Current conditions on the Queensway | Photo: Neil Sullivan via Old NYC

WILL QUEENS GET ITS OWN HIGH LINE?
The High Line is in many ways unique, but it’s by no means the only disused urban rail line in New York in need of repurposing. In Queens, the 3.5 mile leg of the Rockaway Beach Branch rail line, out of service since 1962, runs from Rego Park to the Ozone Park Trailhead, over auto-body shops, through Forest Park and a number of residential neighborhoods. While the current proposals reference the success of the High Line, they differ in intended audience and scope. Friends of the Queensway, the group leading the effort to create a new public space, is prioritizing providing amenities for the surrounding community — such as much-need bicycle infrastructure and community garden space — rather than primarily serving as a tourist attraction. Read more coverage on Treehugger.

The George Washington Bridge in Heavy Smog. View toward the New Jersey Side of the Hudson River | From the Documerica collection.

WHAT AMERICA LOOKED LIKE BEFORE THE EPA
In the 1970s, one of the early acts of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a documentary effort called Documerica, for which EPA photographers travelled the country to capture the state of the nation in ecological terms. Forty years later, the National Archives has released 15,000 of the 80,000 photographs the project produced, many of which portray the harsh reality of our national landscape prior to an overhaul in environmental regulation. Be sure to explore these powerful photographs on the National Archive Flickr database and check out more about the collection on Grist.

MetroChange

METROCHANGE
When there’s not enough money left on your MetroCard for a trip, do you toss it? Apparently, lost or discarded MetroCards account for millions of dollars in wasted funds. So, NYU students Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman and Paul May have collaborated to create a charity donation platform, called “MetroChange,” intended to turn these losses into gains for the city’s neediest families. The project calls for MetroChange kiosks to be installed in the subway, where commuters can swipe their cards (and recycle them) to donate the remainder of the value left of the car to charity. Read more about this project on the MetroChange blog.

RETHINKING AMERICA’S PARKING CULTURE
For those commuters who don’t use a MetroCard to get around this city, the availability, price and logistics of parking your vehicle often determine driver behavior. In most of the rest of the country, however, parking is abundant and takes up uncalculated amounts of land. Eran Ben-Joseph explores the problems and possibilities of parking in Rethinking a Lot, a new book published by MIT Press, that advocates for a transformation of parking lots into appealing, environmentally sound and better integrated features of our built environment. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, explores Ben-Joseph’s argument that parking lots need to be taken seriously by designers and urbanists. Accompanying the article is a fascinating slideshow that encourages a reconsideration of this ubiquitous form that has, until recently, somehow eluded critical investigation by scholars of architecture, urbanism and the American landscape.

NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY TO CONSIDER SELLING AIR RIGHTS, RAISING RENT CAP
On Monday, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) released its five year plan, in which it announced the selling of air rights — the space that can be developed above buildings — as one potential strategy to redress its budget deficit. According to WNYC, NYCHA has also proposed raising the current $2000 rent cap and requiring all households to pay 30% of their income in rent.

BUS TIME
BusTime, the real-time bus tracking website, is now available for all of Staten Island. By allowing users to view exactly how far their bus is from their chosen stop, the real-time bus information “means more time at home with your family, relaxing with a cup of coffee,” according to MTA chairman Joe Lhota. Riders can access the information online, on a mobile phone (simply text a bust stop code to 511123), or — starting this spring — by scanning a QR code at the bus stop. Previously the MTA was having trouble reliably tracking buses through the tall buildings in Manhattan, but Bus Time’s opening up to all of Staten Island bodes well for the other four boroughs, all of which should have complete Bus Time service by 2013 . Read more on StreetsBlog.

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

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.

Last night, Urban Design Week (profiled in last week’s Urban Omnibus feature) wrapped up with the US premiere of Urbanized, a documentary film by Gary Hustwit that introduces viewers to the key issues, projects and individuals affecting the design of cities around the world. Fresh from its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last week, the movie played to a packed house at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Hustwit and three of the urban thinkers featured in the film, Brookings’ Bruce Katz, NYC Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden and architect, critic and educator Michael Sorkin. The panelists, who were seeing the final cut for the first time, responded to the film with enthusiasm. The discussion, which was kept short to make way for the night’s second screening of the film, touched on questions of confidence in US vs. world cities (Katz, distinguishing between leadership at the metropolitan level and the national, stated that he is “phenomenally confident that we can rebuild America from the bottom up, not from the top down.”); innovations in New York (Burden pointed to the City’s ongoing efforts to activate the waterways and waterfront, to “reclaim New York as a world class harbor city.”); and what initiatives they hope to see come next (Sorkin wished for a shift of 50% of urban street space currently dedicated to the car to be given to the pedestrian; and Katz called on cities to “take our nation back” by innovating locally, working regionally and advocating nationally. “Cities are engines of change,” he concluded, “but we don’t act like it.”)

As Omnibus readers know well, the full range of forces at play in urban form is enormous and diverse enough to seem impossible to reduce to a mere 88 minutes. But Hustwit achieves the impossible, criss-crossing the globe from Mumbai to Stuttgart, from New Orleans to New York, to talk to some of the architects, urban planners, historians, artists and citizens responsible for defining or advancing the design of cities. But much more than the individuals and projects featured, what makes Hustwit’s film so engrossing is the way he distills the complexity of urban design and planning without resorting to gross oversimplification of how much thought and action goes into making our cities what they are, from the improvised construction processes of informal settlements in the megacities of the developing world to architectural innovations in the public realm to the policy choices of municipal departments of city planning. We sat down with Hustwit to hear more about Urbanized and the processes, ideas and people that shape our cities.

House models by Elemental/Alejandro Aravena | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

How did the film Urbanized come about?
During the process of making and promoting my last two films, Objectified and Helvetica, I traveled to over 100 cities and became immersed in their design communities. I became fascinated with the similarities and the differences between the cities, and in the ways some architectural or urban development project would inevitably come up in conversation in each place. I thought about that being the theme of a third film. I’ve always been interested in architecture and I hadn’t seen a film expressly about architecture in the context of the city, the design of our cities and people that shape them. At the end of the day, all three films are personal explorations into subjects that I don’t know that much about but am really curious about.

Each of the films explores a different kind of design — graphic design, industrial and product design, and now urban design and planning. What interests you about design as a subject matter in general?
It started with my interest in graphic design. Ever since I got my first Macintosh I’ve been interested in digital fonts and reading design magazines. Helvetica really came out of my being a huge fan of graphic design. I just wanted to see a film about these people whose work I love. I didn’t have any intention of making any other films, much less a trilogy of design-themed films. But the world we created with Helvetica was a world I liked and wanted to stay in a little bit longer. It was only after I started shooting Objectified that I realized how much it felt like an extension of the ideas, questions and visual style of Helvetica. That’s when I kind of saw it as a sequel and then ultimately as part of a three-film cycle.

Amanda Burden at the NYC Dept. of City Planning | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

In professional circles, there is no real consensus as to what urban design is. It’s a matter of incredibly contentious debate. Did you go into this process with a specific definition of what goes into the design of cities? How has your understanding changed over the process?
I didn’t have a specific opinion or idea or definition of urban design going into the project. I learned about all of this over the two and a half years I was making the film. I spent about six months before shooting going to conferences, talking to architects and other people in the field, asking them their opinions about the state of cities and what interesting people and projects they think define the essence of what urban design is. Each person we interviewed would suggest a few other names, and we kept going around, learning more at each subsequent step. After ten interviews I had a little better grasp, and after 30 interviews I got a much better grasp. The narrative of the film developed organically through all these conversations and what the interviewees thought was important. I didn’t start out with a thesis or agenda.

I knew right away that a film like this can’t be comprehensive. You could easily do a full documentary or more on any one of these cities. So we decided to reframe it by looking at specific issues that face all cities and then looking at projects that address those issues. But even when I watch it now I think about things we didn’t get to address — for example, we barely talked about natural disasters. We didn’t get into a project about disaster preparedness.

Protest in Stuttgart, Germany | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

I was amazed at the range of issues you were able to cover. The film moves from public art to public works to public protest. I particularly appreciated that the role of the public in the design of cities was addressed, from the building practices of slum dwellers in India or Chile to the protests of organized, politically active citizens in an advanced economy like Germany’s. Tell me more about how you see the role of the public in the design of cities in years to come.
I hope the film helps people to become more aware, more involved and more critical about the decisions that are made by both city government and private developers. I believe the public should have a huge role both informally and formally. But the idea of participatory design — of using the public as a design compass instead of just getting a reaction to projects that are already proposed — is not being employed as much as it might. It’s really inspiring when you see it happening and working, like the VPUU (which stands for Violence Prevention by Urban Upgrading) project in Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

The township of Khayelitsha, which is outside of Cape Town, was created during the Apartheid era to concentrate the black South African population at the periphery of the city. It was a dormitory settlement — workers just slept there and then commuted back into to the city for work — so there was no real economic base; it’s just houses. It’s one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of the city. So the VPUU of Cape Town started 10 years ago to look at how that settlement had been designed — both the original, formal design from the ‘80s, and also how it had informally developed — and to try to make interventions that would improve safety and combat crime in the area.

Khayelitsha township | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

They spent two years talking to residents before they even started thinking about their first plan. They trained volunteers to go out into the community and talk to people about the problems they face. The biggest priority turned out to be pedestrian walkways, which were where most crime was happening. Khayelitsha has a series of stormwater overflow channels that run through the settlement that were just undeveloped, garbage-strewn land. They weren’t lit, and harbored gang activity and all kinds of criminal activity. But those stormwater floodways were also the informal pedestrian route between the train station and the township. So what VPUU did was formalize the informal pedestrian paths, or desire lines, by paving and lighting the barren channels and turning them into these amazing walkways and public spaces. People are now turning their homes to face these routes because they’re so well designed, and that increases passive surveillance, puts more eyes on the spaces. The murder rate has dropped by 40%. It has become a great pilot program, which they’re now expanding into other townships and to other areas in South Africa. Also, they have trained the people who live in the area to maintain and program it. The project is still evolving. They didn’t just say, “here you go, we built a path, see you later” and step away from it.

What drew me to VPUU’s work was the citizen involvement, even in determining what the project would be. They didn’t come in with an answer — they didn’t even know what the question was when they came in. But they spent years finding out what issue needed a response and then came up with plans that were developed step by step with the community. They spent years designing what the intervention should be and then getting design professionals involved to implement it. That’s the kind of idea that I think should get mainstreamed. It’s not about proposing a project and getting feedback from the public about whether they like it or not. It’s getting people involved in what a project should be, or if there should be a project.

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

That’s a lesson that applies whether the city is in a developed or a developing country. DId you see any patterns that cut across the divides of north and south, developed and developing?
Mobility seems to be one of the main issues that drags cities down. The amount of energy and time and resources that get wasted because of poor mobility solutions, especially in places like Mumbai, or São Paolo, or any of these big cities in the Global South. Think of those famous traffic snarls. It just seems like such a massive waste of energy, waste of resources and also just a total environmental nightmare.

There are so many challenges there, but also so much opportunity, because it’s so universal. Everybody needs to get around. If there are better mobility solutions that can be scaled and mainstreamed, there’s a lot of opportunity to change the way cities operate. I don’t have the answers to those questions, but the purpose of doing a film like this is to generate questions and discussion and awareness and debate about it. Not to tie it all up in a little bow, saying here’s what we should do, go do it.

What role do you see for designers — architects, urban designers and others — in determining the form of cities? The film brings up a lot of forces that shape cities that don’t necessarily rely on design proceeses, such as political processes, for example.
Those political processes are a design process too. It’s all design: any structure of information, built environment, or government process. I think it’s all about the workings of those really complex systems; that is design. And I think it’s the role of designers to improve, change or reframe it incrementally.

The idea of imagining something differently is the kernel is what I think of as design. What really drew me to Candy Chang’s “I Wish This Was” project (which invites city residents to voice what they want to see in their communities) is how that really simple little sticker just gets people who don’t normally think about how their city is shaped to think about it. To imagine what they would want in that vacant lot, or in that burnt out building. To imagine something different. It’s about thinking differently, or being provoked to think differently about the status quo. It seems so simple, but it is just getting people to do that, just getting people to think, “Oh, what could this be? God, I wish it was…” and then fill in the blank. Just that act is so, so powerful. That’s what I think is the future of getting the public involved. It is getting them to and encouraging them to make that step.

"I Wish This Was" by Candy Chang | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

What’s next for you?
Well, we finished the film literally last week. So we’ll spend the next three months touring, screening it in different cities. I’m actually more excited about this tour than that of either of the other two films because these issues resonate in different ways in different cities. I’m really excited to see what issues face each of these individual cities and how they relate to the film. The film had its premiere in Toronto, where there’s been a whole debate about bike lanes and a lake front development. The screening sort of capitalized on all those things happening in the city and made it much more of a public debate. So I’m excited to see how the audience reacts in other cities, in the North America and all over the world.

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. Hustwit worked with LA punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, was Vice President of the media website Salon.com in 2000, and started the indie DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. Hustwit has produced eight feature documentaries, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Moog, about electronic music pioneer Robert Moog; and Oddsac, an experimental feature with the band Animal Collective.

In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, a documentary about graphic design and typography. The film marked the beginning of a design film trilogy, with Objectified, about industrial design and product design following in 2009. Urbanized, about the design of cities, will have its world premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. A longtime advocate of self-distribution and directly engaging his audience, Hustwit will be self-releasing Urbanized with a global screening tour, theatrical runs, and DVD and digital releases.

New York Next: The Future City
Betty Chen, Guy Nordenson, Richard Olcott, Rob Rogers, and Claire Weisz
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
6:30 p.m.
McGraw-Hill
1221 Avenue of the Americas, 50^th Floor
1.5 CEUs

Over the last decade a new generation of architects and engineers has helped guide New York City’s development, through significant public projects produced by their practices and through work with public commissions and agencies.  Five of these influential designers—Betty Chen, Guy Nordenson, Richard Olcott, Rob Rogers, and Claire Weisz – will discuss the city’s trajectory since 2001 and look at the issues, and neighborhoods, that will demand attention in the coming years.

Architect Betty Chen is a member of the New York City Planning Commission and was until recently the Vice-President for Planning, Design and Preservation for the Trust for Governors Island.

Guy Nordenson is a partner of Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers and professor at Princeton, and has served as Commissioner and Secretary of the New York City Public Design Commission since 2006.

Richard Olcott is a founding partner and design principal at Ennead Architects, and a member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1996 to 2007.

Rob Rogers is a principal of Rogers Marvel Architects; recent New York projects include security and streetscape design for Manhattan’s financial district and flood mitigation strategies and street furniture for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Recent projects of Claire Weisz’s firm, WXY Architecture + Urban Design, include the Zipper bench system in Peter Minuit Plaza and public realm plans for Astor Place and Canal Street.

New York Next: The Future City is held in conjunction with the publication of the September Architectural Record, a special issue devoted to New York in the decade since 9/11, when a new focus on superior architecture and urban design helped fuel the revitalization of the city. New York Next: The Future City is co-sponsored by the Architectural League of New York and Architectural Record. Support for the program has been provided by Trespa.

Tickets are required for admission to League programs. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. To reserve a ticket e-mail: rsvp@archleague.org. Tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program.

League programs are made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Photo: Courtesy of Architectural Record

..

Urban Umbrella design by Young Hwan Choi, with Andrés Cortés, AIA, and Sarrah Khan, PE, of Agencie Group.

URBAN UMBRELLA
Two years ago, the NYC Department of Buildings and AIA New York sponsored a design competition to develop an innovative solution for city scaffolding. This week, the winning team unveiled the prototype of the “urban umbrella.” The UrbanSHED competition asked designers to create better “sidewalk sheds” — the ubiquitous blue plywood and metal scaffolding structures seen around town. The winning design comes from Young-Hwan Choi with architect Andrés Cortés and engineer Sarrah Khan of New York-based Agencie Group, who won $25,000 for their efforts. This prototype was constructed by Brooklyn-based architecture and fabrication firm Caliper Studio. “Urban umbrellas” feature modular metal canopies, optimized to allow natural light to reach the sidewalk and designed for cost and structural integrity, that can be custom-installed to meet site dimensions. LED lights will light up the shed at night, which will make for a far safer pedestrian overhang. See a slideshow of the prototype at Inhabitat and read more on this from The Architect’s Newspaper.

Real estate holdings of key players in higher education

CAMPUS HOLDINGS
Mitchell Moss, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University, wrote a compelling piece for The Architect’s Newspaper on recent development trends tied to hotspots of higher education in the city. Illustrated with this beautiful map, Moss points to the fact that the city’s colleges and universities are building up and out at a time when other development is in decline. He cites an incredible statistic: “There are twice as many people enrolled in degree programs in New York City than live in the entire city of Buffalo.” Using every planner’s tool in the box, from eminent domain, rezoning, leasing, trading air rights, public-private partnerships, strategic acquisitions, to contributing space for public purposes, campuses are expanding. The most notable expansions include an additional 6.8 million square feet to Columbia’s current 17-acre Manhattanville campus, an additional 396,000 square feet to CUNY’s 3 million square foot campus, and new buildings for SVA, the New School, and Cooper Union.

Parallel Networks, designed by Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada for Water as 6th Borough Competition

PARALLEL NETWORKS
As a challenge to envision “Water as the Sixth Borough of NYC,” the annual 2011 Terreform ONE prize asked designers to develop a vision for New York City’s future waterway use and to connect this idea with the upcoming Clean Tech World Expo. Designs focused on New York’s waterways, recreational space, transportation and local industry. The grand prize winners, Ali Fard and Ghazal Jafari of Canada, titled their work “Parallel Networks,” and received $10,000 for their work. “Parallel Networks” features a flexible network of floating pods which function as islands for public space and habitat space, with renewable energy, water filtration and food production elements. The pods are easily moveable and adapt to their environment. The modular, add-on system can be grown to diverse scales or could start small, holding potential for adaptation to climate change and other factors. See the full winning design here, as well as other honorable mentions.

FOOD POLICY
New York City Council enacted five bills and several resolutions this week, intending to bring more locally produced food to city residents, schools and jails. The passed initiatives were largely distilled from Speaker Christine Quinn’s “FoodWorks New York,” the proposed comprehensive food system plan for New York City. According to Quinn, New York is the second largest institutional purchaser of food in the city, after the U.S. Department of Defense, which hints at the huge potential these efforts have to influence the region’s food market. Notable measures include: amending administrative code to encourage the purchasing of food grown and processed in New York State; Intro 338-A, which aims to make it easier to construct rooftop greenhouses; and Intro 615, which requires an annual report on the food system from City administration. For more on the benefits and challenges of the City Council’s legislation, take a look at this blog on food policy and this recent piece published in Gotham Gazette by Nevin Cohen, food policy expert and Professor at the New School (who also spoke with us last year about the Five Borough Farm project).

Growing produce in milk crates at Riverpark restaurant

POP-UP FARM IN MIDTOWN?
GOOD Magazine reported this week that a food-producing pop-up farm has been constructed east of the FDR drive in Midtown. The farm sits in the middle of what should have been the Alexandria Center, a bioscience complex that has since been stalled by its developer. Instead of letting the space go,  the developer has partnered with GrowNYC to grow fresh vegetables for Chef Tom Colicchio’s Riverpark restaurant. All the vegetables have been planted in removable milk crates for the time being, considering the site will likely be built out at some point in the future. New York City has more than 600 stalled construction sites and 596 acres of vacant public land. Could milk crate farms be the future for urban ag? See more at GOOD.is.

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

Over the past year, a growing number of online platforms devoted to civic improvements have been launched in cities nationwide, many of them right here in New York. The Institute for Urban Design launched By the City / For the City, asking New Yorkers to generate ideas on how they want to improve the public realm, and then calling on designers to respond to these ideas [Note: By the City / For the City submissions are still being accepted, through July 14. -Ed.] for the forthcoming exhibition and catalogue Atlas of Possibility. This past May, we here at Urban Omnibus compiled Fifty Ideas for the New City, online and in poster form, and asked readers and visitors at the Festival of Ideas for the New City to suggest their own.

The City of New York has been inching toward a digital revolution for some time. In January, Mayor Bloomberg appointed Rachel Sterne, a 27-year old former web entrepreneur, as the City’s first Chief Digital Officer. Soon after, the City released its first-ever Road Map for the Digital City, which lays out a plan to provide more access to the web, improve connectivity, and embrace the growth and influence the web has had on business and personal interaction. And then there are specific web-based services, such as NYCService, a platform for connecting non-profits to volunteers, and 311 Online, the digitized version of citizen hotline 311.

Most recently, the City of New York announced a new digital platform for civic engagement: Change By Us NYC. This online forum is a place “to share ideas, create projects, discover resources and make our city better.” Created by media design firm Local Projects, Change by Us is an adaptation of their earlier project Give a Minute, which has been applied in Chicago and Memphis and is coming soon to San Jose, Philadelphia and Seattle. Change By Us allows users to input ideas by text message and on the website. Based on those ideas, people are directed to “project groups” which connect them with other visitors. By hosting both “‘ideas” and “‘projects,” the site is intended to foster a sense of community through team building and shared resources. The site aims to build a social network for civic engagement by connecting like-minded ideas, people and projects and directing those ideas toward government and non-profits who can make them happen.

Screengrab of nyc.changeby.us

Last December, we spoke to Jake Barton, founder and principal of Local Projects about the Give a Minute project. This week, we checked in with Barton again, and asked him a few questions about Change by Us NYC:

Urban Omnibus: Change by Us NYC is described as an “evolution” of your other successful civic platform Give a Minute, which was announced as a forthcoming NYC initiative by Mayor Bloomberg in January. How will the new platform be implemented differently?
Jake Barton: Give a Minute was a crowd-sourcing platform which allowed anyone to put in their ideas and have them reviewed by various City leaders, whether in government, not-for-profits or business. It was a really exciting way to get people to share their inspirations and innovations with each other and with the City. Change By Us is a platform for actualization. It moves New Yorkers from ideas to solutions, connecting them with projects that make their city better.

You have said: “Change By Us is a moment of transition when residents move from consumers to partners. It’s a way of reinventing public participation.” How will this digital platform increase transparency or connect individuals to organizations, city agencies or other people in any other way than has historically been the case?
Rather than look to the City as the singular provider, Change by Us allows New Yorkers to be partners in innovations and improvements, putting together ideas and initiatives on a local level that are connected to larger organizations like not-for-profits, businesses or government. It is a consolidated approach to improving the city that doesn’t segment between any type of organization, but focuses on the ideas that can make the city better.

How do you think Change By Us will work to effect change? What mechanisms are in place for ensuring that the ideas don’t just stay on the Internet?
Right now there are modest tools for actualization that focus on setting goals, and communicating between project members to achieve those goals. We’re looking to those who start projects to have the passion and tenacity to make their projects real by organizing and taking action. Like all social software, we also have community managers that are starting to go through the site to find projects and advise the project leaders.

How does Change by Us differ from 311 Online?
311 Online is really about access to general City resources, whereas apps like SeeClickFix are really about identifying specific problems for the City to fix. Change By Us is meant to be a platform that frames challenges and provides resources so that New Yorkers themselves can help solve them. The City has some official projects on the site, like the One Million Trees project, but that’s not what powers Change By Us. The New Yorker-led initiatives are at its heart.

How can users connect with the “Network of Listeners” to ensure that their ideas and suggestions are heard?
The goal is to get people who are submitting ideas to join a project and make it happen on their own, using the resources and tools that the site allows. If City leaders listen, and endorse and champion projects, that is just another way to encourage projects to become a reality.

Are you expanding Change By Us and/or Give A Minute to other cities?
We’re slated to launch in Seattle, Philadelphia and San Jose, but are interested in launching in any and every city around the world. By the end of the fall we will have some multi-lingual aspects implemented, as well as a variety of new project tools like video and photo sharing and more, to help us scale up. We’re hoping that Change By Us really is part of a paradigm shift inside cities that mirrors the participation we’re seeing in so many other institutions. We want the people to be able to grab hold and change their cities!

Screengrab from nyc.changeby.us

DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT
The arrival of Change By Us into the digital playing field of civic engagement raises questions: what potential do digital platforms offer for actually improving our city’s public realm? Some of the greatest coalition building and community improvement projects have stemmed from small, citizen-led involvement from the ground-up. Will these platforms benefit small, active groups or offer anything that Facebook, Twitter or Google can’t already provide? More importantly, if decision-makers and proponents of change are thumbing through these ideas, how can we ensure that they adequately represent the needs of all of our citizens, not just a small group of privileged Internet users?

Digital platforms for civic engagement provide users with a diverse set of tools. Change by Us offers a way for people and groups to share best practices and engage with one another to implement change. In a partnership with non-profit Citizens Committee for NYC, Change by Us will offer micro-grants of $500 – $1,000 to community groups seeking to implement ideas shared on the site. Another partner is the online site, ioby, a riff on the Kickstarter model to offer environmental and neighborhood-based groups a platform for fundraising through multiple small donations.

Online platforms like Change by Us will continue to develop and, I hope, will add to the landscape of civic engagement that currently exists in a meaningful way. But it looks like it’s up to us to make sure it is more than just a digital suggestion box.

.

Alicia Rouault is an Assistant Editor at Urban Omnibus. When away from the Omnibus desk, she spends her time working for the City of Newark’s Division of Planning and Economic Development assisting Waterfront Planner Damon Rich. She is currently a Masters Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the Pratt Institute with an interest in urban waterfronts, data visualization, community advocacy, graphic design, and mapping.

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.

There’s a large section on public input gathered from various ‘digital environments’ via Quora.com, Meetups, By the City, online surveys at nyc.gov and more. The top identified needs gathered from such surveys are public wi-fi, internet access in more locations (even in the subway) and real-time public information.

Much of the report talks about all the great stuff the city is already doing — but here’s some of what we can expect from the city’s growing digital infrastructure in the years to come:

• Better Access to the Internet: public computer centers with senior learning, underground subway wi-fi and cell service in six stations, improve computer access with hardware and internet to 72 of the highest-need middle schools in the city
• Open Government: API-enabled Public Data and NYC Platform, an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for City data, a hub for feedback from the developer community and an NYC App store
• Engagement: Partnerships with social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr) to engage residents, digital 311, and a better nyc.gov

Read the full Roadmap for yourself here.
.

HOUSING TRENDS
With New York City’s housing climate hitting new lows — last week’s tragic fire in Bushwick resulted in the deaths of two men living in an illegally-converted boarding house — the need to reevaluate legislation and enforcement around illegal subdivisions was made clear. Bolstered by surprising 2010 Census numbers which discounted predictions on Queens’ new residents (reporting that only 1,343 new people moved to Queens in a decade), illegal conversions housing new immigrants are being taken seriously by housing advocates and even City Hall. A recent analysis by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) found that “illegal housing types, subdivisions and sharing are so extensive in the city that it has become impossible to truly understand the population living behind our closed doors.” The Architectural League is working with CHPC on a multi-phase design study that will provoke innovative design thinking to promote a greater diversity of housing typologies in the city, given the mismatch between contemporary demographic reality and the kinds of dwellings that conform to New York’s complex housing code. Stay tuned for more on this collaboration in the weeks to come.

The issue was also addressed in the most recent version of PlaNYC, and re-evaluation of the topic is at the forefront of political conversation. NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy released its quarterly report on the city’s state of housing — and trends look dreary for foreclosure and sales. Housing prices have dipped in all boroughs except Queens, and 40% of the city’s foreclosure notices are in Brooklyn, but have declined in every borough since 2010. See the full Furman Report and more on housing reform here.
.

New and Old Parks Department Logo | Images courtesy Pentagram

PENTAGRAM AND PARKS DEPARTMENT TEAM UP
Paula Scher, of the design firm Pentagram, has teamed up with the NYC Parks Department to retool their iconic logo and identity, first introduced in 1934. The redesign will touch signage, wayfinding and environmental graphics for 1,700+ parks, playgrounds and other facilities. The design effort, spearheaded by Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, seeks to coordinate the visual identity of the Department of Parks and Recreation with high-profile projects like the High Line and Madison Square Park and to increase consistency across agency materials.

Although consistent with the original design of a leaf in a circle, the new logo has a modernized leaf, a thinner circle line, a brighter, lighter green and is set in the typeface Akkurat. Park signage has the most radical revamp, with modular pieces for future expansion and double sided signs. To read the full story, see Pentagram’s coverage.

New Parks Signage | Images courtesy Pentagram
.

END OF SUBWAY CAR REEFS
If you caught last week’s UO feature on Stephen Mallon’s photography, including his series capturing the process of using retired New York City subway cars as man-made reefs, check out this New York Times slideshow from last week announcing the end of the decade-long program. Over 2,500 retired subway cars (toxic and valuable material removed) had met their fate in the Atlantic, off the coasts of Virginia, Maryland and Delaware, as permanent underwater homes for sea creatures. The program was discontinued this year, when the introduction of newer subway cars with more plastic parts and more complex stripping methods, rendered them unsuitable for oceanic disposal.
.

EVENTS & TO-DOs…

NYPL ALL LIT UP
Paul LeClerc, the president of New York Public Library sought Parisian inspiration to light the renovated Fifth Avenue landmark library. François Jousse, Paris’ civic expert on building lighting and engineering, impressed the library with his practice of putting lights atop streetlights surrounding Paris’ most beautiful buildings, casting a magnificent glow onto the most ornate of facades. The library chose Claude R. Engle, a lighting consultant who has illuminated the World Trade Center, the Louvre and the Pompidou, to redo lighting on the beloved library. Marking its 100th birthday on May 23rd, the building will be drenched in glowing, white light to highlight the massive three-year restoration project.

WILLIAMSBURG SMÖRGÅSBORD
Starting this weekend, there’s a new addition to the growingly popular flea market culture with foodies in mind. Smorgasburg, the new Brooklyn Flea Food Market, is a popular add-on to Williamsburg’s waterfront with 100+ food vendors, food organizations (SlowFood, Just Food, NYC Food Coalition) and NYS Greenmarket farmers to offer a retail market with fresh and prepared food, kitchenware and al fresco dining. Yum! Every Saturday. See the official site here.

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

Janette Sadik-Khan at Shared Streets

Recently, the discourse surrounding sharing New York’s streets (or perhaps more specifically, how to share them with cyclists) has become, to put it mildly, heated. Cycling in the city and the deployment of bike lanes has garnered widespread attention in the press, with The New York Times, The New Yorker and New York all thoroughly covering the unfolding drama of the contentious Prospect Park West bike lane. Having gained notoriety through media outlets across the nation, the issue has now hopped the pond, with the Guardian offering its own take on the debate. All this for what one might otherwise assume is an innocuous street improvement to accommodate cyclists.

Given this context, the Municipal Art Society’s second annual Streets Month — a month-long series of lectures and tours presented with support from the Rockefeller Foundation — is timely. Last Monday evening marked the first of several lectures this April, a lecture/panel discussion entitled “Shared Streets” that explored the challenges of sharing New York’s 6000 miles of streets, our largest public space. Tomorrow, “Big Streets: Using and Reusing City Thoroughfares” will take place at the New York Institute of Technology at 6:30pm. Click here to register.

Last week’s event featured talks from the New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner (DOT) Janette Sadik-Khan and Gil Peñalosa, former Commissioner for Parks, Recreation and Sport for the city of Bogotá, Colombia and the executive director of 8-80 Cities. These presentations were followed by a panel discussion featuring Peñalosa, Sam Schwartz of Sam Schwartz Engineering, and Kate Slevin of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, moderated by Andrea Bernstein of WNYC’s Transportation Nation project.

As Streetsblog reports, “Shared Streets” did not exactly chart new terrain in what has become a familiar topic of conversation. That said, given how the press has characterized the passions in meetings of this sort, I was pleased to see an entirely civil evening unfold. In the formal, calm confines of the Scholastic Auditorium, the speakers underscored not only the multitude of ways the DOT has encouraged a more diverse usage of the city’s streets, but also the difficulty implementing these changes in this sometimes stubborn city. Perhaps more importantly, the event helped to reframe the debate as to why the issue remains critical to the future of New York.

Sadik-Khan’s stump speech offered an appropriate overview of the many initiatives the DOT has implemented since 2007 to foster a broader spectrum of transport modes and to fortify the streets’ multiple roles as places of mobility, commerce and recreation. This primer was helpful. The recent bike lane debates have had the capacity to obscure some of Sadik-Khan and the DOT’s other successes. Under her tenure, the agency has implemented the Select Bus Service, which has reduced transit times and increased ridership on the the routes, deployed 18 new public plazas, and launched programs like the Summer Streets program, giving Park Avenue over to cyclists and pedestrians on August Saturdays. Under the department’s more conventional remit, the DOT is working to make the streets safer, as well as providing maintenance to service the city’s transit infrastructure.

None of this is news, but it was an excellent reminder that the DOT has done an exemplary job of improving the streets for everyone; from the city’s 3 million daily bus riders, to pedestrians, motor vehicles, and of course, cyclists. In this light, it’s interesting how the bike lane issue has come to define the department and Sadik-Khan herself. Yet despite the conflict that has risen in response to the installation of bike lanes, the DOT has done a remarkable job in getting things done. Change is never easy, particularly in New York; it’s a “high profile and sometimes controversial” job, as Sadik-Khan noted, a fitting segue to Mr. Peñalosa’s presentation.

In a breakneck tour across the globe of cities implementing what could be regarded as best practices, Peñalosa echoed Sadik-Khan’s sentiment in timely soundbites. Change is hard. Looking at examples of what have become paragons of successful urban interventions — Copenhagen’s pedestrian streets and cycling culture, Paris’ Velib bike hire, Bogotá’s car-free Sundays — Peñalosa described the need to rebalance our investment in the street to correct the decades-long emphasis on the automobile, and the challenge in doing so.

Mr. Peñalosa helped to refocus the nature of the debate by reminding us of the larger issues at hand. Bike lanes aren’t only for providing cyclists with safe and efficient routes. More importantly, they’re providing New Yorkers with an alternative. Improving the entire DOT transit portfolio — providing an infrastructure of choice — is critical to keeping the city fluid, and allows it to remain competitive with other large metropolitan areas.

The final panel was a slightly less focused discussion, largely surrounding the various cycling controversies that permeated the evening: the role of cyclists on our shared streets, the rules they should obey (or ignore), and the politicization of the lanes. But what became clear from the panel was the need not only to provide the physical infrastructure for cycling but the cultural support for it as well: both the hardware and the software to foster a widespread culture of cycling in New York.

The emphasis on the lanes, a widely reported hot-button issue that has created some rather unlikely foes, is to be expected. And while the provision of bike lanes are one of the more visible of recent DOT initiatives, cyclists are by no means the only actors on a shared street, and it’s perhaps unfortunate that this issue continues to hijack much of the discussion. Sadik-Khan only touched on the success of the Select Bus Service, and their role in the DOT portfolio was largely absent from the panel discussion. While it is heartening to see such an active debate evolve — as one audience member pointed out, more people than ever are now conscious of the new bike lanes throughout the city — the discourse may distract from equally pressing issues facing the DOT.

As New Yorkers, we’re blessed with an innovative and courageous transit authority that has the foresight to provide transit alternatives that will continue to make moving through the city both easier and more enjoyable. With budget shortfalls looming, providing multiple ways to keep the city mobile is critical to ensuring New York can remain competitive globally – the actual mode is far less important than the continued ingenuity and willingness to break beyond conventional planning practices.

For now, bike lanes and cyclists will continue to dominate the Shared Street discussion in New York. But assuming continued support from the city, perhaps the strident resistance will ebb as it has in Copenhagen, Paris and Bogotá, and naysayers will slowly gain an appreciation for these contentious paths.

.

Mat Triebner is a freelance urban strategist, designer, and co-founder of Scout Ltd., a UK-based spatial consultancy promoting creative reuse of vacant lots. 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.