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

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Hurricane Earl is coming! Or at least passing by. Though early reports stated that the storm might hit New York City hard, current forecasts are far less ominous. But maybe we shouldn’t rule out landfall yet. BLDGBLOG tells us that cities might actually attract passing hurricanes due to the jagged topography of urban landscapes. The irregularity of city land cover can result in an air vortex of sorts that can cause storms to veer up to 20 miles off course. With any luck, our potential vortex will stay quiet and keep Earl at bay, since disaster specialists are concerned about New York’s hurricane readiness. City residents don’t consider major storms a realistic threat so preparations would likely be insufficient and the aftermath could be crippling. Flooding would allow saltwater to permeate major infrastructure systems and cause long-term damage and shut-downs even after the storm passed.

Hurricane speculation is just one of many reminders of the vulnerabilities of our infrastructure. Last week, a fire that disrupted the commutes of over 100,000 LIRR passengers was caused by a fire in an “obscure contraption of levers and pulleys” which dates back to the early 1900s. New York is not alone — The New York Times spotlights five major infrastructural systems from across the nation that could be brought down by anything from simple wear-and-tear to burrowing squirrels. Meanwhile, Grist points out that our international systems can be equally unstable, particularly our global food systems, a problem that has motivated many, from community coalitions to government officials, to encourage more localized foodsheds that will improve food security, sustainability and local economies — a challenge that involves land tenure, zoning issues, waste management, urban agriculture and more.

Situ Studio is at it again. The impressive team of Brooklyn designers and digital fabricators, who apply their skills and knowledge to everything from the Guggenheim exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward to a forensic investigation into the killing of a demonstrator on the West Bank, has now teamed up with Princeton University geoscientist Adam Maloof to develop 3D digital reconstructions of fossilized sponges — which might sound boring until you consider that the sponges may be the earliest known form of animal life. Situ’s Bradley Samuels touched on the potential implications of their work for T Magazine: “For Situ Studio, the most exciting aspect of this collaboration is that we were able to successfully employ knowledge developed within an architectural practice to help solve problems in an entirely different field by applying design tools to spatial problems on a completely different scale.” Exactly.

Let’s say you decided to move out of New York City. Where would you go? Or, when you moved here, where did you come from? And why? Brian Lehrer posted those questions to his WNYC audience and then launched Map Your Moves, a migration pattern data visualization challenge using the responses. WNYC has fifteen submissions posted on their site, which range from the humorous to the downright stunning. And FlowingData takes a closer look at Moritz Stefaner’s interactive map and Andrea Stranger’s series of posters.

Screen grab from Map Your Moves by Moritz Stefaner

We recently heard Dan Doctoroff discuss his tenure as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development as part of the League’s Conversations on New York series. Though Doctoroff left office in 2007, projects he launched continue to shape the conversation about our city’s future. This week, City Limits offers a status report for some of Doctoroff’s most notable projects, including Hudson Yards, Bronx Terminal Market, and the rezonings of Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg/Greenpoint.

Last year, we played around with Museum of the Phantom City, an iPhone app which acts as a mobile, living museum of visionary, unbuilt designs for New York City. Now, there is a new app that serves as a portable encyclopedia of built architectural projects around the globe, which you can browse by location, material, architect, program, and more. OpenBuildings.com, the community-driven architectural directory, started the app, simply called Buildings, as a mobile travel guide for architecture enthusiasts. iPhone users can download the app for free to gain access to detailed information, photos, sketches and technical drawings. You can also contribute your own photos or videos to existing entries straight from your phone. Word on the street (or, more accurately, in some comments) is that an Android version is on the way. Sounds like a great excuse to explore the city over the long weekend.

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

UPDATE, 8.21.2010: please see the comments for an important clarification from the author.

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Thomas Birke.

In his “A Country of Cities“ series on Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti recently described how he “attended a terrific conference on vertical density in Hong Kong.” The city-state, he suggested, has mastered the infrastructure challenge. He wrote:

I hadn’t visited in over a decade, and in that time more density has been built, a few more skyscrapers dot the stunning skyline, but the advances one really notices are on the ground. The new airport. The 20-minute train from the airport to downtown. The gleaming subways that glide under Victoria Harbor from Kowloon to Central. The stunning new bridges and tunnels. The lush country parks.

His argument presents examples that might rightly inspire New Yorkers and Americans to clamor for longer-range investment in infrastructure. Why doesn’t New York have a one-seat ride from its airports? Why shouldn’t high-speed rail connect Boston, New York, and Washington, DC?

Still, a notable irony was evident at two conferences organized by The Skyscraper Museum, Vertical Density/Sustainable Solutions, held in New York in October 2008, and Vertical Density: the Public Dimension, held this past January in Hong Kong. While Chakrabarti and other New Yorkers enthused about Hong Kong’s advances, many from Hong Kong worried about the cost of progress. As one top Hong Kong official observed in January, “People are complaining… enough is enough.”

At both conferences, those from Hong Kong invoked our city’s appreciation of history (or, to them, heritage), diversity of building types, avoidance of superblocks, rich street life, and relatively robust opportunity for citizen input. As became clear, density in Hong Kong was fostered by cultural, economic, and historical factors not present in recent-day New York, including top-down planning, warp-speed growth (driven by an influx of refugees from Communist China), an empowered mass transit agency, and a disengaged citizenry.

So while there’s a good argument to build residential density in New York — our city’s towers are primarily commercial — as well as infrastructure, the lessons from Hong Kong may be more aspirational than direct. (Metropolis columnist Karrie Jacobs, who covered the first conference, also teased out the contradictions in a December 2008 column headlined Boomtown Blues.)

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

The Hong Kong scene
Hilly and mountainous, more than three-quarters of Hong Kong territory is preserved as natural landscape, so the city-state has been forced to grow vertically. Complementing the dense central areas on Hong Kong Island, transit-based development creates cross-harbor New Towns out of dozens of identical apartment towers, typically 50-plus stories surrounding a shopping mall. Eminent domain is freely used, and the tax structure militates against warehousing land.

Given the constraints, there was no postwar suburbia to build, as in New York; there was no opportunity, as in New York, to have downzonings privilege wealthier transit-accessible low-rise neighborhoods while upzonings transformed their working-class counterparts, as New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy recently found (PDF).

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user -marten-.

Hong Kong’s thicket of towers has produced a system of upper-level walkways with their own retail and corridor life. Not that it’s fully beloved. While Hong Kong may be the freest economy in the world, “when it comes to pedestrian movement, [it] is one of the least free places in the world,” observed urban designer Oren Tatcher in January.

Hong Kong’s growth has been driven significantly by its transit system, the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), founded in 1975. The MTR (once a public company, now private) acts as a master developer to insure integration of property with the railway, explained Thomas Ho, MTR Property Director, to rapt listeners at the New York conference.

Carrie Lam, since July 2007 Secretary for Development of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, explained that leveling mountains and reclaiming the harbor created the old airport’s runway, the entire new airport, and parts of the Central Business District.  “The harbor is unlikely to argue with you whether it is right or not to reclaim from the harbor,” she said at the New York conference.

That statement pricked up New York ears. Here, “building something in the water today in New York is virtually impossible for a variety of political and environmental reasons,” observed Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

American admiration
American respondents in New York expressed admiration for Hong Kong’s embrace of high-rises and the MTR’s ability to plan rationally. “There’s a dystopia associated with skyscrapers that we need to address,” suggested Ward, citing movies like Blade Runner.

Chakrabarti, then executive VP of the Related Companies, observed, “I think what we’ve seen today should make us, as New Yorkers, very humble, and should really give us pause.” While Americans reject “the culture of density,” he suggested that the real dystopia is evoked by movies like The Stepford Wives, which convey a “very isolated, scary, and fuel-inefficient suburban model.”

A veteran of the effort to build a Moynihan Station that would combine a new train station with mixed-use development, Chakrabarti said we should be “less scared” of public-private partnerships and should “capture land use value around train stations.”

The intangibles
That’s what they’ve done in Hong Kong, to an extent perhaps unique around the world. High-rise living, Ho suggested, can be achieved “in a very civilized way; it all depends on how you plan.”

But most units are smaller than 750 square feet. “We’re living in shoeboxes at extremely high density,” lamented architect Keith Griffiths at the follow-up conference. Local developer Keith Kerr added: “I’m all for building density around railway points, but we end up with a city that’s planned by a railway line.”

Kowloon Housing. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

People in Hong Kong, suggested real estate consultant Nicholas Brooke, pragmatically accept vertical living, though some New Towns residents have experienced “family feuds, suicides, things that build up from pressure from living in high-rise towers.” While planning “was very much driven by engineers” and an effort to maximize land revenues, now there’s a growing sense that intangibles should be considered, Brooke said.

Hong Kong’s functionalism, added Peter Cookson Smith, an architect, city planner and urban designer, is “producing an undifferentiated city form of standard blocks” in contrast to the diversity in New York that “simply takes your breath away.”

Christine Loh, CEO of the think tank Civic Exchange, showed pictures of Hong Kong people going through their daily activities. “How do we preserve the feel of these places?” She and others expressed admiration how issues like landmarking have been translated into New York’s policy. She also cited universities and think tanks as examples of a “tremendous civil society and engagement.”

Hong Kong matures
Secretary for Development Lam, in New York, suggested that, as Hong Kong’s growth has slowed, planners have more of a “luxury” to address issues like building height and bulk and the lack of street life. She described an intensive public planning process for the old airport site at Kai Tak in which more parks emerged, thanks to “an extensive reduction in density.”

Later, at the Hong Kong conference, Lam was more emphatic, asserting that, as much as possible, “We should balance redevelopment with building rehabilitation, revitalization, and preservation of some of our historic past.”

Battery Park City. Photo by Flickr user MD111.

Solutions in New York
Of course Hong Kong and New York have been traveling along different paths. Chakrabarti, in Hong Kong, suggested it was dangerous to compare the two cities’ responses to density, given that New York is “a city that may be very dense at its center, but is extraordinarily sprawling as a region.” And he pointed out that a “mature” city like London also surpasses New York in building infrastructure.

“It’s very difficult to build and finance infrastructure if you don’t believe in central authority,” Chakrabarti said, a hint at the regional inequities he’s highlighted.

It’s hard to disagree, as the main challenge remains regional and national. Still, New York’s record suggests that, even within the city, the rational planning process can be distorted. Consider how the Furman Center suggested fairness has been scanted in the city’s rezonings.

Or consider how the Port Authority’s Ward, at the New York conference, suggested that the resistance to the massive Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn stemmed from locals’ discomfort with a dramatic shift in density. While that shift surely generated dismay, an equal measure of discomfort derives from the perception that Atlantic Yards has been a sweetheart deal, with a single developer anointed public land before any planning process, and with public amenities such as open space coming late rather than early.

Chakrabarti observed that communities will accept density only if the infrastructure is there first; indeed, a showcase New York example at the Hong Kong conference was Battery Park City, with its parkland frontloaded and parcels bid out to multiple developers, though it was acknowledged that original goals for affordable housing were not met.

A former director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning turned developer turned academic, Chakrabarti knows New York’s constraints: “We cannot generate amenities, open space, even simple improvements to the subway system without harnessing new development.” If so, as in Hong Kong, it’s important to get the balance right between the development business and the central authorities entrusted with the public interest.

New York City. Photo by Flickr user Christopher Isherwood.

Brooklyn journalist Norman Oder, who’s written the Atlantic Yards Report watchdog blog for more than four years, attended the first conference and watched the second conference panels via webcast.

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.

Brooklyn Bridge, 1898

Every borough has its own fabled histories, idiosyncratic residents and constantly negotiated neighborhoods. This summer, WNYC is running Borough Tales, a series that explores the legends and quirks of each borough and invites listeners to ask questions of some passionate borough historians. Last week, Queens Borough Historian Jack Eichenbaum spoke about the significance of neighborhoods and the changing patterns of immigration in Queens. This week Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger chose his favorite era in Brooklyn history and spoke about being a life long Brooklynite, a Dodgers (and now Cyclones) fan, and the creation of the Coney Island Hot Dog, the nation’s first fast food.

Speaking of food, a reminder for our Toronto readers that Foodprint Toronto, the second in a series of international conversations about food and cities organized by Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, is taking place tomorrow, July 31. Twilley and Rich spoke with us earlier this year about food systems and their impact on the city, in anticipation of their inaugural Foodprint event here in New York (and stay tuned for a follow-up piece from Twilley next month). This time around Pruned has interviewed the pair about the Toronto event and how they’ll be picking up where they left off in New York City.

One of many points of intersection between food and cities is, of course, community gardens, some of which provide the land required for urban farming. Community gardeners in New York have relied for some time on an agreement between the City and the State Attorney General’s office that helps to protect community gardens from purchase and development. Way back in January 2009, we learned more about this from Holly Leicht, who was involved in litigation leading to the original agreement, while we were investigating urban agriculture in East New York. This agreement is set to expire in September. Make your opinions known by writing in to either the Department of Parks & Recreation (read their rules in this PDF) or the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (read their rules in this PDF) by August 10th. Read more about this on Treehugger.

Clearly, open space of all stripes requires politics and planning, in New York as elsewhere. Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, has written a book on the subject entitled Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, in which he shares case studies from Atlanta to Chicago to Pittsburgh. Read Anne Schwartz’s informative review of the book on Gotham Gazette.

For a different kind of public space, Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta is among those firms selected to design permanent public places along the newly pedestrianized sections of Broadway. Famed Marxist urbanist David Harvey may think that reclaiming the avenue for foot traffic is just a part of the process of turning “the whole damn place into a suburb,” but we are looking forward to the designs. Other firms in the project team include WxY architecture + urban design, Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, BILLINGS JACKSON DESIGN, Leni Schwendinger Light Projects LTD, Pure + Applied, Weidlinger, Buro Happold, BEXEL, Wesler Cohen, and Ducibella Venter and Santore.

Another kind of street life, including “beautifully bleak” images of “New York City’s ventilation towers, highway underpasses, demolition sites and dumps”, has found itself epicted in the canvasses of Rackstraw Downes since the 1960s. Right now, the American landscapes of the British-born artist are on display in three exhibitions, “Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., “Rackstraw Downes: Under the Westside Highway,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut; and “Rackstraw Downes: A Selection of Drawings 1980 to 2010” at the Betty Cunningham gallery in Chelsea.

If Downes’ urban landscapes inspire you to don your safari hat and binoculars for that epic urban hike this weekend, leave your GPS enabled device at home and use the very satisfying techniques of natural navigation. For tips on how, check out this New York Times infographic.

In other news, the director of design documentaries Helvetica, which explores typography through the eponymous and iconic typeface, and Objectified, which explores the world of producct and industrial design, has set his sights on urban design for the third movie in the series: Urbanized. The MTA has released its preliminary budget for 2011, confirming rumors of fare and bridge toll hikes as well as eliminating the one-day and 14-day unlimited MetroCards. The New York taxi fleet looks beyond the era of the iconic Ford Crown Vics. The Landmarks Preservation Commission is set to deny landmark status to the potential site of downtown Mosque, clearing the way for construction of the controversial religious center to go forward, notwithstanding the Mosque-exclusion zone guidelines advanced by the likes of Newt Gingrich. And last but not least, and not a moment too soon, Mayor Bloomberg’s bed bug advisory task force releases its recommendations, including that the mayor appoint a bed bug czar to tackle high-stakes pest control.

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

Last week, New York City Commissioners Amanda Burden, of the Department of City Planning (DCP), Adrian Benepe, of Parks and Recreation (DPR), and David Burney, of the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), convened at the Great Hall of The Cooper Union for the third in the Architectural League’s series of Conversations on New York.  Moderated by New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, the discussion focused on the two major questions posed by the League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made: how has the physical fabric of New York changed in the last ten years, and what is the legacy of this decade for the future of New York?

Goldberger opened the conversation with a question about the recent Active Design Guidelines, an initiative of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene that ultimately involved the DDC, the City Department of Transportation (DOT), DCP and the Office of Management and Budget. How did such a cross-agency collaboration come about? Burden credited this kind of approach to the Mayor, who from the start questioned why things never seemed to get done in city government. Dan Doctoroff played a significant role in increasing effectiveness by consolidating all City agencies with an impact on economic development under his authority, thereby allowing such agencies as DCP, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Economic Development Corporation to report to one deputy mayor. The result, said Burden, has been a coordinated and broad approach to planning that benefits both the agencies and the public.

Goldberger asked if New York City is inherently a fitter city than most, in the same way that our density makes us an inherently greener city — a question that drew attention to a voice missing from the table, that of DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan. (A last-minute schedule conflict prevented Sadik-Khan from participating on the panel.) Benepe “wore the Sadik-Khan hat” and spoke of her well-known work with bike paths and bike safety as a significant contributor to the city’s overall health. Despite controversies, Benepe said, the bike paths work and they are safe. “But we,” Benepe, a cyclist himself, said, “are our own worst enemy.” The missing ingredient for the bike lanes’ ultimate acceptance is better cyclist behavior: running red lights and close swipes to pedestrians and drivers diminish non-cyclists’ openness to expanding the program.

Goldberger asked each panelist to take a step back and consider the overall evolution of the built environment of New York City over the last ten years. What, he asked, will be the legacy of this decade?

According to Burden, the legacy of the Bloomberg administration will be its focus on the public realm, vibrant street life, and quality design. She focused on the massive rezoning efforts undertaken by City Planning, the goals of which were to focus development around transit hubs in all five boroughs, recapture the waterfront for the public, and protect low-density communities that don’t have the transit infrastructure to grow from disproportionate development. Ultimately she hopes that the administration has allowed the city to “grow in place,” enabling each neighborhood to accommodate the new while retaining the assets it already had. “We plan on a Robert Moses scale, but judge ourselves on Jane Jacobs standards.”

For Benepe, this era will be remembered as “the most exciting period of park design and expansion in decades,” a time when appreciation of the landscapes of Olmsted and Vaux did not preclude pushing the envelope of park design. This administration has insisted that municipal architecture be of the best possible quality. As for the legacy of the Bloomberg administration overall, Benepe surmised that the way in which various City departments worked together, in a fashion that may never have existed before, will prove to be a landmark of these ten years.

Burney remarked on the undeniable influence of 9/11, and the way in which it “triggered a fundamental change in how we think about cities in general.” In the ‘70s, cities were going bankrupt and people questioned the value of cities on the whole, an uncertainty that resurfaced after the 2001 attacks. Ultimately, cities survived these losses of faith because our ideas of ‘what cities are’ changed. Burney stated that people live in cities now because they want cities’ “multiplicity of choices:” culture, educational opportunities, safety, recreation, quality of life – not necessarily because they are mercantile or industrial hubs, their primary attraction in earlier eras. If those offerings and opportunities are sustained, New York City will continue to be a place where people choose to live.

Goldberger, returning to parks, questioned Benepe on the increased privatization of public space and parks. While strained public budgets make this appear beneficial, is it “a Faustian bargain in the long run?” Benepe reminded the audience that the private conservancies and alliances in question were formed because the Parks Department had allowed the City’s parks to become frightening, decrepit places. Citizen participation and investment in the maintenance of parks is an energy the city wants to encourage, as long as “public interest always [remains] paramount.” Besides, Benepe asserted, the existence of conservancies and friends groups for the City’s most visible parks makes more city funding available for the ones without private support.

Turning to Burden, Goldberger challenged her characterization of the rezonings as intending to retain the fundamental character of city neighborhoods. What about the shiny glass towers that transformed certain areas and the complete demographic shift of some neighborhoods? Burden acknowledged the strength of the real estate market pre-crash and claimed that some out-of-character development shot up because developers saw the rezonings coming. But she did not apologize for certain noticeable changes. “The Bowery is a fantastic corridor,” she said, “It is exuberant, which is good for the city.” The city does, and should, change, and though the lasting appeal of certain styles will be a test of time, architecture helps keep a city young and important. “If we want to remain a global city, we have to compete. Architecture is one component of that competitiveness.”

In a question directed at Burney, Goldberger asked what the city is doing about affordable housing. Burney emphasized the challenges, pointing to the deficiencies, historically, of federal housing policy, which contributed to the fits-and-starts development of the city’s housing program. He acknowledged the good work being done by Shaun Donovan (Secretary of Housing and Urban Development and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development), but noted that any advancement on the supply side, which is already hindered by budgetary constraints, is overwhelmed by the extraordinary demand. Burney called out Via Verde for commendation as a new kind of housing program that is worthy of attention, one that is creating a complete neighborhood in one piece – with mixed typology, mixed income, retail, and gardens.

Goldberger concluded the panel by asking how New Yorkers will look back on this period fifty years from now.

Burden hopes that they will talk about the waterfront and how the water’s edge is part of their lives. She hopes that they will think about the quality of life in the streets, the integration of nature into the urban environment, and improved walkability. And most importantly, she said, she hopes that the city is considered a truly five-borough city.

Benepe also focused on the waterfront, though he characterized the accomplishment as “taking it for the first time.” The waterfront, he reminded the audience, has been a location for business since the Dutch arrived. This is the first time the waterfront is being given to the people for recreational purposes. Overall this administration’s large-scale public works projects will be remembered as ushering in a new ethos of landscape architecture, one with more sensitive engineering and an increased integration with nature. Benepe also pointed out, to put the time frame of large-scale public works projects in perspective, that in fifty years, New Yorkers will just be seeing the completion of Freshkills Park.

Burney concluded the panel discussion on a cautionary note. We are at a crossroads regarding climate change and its impact on the world, he said. “Fifty years from now we might be in a Ridley Scott situation,” and it’s not looking good that we will turn things around. Citing failures of policy on both the state and national level, Burney called for action: “It’s the cities that are having to step up and take the lead to face these issues. What we do in the next ten years will determine what we’ll be seeing in fifty years.”

UPDATE: A podcast of the event is now available on the League’s website. Click here to watch Adrian Benepe, Amanda Burden and David Burney in conversation.

Varick Shute is the Project Manager of Urban Omnibus.

Last Thursday night, a relaxed and candid Dan Doctoroff joined Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker, for the second of the Architectural League’s “Conversations on New York.” He discussed, with palpable affection for the city, some of the big plans he initiated while Deputy Mayor for Economic Development between 2002 and 2007.

Goldberger began the conversation by asking whether Doctoroff’s focus “on the physical city” as a strategy for economic development was a matter of administrative policy or a personal interest, and why that emphasis seems less strong since he left his position. For Doctoroff, the answer is both: he and Bloomberg came into office three months after 9/11, inspired by the extraordinary responsibility — and opportunity — to “remake the city.” His primary map for this remaking was the Olympic plan, developed by NYC 2012, an organization Doctoroff founded before joining City government. While the bid was unsuccessful, Doctoroff repeated throughout the event that many of the plans developed under the auspices of the 2012 bid have been set in motion anyway. The agenda underlying the Olympic plan was to use the event to catalyze the development of areas of the city that had suffered in the transition to a post-industrial economy, including the west side of Manhattan, the Brooklyn waterfront, Coney Island, the Queens waterfront, Flushing, the South Bronx and Harlem. He credits Alexander Garvin (the subject of the first of the League’s “Conversations on New York” last month) with making a workable urban plan that did not concentrate all Olympic activity in one part of the city, as is the case in London, which won the Olympics for 2012.

Alongside these physical objectives, Doctoroff stated that his desire to win the Olympics for New York was rooted in his deeply held belief in the symbolic power of the city. Invoking both the city’s singular diversity and the increasingly competitive global race in which it finds itself, he saw hosting the games as an “opportunity to remind the world what New York City means to the world.”

Some of Doctoroff’s most ambitious visions, such as the West Side Stadium and congestion pricing, fell afoul of the working processes of a tangle of municipal, state, regional and federal governance structures. With respect to the stadium, in addition to the opposition of state legislators and the extravagant lobbying efforts of Cablevision, Doctoroff admits that he failed to communicate what he saw as an essential argument for the project: it was to be more than a stadium; it was to be a state-of-the-art update to a woefully outdated Javits Center; it was to create a new neighborhood, a new boulevard, a new subway line. With respect to congestion pricing, Doctoroff remains optimistic that it will come up for discussion again.

Doctoroff emerged from his years in city government as a fan of the City’s uniform land use review process (or ULURP), stating that every project that went through ULURP benefited from it. He even evinced some regret that the plan for Atlantic Yards did not go through ULURP. Atlantic Yards, for Doctoroff, is an example of a project with a perceived “purpose for the city” that was “much bigger than the immediate community.” In this case, the purpose was the need for affordable office space in Downtown Brooklyn to counter the migration of back-office functions to New Jersey and elsewhere. When Goldberger asked him about the “Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs dialectic,” Doctoroff replied that he does not believe that community consensus and bold urban visions are mutually exclusive. And, perhaps more than anything else, he believes in the need for long-term planning, building constituencies around plans that transcend any one political administration.

Perhaps the most significant legacy of his tenure is, in fact, a long-term plan, PlaNYC, which grew out of the simple observation, in 2005, that for even the most banal municipal land use needs like salt piles and tow pounds, no sites seemed to be available. Given New York’s projected population increases over the coming decades, Doctoroff went about finding ways to accommodate the growth and turn it into an asset for the city. He cited a list of successes — hybrid cabs, a million trees, stormwater management interventions – and one major disappointment: congestion pricing. Doctoroff’s belief in long-term planning, in counter-cyclical investment, and in bold visions with broad constituencies, underpin his most powerful asset in helping to create the conditions for this future city to thrive: his passionate belief in the openness, tolerance, diversity and symbolism of New York itself.

UPDATE: A podcast of the event is now available on the League’s website. Click here to watch Doctoroff and Goldberger in conversation.

Cassim Shepard is the Project Director of Urban Omnibus.

In 1996, Doctoroff read Garvin’s The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t and subsequently approached him about the feasibility of New York hosting the summer Olympics. Garvin unequivocally agreed with its possibilities, and began seeking out all the city’s sizable and unused spaces for potential venues. He was only interested in vacant sites because, he joked, “I may be far to the right of Michael [Sorkin]… but I don’t believe in relocation.”

In the following excerpt, Garvin describes the back-story of meeting and working with Doctoroff to plan the infrastructural scheme for the NYC2012 Olympic bid. The plan, dubbed The Olympic X, emerged when Garvin placed a roll of trace paper over the map of proposed venues and connected them via the existing subway routes. Check out an excerpt from the story below:

New York, according to Garvin, is ready for a comprehensive rewrite of its massive zoning tome. For Garvin, the need for such a rewrite has just as much to do with financial feasibility as it does the physical edifice of the city, because current legal requirements make it too expensive for individuals and small businesses to build. Identifying himself as “pro-development”, Garvin’s position marks a distillation of public and private roles in the planning process. Nonetheless, his ideal zoning ordinance would focus on the public realm (streetscape, parks, transportation, infrastructure) rather than private property.

Ten years ago, Garvin might not have supported the zoning approach he now favors. Even during his Housing and Community Development work under the Lindsay administration in the 1970’s, Garvin helped develop floor-area bonuses for residential developers for planning in public resources. “It didn’t work,” said Garvin. Since their inception, bonuses have been used by City Planning to incentivize amenities considered beneficial to the general population, ranging from affordable housing to grocery stores providing fresh produce. If developer bonuses should not be included as incentive, Sorkin asked, “then how do you feel about the Inclusionary Housing Program?” Garvin replied that he simply does not favor bonuses. He feels that if we, as a city, want to provide subsidized housing, then we should subsidize housing. When he mentioned that a greater supply of residential units would bring down costs, Sorkin cited this year’s NYU Furman Center report (PDF) that revealed that recent rezoning efforts have effectively provided very little change to city-wide residential capacity.

Development bonuses have been the corrective to the imbalance of public/private power derived from the 1961 zoning ordinance, but Garvin was eager to share how his work at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation after 9/11 gave him new insight into this balancing act.

“It wasn’t until 9/11 that I realized how much power the state had,” Genevro commented. She cited a December 2002 plan by the city she favored because of its emphasis on transportation, the public realm, and removal of office space from the World Trade Center site and asked, “What happened to this plan?” Garvin reiterated that despite the plan’s inclusion of several policies he advocates, city agencies had no control over the site redevelopment, which was run by state agencies. Garvin reminded the audience and his interlocutors that the Port Authority always maintained control over redevelopment.. Because the Port Authority relied on the income from Silverstein Properties to make payments on its bonds, the authority believed it needed to replace the 10 million square feet of lost, rentable office space. He pointed out that Mayor Bloomberg has worked hard to reclaim control of some city agencies that were ceded to the state in previous administrations. Yet he noted that for Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards, the Bloomberg administration chose to pass power to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), a state agency, to circumvent ULURP, the land use procedures requiring community board reviews of such projects.

Nonetheless, he considers the amount of public participation to be one of the successes of his time at LMDC: “Lower Manhattan reflected that architecture mattered in New York City.” And he considers his greatest achievement from this period to be that Greenwich Street will continue through the WTC superblock to connect Tribeca and Lower Manhattan. Hear Garvin explain this episode in his own words in the excerpt below:

The conversation was stimulating, and invoked the complexity at the heart of New York’s built environment and any attempts to affect it. The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 touches only the surface of this tangled history, and Garvin’s talk reminded the audience of the extent to which large plans, built and unbuilt, helped launch an era of massive change in the history of New York. Don’t miss Doctoroff and Goldberger in conversation this Thursday.

UPDATE: A podcast of the event is now available on the Architectural League’s website. Click here to watch the complete discussion between Garvin, Genevro and Sorkin.
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Matthew Storrie is Associate Curator for The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 and former Project Designer at WW. He is a student in the Princeton University Master of Architecture class of 2012 and has resided in Brooklyn for the last two years.

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 fall, we recapped a landmark symposium that the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council convened to challenge housing officials, designers and developers to reform housing and zoning codes based on analysis of how people are actually living. Fewer and fewer people can afford to live within the existing legal housing standard, so more and more live outside of it. In addition to increased vulnerability to fire and safety hazards, tenants in illegal units have few enforceable rights. And the recent immigrants who comprise a large percentage of tenants in illegal units are often unwilling to seek official help. Some of them end up seeking help from community-based organizations like Chhaya, a community development corporation in Jackson Heights that works to address the unique housing needs of New York’s South Asian community – immigrants from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal and Caribbean nations such as Guyana and Trinidad. Seema Agnani, Chhaya’s executive director, has seen firsthand the challenges that illegal dwelling units – particularly basement apartments – pose to immigrant tenants. And she’s also seen the opportunity that legalizing some of these units presents.

For these immigrants and other low-income New Yorkers priced out of the legal housing market, illegal subdivisions provide an undeniable source of affordable housing in New York City. Many of these units are unfit for habitation or otherwise unsafe. But not all of them. In some cases, legalizing a unit would simply require the filing of architectural plans with the Department of Buildings. In others, the impediment to legalization is not the Building Code but the zoning map – the unit might meet legal requirements for safe habitation but the property cannot legally accommodate multiple families. Still others are very close to meeting legal requirements but fall short in a minor way. Architects and planners need to get involved to help community advocates realize this potential for creating affordable housing out of our existing building stock.

Bringing illegal units into the scope of regulation could have a number of positive impacts: tenants’ living conditions would improve; forced displacement would decrease; rental income might lessen the burden on overleveraged homeowners at risk of mortgage default; landlords would begin to report rental income, increasing City revenues and potentially lessening the burden on social services in neighborhoods with large populations of undocumented residents. But how do you do that? Step 1: create an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) code and bring those basements that can be made into safely habitable apartments up to the standards of that code.

What follows is Seema Agnani, executive director of Chhaya, explaining the context and need for an ADU code in her own words. -C.S.

"Do you know your rights as a tenant?" Flyer detail. Chhaya offers services in Bangla/Bengali, English, Hindi, and Urdu

In 2000, as we were in the process of establishing Chhaya, we completed a needs assessment survey of the South Asian immigrant community around the city and found that 50% of people we talked to didn’t have a lease. Over the years, both owners and tenants have sought us out with concerns: tenants who were living in illegal units and owners who were frustrated because tenants were not paying rent. So education, advocacy and organizing around the issues of illegal dwelling units have become a priority area for our organization.

Basement apartments are a legitimate source of affordable housing; the issue is that they need to be brought up to code. If they were, unsafe conditions would be improved, tenants could be guaranteed their rights, and owners could regularize their ability to collect rent and insure the protection of their property. But we’ve found that many elected officials are afraid to touch this issue; they see it as an issue of neighborhood preservation, with a lot of the more established residents feeling that new immigrants are coming in and ruining their communities. But the City is draining all sorts of resources. Judges in the court system are frustrated with the number of complaints, but there is nothing they can do to tackle the issue. The Department of Buildings is tired of having to issue these fines, despite the revenue. It’s also a huge drain on public resources, resulting in overcrowded schools and overstretched social service provision. But if these units and the population that resides in them could be planned for, it could really be a resource for the city. So last year we went about the process of documenting how many of these units actually exist.

Jackson Heights zoning map. Jackson Heights was one of the first of New York's neighborhoods designed with the car in mind, which required creating lots with larger areas at the back for garages. This characteristic allows for the existence of separate rear entrances to additional basement units.

The Housing and Secondary Unit Survey – which was designed in partnership with the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Council – was intended to document that these units exist and to assess the feasibility of legalizing them, looking at means of egress, the size of the windows, etc. We looked at two census tracts, one in Jackson Heights and one in Briarwood, Jamaica. Our goal was to look at what the actual data was versus what was on record. We surveyed 446 homes, all registered as single-family, and found that 80% had signs of basement use, and we estimate that 35% of these basement units could potentially be legalized.

These are decisions that should be based on health and safety not necessarily on inches.After analyzing the data, we put forward a series of recommendations that would remove some of the impediments to bringing illegal basement apartments to code. It basically comes down to implementing an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) code. The concept is that the zoning doesn’t necessarily have to change. Many of the neighborhoods in question are zoned for single-family homes, which makes converting a property into a two-family home much more complicated. An ADU code is a way of getting around all of that – it remains a single-family home with an accessory unit.

Many places have already implemented ADU codes: Washington State, Santa Cruz, Yonkers and other parts of Westchester County, for example. But in New York City, the current building code is so strict that it makes legalization very difficult. For example, there is a legal difference between a cellar and a basement. A cellar is more the 50% below ground, a basement is more than 50% above. We’ve seen apartments that are more that 50% above ground at the front of the unit and less in the back. Our argument is that these are decisions that should be based on health and safety not necessarily on inches. If there is enough air and light and if it is safe, then the codes should be more flexible.

144th Street in Briarwood / Jamaica. Briarwood is a mostly residential, multi-ethnic community of one and two-family homes, many of which have basements, backyards and garages. Out of 305 homes surveyed in this area, 52 properties had received some form of complaint related to an illegal conversion.

Photo: Flickr user Peter Manzari

Our proposal is to create an ADU code, starting with a pilot project in a specific area, and then move on to the creation of financial incentives and the establishment of loan programs and grant programs. The ideal scenario would be to pass something at both the state and city level, but because of this issue’s political sensitivity, we are proposing that the City start with a pilot project. We would set a goal of helping maybe one hundred owners go through the process of legalizing a basement unit. That way, the City could learn from this process and also expedite it. One of the challenges is that these apartments already exist, so how do you insure that they have been converted properly in terms of the built-in wiring, piping, etc. A lot of architects are afraid to sign off on these apartments because they can’t do a proper inspection.

We need more architects involved in this work. There’s a real need for spatial, design and construction expertise, as well as help getting into the specifics of building codes. I think that is the actual missing piece for us right now.  We have advocates, we have legal experts but we don’t have enough of the design community involved in the process. And if we can get a pilot program going, then we’re going to need architects to help us  help individual homeowners through the process of legalization.

Detail of Building Code, Chapter 5: General Building Heights and Areas, Section BC-501

The design community could help us think through energy conservation approaches and ways to improve energy efficiency as well. There are a lot of resources available now – through weatherization programs and other stimulus money – that could be used to help with this process. And I think that we could think of an ADU plan as an opportunity to green these neighborhoods.

The majority of these units exist in the outer boroughs, they exist in immigrant communities that have established hubs. Their temples are here; their mosques are here; their community is here. People are willing to live in overcrowded conditions in order to be in these communities. Particularly in Queens, there really has been very little investment in affordable housing developments. If you look at where all of the development has occurred by the non-profit or for-profit sector, it’s pretty shocking when you see how little has been done in this borough. Of course there are political reasons for that, but I also think there’s a perception that everyone in Queens lives in historic single-family homes or nice condos and co-ops. There’s really a need to educate the broader public about the borough itself and what’s going on here. This is where the majority of new immigrants have settled in New York City.

With such a dynamic population, we need to build a base of tenants and owners who want to push for this. So there is a big community organizing component in addition to the policy advocacy work. The forums we convene can get pretty heated. Owners are stressed out about fines they’ve received, tenants are upset because they’re being evicted – we heard cases where families had been living in a neighborhood for over ten years, with kids in local schools, and then a forced eviction pushes them out, often into another illegal basement apartment, given the lack of legal affordable housing – and both groups are angry at their elected officials for not helping them. It’s not an easy issue to organize around. So we’re taking it to the streets. And we’ll see how it goes.

The staff of Chhaya Community Development Corporation

Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC.  In addition, she worked with Asian Americans for Equality for several years as a housing development associate while also focusing on fundraising and development; and later served as a coordinator of the Lower Manhattan Health Care Coalition. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

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.