Three weeks ago, Mayor Gilberto Kassab of São Paulo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York met in São Paulo as part of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and shared their particular strategies to meet the challenges of climate change. It’s clear that both mayors take sustainability seriously, and their administrations have adjusted their priorities accordingly.

São Paulo is similar to New York in many ways. Both cities are big and growing. They attract the best and brightest, the dreamers and the strivers, and as a result they have a rich cultural life and diversity. They also both face similar problems, from housing solutions to open space access to efficient transportation.

Everything I think I know about good urban design comes from what I know about New York, and working at the New York City Department of City Planning. But recently, I had an opportunity to work for three weeks with the São Paulo city government as part of a professional urban design exchange organized by SP Urbanismo, a public-private agency under the Secretary of Urban Development. And so, equipped with the principles I’ve learned here — and barely any Portuguese — I briefly stepped onto the front lines of the enormous challenges of rapid and unplanned urbanization.

TRAFFIC
One of São Paulo’s priorities is to mitigate its notorious traffic jams. A Paulistano can spend up to three hours each day waiting in traffic and most of their traffic planners believe that the only way to reduce congestion is by adding more road. However, the land-use planners I worked with see the importance of investing in mass transit, and that adding more road results in more cars and more traffic. We talked a lot about how easily São Paulo could become a walkable city. A walkable city needs to have complete neighborhoods: a concentration of density around mass transit, a mix of uses, innovative architecture and design standards for streets and public space. These are the principles on which São Paulo was originally built.

In São Paulo’s old city center, a mix of Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts buildings crowd together around spacious pedestrian streets and continuous networks of public parks. Trolleys once ran on the tree-lined streets and every apartment building or office building had ground floor shops. In 1940, it was a city of about 1.3 million people living in an area roughly similar to the size of Brooklyn. The city center today retains the idyllic pedestrian-friendly DNA apparent in the grainy photos from the 1930s, but now the retail is low-end, many of the great old buildings vacant and covered with graffiti, and many of the parks have been revised over the years by architects fixated on the texture and plasticity of concrete. Since the 1960s, density has been dispersed throughout the city with no apparent pattern, housing has been separated from other land uses, and traffic engineers have guided the major public infrastructure expenditures to serve the unchallenged primacy of car-based transport.

Currently the planners in São Paulo are proposing several urban redevelopment projects that would recreate this vibrant mix of uses and density around transit. But it’s an effort being met with resistance and fear of change. Packed auditoriums of angry residents denounce the projects in fiery oratory, worried that adding density will add more cars and more traffic, not alleviate them as planned. New York sees its own share of conflict and debate over issues in the public realm, but here the City is working hard to create a mutually-supportive alliance between advocates for a greener city, transit-oriented development and safe affordable housing. The planners in São Paulo need more allies to help them make their case.

OPEN SPACE
Flying over São Paulo, you can see a seemingly endless expanse of city, a wide variety of single family houses and pencil towers. You might notice patches of green around the towers, but you won’t see much public open space. Working with São Paulo’s planners, I began to understand that this pattern of prioritizing private open space over public open space is deeply embedded in their regulations. Setback rules push buildings off the street; parking requirements are uniformly high, roughly one space per inhabitant; most of the city is zoned at a low floor-to-area ratio, between two and four. And there is a growing middle class that wants to live in high rises — which demand substantial parking provisions, security fences and significant open space on the lot, which is offered as a private amenity to the residents. But anyone on the other side of those tall fences is left walking on narrow sidewalks, creeping along what feels like a prison wall.

Mayor Kassab is pushing back against these regulations. He has made open space a high priority, constructing 66 new parks and planting nearly 200,000 new trees in the last five years, a much needed greening. Here in New York, we’ve seen Mayor Bloomberg lead his strategy for New York’s open space with a directive to bring each New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a public park. To achieve that goal, we’ve discovered new opportunities for public space where we can find them: on abandoned rail lines, former roadbeds like Times Square and formerly inaccessible waterfront industrial sites; and have worked with developers to provide high quality, publicly accessible, privately-operated open space.

HOUSING
A third priority for São Paulo is how to provide safe and affordable housing for the estimated three million people who currently live in precarious settlements. These notorious favelas occupy land that is often on steep slopes or flood prone areas. The daily conditions in these homes are fraught with poverty, crime and disease. Seasonal floods frequently cause landslides and lead to dozens of deaths.

São Paulo’s housing agencies are employing two major strategies to address this housing crisis. The first is to bring roads and infrastructure through the existing favelas, a process that the housing ministry calls “urbanization.” This model avoids displacing existing communities as much as possible, yet it fails to provide housing at the necessary scale — the government has set their target at providing one million new units in the next fifteen years. The second strategy is to find a very dense model of housing that can be expediently planned and constructed, safely located, strongly built and easily connected to roads and to the municipal infrastructure. To meet this vast demand, they have adopted a familiar model: “towers in the park.”

In the mid-20th century, Robert Moses and the authors of the 1961 Zoning Resolution adopted the towers-in-the-park model with the stated goal of replacing New York’s slums. But over time we’ve seen the shortcomings of this model. Yes, towers in the park offer great advantages in terms of concentrating infrastructure, and being able to execute projects quickly and affordably. They can also provide individual dwelling units that enjoy a lot of light and air and standardized layouts which simplify the economic model, making them easy to scale and repeat. But these virtues have to be weighed against the vices that we’ve come to know. Building gated housing complexes, cut off from the neighborhood street life, reinforces isolation and creates an insecure environment. New York is now turning towards affordable housing projects that are designed to integrate with the surrounding community to create a stronger sense of public life in the neighborhood and transform the urban design of the area.

RESILIENCE
Public transportation is good for cities… right? That’s something that I thought needed no explanation. But I had a debate recently with my boss, Alex Washburn, about which form of transportation has done the most harm to cities. To me, it’s obvious that automobile-centric urban design wreaked a sudden and complete havoc on the American landscape. It only took one generation for much of the United States to go from towns, farms and railroads to suburbs, strip malls, and interstates. Today, other cities all over the world, especially those that are experiencing rapid economic growth, seem to be following this bad example. As I sat in the back of a cab for two hours on my way to a meeting in São Paulo, I noticed the narrowness of the sidewalks, the absence of pedestrians or bikes, the ubiquitous walls, the apparent single-use zoning all around me. All of this to serve the consumer demand for cars. And it’s happening all over the world. It may be years before these cities feel the full effects: the degradation of civic space, the expense of providing services and infrastructure over a widely sprawled area, and the increase in chronic diseases because people walk less.

Even so, Alex says that airplanes may be guiltier, because for many years precocious urban designers (like me) have flown all over the world and put forward their big ideas to politicians and builders. You could call this “flyover urbanism.” On one such mission, Robert Moses came to Brazil in the 1950s to help plan highways, helping to set the direction of its current urban design trajectory.

But planning and prodding can only do so much, and no city can “leapfrog” past the mistakes others have made, or copy their successes. Great cities will always be shaped by forces of economy, politics, nature and pure chance. There is not one course of history which all cities will follow, nor one destination we all seek to reach. Also, cities don’t leap.

Cities might not leap, but every city has its own flow. The forces that govern that flow — “why” we do things — might be similar between places, and we may even learn together the “how,” but we must be wary of copying the “what.”

São Paulo has an elevated highway called the Minhocão that runs through a neighborhood that has strong potential for redevelopment. There is some debate about the utility of this highway to the traffic network, and so it has been closed on Sundays to allow people to use it recreationally. I was asked by officials if I thought this could be São Paulo’s High Line. With this internationally-acclaimed example in mind, architects and engineers have begun to make plans for capping the elevated highway with a park, thus creating even more obstruction of light and air to the public realm below. Trying to recreate the High Line on the Minhocão is copying the “what.” Great urban design projects cannot be dropped from an airplane. But perhaps principles can parachute in to offer a little help. The principle of the High Line is that we can create an invaluable resource out of something that had been thought of as an unwanted remnant of another age.

I have wondered if what Tolstoy famously said about families is also true of cities: that they are unhappy in different ways but happy in similar ways. It would be a boring world if all cities were the same. But it is not our particular unhappinesses that make us different. In fact, our problems seem to be getting more and more universal. What makes us unique is the way in which we deal with these problems, using our own local ingenuity. I once heard a story about an artist who lived in a beautiful, but sparsely furnished, house for very little rent. The landlord gave him a deal because once a year the house is completely under water. The genius is in the adaptation.

.

All photos by Thaddeus Pawlowski.

Thaddeus Pawlowski is Associate Urban Designer for the Office of the Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning. He works on large scale neighborhood and infrastructure projects including the redevelopment of Penn Station area and Hudson Yards. He has previously worked at the Office of Emergency Management where he developed “What if NYC…” a design competition for post disaster urban housing. He earned a Master in Architecture and certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Pittsburgh.

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

Factories have taken advantage of the efficiencies of verticality for decades. Through her research, Rappaport analyzes the evolution of factory design and the impact of shifting economies and markets on how and where manufacturing spaces are built, and uses that history as a basis for exploration of contemporary trends and next steps, including how recent technological developments in cleaner manufacturing processes might allow for greater integration of all aspects of urban living. By engaging designers and planners in that conversation, she hopes that this will be a first step towards redefining and reinvigorating urban industry. -V.S.

Toni-Molkerei Factory, diagram of system processes, Zurich, 1974-76 | © A.E. Bosshard and H. Widmer

In the future, cleaner and greener production methods could make vertical urban factories the new engines of urban revitalization, encouraging both economic growth and urban vitality as well as offering more sustainable solutions with production systems such as just-in-time manufacturing or increases in recycling. A missing part of the sustainable picture is where and how urban industry can contribute to new self-sufficient urban paradigms. With my ongoing project Vertical Urban Factory, the first phase of which is currently on view at the Skyscraper Museum, I want to provoke conversation about the demise of urban manufacturing and call on planners and architects to redefine and reimagine urban industry and its integration with city life. 

Throughout architectural history, the factory has been a place of design innovation for engineers and architects, a typology that provided freedom to explore new material and spatial organization. Nineteenth century vertical urban factories capitalized on power resources of water and then steam, harnessing energy through mechanized systems and gravity conveyances. The proximity of labor, transportation hubs and entrepreneurial energy in dense urban clusters meant that raw materials could flow directly onto factory floors and assembled products could be distributed to local markets in an integrated, industrial, urban cycle.

Fiat Lingotto, roof test track, Turino, 1913-26 | Courtesy of Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat

As the 19th Century gave way to the 20th, two main types of vertical factories dominated the urban landscape: the integrated and the layered. In the integrated factory, workers run the production flows from top to bottom, or vice versa, as components or raw goods are mixed, sorted or assembled, then carried by automated or gravity-feed conveyors or chutes. Examples include Albert Kahn’s design for Henry Ford’s 1909 Highland Park factory in Detroit and Giacomo Matte-Trucco’s Fiat Lingotto factory, in Turin, Italy.

The layered factory has separate stacked floors, occupied by one or more companies that share common areas and services such as lobbies, elevators and power. While the building is multi-storied, the processing may be on all floors, a single floor or gradually expand to other floors, as in the New York’s Garment District or the Starrett Lehigh Building loft spaces. Usually built as speculative properties, they are a resource for those who have smaller scale operations or less capital.

Ford Factory, Highland Park, Detroit, 1910 | © Albert Kahn Associates

During WWII, demand for larger scale, horizontally-oriented operations increased, and these vertical types began to disappear. Factories were suddenly windowless, hermetically sealed spaces with air conditioning and blackout panels. Eventually, a global system of expansive highway networks, container shipping and standardized digital supply chains turned manufacturing into a widespread series of vast groundscrapers. Companies became sequestered in industrial districts, leaving vacant urban sites behind and taking jobs with them. The idea of the urban factory as a place that participated in the city became marginalized and segregated from popular notions of urban vibrancy. Industries continued to move further from their prime markets, shifting economies and production methods. Today, digital connections between consumers in retail spaces and the factory floor have resulted in mass-customization, transforming the traditional demand-supply circuit.

Large-scale industry, for the most part, has left cities. But, in spite of this spatial and economic shift, significant vertical urban factories have developed in the past ten years, all of which are seeds of ideas that can inspire us for the future. Three types of contemporary manufacturing spaces have emerged: the Spectacle, the Flexible and the Sustainable. The “spectacle” factory is iconic in design, often with the intent to represent a company brand. The VW Gläserne Manufaktur (The Transparent Factory) by Henn Architekten in Dresden (2001), for example, advertises its clean manufacturing processes through the transparency of its walls.

VW Gläserne Manufaktur (The Transparent Factory), Dresden | Courtesy of Henn Architekten

The “flexible” vertical urban factory, often located in existing loft spaces, is easily changeable to fit new machinery and adapt to economic flux. In Los Angeles, for example, American Apparel has reused former eight-story factories for their integrated vertical production line.

The “sustainable” vertical urban factory can perform multiple functions and integrates ecological building with a variety of manufacturing systems. The current redevelopment of hundreds of acres of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a prime example of this type of urban industrial redevelopment project.

American Apparel factory | Courtesy of Jessica Varner. Photo by Yan Wang

Cities offer valuable advantages for industrial sustainability. Density allows for shared resources that can support industrial symbiosis — one factory’s heat waste fuels another. Nano and biotech companies, such as those in the Bizkaia eco-industrial park in Bilbao and the new CleanTech corridor along the Los Angeles River, have formed clusters in industrial zones to use proximity to their benefit. Imagine the New York waterfront returning to its manufacturing strength as clusters of vertical factories, linked by water, high-speed elevated rail systems or overhead conveyances, become hubs of production and distribution.

But the benefits of urban factories exist across scale. Today’s urban industry requires a redefinition: to embrace smaller scale shops with highly-skilled labor, the production of niche goods, such as furniture, food, garments or high-tech products, and a collaborative environment where designers (who are often city dwellers) and fabricators work together on high-design items.

With rising costs of oil, manufacturers will need to produce locally to save money, a shift that will also help to limit CO2 emissions. Methods in industrial management, such as lean manufacturing, just-in-time production and cradle-to-cradle recycling, are beginning to reduce production waste. Goods made on demand, without stockpiled materials, allow for smaller, cleaner assembly plants, wherein workers can produce for a more dispersed network. With the advent of open-source manufacturing software, computer numerically-controlled-machines (CNC) and 3D printers, designers can quickly make prototypes and develop a product in small batches.

The vertical urban factory could be reinvented so that supply meets demand for space and is kept flexible for new and future economiesThe viability of vertical urban manufacturing in our postindustrial urban centers is challenged by rising land prices and must be encouraged through financial incentives and zoning adjustments. Neo-cottage industries could be located in new incubator buildings with government support. Local entrepreneurs with shared resources can operate out of existing loft spaces and former factories as a new production market. Industrial zoning should allow for taller, denser, diversified and performative, rather than prescriptive, development. The vertical urban factory could be reinvented so that supply meets demand for space and is kept flexible for new and future economies.

Besides its economic value, a factory has social value and the potential to be a welcome part of a community. It can engage and educate the public about manufacturing. It might circulate information about processes, elevating workers’ social and cultural significance and further influencing interest in local industry and branding, as has been done with various Brooklyn artisanal food companies. In an area such as the Garment District, windows could allow people to see factory production, like in the VW Dresden factory, and entice people to engage with the products being made, thus participating in the inner workings of the city.

Advancements in ecologically-responsible technology mean that clean manufacturing can exist adjacent to residential spaces, and that work and living can be hybridized in new ways. The architectural and urban issues addressing manufacturing in cities present not only an exciting design challenge of integrated systems, new fabrication technologies and emergent materials, but create a demand for new solutions. Vertical urban factories could produce energy rather than just consume it, and workers could recycle goods, rather than spew them out. This in turn would close the loop of making, consuming and recycling as part of a new urban spatial and economic paradigm.

Vertical Urban Factory, developed by Nina Rappaport and exhibited in its first phase in an installation designed by Mike Tower and Mark Kolodziejczak of Studio Tractor and Sarah Gephart of MGMT Design, is on display at the Skyscraper Museum through July 1. Images courtesy of the Skyscraper Museum and Nina Rappaport.

Buckminster Fuller, unbuilt automatic cotton mill, 1952 | Courtesy of North Carolina State University, College of Design. Photo by Ralph Mills.

.
Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic, curator, historian and educator. She is the publications director for the Yale School of Architecture, where she edits exhibition catalogs, books and the bi-annual magazine Constructs. She directs and curates the project Vertical Urban Factory, which includes an exhibition series, dialogues and a book with Actar Press. She teaches an urbanism seminar, Alternative Urbanism, in the Syracuse in New York City program and has previously taught at Parsons and Yale. She is author of the book Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation (Monacelli Press, 2007), and has written numerous essays on structural design and architecture, and on industrial architecture and the global industrial landscape for journals such as Acadia, Praxis, Perspecta, Scapes, 306090, Architectural Record, Architecture, Tec21, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper and Deutsche Bauzeitung.

She has curated shows on architecture and photography, including an ongoing exhibition of the work of Ezra Stoller’s architectural and industrial photography at the 1050 K Street Galleries in Washington, D.C; “The Swiss Section,” a 2004 exhibition at the Van Alen Institute focusing on infrastructure; and she co-curated “Saving Corporate Modernism” at the Yale School of Architecture in 2001.

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

Tokyo, 2010 | Photos by Vishaan Chakrabarti

This, my tenth and final entry for a Country of Cities on Urban Omnibus, is in essence a highly personal love letter to Japan. For over a year, the wonderful readers of the Omnibus have cheered and jeered as I have relentlessly argued that the United States faces a series of deeply connected challenges: economic decline, energy dependence, oil wars, terrorism, xenophobia, protectionism, mounting debt, and spiraling health care costs. These challenges, while vexing when taken together, are surmountable with the silver bullet of the city. The combined growth of the skyscraper and the subway, I continue to posit, is the best path to keep our nation and our developing planet economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. The recent catastrophe in Japan has shaken me into remembering, however, that the real trailblazers in truly dense urban living have been the Japanese, for which they have largely prospered, and because of which they will overcome the unthinkable triple tragedy they now face.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 2010, during the annual ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing | AFP/ Getty Images / Kazuhiro Nogi

Twenty years ago this August, a group of us went to Japan as graduate students fresh from two months of study in China (where skyscrapers were under construction on the then dirt roads of Shenzen, next to its new train station). I was enthralled by and enamored of a Japan whose towers and trains redefined the West as the underdeveloped world. We rode Tokyo’s surface rail for two days before realizing we hadn’t even been on the subway system yet. Knowing my time in Japan was limited, my father gave me the lifelong gift of a two-week rail pass on the Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, which unbelievably had opened in 1964. August 6th would be the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and we were inspired to see a memorial service that included the coming together of school children from all over the country. Every hotel in Hiroshima was booked, but we discovered that the bullet train made the journey from a distant farming village with an inexpensive, immaculate ryokan in mere minutes. To witness the service was a privilege, as we three were the only gaijin in sight in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park that morning. At 8:16am, the time of the bombing, thousands around us young and old dropped to the ground, essentially playing dead. The city went silent. An ambulance wailed in the distance. Minutes passed like hours, drums started to beat, the people rose from the sidewalks and went about their day, as we, dazed, found ourselves wandering shopping streets replete with American flags and statuettes of Liberty. We would go on to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, and ultimately, with a larger group from MIT, to Tokyo to study the densification of Marunouchi.

The lessons from that trip — the lessons of atrocity morphed into forgiveness, of farm juxtaposed with city, of park transformed to memorial, of verticality imbued with life, of hyper-density enabled by hyper-infrastructure, and ultimately of adversity repurposed for prosperity — would go on to color all that I know and feel about cities, all that I have advocated on these pages, and all that would form my own approach to the memorial at the World Trade Center, to the High Line, to the Hudson Yards and #7 line, and now to both of my ongoing professional passions, urban development pedagogy and the rebuilding of Pennsylvania Station.

Recently and on short notice, I was asked to be the host for a Columbia conference on building technology in Tokyo. Remarkably, because of the tightness of the schedule, I was afforded a helicopter ride from distant Narita Airport to the top of a skyscraper near the conference. During that heavenly twenty-minute joyride I sat gobsmacked by a Tokyo transformed. Twenty years earlier, while smaller towers abounded, skyscrapers were still a controversy, but today they define the morphology of the city. As so exquisitely described in Ian Buruma’s recent article for the Wall Street Journal, the permanence of skyscrapers is a relatively new development in a country so susceptible to natural disaster. Buruma points to traditional construction of wood and paper, and of course to the periodic twenty-year reconstruction of the Ise shrine, as embodying the premise that for Japanese architecture, “the only permanence is its impermanence.”

Farmland, Japan, 2010 | Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

Yet, in a mountainous country the approximate size of California but with the arable land area only twice the size of Massachusetts, Japan houses some 127 million people in a condition that is roughly ten times denser than the United States. In this situation, skyscrapers became inevitable given Japan’s prowess in manufacturing, shipping, information technology, financial services and the arts. Beyond economic rationale, however, density is a way of life in Japan. It is commonplace to find a bar on the eighth floor of a sliver building. In farming communities, freed from the moralizing madness of the Jeffersonian grid, housing is clustered together into tight communities with crop fields dispersed on the perimeter. Urbane society is the glue that holds the entire nation together.

And today, it is that glue that we are witnessing. In their fine nightly reporting, Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta and Soledad O’Brien continually comment on the civility with which the populace responds to water running out at shelters, or long waits for transport, or caring for the elderly. To be sure, this civility can also be linked to an unwillingness to confront bad news at the institutional level, as witnessed by baffling statements from the government, by obfuscation from Tokyo Electric Power, and by the general bureaucratic malaise that has stagnated Japan’s economy for well over a decade.

But it is at the individual level that we will witness the rebirth of a nation. It is individual workers who hopefully will return power to the cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi. It is individuals who will rebuild the coastline, the retirement communities, and the country’s sense of self-confidence and pride.

To be sure, we should pause to give the Japanese, particularly their architects and engineers, some praise in this calamity. For all the failures of seawalls and power plants, little is said about the fact that most engineered buildings seem to have withstood the massive temblor and tsunami. With some of the strictest building codes in the world, Japanese skyscrapers were not weaponized in this disaster. Astonishing video of Tokyo skyscrapers swaying “like trees in the breeze,” as one onlooker noted, did their job by swaying as designed. In the extraordinary before-after photos of Sendai airport, amidst the flood damage, it is remarkable to see the air traffic control tower and terminal still standing. One can only hope our cities can boast the same in a similar consequence.

Sendai Airport Terminal after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami | Top: Roberto De Vido, Yokosuka, Japan. Bottom: AFP/HO/NHK

It is natural, in the face of this tragedy, to question density and infrastructure. After all, it is one thing to see the horror of earthquakes and tsunamis ravage largely rural nations, yet it is another to see them ravage a nation that in many ways is more technologically advanced than our own. But it is critical to remember that Tokyo rebuilt after both a major earthquake in 1923 and the bombings of World War II. New York is rebuilding after 9/11. Beirut has rebuilt a stunning city on the Mediterranean. Bahrain will hopefully someday rebuild Pearl Square. In their excellent book The Resilient City, Campanella and Vale reveal the capacity of dense modern cities to rebuild.

Density has served Japan well and will continue to do so. One could argue that if their population were spread out, fewer would be susceptible to disaster. Similar arguments were waged during the Cold War in the US, when the Federal government subsidized the sprawling girth of the American middle class to flee both the arms race and race riots. But, as I have attempted to illuminate in these pages, spreading out only leads to oil dependence and further environmental degradation, which in turn leads to sea level rise and fiercer storm surges.

Admittedly, the alternative of densification leaves many questions unanswered. Cities may use less petrol per person, but they require vast amounts of electricity that must be generated efficiently, and with the advent of electric buses and taxis, this demand will only grow. Many hoped that nuclear energy was a partial solution, or at least a bridge to truly renewable energy, but this is an assertion that must be fully scrutinized, with the question of how to store spent fuel again at the forefront. To read that active reactors in California like Diablo Canyon were built to withstand earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 is cold comfort. Perhaps hope can be found in burgeoning waste-to-energy technology.

This earthquake, even at magnitude 9.0, cannot shake our resolve. To the contrary, with the oil fields of the Middle East in ever deepening turmoil, we must extend our hands, heads and hearts to our dear friends across the Pacific, and learn to be more like them in their civility, to live as they do in their density, to build our world much as they have, in Japan, the ultimate Country of Cities.

"In a mountainous country the approximate size of California but with the arable land area only twice the size of Massachusetts, Japan houses some 127 million people in a condition that is roughly ten times denser than the United States." Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

.

This is the tenth and final installment in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…

Pictures of Leo before and after her rape. A document of the difference in her face. Courtesy of Jana Leo.

Neither manifesto nor memoir, Jana Leo’s new book, Rape New York is, rather, a coolly indignant, highly intelligent appraisal of the state of New York’s often predatory real estate reality. The slim volume can serve as a veritable tract on property speculation, urban poverty, and the opacity of the system to the untrained eye. It is also an investigation into the very nature of home and property and the values attached to both, especially in New York.

Through her very painful personal experience of being raped in her Harlem apartment, Jana Leo traces the conditions that led to her assault, always stepping back and extrapolating from the personal to the general and systemic. Recently, Leo, a conceptual artist and architect, gave a reading at the Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, and sat down for a conversation about it with Superfront’s Mitch McEwen. While the audience was composed almost completely of young keen feminists, it would be a serious opportunity squandered to relegate Leo’s text exclusively to the realm of gender studies.

Rather than completely severing her connection to the city, Leo’s experience instead brought her into a different relationship with it, with fresh insights into what she had not been able to perceive as well before. Towards the end of her book she writes, “It is not the events but the people that still make New York interesting to me. … These people, in this New York, create a system of chance in which one finds what one needs when looking for something else. I cannot see the city that I saw when I first came. From the top of the Empire State Building, New York appears seductively manageable, like a toy city. But at ground level the reality is different.”

Even prior to her ordeal, Leo, and her boyfriend, referred to as “A” in the book, never took their surroundings and their new city for granted. The two, originally from Madrid, had just finished graduate studies in architecture in Princeton, and moved to New York to continue their studies, to teach and to practice. In explaining how she and A decided on Harlem as their new home, Leo describes their approach and their choices — they had first looked at Greenpoint and Williamsburg, two affordable areas preferred by Spaniards, but to Leo, “the buildings emulated American suburbia; but they were also bathed in nostalgia for another place: a Europe that no longer exists. Harlem, on the other hand, felt part of New York City. … Unlike Greenpoint, which resembled a work camp for immigrants, Harlem still revealed the power it had to produce culture from displacement.”

Leo and her boyfriend had a running dialogue about their respective research — A’s investigation into prison systems, Leo’s work on domestic space and the urban fabric — and applied it to their new surroundings, discussing real estate, crime and the architect’s mission in the city.

While highly aware of their own economic limitations and those of their new neighborhood, the two still had a steep learning curve in the realities of neglected and crime ridden pockets of undesirable neighborhoods, the callousness of big city landlords, and the near-byzantine rules and remedies of the City’s Department of Housing Preservation & Development and, ultimately, of the City’s criminal justice system. After numerous complaints to the landlord about fixing the locks to the front and roof doors (unaware that in New York landlords are also legally bound to ensure that all doors in a building, including individual apartment doors, must have working self-closing locks; her door did not), Leo was raped in her own apartment, followed into the building by her attacker, a homeless man who lived on the roof.

Five Reports: the codified phrases and bureaucratic procedures of rape | Courtesy of Jana Leo (click to enlarge)

In the book, moving from the individual to the systemic, Leo describes the cynical exploitation of crime by property developers, in the worst cases pushing crime into specific buildings targeted for speculation. Another crude reality she learned is that brokers profit greatly by high turnover — new tenants bring new brokers’ fees and higher rents, and so there is little incentive to invest in a more habitable living environment where someone might want to stay for too long. As Leo observes, “If a third of the tenants in a thirty apartment building moved annually, income doubled, yielding up to an extra one hundred thousand dollars. Eventually the building would fall completely vacant, and was no longer subject to rent stabilization laws. It would then be demolished or converted into luxury housing.” After her rape, Leo traced the rental history of her own apartment and building, which almost seemed a blueprint for these types of machinations.

The circumstances of Leo’s rape immediately immersed her in the actual reality of all the conversations she and A had been having since arriving in New York. Now, along with walking through the city with a new, keen awareness of the gaping holes in its urban fabric, she was similarly acutely aware of the flaws in the administration and legislation of housing laws and practices in New York.  Leo learned how to navigate the various channels in the city through which one can hold landlords accountable, bring criminals to justice, and ensure that various buildings, blocks, and neighborhoods receive the type of civic attention they often desperately need.

Leo ultimately brought a civil suit against her landlord, and her rapist (who, by law, according to Article 16, must be included in such an action for Improper Security). She notes that “the very existence of an article that legally regulates the relations and financial liabilities between the landlord or owner and a rapist gives a clue of how many rapes happen in apartments and inside buildings.”

…
	Interstitial Space | A photo taken by Jana Leo of her staircase the day after her rape. “My perception of the space has changed. This familiar place has been made into something scary.” Courtesy of Jana Leo.

After enough time had passed and Leo gained a more distant perspective, she began projects to address the gaps she perceived in the interweaving systems that “colluded” to create these types of situations. Through the appropriately named Civic Gaps, a small think tank, Leo sought to advocate for the creation of a city agency that addresses areas in transition, those communities in the process of rapid demographic shifts and piecemeal economic development. Transition periods during gentrification have been widely studied and commented on and yet, according to Leo, there are no actual major projects to address them concretely. Along with Civic Gaps, Leo has also created the Fundación MOSIS, back in Madrid. The Foundation takes an even broader approach and engages with the connection of art to cities.

Leo still has great attachment to New York, despite her experience, but she acknowledges that it has radically changed how she sees the physical city. “Now it is like I am experiencing the city from the inside out,” she told me in a recent interview, “almost from inside my body out, I only see interstitial space. It’s funny, when you are an architect you do basic studies, figure/ground – what do you recognize, do you recognize something on top of the table or do you recognize the table. In the city do you recognize the buildings or do you recognize the grid? Suddenly I was in the grid, seeing what is connecting things, seeing a different city.”

.
Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homey beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

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

What follows is the ninth in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events — the climate talks in Denmark, the Gulf Oil Spill, the canceling of the ARC tunnel project — as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. In this installment, he examines the protests unfolding across the Middle East in terms of how urban space, specifically spaces of public assembly, reflects the political priorities of those in power and enhances or prohibits social change. -C.S.

Tahrir Square, February 2011. Photo: Al Jazeera English. Some Rights Reserved. For a clickable interactive map of the protest camp in Tahrir Square produced by the BBC, click here.

As the revolution in Egypt has unfolded, much attention has been paid to the significance of Facebook and Twitter as organizing platforms for the revolutionaries. Indeed, the Mubarak government shut down the Internet over the past few weeks to limit communications, a move that proved futile in either suppressing the uprising or prolonging his rule.

Of equal, if not greater, importance has been the platform (a word that once referred to something exclusively physical) provided by Tahrir Square in central Cairo, the geographic epicenter of the revolt. The breathless images of men and women, young and old, civilian and military, galvanizers and galvanized, together setting up encampments and protests in Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square, give us faith not only in humanity’s common right to assemble but our common expectation that cities, by definition, must provide ever-restless places of assembly.

Public spaces like Tompkins Square, Tiananmen Square and Tahrir Square have been stages for history because they provide the loci for urban gathering, particularly for a city’s youth. After all, if the revolution is to be televised, from where else would it be broadcast? One could argue that without cities and the spaces they inspire, nations themselves would never change.

Escalators in a shopping mall, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Photo: Vishaan Chakrabarti

It’s hard to imagine a nation without public spaces that foster urban values of mixture and inclusion: the closest I have experienced is Saudi Arabia, where I traveled last year. While there are major developed cities to be sure, one must question whether they fulfill basic standards of urbanity. Such standards are not a Western invention or imposition. Islamic civilizations have created some of the world’s great cities, starting with the religion’s original site of refuge and political organizing, the city of Medina (which means “city” in Arabic), and its holiest site, Mecca, to which the pious make pilgrimages in their millions every year.

Yet the unique morphology of contemporary Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, by contrast, stifles the very development of a public realm. With four million inhabitants and growing, Riyadh is virtually devoid of the public space in which forbidden activities such as the sharing of facilities between men and women, fraternizing between unmarried couples, or protests by abused “guest workers” could ever occur. There are very few places of gathering on the streets. There are virtually no cultural institutions that invite the public, such as movie theaters or performance halls. The most significant convening spaces used by the public are shopping malls, prized of course for their air conditioning, but also for the tight control of public behavior by the religious police that malls enable. In other words, the great social and creative mix of cities extolled throughout centuries of urban thought is made impossible in the urban agglomerations of Saudi.

Deera Square, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Photo via Wikipedia

This is not to say there are not public squares in Riyadh. Perhaps the most famous is Deera Square, which ex-pats call Chop Chop Square in reference to the public decapitations meted out to criminals convicted of murder, rape, even witchcraft, for all to witness. For the state-sanctioned activities in Deera Square alone, Saudi Arabia would be an international pariah if it weren’t for the vast oil reserves that fuel our SUVs and McMansions.

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China | Photos, clockwise from top left by Flickr users Jere Dow, Aaron Olaf, Scott SM.

By contrast, Tiananmen Square, also the site of considerable oppression, plays a substantially more nuanced role in both Beijing and for greater China. To be sure, Tiananmen in the summer of 1989 witnessed one of the greatest crackdowns on public dissent in history, but it’s also a place where young children learn to ride their bikes. By dusk, couples stroll through the Square. One encounters the occasional drunk. Even the events of 1989 did not emerge from a unified opposition with a uniform vision of change: organized workers and elite students held down separate parts of the Square with separate goals in mind. To date, I have few Chinese friends who believe the country should have a one-person-one-vote democracy, and generally there is a degree of faith in the central government that would be unthinkable in the United States.

August 28, 1963 | Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. | via arcweb.archives.gov

In the US, we tend to take public spaces and the activities they enable for granted. From the history of protests in Tompkins Square Park, to Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall, to the makeshift memorial built in Union Square after 9/11, it is deeply embedded in our psyche that civil discourse should have a stage on which to play out. While some moments of dissent occurred in contained surrounds like Rosa Parks’ bus, the majority of democracies worldwide will continue to see their hopes and pains played out in sweeping public spaces.

Surrounding Tompkins Square Park, Lower East Side residents protest the forceful closure of Tompkins Square Park. June 1991. Photo by Q. Sakamaki, via Gaia Photos.

In the weeks and months to come, it would be wise for us not to take for granted any emerging democracies that may unfold upon the public squares of the Middle East. The past few weeks were not our best as a nation, with President Obama and Secretary Clinton contradicting each other over the desired timing of Mubarak’s departure. There has been a pervasive sense that our foreign policy establishment, which helped establish the status quo, would prefer that very status quo to the risks of Egyptian self-rule. Instead of giving full-throated support to Egypt’s protesters, some seemed to be arguing that stability may need to overrule democracy as a practical matter, a realpolitik that has consistently placed us on the wrong side of history dating back to our support for the Shah of Iran. People may wearily point to the rise of the Ayatollahs in post-revolution Iran, but do they consider that had we not actively backed a vicious dictator for so many decades prior, Iranians may have been less tempted by such an extremist government? Instead we continue to play the lead role in our “axis of stability” formed by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which understandably wants to maintain our primary peace treaty in the Middle East, but is just as concerned about the movement of oil through the Suez Canal. Again, we seek this so-called stability to perpetuate a lifestyle the world can no longer afford, and we can only resolve by urbanizing our great nation. As Thomas Friedman wrote in Sunday’s Times, “stability has left the building…good riddance.”

And perhaps this is the primary lesson about public space. That beyond our day-to-day needs for it be clean, amenable, and safe, it also has to allow for the expression of instability, for the expression of a world ever in need of change. Change is the essence of urbanity, and Egypt has reminded us that urban space can drive us towards a changed, perhaps unstable, but in the end better world.

This is what we imagine when we imagine a Country of Cities: a country and a world in which urbanity drives us towards a new, untested reality. We imagine our nation as dense and transit-based, so that our needs for gasoline and home heating oil don’t cause our government to back oppressive Middle Eastern regimes. We imagine a country and world in which a horrifying place like Deera Square can someday truly be public. We imagine a world in which pharaohs exit, and liberty prevails.

Protests in Manama, Bahrain, February 2011. At the time of posting, protests were entering their third day in Pearl Square, a traffic circle in central Manama. | Photo by Flickr user Chan’ad

.

This is the ninth in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…

Click to launch slideshow

On December 3rd, I was two weeks into a new job on the Upper East Side. I have rarely spent time on the Upper East Side over my 17 years in New York. It is not a neighborhood that has ever felt welcoming to me, especially in the dark days of mid-winter, when the streets are pitch black at 5pm. So, I was looking for a reason to like this neighborhood where I suddenly found myself five days a week — and that’s when I discovered my love of neon.

The Upper East Side has quite a few excellent neon signs: Goldberger’s Pharmacy, Cork & Bottle Liquors, and the original location of Papaya King, just to name a few. I was charmed. So, when I saw that December 3rd marked the one-hundredth anniversary of neon signage (more on that history in a moment), I decided to take my camera and follow the glow.

And so, I set out to document the neon of New York — working signs only and, for the most part, avoiding chain-store signs that can be found all over the city. I have been told that New York’s neon is unexceptional in comparison to Chicago’s or Portland’s. I wanted to prove otherwise. I also wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) that the quirky, independent New York is still here — it’s not all chain stores, standard-issue vinyl awnings and luxury condos. I too often hear about all the great things that are gone, going or about to go. I needed, in the dark depths of winter, to find good stuff that’s still here.

Click to launch slideshow

The history of commercial neon signs really begin in 1902, when French inventor Georges Claude perfected a technique for liquefying and slowly reheating air, which allowed him to separate out the component gases and thus cheaply extract the trace amounts of the noble gas neon from air. Although the trick of making certain gases glow with electric voltage had already been discovered, suddenly neon was plentiful. Claude demonstrated a long, glowing tube of neon at the Paris Motor Show on December 3, 1910, one hundred years ago. But if you missed this anniversary, don’t worry — there are other neon landmarks to celebrate, including November 8, 1911 when Claude filed for a patent for a “system of illuminating by luminescent tubes,” or January 19, 1915 when the patent was granted. There’s also 1923, when the first neon sign appeared in the US, for a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles. (You can read more about neon’s early history at the American Sign Museum’s website.)

Neon signs, I have learned, don’t always contain neon gas. Different colors are obtained by using neon, argon, helium, krypton, and xenon (all noble gases) singly or in combination, with each other or with mercury, though neon and argon are the most common. The interior of the tube is often coated with phosphors to increase the glow.

Click to launch slideshow

I love neon signs that have a sense of place, that mark a place, that feel unique and evidence their hand-made origins. The glow, the colors, the hum when you get close, the flicker when they need repair. They are lively and engaging. They are landmarks or even icons. A familiar sign can seem like a helpful friend in the dark of the city at night. If I have forgotten which street Old Town is on (as I often do), I know I can just walk up from Union Square and the glow of the sign will catch my eye.

Smaller neon signs often gather in the neighborhood of a great one. Every glimmer seemed to lead me to the next. Are the smaller signs inspired by the glow of the larger? Or do neon sign sellers concentrate their efforts on key locations? Do certain neighborhoods have the right characteristics to encourage the population of neon to grow? I haven’t figured it out yet, though I suspect a combination of all three. Of course, certain business types are more likely than others to feature neon. Liquor stores, bars and strip clubs are all classic spots for neon — but so are parking garages, drug stores, Chinese take-out places and shoe-repair shops. All places you might be in a hurry to find, at night, possibly in an unfamiliar neighborhood — hence the neon.

Not that neon is confined to the metropolis — some of the best neon signs on earth are lighting up old motels off the beaten path or in small towns at the local movie palace. But the neon sign is, for the most part, a cosmopolitan creature.

Click to launch slideshow

I have spent hours darting all over the city in the last two months, visiting neighborhoods I’ve never been to, discovering new signs I’d never seen, stumbling upon half-forgotten landmarks, revisiting old favorites, and encountering for the first time great signs I’d only seen in pictures or during the day time.

So what are New York’s best neon signs? We all have our own aesthetics, of course, and I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to separate my love for a sign from my love of the place it advertises, but there are more than a few stand-out signs worth a visit. The images in this post’s slideshow are some of my favorites.

Click to launch slideshow

Project Neon has only just begun. I’m continuing to explore and document the neon of New York, and I plan to visit one neon-signed establishment each week (both places I have already photographed and new locations) to have a drink, get my shoes repaired, or eat some BBQ. I want to photograph Sunny’s in Red Hook — one of my favorite signs in the entire city — and, of course, the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, which is also a gem. I’ll write about each visit on my Project Neon blog and you can track my progress on this Google Map (blue markers are places I haven’t yet photographed, green markers I have already documented and the red markers indicate my favorites so far). I’m also assembling a field guide to New York City neon, which I hope to expand to other neon-filled cities in the future, and exploring the possibility of making this into an iPhone app.

Some have said that neon’s days are numbered. LED technology has been steadily improving, but the quality of LED light is not even in the same league as that of neon. LEDs are appropriate for many uses, but neon is worth preserving because nothing — not fluorescents, not incandescents, and not LEDs — can replicate its glow. And so I’m going to continue working on Project Neon, documenting the great signs of New York, mapping them, and visiting the businesses that support them. I hope Project Neon will inspire more New Yorkers to appreciate our metropolis’ treasure trove of neon, encourage shop owners to maintain fading or damaged signs, and persuade citizens to support the businesses that light up our city. New York would be a much poorer city without neon.

Click to launch slideshow

What is your favorite New York neon sign? What other cities do you think have good neon? Would you be interested in a field guide to neon for New York or any other city? Speak up in the comments below!

.

All photos by Kirsten Hively. Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. When not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

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

The exhibition of Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway project currently on view at the Cooper Union may appear at first glance to be an academic excavation of a historical artifact, a lesser-known work by a prominent architect best remembered for individual buildings rather than for his visions of the metropolis. Although done under the auspices of a Ford Foundation grant, the Rudolph project was the last – and by then already belated – attempt to bring to life the Robert Moses plan for running a major highway across Lower Manhattan. Why revisit it now?

Must we remain forever trapped between the twin poles of Jacobs and Moses? And, what is the role of architecture in all this?Most visitors, design professionals and laymen alike, predictably — and understandably — shudder at this reminder of Robert Moses’ scorched-earth policy of city building and laud the heroic efforts of Jane Jacobs and her fellow-activists who saved the city by stopping the project – and by stopping Moses, this time for good. At the same time, for some architects and urbanists (including, one imagines, the exhibition organizers) this feeling is mixed with a great deal of envy about the possibility of “thinking big” that no longer seems to exist in this country but is still encouraged — in fact, often mandatory — in Asia and the Middle East. The real value of the exhibition, however, lies not in evoking nostalgia or relief but in prompting a reflection on two very timely questions: Must we remain forever trapped between the twin poles of Jacobs and Moses? And, what is the role of architecture in all this?

Both the excesses of Robert Moses and the achievements of Jane Jacobs have been well rehearsed by now. The particulars of their battle are specific to their time and place but its legacy remains relevant and has become even more urgent. In the intervening years, many in the architecture and planning community have reached a sensible consensus that “No city can survive without the personal engagements beloved by Jacobs, but no city can thrive without master builders such as Moses,” as Edward Glaeser put it in his article in The New Republic last year.

The argument for this balanced view has been eloquently made by a number of critics. They also take pains to remind us that the “good” Moses, who left a legacy of numerous parkland and infrastructure projects still benefiting the public, and who actually managed to get things built, should not be lost in the heat of the battle. But in the real world Jane Jacobs has carried the day. A conversation with practically anyone outside the profession, excepting those with a vested interest in large-scale development, would leave no doubt that, when it comes to urban development, the “small is beautiful, big is ugly” polarity is now accepted as an article of faith across the political and social spectrum. Among the liberal-minded, it is manifest in the non-negotiable Nimby-ism of community activists and even of their non-activist neighbors, and in the current proliferation of grass-roots adaptive reuse initiatives to reclaim small urban parcels for green or other community uses. For the conservatives, it is bound up with the fear of big government, infringement on private property rights and the anathema of  taxation. For the former, the very mention of “thinking big” raises the specter of evil Robert Moses; for the latter, of evil socialism.

To a large extent, this polarity has become so firmly embedded in the public discourse because it has often played out through a number of highly visible battles, with the news media doing its usual best to depict them as dramatic black-and-white conflicts rather than as complex and nuanced issues. But the profession (the word is used here as shorthand for all those professionally involved with the subject) bears part of the blame. Although different ways of thinking about the city have been put forth in academia and in architecture circles, at least in this country most of these ideas never made it out of the insular world of professional discourse and into the mainstream conversation or to the proverbial corridors of power. The one exception is the New Urbanists, whose ersatz nostalgia is, in the final analysis, the logical descendant of Jane Jacobs. They have succeeded in defining the public agenda on behalf of the profession, not only in the popular mind but on the legislative level as well (i.e. the Livable Communities Act currently under consideration in Congress). Even the data-driven approach of PlaNYC is essentially Jacobsean in its privileging of incremental change over massive intervention. There is also perhaps an element of resignation in the face of reality: politically and fiscally, piecemeal adjustments are much easier to implement, especially in today’s social climate.

New York City is in a unique position of being a laboratory of practically every urban condition.But the livability of the city cannot be reduced to bicycle lanes and rooftop farms, however welcome they may be. The city needs a viable and diverse – i.e. not exclusively service-oriented — economic base and a coherent macro-structure. It is as much a matter of practical functionality as of its spirit, its raison d’etre, which makes the city fundamentally distinct from a town. Small towns exist best in a stasis, having achieved a kind of perfection in the here and now. The big city thrives on being visionary, on always trying to imagine what it can and will be, on possibilities of the future. The density and the coexistence of contradictory forces is what makes the city exciting and sustainable, in every sense of the word.

The seeming inevitability of the Moses/Jacobs polarity led to the triumph of the Jacobs camp: who, after all, would vote to replace their neighborhood playground with a sewage treatment plant (never mind that we fully expect our sewage to be treated somewhere)?  But the fallacy of this polarized way of thinking is particularly apparent and relevant now — locally, nationally and globally.

The infrastructure of the larger, denser and older US cities like New York is usually thought of as being already in place; it needs upgrading, maintenance and improvements — but not major interventions. Yet many of the same problems that the Moses projects (including deservedly scrapped ones like LoMEX) attempted to tackle have simply been left to fester for decades and are not likely to go away. There is still, for example, an undeniable need for efficient transport of goods and services from the west bank of the Hudson River to the east bank of the East River – i.e., across or around Manhattan – which was first identified by the Regional Plan Association almost 90 years ago.

New York City is in a unique position of being a laboratory of practically every urban condition. Manhattan and some of the Bronx, with their density, geographic compactness, varied building stock and public transportation network, bear more resemblance to an older European city than to a typical American one. Much of Queens and some of Brooklyn are not dissimilar to a sprawling urban model like LA, with major arterial roads interspersed among disconnected neighborhoods not accessible to one another by public transportation. Some other parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx bring to mind the devastated, semi-abandoned inner cities like Detroit. And Staten Island is our own suburbia, complete with gated communities. The urban and infrastructural issues engendered by each condition run the gamut and mirror the wide range of issues confronted by other US cities which at first glance do not have much in common with New York. The need to integrate the ubiquitous automobile into the urban fabric — the real impetus behind most Moses projects — seems like an antiquated notion to us here, as we have come to a consensus favoring mass transit over the private car, but this hardly applies to most of the rest of the country or even much of the five boroughs. Because of its urban diversity, New York can still be a laboratory which yields results that could point the way for other American cities.

Left: Dubai by fatboyke | Right: nanjing by Proggie

Although the Jacobs/Moses polarity is home-grown, its lessons are just as relevant globally. For a number of historical reasons, European cities were largely spared a Moses and thus had no need for a Jacobs. This, combined with a different political culture, has put many of them in the position of  being able to contemplate and carry out large-scale urban interventions on a scale unthinkable here, without the destruction of historic city fabric.

The urgency of finding a “third way” between the extremes of destruction and fossilization, of megalomania and retrenchment, is nowhere more obvious than in the uninhibited urban development taking place in Asia and the Middle East. Impressive as this building boom may be, it is a top-down process promoted by governments and powerful private interests with close government ties and no public accountability; it leaves destruction in its wake, disregards human and ecological consequences, and mostly produces instant “just add water” cities filled with cartoon architecture. The Moses problem is playing out all over again, except this time on an extreme scale and within systems that do not have the constraints that he had to contend with. The local Jane Jacobs stands no chance of being heard, should she even dare speak up.

As we have learned to value the intricate urban fabric that Jacobs so astutely identified and championed, and are becoming increasingly conscious of the need to adapt and reuse, we also need to recognize that large-scale infrastructure intervention is not only still necessary but will become even more so in the future, as the cities continue to grow. The physical difficulties — and consequent great costs — of these endeavors (e.g. submerging major arteries below grade) will diminish as technologies improve and new ones emerge. But none of this will be possible without those quintessential Moses attributes that are not much in evidence in this country today: political will at the legislative level, political skill at the managerial level, and long-term financial commitment on both.

Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal

Which leaves us with the other question that the Rudolph exhibition puts front and center: the role of architecture. While architecture of most Moses projects can best be described as an afterthought, this incarnation of LoMEX, in the hands of a talented architect at the height of his career, appears to be driven by professional hubris. His relentless and monotonous language goes viral, infesting Lower Manhattan, overwhelming the little that it does not obliterate, and ultimately undermining its own raison d’etre. The experience of gradually absorbing what is on display in the spectacular model of the project is much like the slow dawning of terror one feels in a horror film.

Yet, at the same time, the Rudolph project also attempts to propose something much more interesting: a new form that would integrate architecture, infrastructure and urban space (unlike, say, Park Avenue which simply set up real estate parcels for development). He recognized that, in a dense city, only architecture could transform civil engineering into urban design. Unfortunately, the failure of projects such as his gave modern architecture – particularly that of the large-scale urban variety — a bad name with the general public and drove it to cling to the old brownstone as the sane alternative. As planning has become more of a social science, architectural design has become less of a participant in the conversation about urbanism. Even among architects, Koolhaas and other proponents of “formlessness” — although coming from a different set of ideas, such as the Situationist critique — have, ironically, ended up embracing a view not all that different from Jacobs: that fostering small-scale, unscripted and unpredictable human interaction will, by itself, produce a rich urban social environment.

But the embrace of non-form and the data-driven approach to city-making creates its own set of problems. Architecture, after all, is what renders the city recognizable and comprehensible. We may navigate the city through infrastructure — but we read the city through architecture. Architecture can create a place — infrastructure cannot. The misery of Penn Station and the glory of Grand Central are both shaped by architecture, not by infrastructure, regardless of whether the trains run on time. For this reason alone, architects – and not just planners and policy makers – have a crucial role in framing the discussion about urban design in this century.

.

Paul Gates and Zhenya Merkulova are founding partners of Gates Merkulova Architects LLP. Merkulova was a founding member of The Society of Young Architects, a group formed for the discussion of current ideas in architecture at The National Arts Club. She has written for and has been interviewed by a number of prestigious domestic and international publications, including Liberation and Newsweek. Gates has taught at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and has served as a critic on architectural juries at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His writings and lectures include “Deus Ex Machina: Architecture and the Electronic Media” (A+U) and “Skyscraper Design and Urban Growth.”

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

Access to the Region's Core Project Map, via www.arctunnel.com

We all of course know the story of Noah’s Ark — of massive floods sent by a disgusted God to wipe out our corrupted civilization except for Noah, who, with his family, builds an Ark to save pairs of animals to eventually repopulate the planet.

The contemporary take on the story has some new twists.

The rains, to be sure, are coming. Last week I took my eight-year-old to see Rising Currents before it closes at MoMA. As he stood below the measuring bar, which showed that in his lifetime the water level on our Tribeca sidewalk may be above his head, he stated the truth in the way that only a child can: “That seems bad.”

But before we even conjure the apocalyptic visions of Greenland ice sheets falling into the Atlantic, we need only look at the crippling effect of the last couple of rainstorms in New York — the flooded subways, the combined sewer overflow, the streets near my office at Columbia awash.

Yet in this version of the story, despite the coming floods, there is no Noah, we don’t build the Ark, and the animals just have fun while they can. In this version, we sink the Ark before it gets built.

Yesterday Governor Chris Christie killed the largest mass transit project in the nation, ARC or Access to the Region’s Core. Planned for two decades and considered vital to the lifeline of the northeast corridor as a new tunnel under the Hudson, ARC clearly answered the question of whether we would simply continue to live off of our predecessor’s infrastructure. Or so we foolishly thought.

Citing costs, the rebellious Republican ruled out increasing gas taxes or surcharges in order to plug the budget gap, instead rejecting billions in Federal and Port Authority funds. Unlike the manner in which we funded the extension of the #7 subway, which is now under construction through debt that will be paid off by the future assessed values on the West Side of Manhattan, no such innovation was sought in New Jersey despite reports that clearly showed increased property values in the towns that would be connected to ARC.

Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, put it plainly: “We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.”

Penn Station’s New Jersey Transit Terminal, Thanksgiving Eve. Photo by Flickr user helloturkeytoe.

And when it comes to infrastructure, that pandering is all about roads versus rail. With New Jersey’s state budget under water, downstate politicians in the legislature — many of them Democrats — saw an opportunity to re-route the ARC monies for highway funding. New Jersey’s commuters live largely in the north, of course, but despite their vital economic role in our tri-state region, they have no regional representation to fight for their interests. This is true nationwide. In the development and planning process for the new Moynihan Station often it became apparent that for every dollar spent in the City, an equal dollar had to be spent on a roadway project in upstate New York. This is part of why Hong Kong and Singapore are surging — they are city-states without an urban rural divide. Such is the price of a country of suburbs.

To be fair to a Governor who appears to be attempting fiscal restraint, however, one must also ask why ARC costs so damn much. A friend recently pointed out that not only does China spend approximately fourteen times more annually on rail infrastructure than we do, but that factor probably triples when one accounts for construction cost differentials. Anyone who works in infrastructure in America today knows the ugly realities of this — the construction industry continually prices its way into joblessness, as the thousands of workers who were about to be employed by ARC will soon discover.

No one is advocating for the unprotected labor conditions of China, but we must ask how far the pendulum has swung the other way. Imagine if Noah, in enlisting the help of his children to build the Ark, was confronted with protests for higher allowance and more days off, all while thunderclouds formed and the rest of non-unionized humanity scuttled for cover while living on less. Joint sacrifice led this country to its greatest heights, just as joint selfishness could bring it to its knees.

Indeed, the fate of ARC, which one can only hope is reversible, may signal the fate of us all. With the densest state in America opting for roads over rails, for emissions over ozone, for a country of suburbs over a Country of Cities, all I can do in response is throw up my hands and find disturbing amusement in a quote from Jaws:

“We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

New Jersey Transit, Metropark, New Jersey, 18 Nov. 2008. Photo by Flickr user PhilipC.

.

This is the eighth in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…