasts.

The predicted advances are plotted on the matrix as large, brightly color-coded circles that declare what the future will look like in attractive, aspirational phrases like “democratized public safety” and “anticipatory health,” followed by detailed descriptions of a future where technology has made the world a kinder, more responsive place. The tensions, on the other hand, appear small, lack explication, and float free of the matrix’s rows and columns. They are described as concise oppositions (“Visible vs. Actionable,” “Identity Safeguarding vs. “Public Good”) linked by arrows that dubiously suggest a chicken and egg cycle of causation or, perhaps, simply make clear that you can’t have one without the other (as in the case of “Economy Gap” vs. “Knowledge Gap”). Townsend, Maguire and their co-authors go into more detail in the full report; check it out here (PDF).

One of these oppositions struck me as especially pertinent to any responsible discussion of the opportunities that the crowdsourced city presents: “Cooperation vs. Offloading.” As technologies empower networks of individuals to take care of those non-emergency services that governments have provided in the immediate past, to what extent will the suspension of public services match the abilities of citizens to pick up the slack?
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LAURA KURGAN AND SARAH WILLIAMS: STORIES AND STRATEGIES FROM FINE-GRAINED DATA
The next presentation, by Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams, grounded the afternoon’s proceedings in examples from one particular body of work, that of the lab at Columbia that Kurgan and Williams co-direct. But before delving into projects like Architecture and Justice and others that collect, analyze and communicate specific stories with fine-grained data, Kurgan sounded a note of caution about the data optimism that permeated the room and the previous presentations. While visualization and data have recently become cool, the former is defined while the latter is not. For her part, Williams seemed a bit less ambivalent than her colleague about the role data can play in providing for the public good. She raised the important topic of creating strategies and policies for using crowdsourced and commercial data when government data is not accessible or doesn’t exist.

Overall, the Spatial Information Design Lab’s work is powerful testament to how carefully and strategically choosing which data set to analyze and spatialize (looking at the home addresses of convicted criminals as opposed to looking at traditional crime data, for example) is as important as the technological ability to collect that data in the first place. As we lean into a future of infinitely more data, it seems to me that fostering a sophisticated conversation about how best to promote tough analytical choices between distinct data sets is crucial to excavating the benefits from a world awash, if not submerged, in automatically generated information.
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CLAY JOHNSON: WHO ELSE NEEDS TO BE AT THE TABLE
The final presentation of the day zoomed out from specific urban-scale projects to national political culture. Clay Johnson, founder of Blue State Digital and Big Window Labs and a former director of Sunlight Labs, has been interviewing Chief Information Officers at governments around the country in an attempt to understand why government creates so much cost around technology. His broad-stroke comments reminded the audience of who was not in the room and not at the table generally in conversations about data, informatics and governance.

Organized labor, he stated strongly and clearly, is a big problem for the crowdsourced city. The rhetoric of efficiency and of do-it-yourself public services often flies in the face of those things labor unions are sworn to protect: jobs. Another conspicuous absence from similar discussions is Republicans and the South. And the failure to engage these constituencies runs the risk of equating, in the popular imagination, technologically-enabled municipal renewal with political progressivism. In other words, the failure of the community of people who care about this topic to talk to people unlike themselves means that any attempts to create political, legislative change will be blocked from both the left and the right.

Johnson had some concrete suggestions for how governments and electoral campaigns can start to shift the culture, particularly by recognizing that information technology, strategic communication, and new media production are distinct skillsets and should be recognized as such in the organization of any government office or campaign. The combination of his irreverence and his pessimism was alternately comic, depressing and reassuringly practical and led the audience into a lively question and answer session that touched on issues of urban morphology, the basic survival needs of slumdwellers and the difficulties of navigating the nexus of corporate interests, privacy concerns and the public good. At no point was the difficulty of defining what the public good is or what inclusion really means addressed. Perhaps those are questions for which we should mine the wisdom of the crowd? Or perhaps what this conversation needs now is debate about what’s desirable, not only what’s possible.

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Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Left: Allen Street under the Elevated. New York Public Library Digital Gallery (Image ID: 715898F) | Right: Compass Bench at Stanton Street, looking north.

Last week Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) — a nonprofit that works at the intersection of design/build, education and advocacy from its home base in the Lower East Side and Manhattan’s Chinatown — unveiled a temporary public art installation on the Allen Street Pedestrian Malls. These “mall-terations” build upon years of advocacy and visioning HSC has undertaken with the residents of the Allen and Pike Street corridor in an effort to turn this underperforming streetscape into open space that provides places for residents to play and explore the history of their neighborhood. Created in conjunction with the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) Urban Art Program and a quartet of Venezuelan-bred, New York-based artists/designers (Carolina Cisneros, Marcelo Ertorteguy, Mateo Pinto and Sara Valente), the installation evokes some forgotten histories of a street also known as the “Avenue of the Immigrants,” in honor of its long history as a spine along which many communities of new Americans have established their homes for well over a century. For example, the line of white paint down the center of the mall from Houston to Delancey operates as a reminder of both the elevated rail line that used to cast its shadow on this street as well as the demolished block of tenements that used to take up what are now the eastern lanes of Allen Street.

Left: Some new users of one of the Mall-terations. Photo: Sara Valente | Right: Roadside injuries to pedestrians along Allen Street from 1998- 2009. Diagram: NYC DOT

The guiding principle of the piece is historically informed wayfinding, yet, mercifully, this is a far cry from a tourist-oriented heritage tour. Maps, timelines and directions to nearby streets painted into the malls mark the path between a delightful series of mobile benches that function as seating, play structure and overgrown compass at once. The compass “dial” beneath each bench’s compass “needle” is a painted circle that depicts a map of the area in one case, a pie chart of neighborhood demographics in another, and a timeline of neighborhood history in a third. The history is rich, and it resonates poignantly with contemporary reality: Allen Street’s rail line was part of the Second Avenue Elevated, whose underground replacement, now dubbed the T train, has been under discussion since before elevated service was discontinued in 1940 and is now projected to open in 2016. The block of tenements that used to occupy the eastern side of the street were razed in 1930 under a predecessor program to Urban Renewal intended to clean up the slums of the Lower East Side. The same program created Sara D. Roosevelt Park, which runs along Chrystie Street two blocks to the west.

But whereas the demolition of two blocks of tenements made way for the green space and ball courts of Sara D., Allen Street received a series of median malls, cemented directly over the foundations of the bulldozed buildings. The malls — there are 14 of them between Houston and South Streets – have been neglected for the past fifty years, beginning the moment the benches were ripped out to discourage use by habitual drug users and the homeless. That pattern of neglect may be coming to an end. The Parks Department, which maintains the malls, has funding to rehabilitate at least five of them, starting with those closest to the waterfront. DOT has already instituted some temporary improvements, including signaling changes and the provision of protected bike lanes aimed at improving road safety. But just because Allen Street is seeing some overdue capital improvements does not mean that active processes of engaging community members’ vision for the space should cease.

The Hester Street Collaborative has been involved in advocacy efforts around re-envisioning the malls since 2003 and was aware of desire within the community for some rehabilitation efforts further north as well. So they set out to transform the northernmost malls, between Houston and Delancey. Which brings us to the real power of ”mall-terations:” they attest to the way an art intervention can foster a sense of transformative possibility and community involvement in the design and programming of public space. That seems to be exactly why the DOT is interested to work with artists and community-based organizations to realize projects like this. The DOT’s Urban Art Program “is an initiative to invigorate the City’s streetscapes with engaging temporary art installations.” The pARTners track, under which the mall-terations received support, invites not-profit organizations to propose a temporary public art installation (for up to 11 months) on DOT priority sites. The “mall-terations” will be on view through the summer of 2011.

Photo: Sara Valente

Photo: Sara Valente

Wendy Feuer, DOT's Assistant Commissioner for Urban Design and Public Art, takes a turn on the compass bench at Stanton and Allen Streets during the October 21st unveiling of Mall-terations.

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.

45-47 Park Place. Image: Google Street View.

Tuesday morning, I attended the final vote of the Landmarks Preservation Commission hearing on whether or not to confer historic protection to 45-47 Park Place in Lower Manhattan. The commission voted unanimously (9-0) against protecting the site. For this site, unlike many of the other buildings brought to a vote, the stakes far exceeded any simple determination of historical significance in architectural or cultural terms. The site in question is proposed for an Islamic cultural center and mosque whose proximity to Ground Zero has sparked a controversy that has motivated passionate, and often inflammatory, commentary from national and local politicians (Palin, Gingrich, Lazio), civil rights groups both for (ACLU) and against (Anti-Defamation League) the project, neighbors and community leaders. For a brief overview of the controversy and yesterday’s public hearing, read Javier Hernandez’s report for the New York Times City Room here. More coverage can be found on Gotham Gazette.

The Press assembled at Pace University's Schimmel Auditorium after the Landmark Preservation Commission's vote was announced

Speaking to CNN on Monday, Landmarks Preservation Commission spokeswoman Elisabeth de Bourbon reminded the public that the “purpose of [the] vote is to decide whether the building has a special character or special historical or aesthetic interest or value as part of the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of New York City, New York State or the nation.” And, indeed, Commissioners cited such architectural ornaments as cornice moldings and the fact that the building’s architect is unknown in their testimonies. But this clarity of focus did little to diminish the perception (at least among hearing attendees) that the vote was a direct ruling on whether or not the mosque should be built at the site in question. Public comments were not allowed. Nonetheless, attendees made their opinions known. Those in support of the mosque project (myself included) applauded when the vote was announced. A few opponents shouted “disgrace” and “shame on you.” The first of these outbursts challenged the commissioners with the question “Did any of you lose anyone on 9/11?” Another opponent, who burst into tears when the vote was announced, held a hand-painted placard that read: “Islam builds Mosques at Sites of their Conquests and Victories.” Another sign read “Don’t Glorify Murders of 3,000; No 9/11 Victory Mosque.”

Developer Sharif El-Gamal, whose company Soho Properties owns the adjacent site, responding to reporters questions after the Landmarks Preservation Committee public hearing

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I was raised in a secular Muslim household with strong interfaith tendencies. We attended mosque (20 miles and four suburbs away), a couple times a year, on holidays. And we attended church (across the street from our house) on Christmas. From a young age, I have identified as Muslim. I have not regularly attended any particular organized prayers since moving to New York, in part because I am not especially observant and in part because the congregants at the mosque a few blocks from where I live in Brooklyn tend to espouse a more conservative and restrictive interpretation of Islamic theology than my own. For this reason, I was heartened to learn the Cordoba Initiative, a progressive organization dedicated to improving relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities, was one of the groups behind the project to bring a Islamic cultural center to Lower Manhattan. And I followed the project closely as it won community board approval and Mayoral support before becoming engulfed in controversy that seemed, at times, to characterize religious freedom and honoring the dead as mutually exclusive goals. Very little of the media coverage looked beyond this false binary to highlight the fact that Lower Manhattan has, since September 11th, seen its residential population increase almost 140% (from 22,961 in 13,046 units in 2001 to 55,000 in 27,881 units today, according to the Downtown Alliance) without a commensurate increase in publicly accessible community facilities, faith-based or otherwise. Very few of the voices speaking out for or against the project — with the significant exception of Mayor Bloomberg — noted the appropriate limits on the role of government in determining how a private landowner can use her property.

If I were not so emotionally invested in the outcome of the public hearing, I might say that the scene made for riveting political theater: the commissioners, the press, the protesters. Simply hearing how commissioners frame their arguments for or against the granting of landmark status helped me to understand the priorities of a city agency with considerable influence over development in New York City. Tuesday, however, my curiosity about city process was secondary to a deep sense of bafflement that, once again, a battle about the politics of memory, tragedy and religious tolerance found itself waged in terms of architecture.

The aftermath of September 11th put architecture on the front page of newspapers worldwide. But, to my mind, what people were debating was not architecture in and of itself, but rather architecture’s capacity to act as a container for public memory, to provide meaning. This capacity is precisely what the Landmarks law of 1965 was intended to enshrine. The mission of the city agency that resulted from the law is to “Safeguard the city’s historic, aesthetic, and cultural heritage; help stabilize and improve property values in historic districts; encourage civic pride in the beauty and accomplishments of the past; protect and enhance the city’s attractions for tourists; strengthen the city’s economy; and promote the use of landmarks for the education, pleasure, and welfare of the people of New York City.”

In that light, I find the way some of the project’s opponents proposed to use landmark designation in order to prevent a feared future rather than preserve a shared past to be, at best, ironic. Obviously, historic preservation is as often used as a tool to inhibit change as it is to celebrate history. And in this case, opponents of the project found no means to stop the project on legal grounds, so a law that can be interpreted on subjective grounds became a means of last resort. The attempt to commandeer the notion of architectural significance as a legal mechanism to obstruct a building project on privately owned land may not be new, but it still strikes me as inconsistent with the spirit of preserving cultural heritage and encouraging civic pride.

For some people, the debates about Ground Zero were about the prospective power of an imagined architectural future that might honorably replace and memorialize what has been lost. For some people, debates about 45-47 Park Place were about the proscriptive power of subjective (yet legally binding) readings of architectural history to stop a building project some people don’t like. In both cases, architecture seems to be incidental to larger questions about civic memory and how to make one particular version of that civic memory invulnerable to change.

Throughout, Mayor Bloomberg’s support for the project has been forceful. After the vote, he held a press conference on Governors Island and spoke of the development at 45-47 Park Place in the context of upholding what he called “the most important” of our civil liberties, the right to worship as we wish.

[Landmarks'] decision was based solely on the fact that there was little architectural significance to the building. But with or without landmark designation, there is nothing in the law that would prevent the owners from opening a mosque within the existing building. The simple fact is this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship.

The government has no right whatsoever to deny that right – and if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question – should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

His speech — delivered on Governors Island “where the earliest settlers first set foot in New Amsterdam, and where the seeds of religious tolerance were first planted,” in view of the Statue of Liberty, flanked by an ecumenical group of political and religious leaders — was, like the debate, loaded with symbolism. Unlike the debate, Mayor Bloomberg’s symbolism invoked American culture as political philosophy and constitutional legacy. Arguably, this legacy has informed, and will continue to inform “the development, heritage or cultural characteristics of New York City, New York State or the nation,” which are precisely what Landmarks is empowered to safeguard. In other words, the symbols Mayor Bloomberg invoked were about rights and freedoms, not bricks and mortar. And certainly not cornices.

Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus.

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. (Watch an excerpt of Dellekamp’s 2009 Architectural League Emerging Voices lecture, in which he presents his work in Oaxaca, on the League’s website.) 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.