NYC SOLAR MAP
A new interactive map was launched by New York City Solar America City Partnership, led by Sustainable CUNY, to show the potential NYC has for solar panel placement. Showing both existing solar photo voltaic (PV) panels and solar thermal installations in NYC, the map also gives an estimate of solar PV potential for every rooftop in the five boroughs. The map allows users to assess any building’s solar panel capacity and estimate a financial payback. Created by gathering imagery and data using LIDAR technology, Inhabitat reports that the map shows that 66.4% of all buildings in the city are suitable for panels, and could generate up to 5,847 megawatts of power. To put this in perspective, the city currently outputs 6.5 megawatts of solar energy. The map represents opportunities for building owners to assess solar capacity on their rooftop for free. See Inhabitat’s piece on the map here, and to find out your building’s solar potential, check out the new NYC Solar Map.

1,000 Nike+ runners in NYC | Image via Cooper Smith

RUNNING IN NEW YORK: MAPS
Graphic design student Cooper Smith developed a striking series to visualize the location, route popularity and time of day people run in New York City. The series was produced for an SVA course with visionary designer Nicholas Felton using the Nike+ GPS-synced mobile app. By geolocating 1,000 runners’ paths, Smith produced beautifully mapped stills and time-lapse videos showing multiple facets of New York runners’ paths. See Infosthetic’s piece on the topic and the full work here.

Underground construction on the 7 Line | Image via MTAPhotos on Flickr

7 TRAIN EXTENSION
Official MTA photographer Patrick Cashin caught some beautiful shots of subterranean work currently underway on the 7 train’s extended line. The extension is expected to be complete in three years, after which passengers will be able to reach 11th Avenue and 34th Street. See the full Patrick Cashin slideshow on Flickr.

9/11 MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM UPDATE
The Architect’s Newspaper reported on developments around the much anticipated opening of the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial and Museum scheduled for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy this coming September. The new complex will feature a subterranean museum and memorial space, an aboveground museum pavilion and a landscaped plaza with reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers. However, due to serious security concerns, a temporary ring of chain link fences and concrete barriers will limit public access to 1500 people at a time. After September 12th, visitors will be required to buy a ticket and pass through a series of metal detectors and x-ray machines in order to enter the plaza. Eventually security measures will be moved into the museum itself, but for the time being, security features trump accessible open space.

Artist’s rendering of +Pool | Image via +Pool

SWIM IN THE EAST RIVER?
Brooklyn designers Dong-Ping Wong of Family and Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin of PlayLab have launched a Kickstarter campgain around their latest project +Pool, a project to build a floating pool in the East River, similar to Berlin’s famed Badeschiff. The designers have developed a comprehensive plan with engineering/design/planning firm ARUP and other experts to help make the pool a reality. The proposed pool will filter river water through its wall to remove bacteria, contaminants and odors, making it swimmable and safe by City standards. Four pools (Children’s pool, Lap pool, Lounge Pool and Sports Pool) will join together to create a giant plus sign in the East River. Their latest round of fundraising will support the physical testing of the proposed filtration system. See the full project description here. To read up on floating pool ideas UO has covered in the past, see Jonathan Kirschenfeld and Ann Buttenweiser’s take on the topic.

NATION’S LARGEST URBAN CAMPSITE IN BROOKLYN
According to a recent press release from the National Parks Service, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has announced that the nation’s largest urban campground will be established at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, a former airport used by Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes. The park’s current five campsites will be expanded to 90 over the next two years, and may eventually reach 600. Special outreach to underserved communities around the area will introduce families to camping skills and equipment in their home neighborhoods and will facilitate participation in overnight use, complete with campfire programs, kayaking and swimming opportunities.

EVENTS + TO DOs:

New York City in 2040 Image via Interboro Partners (left) and Amsterdam in 2040, Image via Space&Matter (right)

GLIMPSES of New York and Amsterdam: 2040
The Center for Architecture has teamed up with the Amsterdam Center for Architecture (ARCAM) to present “Glimpses of New York and Amsterdam in 2040,” a new exhibit showcasing visions of the future for two cities that share an extensive waterfront and similar climate challenges. The organizations commissioned architects and landscape architects in both cities to conceptualize the “future of the future,” with five basic necessities for living: breathing, eating, making, moving and dwelling. The exhibit features five firms from each city: New York’s dlandstudio, Interboro Partners, Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, and WORKac, and Amsterdam’s Barcode Architects, DELVA Landscape Architects / Dingeman Deijs Architect, Fabrications, Space & Matter and van Bergen Kolpa. GLIMPSES will be shown through September 10th at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place. Read Inhabitat’s coverage of the exhibit or, for more information, see the official site.

COME OUT & PLAY NEW YORK
Come Out and Play, the annual festival of citywide street games, will begin on June 19th and run until July 16th. In years past, the festival has “turned New York City into a playground for a weekend,” with satellite city festivals held in San Francisco and Amsterdam. This year, Come Out and Play will begin in Lower Manhattan in partnership with the River to River Festival. Come Out and Play will run the series over the summer, culminating in a one-day field day in mid-July on Governors Island. For more information, see the official site.

GRANT OPPORTUNITIES
The Awesome Foundation is offering multiple $1,000 grants each month to “people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.” Although no New York City projects have been funded as of yet, the NYC Chapter is now accepting applications. To apply, click here.

Sappi has announced a call for entries for grants up to $50,000 with the “Ideas that Matter Grant Program.” Ideas that Matter is open to individual designers, design firms, agencies, in-house corporate design departments, design instructors, and individual design students and design student groups. To apply for an Ideas that Matter Grant, click here. The deadline to apply is July 15th.

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

New Community Data Features on OASIS
We are testing some new features on OASIS (the Open Accessible Space Information System), and we’re looking for feedback. We want to make OASIS more open and accessible (pun intended!) for our users. We think that it should be easier to add mapped data to OASIS, and we’d like to test the option of letting anyone add any data layer they want to OASIS (within reason) regardless of whether the mapped information is explicitly related to open space. This would go far to making OASIS a more meaningful community platform for mapping New York’s neighborhoods. This would offer the ease of use of existing platforms like Google Maps, combined with the richly layered mapped data that’s already a part of OASIS.

Some data sets might be small or temporary. For example: wouldn’t it be neat to overlay all of Prospect Park’s destination sites on OASIS’s maps, so you can view them with historical aerial photos? The Prospect Park Alliance website shows the destinations, but doesn’t have the rich detail that OASIS’s maps have.

Or perhaps adding the locations of “stalled development” sites in Brooklyn? City Councilmember Brad Lander’s website highlights these locations (see below), but not along with maps of land use patterns, other housing sites, legislative districts, and more that OASIS provides.

Screengrab from bradlander.com/stalleddevelopment

Other data sets might be fascinating but totally unrelated to parks and community gardens. For example: 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire that took the lives of almost 150 workers and provided a tragic but powerful rallying cry for the then-nascent labor movement. Researchers have mapped where each of the victims lived. But what if we could view these locations on OASIS, overlaying historical maps simultaneously with the current street grid, imagining what we might have seen 100 years ago as we walk to the subway along the same path that an immigrant worker in the Triangle factory strode along a century ago?

Last year, New York City was hit with a blizzard that caught city officials unprepared. The local public radio station (WNYC) mapped the locations of people who called in with reports of whether their streets were plowed or not. What if we could view these spots with maps (that we have on OASIS) of demographics, zoning, land use, schools, and transit?

With each of these examples, maybe some interesting geographic patterns would turn up, or maybe not. But at the very least it would be intriguing to open up OASIS as a platform for creating and analyzing visual correlations like these — and more. The sky’s the limit. The only thing holding us back — till now — was the technology.

Fusion Tables & OASIS
Last year Google developed a new service called Fusion Tables that could make this vision a reality. Fusion Tables enables you to quickly upload a list of items (like a spreadsheet) or create one from scratch, save it online, map it (if it includes location information), and share it with the world. The Center for Urban Research’s application architect David Burgoon was able to integrate the Fusion Tables service into OASIS.

Screengrab from oasisnyc.net

In order to test Fusion Tables with OASIS, we have added a “Community Data” tab to the right of the map and we have provided links to several data sets already in Fusion Tables so you can try it out. These are: Daffodil planting locations in 2011 from New Yorkers for Parks (the Daffodil Project is a living memorial to September 11, 2001); the locations of the Triangle shirtwaist fire victims; and waterfront access locations in New York and New Jersey. Eventually you’ll be able to add your own data from Fusion Tables (or any table that’s already been created in Fusion Tables), simply by typing the table ID number in a text entry box on the OASIS map page.

If you’re familiar with Fusion Tables, you know that there are many options you can configure. While we’re testing how this new feature works with OASIS, keep the following things in mind if you’d like to suggest Fusion Tables data we should add: Visibility of your data table must be public or unlisted; it must be exportable; it needs to be point data; and it has to have a location column.

Community Map Layers
We’re also testing a feature that’s somewhat more labor intensive, but nonetheless powerful. And it doesn’t have the limitations of Fusion Tables, in that it can be any type of geographic feature, not just “point” locations. Scroll down the Legend tab in OASIS, and you’ll now see a section called “Community Maps (beta).” For now, this only includes one layer (described below). But think of it as a placeholder for other types of information that you think would be useful as part of OASIS’s maps.

Community Maps Test Layer

The map layer we’ve added as a test case shows the areas in western Queens that were impacted by a power blackout in July 2006. For weeks that summer, tens of thousands of residents and businesses were without electricity. Though power was eventually restored, people were justifiably upset and took legal action against Con Ed. The utility eventually entered into an agreement with these groups to provide almost $8 million to invest in energy-efficiency and environmental projects in the Western Queens community affected by the power outage. The NY State Public Service Commission selected a local foundation, the North Star Fund, to administer this project because of the Fund’s expertise in facilitating community led grantmaking processes.

Although the Fund, with Con Ed’s help, has mapped the affected areas and the groups receiving funds, OASIS is supplementing this effort. We’ve added the affected areas map to the OASIS site, making it easy for people involved in the program to easily see which properties are inside or outside the affected areas, what community assets (such as community gardens and schools) are located in the area, and what elected officials represent the areas.

Next Steps
The Community Maps section of OASIS enables us to add maps that may be short-term, focused on specific locations, or change regularly as local needs change or issues evolve.

What are your thoughts? What criteria do you think we should use to add map layers? How much value does this bring to local community organizations? (compared with something like Google Maps, for example.) Should we add layers to this section indefinitely, or only use this to display time-limited information? What Fusion Tables data would you like to see added? We are eager to hear from you. Email your feedback to oasisnyc@gc.cuny.edu.

This is an abbreviated version of a post published on the OASIS wiki, where you can find further information and instructions on testing these new community features.

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Steven Romalewski directs the CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research, CUNY Graduate Center. His 25-year career has centered around accessing, understanding, analyzing, and publicizing data for public policy development, community planning, and research purposes. He lives in Manhattan.

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.

Yesterday, a group of urbanists, technologists, designers and urban planners gathered at the offices of the Rockefeller Foundation to discuss the future of the crowdsourced city. Four presentations focused on forecasting the benefits, tensions and pitfalls of mining the data that humans generate as they go about their daily lives at a variety of scales — global, national and urban.

First was a summary of a report, “The Future of Cities, Information and Inclusion,” authored by the social sector office of the global management consultancy McKinsey & Company, that offers a survey and taxonomy of how cities around the world are making progress in urban informatics. The second explained a “map” produced by the Institute for the Future, entitled “A Planet of Civic Laboratories,” that illuminates the “innovations that will harness urban data to reduce poverty and promote inclusion.” The third delved into a couple of case study projects of the Spatial Information Design Lab that use various kinds of data to reveal those invisible geographies that link the social city to the physical city. In the final presentation, Clay Johnson raised some of the political and managerial challenges to realizing the potential of technological advances to deliver more efficient and effective governance.
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BENJAMIN DE LA PEÑA: 5 EXABYTES OF DATA EVERY TWO DAYS
Before the presentations began, Benjamin De La Peña of the Rockefeller Foundation set the context by referencing the Foundation’s long history with funding new ways of responding to urban change, from giving an unknown Jane Jacobs a grant to finish the book that would become The Death and Life of Great American Cities to investing in innovative economic development programs in the Global South.

He cited UN Habitat’s ubiquitous urbanization statistic – that over half of the world’s population lives in urban areas – and then quickly re-contextualized this over-cited figure by juxtaposing it with a sobering stat from the world of information technology that bears huge implications for how we will deal with urbanization in years to come: Between dawn of humanity and 2003, roughly five exabytes (an exabyte is one billion GB) of information were created. Now, we generate that amount every two days. With that amount of information produced by an incalculable number of sensors embedded in the material of everyday life, from toll booths to cash registers to cell phones, the Rockefeller Foundation and its co-presenter, CEOs for Cities, want to know: how will this information affect how we perceive and manage cities? And in what ways might any of this benefit the poor and vulnerable?
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McKINSEY & CO: BENEFITS AND BARRIERS
The McKinsey people performed like impartial social scientists: explaining their methodology (reviewed published literature! Interviewed 65 experts! Classified 200 examples of current deployments of urban informatics around the world!) and categorizing their findings into neat categories of benefits and barriers. Their examples ranged from mobile electronic systems integration in Istanbul that speed police response to electronic handsets used by New York City’s Department of Homeless Services.

The first question the report asks is, who benefits? Seems like just about everyone. Citizens can profit from direct economic and social benefits, some of which are tailored to local needs, and some of which might empower citizens to engage and participate more fully in public life. Policymakers and administrators can rely on good data for better operational decisions and increased transparency. Nonprofits can expect greater efficiency and effectiveness, while at the same time playing new roles in increasing digital literacy and access. And the private sector can capitalize on talent and infrastructure advantages and rely on cities as important customers and as demonstration opportunities for new devices and applications. Every sector benefits because the benefits themselves are so broad: urban informatics can provide faster and cheaper services and improve coordination between planners and service delivery through data sharing, centralized analysis and the reduction of redundancy and transaction costs. Furthermore, the information itself is not just more abundant but is also of higher quality. What exactly defines higher quality was never made explicit.

The final stated benefit brought the ideas back to the stated keywords of the event – crowdsourcing and inclusion – by asserting that urban informatics provides new opportunities for collaborative problem-solving and engagement. Bringing in new pools of problem-solvers not only strengthens the process itself but also increases the likelihood that solutions will reflect the priorities of stakeholders.

OK, so everybody wins? Not so fast. The barriers are manifold. For these benefits to be reaped, certain mindsets must be overcome: tech developers lack a familiarity with cities’ needs; municipal agencies are risk-averse and are plagued by a structural incapacity to coordinate across siloes; and citizens’ groups are traditionally slow to adapt to new technologies. And then there are the resource constraints: funding, talent, infrastructure and access. The access issue is not just about affordable devices, of course. Digital illiteracy will widen the digital divide and accelerate exclusion. And the speed of technological change will only accelerate the isolation of certain cities and individuals as urban informatics becomes more and more central to the functioning of government, commerce and society at large.

The presentation ended with some suggested principles and actions that were simultaneously encouraging and obvious: put citizens first, multi-faceted approaches work best, etc. The context they provided of what is currently going on in world of urban informatics set the stage for the second presentation, in which a Rockefeller-funded report on the future of cities, information and inclusion outlined what we have to look forward to, and to fear, ten years down the road.
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ANTHONY TOWNSEND AND RACHEL MAGUIRE: A PLANET OF CIVIC LABORATORIES
Anthony Townsend and Rachel Maguire, both from the Institute for the Future, began by claiming that the experimental period in urban informatics that we find ourselves in is likely to continue for the next decade. This condition results in what they, somewhat optimistically, label a Planet of Civic Laboratories, where the urban poor of the Global South roam through slums with smartphone supercomputers in their pockets and global technology is adapted to meet local needs.

They structured their presentation (zoom into the embedded version above) in the same matrix format as the report they were summarizing, with “scales” on the x-axis – people, networks, environments – and “drivers” on the y-axis – commons, markets, design and planning and governance. This format, and its striking graphic design, demonstrated well the simultaneity of major realms of advance (i.e. the good news for the inclusion and justice folks) and key tensions that will bedevil the realization of these forecasts.

The predicted advances are plotted on the matrix as large, brightly color-coded circles that declare what the future will look like in attractive, aspirational phrases like “democratized public safety” and “anticipatory health,” followed by detailed descriptions of a future where technology has made the world a kinder, more responsive place. The tensions, on the other hand, appear small, lack explication, and float free of the matrix’s rows and columns. They are described as concise oppositions (“Visible vs. Actionable,” “Identity Safeguarding vs. “Public Good”) linked by arrows that dubiously suggest a chicken and egg cycle of causation or, perhaps, simply make clear that you can’t have one without the other (as in the case of “Economy Gap” vs. “Knowledge Gap”). Townsend, Maguire and their co-authors go into more detail in the full report; check it out here (PDF).

One of these oppositions struck me as especially pertinent to any responsible discussion of the opportunities that the crowdsourced city presents: “Cooperation vs. Offloading.” As technologies empower networks of individuals to take care of those non-emergency services that governments have provided in the immediate past, to what extent will the suspension of public services match the abilities of citizens to pick up the slack?
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LAURA KURGAN AND SARAH WILLIAMS: STORIES AND STRATEGIES FROM FINE-GRAINED DATA
The next presentation, by Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams, grounded the afternoon’s proceedings in examples from one particular body of work, that of the lab at Columbia that Kurgan and Williams co-direct. But before delving into projects like Architecture and Justice and others that collect, analyze and communicate specific stories with fine-grained data, Kurgan sounded a note of caution about the data optimism that permeated the room and the previous presentations. While visualization and data have recently become cool, the former is defined while the latter is not. For her part, Williams seemed a bit less ambivalent than her colleague about the role data can play in providing for the public good. She raised the important topic of creating strategies and policies for using crowdsourced and commercial data when government data is not accessible or doesn’t exist.

Overall, the Spatial Information Design Lab’s work is powerful testament to how carefully and strategically choosing which data set to analyze and spatialize (looking at the home addresses of convicted criminals as opposed to looking at traditional crime data, for example) is as important as the technological ability to collect that data in the first place. As we lean into a future of infinitely more data, it seems to me that fostering a sophisticated conversation about how best to promote tough analytical choices between distinct data sets is crucial to excavating the benefits from a world awash, if not submerged, in automatically generated information.
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CLAY JOHNSON: WHO ELSE NEEDS TO BE AT THE TABLE
The final presentation of the day zoomed out from specific urban-scale projects to national political culture. Clay Johnson, founder of Blue State Digital and Big Window Labs and a former director of Sunlight Labs, has been interviewing Chief Information Officers at governments around the country in an attempt to understand why government creates so much cost around technology. His broad-stroke comments reminded the audience of who was not in the room and not at the table generally in conversations about data, informatics and governance.

Organized labor, he stated strongly and clearly, is a big problem for the crowdsourced city. The rhetoric of efficiency and of do-it-yourself public services often flies in the face of those things labor unions are sworn to protect: jobs. Another conspicuous absence from similar discussions is Republicans and the South. And the failure to engage these constituencies runs the risk of equating, in the popular imagination, technologically-enabled municipal renewal with political progressivism. In other words, the failure of the community of people who care about this topic to talk to people unlike themselves means that any attempts to create political, legislative change will be blocked from both the left and the right.

Johnson had some concrete suggestions for how governments and electoral campaigns can start to shift the culture, particularly by recognizing that information technology, strategic communication, and new media production are distinct skillsets and should be recognized as such in the organization of any government office or campaign. The combination of his irreverence and his pessimism was alternately comic, depressing and reassuringly practical and led the audience into a lively question and answer session that touched on issues of urban morphology, the basic survival needs of slumdwellers and the difficulties of navigating the nexus of corporate interests, privacy concerns and the public good. At no point was the difficulty of defining what the public good is or what inclusion really means addressed. Perhaps those are questions for which we should mine the wisdom of the crowd? Or perhaps what this conversation needs now is debate about what’s desirable, not only what’s possible.

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Cassim Shepard is the project director of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Images from left to right: Hudson River Park, image courtesy of Mathews Nielsen; West Harlem Piers Park, image courtesy of Alison Cartwright | via archleague.org

PARK TOUR AND BIKE RIDE
This Saturday, Architectural League group Design in 5 is hosting a park tour and bike ride of Hudson River Park and the West Harlem Piers, two of the many waterfront revitalization efforts springing up all over New York City. Design in 5 events are typically open to designers roughly five years or fewer out of school, but the group invites all young Omnibus readers as well. Participants will travel by bike to two different Hudson River parks and meet Len Greco from the New York City Economic Development Corporation and designers Barbara Wilks, of W Architecture, and Signe Nielsen, of Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. Join them to talk about waterfront development, design processes, and coordination efforts involved in projects of this scale, all while enjoying a beautiful day out in the sun. Email designin5@archleague.org to sign up.
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A HUNDRED MILLION CALLS TO 311

311 Calls for New York | Pitch Interactive via wired.com

WIRED reports on What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York, including how 311 calls “represent a huge pool of data to be collected, parsed, and transformed into usable intelligence,” evident in crowdsourced detective work like the Maple Syrup Mystery. Eye-grabbing infographics provide a quick glance at New York’s most vocal zip codes and common gripes, but also reveal more nuanced geographic and temporal complaint patterns. The article points to various efforts, by the City and private companies, to improve the efficiency of problem solving, but suggests that these programs can only go so far in improving the urban fabric. As a resource though, the uses of 311 call data continue to unfold. The call center is a voice of accountability that may encourage more New Yorkers to speak up, and 311 data is a tool to analyze the City’s problems, spurring timely and targeted response.
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DESIGN MATTERS
A recent survey following Election Day, which tested polling issues ranging from voter privacy to equipment functionality, found that over a third of the survey participants thought that the newly-designed ballot was difficult to read and used font that is too small. Design matters! Maybe its time for New York’s Board of Elections to go back to the drawing board with AIGA’s Design for Democracy, which “applies design tools and thinking to increase civic participation by making interactions between the US government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy.”
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TRACING TRASH
Trash can over flowing? Not to worry, take your waste to Union Square tomorrow from 11am- 1pm for Culture Push’s Tracing Trash symposium. The “curated trash experiment” gathers information about waste disposal practices in the city. Orange-jumpsuited liaisons will answer questions about where garbage comes from and where it goes, and offer ideas for alternative disposal. Just remember to RSVP, to cp@culturepush.org, for your date with the dumpster.
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SWIMMING CITIES
Last weekend, the newest addition to Swimming Cities, which we discussed with artist Swoon earlier this fall, was launched in the Gowanus — or at least the radial foundation for it was. The Ocean of Blood, as the fleet of small boats is called, and its crew of artists will begin a journey up the Ganges River in India in March. The small rivercrafts can be connected for common space or separated in order to navigate narrow waterways. On-board motorcycles serve dual purposes, as propellers for the individual boats and vehicles for the crew when they need to get supplies on land. The final destination for The Ocean of Blood is Varanasi, the oldest living city in the world, where the crew will collaborate with local artists to create visual and musical performances using their journey as inspiration.
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KRANTHOUT

KrantHout | via worldchanging.com

File this under new materials wrought from extreme recycling: Worldchanging tells us about newspaper wood, aka KrantHout, designed by Mieke Meijer and available through the Dutch design firm, Vij5. The product is made from layers of recycled newspapers, which can be milled and sanded like any other type of wood. Meijer says KrantHout is “a reversing of a traditional production process; not from wood to paper, but the other way around.” The material has been in development since 2003 and Vij5 is working on a line of products to be added to their collection.
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EYEBALLING BRIDGES AND TUNNELS
Last week’s interview with photographer Stanley Greenberg reminded BLDGBLOG of this 2004 “carto-photographic look” at New York’s bridges and tunnels, an impressive gallery of images from the Library of Congress, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historic American Engingeering Record (HAER). “Eyeballing New York City’s Bridges and Tunnels” spotlights the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, George Washington, Queensboro, Verrazano-Narrows, Triborough and Hells Gate Bridges along with the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, in all their infrastructural beauty.
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TEDxBROOKLYN

This Saturday, TEDxBrooklyn — one of many local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a “TED-like experience” — is hosting a stage event at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn Campus. The one day program will focus on “the making of a movement,” bringing together local artists, entrepreneurs, activists, innovators and other Brooklynites to talk about and demonstrate their work and ideas. Meanwhile, you can nominate a “transformational individual” you know to be considered for TEDxBrooklyn’s “ONE Brooklynite,” to be featured on the program website.
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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

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

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

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

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

Screen grab from Map Your Moves by Moritz Stefaner

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

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

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

In our recent look at the 2010 census, we talked about hard-to-count (HTC) populations and how urban areas, and New York City in particular, have traditionally been undercounted (and thus potentially underfunded and underrepresented). According to the fine folks at CUNY’s Center for Urban Research, we’re not doing much better this year. The Center’s analysis of the first week of participation rates demonstrates clearly that census tracts in urban areas have much lower participation rates than those in non-urban areas.

Steve Romalewski, whom you’ll remember from both our last census post and his Omnibus feature about OASIS 2.0, has just let us know that the Center has been updating its Hard To Count mapping site with this year’s participation data as it comes in. Now you can:

• Type in a county and highlight the tracts below a certain participation rate.

• Sort the resulting list so you can see at a glance the highest and lowest performing tracts as well as their concentration.

• Compare the 2010 rate map with the 2000 rate map.

• Click on any spot on the map to display the latest participation rate for that area (state, county, or tract, depending on your desired zoom level)

Check it out.

On April 16th, 2010, business, civic, philanthropic, media and government leaders will convene at RPA’s annual Regional Assembly. This year, the theme is “Innovation and the American Metropolis” and the event seeks to ponder the impact of emerging trends in technology and data on new approaches to the design and management of cities and regions (check out the day’s agenda here). Urban Omnibus recently sat down with Tom Wright, RPA’s executive director, and Rob Lane, director of the Design Program at RPA, to talk about the meanings and uses of innovation in the context of the history and future of RPA and the metropolitan region itself. -C.S.

New York and its Environs, 1928

Urban Omnibus: First, can you sketch a brief history of the Regional Plan Association?

Tom Wright: In the 1920s, about 25 years after the creation of greater New York City, a group of civic leaders got together to create a single comprehensive metropolitan plan. Today, RPA is still dedicated to pushing those regional ideas that transcend political boundaries and might be too controversial for elected leaders to take on. RPA produces one of these plans each generation and then goes about advocating for its implementation.

Manhattan Land Values, 1923

The 1929 plan projected that the size of the metropolitan region would double by the 1960s, and it recommended that we build the systems to support that growth: highways, mass-transit, airports, housing, and community development. By the early 1960s, the plan was largely implemented with one glaring exception: the transit connections. The failure to invest in recommended transit projects hastened the region’s suburbanization. By the late 1950s, the RPA was already worried about our land use patterns and was publishing reports with names like “The Race for Open Space.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of reports came out that are collectively considered the Second Regional Plan. These reports argued for re-centering the region in a constellation of centers, such as New Brunswick, White Plains, the Nassau hub, Bridgeport and Stamford, based on transit networks.

The Second Regional Plan resulted in some big successes, like the creation of the MTA and NJ Transit. But the ethos of the time was the advocacy planning movement, which meant we didn’t feel it was appropriate to dictate, in a top-down way, what the region’s priorities should be. So instead, rather than publish a definitive Second Regional Plan, we put out a “Draft for Discussion” in 1968.

Land Use in the Metropolitan Region, 1954

The Third Regional Plan, released in 1996, had more robust recommendations: build the 2nd Ave subway, connect the LIRR to Grand Central, dig a new commuter rail tunnel under the Hudson River, and charge drivers coming into Manhattan to pay for it. Right now is about the halfway mark for the Third Regional Plan. So, 15 years after the publication of the Third Regional Plan, we’re at the point of asking what we need to do before the fourth one.

Urban Omnibus: Which brings us to the upcoming Regional Assembly, whose theme and title is “Innovation and the American Metropolis.” In the context of RPA’s work, what does innovation mean?

Tom Wright: The Regional Plan Association has been looking at innovation since its inception. One example is a 1930s photomontage that we used as an advocacy vehicle to stop Robert Moses’ proposed bridge from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. We painted a bridge on top of a photograph of lower Manhattan to demonstrate what this proposal would mean. It’s what Photoshop does now everyday. But in the 1930s, it was an innovative use of technology.

A Rendering of the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, 1939

Like the 1929 and 1968 plans, the Third Regional Plan in 1996 advocated creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth. But the Fourth Regional Plan might end up being less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.

This kind of thinking around innovation connects extremely well to things like IBM’s Smarter Cities program. And it fits well with previous proposals we have made, such as on congestion pricing. The next time we advocate for congestion pricing we will come up with a much “smarter” proposal. It will not just look at tolling East River bridges but will think about how to develop an innovative policy that actually manages traffic and uses, for example, the GPS systems currently in thousands of Manhattan taxis in order to determine how to get the most capacity out of the system.

A vision for Times Square, from "Urban Design Manhattan", one of the reports that constitute the Second Regional Plan, 1968

Urban Omnibus: In the past few years I think we’ve seen a return of the big vision. Yet the kinds of innovative practices that will be discussed at the Regional Assembly seem to have a bottom-up nature. Which leads me to wonder, where is innovation coming from and how does it find its way into the system?

Tom Wright: Part of the answer lies in the incredible amount of data that we can access. But an even greater part of it comes from new networks and dialogues. In the 1920s, RPA was one of a handful of civic organizations in New York City. By the 1960s, we were seeing a flowering of community-based organizations, but they weren’t coordinated in any way. By the 1990s, our entire implementation strategy relied on local organizations doing the advocacy work while we provided the research. We sometimes refer to this as putting rocks in local organizations’ snowballs. In 2010, we see new kinds of networks – epitomized by things like Streetsblog – and the ways they have matured. If the bottom-up ideas that come from blogs and online communities can be coupled with the new data collection, then we can learn so much more about how systems work.

Railroad Commuting Times, New York, 1922

Rob Lane: It’s interesting to think about the role that new social media have had on RPA. In the twelve years that I’ve been at RPA, we completely changed the ways we present ourselves and the way we make our information available and accessible to people.

RPA stays with certain projects for fifty years or more. But these days, people expect a much shorter turnaround time between accessing information and being able to move on things. So how does RPA keep its profile out there and stay effective in a 24-hour news cycle? Part of the answer is in graphic media: making the data and the policy recommendations more accessible. The days of thick reports rich with wonderful data but not compelling to look at are over. And part of it is in social media, which we exploit to build coalitions and constituencies around the initiatives we’re supporting.

But it’s important to remember another kind of digital divide that exists within the region: between the city and the suburbs. Even though we’re an incredibly rich and sophisticated region, the world of iPhone apps and see-click-fix and design-your-own bike paths is a New York City-specific phenomenon. We’re resolved to use social media to get people engaged. But the level of complexity will be limited compared to the New York City world of open-source apps for urban planning.

Bus Service in Bergen County, New Jersey, 2009

Urban Omnibus: Is part of RPA’s mission to foment a regional political identity on the part of citizens?

Tom Wright: Trying to build a regional identity has always been part of our goal. We want people to understand that a tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York benefits both sides of the river equally. There’s a diversity of needs in the market and when we talk about regional development we have to be providing for all of those different needs.

We also want to understand how people are using the system. For example, reverse commuting is the fastest-growing piece of the major transit authorities’ ridership right now, and it’s very poorly understood. Up until very recently, data on this trend has been really expensive and difficult to obtain. New forms of data capture and analysis should be able to make it possible for, say, NJ Transit to learn who is reverse commuting and whether the trend will be growing in the future.

Commuting to Downtown Hartford, 2009

Urban Omnibus: Is there a place for the sort of institutionalized structures for community-based planning – such as community boards – in New York? Which points in the system are most open to innovation?

Rob Lane: Most of the tools available to those community groups and community boards that want to be part of a planning process are tools for collecting local information, getting the word out and organizing via social networking. But there’s a huge divide between collecting information and actually planning and designing. When it comes to actual urban design and planning work, finding the points where the stakeholders can insert themselves into the process is still very difficult, and the new forms of social media don’t help with that that much. Therefore, the role of the planner and the designer is still significant – it has just changed somewhat. The planner/designer has become more of a referee of all this new information that’s coming in.

Tom Wright: Participatory approaches often turn up very conservative designs. When we get all this data and we try and reflect it back to community groups, it often takes the form of very vernacular and common images.

Long Island Index interactive map by CUNY Mapping Center, with data from RPA, 2010 www.longislandindexmaps.org

Rob Lane: I think there’s a scale issue here. In terms of new media, it’s one thing to have bicycle advocates provide the information to locate places for better or worse bike routes, but compared to the scale of complex urban systems, that problem is relatively small. The social media model can only get you so far. If you have to make a decision about where you’re going to build a new tunnel under the Hudson, does social media really play a role in these kinds of big infrastructure decisions? I think it does; its role is diagnostic. Locating and building a tunnel will eventually involve a highly technical design exercise that broad-based social media cannot help to address. But you can’t really bring the technical resources to bear in an intelligent way until you’ve really done the diagnostic work. And social media – by which I mean the stakeholder driven world of blogs and websites and Facebook and Twitter – have a huge role to play in defining what the problems are that we are trying to solve.

The Centers of the Region, 2006

All images ©Regional Plan Association. All rights reserved.

Special thanks to Frank Hebbert, Jeff Ferzoco, Ben Oldenburg and the staff of the Regional Plan Association.

Tom Wright is the Executive Director of Regional Plan Association (RPA) the nation’s oldest private regional planning organization. Mr. Wright lectures widely on growth management and regional planning. He is a Visiting Lecturer in Public Policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; and the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture.Previously, he was the Deputy Executive Director of the New Jersey Office of State Planning, He resides in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three daughters.

Robert Lane is the Director of the Design Program at RPA, where his urban design projects include the Comprehensive Master Plan for Stamford Connecticut and Transit-Friendly Communities for New Jersey. Before coming to RPA, Robert Lane was an Associate at Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects, PC.

It’s been a week of big projects, big plans, and big ideas.

New York University has announced the NYU 2031 plan, an anticipated 40% growth of the institution in the city over the next 20 years. The university has worked with SMWM, Grimshaw Architects, Toshiko Mori Architect and Olin Partnership to develop what it calls “a strategic framework to guide the University’s growth.” The plans, which address academic, residential and public space, and which NYU President John Sexton says will be strongly community-minded, are broken down into three parts: expansion and development of the core campus, open space improvements, and the establishment of new NYU locations within the city at East River Science Park, in Downtown Brooklyn and on Governors Island. The plans have received a lot of attention and renew the conversation about sustaining competitive institutions in a city so limited in space. Love it or hate it, we’ll all have to wait and see how the big ideas start to play out — the proposals have been framed as the design team’s “recommendations,” and they will continue to review and refine them over the next 25 years. The New York Times reports that Cooper, Robertson & Partners is working on the design of the Downtown Brooklyn site and Polshek Partnership Architects will be tackling the East River Science Park Health Corridor. And all this from the preliminary report — the official strategy will be released on April 14.

Speaking of NYU and planning, NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy this week released the report How Have Recent Rezonings Affected the City’s Ability to Grow?, what they bill as the first comprehensive statistical analysis of the first 76 of the 100 rezonings the City has undertaken since 2003. The New York Times takes a look at some of the findings in more detail, or download the PDF yourself here. (While we’re on the topic of 2003, check out this lovely photo project by designer and photographer Andrew Faris, who shares his photographic wanderings from Spring 2003, when he first arrived in NYC, eager to explore with Polaroid in hand.)

Six acres of Brooklyn Bridge Park opened on this past drizzly Monday, with another 3 1/2 to open later this spring. The long-anticipated project will eventually cover 85 acres, so there is still lots to do, but Metropolis claims that “this first section is any indication, it will be worth the wait.” If the chilly weather doesn’t inspire you to check it out yourself quite yet, Metropolis suggests getting a sense of the new space through a video of the park in progress or by revisiting a 2006 piece by (Omni-friend and collaborator) Andrew Blum about Michael Van Valkenburgh’s design. Or take a look at Curbed NY and Brownstoner, both of whom have photos from the event itself.

You’ve read Carter Craft’s thoughts on the big ideas put forth in MoMA’s upcoming exhibition, Rising Currents. Now you can see them for yourself. The exhibition opened to the public yesterday — though it’s not the first chance the public has had to experience the content. MoMA has been blogging about and has offered workshops and open studios with the teams over the past few months. Now exhibition curator Barry Bergdoll is looking for feedback: What are your thoughts on the exhibition’s emphasis on process?

This week we looked at hard-to-count populations for the 2010 Census. It looks like even the not-so-hard-to-count areas are proving to be more challenging than hoped. New Yorkers are taking their time sending their questionnaires back — some neighborhoods hadn’t yet seen a single response as of Wednesday. Send in those forms! Don’t make us show you the music video again…

If you liked our look back into the archives on Wednesday, you might want to visit the Museum of the City of New York’s new exhibition Cars, Culture and the City, a show that explores how New York City “played an essential role in creating today’s car culture, and [how] the car has helped, in turn, to shape modern New York.” From car showrooms that lined Broadway to the development of infrastructure to early 20th century car manufacturing in our fair city, the relationship between automobile and city offers plenty of food for thought. Then balance the historical reflection with some (unsurprising) statistics about the state of traffic congestion today culled from GPS data collected from city taxis. To put NYC driving in perspective: Between November 2008 and October 2009, “weekday traffic in [Manhattan's business] district moved at an average of 9.5 miles per hour — about the speed of a farmyard chicken at full gallop.” And then find utter beauty in traffic patterns through this gorgeous visualization project by Pedro M. Cruz that maps the routes of 1,534 vehicles over 24 hours in Lisbon (via information aesthetics):

Visualizing Lisbon traffic from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

The aesthetics of Lisbon traffic from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Visualizing traffic jam in Lisbon from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

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