Last week, I found myself in an almost endless queue of people hopeful to see a panel of international urban dons assembled at the London School of Economics to celebrate the launch of the book Living in the Endless City. This follow-up to 2007′s The Endless City is again edited by Deyan Sudjic and Ricky Burdett and charts the work of the Urban Age Project over recent years, bringing together the sometimes disparate communities of what Sudjic calls “observers, shapers and professionals.” The blockbuster line-up of academics, mayors and architects who write on Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul were represented on the panel and assembled in congregation.

Over the course of the evening, a unifying theme — or, perhaps, a unifying language — emerged despite the broad range of speakers and disciplinary approaches: specificity; the differences between cities as opposed to their commonalities. The globe-trotting group, who might be accused of “seeing cities from thirty thousand feet,” all honed in on what they called the DNA of the individual city: the built, social and economic variability of a particular place. It felt like a departure from the tired categorizations of mega, global and world cities and Burdett illuminated the quantitative distinctions with a succession of typically hard-hitting statistics which never fail to make his narrative powerful. Although he prefaced the evening with the customary cautionary tale of the rates of urbanization and prospective densities, there was an uncustomary tone of compromise or reconciliation. He asks, riffing off the old saying: “Can you build a place like Rome in twenty years? With its accumulated complexity and sense of accretion? The answer is No.” The built response to the demand placed on city-making is necessary and compromising but, as the opening line of the book suggests, “Cities are political programs made visible” and therefore always up for debate and subject to alternatives.

Wolfgang Nowak, Caglar Keyder, Joan Clos, Ricky Burdett

Joan Clos, a former mayor of Barcelona six months into his new role as executive director of UN-Habitat, chose to speak not about one of the cities or indeed continents presented in the book. Instead, he took the opportunity to pose what he feels is one of the most burning questions of the moment. Speaking on sub-Saharan Africa, he asked, “How are we going to deal with a continent that is going to double its urban population without industrialization in the next 15 years?” The uniqueness of this particular instance of mass urbanization, one unaccompanied by the industrialization that has traditionally instigated it in other historical contexts, proved a very interesting point to reflect on. Clos distinguished between the agrarian shift taking place in China and the migrants that arrive in the African city with no promise or even real hope of a job. Newcomers arrive to the informal city not as a platform from which enter the formal city but because the slums themselves represent urban opportunity. In the context of the continued urbanization of poverty, Burdett and the book emphasize the potential — and responsibility — that planners and urban shapers have in giving these cities a form that recognizes its impact on the ecology of the planet and the social well-being of the people who live there.

"Connecting by Sea" from Living in the Endless City

Mumbai Kamathuria density diagram from Living in the Endless City

Professor Caglar Keyder was invited to speak on Istanbul, a city whose cliché tagline of bridging East and West he immediately re-spatialized as one which in the 1980s regained its role as a central place in the region, a centrifugal urban force upon the former Soviet States, the Balkans and the Middle East which surround it. “It’s Istanbul (Not Globalization),” as Hashim Sarkis’ contribution to the book is titled, is a nice phrasing of the particular type of social and economic transformation the city has undergone. Keyder says that, while in its penultimate transformation Istanbul was a third world metropolis, with 60% of housing “illegal” and the majority of the economy informal, now a successful formalization of the built environment and economy has taken place. While being a city of considerable size before, it has increased by 1300% in the last century through previously informal and more recently formal ways. However, he suggests that Istanbul is succumbing to the homogenizing typologies of speed and a “Violence of Change,” as Asu Aksoy sets out in the book, which tells a familiar global story.

Saskia Sassen’s comments on the evening provided an economic twist on the homogenization of built form. She says of the office typology of central cities: ‘There is a homogenization of the visual order. No matter how brilliant or original the architect’s shaping of a building, you smell the homogeneity and there is no way around that.” She suggests that the “office” typology with “office work” out-sourced to back offices at the edge of the city hides the nuanced and specialized differences that occur inside. She proposes that the deep economic history of a place actually matters and that this should be made clear not just in the form of the city but in how cities compete. In a global or even national order the economic or productive differences should be a bartering tool to ask more of multi-national companies and sustain a real politics among cities.

Gareth Jones gave a compelling presentation on the associational life of young people in São Paulo and Latin America through their relationships in and to the city and representations of it. In his research he seeks out the dramatic variability of the social life of the city and implores that the impulse or event of originality in the city must be maintained even if its potential for change is as yet uncertain. Richard Sennett extended Jones’ argument and suggested that the money that accompanies most styles of development result in over-determined form of the high-rise type, and that this form impairs the originality that Jones admires. He asked how more complexity and more depth can be afforded to the act of making. His closing comments were in some way a response to the time question on Rome which Burdett posed at the beginning. Sennett noted a paradigm shift in what we mean by design and what everyone thinks of as design in the city, moving away from the notion of finished objects to an ongoing process of making and re-making: endless city-making.

Living in the Endless City. The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society
Published by Phaidon 2011
Speakers: Dr Joan Clos, Dr Gareth Jones, Professor Caglar Keyder, Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett
Chairs: Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
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Claire Mookerjee is an artist and urbanist living in London.

All photos courtesy LSE 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.

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.”

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	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.”

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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.

Last week we celebrated our first year of being online, which also means it’s been one year since we shared one of our very first features, a multi-part video and audio piece that chronicled the Reinventing Grand Army Plaza design competition organized by the Design Trust for Public Space and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. The feature included audio interviews with six of the competition jurors, a video that explored the site, some competition entries and public reactions to them in the context of the exhibition that took place in the Plaza in the fall of 2008. And now, the Design Trust has made available a beautiful book about the competition. We recommend anyone who digs Grand Army Plaza, who loves Brooklyn, who obsesses over design competitions or who generally hearts public space should head straight over to the Design Trust’s site to order a hard copy or download the pdf for free.

Here’s what they have to say about it:

The resulting publication, Reinventing Grand Army Plaza: Visionary Designs for the Heart of Brooklyn, not only showcases these 30 design schemes, but also provides a historical, physical and cultural context for the Plaza, and recommends steps the community can take to achieve the goal of a new master plan and a comprehensive renovation.

As with all Design Trust publications, it’s a thing of beauty, in addition to being a wonderful resource for public space partisans everywhere. If you missed our coverage of the project a year ago, visit the original post or watch our video below:

I was expecting a turnout befitting a rockstar when I showed up at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square a couple weeks ago for an event celebrating the publication of David Byrne’s book, The Bicycle Diaries. The book is an account of the former Talking Head’s three decades worth of cycling adventures in cities around the world. And, indeed, the 4^th floor was packed by the time I arrived, relegating me to a standing room spot somewhere back in the self-help section. (Hence the blurry photo above.) But as I looked around at the assembled crowd, it seemed a group that cared more about the urban transportation issues than they did about Byrne’s celebrity – which was, I expect, exactly what the musician/artist/author, longtime bike commuter and urban cycling advocate had in mind.

In lieu of a standard author’s reading, Byrne had convinced his publishers and Barnes & Noble to organize a sort of urbanist “be-in”, a discussion on the theme of “Cities, Bicycles, and the Future of Getting Around.” His discussion partners: Mitchell Joachim, architecture professor at Columbia and Wired-anointed visionary; Paul Steely White, director of cycling advocacy group Transportation Alternatives; and Commissioner of the NYC Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan.

As the speakers were being introduced – the format would be four mini-lectures and a Q&A – I took a closer look at the crowd: messenger bags, cycling caps and helmets, chunky glasses (A 25-year-old in Corbu-style frames? Really?), Rhodia and Moleskine notebooks (quad-ruled, of course), rolled up pant legs, chains locked around waists, even a couple collapsible bikes folded at their owners’ feet. An audience of urbanism nerds and city cyclists.

“Manhattan,” Byrne led off, referencing E.B. White, “is both an island and a fantasy.” In suggesting a tension between the concrete and the ethereal city, the quote was perhaps more instructive than Byrne intended. Because while he seemed to have a foot in both camps, the night, and the rest of the panel, represented an implicit argument over the priorities of urban discourse, pitting the fantastical and grandiose (Joachim) against the pragmatic and incremental (White and Sadik-Khan).

Byrne talked the audience through a slide show that was equal parts Urbanism 101 and tour of his idiosyncratic mind. “I forgot to mention,” he deadpanned, a few minutes in, “I’m not just talking about bicycles.” By that point, he’d already gone from E.B. White to Frank Lloyd Wright and was heading towards Buckminster Fuller, Robert Moses, Jane Jacobs, Corbu, and GM’s plan for an ideal city from the 1939 World’s Fair. He also offered a reading list that made clear his sympathies: Twenty Minutes in Manhattan by Michael Sorkin; Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. His denunciations of Moses and Corbu reinforced the point: for Byrne, like Jacobs, the streets, teeming with life and offering up the unexpected, are the beating heart of the city. And the bicycle, as he said, is the perfect vantage point, “faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person,” a “panoramic window” onto the world.

Hardly anyone left as Byrne ceded the podium to Mitchell Joachim. Dreadlocked and dressed in black, he gave a practiced and entertaining presentation that betrayed a comfort with standing in front of a full room and talking. I believe he touched on bicycles once, glancingly, but he stuck mostly to what he does best: suggesting big, unconventional thoughts at a rate of about six per minute, drawing the crowd along with him on a tidal wave of words. It was a sort of greatest hits of his big ideas: the foldable, shareable CityCar; the jet pack city (“Jersey City to Wall Street in 19 seconds!”); blimp buses; meat houses; buildings grown from trees; buildings built of trash. Fanciful, thought-provoking stuff, but the crowd seemed unenthused.

Janette Sadik-Khan was next, and her opening line was a small triumph. “I’m gonna talk about bikes,” she said, and the room erupted with applause. The main event had arrived. “It’s fun to talk about jet packs and meat buildings, but….” Joachim’s grand schemes have a place, she seemed to be saying, but not in city governance. Her focus was on her department’s effort to address the dual purpose of city streets as conduits of movement and the locus of “social exchange” while also figuring out how to make the city’s transportation infrastructure work for an ever-growing population (set to increase another million by 2025). She slotted biking into a larger plan that calls for improved walkability, fewer cars, and better public transit and larded her talk with stats on the growing number of city cyclists, the declining incidence of  pedestrian and cyclist injuries, and the mushrooming network of bike parking, bike racks, bike lanes, and bikes. (The 9^th Ave. bike lane, when mentioned, garnered its own round of applause.) “It’s a new playbook for anyone who does business on the streets of New York,” she said, and more bikes on the street are an integral part of her vision for a better city. Noting that they hope to double bike-ridership in NYC by 2012 and triple it by 2017, she ended with a prediction: “I think we’re going to see increased recognition of New York City as the number one cycling city in the United States.” The crowd liked that one.

“Isn’t Janette great?” Paul Steely White asked rhetorically on taking the podium. “It was just a couple years ago that biking was freakish,” he said, “And then it kind of went to geek territory, then geek-chic, and, now, chic.” A graph showed that as ridership has gone up, cycling casualties have dropped drastically, a trend White attributed to incremental changes: increasing awareness due to the increasing volume of cyclists and the improvement and expansion of biking infrastructure, primarily. White kept the audience in a pragmatic state of mind by reminding them that their nascent cycling paradise of green-striped bike lanes could be taken away at the whim of the next mayor, pointing out that democratic mayoral candidate Bill Thompson has called for Sadik-Khan’s firing and for the removal of some bike lanes. “Call Bill Thompson,” he exhorted the crowd, “and tell him that safety is not negotiable on New York City streets.”

The audience seemed to agree with White, as the first four earnest questions were all for Sadik-Khan. The second, by a woman from Amsterdam who said she gets “doored” on New York’s streets far less frequently now than she used to, had to do with the impact of politics on the new, bike-friendly New York: What’s to prevent a new mayor from taking that away? she asked. Sadik-Khan made a pitch for a third Bloomberg term. “I can’t speak to what another administration will do, but we have a very robust transportation plan that we’ll keep going forward with, and cycling’s a big part of that.”

Byrne jumped in, suggesting that cycling had reached a “critical mass” in New York that would make it harder to roll back gains already achieved. And, in response to a later question, he got the last laugh of the evening with a parable on the manner in which behaviors shift in a city like New York. “When I first heard they were going to try to get everyone to pick up their dogshit,” he told the crowd, he didn’t believe it would work. “Lo and behold, there’s no poop on the streets. But at the time, did you really think it would work?”

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.

Tim is a freelance journalist based in New York and a correspondent for Outside Magazine. Recent stories have taken him from New Guinea to Alaska and from BASE-jumping lessons to the Navy SEALs obstacle course. He lives in Brooklyn.