The Future History of New York City | View of Manhattan Looking South | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

Late last year, Vishaan Chakrabarti, whose passionate rallying cries for infrastructure investment and urban density are familiar to regular readers of Urban Omnibus, unveiled a radical proposal (dubbed LoLo, as in Lower Lower Manhattan) to connect the Financial District to Governors Island through a land bridge made of landfill, replete with a new mixed-use, high-rise, green infrastructure community.

The setting for his presentation was a conference called “Zoning the City”, convened by New York City’s Department of City Planning and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and Chakrabarti’s premise was how to zone for a modern Central Business District, for affordability, for livability, for energy and waste, and finally for resilience. He armed his argument with planning instruments and infrastructure developments, such as the transfer of air rights and the provision of waste-to-energy facilities, and he closed with a bold vision to create a projected “88 million square feet of development and generate $16.7 billion in revenue for the city” in a neighborhood that is currently harbor.

Even if all the proposal provokes is discussion about the crucial intersection of waterfront planning, densification and big ideas for New York’s growth, it is notable for its provenance. LoLo was conceived by students in a Columbia University graduate studio, led by Laurie Hawkinson with the collaboration of Chakrabarti,  for which students of architecture and real estate worked together on a site – Governors Island – and a topic – ’speculation’ – that have both gotten a lot of play in the past few years and whose implications and possibilities are far from exhausted. The historic significance of Governors Island and its protected status as a park need not preclude the intensification of its use as an integral part of New York City’s infrastructure and landscape. And as for ‘speculation,’ the term has distinct and specific definitions in both architecture and real estate, but with the common meaning, according to Hawkinson, of “taking a really big risk.” For Chakrabarti, ‘speculation’ is a word that “aptly describes the prerogative that designers and developers share, which is to imagine that which does not yet exist.” Hawkinson directs the advanced studios at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Chakrabarti directs Columbia’s Real Estate Program and has recently launched The Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE), an independent think tank at Columbia that aims to “redefine sustainability as dense, mixed-income, mixed-use, transit-based urban development.” The LoLo project has progressed from a student project to the basis of serious study on land creation by the team at CURE, which is engaging experts and City officials to explore the hurdles — from environmental concerns to marine navigation concerns — and the possibilities of the scheme.

The point of Urban Omnibus studio reports is to redress the tremendous intellectual loss that occurs when a student project is completed and young professionals are unleashed into the world. Very seldom do the hard work, dogged research and often revelatory design schemes that students produce ever make it out of the studio environment and into a wider, real world conversation. LoLo is a rare exception, finding its way into the “Zoning the City” conference, The New York Times, CBS Local News and ongoing conversations throughout New York and beyond.

The Speculation Studio marked the first time students from these two programs worked together on a design studio, and signals an overdue evolution in architectural education. The boldness of the schemes and the cogency of the accompanying financial analysis explode the myth that considering financial implications in a student design process will constrain creativity and innovation. Read on for a conversation with Hawkinson about the studio’s theme and site, about the nature of the collaboration between architecture and real estate students, and about the return of big ideas.

-C.S.

The Future History of New York City | Plan | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

Tell me about the idea for this studio.
Laurie Hawkinson: We did this studio in the fall of 2010. Vishaan and I had been discussing collaborating on a studio that brought architecture and real estate students together to work on a joint project. Governors Island seemed timely and not completely exhausted as a subject of study. We also felt that the present constraints placed on Governors Island by local, state and federal authorities – its edge cannot be altered; permanent housing is prohibited – were something that should be questioned.

Given the desire to bring together students from architecture and real estate, we wanted to choose a topic that grew from the common ground between the two professions. That’s how we came up with “speculation.” Even if architecture and real estate look at the topic differently, it’s something both groups of students can engage. In architecture, we’re always speculating because we are making; we’re speculating on conditions that aren’t here yet by projecting into the future. And in real estate, projecting into the future takes on a financial aspect. We talked a lot about value: where you create value, how you create value. When you speculate, you also have to establish certain assumptions that you take forward. The students’ initial research led them to statements of “we’re assuming that the population will be X, or that the value here is Y, then we can do Z.” We made ground rules and set stakes, and we wanted students to consider issues of density, of energy; we wanted them to ask where and how is this city going to grow? 

Farm Park | Six plans | Breanna Carlson, Peter Katz, Georgina Lalli, Pedro Zevallos | Click to enlarge

Did you find any differences between how real estate students and architecture students talk about creating value?
It was amazing to observe how much they traded hats all the time. When the groups were presenting, you might not be able to tell which student was studying in which program.

For instance we had one project that was a vertical farm. The students figured out the cost of the tomato they were going to sell there and how they were going to make it work; they were so precise about all of the metrics and that really galvanized them around the power of the knowledge that they mutually brought to the table.

Flux City | Renderings | Eun Kyoung Kim and John Phinney

“To propose these Metabolist, Archigram-like forms and then to run a pro forma on them and make it work was amazing to see.” -Vishaan Chakrabarti Tell me about some of the other projects in this studio.
Another project added a lot of vertical density in the East River, creating a kind of archipelago of islands going from Governors Island up the river, mindful of shipping channels and other factors. Other projects included a proposal for an Olympic Park that transforms into housing over time, an educational institution, a major convention center. The infrastructural logistics are what become very interesting about these projects. You have to get large numbers of people there in very short periods of time. The real estate students helped define the metrics: if you build a new subway line, where would it go? Or if we are going to rely on ferries, how many will there need to be? As architects, we tend to simply draw a little dotted line and say, “we’re going to put a ferry line here.” But in this studio we were able to delve a little deeper to ask what is really involved in creating the kinds of infrastructure to support large-scale interventions.

Flux City | Section | Eun Kyoung Kim and John Phinney

Take the example of the Olympic Village proposal for 5,000 units of housing: you have to consider how an Olympic athlete can get within 20 minutes to any venue. So you have to think about the network when you’re working with that kind of a scale. If you’re doing 23 units on, say, Wooster and Grand it’s a different story – you may have parking issues, but you’re not going to have to deal with major infrastructural issues like water and energy.

A history of landfill in Lower Manhattan

Of the six projects that the student teams designed, the scheme entitled “The Future History of New York City” which proposed what we are calling LoLo — by Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner – was the most extreme. It was also incredibly thorough and realistic. They began by looking at environmental issues, and the topic of dredge started to direct their project: the metrics of dredge, where it goes, and how to project that into the future and assign it value.

In addition to looking deeply into dredge, they were also working with a parametric model. And, for me, the most powerful aspect of the project is the way they created a new zoning protocol that takes into account energy and rising water levels to make a responsive system. In other words, instead of just caring about the setbacks and the shadows on the streets and things like that, they were calculating energy points people would get for acknowledging solar orientation or surface area.

The Future History of New York City | Parametric models used to calculate zoning protocols for density and for projecting value | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

If you bundle all of your intentions and speculations together, it’s much more powerful, especially at this scale. The proposal explained how to get water from the city (there’s no water on Governors Island currently), how to create a wastewater treatment plan, how to capture rainwater. They thought about how to build the new land with a slope that would retain water and would also anticipate flooding in the future. They thought about how to create conveyance and transport systems. They also staged it in a very smart way: it’s much cheaper to build a subway system by dropping a concrete tube into the water and then building landfill around it rather than burrowing through hundreds of years of Manhattan. Again, the real estate students helped us think through these issues.

The really brilliant part is that way the landfill connects existing Lower Manhattan to Governors Island. The real estate angle is the strong feeling that the proximity to – the extension of — Lower Manhattan is what will maximize value. And they did this without compromising the landmarked park space on the Northern end of Governors Island. So it makes for a kind of Central Park green space.

The Future History of New York City | The phases of creating LoLo | Muchan Park, Luc Wilson, Leigh D’ambra and Scott Hayner

“Capacity creation  – adding landfill, decking over railyards, upzoning around transit corridors – is fundamental to our future.” -Vishaan Chakrabarti

So what happens next with this project? It has gotten a lot of attention. Vishaan presented it at the “Zoning the City” conference and then there was an article about in The New York Times.
The students that worked on it have now graduated, but have continued to work on it as alumni. Vishaan has taken the project to the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) for additional study and we are organizing a roundtable discussion about the proposal this month. Vishaan and I are dead serious about it. We have invited some expert guests to whom we will present of the project and then discuss how to think about it more seriously.

Given the amount of work done on zoning protocols alongside an actual scheme for the infill and design and development of that infill, it seems there are a lot of things that can be learned from the project – whether or not it goes anywhere.
It’s kind of funny when you propose extreme or seemingly impossible conditions, and then you realize that there are other people who are thinking along similar lines. And then there is a plan from the turn of the 20th century, a proposal similar to this one. It turns out that it’s not so unreasonable of an idea and we’d like to engage the City in discussion about it.

How rare is it for a project that emerges in the context of a graduate architecture studio to get put out there to generate discussion?
It’s pretty unusual, I would say. There are certainly exemplary student projects, and sometimes they might submit to a competition and receive some notoriety. And I think more and more students are becoming more entrepreneurial about their work at school. But it is rare for a project to have an afterlife such as this. And perhaps the collaboration with students of real estate enabled this project to live on beyond the studio. But there are other ways that the public might engage with a proposal such as this beyond the real estate implications.

What architects do is make ideas visual. The real estate component on its own wouldn’t necessarily produce imagery that makes viewers say “Wow!” Architects think about how people read and understand information and therefore are able to encourage people to imagine something as outrageous as a land-bridge to Governors Island, and see that maybe it’s not so outrageous after all.

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Laurie Hawkinson is principal of Smith Miller + Hawkinson Architecture. She received her Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California at Berkeley, attended the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York and received her Professional Degree in Architecture from the Cooper Union. Professor of Architecture with tenure at Columbia University, she is currently the Director of the Advanced Studios at the GSAPP; and has served as visiting professor at SCI-Arc, Harvard University, Yale University, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Miami. Significant completed projects include the Corning Museum of Glass, the Wall Street Ferry Terminal and “Strategic Open Space” Public Realm Improvement Strategy for Lower Manhattan. Projects currently under construction include the new Land Ports of Entry at Champlain and Massena, New York and a new Emergency Medical Services building for the City of New York. Collaborative projects include the North Carolina Museum of Art Amphitheater and Site Master Plan, the Museum of Women’s History and the NYC2012 Olympic Village. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Wooster Group and serves on the Contemporary Arts Council of the Museum of Modern Art.

Screengrab of the Just City video via Ford Foundation

On July 14th, a conference on the “Just City” was held in honor of the Ford Foundation’s 75th year, bringing together national and global experts in urban development. Set to “discover a new geography of possibility,” the day included a diverse range of panels to discuss challenges and solutions for urban regions. Some of the most influential panelists included Alejandro Echeverri, Former Director of Urban Project Medellín, Colombia; Kasim Reed, Honorable Mayor of Atlanta; Bruce Katz, VP of the Brookings Institution; John Hickenlooper, Governor of Colorado; Shaun Donovan, US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary; Van Jones, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts; and Jean Quan, Honorable Mayor of Oakland. With a mixed crowd of policy analysts, elected officials and technologists, the room was filled with a sense of dynamic energy about what cities and systems can do for the future, what problems the future will hold, and how we can all get involved.

“We’ve got to connect the Macro to the Metro. We have to commit to making things again. We can’t rely on ideas industries to save cities.”
—Bruce KatzA NEW VISION OF METROPOLITAN OPPORTUNITY
equity, race, inclusion, economics, technology and participation

The first panel kicked off with an uptempo conversation on how cities have long been engines of opportunity, creativity and vitality. As global economies rapidly shift towards cities, how will metropolitan regions continue to connect all citizens to opportunity and ensure economic growth? What is the new urban vision — and how can we break through old assumptions to make it a reality? Panelists Robin Willner of IBM’s Global Community Initiatives, Bruce Katz (@bruce_katz), Mayor Kasim Reed (@KasimReed) and Alejandro Echeverri responded. Angela Glover (@policylink), Founder and CEO of PolicyLink, moderated the panel. Delving deep into the challenges today’s cities face and what their futures hold, the discussion was optimistic. The panelists moved beyond the frequently cited statistic that 75% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, taking care to describe real world scenarios, share best practices and bring global lessons to the stage.

“We’ve got to connect the Macro to the Metro,” Katz said. “We have to commit to making things again. We can’t rely on ideas industries to save cities.” Meanwhile, Echeverri’s vision for an urban future would require solving inequality first. Mayor Reed of Atlanta drove this point home, drawing on the disconnect between policy and language: “We have to get comfortable talking about poor people and working people! We have to re-frame the way we address economic opportunity so that the dialogue includes working people, not just middle class and up.” Robin Willner chimed in with IBM’s perspective on opportunities for future cities. Calling cities “a system of systems,” Willner described the complexity of urban centers and the need for the use of technology not just in developed cities, but in the large, developing cities across the world.

Katz then emphasized the untenable state of the American economy: “This country needs 20 million jobs right now. Last month only 17,000 were created.” Tying the conversation back to equity, he stressed the need to consider who will be employed, and how new jobs can be used to lend help to our already disadvantaged communities. Mayor Quan of Oakland California (a later panelist) raised a point about the need for regionally-based manufacturing — what is made in Silicon Valley doesn’t necessarily make sense in Atlanta — and how that could be encouraged through national policy. As the leaders in the room closed a conversation on challenges and needs, the stage was set to discuss solutions.

Panorama of San Diego / Tijuana, Mexico Border | Image via Political Equator 3

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS
successful cities, scarcity, collaboration and local movements

Discussion moved toward opportunities and innovations in cities today. Teddy Cruz, architect and founder of UCSD’s Center for Urban Ecologies, presented a video showcasing his research on the San-Diego/Tijuana border to spark debate on how solutions are met. The US/Mexican border lies between a manicured San Diego suburb and, just meters away, Tijuana’s 80,000 person shantytown. Cruz and his team designed affordable housing for Tijuana using a broad, citizen-based design process that successfully linked urban design and public participation to provide livable and affordable housing for residents.

“We have to get comfortable talking about poor people and working people.”
—Mayor Reed The next panel connected economic vitality and equity to the equation for a successful city. Moderator Andrea Bernstein, Director of Transportation National, appropriately requested that panelists limit their use of development jargon to reach a broader audience than the present room. UCSC Professor Manuel Pastor Jr. unveiled findings that support a connection between equity and economics: “When you have less racial segregation, you have more economic growth.” Other panelists offered specific examples of cities that have achieved local success. John Hickenlopper, Governor of Colorado, called “collaboration the new competition” when describing how Denver successfully raised taxes (by vote) to develop better transportation infrastructure. MarySue Barrett, President of the Metropolitan Planning Council, explained the economic profitability of improving workers’ quality of life and their working environment.

Bernstein then asked the panel: what is the “special sauce” necessary for successful, sustainable and locally-motivated cities? Ben Hecht, President and CEO of Living Cities called for good and responsible leadership, strategic philanthropy and community-based collaboration, specifically pointing to the need for greater government accountability: “Too many cities say we’ll non-profit or private-sector our way out of it.” Pastor’s “special sauce” lies within social movements organizing around working families. Governor Hickenlooper felt that municipalities need to run more like high-yield businesses. If and when governments meet frequently and get things done, bureaucracy can function more like a business and less like a dysfunctional system.

Ken Snyder (@kennysnyder), President and CEO of PlaceMatters, closed with a film on an interactive mapping project in Nairobi’s formerly unmapped slum Kibera. Home to thousands, this informal settlement was a blank spot on official maps. PlaceMatters used local residents and the OpenStreetMap platform to hold government accountable to a community and space invisible on paper. (See the fascinating project here.) Ending on a note that called for accountable governance combined with hope for smarter, publicly sourced solutions, discussion moved to a global scale over lunch.

URBAN LEADERSHIP ON THE GLOBAL STAGE
regionalism, social capital and targeted resources

Lunch was spent with HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan (@HUDNews) and UNHABITAT’s Joan Clos i Matheu. Donovan, like many panelists of the day, advocated for the need to rebuild social capital in cities. Matheu identified significant problems with developing governments’ failure to take advantage of potential economic agglomeration by not building densely. Secretary Donovan emphasized the need for regional planning and regional urban policy, and asserted that resources in blighted cities must be applied strategically — that the “spreading the peanut butter” approach, loosely applying resources over an entire city, doesn’t work. Instead, we should look at cities like Detroit that are focusing on small, targeted areas (areas with the most promise) to revitalize economic and urban growth. Both Donovan and Matheu advocated for strategies of strategic investment, densification and regionalism, applied at the global and national scale.

GETTING CONCRETE: URBAN INNOVATIONS THAT WORK:
economic justice and citizen government

Solutions exist — so how do you find them? How can we create prosperous, equitable and sustainable metropolitan regions? The third session on urban innovations answered this question, featuring discussion with Professor john a. powell, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; Ellen Dunham-Jones, architect and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Van Jones (@VanJones68), senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; Madeline Janis, co-founder and executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy; and Daniel T. Kildee, co-founder and president of the Center for Community Progress; moderated by Carol Coletta, director of ArtPlace.

“It’s about conceptualizing the government as ‘us’ and then advocating for change.”
—Madeline Janis Van Jones spoke on the need for making an economic case for justice — at one point it cost the same to send a child to Yale as it did to send him to jail. Ellen Dunham-Jones urged a re-framing of the American Dream, from suburbs and single-family homes to denser, smarter living. Dunham-Jones pointed out that, despite the fact that living in cities costs less, when you consider transportation and living costs, people still choose to live in the suburbs (a subject she touches on in her latest book Retrofitting Suburbia, which explores how community-based retrofits are reclaiming lost suburban spaces). Lastly, Madeline Janis spoke up on the need for citizen government: “In order to collaborate to solve problems on the local level, there must be a combination of ideas and government — looking at it as ‘our’ government. It’s about conceptualizing the government as ‘us’ and then advocating for change.”

Just City Upon A Hill panelists | Photo by Martin Dixon, courtesy of Ford Foundation

A JUST CITY UPON A HILL
future, investment and reclamation

The final panel of the day touched on governance and policy with Isabel Wilkerson, journalist and author (@IsabelWilkerson); Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland, California (@JeanQuan); Christine Todd Whitman, president of The Whitman Strategy Group; and Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick (@DevalPatrick); moderated by E.J. Dionne Jr., columnist for The Washington Post. Asked to discuss what cities will look like 25 years from now, Governor Patrick drew on the need for investment in social capital: today there is a great sense of longing for community. Mayor Quan felt that tomorrow’s adults need help today: “Children who have adequate resources do amazing things. Children who don’t have resources struggle to succeed.”

The discussion moved from goals for the future to how cities can balance social justice and economic opportunity. The panel reached somewhat of a consensus around the need for quality of life in cities — that a great concern for the future success of cities falls on a disinvested public. Touching on gentrification, Wilkerson suggested it was a force neither good nor bad, and Governor Patrick felt that city renewal relies on a multi-pronged effort that includes education, transportation and housing, not just small business investment. Regional planning and connecting transportation to healthy neighborhoods are key: “Every place a train has ever stopped has been economically viable.”

Metropolitan regions are the centers of today’s global economies and governments. The Ford Foundation’s Just City conference provided a forum for reflection on what that means for their futures. A room full of decision-makers and advocates is valuable in itself. Sharing best-practices between global movers and shakers shifts leadership out from behind closed doors and towards transparency and accountability. Calling for conversation and rumination on equity, the day encouraged us to find solutions for our cities and economies in regionalism, transparency, strategic investment, local movements and public participation.

For more on the event, see in-depth coverage from the Ford Foundation’s official live-blogging here; on Twitter, check out the hashtag #JustCity and tweets from @johncary and @buttermilk1; for another recap of the event, see Sarah Goodyear’s piece at Grist.org.

Ford Foundation Atrium | Photo by Alicia Rouault

Alicia Rouault is an assistant editor at Urban Omnibus. When away from her UO 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.

Image by Ryan Heshka | via wsj.com

GETTING TRANSPORTATION POLICY RIGHT
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes calls for an overhaul to the way our country spends its transportation dollars. Moving away from the transportation infrastructure improvements that have built enough new highway lane miles since 2000 to circle the world four times, Puentes instead advocates for a necessary alignment between transportation and the new economy with private and public sectors joining forces to cut carbon emissions and increase connectivity. Puentes spells out a series of national goals, concerning export corridors, commuter connectivity, greener infrastructure and better technology, ”and how transportation policy can — no, must — be rethought to achieve them.” Read the full article here.
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PLANYC’S MISSING PIECE
Last month, the City unveiled its latest update of PlaNYC, addressing what various City agencies, community groups, businesses and others can do to further the administration’s sustainability goals, calling for a multi-stakeholder approach to implementation. In an article for Gotham Gazette, Pratt Center fellows Eve Baron and Alyssa Katz see things differently. For them, participatory planning is “The Sustainability Plan’s Missing Piece.” Calling the plan “top-down” and pointing to the remarkable fact that New York is the only major metropolis without a comprehensive plan, Baron and Katz also outline some mechanisms to improve the administration’s track record. Many of the city’s progressive planning voices (Hunter’s Tom Agnotti, the Pratt Center/NYIRN’s Adam Friedman, NYU’s Furman Center, et. al.) have published complimentary pieces raising flags over PlaNYC’s process, in a series of working papers and articles called Sustainability Watch.
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MAKING NYC ACTIVE
Last month, ASLA’s blog The Dirt interviewed Joyce Lee, Director of the Active Design Program at the NYC Department of Design and Construction, about the City’s Active Design Guidelines. The guidelines explore ways to take on the obesity and fitness crisis through interdisciplinary design of both indoor and outdoor environments. Lee goes into the framework behind the plan and points to ways that New Yorkers, despite their use of public transit, suffer from the car-related physical fitness problems that the rest of the country is dealing with. Lee describes the guidelines’ multifaceted approach, from covering sustainable construction and design to changing walking and movement habits. By connecting the design guidelines to the LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) rating system, the guidelines offer credit to developers for including things like bike storage areas and tree-lined streets. The design guidelines are being applied now to cities across the country and, although voluntary, are part of public discourse which will trickle its way into legislation. For more information about the Active Design Guidelines, look back at Samir Shah’s recap of the program’s launch last year or dive into the full Active Design Guidelines Plan at nyc.gov.
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EVENTS AND TO-DOs:

VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY | If Nina Rappaport’s recent Omnibus feature Vertical Urban Factory caught your eye, check out two related upcoming events. On Wednesday, June 1st, the New York Design Center is hosting a panel discussion on the future of manufacturing at Trespa, 62 Greene Street. Then, on June 2nd, a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an American model for sustainable urban manufacturing will meet at the York Street F subway stop at 5:15pm to board a shuttle bus. Suggested contribution is $35, to be paid online at verticalurbanfactory.org (under the “contribute” tab), or bring a check made to New York Foundation for the Arts to the event. The tour will end at Re-Bar in Dumbo for a drink. Rain or shine. RSVP by May 31 to: jamie.chan@gmail.com

Rainbow City at Art Basel Miami Beach | via friendswithyou.com

POP UP PLAZA PARKING LOT: FOOD AND INFLATABLES | The New York Times announced the latest development planned near the High Line’s 30th Street and 10th Avenue entrance. Currently a parking lot, the “Lot at 30th Street” will soon to be transformed into a multi-dimensional art and food mecca planned by Friends of the High Line. The space will feature public art installations, a 350-seat bar called Lot on Tap, managed by chef Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Colicchio & Sons. Collichio will also curate a rotating roster of five high-quality, lower-cost food trucks to compliment the bar. In its 20,000-square-foot eastern section, the Lot will also house a public art exhibition, “Rainbow City,” a collection of huge, brightly colored inflatables from Miami-based artists Friends With You.

BOB the Pavilion | via bobthepavilion.com

BOB the PAVILION | In line with the recent trend in inflatable art, Columbia is unveiling a “floating pavilion” named BOB. This “cloud” will float above a public pavilion and bathroom site, conceived by Columbia’s GSAPP and SoA students. Open June 1 – 25, the pavilion includes composting public restrooms, a projection screen, 12 student-designed seats and a bar. The pneumatic roof is re-pressurized by the toilets’ exhaust. Derived from the idea that “a society that does not provide public restrooms, does not deserve public art,” BOB pushes the link between the necessity for public space and provision of basic amenities. To learn more about BOB, click here.

Stillspotting NYC | via guggenheim.org

STILLSPOTTING NYC: SANITORIUM | The Guggenheim has launched its latest series of off-site, public installations called stillspotting nyc, in response to the idea that “ever-present cacophony of traffic, construction, and commerce; the struggle for mental and physical space; and the anxious need for constant communication in person or via technology are relentless assaults on the senses.” This two-year project will identify “stillspots” across the five boroughs and, every three to five months, will transform these areas with public tours, events or installations by artists, designers, composers and philosophers. The first installation of the series debuts in Brooklyn, from Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Sanatorium, a temporary therapeutic clinic offering visitors 16 distinct “urban therapies,” will be located at the storefront level of 1 Metrotech Center (entrance at 345 Jay Street) in Downtown Brooklyn. Thursdays, June 2 and 9, 2–10pm; Fridays, June 3 and 10, 2–10pm; Saturdays, June 4 and 11, 10am–10pm; and Sundays, June 5 and 12, 10am–10pm; advance tickets only.

ARCHITECTING THE FUTURE CONFERENCE | The Buckminster Fuller Institute is hosting a three-day series of events and lectures around the announcement of the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge finalists. The annual competition asks participants to design workable solutions to significant world challenges. Architecting the Future kicks off with a lecture from John Thackara on June 8th at 6pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; followed by “Urban Solution Sets —Visionary Strategies for the Future of Cities” at the Center for Architecture on Thursday, June 9th, from 2-4pm; and the announcement of winners and presentation of the selected solution at the CUNY Graduate Center on June 10th, from 6-8pm. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to bfi.org.

CALLS FOR ENTRIES | Now through July 4th, BOFFO is inviting architects to submit design proposals for the second annual Building Fashion, which pairs fashion designers with architects for a series of temporary installations in Tribeca that explore the interesection of architecture and fashion. See more details at Architizer. Meanwhile, at the intersection of architecture and urban agriculture, suckerPUNCH is hosting an international ideas competition for a Center for Urban Farming, to be imagined for a site adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Registration deadline is August 15.

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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.

Tokyo, 2010 | Photos by Vishaan Chakrabarti

This, my tenth and final entry for a Country of Cities on Urban Omnibus, is in essence a highly personal love letter to Japan. For over a year, the wonderful readers of the Omnibus have cheered and jeered as I have relentlessly argued that the United States faces a series of deeply connected challenges: economic decline, energy dependence, oil wars, terrorism, xenophobia, protectionism, mounting debt, and spiraling health care costs. These challenges, while vexing when taken together, are surmountable with the silver bullet of the city. The combined growth of the skyscraper and the subway, I continue to posit, is the best path to keep our nation and our developing planet economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. The recent catastrophe in Japan has shaken me into remembering, however, that the real trailblazers in truly dense urban living have been the Japanese, for which they have largely prospered, and because of which they will overcome the unthinkable triple tragedy they now face.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 2010, during the annual ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing | AFP/ Getty Images / Kazuhiro Nogi

Twenty years ago this August, a group of us went to Japan as graduate students fresh from two months of study in China (where skyscrapers were under construction on the then dirt roads of Shenzen, next to its new train station). I was enthralled by and enamored of a Japan whose towers and trains redefined the West as the underdeveloped world. We rode Tokyo’s surface rail for two days before realizing we hadn’t even been on the subway system yet. Knowing my time in Japan was limited, my father gave me the lifelong gift of a two-week rail pass on the Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, which unbelievably had opened in 1964. August 6th would be the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and we were inspired to see a memorial service that included the coming together of school children from all over the country. Every hotel in Hiroshima was booked, but we discovered that the bullet train made the journey from a distant farming village with an inexpensive, immaculate ryokan in mere minutes. To witness the service was a privilege, as we three were the only gaijin in sight in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park that morning. At 8:16am, the time of the bombing, thousands around us young and old dropped to the ground, essentially playing dead. The city went silent. An ambulance wailed in the distance. Minutes passed like hours, drums started to beat, the people rose from the sidewalks and went about their day, as we, dazed, found ourselves wandering shopping streets replete with American flags and statuettes of Liberty. We would go on to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, and ultimately, with a larger group from MIT, to Tokyo to study the densification of Marunouchi.

The lessons from that trip — the lessons of atrocity morphed into forgiveness, of farm juxtaposed with city, of park transformed to memorial, of verticality imbued with life, of hyper-density enabled by hyper-infrastructure, and ultimately of adversity repurposed for prosperity — would go on to color all that I know and feel about cities, all that I have advocated on these pages, and all that would form my own approach to the memorial at the World Trade Center, to the High Line, to the Hudson Yards and #7 line, and now to both of my ongoing professional passions, urban development pedagogy and the rebuilding of Pennsylvania Station.

Recently and on short notice, I was asked to be the host for a Columbia conference on building technology in Tokyo. Remarkably, because of the tightness of the schedule, I was afforded a helicopter ride from distant Narita Airport to the top of a skyscraper near the conference. During that heavenly twenty-minute joyride I sat gobsmacked by a Tokyo transformed. Twenty years earlier, while smaller towers abounded, skyscrapers were still a controversy, but today they define the morphology of the city. As so exquisitely described in Ian Buruma’s recent article for the Wall Street Journal, the permanence of skyscrapers is a relatively new development in a country so susceptible to natural disaster. Buruma points to traditional construction of wood and paper, and of course to the periodic twenty-year reconstruction of the Ise shrine, as embodying the premise that for Japanese architecture, “the only permanence is its impermanence.”

Farmland, Japan, 2010 | Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

Yet, in a mountainous country the approximate size of California but with the arable land area only twice the size of Massachusetts, Japan houses some 127 million people in a condition that is roughly ten times denser than the United States. In this situation, skyscrapers became inevitable given Japan’s prowess in manufacturing, shipping, information technology, financial services and the arts. Beyond economic rationale, however, density is a way of life in Japan. It is commonplace to find a bar on the eighth floor of a sliver building. In farming communities, freed from the moralizing madness of the Jeffersonian grid, housing is clustered together into tight communities with crop fields dispersed on the perimeter. Urbane society is the glue that holds the entire nation together.

And today, it is that glue that we are witnessing. In their fine nightly reporting, Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta and Soledad O’Brien continually comment on the civility with which the populace responds to water running out at shelters, or long waits for transport, or caring for the elderly. To be sure, this civility can also be linked to an unwillingness to confront bad news at the institutional level, as witnessed by baffling statements from the government, by obfuscation from Tokyo Electric Power, and by the general bureaucratic malaise that has stagnated Japan’s economy for well over a decade.

But it is at the individual level that we will witness the rebirth of a nation. It is individual workers who hopefully will return power to the cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi. It is individuals who will rebuild the coastline, the retirement communities, and the country’s sense of self-confidence and pride.

To be sure, we should pause to give the Japanese, particularly their architects and engineers, some praise in this calamity. For all the failures of seawalls and power plants, little is said about the fact that most engineered buildings seem to have withstood the massive temblor and tsunami. With some of the strictest building codes in the world, Japanese skyscrapers were not weaponized in this disaster. Astonishing video of Tokyo skyscrapers swaying “like trees in the breeze,” as one onlooker noted, did their job by swaying as designed. In the extraordinary before-after photos of Sendai airport, amidst the flood damage, it is remarkable to see the air traffic control tower and terminal still standing. One can only hope our cities can boast the same in a similar consequence.

Sendai Airport Terminal after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami | Top: Roberto De Vido, Yokosuka, Japan. Bottom: AFP/HO/NHK

It is natural, in the face of this tragedy, to question density and infrastructure. After all, it is one thing to see the horror of earthquakes and tsunamis ravage largely rural nations, yet it is another to see them ravage a nation that in many ways is more technologically advanced than our own. But it is critical to remember that Tokyo rebuilt after both a major earthquake in 1923 and the bombings of World War II. New York is rebuilding after 9/11. Beirut has rebuilt a stunning city on the Mediterranean. Bahrain will hopefully someday rebuild Pearl Square. In their excellent book The Resilient City, Campanella and Vale reveal the capacity of dense modern cities to rebuild.

Density has served Japan well and will continue to do so. One could argue that if their population were spread out, fewer would be susceptible to disaster. Similar arguments were waged during the Cold War in the US, when the Federal government subsidized the sprawling girth of the American middle class to flee both the arms race and race riots. But, as I have attempted to illuminate in these pages, spreading out only leads to oil dependence and further environmental degradation, which in turn leads to sea level rise and fiercer storm surges.

Admittedly, the alternative of densification leaves many questions unanswered. Cities may use less petrol per person, but they require vast amounts of electricity that must be generated efficiently, and with the advent of electric buses and taxis, this demand will only grow. Many hoped that nuclear energy was a partial solution, or at least a bridge to truly renewable energy, but this is an assertion that must be fully scrutinized, with the question of how to store spent fuel again at the forefront. To read that active reactors in California like Diablo Canyon were built to withstand earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 is cold comfort. Perhaps hope can be found in burgeoning waste-to-energy technology.

This earthquake, even at magnitude 9.0, cannot shake our resolve. To the contrary, with the oil fields of the Middle East in ever deepening turmoil, we must extend our hands, heads and hearts to our dear friends across the Pacific, and learn to be more like them in their civility, to live as they do in their density, to build our world much as they have, in Japan, the ultimate Country of Cities.

"In a mountainous country the approximate size of California but with the arable land area only twice the size of Massachusetts, Japan houses some 127 million people in a condition that is roughly ten times denser than the United States." Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

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This is the tenth and final installment in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. 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.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…

The exhibition of Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway project currently on view at the Cooper Union may appear at first glance to be an academic excavation of a historical artifact, a lesser-known work by a prominent architect best remembered for individual buildings rather than for his visions of the metropolis. Although done under the auspices of a Ford Foundation grant, the Rudolph project was the last – and by then already belated – attempt to bring to life the Robert Moses plan for running a major highway across Lower Manhattan. Why revisit it now?

Must we remain forever trapped between the twin poles of Jacobs and Moses? And, what is the role of architecture in all this?Most visitors, design professionals and laymen alike, predictably — and understandably — shudder at this reminder of Robert Moses’ scorched-earth policy of city building and laud the heroic efforts of Jane Jacobs and her fellow-activists who saved the city by stopping the project – and by stopping Moses, this time for good. At the same time, for some architects and urbanists (including, one imagines, the exhibition organizers) this feeling is mixed with a great deal of envy about the possibility of “thinking big” that no longer seems to exist in this country but is still encouraged — in fact, often mandatory — in Asia and the Middle East. The real value of the exhibition, however, lies not in evoking nostalgia or relief but in prompting a reflection on two very timely questions: Must we remain forever trapped between the twin poles of Jacobs and Moses? And, what is the role of architecture in all this?

Both the excesses of Robert Moses and the achievements of Jane Jacobs have been well rehearsed by now. The particulars of their battle are specific to their time and place but its legacy remains relevant and has become even more urgent. In the intervening years, many in the architecture and planning community have reached a sensible consensus that “No city can survive without the personal engagements beloved by Jacobs, but no city can thrive without master builders such as Moses,” as Edward Glaeser put it in his article in The New Republic last year.

The argument for this balanced view has been eloquently made by a number of critics. They also take pains to remind us that the “good” Moses, who left a legacy of numerous parkland and infrastructure projects still benefiting the public, and who actually managed to get things built, should not be lost in the heat of the battle. But in the real world Jane Jacobs has carried the day. A conversation with practically anyone outside the profession, excepting those with a vested interest in large-scale development, would leave no doubt that, when it comes to urban development, the “small is beautiful, big is ugly” polarity is now accepted as an article of faith across the political and social spectrum. Among the liberal-minded, it is manifest in the non-negotiable Nimby-ism of community activists and even of their non-activist neighbors, and in the current proliferation of grass-roots adaptive reuse initiatives to reclaim small urban parcels for green or other community uses. For the conservatives, it is bound up with the fear of big government, infringement on private property rights and the anathema of  taxation. For the former, the very mention of “thinking big” raises the specter of evil Robert Moses; for the latter, of evil socialism.

To a large extent, this polarity has become so firmly embedded in the public discourse because it has often played out through a number of highly visible battles, with the news media doing its usual best to depict them as dramatic black-and-white conflicts rather than as complex and nuanced issues. But the profession (the word is used here as shorthand for all those professionally involved with the subject) bears part of the blame. Although different ways of thinking about the city have been put forth in academia and in architecture circles, at least in this country most of these ideas never made it out of the insular world of professional discourse and into the mainstream conversation or to the proverbial corridors of power. The one exception is the New Urbanists, whose ersatz nostalgia is, in the final analysis, the logical descendant of Jane Jacobs. They have succeeded in defining the public agenda on behalf of the profession, not only in the popular mind but on the legislative level as well (i.e. the Livable Communities Act currently under consideration in Congress). Even the data-driven approach of PlaNYC is essentially Jacobsean in its privileging of incremental change over massive intervention. There is also perhaps an element of resignation in the face of reality: politically and fiscally, piecemeal adjustments are much easier to implement, especially in today’s social climate.

New York City is in a unique position of being a laboratory of practically every urban condition.But the livability of the city cannot be reduced to bicycle lanes and rooftop farms, however welcome they may be. The city needs a viable and diverse – i.e. not exclusively service-oriented — economic base and a coherent macro-structure. It is as much a matter of practical functionality as of its spirit, its raison d’etre, which makes the city fundamentally distinct from a town. Small towns exist best in a stasis, having achieved a kind of perfection in the here and now. The big city thrives on being visionary, on always trying to imagine what it can and will be, on possibilities of the future. The density and the coexistence of contradictory forces is what makes the city exciting and sustainable, in every sense of the word.

The seeming inevitability of the Moses/Jacobs polarity led to the triumph of the Jacobs camp: who, after all, would vote to replace their neighborhood playground with a sewage treatment plant (never mind that we fully expect our sewage to be treated somewhere)?  But the fallacy of this polarized way of thinking is particularly apparent and relevant now — locally, nationally and globally.

The infrastructure of the larger, denser and older US cities like New York is usually thought of as being already in place; it needs upgrading, maintenance and improvements — but not major interventions. Yet many of the same problems that the Moses projects (including deservedly scrapped ones like LoMEX) attempted to tackle have simply been left to fester for decades and are not likely to go away. There is still, for example, an undeniable need for efficient transport of goods and services from the west bank of the Hudson River to the east bank of the East River – i.e., across or around Manhattan – which was first identified by the Regional Plan Association almost 90 years ago.

New York City is in a unique position of being a laboratory of practically every urban condition. Manhattan and some of the Bronx, with their density, geographic compactness, varied building stock and public transportation network, bear more resemblance to an older European city than to a typical American one. Much of Queens and some of Brooklyn are not dissimilar to a sprawling urban model like LA, with major arterial roads interspersed among disconnected neighborhoods not accessible to one another by public transportation. Some other parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx bring to mind the devastated, semi-abandoned inner cities like Detroit. And Staten Island is our own suburbia, complete with gated communities. The urban and infrastructural issues engendered by each condition run the gamut and mirror the wide range of issues confronted by other US cities which at first glance do not have much in common with New York. The need to integrate the ubiquitous automobile into the urban fabric — the real impetus behind most Moses projects — seems like an antiquated notion to us here, as we have come to a consensus favoring mass transit over the private car, but this hardly applies to most of the rest of the country or even much of the five boroughs. Because of its urban diversity, New York can still be a laboratory which yields results that could point the way for other American cities.

Left: Dubai by fatboyke | Right: nanjing by Proggie

Although the Jacobs/Moses polarity is home-grown, its lessons are just as relevant globally. For a number of historical reasons, European cities were largely spared a Moses and thus had no need for a Jacobs. This, combined with a different political culture, has put many of them in the position of  being able to contemplate and carry out large-scale urban interventions on a scale unthinkable here, without the destruction of historic city fabric.

The urgency of finding a “third way” between the extremes of destruction and fossilization, of megalomania and retrenchment, is nowhere more obvious than in the uninhibited urban development taking place in Asia and the Middle East. Impressive as this building boom may be, it is a top-down process promoted by governments and powerful private interests with close government ties and no public accountability; it leaves destruction in its wake, disregards human and ecological consequences, and mostly produces instant “just add water” cities filled with cartoon architecture. The Moses problem is playing out all over again, except this time on an extreme scale and within systems that do not have the constraints that he had to contend with. The local Jane Jacobs stands no chance of being heard, should she even dare speak up.

As we have learned to value the intricate urban fabric that Jacobs so astutely identified and championed, and are becoming increasingly conscious of the need to adapt and reuse, we also need to recognize that large-scale infrastructure intervention is not only still necessary but will become even more so in the future, as the cities continue to grow. The physical difficulties — and consequent great costs — of these endeavors (e.g. submerging major arteries below grade) will diminish as technologies improve and new ones emerge. But none of this will be possible without those quintessential Moses attributes that are not much in evidence in this country today: political will at the legislative level, political skill at the managerial level, and long-term financial commitment on both.

Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal

Which leaves us with the other question that the Rudolph exhibition puts front and center: the role of architecture. While architecture of most Moses projects can best be described as an afterthought, this incarnation of LoMEX, in the hands of a talented architect at the height of his career, appears to be driven by professional hubris. His relentless and monotonous language goes viral, infesting Lower Manhattan, overwhelming the little that it does not obliterate, and ultimately undermining its own raison d’etre. The experience of gradually absorbing what is on display in the spectacular model of the project is much like the slow dawning of terror one feels in a horror film.

Yet, at the same time, the Rudolph project also attempts to propose something much more interesting: a new form that would integrate architecture, infrastructure and urban space (unlike, say, Park Avenue which simply set up real estate parcels for development). He recognized that, in a dense city, only architecture could transform civil engineering into urban design. Unfortunately, the failure of projects such as his gave modern architecture – particularly that of the large-scale urban variety — a bad name with the general public and drove it to cling to the old brownstone as the sane alternative. As planning has become more of a social science, architectural design has become less of a participant in the conversation about urbanism. Even among architects, Koolhaas and other proponents of “formlessness” — although coming from a different set of ideas, such as the Situationist critique — have, ironically, ended up embracing a view not all that different from Jacobs: that fostering small-scale, unscripted and unpredictable human interaction will, by itself, produce a rich urban social environment.

But the embrace of non-form and the data-driven approach to city-making creates its own set of problems. Architecture, after all, is what renders the city recognizable and comprehensible. We may navigate the city through infrastructure — but we read the city through architecture. Architecture can create a place — infrastructure cannot. The misery of Penn Station and the glory of Grand Central are both shaped by architecture, not by infrastructure, regardless of whether the trains run on time. For this reason alone, architects – and not just planners and policy makers – have a crucial role in framing the discussion about urban design in this century.

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Paul Gates and Zhenya Merkulova are founding partners of Gates Merkulova Architects LLP. Merkulova was a founding member of The Society of Young Architects, a group formed for the discussion of current ideas in architecture at The National Arts Club. She has written for and has been interviewed by a number of prestigious domestic and international publications, including Liberation and Newsweek. Gates has taught at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York and has served as a critic on architectural juries at Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, and the Rhode Island School of Design. His writings and lectures include “Deus Ex Machina: Architecture and the Electronic Media” (A+U) and “Skyscraper Design and Urban Growth.”

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.

Access to the Region's Core Project Map, via www.arctunnel.com

We all of course know the story of Noah’s Ark — of massive floods sent by a disgusted God to wipe out our corrupted civilization except for Noah, who, with his family, builds an Ark to save pairs of animals to eventually repopulate the planet.

The contemporary take on the story has some new twists.

The rains, to be sure, are coming. Last week I took my eight-year-old to see Rising Currents before it closes at MoMA. As he stood below the measuring bar, which showed that in his lifetime the water level on our Tribeca sidewalk may be above his head, he stated the truth in the way that only a child can: “That seems bad.”

But before we even conjure the apocalyptic visions of Greenland ice sheets falling into the Atlantic, we need only look at the crippling effect of the last couple of rainstorms in New York — the flooded subways, the combined sewer overflow, the streets near my office at Columbia awash.

Yet in this version of the story, despite the coming floods, there is no Noah, we don’t build the Ark, and the animals just have fun while they can. In this version, we sink the Ark before it gets built.

Yesterday Governor Chris Christie killed the largest mass transit project in the nation, ARC or Access to the Region’s Core. Planned for two decades and considered vital to the lifeline of the northeast corridor as a new tunnel under the Hudson, ARC clearly answered the question of whether we would simply continue to live off of our predecessor’s infrastructure. Or so we foolishly thought.

Citing costs, the rebellious Republican ruled out increasing gas taxes or surcharges in order to plug the budget gap, instead rejecting billions in Federal and Port Authority funds. Unlike the manner in which we funded the extension of the #7 subway, which is now under construction through debt that will be paid off by the future assessed values on the West Side of Manhattan, no such innovation was sought in New Jersey despite reports that clearly showed increased property values in the towns that would be connected to ARC.

Paul Krugman, in today’s New York Times, put it plainly: “We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.”

Penn Station’s New Jersey Transit Terminal, Thanksgiving Eve. Photo by Flickr user helloturkeytoe.

And when it comes to infrastructure, that pandering is all about roads versus rail. With New Jersey’s state budget under water, downstate politicians in the legislature — many of them Democrats — saw an opportunity to re-route the ARC monies for highway funding. New Jersey’s commuters live largely in the north, of course, but despite their vital economic role in our tri-state region, they have no regional representation to fight for their interests. This is true nationwide. In the development and planning process for the new Moynihan Station often it became apparent that for every dollar spent in the City, an equal dollar had to be spent on a roadway project in upstate New York. This is part of why Hong Kong and Singapore are surging — they are city-states without an urban rural divide. Such is the price of a country of suburbs.

To be fair to a Governor who appears to be attempting fiscal restraint, however, one must also ask why ARC costs so damn much. A friend recently pointed out that not only does China spend approximately fourteen times more annually on rail infrastructure than we do, but that factor probably triples when one accounts for construction cost differentials. Anyone who works in infrastructure in America today knows the ugly realities of this — the construction industry continually prices its way into joblessness, as the thousands of workers who were about to be employed by ARC will soon discover.

No one is advocating for the unprotected labor conditions of China, but we must ask how far the pendulum has swung the other way. Imagine if Noah, in enlisting the help of his children to build the Ark, was confronted with protests for higher allowance and more days off, all while thunderclouds formed and the rest of non-unionized humanity scuttled for cover while living on less. Joint sacrifice led this country to its greatest heights, just as joint selfishness could bring it to its knees.

Indeed, the fate of ARC, which one can only hope is reversible, may signal the fate of us all. With the densest state in America opting for roads over rails, for emissions over ozone, for a country of suburbs over a Country of Cities, all I can do in response is throw up my hands and find disturbing amusement in a quote from Jaws:

“We’re going to need a bigger boat.”

New Jersey Transit, Metropark, New Jersey, 18 Nov. 2008. Photo by Flickr user PhilipC.

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This is the eighth in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…

“Towers in the Park” sounds like what they are: high-rise residential buildings sited on large lots of open space. This particular type of building configuration — popular in postwar American urban renewal schemes, often used in public housing as well as in limited equity cooperative housing societies — is visible all over New York City. In urban design and architecture circles these days, this building typology is more often maligned that celebrated. Here on Urban Omnibus, we’ve presented some alternative views: we’ve walked among the housing projects of Avenue D with a sociologist who grew up there and we’ve looked at how some of the elements that urbanists tend to criticize about these towers actually make them uniquely suited to serve the interests of some of the city’s senior citizens. Both of these perspectives dealt more directly with the tower than with the park. Today, in the second of our series of reports on student projects in architecture and design schools, we hear from a designer and educator about an urban design studio project at the University of Michigan that sought to reimagine towers in the park, and their potential for reintegration with the rest of the city, by keeping the tower and reworking the park.

The Michigan students’ ambitious scheme reflects the growing support among New York City officials to reconsider the development potential of underutilized open space on city-owned land. In December 2006, the city put out bids for 600 new housing units on the sites of public housing projects. Speaking to the New York Sun in April of 2007, Department of Housing Preservation and Development spokesperson Neill Coleman said that the inventory of vacant land for affordable housing “is pretty much exhausted, so we’re looking for new sources of land.” Since then, the Department of City Planning has been working with the New York City Housing Authority to do just that: to modify height and setback requirements and to reduce the amount of required parking in order to facilitate new construction. The new construction envisioned in the studio project described below is not exclusively concerned with making more housing units, it also imagines a new way of weaving towers-in-the-park into their surrounding, and rapidly changing, neighborhoods. Read more below. -C.S.

Photo by Flickr user ShiftOperations.

Michigan in New York
As part of its sequence of studio courses with sites across the United States and the world, the Master of Urban Design Program at the University of Michigan recently re-envisioned Manhattan’s Lower East Side housing projects. The housing projects, located between the Brooklyn Bridge and 14th Street, comprise one of the country’s largest concentrations of towers-in-the-park, the high-rise buildings set on superblocks that New York and other American cities erected as part of urban renewal schemes in the aftermath of World War II.

Borders of the Lower East Side's towers-in-the-park. (Includes Stuyvesant Town above 14th Street that was not part of studio project described in this text.) Source: Sanborn/Digital Globe.

The Manhattan housing projects were selected for study for three reasons: 1) After a studio that designed a new city in Turkey outside of Istanbul, we wanted MUD students to shift their attention from the tabula rasa to an existing urban context; 2) For an international student cohort consisting of people from the United States, China, Egypt, India, Korea and Nigeria, the towers-in-the-park typology is universally familiar and the lessons learned from designing for it are applicable to cities worldwide; 3) The Lower East Side housing projects’ particular conditions – abutting rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods and owned by a cash-strapped New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) that is looking for opportunities to increase its revenue stream – made the topic timely.

The outcomes of the studio benefited from the students’ range of professional and academic backgrounds in architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. Over the course of a single semester, the 12 students in the studio visited New York twice, documenting and analyzing the site. Thereafter, three teams of four students each developed three detailed concepts, complete with comprehensive programs of use, design guidelines and implementation strategies.

A figure-ground diagram illustrates the amount of open space available for development among the towers-in-the-park of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Towers-in-the-Park: Open Space as Opportunity
The studio combined urban development with urban preservation: all project dwelling units were to be conserved in the interest of maintaining one of Manhattan’s important supplies of low-income housing. It proposed capitalizing on the projects’ extensive open grounds – approximately 84% of the site area – for new housing, work spaces, institutions and community facilities that would help generate new revenue streams for NYCHA while integrating the projects with adjacent neighborhoods, improving their connection with East River Park, and enhancing the quality of life for existing residents and newcomers.

By looking at the housing projects’ open spaces as a development opportunity, the studio questioned one of the major principles in post-World War II American urban renewal, which was to reduce the amount of ground each housing project covers. Based on nearly a century of housing reform attempts to open low-income neighborhoods to light and air and reduce their population densities, the need for open space was often cited by architects and public housing authorities as justification for building ever-taller housing projects. From the 50% ground coverage of mid-19th-century “model” tenements to the 16% ground coverage of mid-20th-century Lower East Side public housing, the provision of open space helped drive the design of urban housing for low-income people.

But open space did little to integrate these towers with their surrounding neighborhoods, and many post-World War II public-housing residents — whose high-rise homes were built in undesirable or outlying parts of the city where land was cheap enough for city, state and federal agencies to buy — felt isolated from the rest of the city. The land use planning practices prevalent at the time segregated residential from commercial uses. Almost from the start, post-war towers-in-the-park were criticized by social observers and project residents. The decision to demolish the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and, more recently, Cabrini-Green in Chicago, serve as reminders of the perceived inflexibility of the towers-in-the-park housing typology. Part of the premise of this studio was to find a way to intervene in this typology without destroying the existing housing units.

Today, the revitalization of neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens adjacent to housing projects has added pressure to reconsider superblock open space, where community renewal stops at the housing projects’ edges. For the Michigan studio, the questions became: Can the under-utilized open space within tower-in-the-park superblocks be repurposed to accommodate neighborhood redevelopment trends, to serve housing project residents better and to help preserve public housing by leveraging NYCHA’s existing assets?

Analysis reveals the Lower East Side’s potential connections to rest of Manhattan.

Studio Outcomes
For the Lower East Side’s towers-in-the-park — including the cooperatives built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union and other subsidized housing projects clustered around the Williamsburg Bridge — the Michigan design teams identified space for between 4,400 and 8,000 new apartments (both market-rate and “affordable”); a range of 1.6 million to 5 million square feet of commercial development; and from 600,000 to 3 million square feet of institutional spaces (for libraries, community centers, schools and colleges). The potential exists for between 13.7 million and 22 million square feet of new buildings in and around the towers. And because Michigan students arranged these additions between existing buildings along new streets and pathways cut through superblocks, the scheme conserves all NYCHA apartments.

The results: a boulevard-like FDR Drive, where some of Manhattan’s most desirable apartments can be located; lively streets connecting East River Park to inland neighborhoods; mixed-uses along Avenue D and Madison Street serving residents and visitors (offering business and employment opportunities, too); and at key points, where space, views and new land and water transportation connections encourage them, residential, office and hotel towers that will embellish the lower Manhattan skyline. The studio found that all of these uses can be accommodated by new buildings that cover between 30 and 40% of the lot size. This amount of ground coverage is higher than the study area’s current average but lower than blocks in the most desirable parts of Manhattan, including the Upper East and Upper West Sides. Therefore, the proposal will not obstruct existing housing units’ light and views.

Top: View of new buildings among towers-in-the-park. Bottom: View of new library near Manhattan Bridge. Public buildings reinforce the East River as a public amenity. They are erected by developers whose projects are rewarded increased floor areas.

At ground level, the Michigan studio proposed changing the form and use of open space. The landscapes of tower-in-the-park open spaces are typically passive and homogeneous. The studio’s strategy was to integrate intimate open spaces with a variety of new buildings, including schools (from pre-schools to colleges), live/work lofts, market structures, places of business and community centers. Rejecting the reductive planning philosophies of the 1950s that segregated housing on superblocks, the design teams programmed both buildings and spaces to promote active use throughout the site and to support residents’ ability to participate in community life and a dynamic local economy.

To implement their concepts, the Michigan teams proposed the creation of a public development agency similar to the New York State Empire Development Corporation or Battery Park City Authority whose structure would support both substantial community representation and a clearly-articulated process for larger community input. Indeed, given the complexity of the project and its likely impact on tens of thousands of people, the teams advocated an additional year upfront for creating the agency and its processes of decision-making and communication.

Project funding was also considered. Design teams suggested that federal dollars be applied to East River Drive, transportation and waterfront improvements. They also proposed that the sale or lease of NYCHA-held land underwrite improvements to existing apartments while maintaining their affordability and contribute to the maintenance and construction of affordable housing at other NYCHA projects and in other sites around the city. (Sales and leases include the transfer of air rights from empty or under-developed parts of the site area to locations where high density is desirable.) Additional affordable housing was proposed through incentives such as the New York “80/20” program that permits larger buildings if 20% of their units are provided at below-market rents. And tax credits and/or building bonuses could be offered to developers erecting public amenities and services on a turnkey basis (e.g. schools, libraries and community centers). Although new to NYCHA, such programs have ample precedent in New York City.

Concept view. Buildings in light blue are inserted among towers-in-the-park. Concept includes improvements to East River Park and water and land transportation systems.

Lessons
The Michigan studio learned the following lessons:

• It is possible to redevelop tower-in-the-park public housing without demolition or displacement.
• Tower-in-the-park open spaces are readily adaptable to a variety of physical and programmatic interventions, leading to inventive urban design.
• Forms of development financing that have evolved since post-World War II urban renewal can help support tower-in-the-park redevelopment, including public/private partnerships, incentive zoning, development rights transfers, etc.
• Tower-in-the-park housing, familiar to cities around the world, can be part of urban revitalization strategies that are socially and environmentally more sustainable than demolition schemes that dislocate communities and waste their physical materials.

For New York, the Michigan studio identified the development potential of one corner of NYCHA’s 2,500 acres of property. As the city’s largest landlord, NYCHA, more than any other owner, is positioned to reshape New York’s skyline — while it improves the quality of life for its residents. At a time when financial difficulties encourage the authority to explore alternative methods of retaining and improving its housing stock, the opportunity that this studio investigated is rich with possibilities for both a large public landowner like NYCHA and for the city and citizens it serves.

Roy Strickland is Director of the Master of Urban Design Program at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and, with Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, is the designer of the new Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Manhattan. He led the MUD studio consisting of Komal Anand, Daren Crabill, Emek Erdolu, Yingying Guan, Seun-Hyun Kim, Rachan Ky, Jun-Yi Lin, Obiamaka Ofodile, Kwanseok Oh, Danna Reyes, Amal Shaaban and Xuan Zheng.

Unless otherwise noted, all images produced and provided by the University of Michigan MUD Studio.

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.

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

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Thomas Birke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

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

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

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user -marten-.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kowloon Housing. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

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

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

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

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

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

Battery Park City. Photo by Flickr user MD111.

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York City. Photo by Flickr user Christopher Isherwood.

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

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