-C.S.

What is Seeing Green and how did it come about?
Erik Facteau: Seeing Green is a research project that studies specific urban agricultural sites in the New York City area in order to demonstrate how urban agriculture should be considered as a viable and important component of a city’s green infrastructure. One of the sites we’re currently looking at is Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City; another that we will be looking at is Added Value, a raised bed farm in Red Hook. We’re also looking at the rooftop farm atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Administrative Building on Randall’s Island.

By measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration rates, we are looking to create metrics to calculate how much water urban farms are managing, through both detention (meaning the temporary storage of excess stormwater) and retention (the indefinite storage of excess stormwater). This will tell us how much water urban farms keep from entering the sewer system, therefore reducing combined sewer overflows.

When you start to get these numbers, you can begin to extrapolate over larger areas of land – whether it’s exisiting farms or underutilized land with farming potential – to determine how much water can be managed and what the best practices are for doing so. Right now, we are looking at a couple different sites as a base line and moving forward from there.

Testing the water at the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso: This project began as a graduate research project and as it has evolved to include a series of interesting collaborations; and the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute has helped us pursue these partnerships. In one project, called “Farming Up,” Alec Baxt and Lise Serrell look at nutrient quality of crops growing in urban environment compared to rural environments. “Don’t Flush Me” is a project that puts sensors in sewage outflow points and notifies individuals about how much wastewater they produce during and immediately after those weather events that cause sewage to overflow into the harbor. Another one is called “Farming Concrete,” for which Mara Gittleman has been calculating the area, weight and monetary value of food grown in community gardens in New York City.

Facteau: Another project we’ve been involved in has been to set up a demonstration project on the roof of the Association for Energy Affordability‘s headquarters in the Bronx. We emulated the green roof condition on part of the roof and installed a container underneath so we could measure the amount of water running through the green roof and then compare that to the amount of water rushing off the impervious surface of the regular rooftop.

Caruso: If you take all of these metrics and you collapse them – you look at the nutrient level of both the soil and the crop, you look at the stormwater management potential, the energy rate reduction, the food production potential — the combined analysis is much more powerful. The guiding idea is this: if you can first define the benefits and know what they are and research them, then you can quantify them, and then you can monetize the benefits — and that’s when it really becomes valuable to private property owners and cities. At that point, the research can begin informing policy. And it can begin informing the development of best management practices around the design of farms. For example, if we observe nutrient run-off, we can help design small wetlands around the drain. If we know how much water an urban farm can manage at a particular soil depth, and how much productivity and costs would be affected by increasing its depth, then we can inform building owners about the best investment to reach the desired productivity and the desired environmental outcomes. It’s a necessary step if we want to see urban agriculture grow in New York City.

Soy Plant tested for Farming Up | Photo: Catherine Yrisarri

How did you both get involved in this topic?
Facteau: My background is in microbiology and mycology, working mostly on plant restoration projects and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. I studied environmental science and forestry in college. And I met Tyler while in the graduate program in environmental systems management at the Pratt Institute.

Caruso: Before this, I was working on landscape design and urban agriculture projects and designing and installing grey water systems in San Francisco. When Erik and I started the discussions that eventually led to Seeing Green, we were looking for a thesis project and decided to work together. At the time, there were lots of projects around that dealt with urban agriculture, and most of them were primarily concerned with the economic or social benefits. They might mention the environmental benefits of farming in the city, but not in great depth. The potential of urban agriculture as green infrastructure was a connection that hadn’t yet been made. In 2010, we started noticing how much City agencies were talking about green infrastructure, and realized that if we wanted our cities to support urban agriculture under the banner of green infrastructure, we would have to quantify the environmental benefits.

Brooklyn Grange | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Facteau: The green infrastructure documents from the City that we were looking at all seemed to focus on traditional green roofs. So we started researching how much water these systems could actually handle while simultaneously looking at how rooftop agricultural projects are performing.

Caruso: The grants that Erik is referring to include a green roof tax credit incentive, issued through the Department of Buildings, that specifically prohibits urban farms because of plant selection and because of speculation that irrigation – traditional green roofs don’t require irrigation; agricultural green roofs do – would make rooftop farms less able to retain stormwater than a traditional green roof. That’s a clear example of the city implementing progressive green infrastructure policies that exclude urban agriculture. And in this case, the policy is based on hypotheses that are scientifically untested.

We also find the language of these policies to be more prescriptive than performative. Our methodology for the Seeing Green project looks closely at performativity: how well urban farms and green infrastructure perform over time.

A common criticism of LEED certification system for green buildings is its focus on the design of a building as opposed to looking at how it performs in the long-run, through energy audits or other measurements. With LEED, there is currently no follow up once a building is certified. The next wave in green design – whether it’s buildings, landscapes or infrastructure – is ways to measure performance. That’s what inspired us to develop our thesis project into a larger initiative: to support urban agriculture by defining and quantifying its environmental benefits and seeing how performative it can be.

What kinds of tools or precedents were out there to help you analyze, monetize, to quantify or identify proper metrics?
Caruso: I know everyone says this, but I think social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has really helped empower people with a DIY attitude, has helped citizens’ groups to form, has helped individuals collaborate with a science lab.

Platforms like Kickstarter have created more of a sense of “we’re all in it together,” and that attitude has definitely benefited us.

Facteau: Kickstarter was a huge help in getting this off the ground. We had worked out our methodology as part of our thesis project at Pratt, and when we finished that we asked ourselves, “Where do we go from here?” We knew the equipment that we needed, and we knew that farmers and communities would really value the information we wanted to collect. So we used Kickstarter not only to raise money for equipment but also to raise awareness. Groups from England, from Australia, from the west coast contacted us because of their interest in the research.

Caruso: I just spoke to someone preparing a research report on the potential for urban agriculture in San Francisco. Another group in Minneapolis recently requested our collaboration on a large-scale urban agriculture initiative out there. Around the country, and the world, it’s a really supportive community. There are also some big research initiatives right here in New York….

Like “Five Borough Farm,” which Urban Omnibus featured last year. That effort is also trying to push the idea of metrics.
Caruso: Exactly. I think one of Five Borough Farm’s contributions to the field is its focus on the public health perspective. There’s also the work Kubi Ackerman is doing at Columbia’s Urban Design Lab to evaluate New York’s capacity for urban agriculture. We’ve used some of his preliminary numbers to help us make the case that if we have x amount of stormwater, and if we extrapolate from the knowledge of how many vacant lots or rooftops could be used to scale up urban agriculture, then we can start to talk about how to address the combined sewage overflow problem. If we know that we could manage this many gallons through urban farms, and how much money the city spends per gallon on treating stormwater and wastewater, then we can calculate how much money the city could save if urban agriculture were considered one of many pieces of the green infrastructure puzzle. When you compare that to the cost of retrofitting or constructing new sewage treatment plants, and factor in the amount of energy that goes into treating wastewater, the savings become astronomical. Plus, there are all the benefits that urban agriculture advocates have made well known: vacant land is being re-utilized by communities, increasing property values, supporting economic micro-enterprises, contributing to healthy living, decreasing public health costs. Once you start layering all those factors, the potential of these farms or community gardens is phenomenal. 

Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Speaking of that kind of layering, and the multiple ways to discuss the benefits of farms and community gardens in the city, how did you decide to focus specifically on the intersection between stormwater management and urban agriculture?
Caruso: Our primary goal was to support urban agriculture in whatever way we could. We started by talking to farmers and asking them what would help their efforts. What we heard from people was the need to preserve existing urban farms and expand the agricultural capacity of the city. To do that, we wanted to make a quantitative case for the benefits. Our initial plan was to look at more metrics beyond stormwater.

Facteau: We also wanted to look at carbon capture as a way to show farms as potential carbon sinks and look at temperature differences in order to see urban agriculture’s role in mitigating urban heat island effect. Existing equipment for measuring carbon capture are suited for huge plots of land much more than an acre-size roof. There is definitely potential to look into that more in the future.

Stormwater emerged for us as a focus because of the rooftop tax credit issue we mentioned earlier – that it’s unfounded to exclude urban agriculture from green roof incentives without considering the numbers. We thought this was a good opportunity to initiate a policy change.

But of course we are very interested in some of the other environmental factors. For example, comparing different soil mediums  — what is used on rooftops is not technically soil, because dirt would be too heavy for most building capacities, but an engineered alternative – in terms of drainage, nutrient leaching, nutrient run-off, the remediation quality of the engineered growing medium and of the plants themselves, temperature fluctuations, etc. Those are some of the things we want to look at down the road. I think the more metrics you can get together, the more powerful a statement you can make. The social benefits – from filling in gaps in the foodshed to bringing people together in a shared community project – are well known. The environmental issues, particularly related to roofs, require more research.

Weighing produce at Two Coves, Queens | photo courtesy of Stephanos Koullias via farmingconcrete.org

You have discussed the potential for this research to affect policy and to help building owners understand their options. What are some other lessons to be learned from this research? What else do you hope will be done with your findings?
Caruso: The green roof tax credit is being amended. And the hope is that other plans put out by city agencies or reports by national organizations will factor some of this into their thinking. The American Planning Association, for example, puts out a guide for agriculture; if city planning institutions start to consider urban agriculture as a viable step for cities to strengthen local economies, expand regional foodsheds and isolate and address environmental challenges, that would be great.

The US Green Building Council’s recent announcement that the retrofitting of existing buildings is eligible for an innovation credit is an interesting tactic and a change in the right direction. I think as LEED begins to move more towards performativity and long-term monitoring, we’d like to see services such as Seeing Green becoming inextricable parts of measuring performance.

Some city agencies have legitimate concerns about scaling up rooftop gardens. The Fire Department is worried about the height of plants allowed and how that affects fire safety. The Buildings Department is worried about buildings’ structural load capacity. But hopefully the Parks Department will be a leader in this effort; working with them has been a great partnership for us. Their experimental roof garden on Randall’s Island is intended specifically to inform what kind of green roof systems they should be implementing on their buildings. If other City agencies did the same thing and committed to doing pilot projects on City-owned property, it would have a huge impact.

Recently, some have voiced skepticism about the viability of urban agriculture, dismissing it as a phenomenon only relevant to small portions of the population. What’s your response to those voices?
Caruso: I think when people hear the term urban agriculture, they make the mistake of thinking that its advocates are postulating that a city the size of New York or San Francisco or Chicago could grow all its food within its borders. Most farmers would laugh at that, given the amount of effort it takes to productively and intensively grow on even an acre of land. But I think it’s incredibly important that urban agriculture is part of a regional foodshed, is part of supporting local, decentralized economies and healthy, active and safe communities.

Once again, I think layering the environmental benefits, the social benefits and the economic benefits is really important to counter skepticism about urban agriculture’s viability.

AEA roof demonstration project | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso works as an Environmental Planning consultant and researcher for such companies as Great Ecology and Environments, Roy Co. Architecture, thread collective, Gowanus CDC, and Advancement for Rural Kids, Inc. His area of focus is urban agriculture and ecological sanitation programs, designing closed loop systems using composting toilets, agriculture and greywater and rainwater harvesting systems. He has a Master’s of Science from the Environmental Systems Management Program (ESM) at Pratt. Tyler is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in ESM Masters program. This summer he is co-teaching a design/build urban agriculture course that he helped to develop. He also co-founded and runs New York City’s Youth Food Council.

Erik Facteau is a biologist, with a Master’s of Science in Environmental Systems Management from Pratt Institute. He has a strong interest in the creation of local food systems and has worked at the NYC Greenmarkets for the last 5 years. Previously, Erik worked in a microbiology laboratory as an environmental air quality analyst. As an undergraduate, at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, Erik Facteau studied Biology with a focus on Microbiology and Mycology. While at SUNY ESF, Erik conducted lab and field research on two ongoing plant restoration projects (The American Chestnut-Castanea dentata and The Pinedrop-Pterospora andromedea).

These days, the imperative of sustainable design invokes the health of ecosystems more readily than the health of individuals. Fossil fuels expended, old growth forests cut down, carbon produced in manufacturing: the environmental stakes are well known. But the biological implications of the choices we make in constructing our buildings and cities are harder to come by. The shocking medical realities of malignant substance like asbestos have led to surprisingly little public information about substances that may be damaging, if only we had sufficient data from consistent testing.

To redress this lack of information, the architecture firm Perkins+Will went about creating a free, online database – called Transparency – of building materials that contain substances known or suspected to be harmful to health. The database is geared towards the consumers who most often specify what materials should be used in a building project – architects and interior designers. The firm based their listings on a careful, two-year review of scientific papers and government research. The goal is to “encourage the building product marketplace to become more transparent from extraction to end of life for all points of contact, from manufacturers to de-constructors, so that people are further empowered make informed decisions about specifying, maintaining and disposing of the products in their buildings.”

In the interview below, Peter Syrett, Associate Principal at Perkins+Will explains the development and applications of Transparency, reflecting on architectural responsibility, the nature of scientific certainty and the role of buildings as instruments of public health.

- C.S.

Image courtesy of Perkins+Will

Urban Omnibus: Tell me about Transparency.
Peter Syrett: Transparency is, first and foremost, a concept. We’ve applied this concept to the development of an online tool to help consumers or anyone else understand the total footprint of a project or a product in ecologically- or socially-responsible terms. The classic example of this type of thinking is, “What’s the environmental footprint of my lunch? Where does it comes from?” If it’s sourced locally, it has a lower embodied energy than if it’s a piece of beef from Argentina with a higher embodied energy. The point is to try to understand the implications of your actions as a consumer.

How does the tool work from a consumer’s point of view?
As a consumer, your power is at the point of purchase. In order for you to apply that power, you need to understand, at the point of purchase, what you’re buying. That’s the idea of transparency. At the point of purchase of a building product, the specifier or gatekeeper of that purchase is often the architect or designer. And so it is up to the architect or designer to understand the ecological composition of a carpet or a window system or a cladding system outside a building.

In essence, right now, as an architect, you’re blind when you buy something. You are privy to a product’s price, you are privy to how it relates to certain building codes – how it would combust, etc. You may be privy to some of the manufacturing process, but not all. And you may be privy to some of the composition of the product, but not all. But you are unable to make a comprehensively informed decision on your purchase. Transparency is about being able to make informed decisions, to compare in a meaningful way multiple things next to each other and understand the ecological implications of your purchase. Daniel Goleman writes about this in his book Ecological Intelligence, and so we are seeking to apply that logic to the building product world.

When and why did Perkins+Will see the need to establish this service?
This is an issue that some of my colleagues at Perkins+Will and I have been wrestling with for a long time. Over a decade ago, I was working on cancer center and we decided that we wanted to make it carcinogenic-free. We thought, somewhat naively, that this would be a straightforward or self-evident process. It wasn’t. We simply couldn’t get the information.

And so we locked onto this idea of finding ways to make the information available. How else can we make sure that we’re making things in line with our values? If the building materials in a cancer center are possibly carcinogenic, clearly that’s against the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

Do you see the information and materials listed as part of a growing database?
As I see it, there are two ends to the spectrum. There’s understanding what the implications of substances in buildings materials are — that’s our precautionary list, our list of asthmagens and asthma triggers, and our list of flame retardants – and then there’s understanding what the materials are made of in the first place – that’s our work with construction specialists to label a product with lists of its components. With those two ends, you have the clarity of knowing what’s actually in the product and also a detailed back-up to help sift through what government regulators think may be harmful to humans or environments. Our databases are living lists: substances come on and off the market; regulations change; other governments are doing their own testing (the impact of the European Union’s chemical policy will obviously be important to materials specifiers in the US, for example).

What are some of the other ways the information is categorized on the site?
If you go the website, transparency.perkinswill.com, you can search by health effects; you can search by division numbers according to the Construction Specifications Institute (like concrete, masonry, metals); you can search by substance name. There are several ways to search, for example, if you are concerned about respiratory issues in particular.

We started in 2009 by releasing our Precautionary List, a list of substances that, whenever possible (and it’s not always possible), should be avoided. We soon realized that there are big holes in the knowledge base, particularly opaque sections of the material market. Flame retardants, for example: there’s virtually no information out there. So we hired a researcher from Berkeley, Dr. Arlene Blum, whose team did some original research. Asthma triggers are another important area about which very little information is compiled. Eleven people in the world die every day from asthma, and 30,000 people have asthma attacks.

Speaking of the precautionary list, the website invokes the “precautionary principle.” Could you explain what that means?
The precautionary principle comes from the Wingspread Conference, which was a gathering of scientists, lawyers, policy makers and environmentalists in 1998. Its primary concern was with climate change. The principle essentially states that in the lack of scientific certitude on a topic or an issue, one should choose a more conservative position rather than assuming that there’s nothing to worry about. That’s what we have applied in our compiling of the existing information about material safety. In other words, if you worry about the consequences of your acts, and if you are given a choice and you don’t know scientifically whether something is good or bad, then is better to err on the conservative rather than a purely rational position based on the limited testing that’s been done.

Science has never been about certitude. Once one scientific question is answered, there is always another question to be asked. And in the global climate change debate, we’ve seen people use that fundamental structure of science against what the Nobel Laureates agree is pretty clear evidence about climate change.

Of course, science will continue to explore human health and substances. But it may not clearly come back to the lay population, like myself, in a way that can be applied without a huge amount of additional research. The issue is not so much the lack of scientific study, it’s the lack of people’s ability to digest the information that’s out there. Both sides of the fence agree on that.

I’m interested in what you were saying at the beginning about a comprehensive understanding of the footprint of products and materials, from extraction to disposal. Is that sort of full life cycle, supply chain, systems thinking different from the ways in which existing regulation or standards view material safety?
Yes and no. In essence, the regulatory framework that governs what goes into building products relies on the permitted substances listed in the Toxic Control Substances Act of 1976, which lists about 82,000 substances. Of those, about 600 appear on an EPA watch list, and of those only 200 have been tested and only five have been banned. In other words, the substances in our building products are pretty much unregulated and unmeasured. So the burden is on the consumer to know what might be harmful, and yet it’s so opaque that it creates a central contradictory proposition. In terms of regulation and the market, the government isn’t looking at this terribly well. And for many reasons, we don’t really know what the products are made of. So it’s a real quandary. That’s why the concept of transparency is so important.

The food industry presents a good model for us. It’s a much more transparent industry in terms of content. Take, for example, a company like Coca-Cola. It has been able to maintain its top secret formula while still listing the primary ingredients on the can so a consumer can decide if she wants to put that in her body or not. So I don’t really buy the proprietary argument that more information infringes on intellectual property. If there’s a chance that BPA is harmful to infants, then of course I want to know that my baby’s formula is BPA-free.

Which raises the question, how has the construction industry reacted to Transparency?
Very well, I would say. This past year has been the year of transparency, in a way. Initiatives launched at GreenBuild; the Environmental Product Declaration process developed by UL Envrionment that recently came out. I think these efforts show that the thinking around this path is beginning to change and hopefully in the near future we’ll see broader adoption by the whole design committee. After all, one of the reasons to share this information is to begin to move the whole market. It doesn’t help if we have all this knowledge and research and silo it. We encourage our peers, firms large and small, to use it. The more people use it, the better the whole industry will be — and we hope that our peers have other knowledge that they can begin to share. Maybe there’s a whole other way to think about this profession, to think about resources, to begin to get the greatest leverage out of our collective experience.

How do you personally define responsibility in architecture?
A long time ago, people understood the importance of building for their own health. It was more immediate because buildings were shelter and therefore survival. I believe that buildings are essential to public health, I believe buildings are instruments of public health. And to that end, I want to make sure that I make environments that are healthy and allow people to be healthy and thrive. And that means understanding what they are made of.

Unless otherwise noted, all images by Marcelo López Dinardi.

Peter Syrett AIA, LEED AP, is Associate Principal and K-12 Education Market Leader at Perkins+Will’s New York office. His expertise focuses on sustainable institutional projects, specifically K-12 and healthcare work. He leads teams in viewing the larger ecological picture, one that looks beyond LEED, overseeing projects from brainstorm to detail. Peter’s philosophy on design is the creation of a unique conceptual vocabulary that embodies a client’s mission in space, material, form and character. He lectures regularly on green institutional design and is a recognized expert in the field. He is currently teaching a class at the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies entitled “Managing Sustainable Building Projects.”

UPDATE: Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times coverage of the CHPC/Architectural League Making Room project and symposium is now available at nytimes.com.

UPDATE: Making Room symposium details announced: Monday, November 7, 2011, 8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. at the Japan Society. (NOTE: This event has passed.)

New York City has a remarkably diverse population and, in many respects, a remarkably heterogeneous housing stock to provide it shelter. From Riverdale to Tottenville, Flushing to Chelsea, Washington Heights to Jackson Heights to Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers inhabit an amazing spectrum of residential building types, developed and accumulated over the history of the city. At many critical junctures over the last century and a half, New York City has been an innovative leader in housing regulation and finance, encouraging and shaping development to ensure that dwellings are safe and respond to evolving standards of livability.

But even with the great resources of its varied housing stock and its strong tradition of housing advocacy and reform, New York has a hard time producing enough housing to meet demand. And in moments of economic and social transition, housing supply and housing need can get seriously out of whack.

Over the last several years, the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) has been researching and analyzing how and where New York’s residents live and the housing that is available to them. Their findings have revealed many discrepancies between the kinds of houses and apartments people need and those they can find. CHPC has identified New York City’s accreted mass of housing regulations and standards — all created with progressive and worthy goals in mind — as one of the factors that contributes to this mismatch. For example, regulations have tilted what the housing market produces towards larger units, for households assumed to be “families,” even though only 17% of New York’s dwelling units are occupied by traditional nuclear families. A huge underground or improvised housing market has developed over the last two decades as people try, often in desperation, to find places to live that are affordable and can accommodate their particular needs.

Around the world, architects, developers and policymakers are responding to the shifting demands of urban dwellers with new forms of housing in ways New York is not. If our city wants to continue to respond to the needs of its dynamic population, it must continue to innovate in the types of housing it produces. In 2009, CHPC brought architects from Tokyo, Barcelona, San Diego, Montreal and Leipzig to New York for a landmark symposium (read UO‘s coverage of that event here) that introduced an audience of housing experts from design, development, law, policy and government to the vanguard of housing design for 21st century cities.

This symposium was part of a broader project — called Making Room — to take a fresh look at how housing and space standards constrict the choices architects and developers are able to introduce into New York’s housing market. To move that project forward, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with them to carry out a design study to produce new models for comfortable, desirable dwellings. Four teams of leading New York architects, each with expertise and a particular perspective, have been asked to respond to this challenge. On Monday, November 7, the architects and their teams — Stan Allen and Rafi Segal; Deborah Gans; Peter Gluck; and Jonathan Kirschenfeld — will present their ideas in an all-day symposium. This event is only one part of a much larger research and advocacy project that will include exhibiting these designs publicly and identifying what laws and codes currently on the books are preventing new modes of residential living from becoming available.

In the video above, CHPC Executive Director Jerilyn Perine (who was formerly the commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development), Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro, Chhaya Community Development Corporation Executive Director Seema Agnani, and Blesso Properties President and Founder Matthew Blesso discuss the state of the city’s housing, the underground housing market and some of the kinds of changes that could make New York housing more responsive to the ways we live now. Over the coming months, Urban Omnibus will be providing regular updates on the Making Room project as it develops. Stay tuned.

Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Matthew Blesso is President and Founder of Blesso Properties. Prior to founding Blesso Properties, he worked as a commercial lender, most recently in the Real Estate Finance Group at BHF Bank (now PB Capital), a German bank. Matt is a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Municipal Arts Society, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Urban Land Institute, the New York Preservation Archive Project, and the Manhattan Real Estate Network. He is also a member of Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for the Citizen Housing and Planning Counsel and a founding member and the chairman of the Leadership Board of the Fourth Arts Block as well as Board member of the Institute For Urban Design.

In over 20 years as executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

Jerilyn Perine is the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) where she spearheads a high impact agenda to improve the quality of public debate, inform public policy, promote new ideas, and engage a wide audience as well as a diverse and active Board Membership to improve NYC neighborhoods. Ms. Perine is an urban planner with 30 years of experience in housing and community development. She was appointed Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development by both Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to lead America’s largest municipal housing agency with more than 3000 employees and an annual operating and capital budget of $800 million. As Commissioner, Ms. Perine was the author of Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, announced in December 2002 that provided $3 billion over 5 years to preserve and create over 65,000 units of affordable housing. Under Mayor Giuliani she designed and oversaw the management and operation of programs designed to return a significant inventory of tax foreclosed residential property to local, private ownership. Ms. Perine is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and was a member of the International Brownfield Exchange between 1998 and 2002. She serves on the board of Highbridge Voices, a children’s choir in the South Bronx; West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing; and the New York Housing Conference.

Click images for captions.

If you’re reading this, chances are you are into cities or you are into design. Most likely, you think both are pretty interesting. But “urban” plus “design” does not necessarily equate to urban design, at least not as the term is understood in professional circles. Certainly, designers have helped to determine the physical form of cities throughout the history of human settlement, but in this country, a specific professional expertise or body of knowledge applied directly to the design of urban space has been a long time in coming.

The individuals we most commonly associate with the design of cities came from a variety of professional and educational backgrounds. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw the modernization of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s, was a lifelong civil servant, educated in law. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, responsible for the original design of Washington D.C., and Ildefons Cerdà, responsible for the 19th Century expansion of Barcelona, were civil engineers. Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the new capitals of Chandigarh, India and Brasilia, Brazil, were all trained as architects. And then, of course, are the countless designers of the streets, plazas, parks, campuses and interstitial spaces that are no less designed than the buildings of the city.

Some date the “birth” of the urban design discipline to a 1956 conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design organized by Josep Lluis Sert, or to the establishment of the first graduate degree programs in the subject that emerged at places like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania a few years later, or to the raft of seminal texts on the subject published in that period, including Chermayeff and Alexander’s Community and Privacy (1960), Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Mumford’s The City in History (1961), Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Cullen’s Townscape (1961), Spreiregen’s Urban Design (1965) and Bacon’s Design of Cities (1967).

In the five decades since, the period in which degrees in urban design have existed in American higher education, urban design qualifications have required students to have pre-existing professional degrees in architecture, landscape architecture or, to a lesser extent, urban planning. This year, Parsons The New School for Design is launching the nation’s first undergraduate degree in urban design, which prompted us to ask the program’s director, Victoria Marshall, what exactly is being taught and what exactly it means for the training of a new generation of urbanists with a different relationship to the urban realm than the designers that came before. Marshall says she is most interested in teaching “how to see the city as a designer” rather than, say, how to design the city or its spaces. And from the diverse coursework offered, the education the program provides is, indeed, much closer to an overview of urbanism — the history, the theory, the social science — mixed with fundamentals of design — section, plan, model, 2D layout — than it is to a foundation course in how to propose physical interventions to shape the constituent elements of urban space. With that in mind, there’s a chance a degree offering such as this just might respond to the tremendous civic interest in cities and how they work, especially on the part of young people less and less interested in the traditional disciplinary alignments of the 20th century.

Click images for captions.

A CONVERSATION WITH VICTORIA MARSHALL

UO: How do you define urban design?
Victoria Marshall: I think I define it differently than how others tend to do so. I think of urban design in terms of comfort with multi-scalar thinking, the ability to link the big and the small, from large landscapes to small urban interventions.

I’ve done a lot of research with ecologists, working a lot to translate ecology theory into urban theory: how do we read cities as ecosystems? Whether I’m teaching a class on building a little garden or conducting a big studio looking at the Meadowlands as a site, these topics translate across scales.

Other definitions of urban design might link it more to urban planning – to the writing of reports or codes – or to the scenographic presentation of how an architectural project in an urban context might appear for the purposes of the real estate market, for example. For me, urban design is neither a subset nor a superset of other categories. I’m more interested to talk about what the work is than to define the discipline.

A Google image search for urban design yields a combination of architectural plans, streetscape renderings and aerial photographs.

Tell me a little bit about your educational and professional background.
I studied landscape architecture as an undergraduate in Australia, where I’m from. In graduate school, I studied landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. I have my own practice and have taught urban design for many years at all different institutions — Columbia, Harvard, University of Toronto, Pratt and Penn — and was exposed to many different types of graduate students. But my challenge here at Parsons is to teach urban design to undergraduates. Previous to this, urban design education at the undergraduate level hasn’t existed.

Did the desire to create an undergraduate urban design degree come from the institution or was it in response to student demand?
I’d say it’s institutional. The belief is that once we create the space, students will fill it.

Image: Elinor Mossop

What do you think someone who might want to declare urban design as her concentration is looking for?
We’re getting students who want the strong liberal arts component, but also want the design component, students who want a balance. They like the theory, they like the reading, they like the deep discussion, but they also like to make things and do things in class.

What kind of classes are offered?
On the history and theory side, we have “History of World Urbanism,” which digs into the history of cities since there was ever a city. There is another survey called “Urban Design since 1945.” And then there’s a lab sequence that students majoring in urban studies at Eugene Lang, the New School’s liberal arts college, can also access. That’s one of the reasons why the program was created. The New School is this amazing university, in New York City, with all these urban classes being taught to undergraduate and graduate students all across the university, from international affairs and urban policy at Milano, to design-specific classes at Parsons, to urban studies, environmental studies, the list goes on…

There’s also a core studio for urban design students, in which each student is given a complex problem on a complex site. Each has to do a lot of fieldwork, make a lot of drawings, talk to a lot of people. The studio teaches students how to research, how to do a pin-up, how to present and talk about their work.

Additionally, I taught a class called “Streetlife,” which was about exploring the street through drawing. Other classes are more about fieldwork: observation, taking notes, different ways of documenting a site photographically or otherwise. There’s also a class called “Sensing,” in which students build sensors, collect environmental data, do mapping and create their own aerial photography using balloons. They launch their own satellites and collect infrared data.

Is there a cohesive or canonical body of knowledge you want your students to graduate with? Do you think that exists yet in urban design? Is it emergent? Necessary?
Of course it’s necessary! “Urban Design since 1945,” as one example, looks at how all cities have changed in that period of time, which is also the period where the field of urban design emerged as a profession in this country. But we are careful not to place everything in an American context. Last year I had the opportunity to travel to China as a fellow of the India China Institute and more seriously study the way cities are being built now. If the students can have a sense of some of those dynamics in relation to all the work we’re doing in New York, then that’s a success for the program. Having a love for cities everywhere is key. Being interested in any city, anywhere a student might go, and being able to see it as a designer.

Do you see that interest and passion reflected in your students?
Absolutely!

Image: Colin McFadyen

What kind of professional opportunities do you see this program preparing students for?
I‘m not sure yet. Some of the students have said to me they’ve chosen this because it’s the kind of solid foundation they want for their university education. Others, I think they might work for a non-profit, like a neighborhood group. Any of our students would be an amazing asset for such an organization. They’ll have a strong design toolbox and an ability to participate with people and to propose collaborative ideas.

Given the extent to which ecological thinking informs your approach to urban design, where does architecture figure into this?
Part of the ecological approach for me has to do with how you understand yourself in relation to your environment. I think the way that architecture comes in has to do with measure and specificity. How do you understand what are you measuring? How do you get very specific? Architectural measures include how you work with scale, how you draw a plan, how you draw a section, how you understand the relationship between drawings and the three-dimensional space, between material qualities and material behavior.

So architecture inserts itself as visual language and as a set of methodological tools?
Yes, perhaps. But a lot of it comes from testing different things out and figuring out as we go what I think the students should know. The balloon mapping project actually ends up teaching students how to hack a camera, and then how to stitch all that data together. This serves as one example of new types of technological ‘knowledges’ in which students need fluency these days. They’re learning how to hybridize that with how to draw a plan or how to build a physical model.

Balloon Mapping Project | grassrootsmapping.org

So are the design skills students learn primarily in the service of analysis and representation? As opposed to proposing a design scheme?
No, you have to propose change. Even if I might, as a teacher, tend to move away from intervention, I will still require my students to design, say, a device that somehow transforms a condition.

What do you want your students to understand about cities and cities’ role in the world?
I’m very interested in cities as urban ecosystems. Our students start to become very sophisticated in navigating the rhetoric that gets produced around cities, but then, very strategic in ways that they can intervene or engage the city that is meaningful ecologically. For example, we had a discussion in class last week about things that are sustainable but not necessarily ecological. You can design a zero-waste shoe, or buy one, but does that kind of thinking actually change the way one acts in the world? The ecological approach is supposed to build a sustainable city, but we’re teaching them to approach it socially – and this harkens back to the social activist legacy of the New School – to approach it in terms of equality, difference, justice. If our students can perceive and communicate and strategically design how to engage and propose change, or allow the imagination of change to be engaged by others, I think that would be a success.

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Victoria Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Parsons the New School for Design and the director of the BS Urban Design Program. She is a fellow of the India China Institute practicing landscape architect and the founder of TILL, a Newark based landscape architecture and urban design office which offers design services that transform contemporary landscapes such as reclaimed river beds, brownfields, rooftops and environmental justice neighborhoods.

Broad participation, it goes without saying, is hardly taken for granted in most kinds of large-scale urban development, even though a public review is legally mandated. Many things hinder public input on large urban development projects. For lay citizens to weigh in, they must first overcome the complexities of environmental and land use review procedures and then contend with the inconvenience and confrontation symptomatic of many community meetings. And the proposed plans to which the public is invited to respond are often subject to the manipulations of whoever is doing the proposing. In April of 2008, New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff noted, in relation to the Hudson Yards plan, that misleading and incomplete renderings produce a “distorted picture of reality” that “stifles what is supposed to be an open, democratic process.” With that in mind, Norman Oder, the writer of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, told us that “Betaville offers great promise in equalizing the information gap and helping present, from the start, a more honest perspective on development projects big and small. Such a service is only fair, and long overdue.” At the moment, setting up a Betaville for another part of town still presents some technical barriers to entry. But the project nonetheless reminds us to question, and to advance, the established methods and norms of public review and participation in our cities’ ongoing processes of change.

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Carl Skelton, born in Toronto in 1961, now lives and works in New York City. In his spare time, he’s the founding director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center (BxmC), and the Integrated Digital Media programs of NYU’s Polytechnic Insitute. Carl’s current BxmC initiatives include partnerships with people and organizations as diverse as the Municipal Art Society of New York City and the M2C Institut für angewandte Medienforschung, Bremen (Betaville), the Music Technology program at NYU Steinhardt (Emotive Association project), and Microsoft Research (Games for Learning Insitute). Keep an eye out for upcoming public media installations in New York, and a book project with Luke DuBois.

Five Borough Farm is a project of the Design Trust for Public Space, in partnership with Added Value, to create the first citywide, comprehensive urban agriculture plan for New York City. Over the course of this year, the Five Borough Farm team will be evaluating the city’s existing urban agriculture activity, establishing a set of metrics by which to quantify the benefits of urban agriculture and creating policy recommendations for relevant city agencies. The project officially kicked off in December with a half-day workshop that tapped the minds and expertise of 90 urban farmers and urban agriculture advocates. Two people have been selected by the Design Trust to lead the effort: Nevin Cohen and Rupal Sanghvi. Sanghvi, who specializes in program evaluation and public health, is the project’s Metrics Fellow and therefore is responsible for quantifying and measuring the impact of urban agriculture on the city and its residents. Nevin Cohen, an urban food policy expert and chair of Environmental Studies at the New School, is the Policy Fellow, which makes him responsible for surveying the existing urban agriculture landscape in New York City and identifying new opportunities and recommendations.

We recently had an opportunity to talk with Nevin Cohen about Five Borough Farm. Read on to hear Cohen explain the challenges of developing a unified city plan for urban agriculture and talk about its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development. -V.S.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

Urban Omnibus: What is the Five Borough Farm Project?
Nevin Cohen: Five Borough Farm is a project by the Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that operates one of the city’s largest farms, to create a citywide plan to support urban agriculture in New York City. The urban agriculture movement is booming here: demand for local food production is growing, and in every corner of the city New Yorkers are developing a broad range of community gardens, rooftop farms, composting projects, and farmers markets. But right now no one has a detailed understanding of all of these activities, or hard data or tools to evaluate the benefits of agriculture as an urban land use. So what you find is city officials are reluctant to adopt the many policy recommendations advanced by advocates, or to address local food production on a citywide scale. Often city agencies and the ever-growing number of practitioners – many of whom operate on city land – work largely in isolation, lacking the systemic resources to coordinate or scale-up their efforts. There are outstanding groups like the NYC Community Gardening Coalition and NGOs like Just Food but there isn’t yet an overall vision for how urban agriculture could really transform New York.

The benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Urban agriculture is a social justice movement.The Design Trust is engaging a diverse cross-section of experts and a network of hundreds of individual practitioners to move this project forward. Based on a detailed analysis of the city’s current urban agricultural landscape, we will develop an evaluation framework to measure, in quantifiable and replicable terms, the ecological, social, and economic value urban agriculture brings to the communities it serves and to the city as a whole. Together with Added Value and many other stakeholders, the Design Trust will help city government evaluate what their role should be, and identify specific opportunities for agencies to support urban agricultural activity. The project will also create an interactive website to allow everyone involved with urban agriculture (including practitioners, policymakers, and supporters) to use the project’s tools and findings and share their own expertise.

What is your role as Policy Fellow and Rupal Sanghvi’s as Metrics Fellow?
Rupal Sanghvi and I are working closely together on all aspects of the project. We’re examining what kinds of urban agriculture New Yorkers are practicing now, including the work of advocacy and other supporting organizations, by conducting in-depth interviews with people in all five boroughs, from relatively large-scale operations to individual community gardens, commercial farms to nonprofits.

My work focuses on the policy landscape of urban agriculture. I’ve been conducting case study research in other large North American cities — Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco — to uncover best practices in urban agriculture policy that might be adopted by New York. Over the course of the project, I will evaluate existing New York City-based and national urban agriculture initiatives (e.g. schoolyard farms, urban farming plots on New York City Housing Authority grounds) and policy recommendations advanced by urban agriculture advocates, and will work with New York City policy makers to identify realistic measures that would support urban agriculture citywide.

Rupal Sanghvi has been focusing on developing reliable metrics that can help practitioners to achieve their goals while also providing data on the diverse impacts of urban agriculture on individuals and communities. When the project is complete we will have a set of indicators that address ecology (e.g., the ability of gardens to capture stormwater that would otherwise overburden sewage treatment plants) and stewardship; public health (improved access to fresh vegetables); education and youth empowerment (changes in behavior and academic achievement); community building (residents’ use of a garden as a public meeting space); and economics (revenue from food sales, job creation in ancillary food businesses).

Together, we will be creating a shared evaluative framework and tools that can help practitioners and guide both legislation and on-the-ground programming.

But this is really a multidisciplinary effort. In addition to the Design Trust, Added Value, Rupal Sanghvi and myself, the team includes Thread Collective, an architecture and design firm, post-doctoral fellow Kristin Reynolds, and an advisory committee of experts in urban agriculture, planning, and policy. And we are working in parallel with researchers at Columbia University who are estimating the productive capacity of New York City’s open space.

Also, students at The New School have helped gather data on urban agriculture activity in New York City. (My students mapped this information as part of an urban agriculture exhibition I co-curated at The New School with my colleague Radhika Subramaniam, called Living Concrete/Carrot City.)

Students mapping urban agriculture sites for Five Borough Farm project at The New School's Living Concrete/Carrot City exhibition | Photo by Nevin Cohen

Tell us about the workshop that kicked off the project. Who participated? What was discussed?
In December, we convened a citywide workshop for growers, advocates, and funders to discuss the project and to learn how practitioners measure their success, what information would help them to carry out their work more successfully, and the types of policy changes that would enable urban agriculture to expand in New York City. We asked: Why do you do what you do? What resources (revenue, volunteers, funding, etc.) do you rely on in order to do your work? How do you track what you do, and what do you wish you could track? What would help you measure the benefits of what you do?

Right now, we’re reviewing hundreds of pages of transcripts from all of the small group sessions we held. But I can tell you one thing we heard over and over that day: practitioners want a better way to communicate with each other, whether it’s sharing information about resources (where can I get these tools this week?) or technical assistance (we’re starting a farm-based learning program in the fall at a local elementary school and want some tips on monitoring the students’ progress). I think that’s where the tools and the website for Five Borough Farm will be really useful to people.

Urban agriculture engages people in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole.It’s clear that the complexity of urban agriculture extends far beyond the prevalent images of rooftop gardens and community plots. Questions of land use, community engagement, city policy, ecological effects and farming expertise, among others, all have to be addressed. What activities fall under the scope of Five Borough Farm? How much of this is about growing and how much is about distribution and access to healthy food? How much is about something else entirely?
That complexity is precisely why we are engaging so many practitioners and advocates in the process. For many urban farmers and gardeners, food access is their main objective: it’s about the fresh kale and tomatoes they grow and the weekly eggs they harvest, for themselves and others in their community. But urban agriculture is about far more than that. Urban agriculture engages people citywide in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole. The scope of Five Borough Farm includes the youth leadership programs, school-based curricula, entrepreneurial rooftop farms, and related infrastructure – from composting projects to farmstands – that make urban agriculture such a powerful, multidimensional movement. The urban agriculture system — and it really needs to be addressed as a system — is a promising model of community development that has the potential to improve many aspects of urban life.

What are your ultimate goals for this project?
I hope that the tools we develop to measure the benefits of urban agriculture will enable gardeners and farmers to more effectively achieve their goals, whether it’s more sustainable food production, youth development, more revenue, or better health for the people in their neighborhood. We expect that reliable indicators of the impact of urban agriculture will also provide evidence to policymakers that urban agriculture is an important part of urban sustainability and should be supported like other municipal infrastructure. A broader goal is to influence City policy so that zoning, local laws, funding decisions, and City programs support the growth of urban food production.

What are the food security issues that urban agriculture can realistically address on a coordinated, large scale?
About three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with few or no grocery stores and supermarkets. These residents spend more of their limited income at bodegas and convenience stores for a narrow selection of poor quality food. While urban farms and community gardens are no substitute for full-service grocers, local food production can supplement the food budgets of low-income New Yorkers and enable people to eat healthier meals. A recent study in Philadelphia found that community gardeners in that city produced $4.9 million worth of summer vegetables alone, not including spring and fall plantings or fruits and berries. For low income New Yorkers, the ability to grow fresh, healthy food in the spring, summer and fall can be a godsend.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

What land availability does New York City have for urban agriculture use? What kind of supply and distribution can be achieved?
Our colleagues at Columbia University are evaluating the productive capacity of open space in New York City to estimate how much food could be grown in the five boroughs. New York City doesn’t have vast unused tracts of land, but we do have quite a bit of open space, including rooftops and some 52,000 acres of yard space. If we gardened just 10% of our yards we could grow enough vegetables to feed 650,000 New Yorkers. One of the key design challenges is how to weave together these small patches of urban farmland to achieve a large impact. BK Farmyards (in Brooklyn) has given this a lot of thought, as have entrepreneurs in many other cities.

But the benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Community gardens make neighborhoods more livable, and also increase property values. Innovative entrepreneurial urban farms create jobs and make underused spaces safe and productive. Non-profit urban agriculture projects teach young people about ecology, food and nutrition, and help build skills and confidence. Productive green spaces keep rainwater out of our sewer system, reduce the urban heat island effect, and recycle organic matter. The impacts are far-reaching — as many practitioners will tell you, urban agriculture is a social justice movement.

What can the City itself do to promote or support an urban agriculture system?
People are already discussing policies about long-term stability for existing urban farmers, the use of vacant and under-used land and rooftops for new farms, municipal composting of organic waste for city gardens, and financial and technical support for urban farm projects that provide substantial social, economic and environmental benefits.

Several months ago, the departments of Parks and Recreation and Housing Preservation and Development issued new rules governing the use of city-owned sites for urban gardens. These were the subject of public hearings and extensive participation by community gardeners, and resulted in the proposed rules being modified. In addition, the City Council’s FoodWorks plan recommends policies to ensure the stability of community gardens, as did Scott Stringer’s FoodNYC. The specific local laws to put the ideas in FoodWorks into effect will be developed and introduced in the coming year or so.

What are the barriers? What can the City do to overcome them?
Policymakers need evidence of urban agriculture’s impacts to move public policy forward — especially in this economy. That’s why the metrics we are developing will be so important. It will help people see the tremendous value of each community garden or small urban farm in more than anecdotal ways. At the same time, we also need a broad understanding of urban agriculture in New York City and how it can best fit into the City’s food system. With this big picture view, people will understand the cumulative impact of hundreds — and potentially thousands — of those small community gardens and farms.

In terms of practical barriers, limited access to land, clean soil, skilled gardeners and farmers, technical expertise and efficient distribution channels all pose challenges. Our research is identifying which are most important and to what extent these limitations restrict urban agriculture’s potential. Like their rural counterparts, urban farmers are able to overcome many obstacles, and the wide range of urban gardens and farms is evidence of this, but the right public policies and targeted support could really scale up the movement.

Five Borough Farm Workshop, December 2010 | Photo by Dan Honey

How does a scaled-up, systematized urban agriculture network accommodate different farming models?
The key is to recognize that urban agriculture is a true polyculture. It ranges from window boxes and planters to multi-acre farms that grow many different crops. The efforts can be led by individuals, non-profits, or public and private institutions, like schools or hospitals. Cities can accommodate the entire spectrum of food production by removing unnecessary barriers and supporting the infrastructure to make diversified food production feasible. This might mean expanding programs to enable the produce from school gardens to be incorporated into school meals, or providing funding for commercial kitchen incubators so that food producers can add value to the food they grow.

The model that is most problematic is the vertical farm. It is highly capital intensive, and material- and energy-intensive as well. Fanciful schemes of high rises filled with tomato plants and pigs just doesn’t make sense from an economic, environmental or social perspective.

Does a city-wide plan call for a market-based system of farming? A more cooperative one? One that is reliant on volunteer networks? All of the above?
My sense is that the most vibrant urban agriculture system will be a civic agriculture system, to use a phrase coined by the late rural sociologist Tom Lyson. It will involve pure for-profit farms that are embedded in their communities, neighborhood-based community gardens run by volunteers, and hybrids — for-profit farms that rely at critical moments on “Crop Mobs” for extra labor, and non-profits that teach young people how to make a buck growing and selling fresh produce.

What’s next for Five Borough Farm?
Within the next few weeks, the Design Trust will release a workshop summary. By March, we’ll have completed about twenty-five in-depth interviews. Our whole team will be working on synthesizing and sharing this information with people in the urban agriculture community. We’re talking to photographers and graphic designers about how to visualize our findings, and we’ll have more events like the December workshop. Ultimately, we’ll end up with a Five Borough Farm publication and a website that we hope people will start using for their projects all over the city.
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Nevin Cohen is Chair of Environmental Studies at The New School, where he teaches courses in urban planning and food systems.  Dr. Cohen’s current research focuses on urban food policy, particularly innovative planning strategies to support food production in the urban and peri-urban landscape, public policies to engage citizens in sustainable food production, urban planning and food access, and civic agriculture in cities and suburbs. He has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Rutgers University, a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell.

The first edition of the New City Reader, "City," edited by Network Architecture Lab, posted on the facade of Storefront for Art and Architecture on Kenmare Street

The New City Reader is a weekly newspaper produced in the galleries of the New Museum throughout the duration of “The Last Newspaper,” an exhibition on view until January 9th, 2011. The show’s context, signified by the exhibition’s fatalistic title, is the existential crisis facing the newspaper industry. But the show’s content is more concerned with the variety of artistic explorations (including works by Hans Haacke, Wolfgang Tillmans and Dash Snow, among many others) into the ideological, political and material dimensions of the newsmedia and print journalism than it is with failing business models or the adoption of new information technologies. Alongside artworks that disassemble and recombine the politics and the lo-fi materiality of newsprint, a series of cultural producers are in residence in the galleries, making work within the confines of the museum itself: the Center for Urban Pedagogy, StoryCorps, Latitudes, the Slought Foundation and a partnership between Joseph Grima (editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture) and Kazys Varnelis (director of Columbia’s Network Architecture Lab).

Grima and Varnelis conceived of the New City Reader as a newspaper of public space, whose content probes “the spatial implications of epochal shifts presently occurring in the information industry.” Over the phone, Grima told us that he is particularly interested in newspapers’ capacity to be “a laboratory for the production of knowledge,” and so he approached the project as a mechanism for mobilizing “a diverse network of collaborators” (about 300 people have taken part in making the New City Reader) to investigate “contemporary spatiality” by re-creating the traditional sections of the newspaper (Culture, Sports, Real Estate, etc.) Like Postopolis, another loose framework for networked knowledge sharing that Grima developed, he refers to the New City Reader as “a pyramid scheme of thoughts” in which he and Varnelis invited a series of guest editors for each issue who, in turn, invited a wide-ranging set of thinkers to probe the intersection where, in the words of New City Reader managing editor Alan Rapp, “urban space and information space converge.” According to Grima, what has emerged is “an incredibly heterogenous and kaleidoscopic snapshot that captures the conflictual nature of the relationship between information and public space.”

Kazys Varnelis recently sat down with Urban Omnibus to discuss how the New City Reader came to be and how it seeks to renew awareness of overlooked spatial and social practices in the context of current affairs. -C.S.

The third floor gallery of the New Museum has been turned into the site of an editorial residency where the New City Reader team edits, designs and produces each issue. Joseph Grima (seated, center) discusses the project with a museum visitor | Photo by Benoit Pailley, courtesy of the New Museum

Urban Omnibus: How did the New City Reader come to be?
Kazys Varnelis: Joseph Grima and I were already talking about working together when he received a call from Richard Flood at the New Museum who was beginning the curatorial process for “The Last Newspaper.” Joseph and I were talking about how in the 1960s, artists and thinkers connected to obsolete practices in order to re-imagine contemporary possibilities. Newspapers are not yet obsolete, but we wanted to go back to earlier methods of producing and consuming newspapers as a way to investigate critically a variety of trends and practices in the contemporary city.

Dàzìbào during the Cultural Revolution | via benoitvidal.com

Joseph immediately suggested a model he had seen in China, the Dàzìbào (大字报), or wall-mounted newspaper, meant to be read — and presumably discussed — in public. Then I began to do research into 19th century New York. A fascinating book called City Reading explains the proliferation of print culture in New York on the facades of buildings. In the 17th and 18th centuries there weren’t many signs on buildings. There actually weren’t any street signs until the 1820s – imagine wandering around New York without any street signs! I remembered from my childhood in Chicago seeing newspapers on walls, and wondered if there was something in this forgotten practice that was worth reclaiming.

Right now, each edition of the New City Reader is mounted on the façade of Storefront for Art and Architecture, in the window of New Museum and also up at Columbia. We had initially hoped for it to be posted in more sites but the realities of permissions, labor, etc. prevented that.

"Editorial," edited by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis

So is the project more about interrogating the practice of sharing information in public or more about critiquing the shifts that the information industry finds itself in?
Both. On one hand, we have the ability to take advantage of some of the technological shifts that decrease the need for the heavy machinery of printing presses. It has only been a couple decades that we have been able to do this kind of thing on a computer, and only ten years that it’s been realistic to do this on a laptop. But while we are taking advantage of those shifts, we are also suggesting that some things are getting lost in the process: like this practice of collective reading, for example, which was pretty common here in the 19th century. If you think about collective television viewing, you might envision some images of people gathered around a TV set watching the Apollo landing or the JFK assassination. These days, I think, that kind of collective sharing of media is reserved exclusively for soccer matches.

"City" | Detail of a diagram showing the New York Times offices during the 1977 blackout

In one of your pieces for the New City Reader, you’ve written about the “interdependence of infrastructure, information and social stability.” Tell me more about that idea.
A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately is on this topic. And I think the moment of the blackout in July of 1977 – which was the subject of the “City” section, the first edition of the New City Reader – really signifies this interdependence. Twelve years previous, in 1965, there was a blackout that resulted in very little crime. But the 1977 blackout – with the economic stagnation, municipal bankruptcy and cuts to public services over the previous decade – resulted in mass rioting and looting, with parts of Bed-Stuy and the Bronx in flames, and the total breakdown of the kinds of societal networks that had previously kept the city afloat. We are now so comfortable with the idea that the City can’t possibly collapse. Yet the massive government debt and bad public-private partnerships that led to the fiscal crisis of the ’70s are perhaps not so unimaginable today: just the other day the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how problematic municipal bonds are.

As part of our broader objective to show how connected the newspaper is to the city, we were interested to probe a potential link between newspapers and the prospect of urban collapse. Harvey Molotch’s influential 1976 essay “The City as Growth Machine” described how certain interests see growth as the only possible move for cities. Growth, as we’ve seen in most recent economic crisis, often leads to unsustainable conditions. We’ve all heard that finance, insurance and real estate (the so-called FIRE economy) drive this ideology of growth. But newspapers have traditionally been a part of this as well, with business models based on growing circulation, real estate advertisements and so on. That’s why in times of economic contraction, the newspapers rarely raise any kind of alarm.

"Culture," edited by D-Crit (detail)

On one hand, it seems like the project seeks to critique newspapers as complicit with a lot of trends you find problematic in contemporary cities. On the other hand, it seems like it is issuing a call for civic activities that are shared among strangers, whether that’s reading in public or some other form of collective action.
There is certainly a call for more collective action. There is also a call for other kinds of voices to be included in newspapers. Typically when we think of newspapers, we think of them as media that simply communicates news. But they have a huge amount influence on the physical city. Just as the newspaper plays a role in Molotch’s growth machine thesis, the newspaper also helps to determine the architectural face of the city, particularly in the last ten or fifteen years, when I think there hasn’t been very good architecture at a top level. I think that, in a way, newspapers are partly to blame for this incredible embrace of starchitecture, of fame, of wanting to have dinner with the hot shots.

"Real Estate," edited by Mabel Wilson and Peter Tolkin (detail)

What does it mean to you that the New City Reader is “a newspaper of public space”? Does this subtitle refer only to the proposed act of collective reading? Or are there other spatial implications that you wanted to interrogate?
I think the idea has to do with the overlapping of different aspects of public space and the public sphere. For Habermas, whether it was the salon or the coffee house, the street or the city itself was a public space, and the public sphere required places where people read and discuss the things that they read.

You think of something like the old Berkeley tree stump — there used to be a tree stump in the middle of Berkeley where anybody could get up and give a speech at any time of day. You can imagine that people might, in public, respond to this condition, to someone making a proposal of some kind publicly, be it on the left or the right. And that’s something that I feel we don’t do much at all today. The Internet reinforces a kind of balkanization where I tend to read one political spectrum of information and other people tend to read another political spectrum. We also tend to live in places that fit us politically, I think.

"Leisure," edited by Beatriz Colomina, Spyros Papapetros, Britt Eversole and Daria Ricchi (detail)

So is the New City Reader an instrument to replicate the Berkeley Tree Stump or Speakers’ Corner, where contributors are invited to offer an opinion?
You could say the whole thing is an editorial project more than it is a reporting project.

My idea was to do it in a set of sections – Editorial, Sports, Culture, Real Estate, etc. – so, in the end, you have a giant newspaper. Then we decided we were going to look at the section titles and try to get interesting people with exciting things to say – in some cases very political, in some cases less so. In the end, pretty much every project had a degree of political content, which we welcomed.

As a newspaper, we certainly wouldn’t say this is a work of disinterested reporting. Everyone was motivated to do something. But the “disinterestedness” of traditional newspaper reporting is itself a bit of a mask. As an academic, I try to figure out the agenda behind everything. And I do feel like newspapers have a very clear stated agenda that does appear in their reportage, it just happens to be masked a little more. It appears at the level of editing, at a level of what content is selected, at a level of who is hired and what a newspaper chooses to cover.

"The Last Newspaper," 3rd Floor | Photo by Benoit Pailler, courtesy of the New Museum

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New City Reader contributing editors:
CITY: Network Architecture Lab | EDITORIAL: Joseph Grima & Kazys Varnelis | CULTURE: D-Crit, School of Visual Arts | SPORTS: Jeannie Kim & Hunter Tura | LEISURE: Beatriz Colomina, Spyros Papapetros, Britt Eversole & Daria Ricchi, Media & Modernity at Princeton University | FOOD: Will Prince, Krista Ninvaggi & Nicola Twilley | REAL ESTATE: Mabel Wilson & Peter Tolkin, SideProjects | BUSINESS: Frank Pasquale & Kevin Slavin | LEGAL: Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture at Goldmsiths | LOCAL: Geminidas & Nomeda Urbonas (Nugu) & Saskia Sassen | POLITICS: common room | MUSIC: DJ N-RON & DJ/rupture | STYLE: Robert Sumrell & Andrea Ching | SCIENCE: David Benjamin & Livia Corona | WEATHER: Jeffrey Inaba, C-Lab | OBITUARIES: Michael Meredith & Hilary Sample, MOS | CLASSIFIEDS: Leagues and Legions

New City Reader Staff:
EXECUTIVE EDITORS: Joseph Grima, Kazys Varnelis | MANAGING EDITOR: Alan Rapp | ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: John Cantwell | ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Brigette Borders, Daniel Payne | EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Pantea Tehrani | ART DIRECTOR: Neil Donnelly | DESIGNER: Chris Rypkema | EDITORIAL CARTOONIST: Klaus | BLACKOUT! CARTOONISTS: Momo Araki, Alexis Burson, Leigha Dennis, Kyle Hovenkotter | WEB DIRECTOR: Jochen Hartmann

And building a movement is exactly what Carol Coletta, president of urban advocacy non-profit CEOs for Cities, and Jake Barton, principal of the media design firm Local Projects, set out to do when they came up with this idea. This week in Chicago, CEOs for Cities is convening what it calls a “Challenge Event” where it will be discussing its ambition for everyone in the city to get where he or she needs to go without owning a car. To that end, for the past few weeks Chicagoans have been asked, through ads in subways, buses and newspapers, “What would encourage you to walk, bike and take CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) more often?” Read on to learn about how Carol and Jake came up with this idea, and what they plan to do with it next. And get ready for when Give a Minute hits New York next year. -C.S.

The Give a Minute interface. Click image to launch giveaminute.info.

What is Give a Minute?

Jake Barton: Give a Minute is a new way to create public participation and conversation at a citywide scale. It allows for the asking of a question (or questions) to an entire city simultaneously. Instead of looking at the way cities work as a sort of zero-sum game of limited and finite resources, Give a Minute seeks to identify and then deploy questions around shared priorities; questions that tap into the interests of the general population as well as those of different city leaders and organizations that might be able to put changes into practice.

Carol Coletta: Nobody thinks that public engagement works very well in America. You can certainly see from trends in voting and other indicators that we have opted out from public life in many ways. Public life in a democracy shouldn’t be so painful and depressing that you would rather watch Dancing with the Stars than make your voice heard. And a lot of elected officials would rather slit their wrists than attend a community meeting.

So we started to ask ourselves, can we do it differently? Can we imagine community engagement in which people are not just checking a box, but really engaging? When I became familiar with the work of Local Projects, I approached Jake and said, “Hey, I have a project for you. How would like to help reinvent public life in America?” And he said, “Okay.”

“For most people, public meetings try your patience; they are hostile and certainly no fun. Give a Minute is an attempt to make participation fun.” –Carol Coletta | Photos by Chris Schneider.

Jake Barton: The question Carol was really asking was “How do you redefine public participation in the 21st century?” And the solution involved using existing technologies to facilitate a conversation and focusing or structuring that dialogue in a constructive way.

As they exist now, most contemporary forms of participatory activity in the public sphere invite critique: if you put forward a plan and put a microphone in front of it, people are going to critique it. And, because community meetings happen in physical space in a very restrictive amount of time, the only people who go are those who already care about the issue at hand, who have the time and disposition to make their voices heard, or the people who are most polarized on either side of the debate. For Give A Minute, we wanted to lower the barriers for entry into constructive dialogue focused around positive collective change rather than specific complaints.

The project emerged from a series of challenges that CEOs for Cities has issued to specific cities – including Detroit, Indianapolis, Memphis, Grand Rapids and others – across the nation as part of their US Initiative.

Carol Coletta: Which is a national initiative that imagines opportunity, community, connectivity, livability and optimism as best achieved through good urbanism. It came out of frustration that a lot of things aren’t working. We can’t continue to drive as much as we do, consume as much as we do, under-educate ourselves as much as we do, vote as little as we do – essentially ignore the public realm as much as we do.

Creating Cities that are of, by and for US from CEOs for Cities on Vimeo.

We want to make a different future compelling so that people will move forward to meet it, not because they are scared of today but because they are excited by a shared vision for tomorrow.

We’ve come up with what we call the Declaration of Interdependence, which articulates some of the values we would like our shared urban future to uphold. For example, on the topic of connectivity, we want a future in which we can realistically say: “We can go where we need to go without owning a car.” On the topic of community, we want a future in which we can say: “We can engage in a robust public life.”

Jake Barton: Our first Give a Minute question in Chicago was related to CEOs for Cities’ “connectivity challenge.” The question we wanted to ask was, “How can we get you where you are going without driving a car?” But, in an effort to engage as much of the general populace of the city as possible, a lot of work went into figuring out how best to ask that question. The final phrasing is: “Hey Chicago, what would encourage you to walk, bike or take CTA more often?” Chicago is serving as our test case for the platform as we work on expanding the project to other cities. When we launch Give a Minute in New York City next year, we hope to address sustainability in some way. We’re talking to the city government about what questions might be most useful.

But before we came up with the platform, we started with a lot of ethnography, a lot of observation of existing systems on different scales. From the beginning, we had a sense that we wanted our system to be based on mobile apps, texting and websites, so that it could feel as open and universal as possible. It is clear that, of all the communication technologies available at this point, texting has the most penetration.

An early prototype for the Give a Minute interface

We also spent a lot of time working on how to motivate people to participate. The idea that we landed on was to reinforce that people’s answers are valued by attaching the questions to what we are calling “response leaders.” The response leaders are a way to make clear that the project was about dialogue – if there is someone specific asking the question, and reading the answers, members of the public will be more likely to respond. The response leaders that we have in Chicago are the head of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), the head of a bicycling advocacy group and the head a private company that builds bicycling accessories. The idea is that by texting or using the mobile app or website to answer the question, you are not just communicating with government alone, but with a coalition of leaders from private, public and non-profit sectors. It’s collective action combined with conversation with specific individuals.

Some responses to the question, "Hey Chicago, what would encourage you to walk, bike or take CTA more often?"

So, specific leaders are asking the questions and citizens are sharing their ideas, but to what extent are subsequent actions designed into the process?

The satisfaction of simply being asked isn’t going to last for a very long time if nothing ever changes. But, on the other hand, once I’m asked – as someone who is not a transit expert but who does ride the CTA every day – once I’m asked to share an idea about what would get me to walk, bike or take public transportation more often, then I’m going to start thinking about how the conditions for walking, biking or transit ridership could be better. And once I start thinking like that, I’m going to ask, “Why isn’t that on the agenda? Are we talking about it? How do I make sure we are talking about it?”

The simple notion that Give a Minute has opened up a way for me to express my personal feelings and ideas without having to look up the CTA’s phone number or email address or trying to figure out who in the world might be listening; the fact that I send in an idea and get an instant response and a thank you – these little things make a big difference in changing the perception of public participation.

Jake Barton: The system is a space to get users of city services to make their voices heard. We want to make a hierarchy and database out of the input, but any actions that ultimately result from that feedback require another, deeper step. So I think it will be on a city-by-city case. We have plans to create proof points around the system itself, so when people text something they get an actual response from someone who is paying attention. Based on our work in Chicago, I think the cities understand what’s required to make the system feel functional and responsive and that will be built into future partnerships.

Our hope is that people, whether groups of citizen responders or city agencies or other kinds of coalitions, will be able to create actions out of the answers themselves. Essentially, Give a Minute can bring together a bright idea, a group of people that can make that happen, a group that feels passionately about this concern, and a group that can be deployed when and if we are trying to rally support for x, y or z issue.

How does Give a Minute work in practice?

Jake Barton: In Chicago we had ads in the Chicago Tribune, around 500 donated ads from the CTA running on buses and trains, and then just word of mouth. People can also choose to post their answer to their Facebook or Twitter status, which helps their friends hear about the project.

In the current, beta version, the website simply groups the answers chronologically. Going forward, we will group them by common interests. For example, in the case of the Chicago question, we can group all the biking people together and then within that group we can have a sub-group for bike lane advocates, bike safety advocates, etc. That allows us to message those sub-groups directly to help turn common interests into actions.

A Give a Minute poster in the Chicago public transit system | Courtesy of Local Projects

Carol Coletta: Identifying these interest groups will allow users to go find other people with shared priorities and get together to do things that don’t necessarily need government intervention.

Jake Barton: Some ideas that may be floated through Give a Minute recommend government action – like, we should build a light rail, or pay more attention to places open after midnight. Other kinds of answers – like, we should make a pocket park in my neighborhood, or there’s this vacant lot we should make into something cool, or we should start a walking group in my neighborhood – are exactly the type of things that groups of private citizens can take on. For actions that can be addressed by citizens meeting in physical space, we’ve talked about kicking out some of the next steps to meetup.com (if the next step is getting strangers to meet in physical space) or Kickstarter (if the next step is micro-fundraising to help start a pocket park, for example).

Give a Minute aspires to be the kind of system that can support both of those types of answers – those that require government action and those that can lead to self-organized action – simultaneously. Because, right now, all the existing crowdsourcing platforms take a big picture approach and a lot of cities don’t have the funds or political will to work like that.

A lot of current technologies that are working now on city-scale questions are all based on a pyramid structure, where it is presumed that there is one golden idea that should rise to the top. Give a Minute works differently: it’s not about sourcing ideas that haven’t been floated before, it’s a matter of building enough momentum and political will to actually implement change.

So it’s as much about movement building as sourcing information and ideas?

Jake Barton: Exactly. It is using the sourced information to hopefully build a movement – that was the idea.

Carol Coletta: It is legitimately both. Simply asking people in Chicago about what would make them walk, bike or take transit more often will, we think, encourage them to walk, bike and take transit more often. It really is that obvious.

Testing the idea in physical space | Courtesy of Local Projects

How will you measure success?

Jake Barton: Of course, one goal has always been to make participation as easy as possible, so we have multiple platforms and we like to capture people anywhere that we can – texting when you’re bored on the subway, or participating through Facebook or Twitter when you see your friends doing the same. But the trick is to make sure that the questions are both compelling and make sense but also that they have a productive aspect to them. You can ask dumb questions and get a ton of participation, but we want to ask the best questions possible that will actually spur people to participate.

I think one measure of success would be if Give a Minute could actually produce enough political capital to help cities make changes. We don’t have one specific approach that we are pushing as a metric of success. This is an experiment to try to help cities create a more qualitatively successful approach themselves.

Carol Coletta: We recognize that we are still dancing in the dark a bit. This is the first of what will surely be many iterations of the project, so we are out there learning. But ultimately, our goal is to reinvent public engagement in ways that are more suited to contemporary democracy. Without a robust public life, democracy suffers, our cities suffer and we suffer. So, call me ambitious, but that’s what success looks like for me.