Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association | Photo by steveladner.com.

Our economic and environmental crisis is building consensus that we need new ways of doing business, making policy, and building infrastructure and investing in our communities. We know that these issues are interconnected, yet we are only beginning to understand the deep complexity of those interactions. Innovations in decentralized technology – social media, GIS data, locative software and smartphone applications – provide us with rich new sources of localized and distributed information that have the potential to identify new trends in how we use our built environment and, therefore, might uncover new efficiencies and opportunities for planning our built environment.

Yet the full meaning and scope of the innovations we seek have no consensus. New efficiencies might yield better price signals, reduce power consumption or provide better transportation. But efficiency alone cannot address the larger issues of sustainability and equity. All the information and embedded intelligence we can imagine will not represent input from the full breadth of our society if the digital divide is not addressed or continues to grow. We need innovations not only in technology, but also in how we perceive our cities, and in how and what we choose to learn from the ever-growing stream of information that people produce about themselves and their communities every day.

These issues were the topic of discussion at the Regional Planning Association’s annual assembly on April 16. Designers, planners, and policy-makers gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria to take part in a discussion of this year’s conference theme, Innovation and the American Metropolis. The day-long event comes at the halfway point between the release of RPA’s last Regional Plan in 1996 and the next plan to be released around 2025. RPA’s goal is to begin looking forward and to think about how innovations in technology can lead to innovations in policy and planning. Recently, Urban Omnibus sat down with some of RPA’s leadership to discuss the premises behind the event in the context of the organization’s history. The event itself aired a range of responses and approaches to new technological opportunities for metropolitan areas already underway, and it also provoked new and difficult questions about how these innovations might fit into a larger vision of design and planning.

Regional Assembly 2010 Keynote: William McDonough from Regional Plan Association on Vimeo.

Efficient vs. Effective
In a keynote speech, William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle and renowned sustainable design architect and educator, cautioned the power-brokers in the room – from NRG to the Port Authority – about the difference between being efficient and being effective: that when efficiency alone is a goal, the formation and implementation of policy begins with metrics and never goes beyond the mere measurable to include values and principles. It was a reminder that when we plan and design our environment, we must think about values before metrics in order to be effective. McDonough’s point seemed to resonate throughout the remainder of the conference. When Robert Atkinson, CEO of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, talked about a future city in which embedded intelligence allows efficient pricing or when Chris Ward of the Port Authority embraced these efficiencies as a way to support new infrastructure investments, the trends seemed promising. As previously guarded and proprietary information becomes open source, as in the recent decision about MTA scheduling data, new data-gathering intelligence from the private sector can work in the public interest. This model of public/private partnerships in the areas of energy, transportation, and infrastructure seemed to dominate the interest of both the individual participants and the corporate sponsors. Yet for all the technological optimism, there was little discussion about how this technology could or should affect our values and principles, or any attempt at articulating a larger vision. Among the smaller workgroup sessions offered, the two outliers in this context, “Radical Housing” and “New Tools for Civic Engagement and Community Design,” seemed to represent the best opportunity for a discussion that might engage these larger themes.

How to Use the Data

Audio of the New Tools for Civic Engagement and Community Design workshop courtesy of RPA.

“New Tools for Civic Engagement and Community Design” presented many of the potential benefits and pitfalls for the use of new technology in planning. The panel ranged from those skeptical of technology to those who openly embrace it. For instance, the moderator, Ed Blakely, represented the skeptics, concerned with the digital divide and the ease with which a true participatory process could be hijacked by others. Michael Keating of the Open Planning Project represented the technological optimist, telling the design and planning community that they no longer have control of the message, and that they have no choice but to learn to use social media and to referee the free flow of input. Barbara Faga of AECOM and Robert Lane of RPA stood somewhere in between, believing in the role of technology with limited application. Damon Rich, urban designer for the city of Newark and founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy had a unique stance on the issue, saying that good participation demands very clear goals about the type and level of participation that is being asked for. He also advocates a kind of grassroots educational campaign, akin to organizing, to build the decision-making capacity of those we seek to consult. The comments of Mr. Keating and Mr. Rich point to the use of marketing tactics and social media already developed by advertisers trying to reach new consumers, but repurposed to be used in the interest of the public realm. In general, though, the session and audience comments seemed to reveal unease in the design and planning community about the loss of control that comes with new social media and new technologies. There was also ambivalence towards real engagement with community participants and perhaps a lack of imagination as well. A real opportunity was missed when a decision was made early on not to show a demonstration of some of the new tools available to planners. Some of them require both sides to realize that once the input is given, it can no longer be under anyone’s complete control. For instance, Amsterdam Real Time represents a new kind of data-gathering tool that is still more art than application. Yet, the potential is enormous. Once we understand how to use the data, it may tell us things about our environment nobody had considered or thought possible. This is the kind of radical, innovative tool that may allow us to get beyond our ambivalence towards real participation and our desire to control the outcome.

Housing as Part of a Larger Social System

Audio of the Radical Housing workshop courtesy of RPA.

The “Radical Housing” session, in the afternoon, included Jonathan Rose, Rosanne Haggerty of Common Ground, Jerilyn Perine of Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC), Michael Kelly of NYCHA, with Julia Vitullo-Martin of RPA serving as moderator. Ms. Perine gave the most thought-provoking presentation, painting a portrait of New York as a community of people trying to fit into a housing stock that does not reflect new social realities. For Perine and CHPC, innovation in housing would require a radical rethinking of housing standards and a real increase in density matched by an increase in services for that density. For Kelly and NYCHA, the goal is to re-integrate public housing into neighborhoods with mixed-income communities where the homes of those who receive subsidies are indistinguishable from those who do not. Haggerty’s account of her work with Common Ground, an organization dedicated to housing the homeless, highlighted new unit typologies and living arrangements that echoed some of Perine’s comments. Jonathan Rose spoke of the focus of Rose Companies’ projects on social and environmental concerns. The session catalogued a series of approaches that attempt to deal with housing as part of a larger social system. Given this country’s history of planning and policy in subsidized housing, the projects shown were more encouraging than radical, and the ways in which they represent the cutting edge of housing delivery has very little to do with new technologies. As Ms. Perine mentioned in answer to an audience question, there are typically two tools, and only two tools, that planners have to make affordable housing – land-use policy and tax structure, policy areas where decentralized sources of information can only do so much.

Complex Systems
Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch, speaking of the grave economic situation in the state, at one point leaned into the microphone and told us in his gravelly voice that we are eating our seed corn, using tomorrow’s wealth today. Adolfo Carrión, Jr., now White House Director of Urban Affairs and former Bronx Borough President, struck a much more positive tone. The contrast in tone can be attributed partly to politics and partly to the reality that the Federal Government has funds that the State does not. Both are looking to cities to innovate in the development of a new economy and a more sustainable future. In a country where past Federal administrations have usually lacked faith in cities and failed to invest in them, this new message is welcome. But innovation is a funny thing. It can lead to tremendous efficiencies when implemented on a large scale, but it is borne out of a process that is messy and inefficient – it is a creative act. Cities are always messy, sometimes inefficient, but they are creative. They are complex systems that function in a non-linear fashion, sometimes producing surprising results. The conversations at the conference revolved around the idea that we are just beginning to understand the nature of these complex interactions. Planners, designers, and policy-makers need to embrace the laboratories that are our urban environments precisely because they are not under our complete control. They must also be open to the idea that what is efficient according to one set of metrics may not be effective under another. In the population densities of major metropolitan areas, localized and distributed information sources reach a critical mass that produces a constant feedback loop, allowing us to constantly reevaluate our goals, values, and policies. With greater access and fewer barriers to technology, more density, and more embedded intelligence, we will have more and more information about our environment and ourselves. Real innovation will involve a blurring of the boundaries between the environments and communities that we seek to shape and those who seek to shape them. And it may also require a leap of faith that sometimes solutions can present themselves outside of anyone’s control.

Samir S. Shah, AIA is an architect and writer based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Fellow in Art & Architectural History and has written for various publications, including the Architect’s Newspaper. Samir has taught courses in architecture at the City College of New York and abroad, and is currently principal at Urban Quotient, P.C., a full-service architecture design firm and research collaborative.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

There’s a new, bright green poster that will be making an appearance around the city in the near future, encouraging people to take the stairs and ”Burn Calories, not Electricity.” In addition to reducing our carbon footprints, the city is offering us another way to help the environment and to help ourselves; reducing body fat.

Or maybe the city simply wants to “promote physical activity and health through design”- the subtitle to the Active Design Guidelines, a new publication and policy initiative released last Wednesday at the Center for Architecture. The commissioners of five city departments gathered for the public launch to make brief remarks about the guidelines and to underscore their importance in tackling the problem of obesity and chronic diseases resulting from lack of physical activity.

Four of the departments, represented by Janette Sadik-Khan of Transportation, David Burney of Design and Construction, Amanda Burden of City Planning, and Adrian Benepe of Parks & Recreation, have each been implementing policy and initiatives to create a greener and more livable city over the last few years. The Active Design Guidelines are an overlay to these initiatives, which adds the dimension of public health to the definition of a sustainable city. Originally conceived during the Fit City Challenge in 2006, a conference organized by the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter and the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, it grew into an inter-agency project of the city. The guidelines are a joint effort of all these agencies as well as other professional and academic institutions to raise awareness about the public health crisis of chronic disease, and to set down a clear, simple set of recommendations about how to address it in the built environment.

The fifth commissioner, Thomas Farley of Health and Mental Hygiene, acted as a client of sorts for the guidelines, and provided the context for the effort. He began his comments by listing the medical benefits of increased physical activity. These include reduced risks for a number of chronic diseases as well as reduced depression, and a reduced rate of cognitive decline in the elderly. These health issues are the most prevalent and most expensive to treat in our society, and something as simple as walking ten blocks a day might be one of the most effective prescriptions for them out there. He likened the current health crisis of chronic disease and obesity to the epidemics of infectious diseases in the 1800’s. Those diseases were defeated through design and infrastructural changes to the city, such as zoning regulations, light and air requirements, and clean water delivery. Similarly, Farley believes that it is through design that chronic disease and obesity will be controlled or defeated. He delivered the most striking comment of the evening, stating that in our current urban environments, we have engineered out physical activity. According to him, these guidelines represent the re-engineering of the choice for physical activity back into the city.

When reading through the actual text, I was struck by its common sense. The guidelines are organized by scale of design intervention, from urban planning down to architectural details, and can be implemented with the aid of checklists. On the whole, there was nothing very new, nothing very radical. From the perspective of a design professional, they seem almost obvious. These guidelines, however, are meant for a wider audience. The entire publication was designed to be accessible to the general public in order to raise awareness of design’s role in public health. The recommendations rely heavily on evidence-based research in order to make the connection between the design of our environment and health clear to all audiences. It may not be obvious to the residents of neighborhoods without grocery stores that a lack of dietary choice has a direct correlation to high incidences of diabetes. There are many cities in this country with no sidewalks, bike lanes, or public transit, and the health benefits of providing transportation alternatives may not be obvious. It may not be obvious to us New Yorkers, who pride ourselves on the walkability of our city, that 43% of our city’s schoolchildren are overweight or obese. The potential importance and impact of the guidelines becomes clearer from this perspective, because good planning and design as well as public awareness and pressure are required to implement them. The recommendations are not just good for the environment or good design moves. They create a city whose infrastructure is designed to keep us fit, active, and healthy. They address pressing social problems through fairly innocuous and inoffensive measures that are understandable by everyone and can be implemented at all scales. If such seemingly intransigent and difficult problems such as the rate of type II diabetes or cognitive decline in the elderly can be addressed by such simple, common sense recommendations, then we have a real chance to solve them. In the process, we can take a few steps towards creating an environmentally sustainable city that is also socially sustainable.

A few hours after the public launch of the Active Design Guidelines here in New York, President Obama gave his first State of the Union Address. In an aside which drew the evening’s loudest applause, the President took a moment to acknowledge the First Lady’s new public health campaign to fight the epidemic of childhood obesity. Was it coincidence that the city chose this date to launch the guidelines? Probably not. Just as other municipalities and regions in this country have looked to New York in the past for answers on issues of zoning and historic preservation, for example, New York City is poised to lead in this new initiative as well. And as the debate about how to provide better, more efficient healthcare continues, perhaps designers here in New York City have an answer; a prescription that requires no doctor and no insurance coverage – just a livable, efficient, sustainable city.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Samir S. Shah, AIA is an architect and writer based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Fellow in Art & Architectural History and has written for various publications, including the Architect’s Newspaper. Samir has taught courses in architecture at the City College of New York and abroad, and is currently principal at Urban Quotient, P.C., a full-service architecture design firm and research collaborative.

As we look forward to 2010, it seems that we are getting signals of more austerity ahead. Recently, the MTA approved a series of fairly drastic service cuts. There is a sense that Albany will add strain to the city’s public schools by forcing budget cuts in education on top of last year’s hiring freezes. Within the architecture and design fields, of course, new jobs are scarce and this situation may not improve any time soon. Yet there are opportunities to put professional skills to use in the interest of local communities and engage with public policy in this time of uncertainty. At the Center for Architecture this past Wednesday morning, Shaan Khan, of the Manhattan Borough President’s Office was on hand to promote awareness of community boards and to recruit architects to lend their expertise to the cause of good governance.

Across the five boroughs, there are a total of 59 community boards, each with 50 members who are appointed for staggered two year terms (Find your community board here). In 2010, half of the 2950 seats are open for new appointments. According to Mr. Khan and Margery Perlmutter, legislative director of the AIA New York Chapter, architects are sorely needed to fill some of those seats. When major projects such as the East River Waterfront Esplanade, or the construction of new buildings in historic districts are undertaken, the land use committees of community boards are consulted and often relied upon heavily for community input. Architects can play a very important role on these committees when forming recommendations for projects that are sometimes controversial and would affect the daily lives of many people. According to Ms. Perlmutter, the need for architects’ expertise and judgment in issues of zoning, landmarks, and design is needed throughout the city, but is even greater in the outer Boroughs.

Based on that statement, I decided to look up my community board, and find out the range of professional expertise among its members. When I spoke to Robert Perris, district manager of Brooklyn Community Board 2, he told me that there were no architects on the board. Not only that, there were no landscape architects, no engineers, and no artists or designers.  In a district with double the citywide percentage of professionals and a large artist community, I found this surprising. It certainly speaks to the need for recruiting members of the design professions. The only qualifications to be eligible for a community board seat are residence in New York City, a “significant interest” in the community board to which the application is made (defined simply as living or working in the district), and some record of community involvement or engagement.

In addition to land use, community boards have an advisory role on issues of municipal services, city budget, as well as any other concerns regarding the welfare of the community. All members must serve in at least two committees as well as attend all executive committee meetings. It can be a time-consuming affair, but it can also provide a unique perspective on local events from the headline-grabbing to the mundane. For instance, land use committees meet to hold public hearings on certain proposed projects through the city’s Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). There is often a great deal of controversy in this process, and the hearings can get very intense and very vocal. This is particularly true because of a common misunderstanding over the role of public comment in ULURP. According to the City Charter, the recommendations of the community board are strictly advisory. Neither the Borough President nor the City Planning Commission is obliged to follow them.  In many cases, however, community opinion does sway the final outcome. There are also smaller items that most board hearings consist of, such as the addition of sidewalk cafes, the safety and lighting around parks, the frequency of garbage service, or a host of other issues that make up the life of a community.

This recruitment effort fits nicely into a new national focus this past year, on the theme of public service and a call to be more responsible citizens. I think of all the buildings that architects helped create over the last ten years, and how often we may have seen community boards as unyielding or obstructionist. Perhaps many of us saw their importance but simply did not have the time to commit to our communities. I have given presentations to community boards over the last ten years, seeking approvals for projects in other parts of the city, but I never considered joining my own.  As the work slows down, and the needs of communities change from protecting their character to creating jobs, perhaps architects can use this time as an opportunity to join the discussion from a different point of view. After all, community boards are autonomous city agencies, and are the only city agency comprised of completely volunteer members.  This makes them  a unique democratic institution in our civic landscape, and one from which the voice of architects and design professionals should be heard.

Applications for Manhattan Community Boards are due in the Borough President’s Office by January 15, 2010. Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island are due at a later date.

For more information and applications contact:

Shaan Khan
Director of Community affairs and Constituent Services
Office of the Manhattan Borough President’s Office
212.669.4416

or

Margery Perlmutter, Esq., AIA
Legislative Director, AIANY Chapter

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

As the plaintive wail of an ambulance drifted up 2^nd Avenue last Friday night, a group of about 30 people at the corner of East 10^th Street paused to listen to the siren as it passed by. I had joined a nocturnal urban hunt, an aural field trip through New York City, listening for the sounds of sirens and what they signify. The event was one of a three part series called Sirens Taken for Wonders, a joint program of Performa 09 and the Van Alen Institute. Organized by British artist Paul Elliman, the series took the form of two field trips and a live radio panel discussion on Saturday afternoon. Elliman’s idea is that sirens represent an apparently unambiguous message of stress, alarm, or danger within a city, yet they also contain a range of contradictory meanings when seen from different perspectives. Sirens Taken for Wonders gathered experts and enthusiasts on the field trips and the panel discussion to share these different sonic images of the city.

The field trip began at 10:00pm at the Performa hub in Cooper Square, a temporary storefront gallery space carved out of the new Morphosis building at the Cooper Union. Paul Elliman began the evening’s activities with a brief introduction to the typology of siren sounds and the emergency codes used by the city’s EMS personnel to denote different emergency situations: Code 1 is for an EDP, or Emotionally Disturbed Person. No siren is used, and the lights are used sparingly. Code 7, at the other end of the spectrum, is for severe trauma such as gunshot wound or cardiac arrest. Both siren and lights are at full volume. Daisy Press, an operatic voice coach who developed a series of voice training exercises based upon siren sounds, demonstrated the different siren tones. She later referred me to a New York Times article, written in 2007, in which these tones were described and sampled in audio format.

The leisurely pace of our stroll was interrupted abruptly at the first notice of a siren: a “whale”, so named because of its slow, full range of sound from low pitch to high. Over the next hour and a half, we heard a few “yelps” and “air horns” as well. Towards the end of the tour, we witnessed an ambulance breakdown and the transfer of a patient from one ambulance to another, which triggered a conversation began about the voyeuristic aspect of the endeavor, a topic that was picked up the next day in the panel discussion.

The field trips had really been a warm-up for Saturday’s discussion, which was held at 4pm at the Van Alen Institute. Paul Elliman began the discussion, broadcast live on internet radio, and acted as the moderator. He gave an exhaustive account of the history of sirens – including the literature, music and other art forms they have inspired – and posited them as an iconic, even touristic, characteristic in the popular imagination. The most vivid and poetic description that Elliman referenced came from a South Bronx ambulance driver who described the movement of cars in front of him as a wave that rippled around him: a visual Doppler effect that moved with the siren. From there, urban sonologist Raviv Ganchrow discussed sirens as physical wave phenomena and the urban canyon as a range of reflectance and frequency absorption determined by building material. The sounding of a siren maps or scans the city’s frequency range. The relationship between the city’s built environment and sonic experience brought up the work of Max Neuhaus, who had been hired by New York City in the late 1980s to rethink sirens sounds and emergency codes (PDF) (the same Max Neuhaus whose installation in Times Square was reinterpreted last week and covered here by Veronica Kavass -Ed.). Among Neuhaus’ contentions were that more intelligent sirens would use information about the urban environment to modify their sound. This notion provided a segue to Laura Kurgan’s work at the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL). Research at the lab included access to the 311 database (see SIDL co-director Sarah Williams’ analysis of 311 complaints here), in which there is no mention of sirens in any neighborhood as a noise complaint. New Yorkers, it seems, complain about a lot of other noises, but never sirens. When Elliman commented that only a few sirens were audible on his walks, and Dr. Bronzaft, Chair of the Noise Committee on the Mayor’s Council on the Environment of New York City, replied that there were probably more sirens in the South Bronx or Brownsville, Kurgan suggested that a map of sirens might correspond to the maps of incarceration Kurgan has researched and produced at the Spatial Information Design Lab. Dr. Bronzaft corroborated that there were no complaints about sirens in the 311 database. Both Kurgan’s and Bronzaft’s work have the potential to affect public policy, and while it was unclear how frequency mapping might be used, the possibilities were apparent to both.

As the afternoon darkened into evening, the lights remained turned off in hopes of inviting the night sounds of sirens into the room. However, as Dr. Bronzaft pointed out, perhaps we should have gathered in the South Bronx for that purpose. The darkened atmosphere did, however, present an ideal setting for a bit of performance art. Lazaro Valiente performed an improvisational piece and described his Police Car Quartet, composed as a public concert with Mexico City police cars. Mr. Valiente’s work brought us out of a policy discussion and back to the central ambiguity that the panel elaborated but never really clarified. In an urban environment in which density and noise are both increasing, what do sirens mean, and how do they convey that message? I’m not sure that I got an answer to that question, but I think that Mr. Elliman would have been disappointed had there been a unanimous conclusion. His work is deeply engaged with ambiguity, and his concept for this event was a wonderful, thoughtful, and intelligent rumination. I left with a much richer appreciation for sirens, and another layer of complexity to add to the texture of New York City.

Panel Discussion Participants:
Paul Elliman: Artist, Moderator
Raviv Gonchow: Sonologist at the Royal Conservatory at the Hague; Design Professor, TU Delft
Lazaro Valiente: Mexico-City based musician, composer of “Police Car Quartet”
Laura Kurgan: Director – Spatial Information Design Lab, Columbia University
Dr. Arline Bronzaft: Chair of the Noise Committee, Mayor’s Council on the Environment of New York City


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Photo “Intersect” by Flickr user Digiart2001.

Samir S. Shah, AIA is an architect and writer based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Fellow in Art & Architectural History and has written for various publications, including the Architect’s Newspaper. Samir has taught courses in architecture at the City College of New York and abroad, and is currently principal at Urban Quotient, P.C. , a full-service architecture design firm and research collaborative.