INTRODUCTION
People become urban planners because they want to make life in cities better.

But change comes slowly. And planners often find themselves pigeonholed into repetitive or isolated work as technocrats whose role is to move along processes defined by local laws and regulations, department bureaucracy, or a particular professional culture.

Could planners reshape the process through which they apply their skills? Though architects and artists commonly use their skills to intervene in troubled cityscapes, planners are rarely asked to exercise their creativity in the same way.

My colleague Frank Hebbert and I were mulling over this question at the very same time that a group of concerned citizens in New York City were struggling to make changes in the deadly thoroughfare that dominated their commute: Queens Boulevard. So we asked ourselves: What might a planning intervention look like? Would it be possible to structure the process so that urban planners could offer their unique expertise directly to complex problems in cities?

To help answer these questions, Frank and I launched Planning Corps, a network of volunteer planners whose skills we match with non-profits or community-based projects that frequently confront the kind of planning-type decisions that might benefit from a little technical assistance.

Old Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills circa 1900 | Photo courtesy of OldKewGardens.com

QUEENS BOULEVARD: A BRIEF HISTORY
Queens Boulevard has long been one of the most dangerous corridors for pedestrians and cyclists in New York. But its origins were in the tradition of the grand promenade boulevards that marked great cities of its day. It was conceived as a redesign and connection of two boulevards, Thomas Boulevard and Hoffman Boulevard, to serve traffic coming from Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. A 1912 proposal called for a central roadway at 44 feet wide, two side roadways at 28 feet, trolley tracks along the side roads, two 30-foot-wide “malls” or medians separating the roadways, and 20-foot sidewalks on either side. Its combined width of about 230 feet supported multiple uses: a Sunday stroll, a bicycle delivery and a carriage ride. But by 1922, the population of Queens had developed so rapidly that planners widened the roadway to 200 feet to meet the needs of all the new cars on the road.

A proposal for the layout of Queens Boulevard by the Queens Chamber of Commerce. Good Roads magazine, June 1914.

In 1933, the Queens Chamber of Commerce created a Queens Boulevard committee to ensure that the development of the boulevard did not occur at the expense of “beautification.” The Chamber even sponsored a competition for ideas on the development of Queens Boulevard in partnership with civic organizations such as the Regional Plan Association, the American Institute of Architects, and the Society for the Beaux Arts. Cord Meyer, the Chamber’s chair at the time, explained:

We plan to study the development of the boulevard, first of all, from the physical angle… We shall try to hasten the completion of the subway, the laying of the water mains, electrical light conduits and gas pipes and the building of the sewers. Then we shall consider zoning.

No one predicted the rampant pace at which the Borough of Queens would grow, nor did they anticipate the traffic that would come with it. By 1963, the entire borough of Queens had experienced more construction than any other borough since World War II, investing over two billion dollars on over 90,000 structures between 1946 and 1962. But development was uneven and difficult to control. Real estate speculation drove up property values at the same time that public service needs were inadequately met. Queens Boulevard was only one of many development projects; in 1963, only half of the roads in the borough were paved. Transportation development lagged behind population growth and housing demand, and local civic leaders repeatedly requested additional funds from the City to keep up with necessary infrastructure construction.

As early as 1971, The New York Times reported on the dangers of Queens Boulevard to pedestrians:

There are times when it seems as though the light is in favor of the pedestrian and he has to look in all directions at once. When the light seems to be in favor in one direction, the cars are turning in another direction. And before he has taken a few steps the “Don’t Walk” signs are flashing.

Most recently, in 2005, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted a traffic safety study on the Boulevard and concluded that traffic volumes were so high that little could be done to improve it. The minor safety improvements that were suggested – the addition of turning lanes and few through-street closures – were either challenged by local stakeholders or lamented for their inadequacy. Opposition from business owners, who feared that changes in the traffic pattern would reduce sales, was the strongest. Mayor Michael Bloomberg shot back that saving lives was a bigger concern than making profit. Still, implementation of comprehensive safety improvements faltered. Signs cautioning pedestrians to be careful while crossing the street stayed up on their posts and became the butt of jokes for transportation advocates.

Detail from Planning Corps' study "Crossing Queens Boulevard: The Effects of Signal Timing at Broadway/Grand Ave"

Late one summer night 2009, James Langergaard — a committed cyclist and a volunteer at Transportation Alternatives (T.A.), a transportation advocacy organization in New York City – was struck and killed on Queens Boulevard as he biked his way home. Because a traffic safety study had been so recently completed, there was little faith among citizens that more could be done to make additional changes to the street. But the community’s questions remained: how many more lives should be lost and put at risk?  What could they do right now that could spur on the process for change?

Into this vacuum of viable ideas, T.A.’s Bicycle Advocacy Director Caroline Samponaro introduced the idea of offering realistic alternative cross sections (a flat drawing that shows how a street space is or could be used) to garner support from the public and from city agencies. But T.A., over-committed and cash-strapped, did not have the capacity to execute this idea. It did, however, have a significant asset: an organized volunteer committee of Queens residents who were interested in taking up the cause.

I was working at T.A. at the time, and pondering the role of urban planners in general with Frank. How might we imagine different ways for planners to make use of their abilities to bring about change? Planning processes tend to be drawn out, but community needs tend to be immediate. For example, changes even as seemingly small as traffic signal timing to prioritize pedestrians would require a large study and would need to be initiated by the Department of Transportation. But a volunteer corps of planners could, at a minimum, help draw the cross-sections.

ENTER PLANNING CORPS
From the start, we were curious about what we could accomplish if we deconstructed the process by which planners and non-planners collaborated on a solution. Working closely with the Queens Volunteer Committee, we began with standard problem identification and relied on residents to share their observations and expertise with us. The dedicated volunteers also ran a series of activities to support our research, such as a community walk along the entire length of the Boulevard that documented street design challenges. These observations proved invaluable.

The Queens Volunteer Committee on the Boulevard

The committee’s observations showed that there are actually five basic street and neighborhood contexts for Queens Boulevard, and for each there could be a different solution. A long boulevard that seemed to present new problems on every block and at every unique intersection now required five tailored solutions. This was much easier to digest and conceptualize and mirrored the intent of the neighborhood sub-committees formed by the Queens Chamber of Commerce’s Queens Boulevard Committee in 1933.

We had settled on cross-sections as the major deliverable of our efforts because local non-profit or community groups could express their unique knowledge through the drawn images. In addition, we thought that focusing on one specific product would ensure our ability to deliver good work, and we didn’t want the Queens Volunteer Committee to expect more than we could offer. As we worked, however, we realized that limiting ourselves to cross-sections was impeding our ability to tackle the full scope of the problem.

Planning Corps at work | photo: Dory Kornfield

PROCESS, PRODUCTS, PERSUASION
After five months of floundering in this cyclical workshop process and worrying about losing the attention of the Queens Committee volunteers and the volunteer planners, Eric Galipo of H3 Architects, a planner, came onboard. Eric reframed the issue. He asked: What would be the most persuasive way for the Queens Volunteer Committee to persuade their elected officials that something had to be done to the street?

Reframing our process made the flow of activity needed to build up to the demand for change more legible. Instead of fixating our time on producing a product, we became more aware of the questions at large and how the community would have to answer them to build support for the changes they wanted. We started to ask more specific questions about who the volunteers would need to talk to and what would help them make their arguments.

Typically these questions are answered for planners by a city or industry’s framework, for example, the Uniform Land Use Review Process in New York City for land use zoning changes. Developers work off of pro formas and in-house economic models that support development proposals. To make changes to Queens Boulevard, we needed to intervene in the City’s formal planning process for transportation capital improvements.

We determined that it was be the elected officials who needed to be convinced to set aside public funding for another traffic safety study. Elected officials are not usually trained in street design and they are usually short on time. The question every elected official had to field in public was how more space for bicycles would fit on a boulevard that experiences so much congestion already. Cross sections of street space allocation would be useful, but perhaps more useful if they were presented in a collection of boulevard cross sections taken from around the world – boulevards that had demonstrably fewer crashes. Mike Lydon, the founder and principal of the Streets Plan Collaborative, found examples of boulevards that matched the typology of Queens Boulevard but were demonstrably safer and served multiple modes. Eric helped reorganize the detailed information to demonstrate comparisons that support the concept that it is possible to redesign the street.

Two comparable boulevards from Planning Corps' Book of Precedents

Most street typology books force the reader to draw mental comparisons, but we could not afford to lose the attention of our target in that way. Given that the volunteers would be trying to start conversations with people who might not be disposed to having the conversation in the first place, the comparisons would have to be immediate, visual, and clear. Anthony Denaro from OpenPlans took all the content, worked out the necessary information design keeping all of these concerns in mind, and formatted them into a booklet.

Additional themes that surfaced during the original problem identification became starting points for other products. They included topics such as how much businesses would be impacted, and why it’s so hard to convince people that signal timing can make a big difference for pedestrian safety.  The main question that persisted was how all of the desired safety improvements for multiple modes could fit in the existing space of Queens Boulevard.

For example, to show a non-transportation specialist the basics of geometric street design, we finally arrived at what we called the “Julia Child Street Kit Model.” H3 Architects has a history of creating models that show clients the trade-offs between possible uses for a space and the constraints. These models of different parts can be combined in multiple ways to make different plans and programs, just as the ingredients and tools in Julia Child’s kitchen can be combined to create different dishes.

For instance, a new theater building may require a certain number of parking spots. The cheapest way to provide parking is through a surface lot. But this is also the most expensive in terms of land acquisition. Underground parking is more expensive in labor and materials, but much cheaper in terms of land and opportunity cost for that land. The Julia Child Kit allowed the designer to trade surface parking for structured parking on a model.

We made a huge list of street elements – bus lane, bike lane, parking, travel lanes, wider sidewalks, curb extensions, and street trees. Eric laid the pieces out in CAD (Computer-aided Design) and mounted it on foam core. Then we spent a few hours cutting them out. Once you have your pieces ready, you can line up all the pieces to represent the existing street; move the pieces around and take out a travel lane; add a bike lane and sidewalk extension as you see fit.

Dealing with small business owners who continuously feel threatened by any traffic or street design changes – as they have every decade since Queens Boulevard has experienced safety issues – was another significant challenge. We asked the volunteers, what would you like to have with you when you talk to them? How would you convince them? What would give you confidence to have that conversation? We had trouble imagining small business owners reading a report that provided evidence of the economic benefits of a more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly street so we did not conduct a literature review. Instead, we created an informal text document that listed common questions and a few possible answers. We listed resources and studies at the end of the talking points, in case anyone was so inclined to read more.

Over the course of our collaboration with the volunteer planners and community members, we did not produce anything that could be called new in terms of design. Our innovations were limited to reframing questions, discussions and tasks, and to designing the products to meet identified needs. Our discussions enriched our understanding of what was involved in seeking the urban change, and the products followed suit.

It is worth noting that we had the luxury of time. One could say that we ended up with typical planning products and we just took the long way around to it. Yet it is hard to imagine the group of us knowing from the beginning that we should build a street model kit, write talking points on economic benefits, or design a book of boulevards, without first having had all those discussions that revealed the layers of actors and information, and connected the points of engagement. Community members seeking drastic design changes on Queens Boulevard needed to deal with multiple stakeholders in their campaign to build public support, and each stakeholder group required a different approach and thus individual tools. Though we never lost sight of the ultimate goal – winning safer, more livable street design changes for Queens Boulevard – the deconstructed framework allowed us to experiment and hopefully end up with better tactical results.

Planning Corps continues to welcome members and is especially interested in planners who are enthusiastic about committing to more leadership. Sign up here or contact Shin-Pei Tsay if you’d like to learn more.
Queens Boulevard, 2010 | photo: Flickr user Haruko16

Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Planning Corps.

An earlier version of this article appeared on CoLab Radio.

Shin-pei Tsay is the director of Cities and Transportation in the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on federal, state, and local transportation policy, climate change policy, and urban and regional planning issues, with an emphasis on economic development.

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Tsay served as the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, a nationally renowned non-profit focused on transportation issues in New York City; as a founding member of the NYC office for ZGF architects where she was on the sustainability team; the chief operating officer of Project for Public Spaces, an international non-profit; and a strategy consultant with a company serving the Fortune 500. Most recently she contributed to New York City’s Street Design Manual, New York City’s Active Living Design Guidelines, and New York State’s Livable Communities Manual.

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.

Left: constructing a public interest design project in Brooklyn | Right: Bryan Bell leading a workshop and presentation

Before Urban Omnibus went live, we co-hosted a weekend-long event that invited teams to design a project in the public interest and build it from found materials in two days. The event was led by Bryan Bell, on the occasion of the launch of his 2008 book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, which surveys the field of “creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good.” Bell, founder of Design Corps and co-founder of SEED, has been working towards a better understanding of how design can affect communities and serve the under-served for over twenty years.

His most recent initiative, The Public Interest Design Institute is devoted to educating architects about how to fold public interest design into their practices. Starting next month, the Institute will be hosting two-day training events at universities throughout the country. According to Bell, despite increasing interest from designers, professional schools of architecture have not focussed on equipping students with the unique skills and knowledge relevant to public interest design. Therefore, specific training is urgently needed. With the support of the Surdna Foundation and the Architectural League, the Public Interest Design Institute will hold one of these training sessions at Yale University in January. For more information about the event or to register, click here.

Bell will lead the event with the support of instructors dedicated to public service from around the world, utilizing case studies that adhere to the standards and evaluation metrics set forth by SEED. Participants will earn certification in the SEED process, which means they will learn how public interest design is re-shaping the design profession, how to find new clients embedded within communities, how to identify new fee sources and structures, and how to measure and maximize its positive social, economic and environmental impact on communities.

Public Interest Design Institute at Yale University
January 13, 9am – January 14, 5pm, 2012
New Haven, CT
For more information, click here.

Bryan Bell is the founder of Design Corps, founder of the Public Interest Design Institute, and a co-founder of SEED. Bell has supervised the Structures for Inclusion lecture series for ten years which presents best practices in community-based design. He has published two collections of essays on the topic, Bell has lectured and taught at numerous schools including the Rural Studio with Samuel Mockbee. He has received an AIA National Honor Award in Collaborative Practice. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Cooper Hewitt Museum Triennial. He was a Harvard Loeb Fellow in 2010-11 and a co-recipient of the 2011 AIA Latrobe Prize which is focused on public interest design.

Many of the events during this week hinge on By The City / For The City, a crowdsourced ideas competition for New York’s public realm for which the Institute solicited design challenges from people across the city and then invited designers to respond. Tomorrow’s opening night event at the BMW Guggenheim Lab will launch a book and exhibition of the designs from By The City / For The City, and the rest of week will see events that range from discussing the historic significance of Isham Park in Inwood to participating in a 72-hour “urban action” in Long Island City, from open air film screenings on the High Line to helping to design a new skatepark under the Manhattan Bridge, from a picnic in the Financial District to a walking tour that explores the ways women have contributed to the creation and life of the Brooklyn Bridge. With over 35 happenings, openings, screenings and designings, Urban Design Week seeks to increase public understanding of how living in the city fits into larger systemic questions of what cities are and how cities work. What’s more, it promises to foster a sense of transformative possibility about those systems and how design can improve them. We sat down with Anne Guiney, executive director of the Institute for Urban Design to find out more about how it came about and what to expect from…  

Tell me about Urban Design Week.
Urban Design Week is six days of events – starting this Thursday, September 15th – organized by The Institute for Urban Design that seeks to engage New Yorkers in the complexity of the public realm, to get people thinking about the streetscapes, sidewalks and public spaces at the heart of city life. This week of activities is about celebrating what makes New York the city it’s known to be: it’s dynamic public realm.

None of it is accidental. There are a thousand decisions that go into shaping and reshaping the city and its public realm; it’s an ongoing process. There are a lot of wonderful ways to insert one’s opinions, desires and hopes into those processes. The traditional apparatus for citizen involvement in New York is absolutely necessary and hugely important. But existing mechanisms for participation have limitations. Some people can’t afford to spend three hours on a Monday night at a community meeting. With that in mind, we made our project “By the City / For The City” the centerpiece of Urban Design Week. The project combines crowdsourcing methods with a design ideas competition to ask New Yorkers to articulate how the city’s public realm could be improved. It’s about trying to find different ways — ways that feel less official or restrictive — to get people involved in conversations about what works in the city.

How does “By The City / For The City” work?
We conceived “By The City / For The City” as a way to figure out how non-designers imagine that design can change the physical fabric and systems of the city, the things they use and think about every day. We wanted to explore what the potentials and limitations of design to make meaningful change are by asking New York City residents to identify challenges. And then we invited designers to respond to those challenges. The range of ideas that came in was amazing. There were 600 in total. Some are incredibly modest and small in scale — for example, “This corner always floods.” Others were much grander in scale: “Please rethink how to get from Brooklyn to Queens.”

Map of ideas from By the City / For the City

We started by asking people to respond to a very simple question: “Wouldn’t it be great if…” Then we worked on how to ground this hypothetical in spatial and physical terms, because we wanted to avoid kvetchy responses like “Wouldn’t it be great if… my neighbor didn’t yell so loud.” So we encouraged respondents to give some context: a location and an explanation of why. So we provided four prompts: “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” “Where?” “So that people could…” and the final one was “Because I want the city to be…” Here’s an example of a response, #362:

Now this is, I think, a great example of somebody thinking, “this road is a nightmare to get across,” but then imagining that as a challenge that design — whether it’s traffic calming or planting or everything in between — could solve. It’s so important to get down to the perceived social benefit of a design intervention. That helps ground it in an important way.

Location was a great way for respondents to give some context for the challenge they were articulating. We worked with Project for Public Spaces to develop a system that allowed people to drop a pin on a map where their ideas would happen. But we wanted more than just, say, “wouldn’t it be great if this intersection in Throgs Neck had a park?” We wanted to get each respondent to explain why he or she would want a particular goal to be met: “I want the people of Throgs Neck to have a place to sit outside because right now there is no public space that actually makes sense.”

Design proposal submission Park in a Box | Cadence: Gage Couch and Rebecca Bradley | Courtesy of IfUD

What was the audience for your call for challenges? Who suggested ideas?
Our hope was to be able to reach out to people who might not customarily participate in projects like this. So we worked with local newspapers, community boards and neighborhood blogs to get the word out and begin to take the temperature of how people see the physical city and how it could be better. For some people, that’s a flooded corner at Astor Place. For others, it’s the transportation system. Someone else wants the Steinway Mansion saved, or is concerned with waste removal practices. Now that we have gathered all the ideas that came in from this process into a website, a book — An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York — and an exhibition, we can start to help people understand how these concerns, at both small and large scales, are the concerns of urban design.

So the next phase was bringing those concerns to designers.
Exactly. And that was a totally open invitation. Designers looked through the challenges that were contributed by respondents, chose one and worked out a design scheme to address it. The designers took the respondents’ ideas very seriously, and it was interesting to note which challenges designers took on. There were a lot more system-based projects than there were building-specific proposals. The designers who participated seemed interested in challenges like how to deploy green roofs all over the city, or what you could do if you took away one parking space per block. There were a lot more solutions that took a “kit-of-parts” approach than there were solutions for what should be done in a specific building.

from An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York | Courtesy of IfUD

The “kit-of-parts” approach is huge right now.
Along with tool kits and field guides! And that points to the ways that this project taps into the zeitgeist; it takes the pulse of what people are thinking about in the urban realm: green roofs, urban agriculture, cycling systems. It’s not a scientific sample, of course, but it’s revelatory nonetheless.

Crowdsourcing is also very popular at the moment, particularly in the context of urbanism and civic improvements. What do you think about the potential and the limitations of crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool we have enjoyed using but I think I’ve learned as much about what its limitations are as I have about its potential. I’d be the last person to say it’s the silver bullet. It operates at a certain scale and is great for providing a certain kind of data. But there are certainly limitations. We talked to some experts in the design of forms and surveys who made clear that it’s best not to ask more than four questions on a form, such as the one we were putting out there, and that questions have to be short. We went back and forth for weeks and weeks crafting the questions that would yield the information that we wanted to get but would not discourage participation. We have to be completely honest with ourselves about the potential of these tools and when it’s appropriate to use them.

So what’s actually going to happen during Urban Design Week?
We’re going to kick off with a party at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, where we will launch an exhibit and a book of the results of By The City / For The City. Then there’s a full calendar of events all week, many of which are public conversations. We’re trying to do less stuff in lecture halls and more stuff in venues that are open. For example, Open House New York and Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop are going to run a community charrette with the organizers of the Gowanus Lowline competition.

Challenges from respondents | from An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York | Courtesy of IfUD

Some of the events will appeal to a wide public, others are more specialized. Mimi Zeiger and her loose consortium of writers and thinkers, LGNLGN, are really interested in talking about some of the issues around public interventions and how we define communities. So she is hosting more of a salon-style conversation. There will be an event at the Queens Museum of Art – related to their show on Detroit that’s opening on September 18th – that looks at citizen interventions on a small scale. Mitch McEwen is involved in connecting that work to community-based efforts. And we’re going to hang out on the Museum’s incredible panorama and talk about some of these issues and precedents in relationship to both New York and Detroit. Those are just a few examples of everything’s that’s going on.

We will wrap up Urban Design Week with the US premiere of Urbanized, Gary Hustwit’s new movie and the third in his trilogy of design documentaries that also includes Helvetica and Objectified. I think that his goal in all three of the movies is to convey some of the complexities of design in a way that is popular. For Urbanized, over the last year or so, he’s been interviewing mayors, policy people, designers, everybody in between, to talk about how cities are designed and made.

How does all of this advance the mission of the Institute for Urban Design?
The Institute for Urban Design has tended to operate as a practitioner’s think-tank, where professionals working at a pretty high level in architecture, planning, design, urban policy, energy, etc. convene and work through issues. They then brought the benefit of this thinking back to their work.

Now, we’re at a wonderful point at which conversations about the city fabric and city systems are much more commonplace. The kinds of conversations that fellows of the Institute for Urban Design in the past have had just with each other are now heard in public settings throughout the city. Look at the kerfuffle over the Prospect Park bike lanes: you’ve got people all over the city passionately for or passionately against what is essentially an urban design issue. So I think this is a really good time to try and crack that open. There are people who care passionately about bike lanes and people who care passionately about streets and people who care passionately about dog runs or transit funding or housing prices. All of these fit into or are part of the conversation about urban design. That conversation becomes more productive when you’re not talking about bike lanes as just a transit problem, but you’re talking about them as a streetscape issue, a livability issue, a public health and sustainability issue. This is a great time to try to connect the disciplinary dots to be part of a larger public dialogue.

What do you hope someone who attends some part of Urban Design Week — someone who is perhaps interested in some of these issues but not involved in them personally or professionally other than being a neighborhood resident and a subway user — will get out of it?
I’d love for people who attend some of the events at Urban Design Week to start to think of the parts of the city that they use as part of a much larger, shared system. I would like that person to have a more straightforward understanding that taking the subway is more than just getting to work. It fits into a larger constellation of questions and issues.

That seems to me like a goal one could set for Urbanism Week or City Week. This is Urban Design Week. Where does design fit in?
I think the book, which showcases the designers’ responses to the ideas that came in from the crowdsourced search for urban challenges, helps to show how design strategies can address public realm challenges in multiple and overlapping ways. Take the area around the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. A sophisticated design proposal for that space would look at it as a traffic problem, as an aesthetic problem and as a greenspace problem. Design helps us get from “this space is a nightmare” to more productive and positive thinking about how planning, architecture and landscape architecture can be applied to mitigate that space, to make it much more pleasant and functional.

This is about showing what design can do. Not in the sense of implementation, but to get people thinking. People don’t even agree on a common definition of urban design. I don’t expect that Urban Design Week will be able to establish that urban design is X, Y or Z in a neat little package. But it will, I hope, get people to ask questions and posit some, perhaps contradictory, answers.

Design proposal submission Tunne (Re)Visions | Jaklitsch / Gardner Architects PC | Courtesy of IfUD

Interview conducted by Cassim Shepard.

Before joining the Institute for Urban Design as Executive Director in January 2010, Anne Guiney was the editor of the New York edition of The Architect’s Newspaper, and was part of the original team that launched the newspaper in 2003. Prior, she was an editor at Architecture magazine and Metropolis, and has written widely on architecture and design for other publications, including Architect, MARK, ID, and Details. She has also worked as a consultant organizing high-profile architecture competitions (working with Jones | Kroloff), including the commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Portland Aerial Tramway.

Gorton’s involvement with urban issues began in 1999, when he founded OpenPlans, a non-profit devoted to the pursuit of smart planning and civic engagement through media and digital tools. Since then, he has helped launch the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, which advocates for a more dynamic use of public space, and the online media outlets Streetsblog, Streetfilms and Gotham Schools.

Last week, Gorton took me on a walk through the Flatiron District to talk about cars, people and the future of New York City. He painted a picture of a New York free from car dependency, in which both policy and the design of our streets give priority to people, social vitality and safety. (Look back at this 2009 Omnibus feature on Ulrich Franzen’s 1969 short film “Street” to see another bold vision of how to reclaim our congested streets.) Read on to hear Gorton’s thoughts about the largely car-free city he has envisioned and how it can come to be. —Alicia Rouault

Mark Gorton | photo by Alicia Rouault

In 1999, you founded OpenPlans, a non-profit organization that uses technology to improve the way that cities and citizens interact. How and when did you start moving towards transportation reform specifically?
Five years ago, nobody was talking about transportation in NYC. It was a non-issue. There was this sense that New York is a big city, it has a lot of traffic, so what?

We consciously launched an agenda to raise awareness of different policy options. We started Streetsblog and Streetfilms. We formed something called the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign and talked a lot about the potential of Bus Rapid Transit, programs like Summer Streets and bike lanes. We initially focused on leaders at the Department of Transportation (DOT), the mayor and other transportation policymakers, and we were very effective within that circle.

Now, thanks to the work of the DOT, people have seen change on the ground. It’s no longer theoretical. So all the people who couldn’t be bothered for years are taking notice. Whether it’s in The New York Times, The New York Post, on CBS News or amongst people in neighborhoods, there is a citywide debate about what we should do with our streets and people understand that there are policy alternatives.

So now that the current administration is supportive of your work and many of your initiatives have been enacted, how do you engage with transportation reform today?
The main point that I’m trying to make now is that cars are bad for New York and that the incorporation of the automobile into the fabric of the city was a big mistake. I want people to question, at the most fundamental level, the role of the car in the city.

Through both street design and policies, our city is programmed for driving and for maximum automobile throughput. But the needs of people and the needs of the automobile are completely different. The automobile asks for very simple, straight, distraction-free — people-free — places. Activity in a human context, at a human speed, won’t work with cars flying by.

Streets used to be safe places for kids to play, places where neighbors would gather. Now we have this definition of the street that was essentially promulgated by the automobile industry and the oil industry, in which cars dominate and people are considered only when absolutely necessary. It’s been incredibly pathological and as a result we have a much worse city than we could have otherwise. The automobile industry has been happy to tell people that the car is about freedom. It’s not about freedom for me. It’s an oppressive burden on my kids and my family.

Broadway and Houston, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

Why do you think people are so protective of cars?
There are a number of reasons. First of all, I think there’s just an inherent bias towards the status quo. Most people are inherently resistant to change. Also, our society has been indoctrinated to see cars as exciting, fun and sexy, not dangerous, selfish, rude and annoying. Most people think that if they drive around and don’t crash into somebody, they haven’t done any harm. But much of the damage done by the automobile is social harm, invisible harm that degrades our neighborhoods and makes the city unpleasant and dangerous.

Donald Appleyard, a professor at UC Berkeley, did a series of studies on the societal impact of traffic. He looked at three streets in San Francisco, similar in every way possible except for how much traffic passed through. He found that people who lived on the lightly-trafficked street had more friends than those who lived on the heavily-trafficked street. 3.0 friends per person versus .09. The same went for acquaintances, people in heavily-trafficked areas had fewer. He also tracked where people congregated and how they engaged with their surroundings. He then asked the residents to draw their “home territory.” On the heavily-trafficked street, people drew their apartment building or maybe a piece of the sidewalk in front of their building. On the lightly-trafficked one, people included their entire street. At a certain level, Appleyard showed that traffic destroys people’s social connections with their neighbors and friends. [Watch a Streetfilm on Appleyard's study below. -Ed.]

Streetfilm: Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets

So is the primary challenge to change the discourse? What comes after that?
This is going to be a decades-long process. There are a number of things we have to do. A lot of people assume that the car is important, essential and properly used. Therefore, if there’s not enough space to park, you need to create more parking. If there’s not enough road space, you should create more road space. That’s essentially what the story of the 20th century was. Sidewalks were narrowed, parking was added, the city became more friendly to cars and more hostile to people. But all of those efforts still failed to make the car work in New York City. The automobile does a bad job as a transportation technology in the city because it’s so spatially inefficient.

We want to communicate an alternative vision. We’re talking about changes that will get people out of their cars, that will make it difficult and expensive to drive. Of course, some drivers just don’t want to get out of their cars. And some people don’t want to consider alternatives, because it forces them to question their own behavior, to accept that every time they get in their car, they somehow, in some small way, harm their neighbors and use an unfair share of the scarce public space of the city. They don’t see how change can give us healthier children, improved social activity and a better economy.

What is your alternative vision? Do you want to completely eradicate cars?
I don’t want to eradicate cars, but I think we could reduce them by 90%. The automobile is one of the most significant technologies in this country, but it is fundamentally misused. Capable, healthy people should not be driving within the city at all. Any trip that you make on a regular basis, whether it’s going to school, work or the grocery store, should be possible without driving a car. Automobile trips should be limited to those where people are leaving the city or the occasional trip that requires a vehicle, such as carrying cargo.

The remaining traffic, whether it be automobile or truck, could be concentrated in space and time. Some streets could be fully pedestrianized and some could be auto-oriented. Maybe a street allows traffic from 6am until 10am, but then from 2pm until 5pm, when kids get out of school, auto access is radically reduced. You can concentrate the harm onto the auto-oriented streets and free up more space to be beautiful, peaceful and safe.

I think 20% of the streets in Manhattan alone could be fully pedestrianized, with no cars, buses or bikes. We should have a comprehensive network of pedestrian streets. Broadway, for the whole length of Manhattan, could be fully pedestrianized. On the east side, maybe Lexington Avenue. We could do that.

This is also good for business. Kalverstraat, a fully-pedestrianized street in Amsterdam, has the highest retail rents in all of Holland. Here in New York, the street with the highest retail rents outside of Manhattan is Brooklyn’s Fulton Street on Fulton Mall — which has no cars. No one wants to live on a street that’s choked with a lot of nasty traffic. No one wants to work, shop or eat dinner on a street that’s polluted, loud, dangerous and unpleasant. Automobiles are bad for business.

Property owners are one of the constituencies we want to reach. The easiest way to increase property value in the city is to get rid of cars on the street. When the real estate industry realizes that, we’ll start to see more change.

Of course, the transportation dynamics in Manhattan are different from those in eastern Queens or parts of the Bronx. There are neighborhoods in which getting rid of cars simply doesn’t work. But things can be done in every neighborhood. It’s just a question of engaging the residents and finding how they want their streets to be.

Fulton Mall, Brooklyn | photo by Varick Shute

You say that automobiles are bad for business, but what about car-dependent businesses, necessary truck traffic or the taxi industry?
Yes, I want to be sure to distinguish between truck traffic and automobile traffic, because you certainly need freight delivery, garbage trucks, things like that – though I think with conscious effort we can probably improve efficiency and reduce truck trips by 30-50%.

But there are very few auto-dependent businesses, particularly in Manhattan. Restaurant and store owners worry that their patrons won’t be able to show up without their cars. They will, they’ll just be using different means to get there. The idea that people need to drive to go shopping is simply not true. Only 6% of shopping trips in the central business district of Manhattan are done by car.

That’s not to say there aren’t losers if there are fewer cars – parking garages, auto-parts supply stores, there are businesses directly related to vehicles. But in New York there is always a process of creative destruction in the economy. And the alternative is endangering our children and having an obesity epidemic because people can’t live an active lifestyle.

The taxi industry is more of a grey area. Cabs produce noisy, dangerous traffic. But in some ways taxis complement the public transit system. They make cars available for people who need to use them without relying on private ownership. There are also options like car sharing. We’re not talking about banning cars, we’re talking about making them available for the rare trips where people really need them.

What else needs to be done in order to make your vision a reality?
We need to improve our buses and expand Bus Rapid Transit. Buses are much more spatially efficient than cars. And the surface route infrastructure is mostly there. The select bus service routes that New York City has already put into place have increased bus speeds by 20% and that number can definitely increase. But it takes funding, innovation and willingness to dedicate road space to bus-only lanes.

We also need to take the bicycle seriously as a transportation technology. Other big cities do: in Tokyo, 20% of all trips are carried by bicycle; Osaka 25%; Berlin 13%; Amsterdam 40%; Copenhagen, 37%. Without much difficulty, we could see 20-25% of all trips in New York being taken by bicycle, which would reduce congestion, increase mobility and make the city safer and more livable. But right now, our street network is implicitly hostile to the bicycle. And it’s unreasonable to expect people to take their lives in their hands just to get around, so they’re going to resort to other alternatives. The city has begun to take steps to make our streets safer but we still have a long, long, long way to go.

In some ways this is a generational issue. The automobile used to be a symbol of progress and economic might. But it doesn’t represent the future anymore. Now it’s part of this nasty, mechanized, dystopian world that we have to deal with.

Madison Square, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

How does your work with participatory planning come in to all of this?
In order to achieve significant change in how the city behaves, you have to engage the public as deeply as possible. People have to understand why this in their own self-interest. I’m talking about creating a process where people come together and decide how they really want their streets to function. Do we want them to be thoroughfares for people outside the neighborhood or places for our children to play?

Do you see a role for the recent crop of web-based, interactive, democratic tools, like ChangeByUs or SeeClickFix, in doing what you’re talking about?
Software and internet tools definitely have a role to play in this participatory democracy, because they can help disseminate information and create a forum in which to build social consensus for change. Each of the tools you mentioned is good for what they do. But to really see change, I think we need more government agencies deploying them. Because the government controls the streets. It doesn’t matter how many people join a group or “like” something on Facebook, that doesn’t change government policy.

But if we can integrate these tools into a public input process and get the DOT to adopt them, there’s significant potential to galvanize communities. A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. New York is a huge city, and the only mechanism the DOT has to gather input from communities — Do you want a bench here? Do you want to put in a loading zone? Do you want that intersection daylighted? — is to have its staff facilitate tens of thousands of local dialogues, which is impossible. As a result, that happens only in a rare handful of circumstances.

What’s your strategy moving forward? Are you still focusing your advocacy efforts on policymakers?
The strategy now is to try and engage with and talk to the media and the thought leaders in the city. We’ve been faced with a lot of knee-jerk reactions against change. It amazes me how thoughtless a lot of coverage in the media is on this topic. Many reporters who don’t know anything about transportation show up to cover these issues — and much of the media drives around the city as they cover it, which gives them a very windshield-oriented perspective. The Post has been particularly awful. CBS news too. So what I’m trying to do now is to speak more publicly about these things, to reach both the media and a broader audience.

Will you continue to work with smaller groups or do you want to focus on changing the way the big outlets cover the topic?
It’s a combination. We’ve been working through the more niche-oriented media channels for the last five years, and we’ve made great progress. But to take it to the next level and get people all over the city who are now seeing the changes on their street to understand what these changes are for, why they should want them, and why they should ask for more, then we have to talk to them through the media that they’re used to consuming.

A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. I want people to understand that the automobile is a flawed technology for our city and that we need change. I want them to see the positive things that can happen if they embrace that change. I want my street to be safe for my kids so they can play. And I’m not content to wait for that. I want it to happen now.

Interview conducted by Alicia Rouault.

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Mark Gorton, the founder of a series of innovative financial and technology companies, is a leading advocate for alternative transportation and livable streets. He is the founder of Tower Research Capital LLC, a money management firm specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies, as well as the founder of Lime Brokerage LLC, Lime Wire LLC, Lime Labs LLC, and OpenPlans. In 2005, Mark founded the New York City Streets Renaissance campaign in partnership with the Project for Public Spaces and Transportation Alternatives. Through his philanthropy, his leadership at OpenPlans, and his public and media appearances, Mark Gorton continues to advocate for alternative transportation, livable streets, and open government.

Mark holds a B.A. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a MBA from Harvard University. He lives on the Upper West Side and bikes regularly to his offices in Lower Manhattan.

Today marks the launch of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a partnership between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, BMW, a team of curators and consultants, and the public. This participatory and generative “mobile laboratory,” now open in the East Village at Houston Street and 2nd Avenue, aims to be a catalyst for “the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions for city life.” In the planned investigations and explorations of the spaces, systems, structures, culture and people that are the city, the project recognizes that the wellbeing of citizens is inseparable from the wellbeing of the built environment.

The Lab will be based in the East Village from August 3 — October 16, 2011. Over the next two years, it will make its way from the United States to Europe and Asia, during phase one of a “six-year migration” around the world. The space is envisioned as a “traveling toolbox” in which the architecture acts as a frame for a series of interdisciplinary urban investigations. In this phase, the mobile structure has been designed by Japanese team Atelier Bow-Wow, a Tokyo-based firm known for urban residential and “micro public space” design.

“Confronting Comfort,” the theme of the first two-year cycle, will explore both individual and collective comfort in the context of environmental and social responsibility. To address the theme, Guggenheim curators Maria Nicanor and David van der Leer and an international advisory committee assembled a Lab Team of experts working across a range of fields — an environmental justice activist and cooperative developer, a journalist and “urban experimentalist,” a microbiologist and inventor, and two architects — to concoct a program of conversations and events that will transform the Lab space into a public forum.

Olatunbosun Obayami, microbiologist and founder of Bio Applications Initiative; Elma van Boxel and Kristian Korean of architecture and urban design firm ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles]; Charles Montgomery, writer on happiness and climate change; and Omar Freilla, environmental justice activist and founder of Green Workers Cooperatives, collaborated to create an itinerary of lectures, debates, screenings and workshops that question how individuals and institutions can create comfort in the city, and how that comfort will enhance the lives of city dwellers. From there they will venture out into the city to accrue data on how people use urban space and infrastructure, to gain crucial understanding of both the physical and emotional needs of their citizens, and to expose private and public sites in New York City where our comfort has led to complacency.

Urban Omnibus recently had a chance to speak with one of the Guggenheim curators and all four members of Lab Team New York. Click on the images below to read more about issues of “segrification,” hedonistic utility, and how the city operates like a living microbe. —Caitlin Blanchfield

	Maria Nicanor “This is a lab, an experiment. It’s about the process. It’s about awareness and about getting people to think about the city in new ways.”
	Omar Freilla “We have a game at the Lab, Urbanology, that’s kind of a mix between Red Light, Green Light, 1, 2, 3 and civics class. It gets people to rethink what their priorities are for the city, and what the city’s priorities should be.”
	Charles Montgomery “We want to map out the emotional landscape of public space in Lower Manhattan, to learn how design influences the emotional experience of the city. The answers might help city builders design systems that are not just more efficient, but happier.”
	Olatunbosun Obayomi “A city is like a living microbe. It operates as a combination of systems (transportation, sewer, governance) coming together to aid movement and production. In science, a microorganism also combines various systems (cell walls, mitochondria, plasma) to move and produce.”
	ZUS: Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman “Acupunctural ‘green’ infrastructure is a good start, but the real challenge in this city is to equally distribute wealth and health within its territory. This demands a political infrastructure in which global and local parties and institutions are equally represented.”

All photos © 2011 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Alicia Rouault

Until the early 20th century, New York City’s waters were teeming with oysters. Some biologists estimate that the Hudson-Raritan Estuary was once home to half of the world’s oyster population, serving as both an abundant culinary delicacy and a natural water filtration system. Oysters are considered “ecosystem engineers” that shape their environment into complex three-dimensional structures to support themselves and a host of other organisms. Estuaries — bodies of water formed where freshwater and seawater meet — offer ideal conditions for these diverse ecosystems of marine and plant life to flourish. But now, due to overfishing, the destruction of natural wetlands, poor water quality from sewage overflow and decades of contamination, biodiversity has reached a low point — and the once ubiquitous oyster, a paragon of water filtration and habitat production, has nearly disappeared.

Today, the Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP), a partnership led by the Hudson River Foundation, the US Army Corps of Engineers, NY/NJ Baykeeper, the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program, the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, is working to reverse that trend. The ORRP, which covers an area of the estuary reaching out 25 miles from the Statue of Liberty, is bringing together policy, science and community engagement to restore a keystone oyster species once native to New York and New Jersey waterways. The nature of the restoration project is largely misunderstood as an effort to revive oysters for food. ORRP partners tell a different story, one of equal value, that brings New Yorkers to the water and puts wildlife — wildlife that can improve water quality, facilitate nutrient cycling, enhance biodiversity and stabilize our shorelines — back into our waterways.

Monitoring oysters by Soundview Park | Photo by Alicia Rouault

The program stems from a major planning document released in 2008: the Comprehensive Restoration Plan (CRP) for the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary. The CRP, which was developed as part of a study by the US Army Corps of Engineers – New York District, the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey and the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program, identifies a series of short- and long-term goals that aim to restore a “mosaic of habitats” to eight specific planning regions throughout the estuary. The ORRP project will help partners analyze the feasibility of this ambitious plan, which calls for restoring 500 acres of oyster reefs by 2015 and 5,000 acres by 2050. Six pilot reefs have been installed in and around New York Harbor, at Hastings on Hudson, Soundview Park, Governors Island, Bay Ridge Flats, Staten Island and Jamaica Bay. Each has been stocked with 50,000 oysters, which are being monitored for development, survival, growth and ecological performance.

Earlier this month, I joined Jim Lodge of the Hudson River Foundation, Katie Mosher-Smith and Kerstin Kalchmayr of NY/NJ Baykeeper, and Kate Boicourt of the New York-New Jersey Harbor Estuary Program to check on some recently-planted oysters in Soundview Park in the Bronx. As we donned our waders and headed towards the water, the team offered some insight into their collaborative process, the educational aim of their program and the unique challenges of bringing oysters back to New York Harbor. –A.R.

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The Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP) has a uniquely collaborative model. Tell us about some of the partnerships that have helped make oyster restoration a reality.
Jim Lodge: We currently have about 28 (see full list below in Comments) different organizations on the project, and within each organization there are multiple partners. Partners range from not-for-profit groups like the Hudson River Foundation, Rocking The Boat (a Bronx River-based group) and the Bronx River Alliance; to city departments, like the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s Natural Resources Group;  to federal government agencies, such as EPA Region Two, the Harbor Estuary Program and the US Army Corps of Engineers; to student groups, including the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School — ORRP is, at its heart, a research project, so we have a lot of academic institutions and partners on the project, including Stonybrook University and University of New Hampshire — and then, of course, NY/NJ Baykeeper.

NY/NJ Baykeeper has been a pioneer in pursuing oyster restoration for New York Harbor. They have been exploring the potential for natural recruitment of oysters since 1999. Around the same time, they started the Oyster Gardening Program, which has done a lot to highlight the challenges of restoration and the importance of bringing oysters back to the harbor.

Creating an artificial oyster reef off Governors Island, October 2010 | Photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

The Oyster Gardening project is a public program?
Kate Boicourt: Oyster gardening is a system of citizen science that’s been used up and down the east coast for a while, engaging schools, individuals and community groups in restoration work.

Jim Lodge: It’s a strange name for what it is. It’s called a “gardening program,” so people associate it with food production. But that’s clearly not the goal. The Oyster Gardening Program teaches people about restoration through raising and cultivating oysters. It’s not just high schools that are getting involved, but community groups, senior citizen centers and preschools. That’s why the model is so powerful, because you can involve the public at multiple levels and encourage a connection between the average citizen and the estuary. And it’s fun! People get to participate, they get to watch oysters grow and eventually these oysters will be used in restoration efforts.

Kerstin Kalchmayr: We want to create an oyster reef specifically for these garden oysters so that participants can feel that they’re part of the greater project of restoring the health of the urban estuary. We want gardeners to be able to wade out and monitor their own oysters.

Part of an artificial oyster reef, October 2010 | Photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

Where are the ORRP pilot sites?
Jim Lodge: We have six experimental research sites within New York Harbor. Starting from the south, the sites are: near Great Kills Harbor in Staten Island; Bay Ridge Flats, which is a quarter mile south of Governors Island; Buttermilk Channel, on the east side of Governors Island; there’s a site out in Soundview at the mouth of the Bronx River, which is where we’re headed today; an experimental reef site in Hastings-on-Hudson; and one in Jamaica Bay at Dubos Point.

We chose geographically dispersed sites to ensure a range of environmental conditions. We go from water with almost no salinity up at Hastings to near-seawater at the Staten Island site. Food availability varies, as do levels of oxygen. We monitor survival, growth and reproduction at each site and then look at those variables to try to understand how they influence success or failure. We are also studying predation pressures. Because we don’t have any naturally existing reefs, we need to take note of different predators across locations.

Each of the sites uses the same design. A 6-inch, granite rock, rip-rap base is followed by a veneer of clam shells and a top layer of spat-on-shell. Pete Malinowski and his students at the Harbor School cultivate the spat-on-shell in aquaculture tanks on Governors Island, which allows the juvenile oysters to settle and mature on old oyster shells before installation at each reef site.

Monitoring oyster reefs by Soundview Park | Left photo by Kate Boicourt; right photo by Alicia Rouault

What unique challenges does oyster restoration present in the Hudson-Raritan Estuary?
Jim Lodge: In places like the Chesapeake Bay and South Carolina, restoration efforts focus on providing a suitable substrate — they basically just put down shell material and there are enough larvae in the water column to take hold. We don’t have a large enough natural larval pool, so we have to go through many more time-consuming, labor-intensive steps. So we’re trying to determine how to optimize those techniques and how to take advantage of any minimal natural recruitment that we may get. Soundview has some natural oysters due to its proximity to the Long Island Sound where there is a viable oyster population.

Kate Boicourt: There’s been a specific effort to look at how we maintain our shorelines and if there are ways we can try to increase complexity and create potential for habitat. There’s not a lot of habitat on a hardened shoreline, but there are options to improve conditions. For example, oyster reef balls, which are these porous, concrete structures that mimic naturally occurring reefs and provide shelter for growing oysters. Though that’s slightly different than straight oyster restoration.

Photo by Alicia Rouault

What are your metrics for success?
Jim Lodge: To be successful on a large-scale restoration effort, you want to have natural recruitment on the reefs. But this project is focused on research and information. We want to understand how and if it is feasible to restore our oyster population, to drive future restoration efforts. And the project is not limited to oysters. We will be experimenting with different bivalves. We have to look broadly at what we’re trying to accomplish and what sort of things are going to help us reach those goals.

The Comprehensive Restoration Plan is the guiding document for what we’re trying to achieve in the region, and the Harbor Estuary Program has adopted the plan as their restoration vision. The CRP calls for about 500 acres of restored reef by 2015 — which is extremely optimistic considering it’s 2011 and we have basically none — and 5,000 acres by 2050. We don’t know if that’s realistic or feasible or not.

There has been a lot of attention given to increased usage of NYC waterways based on PlaNYC and the comprehensive waterfront plan Vision 2020. Do you see that having an effect on your project?
Jim Lodge: Oyster reefs wouldn’t be in competition with other waterway uses. Even 5,000 acres is a very small footprint within the estuary. If anything, increased attention on the waterfront is amplifying interest in restoring the habitat. People want to see the water clean.

L: Photo by Alicia Rouault | R: Raising oysters at the Harbor School; photo courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers

Are you in communication with or involved in other local efforts to engage oyster restoration in waterfront design, such as Kate Orff of SCAPE’s Oyster-tecture, or Mara Haseltine’s New School project? Do you see their projects having any impact on your efforts?
Katie Mosher-Smith: The director of the oyster program from Baykeeper works collaboratively with Mara Haseltine and they’re doing some illustrative experiments this year in New Jersey. We do speak with Kate Orff but we’re not directly involved with any of her efforts. They engage with different audiences than we tend to attract, which is a real benefit. Any way we can expand public interest and involvement in this issue is an advantage to our efforts.

Jim Lodge: The intersection between restoration as a planning and regulatory issue (thinking again of Vision 2020 and PlaNYC) and as an interest of the architecture and design communities is fantastic. There has always been a disconnect between restoration and planning efforts and the people on the ground. Now, our broad visions are being applied in a very real sense, providing us an opportunity to think about how to optimize that work.

Soundview Park | Photos by Alicia Rouault

What do you wish people knew about oyster restoration that is often misunderstood?
Katie Mosher-Smith: A lot of people think you’re going to eat them.

Jim Lodge: When most people think of oysters, including me in my non-work life, they think of oysters on the half shell. They think of food. The main purpose of our project is to restore oysters for their habitat value. Reefs provide habitat for fish and invertebrates. We’re also looking at the potential for water quality improvements, which we think might have limited local effect. There have been other areas of the country where people are building reefs to help eroding shorelines. The word we’d like to get out is that it’s not about bringing back a lost fishery, but lost habitat value.

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In the past year, public planning sessions were held in the eight planning regions of the Hudson-Raritan Estuary to define potential sites for restoration and to incorporate citizen input into the development of public access points for shoreline restoration sites. People were, and still are, able to nominate a site for land acquisition and restoration if they can demonstrate its potential habitat value. The sites in question are documented on oasisnyc.net, a mapping site developed by Steve Romalewski previously featured on Urban Omnibus.

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Photo by Alicia Rouault

Kate Boicourt began the position of Restoration Coordinator of the NY-NJ Harbor Estuary Program in September 2010. Through this position, she works to coordinate and advance restoration and public access activities throughout the harbor estuary, with a particular focus on those within the goals of the Comprehensive Restoration Plan. Prior to coming to HEP, Kate worked on climate change adaptation issues for the State of Maryland, estuarine ecology and science communication for NOAA/University of Maryland, and collaborated with the Matthew Baird team for MoMA’s Rising Currents Exhibit. Kate holds an MS from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science, where she studied the success and effects of Phragmites australis removal, and a BA from Kenyon College in Biology.

Kerstin Kalchmayr is the Oyster Restoration Program Field and Project Assistant for NY/NJ Baykeeper. She is originally from South Africa and has been living in New York since November 2008. She graduated from the University of Stellenbosch in 2005, where she completed a Bachelor of Science Honours degree majoring in Zoology. After completing her studies she went abroad to Central America and lived in Costa Rica for a year. In Costa Rica she coordinated two sea turtle conservation restoration projects working predominantly with olive ridley and leatherback sea turtles both on the Pacific and the Carribean coast. It was the work with the sea turltes that inspired her to work for the conservation and restoration of marine/estuarine habitats.

Jim Lodge has been a project manager with the Hudson River Foundation since 2002. Prior to joining the Hudson River Foundation, Lodge held a position as an Oceanographer with the New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His primary interest is integrating science and policy research into government decision making. Jim served as project coordinator and a primary author for the Target Ecosystem Characteristics (TEC) project and is currently coordinating the Oyster Restoration Research Project (ORRP) a multi-partner research project to determine the feasibility of restoring oyster to the NY/NJ Harbor Estuary. Jim holds a Masters of Science degree in Marine Environmental Management from the Marine Science Research Center at Stony Brook.

Katie Mosher-Smith manages the Oyster Restoration Program/New York for NY/NJ Baykeeper and is the Field Project Manager for the ORRP. Prior to that she served as the field manager for the Bay Ridge Flats Oyster Project and as Baykeeper’s Oyster Gardening Coordinator.

Interview conducted by Alicia Rouault, Urban Omnibus Assistant Editor.

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

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

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

Screengrab of nyc.changeby.us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screengrab from nyc.changeby.us

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

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

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

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

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