PLACEMAKING THROUGH LIGHTING
The City’s plan to make Lower Manhattan more vibrant after dark goes beyond simply installing more lights. The title of the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Request for Proposals, “Placemaking through Lighting,” explains the initiative’s priorities: to use creative illumination to enhance Lower Manhattan’s identity, to attract visitors and investment and to create a sense of place for the area. Some of the vanguard lighting technologies mentioned in the brief include projection mapping, 3D effects and a range of interactive strategies, including motion-activated lighting. According the The New York Times’ City Room, EDC officials and local Community Board members cited the fact that the Financial District loses out on the after-dark tourist foot traffic that small businesses in other neighborhoods enjoy, a concern that motivated the desire to use lighting to “transform the experience of Lower Manhattan at night.”

TRANSIT POLITICS
Transit advocates are angry at the implications of Governor Cuomo’s new tax code on MTA funding. Essentially, Cuomo sets to eliminate a payroll tax from which the MTA receives roughly $320 million and substitute it with a direct state government subsidy. This transformation of dedicated MTA revenue to discretionary funding makes the MTA particularly susceptible towards future budget cuts. Moreover, the new bill, rushed forward by Cuomo, avoided public discourse and “eviscerated” the previous lock box legislation, which made the government responsible for reporting fully the effects of funding cuts ahead of any fiscal re-appropriations. Assuming the MTA subsidies do wither out in the future, Charles Komonoff of Streetsblog did some number crunching to demonstrate the negative effects. In short, New York’s $320 million in tax savings would be offset with nearly $580 million in extra costs. Apparently the difference between $320 million from payroll taxes versus $320 million from direct subsidies is much more than semantics.

IT MIGHT BE GETTING EASIER TO BE GREEN
This week, officials from the Department of City Planning announced the beginning of the approval process for new zoning regulations that would remove impediments for property owners to build green buildings or to retrofit existing buildings with renewable energy technologies such as windmills or solar panels. Other energy-efficient measures that will become easier to implement if the regulations are adopted by the City Council include stormwater retention systems, height exemptions for greenhouses, and the building of walls thick enough to allow for external insulation. According to Amanda Burden, the City’s Director of City Planning and the chair of the City Planning Commission, the changes will amount to “the most comprehensive citywide initiative dealing with energy efficiency and green building in the U.S.” Read the full article on Crain’s.

THE HENRY HUDSON BRIDGE TURNS 75
On December 12th, the Henry Hudson bridge celebrated its 75th birthday. Originally built to accommodate light traffic, it is now one of the most vital and dense transportation nodes in the city, linking Manhattan to the Bronx across Spuyten Duyvil Creek. In celebration of this iconic landmark, the Riverdale Public Library will open a photo exhibit featuring historic photos of the construction and evolution of the bridge over time as well as an archival collection on other bridges built during the Depression. For more background about the history of the bridge, read the press release from MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

PUBLIC AUTHORITIES BLOG
For another view of the government agencies and lawmakers that preside over public works, the Public Authorities blog, a project of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School. Its one of the more recent finds added to our increasingly geeky feedreader and offers an excellent overview of the “laws, practices and proposed reforms relating to state and local public authorities in New York.” Its comprehensive links roundups and its concise and measured summaries of bills or court cases or major capital projects (like the reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge, reportedly among the largest public works projects currently being planned in the nation) will be of interest to anyone whose ears perk up at the mention of terms like “eminent domain” or “utilities reform.” The authors also dip into the history and culture of public decision-making, like in this recent post that recapped a live conversation with Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, a tome sure to be on the shelf of every self-respecting urbanist.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

More than five years later, Atlantic Yards continues to provoke web innovation, with the advent of Atlantic Yards Watch, not a platform for opposition but a self-described “community-based initiative to protect the health and livability of neighborhoods” impacted by the now-under-construction Barclays Center arena and the planned 16 towers. While the arena is the only project building under construction, demolition, utility and railyard work continue, as well as construction staging and development of a massive surface parking lot.

Atlantic Yards Watch, the product of three civic groups concerned about gaps in State oversight, is more than a web site; the sponsors — the Boerum Hill Association, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council and the Park Slope Civic Council — have already partnered with Transportation Alternatives on a survey of illegal parking and hope to hire consultants to analyze issues like traffic.

Very Tight Fit
Atlantic Yards represents a very tight fit — an effort to shoehorn an arena into a residential neighborhood, at its southern and eastern borders, by overriding city zoning that requires a 200-foot buffer zone between arenas and residential districts. So residents near the project site have been submitting regular incident reports — emails, photos, and video — along with links to the associated 311 service requests.

The incident reports offer fodder not only for the Atlantic Yards Watch blog, but also for other media outlets. For example, Atlantic Yards Watch has highlighted the proliferation of rats in the blocks near the 22-acre site, helping focus the attention of a city task force and adding pressure on developer Forest City Ratner to extend abatement efforts beyond the project perimeter. Indeed, on July 14 the developer announced it would buy neighbors new garbage cans as part of a multi-faceted response to the problem.

Atlantic Yards Watch has posted numerous photos of apparent parking violations, including some by construction workers and police officers, leading to sympathetic television coverage. Also, partnering with Transportation Alternatives, Atlantic Yards Watch conducted an offline survey to document the scope of the problem. After that, a representative of Empire State Development (ESD) — formerly known as the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) — and neighborhood residents said that the police have finally cracked down on scofflaws.

Filling a Niche: Transparency
Atlantic Yards Watch, which launched in May and was developed with the help of a graduate class at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, fills a niche that remained despite established advocacy groups and blogs. And it responds to a widespread local perception that the ESD, the State authority with the inherently complicated role of promoting development while overseeing it, has “done the developer’s bidding,” in the words of Brooklyn Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries. “Atlantic Yards Watch is intended to address gaps in oversight that we hope will eventually be closed through the establishment of a local development corporation or authority that is accountable to the public,” said Howard Kolins, President of the Boerum Hill Association, one of the co-sponsors of the site.

The three groups behind the project are part of the coalition known as BrooklynSpeaks, initially spearheaded by the Municipal Art Society (MAS), which, beginning in 2006, pursued a “mend it, don’t end it” strategy regarding Atlantic Yards. By contrast, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), formed in 2004, led opposition to Atlantic Yards via lawsuits challenging the use of eminent domain, the legitimacy of the environmental review, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s revision of the deal to sell development rights to the Vanderbilt Yard in Brooklyn.

Pushing for Transparency in Court
By late 2009, however, BrooklynSpeaks (sans MAS) had joined DDDB in court challenging the ESD’s decision to re-approve the project while maintaining, despite significant reason for skepticism, that Atlantic Yards would be finished in ten years. The lawsuit, which included as petitioners three local elected officials, charged that the ESD, in its rush to approve a slightly reconfigured project, had failed to study the neighborhood impacts of a potential 25-year buildout.

That lawsuit was initially dismissed by Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman in March 2010, a day before the arena groundbreaking. It was reopened, remarkably, as Friedman agreed to admit into the record the Development Agreement — which allows a 25-year buildout — that the State withheld until after the court argument in the first stage of the lawsuit.

In the latest twist, on July 13 the judge ruled for the community groups, ordering the ESD to produce a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) detailing the impacts — such as noise, traffic, and safety — of the longer construction period. (The ESD has not announced whether it will appeal.) Such a ruling is highly unusual, given that judges rarely second-guess agencies, but in this case Justice Friedman deemed the ESD’s actions “arbitrary and capricious.” What was behind the agency’s rush in 2009? The lawyer for BrooklynSpeaks suggested that the ESD was driven by a end-of-2009 deadline to get tax-exempt bonds issued for arena construction.

Community Contributions
While ESD documents, conducted by the ubiquitous environmental consultant AKRF, used the bloodless language common to environmental reviews (e.g., “significant adverse neighborhood character impacts”), Atlantic Yards Watch brings the impact of construction home, posting video of trucks idling outside a residential building at 5:45am, photos of trucks leaving the construction site with piles of dirt uncovered, violating an agreement with the State, or photos of a wrong-way truck blocking traffic.

It also serves as a longitudinal archive of area conditions. In response to widespread belief that the construction site contributed to the rat problem, City health officials recently surveyed the Forest City Ratner-controlled site, and announced that it appeared to be well-maintained. However, it’s plausible that the developer had stepped up site maintenance in anticipation of that walk-through. After all, Atlantic Yards Watch had previously posted photos of lingering piles of garbage. And Forest City did agree to add new trash receptacles in the construction site for food waste only.

The Atlantic Yards Blogosphere
Atlantic Yards Watch complements an established, and evolving, blogosphere regarding Atlantic Yards. The most prolific site is NoLandGrab, a daily anthology of articles and blog posts related to the project, often with critical commentary appended. Prospect Heights photographer Tracy Collins has been documenting both the neighborhood around the project and Atlantic Yards-related events; photographers Adrian Kinloch and Jonathan Barkey also chronicle events. All have been vital for my own daily blog, Atlantic Yards Report, which features original reporting, plus analysis and commentary.

Both DDDB and BrooklynSpeaks use a blog format for announcements and articles. Other Atlantic Yards-related blogs have been published for shorter periods, such as the urban design-focused Brooklyn Views. A more personal blog, the Footprint Gazette, in 2008 chronicled the significant disruptions faced by a smaller number of Prospect Heights residents within the project footprint, as pre-construction utility work went on outside their windows.

“If Jane Jacobs had the tools and technology back when she was fighting Robert Moses’ plans to bulldoze Lower Manhattan, I bet The Death and Life of Great American Cities would have been a blog,” Brooklyn blogger and activist Aaron Naparstek told the Times in 2006. Perhaps, though Jacobs and her allies also had the Village Voice, which crusaded along with them. These days, established media outlets, with shrinking numbers of staff and a universe of topics to cover, give projects like Atlantic Yards relatively little scrutiny.

Can it be Duplicated?
While the overall response to Atlantic Yards may seem a salutary example of citizen media, using widely available innovations like blogs and YouTube, it also relies on several educated professionals with formal or informal journalistic, programming and photographic skills, and the capacity to put in significant volunteer hours.

Regarding Atlantic Yards Watch, said Peter Krashes, an artist (and Dean Street Block Association president) who helped develop the initiative, “I think it is duplicable.” After all, he observes, most community controversies are far less complicated, involving fewer problems and fewer agencies. A community board, he mused, could even adopt the model of establishing on online repository to register and track concerns.

Making an Impact
Atlantic Yards Watch sponsors hope to do more. With $4,000 in support from Council Member Letitia James, the aim is to hire consultants and/or reach out to other community groups in areas impacted by the project.

The initiative has already changed the ecosystem for discussing Atlantic Yards. Arana Hankin, Director of the Atlantic Yards Project for the ESD, gave Atlantic Yards Watch an off-the-cuff compliment at a June 23 community meeting on rats, calling the web site “fantastic and wonderful,” but at the same time — to the frustration of some — suggesting that complaints must be filed directly with the agency to provoke changes. However, thanks to Atlantic Yards Watch and that public meeting, the media had become aware of the “rat tsunami,” spurring official concern.

This weekend, the site’s most prolific contributor posted another incident report, documenting how trucks delivering steel idled on the public street rather than used the designated staging area. Once again, citizen watchdogs were making sure that government overseers could not plead ignorance.

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Journalist Norman Oder has written about the Atlantic Yards development — and other urban issues — in his watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report since 2006 and is now working on a book about Atlantic Yards. Until late 2010, he spent 14 years as an editor at the magazine Library Journal. In 2000, he began operating a tour guide business specializing in Brooklyn, New York Like a Native. He lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Much has already been said about how everyone is an architecture critic these days, how the Internet has sped up the criticism cycle, and how the ubiquity of imagery has made architecture magazines that much less valuable. But Alexandra Lange noted another problem with Internet criticism: Nowadays most architecture “criticism” is really just commentary on renderings. Rare is a critic’s response to experiencing an actual building. In fact, a building’s merits are so thoroughly debated while in rendering form that writing about the built work can seem almost besides the point. As a result, the experiential quality of buildings has become less of a focus for design criticism — a potentially dangerous problem for architecture.

We’re a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.Indeed, very little of the evening’s conversation even touched on buildings themselves. While the Internet has enabled commentary on projects far from our backyards, it has encouraged a kind of watered-down criticism that lacks real reporting. Mimi Zeiger defended the Internet’s merits by giving a great example of how the Internet’s speed and conversational tone can enable a fast debate about the value of a building. Recently the LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short blog post about a Michael Maltzan building (yes, still in renderings!) at San Francisco State University. The building, which will cost $265 million, was then criticized by blogger Javier Arbona on the grounds of its financing — though it is paid for by a public university, which is getting less and less money from the bankrupt state of California, the money will come through a complex financial arrangement with Wall Street. Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), then chimed in about the corporatization of universities. Zeiger used this example of fast-paced dialogue to show how lively the Internet criticism sphere is — it drew in a “traditional” critic, a non-traditional blogger, and an architect, plus all the archi-Internet nerds through comments and Twitter. This debate has the additional effect of shaping future reviews of this building and other public-financed projects.

But as the editor of a print publication and the person responsible for the overhaul of Domus’ online presence, Grima voiced a fair amount of nostalgia for the heyday of print architecture magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, magazines like Domus or Casabella would publish all important buildings, and yet criticize many of them. Today’s architecture criticism is stifled by the fact that most magazines do not publish stories about buildings the editors don’t like — or can’t criticize. Zeiger noted it’s too expensive to print a story on a building an editor hates.

I’d argue that there’s something else at play here. Perhaps part of the reason we are nostalgic for the mid-20th-century coverage in print magazines is that the United States was then the center of the skyscraper and urban planning boom. Now the industry has moved to Asia. But where is the commentary on Zaha’s opera house in Guangzhou or Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay? Architectural Record will still cover it, but three months later. And certainly not with the same kind of first-person knowledge and passion that Maltzan’s SFSU building inspired. Isn’t it problematic that this blogger community is not able to respond to the work going up in Asia and the Middle East with the same kind of authority and visceral response as they might to one in California?

Eva Franch noted that this lack of “criticality” isn’t confined to print magazines. Rather than criticism, she sees the Internet encouraging more exposure of architecture and commentary on it. She noted that blogs are “reporting an obsession, not taking a position.” It’s a comment that gets right to the heart of my last On Criticism piece. A lack of editorial vision or critical position is the final element that many blogs are missing — the thing that keeps us pining for print.

Shannon Mattern helped to conclude the evening with a reminder: the unsettling aspects of Internet “microculture” pervade all art forms and are not particular to architecture criticism. We assume that most architecture blogs, which pursue niche interests without establishing broader socio-political values, fail to inspire a broader debate about architecture. But I’m beginning to think we’re a little too critical of the dialogue happening online, and a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.

In the drafty Storefront space, without adequate seating and headache-inducing microphone problems, I felt an honest desire to be back at home, in a comfortable chair, with my laptop and Twitter feed. I never thought I’d become the kind of person who occasionally prefers virtual communication to the real kind. But increasingly I think we are living in a golden age of online conversation, one that has more in common with “happenings” than the print journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Happenings had a great influence on the development of conceptual art; could the same be said one day about blogging and architecture?

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This is the eighth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

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 article takes issue with the kind of criticism that is found on popular architecture blogs. We know this brand of lament well: the web is killing everything that was ever good, and, in this case, Kelly is wringing his hands that “speculative” bloggers who focus more on cultural mashups than straightforward dissections of architectural projects — in the style of, say, Paul Goldberger — have failed to produce what he blandly calls “informed, intelligent criticism.” And because the blogosphere is the new establishment, this means that we can expect that this kind of writing and the figures behind it are here to stay.

Although Kelly takes aim at a few British bloggers (Bad British Architecture, Strange Harvest, etc.), I was most interested in his attack on BLDGBLOG, which he calls “probably the most influential architecture blog in the world.” Its author is Geoff Manaugh, whom Kelly calls an “institution.” Manaugh’s response to Kelly makes two key points: first, Manaugh has never attempted to replace traditional architecture criticism, nor does he hope to cultivate an audience that is looking for that kind of stuff; and second, he would welcome an alternative to his own style of blogging that might resemble the smart, level-headed approaches of the LA Times‘ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne or The Center for Land Use Interpretation‘s founder Matthew Coolidge. He then ends by saying:

Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this — and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger — then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.

To my mind, the reason why there isn’t more of Peter Kelly’s kind of writing is that there aren’t enough places where one can make a living writing about architecture. There are probably fewer than a dozen people who make a living in the United States writing about architecture (and don’t get the majority of their incomes through editing, teaching or consulting). The problem, in other words, isn’t that Geoff Manaugh is a popular blogger, but that the vision of Peter Kelly’s ideal critic isn’t economically feasible these days. Until a new business model, or a better way of funding criticism through a smaller niche of avid readers, is figured out we can expect to see the number of pages (even webpages) dedicated to serious criticism dwindle: even the monthly critiques by Robert Campbell and Michael Sorkin had to be cut from Architectural Record‘s coverage in 2010.)

This economic impossibility needs to be recognized before proposing a utopian world where architecture critics have all the necessary resources to provide the informed, intelligent criticism expected of them. Otherwise it’s like saying our urban education system should rival that of private schools without recognizing that there aren’t unlimited funds to support that revolution.

A sense of responsibility for guiding public discussion about architecture is what I miss most.

So what is the appropriate response to this situation that we all find a bit disappointing? Is it to voice frustration with the new guard that is innovating? No. Instead, we should be asking: Why does the Old Establishment, which is adequately supported, suck so much? Why is Nicolai Ouroussoff still the lead critic for the Times when his writing, at its best, is greeted with a shrug? And while we all love Paul Goldberger, why hasn’t The New Yorker given someone else a chance to write the occasional piece of criticism for the magazine? If we’re going to be using new means to create a dialogue about architecture criticism, it might be interesting to do it in a way that is purposefully attempting to overthrow the PMS (pale, male, stale) guard.

Kelly presumes that BLDGBLOG is incredibly influential, and it is, in so far as it has widened the context and lens through which we see architecture. But it doesn’t shape the architecture profession (that’s not what it sets out to do) and it doesn’t serve as much of a reference about what’s happened in architecture over the past few years. Like most blogs, it’s really more of a catalog of Manaugh’s personal interests.

If the old architecture criticism establishment continues to be boring and a new establishment continues to mine the esoteric margins of architectural thought rather than the work of architects, what is at risk is a clear sense of who is debating the direction of architecture as practice or discipline. Kelly blames Manaugh et al. for lacking the right style or substance; Manaugh seems to shirk responsibility for the future of online dialogue about architecture.

Perhaps magazines like Architectural Record feel too much of a responsibility for charting what’s happening in highbrow, mainstream architecture and don’t allow for enough personal, tangential conversation. But that sense of authority and responsibility for guiding public understanding and discussion about architecture is what I miss most about the old establishment. I miss that much more than the writing style in which old media expressed itself or even the architecture that old media referenced. When Herbert Muschamp was the critic for the Times, he felt a responsibility to curate a series of alternatives to the SOM-designed replacement for the World Trade Center — is there anyone writing right now who would take on that role of architectural shaman?

What should someone with the privilege of being listened to do then? Manaugh’s call for a more vibrant criticism scene, which enriches the thinking of writers and architects, is just one example of how he can wield his power to greater effect. We all seem to agree that we need more online voices that are actively challenging architecture and architecture criticism as they are practiced. To use a Manaugh-style analogy: he’s shown us the playing field and now he’s kicking around a soccer ball waiting for a game of pick-up. Anyone else inspired to answer this call to action? At the very least, I think this debate has revived the On Criticism series on this website, so game on!

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This is the seventh in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

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.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

I recently spent the better part of five days sitting on a cinderblock in the courtyard of Museo Experimental el Eco, listening to various creative people, mostly from Mexico, talk about their work. I am not entirely certain why I did this, but I am glad that I did. The event, Postópolis, is described as “a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design.” I applaud the premise: to celebrate and take stock of the extent to which sophisticated discourse and debate about design and urban culture (and the creative forces which influence them) have migrated to online formats. And I appreciate the method: to instigate “a Ponzi scheme of ideas,” in which the organizer (Storefront for Art and Architecture) invites a set of bloggers to descend upon a particular city, each of whom then invites a set of individuals from that city to discuss their work in front of a live audience.

But I am not clear on the outcome. Certainly, as an audience member, I am today more informed of about the dizzying amount of creativity and innovation at the heart of Mexico City’s cultural life than I was pre-Postópolis. But I am at a loss as to how exactly the wealth of information and ideas I witnessed might be put to work. What comes next? Of course, the event was more esoteric snapshot than representative sample. But even then, if the point is to spotlight the fact that serious dialogue about cities now takes place on the internet and to apply that serious dialogue to a real time and place, then shouldn’t that attention and dialogue lead to some kind of action about how best to understand, represent or intervene in urban life?

Eduardo Terrazas | Photo by Cassim Shepard

What attracted me to Postópolis was the opportunity to experience the improvised and extemporaneous formation of a collective portrait of the creative energies defining a city at a particular moment. I did not participate in the first two incarnations of Postópolis — in New York in 2007 and in Los Angeles in 2009 — but I am told that what emerged were studies in contrast. How could a sophisticated portrait of a city be anything else? As I said in my own introductory speech on the first day, the complex challenges of urban portraiture define my own work as a documentary filmmaker and as the editor of Urban Omnibus. In both roles I rely on the evocative power of juxtaposing diverse fragments to tell stories that resist the tendency to reduce urban complexity into facile essences or prescriptions, with the goal of telling stories that amount to more than the sum of their parts.

But portraiture requires a kind of coherence that the frame alone — in this case the conceptual frame of Postópolis and the physical frame of the Museo Experimental el Eco — struggled to provide. Instead of coherence, we got a diffuse and diverse sense of Mexico City, composed of disparities. The unlikely juxtaposition of the opening presentations — Fernando Romero shared 100 hundred slides of his slick architecture and Ali Gadorki discussed the messy fusion of punk, cumbia and queer identity politics — telegraphed beautifully the primary lesson of Postópolis: that portraying Mexico City (or any city) requires engaging the stark contrasts within its creative community. Romero was invited by Sam Jacob, an architect based in London. Gadorki was invited by Daniel Hernandez, a Mexican-American journalist from L.A. who has spent the past few years infiltrating and documenting Mexico City’s various subcultures. Over the course of the following days, the audience was treated a similarly dizzying diversity of voices. To name just a few: we heard from Raúl Cardenas, one of the forces behind the excellent Tijuana-based research and design collective torolab. We heard from Julio Cou Cámara, a scuba diver charged with maintaining Mexico City’s sewer system. We heard from Captain Remigio Cruz, who directs the efforts of the Mexican military’s museum of narcotics to educate soldiers on the army’s “successes” in its war on drugs.

Derek Dellekamp | Photo by Ariette Armella

At root, Postópolis asserts that some sort of affinity or relationship exists between curatorial practice and blogging practice — between the institutions that select and present creative work and the individuals who offer commentary on whatever interests them — but the nature of this relationship remains unnamed. To be sure, it is still in formation; and Postópolis offers a good first step toward identifying how these two practices might inform each other.

Bloggers are often considered diarists, but I prefer to think of them as foragers: most blog posts take something that already exists — from the internet, popular culture or lived experience — as a point of departure for reflection that combines elements of essay, anecdote, news, analysis and speculation. That’s why bloggers make good portraitists, even if they don’t see themselves as such. The vantage of the scavenger/storyteller speaks well of her ability to inform a collective image of a city. As someone who directs an editorial website that has dozens of authors and advisors, is based at an established institution (the Architectural League of New York) and sticks to a weekly publication schedule, I felt slightly disingenuous masquerading as a blogger. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Urban Omnibus is an interdisciplinary index of innovative ideas conceived to make New York City smarter, greener and fairer, it also functions as a kind of ad-hoc portrait of the creative energies currently shaping urbanism.

Jose Castillo | Photo by Ariette Armella

Of the 70 or so presentations at Postópolis, one in particular resisted Mexico City’s tendency to splinter and fragment the moment anyone tries to define it. From the moment I was invited to take part, I knew that at the top of my wish list of speakers would be Eduardo Terrazas, the architect, designer and artist behind the Mexico ’68 identity program for the 1968 Olympics. In part, I wanted Terrazas to speak because I suspected that most of the other bloggers would be inviting practitioners from their own generation. But more than wanting to include mature voices, I also wanted to hear more about the historical moment (a decade before I was born) when all eyes were trained on Mexico City. I wondered: “How can a designer develop and establish a coherent identity for a place as complex as Mexico City?”

Terrazas was a young man when he got the massive job, in 1966, to use the tools of design — the job included everything from a logotype for the Games to an urban-scale communications and wayfinding system, from public transportation logistics to public art projects — to present Mexico’s varied and singular culture to the world. He explained how he found inspiration for the graphic identity in the Sierra Madre Huichol Indians’ use of parallel, curvilinear lines; how he carefully evaluated the balance between Mexico’s past and its future; how he found an ideographic system that was both distinctly Mexican and universally legible; and how the legacy of the work is forever intertwined with the tragedy of the Tlatelolco massacre, ten days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Derek Dellekamp, Pilgrim Route, State of Jalisco, Mexico | Courtesy of Dellekamp Arquitectos

Eduardo Terrazas, Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, Lance Wyman, Mexico '68 Identity | Image courtesy of Hespánica

Clearly, a great deal fed into that project, and great deal came out of it. But Terrazas did not confine his presentation to work from the late 1960s. He went on to describe several art exhibitions he organized about the material culture of Mexico City. He showed some of his paintings. He shared his proposal for jurisidictional reform that would expand the city’s current and outdated political limits — the borders of the Distrito Federal — to encompass its larger metropolitan region. And he showed one of his current architectural projects. He left out international highlights of a career that includes urban design and planning in Tanzania, Pakistan and India; teaching in Berkeley and New York; and art exhibitions in Paris, St. Petersburg, Caracas and Santiago. But he managed to detail a career trajectory that at every point critiqued, challenged and expanded the role of the architect.

The two other architects that I invited to Postópolis, Derek Dellekamp and Jose Castillo, also presented work outside the traditional understanding of what architects do. In Dellekamp’s case, this meant discussing social housing in Oaxaca and a pilgrimage route in Jalisco. (Watch an excerpt of Dellekamp’s 2009 Architectural League Emerging Voices lecture, in which he presents his work in Oaxaca, on the League’s website.) In Castillo’s case, this meant discussing the architect as public intellectual. The expanding role of the architect — as analyst, as storyteller, as urbanist — is certainly a theme I wanted to pursue at Postópolis (and why I invited Dellekamp, Castillo and Terrazas). To be honest, when I arrived in Mexico City, I was not thinking about the role of the architect as urban portraitist. Yet now that I am back in New York and again engaged in identifying and sharing good ideas for the future of New York’s built environment through Urban Omnibus, I suspect that the long-ago case study of Mexico ’68 and the recent experience of Postópolis each offer, in different ways, lessons for how to communicate what’s going on in a particular city. Once we have grappled with what those lessons might be, then we can start the messy process of how to use that kind of communication — that kind of portrait — to the greater urban good.

Cassim Shepard is the director of Urban Omnibus.

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UPDATE 6.9.10: Check out the complete Postópolis! schedule and watch a livestream of the event on both Domus and postopolis.org.

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It should come as no surprise that I love to talk (some might say, can’t shut up) about cities — problems, solutions, and the innovative problem-solvers who work on them. And I think I can speak for the whole Omnibus family when I say that we’re grateful for the opportunity Urban Omnibus affords us: to help share the back-stories and speculative futures of some incredible ideas about cities — some tried and tested in New York, others initiated elsewhere and applied here. With that in mind, I’m psyched to announce that I will soon get to bring this zeal for identifying and introducing good, design-based approaches to urbanism to one of the most interesting large cities in the world: Mexico City. So if anyone has occasion to be in Mexico around the second week in June, come join me and a storied bunch of urbanists, technologists, designers and bloggers for the third installment of Postopolis! — a five-day event of near-continuous conversation about the built environment and the various design cultures that influence it.

Postopolis LA, 2009, on the roof of the Standard Hotel

The first Postopolis! took place in the gallery of Storefront for Art and Architecture, here in New York, way back in 2007. The second held forth in Los Angeles in 2009. Omnibus readers will recall the brilliant recap of that event by Rachel Abrams and Alissa Walker, in which they ruminated on what it means when bloggers come out from the aether to  introduce, in person and face-to-face, their favorite innovators in the worlds of design and urbanism. Once again, Storefront — in collaboration with sponsors Museo Experimental El Eco, TOMO and Domus Magazine – has convened a group of people who wax poetic on the internet and asked each of us to invite thinkers and practitioners in Mexico City into discussion.

I have invited Eduardo Terrazas, the architect, artist and urbanist responsible for the masterplan for Mexico City’s 1968 Olympics; Juan Carlos Rulfo, director of the award-winning film En el hoyo; Professor Martha Schteingart, a internationally renowned expert on urban poverty, segregation and housing; Derek Dellekamp, an architect known for his wide-ranging collaborations with artists, engineers and environmentalists (and selected as one of the Architectural League’s 2009 Emerging Voices – a podcast of his presentation is available on the League website); and Jose Castillo, whose architecture and urban research include intimate residential spaces as well as urban-scale housing and transportation systems. I’m thrilled to be bringing these voices into this conversation. And I cannot wait to consume the insights from the participants invited by the likes of Intersections (Daniel Hernandez), DPR Barcelona (Ethel Barona Pohl), Toxico Cultura (Gabriella Gomez-Mont), Mudd Up! (Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture), Tomo (Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa), Edible Geography (Nicola Twilley), We Make Money Not Art (Regine Debatty), Strangeharvest (Sam Jacob), and Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall).

The Courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco, where the presentations and discussion will take place

Here’s the official info:
Postópolis!DF
June 8, 2010

From 8-12 June 2010, Storefront for Art and Architecture, in partnership with Museo Experimental El Eco, Tomo and Domus Magazine, will host the third edition of Postopolis!, a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design. 10 world-renowned bloggers from Los Angeles, New York, Turin, Barcelona, London and elsewhere will convene in one location in Mexico City to host a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, presentations, films and panels fusing the informal and interdisciplinary approach of the architecture blogosphere with rare face-to-face interaction.

Each day, the 10 participating bloggers will meet in the magnificent courtyard of Museo Experimental El Eco, designed by Matthias Goeritz, to conduct back-to-back interviews of some of Mexico City’s most influential thinkers and practitioners – including architects, city planners, artists and urban theorists but also military historians, filmmakers, photographers, activists and musicians. The talks will be conducted in either Spanish or English, and translations will be available. Each day of talks will end with an after-party hosted by some of Mexico City’s most influential music blogs.

The first Postopolis! took place in the gallery space at Storefront for Art and Architecture during the summer of 2007, and a second edition was held in Los Angeles in 2009.

Participating blogs:
Urban Omnibus (Cassim Shepard)
Intersections (Daniel Hernandez)
DPR Barcelona (Ethel Barona Pohl)
Toxico Cultura (Gabriella Gomez-Mont)
Tomo (Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa)
Mudd Up! (Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture)
Edible Geography (Nicola Twilley)
We Make Money Not Art (Regine Debatty)
Strangeharvest (Sam Jacob)
Wayne & Wax (Wayne Marshall)

Location
Museo Experimental El Eco
Sullivan 43, Col. San Rafael, CP 09470 Mexico City, Tel. 5535 51 86
www.eleco.unam.mx

Participants list in formation: please check www.postopolis.org

Twitter: @postopolis, #postopolis

Partners
Museo Experimental El Eco
TOMO
Domus Magazine

Sponsors
Mexicana
British Embassy
Urbi VidaResidencial
UNAM
Difusión Cultural UNAM
Museo Experimental El Eco
Cityexpress
XXLager

Organizers
Daniel Perlin and the Storefront Team

Click here to download the press release.
Presione aquí para descargar el boletín de prensa.
www.postopolis.org

So Brooklyn is (one of) the “bloggiest” place in America (see endnote) – a fact verified and positively fêted at Thursday night’s Brooklyn Blogfest, now in its robust fourth year. Here was the opportunity to put faces to the blogs based in this truly outspoken borough, and more than 300 digerati emerged to revel in each other at The Powerhouse Arena in DUMBO.

The event was orchestrated by a coalition of many, including the folks behind Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and outside.in, which bestowed Brooklyn’s crown as America’s blog supreme in May 2007. After video and photo essays showcasing the best of the local pictorial blogs, the evening’s main discussion was entitled  “Why Do We Blog?” chaired by Brooklyn Independent Television‘s Megan Donis and featured Jake Dobkin of Gothamist, Anne Pope of Sustainable Flatbush, Tracy Collins of Freakin’ Blog, Sharon Kwik of Bed Stuy Banana (who deserves applause for walking and documenting every single street in Bed-Stuy, with partner and toddler in tow), and Melissa Lopata of Hip Slope Mama.

It’s a good question. The diversity in subject matter and approach seen last night is perhaps symptomatic of the blog-boom experienced all over the interweb, but what was striking about this event is exactly WHY there are hundreds of blogs in and about Brooklyn. How much is there to be said about this place? Why isn’t it exhausted yet – is Brooklyn really more dynamic, diverse or blogworthy than the Bronx, Staten Island, Queens or even Manhattan? What is it about Brooklyn that encourages its residents to be so vocal about it? True, not all of them are about “place” as such, but most are very localized and aware of their immediate community, if not actively trying to discuss and strengthen it. Following outside.in’s pronouncement in 2007, champion BK-blogger and founder of Brownstoner Jonathan Butler, said “Brooklyn in general lends itself to blogging because it’s a borough of neighborhoods. Unlike Manhattan, people feel connected and empowered to do something about the changes happening in their neighborhoods.”

This year the blogfest held a short period of breakout sessions entitled Blogs of a Feather. As suggested by the title, these were small group discussions intended for typological blogs, including Political, Food & Craft, Comedy & Pop Culture, Social Activist, Place, Historic, Photographic, Parenting and Eclectic. The mommy and daddy bloggers had so much to share that it took more than a gentle nudge to usher them from the Powerhouse to the afterparty across the street at Galapagos.

So: does Brooklyn need more bloggers? Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin – who is surely one of relatively few in attendance raking in a healthy profit from localized online publishing - says NO. The man might have a point; a lot of voices make for an incomprehensible Babel, and while it is fantastic that the charismatic physical space of Brooklyn can effect and occupy such a burgeoning virtual space, last night’s event showed that canny networking – singing in chorus, if you like – might be a way to share and provide resources and dialogues more efficiently and actually utilize the networks that blogs establish.

The proceedings of the evening were dedicated to the memory of the late Robert Guskind (1958-2009), true citizen journalist and founder-editor of the Gowanus Lounge (a local blog close to UO hearts and headquarters), and something of a legend in these parts. His online enthusiasm for discussing spatial, developmental and psychogeographical conditions in Brooklyn, and particularly his talent for finding beauty in the unsavory – of which there is plenty in Gowanus and Brooklyn in general – was infectious. A touching video tribute has Bob himself narrating his favorite anecdote about a chopstick warehouse, an illegal Matzo factory and farcical catastrophe. Only in Brooklyn…

NB: To qualify the “bloggiest place” further: Clinton Hill get the prize for highest density of bloggers in a neighborhood, and Atlantic Yards came second in terms of being of interest to the blog-reading public. Research undertaken by outside.in in early 2007, see here and here.

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.

R: This year, Postopolis was a five-day event, where bloggers of the built environment came back out from behind their keyboards, convening in a real, live urban environment. For me, this trip out west was a follow up to the first Postopolis that Storefront for Art+Architecture hosted in the unseasonably sweaty June of 07. I glowed my way through that, when the Masters of the Built Environment Blogs (BLDGBLOG, City of Sound, Subtopia and others) descended on NYC to curate several days of talks by their favorite urban/tech thinkers-and-doers. This week, Alissa and I joined the Postopolites again, this time shivering through its second coming last week in LA, outdoors on the fifth facade – aka the roof – of the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

A: It was disturbingly, unseasonably cold. I believe I coined the term Frostopolis.

R: Nice. Did you feel like this was primarily a celebration of blogging or of architecture or urbanism or something else all together?

A: I think it represented a very interesting convergence of information and urbanism. I think blogging as a phenomenon is kind of boring to talk about, but what it represents is really just a faster way of disseminating good ideas about where and how we live (and Twitter is maybe even better). Maybe the point of all this is that we’re able to affect cities more intelligently by understanding them better, and now, thanks to our ability to share this information more efficiently, we will? What do you think?

R:  I absolutely agree that the draw for me was far more the subject matter, than the format – I’m taking the ‘it’s the content, stupid’ approach, as usual. Converging on shared interests creates community, and that’s one reason I made the trip out here – to participate, instead of just reading about it. When I’ve described Postopolis to others, I’ve made a point of saying it’s about urbanism and technology: the intersection of physical place and information space, not just about blogging about cities.

That said, there’s definitely a quality to this that’s defined by the format – something appealing about seeing some of my favorite online foragers coming out from behind the screen to put faces to what and who they’ve gathered on their blogs. I mean, when I scroll through archive lists of months and years of posts, my mind boggles that there’s a real person, with bills to pay and a life to lead, behind these editorial ziggurats that the rest of us gobble up and trade with others. But more impressive than the discipline of maintaining that curatorial role is what they’ve documented: Yes, your idea that we’re able to impose ourselves on the city by understanding it better is key; how better representations of cities improve our understanding, experience and engagement with cities is of particular interest to me – I’m here for the dynamic data visualizers, the graphic storytellers, the spoken word poets, pretty much anyone who forsakes PowerPoint.

A: Right, like Eric Rodenbeck’s super-conversational whiskey-drinking delivery of his work for Stamen Design. I love how they see the city as data to be sliced and diced at will:  they made heat maps of Manhattan showing where all the upwardly mobile single ladies lived and also slurped all the information about where Oakland crimes were located into this beautiful, easy to read web-based application. It just wouldn’t have been possible to see the city that way before, and it can all be used to improve the urban experience.

R: Yup, can’t get enough of what Stamen has been up to, and the implications of others’ work like that. Coming back to Postopolis this year after the first one, it’s struck me this time how much has changed in just two years. From Bush to Obama, the economy tanked, and perhaps a shift from peak blogging to peak Tweeting. Graphics of dry data are now sexy – or at least better looking to regular people: pictures are indisputably a compelling way for fact-chasers to view and make sense of the ec-crisis. Oh, and we headed west for this one. I like that we’re in SoCal, not SFO for this one – it resituates the tech vibe of the discussion significantly. And there’s no escaping the urbanism here.

A: True, it’s obvious for anyone who knows me that the fact this event focused on LA was the single biggest draw, seeing as I’m a rabid defender of Los Angeles as the Greatest Unfinished City on Earth, and I’ll deliver a beat down to anyone who says otherwise. I was interested to see what about LA they found compelling, as (mostly) outsiders.

R: So what, to you, felt distinctly ’09 and West Coast to you about this week’s talks? And what’s noteworthy about the blog culture of this event?

A: Well, if you’re going to be discussing any issues of the built environment, LA is like one big gaping wound of a case study. We have some pretty awesome problems to deal with right now, so if you’ve got radical new ideas, our situation puts you in a good frame of mind to express them. There was a lot of talk of community, whether it’s designing a building to encourage it, or using technology to map it, or even the community that’s this connective tissue that binds all us design and architecture bloggers. I think 2009 was a sign that we’re moving from the era of posting a rendering first (First!) to becoming something much more substantial. We’re so closely networked now, we share and comment on each others’ ideas in a public forum, we can reach a lot of people who are engaged with their own communities…so what do we do with this phenomenon?

R: I reckon we keep going with the systemic thinking that networks encourage; the economic crisis demonstrates that bluntly. So I also reckon, as far as urban planning goes, we celebrate that we’re now more aware of interconnectedness and networks offline, whether that’s run-off from nascent internet culture or not: Michael Downing, the LAPD Chief Commissioner for Counterterrorism, brought this home: Communities are at least a match for vertical organizations, joined-up effort makes the efficient and personalized experiences (of all kinds) possible, especially in cities where there’s connectedness through density. From his talk, I also appreciated that interesting relationships emerge as top-down, traditional hierarchies coexist alongside – and even intersect and cooperate with – matrixed communities. So at once, he lent the event credibility – woo, here’s an important guy from law enforcement – but he also appreciated the potency of shared knowledge and collaboration in a city with no center.

A: Right, which is also where something like Twitter came into play, with little bits of ideas drifting out over the rooftop and out into the world like dandelion fluff for anyone to grab onto and act upon. I really liked that part of it. I liked reading into some of the community coverage and analysis more than some of the speakers themselves, some of whom I thought had exceptionally poor presentation skills. But as we discussed, that’s what happens when you invite someone mysterious from the dark realms of the blogosphere.

R. Which leads me to wonder…where are the girls besides Mademoiselle deBatty? There are certainly lots of women blogging, and many in the audience. Did we lose our voice or not make it into the lads pack this time? Who gets citizenship of Postopolis? What kind of community is it?

A: To tell you the truth, I was surprised. I don’t want to dwell on it, but since this is a hot topic, I went ahead and broke it down. Of the 62 speakers only 13 were female. I was actually on a panel with three other women, the most female-dominated moment of the entire event. Thursday was completely bereft of women speakers whatsoever. One can only think that this could have been avoided in the planning stage if the participating bloggers weren’t 5/6 male. But you’re right, there were tons of women who attended and plenty who blog about this stuff. Besides all that, though, what were some of the highlights for you?

R. I liked the Benjamins: Benjamin Ball, of architect duo, Ball and Nogues, presenting Frank Zappa’s axiom, “You can’t eat the recipe” and Benjamin Bratton‘s entire talk (looking forward to Cityofsound.com posting the full transcript) and his phrase the ‘Caliphate of Google’ – don’t give them any ideas! Back to format, and better representations of complex information, I loved Mike the Poet and now that I’ve washed my hands, I liked that my red pen started leaking during Gary Dauphin‘s talk on vampirism and Fort Greene.

A: There were a lot of weird moments like that. Downing talked survelliance as a helicopter circled overheard. And remember when Christian Moeller was talking about his “vibrators”—poles that sent out an electric charge when people touched them—and he kept getting shocked by his computer? Ok, highlights. I already mentioned Stamen Design. The Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Matthew Coolidge showed this crazy flyover of the Houston Ship Channel, which is basically an oil metropolis. Christopher Hawthorne talked about Dubai as an example of Bernie Madoff planning. I loved Jeffrey Inaba‘s studies for Volume and the New Museum where they discovered this new culture of giving alongside all the economic collapse. Fallen Fruit is always a treat. And I really liked the casual nature of the event, that you could move in and out of the space without disturbing the program, huddle under heat lamps with someone for a quick tete-a-tete then come back into the conversation. Did you like the format?

R: Yes, though wish I’d had a duvet and better socks with me. It’d definitely lose some character if the main bloggers weren’t moderating, and it feels like a more concentrated dose of inspiration than quickfire multi-city, often mobbed Pecha Kucha. How would a Postopolis ’11 go down in the suburbs, in the periphery, in – heaven forfend – the flyover zone?

A: Sydney has been floated around as the next location, but to be honest I’d like to see this go somewhere like Detroit. And I’d rather see mini-Postopolises spring up in cities throughout the year, with the bloggers from their own cities curating the programs and focusing on action.

R: So, PNY 07 was too hot, and PLA 09 too cold, but now we can all retreat to our respective built environments for another couple of years til the next one throws some other climatic adversity our way. Temperature fluctuations = no impediment: Just a healthy reminder that even bloggers, and their devotees, express sensitivity to physical surroundings not only through WordPress and beard-scratching architectural erudition, but also in flip flops and fleece.

A: And drinking Red Bull Belvederes doesn’t even help you stay warm, unfortunately.

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