INTRODUCTION
People become urban planners because they want to make life in cities better.

But change comes slowly. And planners often find themselves pigeonholed into repetitive or isolated work as technocrats whose role is to move along processes defined by local laws and regulations, department bureaucracy, or a particular professional culture.

Could planners reshape the process through which they apply their skills? Though architects and artists commonly use their skills to intervene in troubled cityscapes, planners are rarely asked to exercise their creativity in the same way.

My colleague Frank Hebbert and I were mulling over this question at the very same time that a group of concerned citizens in New York City were struggling to make changes in the deadly thoroughfare that dominated their commute: Queens Boulevard. So we asked ourselves: What might a planning intervention look like? Would it be possible to structure the process so that urban planners could offer their unique expertise directly to complex problems in cities?

To help answer these questions, Frank and I launched Planning Corps, a network of volunteer planners whose skills we match with non-profits or community-based projects that frequently confront the kind of planning-type decisions that might benefit from a little technical assistance.

Old Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills circa 1900 | Photo courtesy of OldKewGardens.com

QUEENS BOULEVARD: A BRIEF HISTORY
Queens Boulevard has long been one of the most dangerous corridors for pedestrians and cyclists in New York. But its origins were in the tradition of the grand promenade boulevards that marked great cities of its day. It was conceived as a redesign and connection of two boulevards, Thomas Boulevard and Hoffman Boulevard, to serve traffic coming from Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. A 1912 proposal called for a central roadway at 44 feet wide, two side roadways at 28 feet, trolley tracks along the side roads, two 30-foot-wide “malls” or medians separating the roadways, and 20-foot sidewalks on either side. Its combined width of about 230 feet supported multiple uses: a Sunday stroll, a bicycle delivery and a carriage ride. But by 1922, the population of Queens had developed so rapidly that planners widened the roadway to 200 feet to meet the needs of all the new cars on the road.

A proposal for the layout of Queens Boulevard by the Queens Chamber of Commerce. Good Roads magazine, June 1914.

In 1933, the Queens Chamber of Commerce created a Queens Boulevard committee to ensure that the development of the boulevard did not occur at the expense of “beautification.” The Chamber even sponsored a competition for ideas on the development of Queens Boulevard in partnership with civic organizations such as the Regional Plan Association, the American Institute of Architects, and the Society for the Beaux Arts. Cord Meyer, the Chamber’s chair at the time, explained:

We plan to study the development of the boulevard, first of all, from the physical angle… We shall try to hasten the completion of the subway, the laying of the water mains, electrical light conduits and gas pipes and the building of the sewers. Then we shall consider zoning.

No one predicted the rampant pace at which the Borough of Queens would grow, nor did they anticipate the traffic that would come with it. By 1963, the entire borough of Queens had experienced more construction than any other borough since World War II, investing over two billion dollars on over 90,000 structures between 1946 and 1962. But development was uneven and difficult to control. Real estate speculation drove up property values at the same time that public service needs were inadequately met. Queens Boulevard was only one of many development projects; in 1963, only half of the roads in the borough were paved. Transportation development lagged behind population growth and housing demand, and local civic leaders repeatedly requested additional funds from the City to keep up with necessary infrastructure construction.

As early as 1971, The New York Times reported on the dangers of Queens Boulevard to pedestrians:

There are times when it seems as though the light is in favor of the pedestrian and he has to look in all directions at once. When the light seems to be in favor in one direction, the cars are turning in another direction. And before he has taken a few steps the “Don’t Walk” signs are flashing.

Most recently, in 2005, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted a traffic safety study on the Boulevard and concluded that traffic volumes were so high that little could be done to improve it. The minor safety improvements that were suggested – the addition of turning lanes and few through-street closures – were either challenged by local stakeholders or lamented for their inadequacy. Opposition from business owners, who feared that changes in the traffic pattern would reduce sales, was the strongest. Mayor Michael Bloomberg shot back that saving lives was a bigger concern than making profit. Still, implementation of comprehensive safety improvements faltered. Signs cautioning pedestrians to be careful while crossing the street stayed up on their posts and became the butt of jokes for transportation advocates.

Detail from Planning Corps' study "Crossing Queens Boulevard: The Effects of Signal Timing at Broadway/Grand Ave"

Late one summer night 2009, James Langergaard — a committed cyclist and a volunteer at Transportation Alternatives (T.A.), a transportation advocacy organization in New York City – was struck and killed on Queens Boulevard as he biked his way home. Because a traffic safety study had been so recently completed, there was little faith among citizens that more could be done to make additional changes to the street. But the community’s questions remained: how many more lives should be lost and put at risk?  What could they do right now that could spur on the process for change?

Into this vacuum of viable ideas, T.A.’s Bicycle Advocacy Director Caroline Samponaro introduced the idea of offering realistic alternative cross sections (a flat drawing that shows how a street space is or could be used) to garner support from the public and from city agencies. But T.A., over-committed and cash-strapped, did not have the capacity to execute this idea. It did, however, have a significant asset: an organized volunteer committee of Queens residents who were interested in taking up the cause.

I was working at T.A. at the time, and pondering the role of urban planners in general with Frank. How might we imagine different ways for planners to make use of their abilities to bring about change? Planning processes tend to be drawn out, but community needs tend to be immediate. For example, changes even as seemingly small as traffic signal timing to prioritize pedestrians would require a large study and would need to be initiated by the Department of Transportation. But a volunteer corps of planners could, at a minimum, help draw the cross-sections.

ENTER PLANNING CORPS
From the start, we were curious about what we could accomplish if we deconstructed the process by which planners and non-planners collaborated on a solution. Working closely with the Queens Volunteer Committee, we began with standard problem identification and relied on residents to share their observations and expertise with us. The dedicated volunteers also ran a series of activities to support our research, such as a community walk along the entire length of the Boulevard that documented street design challenges. These observations proved invaluable.

The Queens Volunteer Committee on the Boulevard

The committee’s observations showed that there are actually five basic street and neighborhood contexts for Queens Boulevard, and for each there could be a different solution. A long boulevard that seemed to present new problems on every block and at every unique intersection now required five tailored solutions. This was much easier to digest and conceptualize and mirrored the intent of the neighborhood sub-committees formed by the Queens Chamber of Commerce’s Queens Boulevard Committee in 1933.

We had settled on cross-sections as the major deliverable of our efforts because local non-profit or community groups could express their unique knowledge through the drawn images. In addition, we thought that focusing on one specific product would ensure our ability to deliver good work, and we didn’t want the Queens Volunteer Committee to expect more than we could offer. As we worked, however, we realized that limiting ourselves to cross-sections was impeding our ability to tackle the full scope of the problem.

Planning Corps at work | photo: Dory Kornfield

PROCESS, PRODUCTS, PERSUASION
After five months of floundering in this cyclical workshop process and worrying about losing the attention of the Queens Committee volunteers and the volunteer planners, Eric Galipo of H3 Architects, a planner, came onboard. Eric reframed the issue. He asked: What would be the most persuasive way for the Queens Volunteer Committee to persuade their elected officials that something had to be done to the street?

Reframing our process made the flow of activity needed to build up to the demand for change more legible. Instead of fixating our time on producing a product, we became more aware of the questions at large and how the community would have to answer them to build support for the changes they wanted. We started to ask more specific questions about who the volunteers would need to talk to and what would help them make their arguments.

Typically these questions are answered for planners by a city or industry’s framework, for example, the Uniform Land Use Review Process in New York City for land use zoning changes. Developers work off of pro formas and in-house economic models that support development proposals. To make changes to Queens Boulevard, we needed to intervene in the City’s formal planning process for transportation capital improvements.

We determined that it was be the elected officials who needed to be convinced to set aside public funding for another traffic safety study. Elected officials are not usually trained in street design and they are usually short on time. The question every elected official had to field in public was how more space for bicycles would fit on a boulevard that experiences so much congestion already. Cross sections of street space allocation would be useful, but perhaps more useful if they were presented in a collection of boulevard cross sections taken from around the world – boulevards that had demonstrably fewer crashes. Mike Lydon, the founder and principal of the Streets Plan Collaborative, found examples of boulevards that matched the typology of Queens Boulevard but were demonstrably safer and served multiple modes. Eric helped reorganize the detailed information to demonstrate comparisons that support the concept that it is possible to redesign the street.

Two comparable boulevards from Planning Corps' Book of Precedents

Most street typology books force the reader to draw mental comparisons, but we could not afford to lose the attention of our target in that way. Given that the volunteers would be trying to start conversations with people who might not be disposed to having the conversation in the first place, the comparisons would have to be immediate, visual, and clear. Anthony Denaro from OpenPlans took all the content, worked out the necessary information design keeping all of these concerns in mind, and formatted them into a booklet.

Additional themes that surfaced during the original problem identification became starting points for other products. They included topics such as how much businesses would be impacted, and why it’s so hard to convince people that signal timing can make a big difference for pedestrian safety.  The main question that persisted was how all of the desired safety improvements for multiple modes could fit in the existing space of Queens Boulevard.

For example, to show a non-transportation specialist the basics of geometric street design, we finally arrived at what we called the “Julia Child Street Kit Model.” H3 Architects has a history of creating models that show clients the trade-offs between possible uses for a space and the constraints. These models of different parts can be combined in multiple ways to make different plans and programs, just as the ingredients and tools in Julia Child’s kitchen can be combined to create different dishes.

For instance, a new theater building may require a certain number of parking spots. The cheapest way to provide parking is through a surface lot. But this is also the most expensive in terms of land acquisition. Underground parking is more expensive in labor and materials, but much cheaper in terms of land and opportunity cost for that land. The Julia Child Kit allowed the designer to trade surface parking for structured parking on a model.

We made a huge list of street elements – bus lane, bike lane, parking, travel lanes, wider sidewalks, curb extensions, and street trees. Eric laid the pieces out in CAD (Computer-aided Design) and mounted it on foam core. Then we spent a few hours cutting them out. Once you have your pieces ready, you can line up all the pieces to represent the existing street; move the pieces around and take out a travel lane; add a bike lane and sidewalk extension as you see fit.

Dealing with small business owners who continuously feel threatened by any traffic or street design changes – as they have every decade since Queens Boulevard has experienced safety issues – was another significant challenge. We asked the volunteers, what would you like to have with you when you talk to them? How would you convince them? What would give you confidence to have that conversation? We had trouble imagining small business owners reading a report that provided evidence of the economic benefits of a more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly street so we did not conduct a literature review. Instead, we created an informal text document that listed common questions and a few possible answers. We listed resources and studies at the end of the talking points, in case anyone was so inclined to read more.

Over the course of our collaboration with the volunteer planners and community members, we did not produce anything that could be called new in terms of design. Our innovations were limited to reframing questions, discussions and tasks, and to designing the products to meet identified needs. Our discussions enriched our understanding of what was involved in seeking the urban change, and the products followed suit.

It is worth noting that we had the luxury of time. One could say that we ended up with typical planning products and we just took the long way around to it. Yet it is hard to imagine the group of us knowing from the beginning that we should build a street model kit, write talking points on economic benefits, or design a book of boulevards, without first having had all those discussions that revealed the layers of actors and information, and connected the points of engagement. Community members seeking drastic design changes on Queens Boulevard needed to deal with multiple stakeholders in their campaign to build public support, and each stakeholder group required a different approach and thus individual tools. Though we never lost sight of the ultimate goal – winning safer, more livable street design changes for Queens Boulevard – the deconstructed framework allowed us to experiment and hopefully end up with better tactical results.

Planning Corps continues to welcome members and is especially interested in planners who are enthusiastic about committing to more leadership. Sign up here or contact Shin-Pei Tsay if you’d like to learn more.
Queens Boulevard, 2010 | photo: Flickr user Haruko16

Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Planning Corps.

An earlier version of this article appeared on CoLab Radio.

Shin-pei Tsay is the director of Cities and Transportation in the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on federal, state, and local transportation policy, climate change policy, and urban and regional planning issues, with an emphasis on economic development.

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Tsay served as the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, a nationally renowned non-profit focused on transportation issues in New York City; as a founding member of the NYC office for ZGF architects where she was on the sustainability team; the chief operating officer of Project for Public Spaces, an international non-profit; and a strategy consultant with a company serving the Fortune 500. Most recently she contributed to New York City’s Street Design Manual, New York City’s Active Living Design Guidelines, and New York State’s Livable Communities Manual.

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.

Map created by WXY Architecture + Urban Design

Long Island City covers a huge swath of Queens — 1,664 acres, or 500 square blocks, between Newtown Creek and 33rd Street — and encompasses such neighborhoods as Hunters Point, Ravenswood, Astoria, Dutch Kills, Sunnyside and more. Its history is one of transition from farmland to industrial center, accompanied by large-scale infrastructural development, as bridges, tunnels, ferries, rail lines and roads criss-crossed the region, to support the many steel, stoneworking, food processing and manufacturing companies that populate the area. But while industry continues to be an active and present part of LIC life, these days residents and visitors recognize the neighborhood’s thriving contemporary arts scene.

Individual artists and cultural institutions have fostered the evolution of Long Island City’s cultural landscape. In 1976, PS1 Contemporary Art Center opened its doors in a former school building on Jackson Avenue (PS1 merged with MoMA in 2000). The Thalia Spanish Theatre was established in 1977. In 1985, 24 years after first opening his studio in the neighborhood, sculptor Isamu Noguchi founded The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Long Island City. One year later and one block away, sculptor Mark di Suvero (who had also had studio space in the area since the early 1970s) established, with a coalition of other artists and community members, Socrates Sculpture Park, a foundation and public park on the site of a formerly abandoned landfill and illegal dumping ground. The establishment of these two cultural centers amplified LIC’s burgeoning identity as a contemporary arts hub, soon joined by the Museum of the Moving Image (which opened in 1988), the Fisher Landau Center for Art (1991), the Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs (2001), the Museum for African Art (2002), SculptureCenter (2002), and MoMA QNS, the temporary home of the museum during the two-year renovation of its Manhattan space, which took over factory space on 33rd Street as its central exhibition space from 2002-2004.

For both Noguchi and di Suvero, affordable real estate and proximity to suppliers and fabricators with whom they worked made the area appealing and logical for studio space. But their impact on the neighborhood extended beyond the studio and out into the public spaces of Queens, and the cultural institutions they founded underscored the existence of a local residential and cultural community that deserved attention and support. Now, the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park have come together to organize Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City, a multi-phase project, in the spirit of Noguchi and di Suvero, to conceive of new approaches to the neighborhood’s growth. They invited Natalie Jeremijenko, Mary Miss, Rirkrit Tiravanija and George Trakas, artists known for their socially-engaged work, to lead teams comprised of designers, writers and others in envisioning a future Long Island City that will retain its cultural, industrial and residential texture — as well as the still-evolving legacy of its artists — as it grows.

Opening tonight, October 12, 2011, at the Noguchi Museum, is an exhibition of the projects created by the four teams. Over the course of the fall and spring, the organizations will present a series of public programs to engage the public in the conversation and further investigate many of the issues at play. In the spring of 2012, the teams will install large-scale prototypes for elements of their proposals in Socrates Sculpture Park. A publication documenting the teams’ processes and projects will be published to conclude the project.

Last week, we had a chance to sit down with two of the forces behind this ambitious project: Jenny Dixon, the director of the Noguchi Museum, and Alyson Baker, the former executive director of Socrates Sculpture Park (now the director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum). Read on to learn more about Civic Action, the legacy of these two prominent artists, and how big-thinking, creative approaches to planning and development can encourage growth while maintaining character, honoring local history and recasting the role of the artist in urban development. Then click through to get a preview of the projects created by the four artist-led teams, on view at the Noguchi Museum, tomorrow through April 22, 2012.

— Varick Shute

R/Call: IF ONLY THE CITY COULD SPEAK installation by artist Mary Miss and project team as part of Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City | Photo by Bill Taylor, Courtesy of The Noguchi Museum

Tell me about Civic Action. How did you conceive of the idea and what was the process of turning it into the project it is now?
Jenny Dixon: The idea started with our concern about how development might drastically change this neighborhood, and the environment and experience of the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park. Alyson and I, along with my colleague Amy Hau, were invited by the head of the local community board to come and look at a proposed project for a building right behind the Noguchi Museum. The plans referenced the Noguchi garden and Socrates Sculpture Park, but the architect and developer had never asked us or talked to us.

Alyson Baker: The crux of the problem, illustrated by that story, is that there is an awareness and acknowledgement of how important the legacies of figures like Isamu Noguchi and Mark di Suvero are to this area, and yet development is going on without including, or even speaking with, people from the creative sector who are such a big and important part of this community. The acknowledgement is there, but the inclusion is not.

Here we have this tremendous legacy of two artists shaping a significant section of New York City and we need to make sure that legacy is not only acknowledged, but becomes part of the future. That really inspired the project.

For those who aren’t familiar with Noguchi and di Suvero’s histories with Long Island City, can you summarize their relationship with the area?
AB: The short version is that Mark di Suvero established his studio here, saw an empty lot next door and had a vision that probably no one else could have possibly had other than Mark di Suvero, which was to transform it into a park and a residency and exhibition opportunity for artists.

JD: Noguchi’s story is not dissimilar. Noguchi came here first in 1960, and around 1980 he decided to build the museum. Noguchi’s vision for the Museum was to house his work and be the place for people to understand who he was.

Here we are, in the shadow of these amazing visionaries — of course, Mark is still living and working here today — who lived within spitting distance of each other. It’s our job to carry forth their legacies. That’s what we’re trying to do with Civic Action.

This project stems from the idea of Noguchi as somebody who looked at public spaces, who was engaged in the realm of planners and architects. Noguchi was an artist who hired architects, hired planners — and he worked for them as well. His relationships with Gordon Bunshaft or with Louis Kahn were very much collaborations of mutual respect. His very dear friends at the architectural firm of Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao were right next door. It was in that light that we chose to have artists lead the Civic Action teams.

How did you identify the artists who are participating and how did they assemble their teams?
AB: We both did a lot of research, reached out to peers, and then put together shortlists. We knew that we would be asking these artists to jump in with a relatively short time frame and that they really needed to be able to come to the table with a good solid background in socially engaged work. We also wanted each artist to have a unique perspective, but one that would complement the others.

Though they are artist-led, the teams include designers, architects and landscape designers as well. But this wasn’t an architectural competition. We wanted to make sure that the artists, the public and everyone participating knew that this was a collaboration. It was about complementary ideas coming together, with as broad a perspective as possible.

Once the artists signed on, you charged them with finding an architect or planner and a scribe to complete their teams. What did you imagine those three roles would accomplish together?
AB: That goes back to the idea of Isamu as an artist who hired architects to work with him. He was, as an artist, the leader of the team and the director of the concept, and was looking to architects to support his vision — not that he didn’t also work in support of architects as well. We took that model and translated it within the framework of this project. The artists would be the initiators, the driving forces behind the teams — and we didn’t limit it to just an architect and a writer, they were welcome to open up their teams beyond that as well.

JD: The writers, documenting the teams’ work, are key to the project. We will be producing a catalog, in which each team will explain their process, their ideas and their thinking. We want to offer this project as a model in some ways. So the catalog will be more like a workbook or a journal.

AB: Collaboration is something I’m really interested in because of the years that I’ve spent at Socrates working with young artists, mentoring them through a process of understanding how to work on a larger scale, with materials that might be unfamiliar to them. We have just initiated a new project at the park where we are creating a forum where young architects and young artists work together, on separate projects, on their own things, but in the same studio. I think that kind of collaboration is important, especially when it comes to work within the public realm, and when you have so many artists who are interested in architecture, urban planning, design — a much bigger picture.

What was the brief that you presented to the teams? What did you challenge them to do?
JD: We gave them a big briefing book on the community, with information about neighborhood demographics, local industry, things like that. We also gave them a list of people who had agreed to be community advisors, people like Alan Suna from Silvercup Studios, community board members, residents, the principal from a local school.

Then we told them a story similar to the one that we’re telling you, about how we wanted to empower them to look at this community, in the spirit of di Suvero and Noguchi, and come up with ideas about how to maintain the existing texture. Everything changes — we’re not saying there should be no development — but how can we participate in that change in a way that affirms the missions of our respective organizations and their founding artists.

AB: In a way, we didn’t tell them so much what they should do, as we told them what Mark and Isamu had done. We said, this is the legacy of this neighborhood and the impact that artists have had, and now we’re handing the baton to you to look to the future.

JD: We didn’t enter into the project with any preexisting expectations. We didn’t know what they were going to come up with. We presented information to the teams and gave them access to resources and people — it’s important to recognize the advisory group we had for the project: Hugh Hardy, Donald Elliot, Diana Balmori, Richard Meier, David Childs and Richard Maltz. We set up meetings with the artists and the advisory group, moderated by Claire Weisz, who was our project strategist and has been key to the project, and Laurie Beckelman. Those meetings were where these ideas and conversations began.

AB: We informed the teams that there was going to be a component of the exhibition at Socrates next year, which represented an opportunity to do real scale, real time prototyping in the landscape — to realize something substantial. But it was about vision, too, so we knew that some of the ideas might be far-fetched. But George Trakas has actually completed amazing projects with the City, so has Mary — we knew that these artists were capable of realizing projects.

Click here for a preview of the projects created by the four Civic Action teams, on view at the Noguchi Museum from October 13, 2011 through April 22, 2012.

Building on Legacy: Artists as Planners, a video from The Noguchi Museum about Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City.

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Jenny Dixon joined The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum as director in April 2003. She began her arts career in 1977, when she joined the Public Art Fund, where she served as executive director from 1980 through 1986. Among her many accomplishments at the Fund was the initiation of the New York City “Percent for Art” program. In 1986, Dixon joined the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council as executive director, and in 1999 was named director of The Bronx Museum of the Arts. She has taught at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Parsons School of Design, and New York University. She is on the boards of the Public Art Fund and the New York City Arts Coalition, among other organizations.

Alyson Baker is the executive director of The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and was formerly the executive director of the Socrates Sculpture Park for over a decade before she ended her tenure in June 2011. Prior to joining Socrates, Baker was director of Pat Hearn Gallery (1987-1992), an associate director of Gagosian Gallery (1992-1997), curatorial assistant in the Contemporary Art Department at the Carnegie Museum of Art and assistant to the 1999 Carnegie International exhibition (1998-2000). Ms. Baker is a co-founder and former president of the Long Island City Cultural Alliance, a non-for-profit partnership of arts organizations that works in concert with artists, businesses, and residents to encourage and enrich the arts community in Long Island City. In 2009 she founded Makers Market, an annual craft and design fair, in partnership with American Craft Magazine, The Noguchi Museum, and R 20th Century. Most recently, she initiated a collaboration with The Architectural League of New York to create “Folly,” a studio residency and exhibition program at Socrates Sculpture Park for architects and designers.

Many of the events during this week hinge on By The City / For The City, a crowdsourced ideas competition for New York’s public realm for which the Institute solicited design challenges from people across the city and then invited designers to respond. Tomorrow’s opening night event at the BMW Guggenheim Lab will launch a book and exhibition of the designs from By The City / For The City, and the rest of week will see events that range from discussing the historic significance of Isham Park in Inwood to participating in a 72-hour “urban action” in Long Island City, from open air film screenings on the High Line to helping to design a new skatepark under the Manhattan Bridge, from a picnic in the Financial District to a walking tour that explores the ways women have contributed to the creation and life of the Brooklyn Bridge. With over 35 happenings, openings, screenings and designings, Urban Design Week seeks to increase public understanding of how living in the city fits into larger systemic questions of what cities are and how cities work. What’s more, it promises to foster a sense of transformative possibility about those systems and how design can improve them. We sat down with Anne Guiney, executive director of the Institute for Urban Design to find out more about how it came about and what to expect from…  

Tell me about Urban Design Week.
Urban Design Week is six days of events – starting this Thursday, September 15th – organized by The Institute for Urban Design that seeks to engage New Yorkers in the complexity of the public realm, to get people thinking about the streetscapes, sidewalks and public spaces at the heart of city life. This week of activities is about celebrating what makes New York the city it’s known to be: it’s dynamic public realm.

None of it is accidental. There are a thousand decisions that go into shaping and reshaping the city and its public realm; it’s an ongoing process. There are a lot of wonderful ways to insert one’s opinions, desires and hopes into those processes. The traditional apparatus for citizen involvement in New York is absolutely necessary and hugely important. But existing mechanisms for participation have limitations. Some people can’t afford to spend three hours on a Monday night at a community meeting. With that in mind, we made our project “By the City / For The City” the centerpiece of Urban Design Week. The project combines crowdsourcing methods with a design ideas competition to ask New Yorkers to articulate how the city’s public realm could be improved. It’s about trying to find different ways — ways that feel less official or restrictive — to get people involved in conversations about what works in the city.

How does “By The City / For The City” work?
We conceived “By The City / For The City” as a way to figure out how non-designers imagine that design can change the physical fabric and systems of the city, the things they use and think about every day. We wanted to explore what the potentials and limitations of design to make meaningful change are by asking New York City residents to identify challenges. And then we invited designers to respond to those challenges. The range of ideas that came in was amazing. There were 600 in total. Some are incredibly modest and small in scale — for example, “This corner always floods.” Others were much grander in scale: “Please rethink how to get from Brooklyn to Queens.”

Map of ideas from By the City / For the City

We started by asking people to respond to a very simple question: “Wouldn’t it be great if…” Then we worked on how to ground this hypothetical in spatial and physical terms, because we wanted to avoid kvetchy responses like “Wouldn’t it be great if… my neighbor didn’t yell so loud.” So we encouraged respondents to give some context: a location and an explanation of why. So we provided four prompts: “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” “Where?” “So that people could…” and the final one was “Because I want the city to be…” Here’s an example of a response, #362:

Now this is, I think, a great example of somebody thinking, “this road is a nightmare to get across,” but then imagining that as a challenge that design — whether it’s traffic calming or planting or everything in between — could solve. It’s so important to get down to the perceived social benefit of a design intervention. That helps ground it in an important way.

Location was a great way for respondents to give some context for the challenge they were articulating. We worked with Project for Public Spaces to develop a system that allowed people to drop a pin on a map where their ideas would happen. But we wanted more than just, say, “wouldn’t it be great if this intersection in Throgs Neck had a park?” We wanted to get each respondent to explain why he or she would want a particular goal to be met: “I want the people of Throgs Neck to have a place to sit outside because right now there is no public space that actually makes sense.”

Design proposal submission Park in a Box | Cadence: Gage Couch and Rebecca Bradley | Courtesy of IfUD

What was the audience for your call for challenges? Who suggested ideas?
Our hope was to be able to reach out to people who might not customarily participate in projects like this. So we worked with local newspapers, community boards and neighborhood blogs to get the word out and begin to take the temperature of how people see the physical city and how it could be better. For some people, that’s a flooded corner at Astor Place. For others, it’s the transportation system. Someone else wants the Steinway Mansion saved, or is concerned with waste removal practices. Now that we have gathered all the ideas that came in from this process into a website, a book — An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York — and an exhibition, we can start to help people understand how these concerns, at both small and large scales, are the concerns of urban design.

So the next phase was bringing those concerns to designers.
Exactly. And that was a totally open invitation. Designers looked through the challenges that were contributed by respondents, chose one and worked out a design scheme to address it. The designers took the respondents’ ideas very seriously, and it was interesting to note which challenges designers took on. There were a lot more system-based projects than there were building-specific proposals. The designers who participated seemed interested in challenges like how to deploy green roofs all over the city, or what you could do if you took away one parking space per block. There were a lot more solutions that took a “kit-of-parts” approach than there were solutions for what should be done in a specific building.

from An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York | Courtesy of IfUD

The “kit-of-parts” approach is huge right now.
Along with tool kits and field guides! And that points to the ways that this project taps into the zeitgeist; it takes the pulse of what people are thinking about in the urban realm: green roofs, urban agriculture, cycling systems. It’s not a scientific sample, of course, but it’s revelatory nonetheless.

Crowdsourcing is also very popular at the moment, particularly in the context of urbanism and civic improvements. What do you think about the potential and the limitations of crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool we have enjoyed using but I think I’ve learned as much about what its limitations are as I have about its potential. I’d be the last person to say it’s the silver bullet. It operates at a certain scale and is great for providing a certain kind of data. But there are certainly limitations. We talked to some experts in the design of forms and surveys who made clear that it’s best not to ask more than four questions on a form, such as the one we were putting out there, and that questions have to be short. We went back and forth for weeks and weeks crafting the questions that would yield the information that we wanted to get but would not discourage participation. We have to be completely honest with ourselves about the potential of these tools and when it’s appropriate to use them.

So what’s actually going to happen during Urban Design Week?
We’re going to kick off with a party at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, where we will launch an exhibit and a book of the results of By The City / For The City. Then there’s a full calendar of events all week, many of which are public conversations. We’re trying to do less stuff in lecture halls and more stuff in venues that are open. For example, Open House New York and Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop are going to run a community charrette with the organizers of the Gowanus Lowline competition.

Challenges from respondents | from An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York | Courtesy of IfUD

Some of the events will appeal to a wide public, others are more specialized. Mimi Zeiger and her loose consortium of writers and thinkers, LGNLGN, are really interested in talking about some of the issues around public interventions and how we define communities. So she is hosting more of a salon-style conversation. There will be an event at the Queens Museum of Art – related to their show on Detroit that’s opening on September 18th – that looks at citizen interventions on a small scale. Mitch McEwen is involved in connecting that work to community-based efforts. And we’re going to hang out on the Museum’s incredible panorama and talk about some of these issues and precedents in relationship to both New York and Detroit. Those are just a few examples of everything’s that’s going on.

We will wrap up Urban Design Week with the US premiere of Urbanized, Gary Hustwit’s new movie and the third in his trilogy of design documentaries that also includes Helvetica and Objectified. I think that his goal in all three of the movies is to convey some of the complexities of design in a way that is popular. For Urbanized, over the last year or so, he’s been interviewing mayors, policy people, designers, everybody in between, to talk about how cities are designed and made.

How does all of this advance the mission of the Institute for Urban Design?
The Institute for Urban Design has tended to operate as a practitioner’s think-tank, where professionals working at a pretty high level in architecture, planning, design, urban policy, energy, etc. convene and work through issues. They then brought the benefit of this thinking back to their work.

Now, we’re at a wonderful point at which conversations about the city fabric and city systems are much more commonplace. The kinds of conversations that fellows of the Institute for Urban Design in the past have had just with each other are now heard in public settings throughout the city. Look at the kerfuffle over the Prospect Park bike lanes: you’ve got people all over the city passionately for or passionately against what is essentially an urban design issue. So I think this is a really good time to try and crack that open. There are people who care passionately about bike lanes and people who care passionately about streets and people who care passionately about dog runs or transit funding or housing prices. All of these fit into or are part of the conversation about urban design. That conversation becomes more productive when you’re not talking about bike lanes as just a transit problem, but you’re talking about them as a streetscape issue, a livability issue, a public health and sustainability issue. This is a great time to try to connect the disciplinary dots to be part of a larger public dialogue.

What do you hope someone who attends some part of Urban Design Week — someone who is perhaps interested in some of these issues but not involved in them personally or professionally other than being a neighborhood resident and a subway user — will get out of it?
I’d love for people who attend some of the events at Urban Design Week to start to think of the parts of the city that they use as part of a much larger, shared system. I would like that person to have a more straightforward understanding that taking the subway is more than just getting to work. It fits into a larger constellation of questions and issues.

That seems to me like a goal one could set for Urbanism Week or City Week. This is Urban Design Week. Where does design fit in?
I think the book, which showcases the designers’ responses to the ideas that came in from the crowdsourced search for urban challenges, helps to show how design strategies can address public realm challenges in multiple and overlapping ways. Take the area around the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. A sophisticated design proposal for that space would look at it as a traffic problem, as an aesthetic problem and as a greenspace problem. Design helps us get from “this space is a nightmare” to more productive and positive thinking about how planning, architecture and landscape architecture can be applied to mitigate that space, to make it much more pleasant and functional.

This is about showing what design can do. Not in the sense of implementation, but to get people thinking. People don’t even agree on a common definition of urban design. I don’t expect that Urban Design Week will be able to establish that urban design is X, Y or Z in a neat little package. But it will, I hope, get people to ask questions and posit some, perhaps contradictory, answers.

Design proposal submission Tunne (Re)Visions | Jaklitsch / Gardner Architects PC | Courtesy of IfUD

Interview conducted by Cassim Shepard.

Before joining the Institute for Urban Design as Executive Director in January 2010, Anne Guiney was the editor of the New York edition of The Architect’s Newspaper, and was part of the original team that launched the newspaper in 2003. Prior, she was an editor at Architecture magazine and Metropolis, and has written widely on architecture and design for other publications, including Architect, MARK, ID, and Details. She has also worked as a consultant organizing high-profile architecture competitions (working with Jones | Kroloff), including the commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Portland Aerial Tramway.

But before we delve headlong into the happenings, conversations, performances and talks of early May, we wanted to hear directly from some of the institutions behind this ambitious undertaking. In the video below, Lisa Phillips, the Toby Devan Lewis Director of the New Museum, Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director of the Architectural League, Eva Franch, Director of Storefront, and Brett Littmann, Executive Director of the Drawing Center, explain in their own words what the Festival is, how it came about, and what they hope its legacy will be.

And don’t forget to join us for the Festival itself, May 4-8, 2011. It kicks off with a keynote address by Rem Koolhaas, and includes presentations by a number of people whose ideas you’ve seen on Urban Omnibus: Robin Chase, Frank Duffy, Suketu Mehta, Adam Greenfield and others. Stay tuned Click here to learn more about our poster campaign, which is up on a wall or a fence near you from Sutphin Boulevard in Jamaica to Brooklyn Flea in Clinton Hill to Broadway in Midtown Manhattan. And come visit us in our booth at StreetFest on May 7th, on Rivington near the corner of Bowery.

FESTIVAL OF IDEAS FOR THE NEW CITY
SCHEDULE

WEDNESDAY, MAY 4
Keynote Address: Rem Koolhaas (7pm)

THURSDAY, MAY 5
The Heterogeneous City: Vito Acconci, Jonathan Bowles, Rosanne Haggerty, Suketu Mehta. Moderated by Jonathan F.P. Rose (1–3pm)
The Networked City: Adam Greenfield, Natalie Jeremijenko, Anthony Townsend, McKenzie Wark. Moderated by Joseph Grima (4–6pm)
Keynote Address: Jaron Lanier, The Networked City (7pm)

FRIDAY, MAY 6
The Reconfigured City: Robin Chase, Elizabeth Diller, Frank Duffy, Pedro Reyes (2–4:30pm)
Keynote Address: Antanas Mockus, The Sustainable City (5pm)
Mayoral Panel, The Sustainable City: Sergio Fajardo, John Fetterman, Greg Nickels, Michael Nutter. Introduction by David Byrne. Moderated by Kurt Andersen (7–8:30pm)

SATURDAY, MAY 7
StreetFest (11am–7pm)
Workshop Session 1: World Café: Downtown NYC, Policy Issues (10am–noon)
Workshop Session 2: World Café: Built Environment (2–4pm)
Session leaders include David Benjamin, Andrea Blum, Anna Dyson, Mitchell Joachim, Lydia Kallipoliti, Mitch McEwen, Jorge Otero-Pailos and Roo Rogers.

Writers (of both the fiction and non-fiction varieties) have engaged with the urban landscape for as long as we’ve had cities, and Urban Omnibus has enjoyed sharing writerly perspectives, including those of Richard Sennett, Dalton Conley, Andrew Blum and Suketu Mehta, each of whose books and articles rigorously examine some complexities of the urban condition. But what happens when you ask writers to engage with a medium, like blogging, not known for its sustained attention to detail or its ability to render nuance? What happens when you try to turn blogging into a new mode of creative urban investigation? With that in mind, Urban Omnibus asked each of the Open City organizing fellows to respond to a series of questions. We were interested to know how each of them personally defines urban change, goes about investigating it, finds blogging a useful medium of investigation and communication for this topic, and, finally, what each of them has found most surprising or notable in his or her explorations. Read selections from their answers below.

Or, read each blogger’s individual Q&A and check out some of the blogposts they’ve contributed to this collaborative project. Click here for Deanna Fei, a novelist who grew up in Flushing; click here for Jerome Chou, an urbanist with diverse experiences in community organizing, landscape architecture and public space advocacy; click here for Cristiana Baik, a writer with a background in affordable housing and architecture; click here for Peggy Lee, a poet, performer and youth worker who lives in Sunset Park; and click here for Sahar Muradi, an Afghan-American writer who has worked in both international development and youth development in Afghanistan and the United States. -C.S.

Everything Frosted | photo: Tom Giebel

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Deanna Fei

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been exploring my own hometown of Flushing, Queens, through various personal lenses: the Tai Chi scene that includes my dad, photo essays of Main Street by my sister, my own emotional associations to place names in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and pretty much anything else that moves me.

How do you define urban change?
When my parents first moved to the house where I grew up, my sister and I used to get taunted for being the only “Chinks” on the block, which was traditionally Italian. By the time I was in high school, the line for my bus, the Q26, was almost entirely composed of Asian Americans, and one day, I heard the (Caucasian) bus driver mutter, “Another handful of macaroni.” That line took me some time to parse (especially given the originality of the racial slur, not to mention its Italian roots), but I think these episodes, taken together, encapsulate so much of urban change: how rapidly it happens, how an entire population can go from alien to dominant, the dance between what is gained and what is lost… (To read more from Deanna Fei, click here).

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Jerome Chou

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I wanted to be in the area as much as possible, so last November I subletted my Brooklyn apartment and took a short-term room in the heart of Fujianese Chinatown. Living in the neighborhood makes it easier to talk to people. I’ve met Tai-chi students, Chinese opera singers, and soccer players in Columbus Park; restaurant workers and owners; heads of Business Improvement Districts and community design centers; a teacher with a Chinese American youth drum, fife, and bugle corps; A young woman who sketched on a napkin for me how her family fit eight people in two bunkbeds when she was growing up. The Chinatown Progressive Association is working with a group of local high-school and college students in a program called Shared Stories; I’m working with them to develop their own narratives about being a recent immigrant in Chinatown.

Whenever possible, I tie these personal stories to all of the forces that shape neighborhoods that are not immediately visible or accessible to most people: zoning, subsidies for new residential development, rent control laws and affordable housing guidelines, demographic shifts and real estate values. I think people often feel overwhelmed by neighborhood change because it happens quickly and seems outside of anyone’s control. But in fact there are many specific decisions and policies and campaigns that have an enormous influence on neighborhood change. That means there are tools people can use to guide change. And there’s a huge opportunity for urbanists from many disciplines (architects, landscape architects, planners, graduate students, graphic designers, photographers, etc.) to research and synthesize all of these complex and often controversial issues, to create visually engaging materials that make these issues more accessible to people who are most affected by neighborhood change, and to shape ongoing debates.

For instance, Community Board 3 just approved development guidelines for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, including several large parcels along Delancey Street that have been empty for 43 years. The guidelines propose a range of market-rate, moderate-income, and low-income units. Manuel Miranda and I produced an infographic juxtaposing this proposed mix against the incomes of Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. On a separate topic, Yeju Choi and I created a map of all of the bank branches in Chinatown, and I wrote about what the concentration of banks in the neighborhood means and where all of that money is going.

So this is an open call disguised as an answer to your question! I would love to hear from Urban Omnibus readers who want to get involved (opencityjc[at]gmail.com)… (To read more from Jerome Chou, click here).

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

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Cristiana Baik

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I think talking to people — local residents — is pretty much the heart of the blog, and probably the best way for us to think about the way urban changes have affected local communities. The process of interviewing has also been the most difficult aspect of the project for me — finding a non-invasive way to access people’s stories without feeling like you’re objectifying them. The role of a privileged writer coming in to tell someone’s story just really doesn’t jive with me, hence I am always a bit tentative/paranoid about how I go about conducting interviews or writing about interviewees, etc. On one hand, and for various reasons, I haven’t found it very plausible to get “life histories” of individuals. I don’t think the project necessarily asks or lends itself to this kind of process — it’s a daily blog, which, more often than not, calls for interviews that are tongue-in-cheek. As a writer, I think this degree of freedom/”openness” is one of the most interesting aspects of the project… (To read more from Cristiana Baik, click here).

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Peggy Lee

What have you particularly enjoyed writing about?
As one example, karaoke — a weekend passion of mine —  is one of my starting points. I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Open City has given me the opportunity to be more intimate and critical with my daily life, with its dailiness. I learn something new everyday walking in Sunset Park, my neighborhood. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying thinking about how karaoke sound and music night life in Chinatown connect to larger circuits of diaspora, immigration, in-translation, class, race, and, of course, urban change… (To read more from Peggy Lee, click here).

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Sahar Muradi

What have you noticed in particular?
What I’ve noticed and what I’ve enjoyed so much about this project is that people generally want to talk and tell you their stories. When I told my landlord about the project, she started slipping newspaper clippings under my door. This is her dad’s building, constructed in 1900 and the only one on the block with its original door and wallpaper. Ms. Fedorko is very proud of it and very interested in the history of the LES. A few weeks later, she eagerly brought me old city plans and guidebooks, with ominous “DEMOLISHED” stamps across the pages. It was the same with my friend Naomi, who relished giving me a tour of her neighborhood in Chinatown and its hidden art galleries, or Mr. Leung, who talked about the history of his shoe cobbling stand on Forsyth St. I’ve enjoyed meeting people and reflecting on the fact of our two lives intersecting in this city… (To read more from Sahar Muradi, click here)

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To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Few would argue with the notion that a robust cultural life is good for cities as well as neighborhoods. But how best to support it — through investments, incentives, philanthropy and public policy – is up for debate. Create new institutions and venues? Fund specific artists or projects? Incentivize cultural groups to move into your development or neighborhood from outside? Or learn from those examples where cultural opportunities emerged from the ground up? Fourth Arts Block, an organization comprised of 17 arts organizations located on a single block of East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and the Bowery, is a powerful example of the latter. It’s also a unique case where the complex histories of immigration, labor organizing, urban renewal and eminent domain intersect with the resourcefulness of New York’s artists. And as Manhattan’s only officially designated cultural district, FAB is a natural partner to work with the Arts + Community Change Initiative to increase recognition and support for NOCDs. To that end, FAB and Arts + Community Change have convened a series of roundtables in New York City with arts leaders, policy makers, and academics to develop a definition, identify support strategies, share effective case studies and initiate a working group that will continue advocating for policies to support existing NOCDs, while offering technical assistance to nascent organizing efforts in New York City. Read more about their initial findings in the interview below, and, while you’re at it, get a history lesson on one of New York’s most storied blocks. -C.S.

In 1775, what would eventually become East 4th Street was near the southern edge of the Stuyvesant farm (pictured left). By 1920, it was home to a number of theaters and social halls (including Astoria Hall, pictured right) catering to the needs of immigrant populations and labor unions. Click to enlarge.

First off, what is a Naturally Occurring Cultural District? How is it different from institutionally organized arts and culture districts and why is the distinction important?

Tamara Greenfield: A Naturally Occurring Cultural (or Arts) District is distinguished by both its origins and organization. A NOCD (for lack of better term) supports existing neighborhood cultural assets rather than imposing arts institutions somewhere new. Traditional cultural districts are often used as a promotional tool to import visitors to a downtown shopping or commercial district and are generally centered on large institutions. The difference is important because each idea represents a distinct set of public values about what’s important to cities and what’s worth supporting. Understanding NOCDs can provide a framework to recognize and support a more inclusive, equitable vision of a neighborhood’s culture.

Caron Atlas: Another important reason to make the distinction is that institutional arts districts are often more visible, whereas naturally occurring ones are more rooted in the neighborhood fabric and might therefore be invisible to those outside the neighborhood. If a cultural district has emerged “naturally,” then it grows from, builds on and validates existing community assets rather than importing assets from outside a community.

Historical highlights of Fourth Arts Block properties over the years, adapted from a lot-by-lot history of East 4th Street compiled by the Lower East Side History Project | Diagram: Purva Jain. Click to enlarge.

What are some common reasons for diverse cultural opportunities to cluster in particular urban areas?

Caron Atlas: I find an ecological perspective to arts and culture to be helpful in thinking about this. Healthy systems are composed of diverse and interdependent parts. In this way, NOCDs often demonstrate more decentralized, and resilient, support networks than conventional institutions. Like any community of common interest, they can also respond to both threats and opportunities with a louder voice and more unified actions.

When I was doing interviews with the Urban Institute around artist support systems in nine cities across the country, what really struck me was how often artists spoke about the importance of being in places where they can share and be challenged by other artists and audiences – this was often as important as monetary support. They not only stimulated each other’s creativity, they supported one another in many different ways ranging from barter to social networks to hiring one another.

Club 82 was a legendary drag cabaret club located at 82 East 4th from 1958 to 1978.

Tamara Greenfield: The story of Fourth Arts Block is perhaps illustrative of some broadly shared trends. Of course, over the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, cultural groups clustered activity because artists collaborated, socialized, shared information and resources, passed spaces on to each other, promoted each other and lived in the community. But another key reason was the appropriateness of spaces for their needs: many of the buildings were City-owned in what was at the time an undesirable neighborhood and many had initially been built as social halls and theaters for immigrant communities, including German music societies, Italian theaters, Yiddish publishers, Union organizing (ILGWU was founded at 64 East 4th Street), film and television sound stages, Puerto Rican and Ukrainian social clubs, and drag clubs.

In the 1950s, Robert Moses proposed an urban renewal plan for the area that would have torn down most of the buildings, many of which were being used for light manufacturing and low rent housing. Cooper Square Committee formed to fight this plan, which they ultimately defeated, and replaced it with a new plan for low-income housing, which did not include the buildings that had previously housed cultural and manufacturing activities. That’s how the buildings came into city ownership — through eminent domain — but they sat unused until La MaMa and Millennium Film Workshop secured temporary, month-to-month leases from the City. Gradually other small groups moved in, and the Off-Off-Broadway and experimental arts movement took off.

This arrangement continued more or less fluidly for the next 30 years, until the artists and arts groups on East 4th Street became concerned about their future tenancy during the Giuliani administration. Cooper Square Committee and 11 arts groups started meeting in 1999 and founded Fourth Arts Block in 2001 to develop a unified plan for the publicly owned buildings. Due to their advocacy and the support of local residents and elected officials, in 2005 the City sold eight properties to the arts groups for $8, all of which are protected for nonprofit use in perpetuity.

East 4th Street

Currently, we are Manhattan’s only “official” cultural district and, along with the BAM Cultural District, one of only two designated in the city. What does this mean? Not much yet. One participant in our roundtable suggested that this was a mechanism for the City to transfer ownership of public property. Otherwise, there is no official policy or set of benefits (or restrictions) for cultural districts. FAB uses the designation to help us navigate across sectors and access resources that otherwise might not be available – street closings, streetscape improvements, funding and investment. FAB also utilizes the cultural district designation for marketing and organizing, to draw attention to smaller cultural groups who disappear in a City this size.

We hope that the work that we are doing on 4th Street will have applications to other neighborhoods that want to support networks of independent artists and small cultural groups. We know there are dozens of actual cultural districts in New York even if they have not been made “official” yet.

Lets talk about the role of placemaking in the context of the NOCD conversation. Can you tell me a little bit about the Fourth Arts Block masterplanning and streetscape improvement project? I’ve read that the goal was to make East 4th Street “even more of itself.” What aspects of the block’s unique ecology would you like to see enhanced? In other words, to what extent do you want the block’s “district-ness” to be legible?

Tamara Greenfield: FAB and Cooper Square Committee led a community design process to engage the primary stakeholders in developing a master streetscape plan for East 4th Street. We did separate focus groups with merchants, residents, and arts groups to identify specific issues or needs before bringing everyone together to develop a unified vision. Since most agreed that they loved the eclectic nature of the block, we identified some modest, incremental interventions that could increase visibility and access, as well as improve overall appearance and flow through the District. Improvements included the removal of large scale planters that blocked the sidewalks, more trees, restoration of artist-designed tree guards, public art installations, more welcoming entrances and signage at the theaters, more attractive lampposts that improve lighting on the block, district signage, kiosks and a visitors center, and changes to the street geometry to create better entrances to the street and accommodate audience overflow mid-block. We would like to help people to see and support the neighborhood’s arts and artisans by using specific placemaking tools that draw attention to what’s in front of them.

Pedestrian activity diagrams. Prepared by Starr Whitehouse as part of the Revisioning East Fourth Masterplan. Click to enlarge.

The emerging literature on Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts uses words like “cultivate” and “nurture” as the bywords for philanthropic and public policy strategies to benefit these clusters. Is policy planning for something “natural” a contradiction in terms? Why not?

Tamara Greenfield: In terms of foundation funding, traditional arts funding models tend to focus on discipline or outcome (often “high art” presented in large institutions) rather than process or relationships. In my experience, community development funding tends to be more open to funding process than product, understanding that investment in neighborhood networks could leverage long term social capital and empowerment. I would like to see more cross-sector and refined funding strategies that encourage long term community collaboration and leadership.

Caron Atlas: And in terms of public policy, some of our conversations have raised concerns from people in the arts who see policy as something imposed from the top that you have little voice in, and something rigid that will not allow for the flexibility and organic nature of the districts. But I think there are other approaches to public policy that can provide the conditions for NOCDs to flourish without boxing them in or dictating what they need to be. This is policy that is built from community-based input and is created in ways that are responsive and accountable to communities. Cultural policy is both a product and a process based on social relationships and values. Too often it becomes a de facto policy that excludes much of this work because it doesn’t fit into conventional definitions of the arts or community development. We need to be clear about what we want, and what we need to change.

Tamara Greenfield: Right. And we certainly understand the fear of overbearing public policy solutions. I do think, however, that there are tools already in existence in other sectors that could better support NOCDs. NYC Small Business Services (SBS) offers funding to support BID development, with the understanding that it can take many years and a support system to organize an inclusive coalition that represents multiple interest in an area. SBS also supports placemaking strategies for festivals, publications, signage and other activities that could support NOCDs. The NYC Parks Department has the Partnerships for Parks program, which was established to support organizing and involvement by local stakeholders in their public spaces and helps them navigate the Parks Department’s bureaucracy. Industrial Development Areas often have organizations that offer support and advocacy for networks of small manufacturing firms.

What other precedents from other sectors could benefit the NOCD conversation?

Caron Atlas: This is an area we still need to go further into. We’re interested in learning more about naturally occurring retirement districts, historic districts and there is some interesting work about the public health benefits of clusters and community efficacy. There’s also a lot we can learn from other countries that better integrate culture into other policies.

Is it possible that a better understanding of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts can help distinguish between what is valuable and what is not in the literature about the cultural economies of cities?

Tamara Greenfield: We certainly hope so! Usually when the arts are discussed now as part of the economy of cities, they are framed either as a Cultural Attraction (large museum, aquarium, performing arts complex) or Cultural Production (high value art, high volume traditional handicrafts, music, film). There is little understanding of the value of diverse levels of creation and cultural activity to the cohesion and economy of a specific neighborhood, rather than to a larger creative ecology or regional economy. FAB’s members range in size from volunteer-run art collectives to nationally renowned theaters, and have long histories of community outreach, racial and ethnic diversity, low cost programs, and training for emerging artists and youth. Each year, FAB’s member arts groups serve more than 1,250 artists and attract an audience of more than 250,000 to our neighborhood. Some artists and productions are developed here and move into a more commercial realm; other dance and theater is experienced exclusively by neighborhood residents or drawn from a focused, regional network (Spanish-language theater, Gay & Lesbian performance art) that serves an important (though less visibly commercial) purpose to those communities.

Caron Atlas: I would say that NOCDs can be useful in helping to reframe the discussion of the creative economy in a manner that factors in equity and considers how creativity is defined and validated and how economic benefits are shared throughout communities. I think NOCDs are a great way to think about culture and creativity as part of grassroots resilience and sustainable development – rather than top down, and often unsustainable, development strategies.

East 4th Street today.

…

Caron Atlas is a Brooklyn-based consultant and cultural organizer working to support and stimulate arts and culture as an integral part of social change. She is the project director of Place + Displaced, Fractured Atlas’s NYC community mapping project, and also of the Arts & Community Change Initiative and the Arts & Democracy Project. Additionally she is a faculty member in New York University’s Art and Public Policy program. Caron worked many years at Appalshop, the Appalachian media center; was the founding director of the American Festival Project, a national coalition of activist artists; is a consultant to foundations, including Ford and Nathan Cummings; and also worked with, amongst others, National Voice, Animating Democracy, and the Cultural Blueprint for New York City.

Tamara Greenfield has been the executive director of Fourth Arts Block since 2006, the organization’s first paid staff person. She has 18 years of arts administration, program planning and production experience, ranging from overseeing Partnerships for Parks’ Catalyst for Neighborhood Parks Program to developing performances, exhibits and lectures at the Interfaith Center of New York. Previously, she directed the ZviDance company and school and co-founded the grassroots DanceNOW[NYC] festival, curating and producing the work of 40-75 choreographers annually in multiple sites, ranging from theaters and cabarets, to galleries, gyms, parks, a firehouse and boxing ring.

According to the Department of City Planning’s most recent data, 7.1% of New York City’s land is vacant and, for the most part, underutilized. This is a rate much lower than the national average of 15% (in some cities the rate of vacant land is as high as 45%). However, taken together, these properties amount to approximately 11,000 acres of underutilized land — roughly the size of Manhattan (not counting streets). Imagine: across the five boroughs there is enough available land to fill Manhattan, with the potential to grow fresh food, create new parks or build affordable housing. But many of these vacant sites are potentially contaminated by previous industrial uses or leftover building materials, especially lead-based paint. Contamination and the potential health hazards to people who live, work or play on or near such sites become subject to oversight and regulation only in the event of a rezoning permitting residential uses. In those cases, a site receives an e-designation, which identifies it as potentially hazardous due to previous industrial uses. Once designated, site owners are obligated to submit to a process of site investigation and clean up.

50% of all vacant lots in New York City are smaller than 2,500sf and are owned by individuals. Click to enlarge.

In May of 2009, Mayor Bloomberg signed the New York City Brownfield and Community Revitalization Act, a milestone in the City’s commitment to cleaning up brownfields for productive reuse in accordance with PlaNYC. Citing the scarcity of land in New York City and the anticipated influx of one million new residents by 2030, PlaNYC identified the importance of cleanup and redevelopment of properties that are abandoned and underutilized due to the presence or perceived presence of contamination. As part of this effort, the City has created the Office of Environmental Remediation, which oversees the environmental review of brownfield sites and offers assistance to property owners on the path to a Green Property Certification and potential redevelopment.

50% of all vacant properties in the city are smaller than 2,500sf and individually owned. 80% are smaller than 5,000sf. Remediation, typically in the form of excavation of the contaminated soil, is costly, despite programs, assistance and grants now available. As a result, these small properties lie vacant for years, underutilized and toxic, their value further diminished by the appearance of abandonment and potential contamination.

We created a Field Guide to Phytoremediation to illustrate how property owners can use these years to their advantage and initiate a slow but cost-effective clean-up process using nature as their ally to add 11,000 acres of productive, usable land to the City‘s healthy environment.

Phytoremediation is the use of plants to remove contaminants from the environment. By harnessing the natural capabilities of plants we can remediate toxic soils, groundwater, surface water, and sediments. Phytoremediation is a low-cost alternative to traditional brownfield clean-up. Instead of removing tons of toxic soil and filling the site with new clean soil, plants remove contaminants from the soil and store it within their plant tissue. In some cases, the plants themselves then have to be removed as hazardous waste, other plants break down the toxins and eliminate them altogether.

Click to enlarge.

Contaminants successfully removed in field studies have included heavy metals, radionuclides, chlorinated solvents, petroleum hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), pesticides and explosives. In order to successfully remediate toxins in soil or water, the appropriate plant groups have to be planted and monitored. Different plants have different remediative qualities. Plants offer an aesthetic as well as an environmental value to the city beyond the phytoremediation process. Improved air quality and reduction of storm water run-off are among the additional benefits of planting on sites that would otherwise be underutilized until funding for soil removal becomes available.

The costs associated with remediating lead contamination on a 2,500sf lot through phytoextraction using Indian Mustard can be reduced to 10% of those using common methods of excavation and fill.

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The steps below describe a one-year process of testing, planting, monitoring and harvesting. Depending on the level of contamination, this cycle can be repeated for several years until levels of metal or PCBs in the soil reach the minimum recommended by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation.

	1. COLLECT A SOIL SAMPLE Gather soil samples by taking them from at least 4 different areas per every 400sf of space. Samples should come from approximately 6 inches below the surface and should not contain any gravel, grass, trash, etc. You can mix the samples to form a composite sample of your entire lot.
	2. SEND IT TO A LAB Brooklyn College and Cornell University provide inexpensive soil testing services (approximately $30 for heavy metal tests). The NY State Department of Health also offers a list of certified professional labs on its Wadsworth Center website. Fill a zip-lock bag with your soil and send it to the lab together with information about your site. You will get a report in about 2 weeks.
	3. CREATE A REMEDIATION STRATEGY From the test results, determine if and how you should remediate contaminants. See the chart at the end of this post to determine which plants would best help you clean up your lot and how many you will need.
	4. START PLANTING Most of the seeds you will need are sold online. Sow and germinate them in a small container and water them regularly. Transplant them to your site when they are about 3“ high and after the last spring frost. Manage them as garden plants and watch them grow.
	5. HARVEST AND RE-PLANT After about fourteen weeks, your plants will be saturated with heavy metals, PCBs or other toxins. Harvest the entire plant, including the roots, stems and leaves, and repeat this growing cycle as often as climate permits.
	6. DISPOSE AS HAZARDOUS WASTE Some plants are hyperaccumulators. They store the toxins within their plant tissue and, after this process, will themselves be toxic. Check for the location of the Special Waste Drop-Off site in your borough and dispose of them as hazardous waste. Keep them away from children and animals.
	7. RE-TEST YOUR SOIL At the end of the growing season, re-test the soil to track the improvements. You can also test the plant material if you are curious about the change. Depending on the level of contamination at the site, this planting process may have to be repeated over 2-3 years.

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The table below gives examples of levels of acceptable soil contamination for certain recreational, residential or food production uses (as recommended by the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation) and suggests plant material most effective in remediating each contaminant.

Click to enlarge.

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We would love to help and put this research into action. So, whether you are an individual property owner or community group with little budget but plenty of energy and a vacant lot that might be contaminated, get in touch!

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Update, July 2011: “Step #8: Get a Green Property Certificate,” which appeared in an earlier version of this article, has been removed to avoid misunderstandings about the certification process.

This project was originally submitted to the One Prize: From Mowing to Growing competition in May 2010. Lisa Brunie, Erik Facteau and Jay Tsai assisted in research for the field guide.

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SOURCES:
1. US Environmental Protection Agency. “Re: Contaminant Focus.” Contaminated Site: Clean-Up Information. US EPA Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation, Washington, DC, 7 Jan. 2010. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
2. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “Re: 375-6-8 Soil Cleanup Objective Tables.” Subpart 375-6: Remedial Program Soil Cleanup Objectives. NYS DEC, Albany, NY, 14 Dec. 2006. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
3. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. “Re: Hyperaccumulators Table – 1 and 3.” Redirected from, Phytoremediation, Hyperaccumulators. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. San Francisco, CA, 14 Apr. 2010. Web 22 Apr. 2010.
4. U.S. EPA. 1996. Soil Screening Guidance: User‘s Guide. Office of Emergency and Remedial Response, Washington, DC. EPA/540/R95/128.
5. Schippers, R.R. & Mnzava, N.A. Brassica juncea (L.) Czern. [Internet] Record from Protabase. van der Vossen, H.A.M. & Mkamilo, G.S. (Editors). PROTA (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa / Ressources végétales de l’Afrique tropicale), Wageningen, Netherlands. 2007. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
6. Duke, James A. Brassica juncea (L.) Czern. Handbook of Energy Crops. unpublished. Center for New Crops & Plant Products, Purdue University, 1983. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
7. Shayler, Hannah, Murray McBride and Ellen Harrison. “Re: Guide to Soil Testing and Interpreting Results.” Cornell Waste Management Institute. Department of Crop & Soil Sciences, Ithaca, NY, 15 Apr. 2009. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
8. Environmental Science Analytical Center. Soil Testing Brochure. Department of Geology, Brooklyn College, Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
9. Washington State Department of Ecology.  Dirt Alert – Soil Sampling Guidance for Owners, Operators and Employees of Small Properties Where Children Play. Publication #06-09-099. Olympia, WA, Sep. 1999. Web. 22 Apr. 2010.
10. New York City Department of City Planning (Land use summary, 2007)
11. Michael A. Pagano and Ann O’M. Bowman: Vacant Land in Cities, Brookings Institution Report, 2001

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Kaja Kühl is an urban designer and principal of youarethecity, a research, design and planning practice interested in creating dialogue about the urban environment. She is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University.

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.

Carmen Dukes and Katie Koch are the co-founders of Project: Interaction, a 10-week after school program that teaches high school students to use design to change their communities. As students of the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, Dukes and Koch are well versed in the ways design thinking and methods can inspire change and solve problems. Inspired by the achievements of practitioners today, they found themselves imagining the potential impact of starting design education at an earlier age. On September 29, the Project: Interaction team will teach their first class, fifteen 9th and 10th grade students at the Urban Assembly Institute for Math & Science for Young Women in Downtown Brooklyn. Their intention is to encourage skills in and engagement with creative thinking, problem solving, observation of the world around us, and the sketching, building and communication of ideas. Dukes and Koch talked with us about the motivations behind the project, and the importance of education in the still-evolving field of interaction design and how to use the city as a classroom. If you like what they have to say, check out their Kickstarter page, where they are working to raise money for classroom supplies and materials. -V.S.

What is interaction design?
Katie Koch: Interaction design is a holistic process of thinking about an unmet need. The process includes observing and defining a problem, imagining possibilities for how we might fix it, and implementing and testing our ideas in the form of prototyping. The problems we address range from the ways you use your cell phone, to how you get money out of an ATM, to how you order and receive your Netflix DVDs.

Carmen Dukes: It’s important for interaction designers to understand the people who experience the products and services we build. It’s our responsibility to evolve our ideas to accommodate the needs of the people who interact with them.

How did Project: Interaction come to be?
Katie: Carmen and I met in the MFA in Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). I started my career in graphic design and have been a long-time design evangelist. My practice as a designer helped me have a greater understanding of the world around me and fueled my interest in studying the people and things in my environment. So last year I decided to return to graduate school.

Carmen: My background is in film and television and currently I work in web and mobile production. In my spare time, I’ve spent hours studying game design and how successful games create meaningful experiences. The overlap of these personal passions led me to the field of interaction design.

Katie: During the first week of classes at SVA, we both attended a lecture by accomplished interaction designer Kim Goodwin. She issued a call to action for designers to educate and train people to employ creative thinking to solve day-to-day tough problems. Carmen and I walked away with the same thought: why isn’t anyone teaching these skills to kids?

Why did you decide to work with high school students?
Katie: If you ask any designer where she first learned about design she will likely be able to recall a specific moment that opened her eyes to this world. In high school I was very much into math and science classes and engaged with art in my free time, for fun. I didn’t know about design as a way to use my logical left brain and my creative right brain together to create artifacts and experiences that make people’s lives clearer, easier, and more fulfilling. High school students are often investigating broad sets of interests, figuring out what their personal passions are while beginning to understand and establish their place in the bigger picture beyond school. They are at a crossroads in many ways and I imagine many would be delighted by the discovery of design just as I was.

Carmen: A knowledge of design methods is a transferable skill set. Giving students a toolkit that they can use to explore and solve problems that matter to them will be powerful no matter where their future careers lead them.

Before the semester begins, you are asking the students to complete a survey about their existing knowledge of design. What will you ask them and how do you hope to use their answers?
Katie: We will start by asking the students to draw a picture of their favorite place in New York City. Then, to answer questions about their favorite school subjects, what kinds of activities they like, and why they want to be in the program. We want to find out what knowledge the students already have so we can leverage and build upon their existing interests.

Carmen: This exercise is also a simple way for us to begin to get a sense of our students’ personalities. The more we can get to know our class, the better learning experience we can provide.

Tell us a little about the curriculum and planned program for your first semester of Project: Interaction.
Katie: The first few weeks will be spent covering design basics, talking about what design is, how to observe the people and places around us, and how to develop new ideas. We’ll take a field trip to a working design studio, R/GA, so students can see how designers work together in the context of a business. Then we’ll spend a couple of weeks on more intensive topics like the increased availability of mobile devices as a way to connect to other people and communities. The class will end with a three-week project that the students can share with parents, teachers and their schoolmates.

Carmen: The goal of our curriculum is to expose our students to design in a relatable and tangible way. It is critical that we engage them by using all the senses, so in-class activities and assignments will be hands-on — rapid sketching sessions, prototyping with Legos and letting them act out their ideas.

Katie: Our students might be surprised when they come to our first class. We want to show them that you don’t need a fancy computer to start designing; anyone can start by sketching with only a pencil and paper. We expect that the students will want to start using a computer or other device to help them solve the problems we present to them but we think it’s important to learn first how to approach issues using their brains before relying on a machine to support their thinking.

Your curriculum overview shows that you plan on staying very NYC-specific. Why did you choose such a place-based approach to the subject?
Katie: A lot of the concepts we’re presenting are fairly abstract. We wanted to ground the program in something the students are already familiar with. New York is a city made up of communities, and that’s a theme that the students will already understand.

Carmen: We want the students to rethink parts of New York City they see everyday; for example, offsetting the experience of a crowded subway commute with better bike lanes or creating green spaces for enjoyment, collaboration or recreation.

We received a lot of advice from educators about the importance of making each lesson in our program meaningful for student retention and engagement, so it was critical to us that we create connections between the city and our students. The curriculum we’ve designed will help them explore the city and the final project will give them an opportunity to apply their new-found design skills to a project that impacts their immediate community. We’re excited to be working with folks from Transportation Alternatives for the final project. They will work with the kids to observe and document city life on the street outside their school and envision ways to better utilize the space for the people who use it each day.

Katie: Ultimately, we hope our students will walk away from the class with the understanding that practically everything around them is designed, and that they, too, can participate in shaping their world.

How are you balancing the curriculum to reflect both the more consumer-driven side of design practice and the potential for design to effect social change?
Katie: Because of the way they think, designers are in a unique position to incite changes in the practice of design and in the business of the clients with whom they work. There are plenty of design studios that are focused on sustainable practices or are incorporating design for good into their services. Designers think through problems by reframing how they see them, and they often act as change makers because of their unique perspective. We’d like to reinforce that idea with our students.

Carmen: We will talk about both commercial and social design, depending on the lesson, so that students will have a comprehensive understanding of what role design has in an organization. The similarity between design firms focused on designing products for consumers and those focused on design for social change is their process for defining a problem or unmet need and arriving at the right solution. These are the methods that we are teaching.

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Carmen Dukes is a digital producer at Hit Entertainment where she is responsible for creating games and websites for global kids brands including Barney and Friends and Bob the Builder. Previously, she worked at VH1.com where she developed interactive content in support of VH1’s popular Celebreality shows. Her professional interests include video game mechanics for interaction, sustainable product design, data visualization, and educational technology.

Katie Koch is a web designer from the Midwest, by way of Brooklyn. She has designed and developed interactive projects ranging from corporate and nonprofit websites, online communities, mobile applications, and user interface designs. A typographer at heart, Katie is a details and information enthusiast whose passion for simplicity drives every aspect of her work in design and user experience.