The locations, heights and age of the mobile phone antenna installations filed with the Department of Buildings since 2005. The variable density of base stations is a reflection of the extremes of architectural topography and the obstruction environment, as well as the volume of user demand.

The relationship between mobile infrastructure and a city like New York is complex, and subject to many different forms of negotiation. It is also subject to a remarkable degree of change, reflecting the evolving form of the city itself and the novel ways that people engage it. The variables that concern how mobile infrastructure operates, how it is deployed and located within the city, and how its tactics change over time are certainly all spatial in nature. And taken as a whole, the negotiation between the infrastructure and the city describes a fundamentally new form of space – the signal space of the city – where the city and its electromagnetic transmission environment meet.

Mobile networks are at once invisible, and are also the systems most associated with the soft dimensions of infrastructure and its potential to act as an engine for large-scale social, economic and technological change. At a recent conference on mobile communications technology, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission noted that “no sector of the communications industry holds greater potential to enhance America’s economic competitiveness, spur job creation and improve the quality of our lives.” And just as the operational and physical dimensions of conventional infrastructure, from transportation to utilities, manifest themselves and influence the growth of the city in important ways, signal space can be understood as a new and important public space, located at a nexus of public, corporate, governmental and technological concerns.

While much of the speculation about the future of the city in relation to mobile networks has been focused on applications and potential uses of the technology, less attention has been devoted to the way that the technology itself is developing and the impact that it may have on the city. Our research into mobile infrastructure centers around identifying some of the developments in mobile technology that have the greatest potential to affect the future development of the city, and speculating on where they may have particular relevance for design. Our aim has been to theorize and document signal space, to increase its visibility, and to make its protocols and characteristics available for action.

Cellular network organization

SECTORIZING THE CITY
At the most fundamental level, a mobile phone is a two-way radio. The phone contains an antenna that communicates with a mobile base station nearby. A base station generally includes a series or array of antennas that receive and transmit signals, and a computer that coordinates the communication and interfaces with the cabled phone system. The structure of mobile networks is generally comprised of sectors or cells, defined as the overlapping region of three base stations. At its simplest, a cellular network can be imagined as a continuously tiled set of hexagonal cells, with base stations located at every other vertex. An individual user making or receiving a call communicates with a nearby base station. As that user moves out of range, the signal is shared between other base stations within range until the most optimum base station is identified and the call is handed over.

The broadcast spectrum is a finite resource, so the region of the broadcast spectrum available for any given technology is rigorously policed and legislated. Mobile networks have access to a limited range of frequencies, so cellular communication is based on the reuse of frequency channels within the network. Any of the frequencies associated with a given cell are being reused at another cell, usually nearby but far enough away to avoid co-channel interference.

Frequency Allocations of the Radio Spectrum from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) | Right-click and open in a new window to see details.

The capacity of the system is limited by interference from the environment and by the depletion of available channels due to an increasing number of users. Each base station can only accommodate a certain number of simultaneous users, for instance, so one of the primary methods for increasing the capacity of mobile network technologies relies on subdivision — sectorizing the city into smaller and smaller individual frequency zones.

The surest measure of signal quality is the unobstructed line of sight from antenna to receiver. In dense environments, like cities, signals tend to be reflected off of obstructions and arrive out of phase at the receiving antenna. Coverage is dependent not only on the availability of a signal at a given location, but on the network’s ability to maintain a signal over time, throughout an individual cell, and as a user moves from cell to cell. Mobile base stations are strategically located to optimize the “fit” between the available signal and the specific physical environment. The complexity of this relationship is such that most base stations are located as a result of experimental testing and local calibration because no sufficiently powerful analytical methods or modeling are available to determine the behavior of signals.

Base stations and antennae | L-R: Jane Street at Hudson; E. 4th St. between Ave. A and Ave. B; E. 2nd St. and Ave D; Sullivan and W. 3rd St.

The FCC, in recent years, has authorized a three-fold increase in the commercial spectrum, which includes the recent auction of 700MHz frequencies previously in use by analog television. However, given that a 35-fold increase in wireless traffic is expected over the next five years, mobile providers constantly add antennas to their networks. While a single base station might have a range measured in miles in an unobstructed environment, in an urban setting installations are often separated by only a few hundred feet.

Rapidly increasing demand will mean that base stations, which today are almost exclusively located semi-stealthily on mid-rise building rooftops, will not only become denser, but will likely migrate into interiors, streets and other public spaces. The radical densification of sectoring into ever-smaller cells affords finer degrees of control over the transmission. It also calls for a miniaturization of the antenna equipment to allow for easier integration with other structures and camouflage. Already, hundreds of thousands of femtocells (small-scale base stations for boosting wireless signals indoors that are the size of a Wi-Fi router) are currently installed throughout the United States.

Base Station Density | L: The service volume, or exposure, for each base station was determined by calculating the total interior square footage of buildings within the broadcast radius of each antenna point. The size and color of each base station is proportional to its positive or negative deviation from the mean exposure. Not surprisingly, in Midtown Manhattan a high number of base stations service a large amount of building volume, or user volume. Fairly large differences are evident, though between the Upper West and Upper East Sides. | R: Base Station density by New York City Community District. The average density of antennas in Manhattan is one for every 218 square meters. Evaluated by community district, the density ranges from 380 square meters at the low end to 160 square meters on the high end. A number of other administrative boundaries show wide variation in the density of base stations. For instance, Landmark Districts as a whole have considerably fewer installations and on average have an antenna density just over half of that of the rest of Manhattan.

PROLIFERATION OF THE MOBILE NETWORK
One of the most significant factors in the development of the infrastructure and its proliferation will be any proposed change to the registration and reporting requirements currently in existence. No comprehensive documentation on the mobile infrastructure in New York is available, largely because the infrastructure itself is entirely owned by corporate entities and installations on specific buildings are often negotiated in private. Since 1998, New York City’s building code requires that new rooftop installations be approved under an alteration permit, though no data concerning the operation of a base station or its conformance to FCC radiation regulations are maintained by the City. And since 2005, the Department of Buildings has maintained a cellular antenna information database with information on mobile antenna permits. This data, coupled with registration from the FCC and FAA (above 200 feet, antennas must be registered as potential flight hazards), constitutes a substantial record of the infrastructure. To start to get a picture of the built infrastructure of mobile networks in New York, we developed a series of maps (seen throughout this piece) by cross-referencing permit and registration data with the NYC Planning Department’s PLUTO and LION datasets, as well as individual building information from the New York City Data Mine.

Not only are base stations proliferating, they are also developing sophisticated spatial senses and intelligence. Base stations employ spatial algorithms, probabilistic modeling and other soft computing methods to anticipate and coordinate the effects of signals that are lost, delayed, or arriving out of phase with the primary transmission. In effect, they reconstruct signals from the interference generated by the physical environment and are able to anticipate the transmissibility of a signal given a specific environment and user.

SIMULACRUM OF THE CITY
“Smart” antenna installations are designed to customize a radiation pattern for each individual user as a means to better negotiate obstruction-rich environments and to greatly increase the capacity of a given base station’s limited set of frequencies. The sensitivities of each component of the network are precisely tuned to users and to the physical environment alike. In aggregate, they add up to what is unquestionably one of the most comprehensive representations of the city in existence, capable of accounting for the physical obstruction environment of the city (its physical form) and the activities, communications, data transmissions and locations of the network’s users. As the network becomes denser, and cells finer, the resolution of the signal spaces increases dramatically.

Visually confirming the data set along the Bleecker Street and East 3rd Street from the Hudson River to the East River. While base stations are most frequently absorbed into the visual noise of rooftops, a number of camouflaging techniques related to color and matching brick textures are apparent. This limited sampling also reveals the broad range of scales associated with equipment. It is common in the far East Village, for instance, to see installations covering entire rooftops.

As recent reports have widely publicized, mobile phones and base station computers store significant personal data. That information, coupled with the emerging spatial and user sensitivities of the infrastructure itself, could be understood as a unique form of spatial memory. Proposals to embed sensors into mobile phones for sniffing out bioterrorism agents or nuclear radiation are indications of the network’s potential to support crowd-sourced passive surveillance, but also to retain memory of the activities of the city at particular locations and in relation to particular spatial environments.

In his work Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard recounts a fable by Jorge Luis Borges where a great empire creates a map of its territory so exact that it approaches the size of the territory itself. In many ways, the memory built into signal space reflects Baudrillard’s observation that in contemporary societies, the simulacrum supersedes the actual territory itself. In 2003, New York City’s Department of Information, Technology and Telecommunications collected information about signal quality by inviting New Yorkers to report areas with poor cell phone reception, so that they could be reported to mobile carriers. More recently, in a 2011 paper, researchers at AT&T Labs have proposed that cell phone user data has the potential to dramatically change the future of urban planning, noting that “cellular networks must know the approximate locations of all active cellular phones in order to provide them with communication services. Given the ubiquity of these phones and their almost constant proximity to their owners, cellular networks can be used to opportunistically sense the locations of large populations of people. They thus provide a means to monitor city dynamics frequently, cheaply and at an unprecedented scale.”

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All images, except the FCC Frequency Allocations graphic, by Michael Chen and Justin Snider.

Michael Chen is principal of Normal Projects, a New York-based architecture and design firm, and teaches design studios and seminars at Pratt Institute School of Architecture (www.crisisfronts.org). His design work and writings have been published widely. “Signal Space: New York’s Soft Frequency Terrains,” an article exploring the relationship between broadcast technologies and urban form with maps and visualizations by Chen and Justin Snider will appear in Bracket issue #2, Bracket [goes soft], published by Actar later this year.

Justin Snider is a designer and researcher based in New York.  He is currently a Project Manager for Hume Coover Studio and Teacher’s Assistant for the Pratt Institute Berlin Program.  His project REBOOT was winner of the ARCHIVE Seed Award.  Images and videos of his recent work are available at http://a-object.com/.

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

The Intelligent Cities Initiative, a project of the National Building Museum, is an effort to investigate the intersection of information technology and urban life and design. In partnership with TIME and IBM, and with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Museum has launched a multi-pronged effort to understand how we live in cities today, the choices we’ve made in the past, where we want to be in the future and how we can make better-informed decisions to reach those goals. And they want input from as many people as possible — that means you — to help them do so.

Intelligent Cities launched in November 2010 with the first of a series of polling questions centered around six scale-based topics: the home, the neighborhood, the community, the city, the region and the country. While gathering answers from the public, the Museum is also developing a series of explanatory infographics and preparing for an upcoming day-long forum, a publication and an Intelligent Cities exhibition to be held in 2013.

Here, Susan Piedmont-Palladino, the curator of the Intelligent Cities project, and Scott Kratz, Vice President for Education at the National Building Museum, tell us more about the initiative, how they have turned a typical curatorial process on its head, and what they’re doing to help people understand the broader implications of their individual choices and make better decisions through better information. -V.S.

Community | An infographic about physical and virtual networks | Click to enlarge the image

URBAN OMNIBUS: What is the Intelligent Cities Initiative?

SUSAN PIEDMONT-PALLADINO: Imagine the cloud of information that hovers over all of our cities, containing all the chatter, the communication, the patterns, the history and the data being collected and yet to be collected. Intelligent Cities is looking at how we can harness all of that information and put it in a form that people across disciplines and professions and the general public can use to make better decisions about making better cities. We want to make this stuff visual. We want to make these things present. The project is a comprehensive look at the world of information and the designed, planned, physical world of cities – the built environment, the natural environment, human behavior, a whole host of things.

SCOTT KRATZ: There are two phases to the Intelligent Cities project. In phase one, we are publishing infographics and ads in TIME magazine that drive people to the website, where we are posting polling questions for the public to respond to. In June, we will host a one-day forum in DC and then we will finish up phase one with a publication. Phase two, which is the culmination of the whole initiative, will be an exhibition held at the National Building Museum in 2013.

There is an enormous amount of information out there. But that’s the problem – it’s out there. It’s not visible and, much more importantly, it’s not useful.

SPP: In a typical curatorial process, I would be engaged in some pretty intense but also reclusive research. Gradually, that would turn into an exhibition, a catalog and a series of public programs and outreach. The Intelligent Cities initiative turns that process upside down.

The forum in June will be both a physical and a virtual gathering of people involved in design, planning, policy, resource conservation, cultural resource conservation, gaming, civic participation and more. The book will focus on conclusions and questions that emerge from the earlier parts of phase one and will also serve as a guide for developing the exhibition. But again, though the exhibition will definitely be a physical display, we hope it will have all sorts of virtual tentacles to reach out to places yet to be determined.

UO: Tell me more about the process. How does it work?

SPP: The first step is digital outreach, getting people to contribute content to the Intelligent Cities website. There, users can answer questions about decisions they have made about their own homes, their neighborhoods — their individual choices. We have ads in six issues of Time Magazine, centered around a set of infographics we are developing, that are another way to provoke curiosity and interest and drive people to the website to contribute their feedback.

SK: So far we have launched three topics — the Home, the Neighborhood and the Community — and are currently developing three more: the City, the Region and the Country.

Home | An infographic about energy use, house size, and household size | Click to enlarge the image

Searching for the data for the infographics has been fascinating. You might expect information about trends in these categories to be easily accessible – just do a Google search and you’ll figure it out. But it’s not. For instance, I have been researching the growth of big box stores in the US. Finding clear, accurate information about those trends has been incredibly difficult. I’ve had to read several PhD theses, reports by the Census Bureau, and data sets loaded with caveats. But every dead end that I hit underlines the value of the project. There is an enormous amount of information out there. But that’s the problem – it’s out there. It’s not visible and, much more importantly, it’s not useful. It’s not useful to the professionals who work in the built environment and its not useful to the general public.

UO: What kinds of information are you asking about?

SPP: We are setting this up according to scale, in a sort of expanding set of concentric circles. We start with the home and move out to the neighborhood, then to the community, the city, the region and the nation. Because all of the decisions we make about our homes, those decisions which seemed so personal, have ramifications at the next scale up and the scale after that, all the way up to the largest level.

We all need to start making better decisions — and that starts with clear, actionable information that more people can understand.

For example, in the Home infographic, we take a piece of information that many of us are aware of – the size of the American house has gotten larger while the size of the American family has gotten smaller – and treat it as more than just a quirky piece of trivia. That trend has huge implications for density, land use, transportation and energy use. We want people to think about what the consequences are of the decisions we are making. So we started exploring the topic by asking people what considerations they took when deciding where to live.

SK: We’ve been surprised by the polling results to date on the questions about what motivates people to live where.

SPP: You might think that everybody makes decisions on where to live based on money. But, by a wide margin, the top answer to ‘Why did you choose where to live?’ is ‘Because I can walk and bike to stuff I like.’ These questions are a little more nuanced than a lot of conventional wisdom might lead you to think. Of course, this is not a scientific sample, but still.

UO: How do you determine the questions?

SPP: I think of it as a design process, really. There’s a lot of tinkering, tossing out ideas, running word choice past our colleagues and advisors, until we eventually come to a consensus. We want the questions to be quite brief – we don’t want people to feel like they are taking a test or that there is one “right answer.”

We work a lot on the tone. I guess we could call it the Intelligent Cities Voice. The Intelligent Cities Voice is conversational and we use the second person regularly, which is very unconventional in academic writing. But we found that both the web and the character of the Intelligent Cities project lend themselves to that kind of voice.

Neighborhood | An infographic about how kids get to school and obesity rates | Click to enlarge the image

SK: We pose the questions from three angles. One asks people about their perception of the built environment. The second looks at what barriers to change exist. For example, the Neighborhood poll asks, Do you allow your children to bike or walk to school? If you don’t, why not? Are you are concerned about safety? That your kid might be kidnapped? Are there no bike lanes? Do you physically live too far from schools to bike or walk to your school? Thirdly, we want the general public to more actively consider those kinds of connections, to break down some of the silos of their thinking about the built environment.

The last question asked during phase one will be a crowdsourced question, voted up by our delegates. We’re really intrigued to see what that turns out to be.

UO: Tell us more about the delegates and what groups you are engaging outside of the public outreach effort.

SPP: We want to engage individuals on a number of different levels. We have gathered a Board of Advisors from the public and private sectors, design, planning and academia. And then we are collecting about 150-200 folks we’re calling “delegates.” The delegates aren’t necessarily people in positions of power or expertise. They are the next generation of tech-savvy design professionals, civic activists, young faculty, recent grads — people who just have a lot to offer, want to be involved and also are extremely savvy in the social media world. And we want them to communicate with us, form their own discussion groups, share ideas with us. I’m really looking forward to mining that wonderful group of people during the research phase for the exhibition.

TIME magazine ad

UO: So you are going to work to represent the results that you get from this series of questions and forums and then communicate that outwards again?

SPP: During each stage of the project, one month after another, we reflect on what we’ve learned, which generates more conversations, mini-forums, chats – more questions. We want the project to build on itself.

The polling question segment of the project will end in March, at which point we will lock ourselves in a room to reflect, digest and prepare for the June forum. We don’t want the forum to be the usual three panelists and a moderator, coffee break, three panelists and a moderator. And we use the term “forum” on purpose, as opposed to conference, symposium or convention, because the forum is a place of discussion. It’s a political space, an urban space, a physical space, a virtual space, a space where there are people who are invited, but where there is also room for people to step up and volunteer to take a seat and to converse.

We will also be fleshing out the structure of the publication. What works on a screen doesn’t always work in print. And once the forum ends in June, we will gather up those findings and feather them into the book as well. All the while, of course, I’m keeping a running outline of possible ways to structure the exhibition. That will remain extremely fluid for a while.

graphic from advertisement for TIME magazine

UO: That was my next question. How do you turn all this into a presentation that one encounters in physical space?

SPP: It’s a little premature to talk about it, but we have some ideas. The primary mission of the Building Museum is to educate the public about the built environment and one of the things that we can do in an exhibition that isn’t so easy to do on the website, and that we may not have room to do in the book, is to give context to this entire discussion. How do we know the city? How do we see ourselves throughout history? Citizens, artists, urban planners, and philosophers and writers have been engaged in this same task for generations, using whatever technologies were at hand. What can we learn from them?

So we’re envisioning something that is dynamic, immersive and interactive. Bits of the exhibition might be in other locations. It’s going to be an interesting challenge for whoever gets to be our exhibition designers. The Building Museum has a long track record of taking on subject matter that might, on the surface, have seemed, how should I put this…

SK: Daunting, maybe?

TIME magazine ad

SPP: Unlikely to make a good exhibition, you might say. We had a whole exhibition on air conditioning years ago that was just spectacular.

UO: What are your ultimate goals? Why is the National Building Museum doing this?

SPP: The Building Museum wants to remind us all that buildings, landscapes and cities are crucially important. Place still matters, even if we are all connected digitally – in fact, it matters more. We are adding this other layer of communication and representation to the built environment and we need to start to reveal to ourselves the new conditions, problems, beauty or other potential scenarios that come with that.

To achieve that goal, we are asking people to think about choices they have made and understand the choices made by others. What we get to do is add some reflection and contextualization.

For those of us in the professional world, it’s part of our ethical responsibility to learn how to communicate more broadly. And so with the infographics, with the polling, with the narratives, and eventually through the forum, the book and the exhibition, we are trying to get this project to as large an audience as we can. We want to talk to a multi-layered audience that includes the general public, but that also includes elected officials.

SK: The important thing is seeing the connections between these data sets, not necessarily seeing the individual pieces of data. There are connections between the size of the American home and the energy we use. There are connections between kids being driven to school instead of biking or walking and obesity. These elements inform each other. We want a larger audience to understand the community implications of individual choices.

SPP: Our agenda is a more sustainable world. And our contention is that we all need to start making better decisions — and that starts, not necessarily with more information, but with clear, actionable information that more people can understand.

This is an issue of democracy. We want to broaden the conversation and help the larger populace really understand the issues in front of them and realize that they can make meaningful contributions to the decisions about the future of their cities, their towns and their neighborhoods.

The first edition of the New City Reader, "City," edited by Network Architecture Lab, posted on the facade of Storefront for Art and Architecture on Kenmare Street

The New City Reader is a weekly newspaper produced in the galleries of the New Museum throughout the duration of “The Last Newspaper,” an exhibition on view until January 9th, 2011. The show’s context, signified by the exhibition’s fatalistic title, is the existential crisis facing the newspaper industry. But the show’s content is more concerned with the variety of artistic explorations (including works by Hans Haacke, Wolfgang Tillmans and Dash Snow, among many others) into the ideological, political and material dimensions of the newsmedia and print journalism than it is with failing business models or the adoption of new information technologies. Alongside artworks that disassemble and recombine the politics and the lo-fi materiality of newsprint, a series of cultural producers are in residence in the galleries, making work within the confines of the museum itself: the Center for Urban Pedagogy, StoryCorps, Latitudes, the Slought Foundation and a partnership between Joseph Grima (editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture) and Kazys Varnelis (director of Columbia’s Network Architecture Lab).

Grima and Varnelis conceived of the New City Reader as a newspaper of public space, whose content probes “the spatial implications of epochal shifts presently occurring in the information industry.” Over the phone, Grima told us that he is particularly interested in newspapers’ capacity to be “a laboratory for the production of knowledge,” and so he approached the project as a mechanism for mobilizing “a diverse network of collaborators” (about 300 people have taken part in making the New City Reader) to investigate “contemporary spatiality” by re-creating the traditional sections of the newspaper (Culture, Sports, Real Estate, etc.) Like Postopolis, another loose framework for networked knowledge sharing that Grima developed, he refers to the New City Reader as “a pyramid scheme of thoughts” in which he and Varnelis invited a series of guest editors for each issue who, in turn, invited a wide-ranging set of thinkers to probe the intersection where, in the words of New City Reader managing editor Alan Rapp, “urban space and information space converge.” According to Grima, what has emerged is “an incredibly heterogenous and kaleidoscopic snapshot that captures the conflictual nature of the relationship between information and public space.”

Kazys Varnelis recently sat down with Urban Omnibus to discuss how the New City Reader came to be and how it seeks to renew awareness of overlooked spatial and social practices in the context of current affairs. -C.S.

The third floor gallery of the New Museum has been turned into the site of an editorial residency where the New City Reader team edits, designs and produces each issue. Joseph Grima (seated, center) discusses the project with a museum visitor | Photo by Benoit Pailley, courtesy of the New Museum

Urban Omnibus: How did the New City Reader come to be?
Kazys Varnelis: Joseph Grima and I were already talking about working together when he received a call from Richard Flood at the New Museum who was beginning the curatorial process for “The Last Newspaper.” Joseph and I were talking about how in the 1960s, artists and thinkers connected to obsolete practices in order to re-imagine contemporary possibilities. Newspapers are not yet obsolete, but we wanted to go back to earlier methods of producing and consuming newspapers as a way to investigate critically a variety of trends and practices in the contemporary city.

Dàzìbào during the Cultural Revolution | via benoitvidal.com

Joseph immediately suggested a model he had seen in China, the Dàzìbào (大字报), or wall-mounted newspaper, meant to be read — and presumably discussed — in public. Then I began to do research into 19th century New York. A fascinating book called City Reading explains the proliferation of print culture in New York on the facades of buildings. In the 17th and 18th centuries there weren’t many signs on buildings. There actually weren’t any street signs until the 1820s – imagine wandering around New York without any street signs! I remembered from my childhood in Chicago seeing newspapers on walls, and wondered if there was something in this forgotten practice that was worth reclaiming.

Right now, each edition of the New City Reader is mounted on the façade of Storefront for Art and Architecture, in the window of New Museum and also up at Columbia. We had initially hoped for it to be posted in more sites but the realities of permissions, labor, etc. prevented that.

"Editorial," edited by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis

So is the project more about interrogating the practice of sharing information in public or more about critiquing the shifts that the information industry finds itself in?
Both. On one hand, we have the ability to take advantage of some of the technological shifts that decrease the need for the heavy machinery of printing presses. It has only been a couple decades that we have been able to do this kind of thing on a computer, and only ten years that it’s been realistic to do this on a laptop. But while we are taking advantage of those shifts, we are also suggesting that some things are getting lost in the process: like this practice of collective reading, for example, which was pretty common here in the 19th century. If you think about collective television viewing, you might envision some images of people gathered around a TV set watching the Apollo landing or the JFK assassination. These days, I think, that kind of collective sharing of media is reserved exclusively for soccer matches.

"City" | Detail of a diagram showing the New York Times offices during the 1977 blackout

In one of your pieces for the New City Reader, you’ve written about the “interdependence of infrastructure, information and social stability.” Tell me more about that idea.
A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately is on this topic. And I think the moment of the blackout in July of 1977 – which was the subject of the “City” section, the first edition of the New City Reader – really signifies this interdependence. Twelve years previous, in 1965, there was a blackout that resulted in very little crime. But the 1977 blackout – with the economic stagnation, municipal bankruptcy and cuts to public services over the previous decade – resulted in mass rioting and looting, with parts of Bed-Stuy and the Bronx in flames, and the total breakdown of the kinds of societal networks that had previously kept the city afloat. We are now so comfortable with the idea that the City can’t possibly collapse. Yet the massive government debt and bad public-private partnerships that led to the fiscal crisis of the ’70s are perhaps not so unimaginable today: just the other day the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how problematic municipal bonds are.

As part of our broader objective to show how connected the newspaper is to the city, we were interested to probe a potential link between newspapers and the prospect of urban collapse. Harvey Molotch’s influential 1976 essay “The City as Growth Machine” described how certain interests see growth as the only possible move for cities. Growth, as we’ve seen in most recent economic crisis, often leads to unsustainable conditions. We’ve all heard that finance, insurance and real estate (the so-called FIRE economy) drive this ideology of growth. But newspapers have traditionally been a part of this as well, with business models based on growing circulation, real estate advertisements and so on. That’s why in times of economic contraction, the newspapers rarely raise any kind of alarm.

"Culture," edited by D-Crit (detail)

On one hand, it seems like the project seeks to critique newspapers as complicit with a lot of trends you find problematic in contemporary cities. On the other hand, it seems like it is issuing a call for civic activities that are shared among strangers, whether that’s reading in public or some other form of collective action.
There is certainly a call for more collective action. There is also a call for other kinds of voices to be included in newspapers. Typically when we think of newspapers, we think of them as media that simply communicates news. But they have a huge amount influence on the physical city. Just as the newspaper plays a role in Molotch’s growth machine thesis, the newspaper also helps to determine the architectural face of the city, particularly in the last ten or fifteen years, when I think there hasn’t been very good architecture at a top level. I think that, in a way, newspapers are partly to blame for this incredible embrace of starchitecture, of fame, of wanting to have dinner with the hot shots.

"Real Estate," edited by Mabel Wilson and Peter Tolkin (detail)

What does it mean to you that the New City Reader is “a newspaper of public space”? Does this subtitle refer only to the proposed act of collective reading? Or are there other spatial implications that you wanted to interrogate?
I think the idea has to do with the overlapping of different aspects of public space and the public sphere. For Habermas, whether it was the salon or the coffee house, the street or the city itself was a public space, and the public sphere required places where people read and discuss the things that they read.

You think of something like the old Berkeley tree stump — there used to be a tree stump in the middle of Berkeley where anybody could get up and give a speech at any time of day. You can imagine that people might, in public, respond to this condition, to someone making a proposal of some kind publicly, be it on the left or the right. And that’s something that I feel we don’t do much at all today. The Internet reinforces a kind of balkanization where I tend to read one political spectrum of information and other people tend to read another political spectrum. We also tend to live in places that fit us politically, I think.

"Leisure," edited by Beatriz Colomina, Spyros Papapetros, Britt Eversole and Daria Ricchi (detail)

So is the New City Reader an instrument to replicate the Berkeley Tree Stump or Speakers’ Corner, where contributors are invited to offer an opinion?
You could say the whole thing is an editorial project more than it is a reporting project.

My idea was to do it in a set of sections – Editorial, Sports, Culture, Real Estate, etc. – so, in the end, you have a giant newspaper. Then we decided we were going to look at the section titles and try to get interesting people with exciting things to say – in some cases very political, in some cases less so. In the end, pretty much every project had a degree of political content, which we welcomed.

As a newspaper, we certainly wouldn’t say this is a work of disinterested reporting. Everyone was motivated to do something. But the “disinterestedness” of traditional newspaper reporting is itself a bit of a mask. As an academic, I try to figure out the agenda behind everything. And I do feel like newspapers have a very clear stated agenda that does appear in their reportage, it just happens to be masked a little more. It appears at the level of editing, at a level of what content is selected, at a level of who is hired and what a newspaper chooses to cover.

"The Last Newspaper," 3rd Floor | Photo by Benoit Pailler, courtesy of the New Museum

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New City Reader contributing editors:
CITY: Network Architecture Lab | EDITORIAL: Joseph Grima & Kazys Varnelis | CULTURE: D-Crit, School of Visual Arts | SPORTS: Jeannie Kim & Hunter Tura | LEISURE: Beatriz Colomina, Spyros Papapetros, Britt Eversole & Daria Ricchi, Media & Modernity at Princeton University | FOOD: Will Prince, Krista Ninvaggi & Nicola Twilley | REAL ESTATE: Mabel Wilson & Peter Tolkin, SideProjects | BUSINESS: Frank Pasquale & Kevin Slavin | LEGAL: Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture at Goldmsiths | LOCAL: Geminidas & Nomeda Urbonas (Nugu) & Saskia Sassen | POLITICS: common room | MUSIC: DJ N-RON & DJ/rupture | STYLE: Robert Sumrell & Andrea Ching | SCIENCE: David Benjamin & Livia Corona | WEATHER: Jeffrey Inaba, C-Lab | OBITUARIES: Michael Meredith & Hilary Sample, MOS | CLASSIFIEDS: Leagues and Legions

New City Reader Staff:
EXECUTIVE EDITORS: Joseph Grima, Kazys Varnelis | MANAGING EDITOR: Alan Rapp | ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: John Cantwell | ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Brigette Borders, Daniel Payne | EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Pantea Tehrani | ART DIRECTOR: Neil Donnelly | DESIGNER: Chris Rypkema | EDITORIAL CARTOONIST: Klaus | BLACKOUT! CARTOONISTS: Momo Araki, Alexis Burson, Leigha Dennis, Kyle Hovenkotter | WEB DIRECTOR: Jochen Hartmann

Not too long ago we introduced you to a new project conceived by Omni-collaborator Jesse Shapins and a group of dedicated media artists – namely Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann and James Burns – called Mapping Main Street. Well, several thousand miles later, the team has built an expansive and flexible online platform for a collaborative documentary media project that will eventually provide a vision of America unlike any we’ve seen before. Users from across the country have contributed photos via Flickr, and audio and video content via Vimeo. The only requirement is that all media “must be recorded on a street named Main.”

Over 400 hundred Main Streets have been documented so far. Which leaves about 10,000 to go. Get involved; each borough of New York has a Main Street. Brooklyn’s got a two-block long stretch in Fulton Ferry. In the Bronx, Main Street is a tiny residential lane near Locust Point and the Throg’s Neck Bridge. In Staten Island, Main Street runs across the southern tip of the island from Tottenville to Conference House Park. Roosevelt Island, weirdly, has a couple different Main Streets. There’s even one on Governors Island. And then there is the fabled subject of this week’s feature: the Main Street that’s the bustling terminus of the 7 train and the central commercial spine of Flushing, Queens.

We recently caught up with Jesse and Kara to talk about the project and where it fits into a constellation of issues including new challenges to political rhetoric, new directions in media production, and new lessons for urban planning and design.

The project was conceived last year in the context of the election. As an image of Main Street was being bandied about by politicians (often as a foil to Wall Street), the team was struck that the reductiveness of such political imagery goes unchallenged and is perpetuated by the media. Main Street is not, in Jesse’s words, “some abstract, general place; there’s a street named Main in almost every city and town across the nation!” So they went about setting up a way for citizens to complicate the presumptions that the image of Main Street, USA provides an accurate shorthand for a certain set of uniform values, economic interests and political opinions. The project’s goal is not to redefine the image of Main Street, but rather “to suggest a critical attitude toward the language and rhetoric around you.”

Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members. It just might also suggest a critical attitude toward conventional attempts to identify community priorities around such often contentious issues as growth, change, context, preservation and development. Jesse notes that “since the 1960s, since the rise of advocacy planning and its critique of modernist planning, there has been a strong emphasis on democratic and participatory processes.” But these structures have, for the most part, “emphasized deliberative decision-making, rather than expressions of experience or identity. Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members or stakeholders.” And indeed, some communities out there are starting to use collaborative media production to inform policy goals. Case in point: Starksboro, Vermont, where an artist-in-residence assembled a team of students (elementary through college) to use the arts to draw the community into a conversation about the town’s future and support efforts to create a masterplan.

And the production of the media itself has broader applications. Schools, youth programs and local radio stations across the country have been getting in on the action, encouraging participation in the Mapping Main Street project both as a way to build storytelling skills and also to get youth to engage more deeply with place. The four portraits of Flushing’s Main Street below were produced by high school students from the East-West School of International Studies and the Frank Sinatra High School for the Performing Arts as part of WNYC’s Radio Rookies program. Over the next three years, the Mapping Main Street Project will roll out a distributed production model, partnering with a wide variety of NPR affiliates and educational institutions to document every single Main Street in the country. But while infrastructure to support that effort begins to develop, the first phase – producing the participatory platform, setting the tone and getting the word out – will conclude with an exhibition created with Red Antenna (which just happens to be the creative agency that designed and developed urbanomnibus.net) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago early next year as a part of the Third Coast Filmless Festival. Just as the website enables thematic relationships between Main Streets to emerge – in addition to the geographic relationships – the exhibit is certain to make manifest the elegance of the Mapping Main Street project: to infuse a cliché with all the contradictions and diversity of America itself.

And that diversity, of course, isn’t just apparent among small towns in different parts of the country. Big cities, like ours, have them too. And sometimes, as in the case of Flushing, Queens, street names harken back to a time when outer borough villages were independent of the growing metropolis that would eventually subsume them. Flushing, in fact, was one of the first Dutch settlements on Long Island way back in 1645. It was the site, according to New York City historian Kenneth Jackson, of the birthplace of religious tolerance by decree in America. These days, the neighborhood is more commonly associated with Queens’ incredible ethnic diversity and large foreign-born population. Flushing’s Chinatown “now rivals [Manhattan's] Chinatown as a center of Chinese-American business and political might, as well as culture and cuisine” according to the Times’ Kirk Semple. It’s a place of steam buns, old movie theaters, ethnic perceptions and interactions, and some particularly intriguing (and dapper) characters. -C.S.

Steam Buns ‘R’ Us from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Main Street Cinemas from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Culture Talk from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Searching For Main Street’s Flushing Pimp from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Mapping Main Street is created by James Burns, Ann Heppermann, Kara Oehler, and Jesse Shapins. Production help from Ian Gray, Josie Holtzman, Sara Pellegrini and Baughman Reinhardt. The project features new original songs by High Places, Chain and the Gang, Jason Cady and The Hive Dwellers. Radio Rookie Short Wave stories in Flushing, Queens are reported by Tracy Leon, Edwin Llanos, Rachel Temkin, Helen Peng, Andrea Torres, Rayon Wright, Alexis Gordon, Hawa Lee and Melissa Best and produced by the Mapping Main Street team with Sanda Htyte and Veralyn Williams. The website was designed by the Mapping Main Street team and Local Projects.

The first phase of the project is produced through the generous funding of Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative between the Association of Independents in Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and KUOW’s Program Venture Fund. All broadcast radio stories aired on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

sample data for Google’s Transit Feed Specification

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing a lot of people wondering what’s so special about the L train and the 34th Street crosstown bus that allows these transit routes to make known the ETA of the next train or bus? And then, just when civic-minded web developers take matters in their own hands and push schedules onto the mobile devices of riders, they get the smackdown from transit agencies claiming infringement of intellectual property.

On Tuesday night, I joined a group of passionate open data advocates, technologists, legislative aids, lawyers and assorted straphangers to brainstorm, over pizza and beer, potential modes of and arguments for greater collaboration between web developers and the MTA. The meet-up was in response to the flare-up over the past couple weeks when the MTA sought licensing fees for an iPhone app that provided Metro-North schedules. The events’ organizers provide a good overview here.

Can factual data have a copyright? Maps, logos, branding: sure. But data? The licensing precedent invoked by the MTA in this instance essentially treats schedule apps for mobile devices the same way as it would shower curtains, cuff-links or those flashy silk boxers bedecked with a subway map.

I should say that I went in to the meeting, which was organized by the Open Planning Project (TOPP) and took place at their appropriately open plan offices, feeling like an unlikely apologist for the MTA. I don’t normally get in the habit of defending the embattled agency, but I can understand the misgivings of a public authority that doesn’t want to be forced into taking responsibility for the accuracy of data delivered to its ridership by third parties. And if web and mobile tech developers are going to profit from products that trade on the schedules of a service funded by the public purse, shouldn’t the cash-strapped transit system be able to offset some of its costs by taking a cut? Besides, I do find that many commuters, frustrated with the state of transit in New York, often fail to appreciate the complexity of the services that the MTA delivers, not to mention the political challenges of reforming a state-run operation (have you read the latest from Albany recently?) Surely, there are issues more pressing than creating a more efficient system to share scheduling data.

Or are there? On second thought, maybe making open data a top priority is one of the best ways for the MTA to make significant gains in public perception and the quality of riders’ experience without the need for any capital investment.

The group Tuesday night, I’m glad to report, appreciated the challenges, and everyone took a pro-active approach to identifying opportunities for positive collaboration rather than berating the MTA. Attendees were highly informed. The crowd was not only intimately familiar with the MTA’s anachronistic data request process: first, you file an official Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request, then you wait several months for an (often outdated) CD of schedule data, and then (if you are so inclined) you laboriously parse the data to make it conform to Google’s Transit Feed Specification (GTSF) for use in a mobile app. The assembled were also aware of the ways other municipal and state transit agencies across the country had been able to leverage the expertise of the open source community to improve their public transportation systems, such as in Massachusetts, the SF Bay Area and (of course) Portland.

The event resulted in a wiki. Read it and contribute ideas to help flesh it out.

More information * ease of access = happier riders. Right?

Next, to do this weekend: in case you missed mention of it on Brownstoner, be sure to join watchdog blogger extraordinaire (and frequent commenter keeping the Omnibus honest, see here and here) Norman Oder for a tour of the Atlantic Yards footprint tomorrow.

Speaking of walking tours, remember how much fun we had when we walked down the Grand Concourse with Sam Goodman and got all pot-lucky with the Design Trust? Well, if you missed it and want to tour the “Champs Élysées of the Bronx” on your own, start by reading this article by Constance Rosenblum – in which an evocative photo of the young Sam Goodman plays a role – and then, if you’re still as smitten with this fabled roadway as we are, mark your calendars for the results of the design competition on display at the Bronx Museum this November, and get psyched for Rosenblum’s forthcoming book about the Concourse, Boulevard of Dreams.

Identically named places connected (USA). By Neil Freeman.

So, it should be pretty clear by now that we firmly believe that close attention to new trends in data visualization and communication is crucial to any discussion of the relationship between design innovation and the built environment of our cities. Simple visualizations of data can also, it turns out, provide images beautiful to behold in their own right: the image above is one of several artworks by Neil Freeman, of Brooklyn Typology fame, that combines, maps, lists, rules and then connects the dots (the one above traces a line between all identically named places in the United States; another fave of ours is his New York City public schools connected in numerical order, below). You can buy a limited edition of the image above from our good friends at the Next American City. And guess what? BusinessWeek has recently named Neil as one of their 21 heroes of data visualization. There’s some other cool stuff in there, too. We particularly like the flight pattern map of the US and the tree-like representation of bicycle and walking paths in Seattle.

New York City public schools connected in numerical order. Manhattan: 110 schools (1 — 364). By Neil Freeman.

It’s been a big week in the news for communicating urban data – not just the beautiful kind, but the kind that involves crime stats and the sad news that your favorite ethnic restaurant has perhaps a few too many health violations. The news on Monday that MSNBC has acquired hyperlocal website Everyblock.com reverberated around the blogosphere, including two opinions shared here on Urban Omnibus. We’re eager to include other voices in this conversation, particularly from writers, designers, thinkers and citizens who can speak to the difference between data aggregation, “actionable” urban intel, and human-interest stories that highlight the city’s diverse neighborhoods, characters and designs. So, please get in touch if you want to chime in on the future of local news.

If you’re gearing up for another grueling semester of design school, or if you just want to probe deeper into the culture of architectural education and practice, then join the team behind the upcoming Archiculture documentary on September 2nd for a premiere party for the film’s new trailer. Whet your appetite with the teaser below:

Archiculture Teaser from arbuckle industries on Vimeo.

Meanwhile, our friends at GOOD just keep finding the best innovations in green, urban technology to endorse. This week the team shows us some solar-powered trash compactors in Philadelphia. Frankly, we’d be happy just to see more curb-side recycling opportunities in New York, but a compaction system powered by a renewable energy that lessens the load, lowers the frequency and shrinks the footprint of trash collection all the while communicating wirelessly with networked system of streets and sanitation management? Yeah, we’d like that too. Have you used the pilot Big Belly solar compactor in Union Square? Let us know what you think.

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

detail from outside.in

In 2003, as a grad student at NYU, I created a site called Neighbornode, which was a series of bulletin boards for local neighborhood residents to log on to and talk to each other in cities. The site was very simple, and to be totally honest a bit of a hack (I was never a fabulous coder). But the idea alone was enough to attract a good amount of attention and interest from people around the world. Just the notion of the web being overlaid on top of physical space, at such an ultra-local level was at that time newsworthy. The New York Times commented “If these do-it-yourself nodes catch on, a new form of urban communication may emerge.”

Skipping forward six years, Neighbornode is long gone (it was just a school project), but an entire class of web content, dubbed “hyperlocal”, has emerged around the notion of location-based news, information and discussion. And this week, Everyblock, one of the preeminent hyperlocal web sites, was acquired by MSNBC.

What does this merger, of a relatively small site built on aggregated geolocated data, and a news media mega-giant signify? Lots of things, to be sure. But mainly it signifies that the formerly niche concept of hyperlocal – that location matters as a component of online data, particularly in relation to where you, the reader, happen to be right now – has been accepted, validated, maybe even co-opted by the mainstream media.

The significance here is symbolic, more than anything else – the change has been happening for a long while now. News has been increasingly hyperlocal for the past two years. Outside.in, the website I co-founded in 2006 with Steven Johnson and Cory Forsyth, serves up millions of hyperlocal blog stories per month to readers all around the country, on its home site as well as on a wide variety of partner websites. News companies, once leery of anything written by anyone without a journalism degree, are now embracing local bloggers (though sometimes reluctantly) as a bona fide part of their future. And it’s not just the news that has gone local. Social networks have gone local (take a look at Foursquare). Politics online is local (look at the gov2.0 groups springing up in towns everywhere bent on reinventing local politics online). Most importantly, perhaps, advertising online is going local, allowing all of this localization of content to be supported with local ad dollars. So this local wave has been building for a long time.

But with the acquisition of Everyblock, that wave has now started to crest. And with that, I think it’s time we ditched the term “hyperlocal” and got beyond the idea that localized content is somehow niche, a tiny subset of the online experience, able to be regarded or disregarded at the whim of the user. Instead, as this wave breaks, we’re arriving at a place where everything is local, or is location-aware, and no special attention needs to be called to it. It is part of the makeup of the web, woven into it, seamlessly, fully expected by everyone. In the era of geolocative smart phones, geolocative browsers that know exactly where you are when you load a webpage, and geotagged data, calling anything hyperlocal begins to sound redundant, like vinyl records from the 60s that announced that they were “stereophonic”. Of course it’s hyperlocal – it knows where you are, it knows where it is, and knows exactly what the distance is between those two places. It can tell you everything that anyone has said about the place you’re standing right now, it can tell you where the nearest subway stop is, it can recommend the five best pizza places within half a mile of you, and it can tell you the name of the representative for that district and how he/she voted.

Just like every record is now stereo and that fact is taken for granted by all, the future of the web is fully local, and that local-ness will be taken for granted as well. The more noteworthy case becomes the site that is not location-aware. And in that scenario, why do we need the term ‘hyperlocal’ at all? We don’t, and the term will go away, to be replaced by the term “the web”.

That’s fine with me – let’s get on with it. The web of the future, local and all, is going to be great.


As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

John Geraci writes, consults and speaks on how to make cities more efficient, effective and livable with web technology. He started DIYcity, a site that invites people everywhere to personally reinvent the spaces around them using common web applications. Previously, he co-founded and served as Head of Product for Outside.in, a leading hyperlocal news site that lets people experience the news right around them in real time.

The Building as Microcosm
I run a communication design firm. We create projects that take design cues from insights on how people interact with information. Most recently we created an online platform called STACKD. It is a directory, a marketplace, a communications channel and a lens through which to view the city.

The idea for this project came from a number of observations after our company moved into a 20-story building on W 28th Street. First of all, we were new to the building; we did not know anyone here. Secondly, this building has some size to it. It may not be huge by New York standards, but there are over 100 tenants: four to six tenants to every floor, accessed via two main elevators with a freight elevator serving as back-up for when the mains fail (and they often do). Our previous location was a six-story building in which we knew everyone, for better or for worse. Eminem’s Record label Shady Records thumped away directly one floor above and sewing machines whirred from the sweatshop beneath us. Even though I knew who was in the building, the moment the elevator doors opened to reveal such different realities was always jarring. This sense of curiosity about what might be happening inside a large vertical building became even more pronounced once we had moved to our current, significantly taller location. I was reminded of writings by Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas that grapple with disjunction and multiplicity, so I spent some time rereading Architecture and Disjunction and Delirious New York. Tschumi distinguishes three basic types of relationships between the actual and intended uses of architectural space:

“Specifically, three basic types of relations can be distinguished: (a) the reciprocal relation, for example to skate on the skating rink; (b) the indifferent relation, for example to skate in the schoolyard; and (c) the conflictual relation, for example to skate in the chapel, to skate on the tightrope” (Tschumi 1996: p. 186)

The unexpected mix of program in a Manhattan highrise isn’t exactly “skating in the chapel” but it nonetheless excites and feeds the imagination. Rem Koolhaas sets the stage for multiplicity when he retells the birth of the skyscraper in 1909:

“The building becomes a stack of individual privacies … the use of each platform can never be known in advance of its construction…” (Koolhaas 1994: p. 85)

As we started getting familiar with our new neighborhood on the last street of the Flower District, I was curious who else was in our building. Being able to listen to the conversations in a class C building such as 150 W 28th Street would reveal much that is unexpected: a healing center that provides “scream therapy”; a wholesale-only purveyor of minerals and crystals; one of the city’s most prominent florists. The rent is reasonable for New York and the neighborhood has an ad-hoc, undefined quality that has attracted a wide range of businesses from a variety of sectors. Brief glimpses of floor directories revealed other creative industries such as design, advertising, architecture and photography. Even though some of them are the competition, it always makes me feel welcome to know there are other companies nearby that do something similar. The history of the neighborhood and its role as the Garment District has also left a trace. The last of the fur trimmers that once defined this part of the city are here, dustmotes of mink in every corner.

Supply and Demand
I caught glimpses of people in the buildings across the alley and noticed when offices were suddenly empty after they had housed busy bunches of people for months. It made me nervous, but I talked to people in the elevator, asked what they did and never had more than a few seconds to find out. Strange how we share the ride staring at our feet. People make crude flyers and notes posting items for sale or marketing their services in the elevator but they rarely pause to talk – maybe because the elevator is always moving and the chime urges you to get out quickly.

Sharing resources between multiple floors… can play a role in making the city – and its use of space – more legible. A palpable sense of the great story of New York City unfolding all around us appealed to my imagination. As an entrepreneur accustomed to identifying demand, I began to see the building as a potential market for our services. Craigslist and Ebay proved that there was a huge dormant need to connecting buyers and sellers on an individual scale. If we didn’t know already, Facebook showed that people are social animals and thrive on sharing something of themselves with each other. Twitter is taking the world by storm just by giving people a megaphone and 140 characters of broadcast time. As designers versed in proposing solutions we began to imagine whether we could create something that could make use of our specific physical location – something that would open doors for us but could also connect supply and demand on a larger scale.

One of the reasons our business is located in New York City, and I imagine the same holds true for many others, is opportunity. In my mind, opportunity is intensified by density – a density of potential clients, of talented people, of inspiration and also the density of competition. Kenneth Jackson recently lectured on the five reasons why New York will bounce back from the current recession to thrive in the next century: Density, diversity, tolerance, aspiration and the willingness to change. All of his arguments can be found above and below my desk on the 14th floor. With this in mind, we decided to narrow our focus for STACKD to an extreme. We wanted to create a way to reach the other businesses in our own building. Wouldn’t they have similar needs to our own?

How it works
STACKD emphasizes physical proximity in each feature that it offers. Users are prompted to act upon the information STACKD provides for the simple reason that updates are extremely timely and that someone else is easy to reach because they are located close by. You can see these qualities emerging in systems that did not originally account for them. For example, Craigslist users have introduced an informal feature dubbed “curb-alert” in which people post when and where they are going to put something out for free pick-up. If it’s close to where you are, you score.

Let me give you a quick tour through the STACKD user interface.

The current version does only a few things. On a map, it shows which buildings belong to the network. Once a user wants to know more and has selected a building they are prompted to log into the system (or join if they are not a member yet). Membership is important to track information and to ensure that only users who are willing to share information can also access it. Once you are logged in and click on a building you can see – listed in a vertical stack – the businesses located there. Selecting a particular business reveals contact information and industry as well as what the business offers and needs on a regular basis. If that’s all you need to know, then click on the contact email address and send the business a note or give them a call. Above this directory listing is an area that we call the feed. This is where the building does its talking and where you can listen in. Every building is set up with a twitter account so that others can tweet to it and follow the collective conversation. Once you have used STACKD for a while, the twitter feature becomes an important alert to information that is time-sensitive or changing. I could tweet that I have a chair to sell, or that I am looking for a tip on where to go for lunch. If we were to consider our building to be part of a network that can circumvent the borders of individual offices then I could also let other businesses know when our conference room is free or that we have a spare desk on Thursdays and Fridays.

Clearly, resource sharing requires an open attitude and the desire to change established conventions. However, with coworking communities emerging throughout New York City, sharing resources between multiple floors may not be far behind. As we continue to work on STACKD and as it expands to other buildings, perhaps it can play a role in making the city and its use of space more legible. Architectural typologies could adapt to contemporary needs and business cycles. The first step is seeing what is happening. One of the biggest challenges with large amounts of information is making sense of it all. As visual creatures, we’re equipped with sophisticated interpretative capabilities that yield insights at a glance far more readily than confronted with purely quantitative information. With the right interface and mapping capabilities we could gain a more fine-grained understanding of what kinds of activities are performed in what parts of the city.

Networked Spaces and the Future of the City

Urban Omnibus recently published a number of articles that address the issue of excess capacity. In a conversation with Rosalie Genevro, Frank Duffy commented on how corporations’ use of space leaves it underutilized much of the time. He posits that spaces must have the idea of change built into them in order to adapt. The theme of underutilization also drives an article with ZipCar founder Robin Chase, that introduced a ride-sharing platform to make use of the excess capacity of individual seats in a car heading to a shared destination. Laura Forlano reflected on the proliferation of coworking spaces in the city. Meanwhile, New York City has discussed ways to enable cab sharing and hopefully will soon find a way to implement bike-sharing.

All of these efforts share something simple: in order to make use of the excess capacity in a network, I have to see that it exists and I have to be able to access it. STACKD offers an interface that could fit this need. Individual offices could be transformed into a network that functions as a marketplace connecting supply and demand of services, products and resources. Planners could see a fine-grain use pattern result from zoning initiatives and open-space guidelines. Businesses such as restaurants could position their next location based on geolocated market analytics. Start-ups could join ad-hoc incubators by knowing where strategic partnerships might flourish. In the city of the future, I might be able to use space and do business more efficiently. Perhaps excess space could be allocated to form building-wide or neighborhood-wide amenities. Underutilized buildings would display why they are ignored and could be retrofitted with more flexible typological configurations. Owners could make decisions about their property portfolio by incorporating space utilization statistics. We just might learn which parts of the city will continue to thrive and why.

Sidney Blank runs the strategic communication design firm Supermetric. His background in architecture greatly influences the methodology and areas of interest of his work as a designer. STACKD is the first self-initiated project created by Supermetric that aims to tie people, architecture and business together. Sidney currently teaches in the Design & Management department at Parsons, The New School.

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.