Research as Design Tool
Research is often conceived as a luxury for designers – since it doesn’t typically pay the bills, it’s seen as a secondary aspect of practice, particularly during a recession. For established practitioners trying to maintain and strengthen a clearly defined role within the field, this model leaves larger questions of urban problem-solving and design provocation in the hands of management consultancies and developers. For younger designers like ourselves, research acts as a way in, a way to define and design our future practice, and a long-term strategy for continually questioning and challenging our role. This proactive approach offers a way to skip straight to the point, to address the issues we’re interested in rather than shaping our work around someone else’s agenda. It’s also a way to ask bigger questions, to expand the realm of possible outcomes, and to put greater agency in the hands of architects and designers.

Developing a Brief
For the past three years, we have been researching the systemic cycle of homelessness in New York City. We began the work in a housing studio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and we have continued the project through a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. The research has evolved into a project we call Private/Public: a design brief that connects the spatial issues faced by small-scale homeless service providers to questions about the overlaps and boundaries among private and public spaces in the city. As developers of the brief, we are working to collect a catalog of spatial and architectural responses. In addition to our own work, we want to field responses from other architects, planners, designers, public advocates, community members – in short, we want to hear from you.

Constituents of Homelessness
On any given day, about 36,000 people are homeless in New York City. We began our research by mapping these constituents to identify the spaces people occupy before, during and after the process of becoming homeless. Our mapping revealed a number of surprising insights:

• Less than 10 percent of this population resides in the public spaces of the city typically associated with sites of homelessness: the street, the subway, abandoned lots.

• The majority of New York’s homeless are families living in the city’s shelter system, invisible to the public.

• Sixty percent of New Yorkers who become homeless in a given year cycle in and out of homelessness, spending at least part of the year living in the homes of friends and family, or transitioning from prisons, hospitals and foster care.

These factors make it very difficult to delineate the boundaries of homelessness in the city. How can designers address such an invisible institution?

Beyond Housing: Rethinking Design for the Homeless
For decades, New York City’s plan to combat homelessness consisted of temporary solutions—funding emergency shelters and relief initiatives in the hopes of easing the discomfort of life on the street. A surge in the population seeking emergency shelter following 9/11 provoked the Bloomberg administration to reformulate the city’s homeless services system. The 2002 plan focused on permanent solutions for those currently homeless and preventative measures for those at risk of becoming homeless.

While policy responses to homelessness have shifted in the past decade, designers have continued to focus a majority of architectural action on spaces occupied by a minority of homeless constituents, designing temporary shelters for those living in the street and single room occupancy (SRO) housing for the chronically homeless. While these responses can have great power for the individuals involved, they fail to address the needs of the majority of the homeless population: the thousands of men, women and children cycling back and forth between unstable housing and homelessness or currently navigating the city’s homeless service system.

The policy changes enacted in the past decade have led to the construction of some new models of supportive housing, but designers have, for the most part, responded to competition briefs and RFPs, rather than helping to define the issues involved. We are interested in how designers can work alongside city organizations and homeless service providers to identify the kinds of issues beyond housing that design is well-equipped to address. For instance, what would happen if designers refocused attention on shelters, drop-in centers, and the multi-use spaces occupied by small-scale service providers? How could designers address the issues faced by these organizations, improving the effectiveness of service and outreach as well as the quality of the spaces themselves? How might their efforts help to end chronic homelessness?

Design Challenges
The basement of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Harlem has served as the research case study site for our project. Like most homeless service providers in New York City, the organizations at St. Mary’s are tucked away in a marginalized space, operating at odd hours, in a room used by many other groups. The space houses the Columbia-Harlem Homeless Medical Partnership (CHHMP), a non-profit provider of medical services to the homeless, and the Center for Urban Community Services (CUCS), an organization providing a range of homeless services including supportive housing placement, legal aid and psychological counseling. In addition, the space hosts a food pantry, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and various church, community, and civic events.

Densely-Programmed Space
St. Mary’s basement consists of a 2,200-square-foot room with a dense program schedule. The space accommodates a variety of groups and programming over the course of the week and even over the course of a day. In this context, flexibility is crucial to maintaining efficiency. Each group uses the space of the basement differently, rearranging the furniture to suit its needs. Furniture is shared, and must be easily movable to allow for smooth transitions between programs. Storage space is limited, and dedicated furniture and supplies must be packed away in locked cabinets for security reasons. CHHMP’s storage space consists of a 2.5’ x 4.5’ x 8’ closet that is packed so full that only a few people know how to fit everything in. These spatial constraints present a clear design problem: a need for program flexibility, ease of use and multiple functionalities, all on a tight budget.

Privacy in Public
Perhaps the most pressing issue faced by small-scale homeless service providers is the need to engage in very private interactions in very public spaces. In the case of the clinic, patient histories, physical exams and diagnoses all take place in one open room, where flimsy screens and a noisy environment serve as the only buffers offering any sense of privacy. On the other hand, the clinic’s open model maintains visual connections among staff, doctors and patients at all times, creating a less intimidating environment for patients. Building openness and privacy simultaneously is one of the main design challenges of the project. Additional challenges include creating a sense of permanence and solidity for users who are cycling through a variety of unstable conditions; providing clarity and legibility in a complex system of unfamiliar interactions; and employing the politics of shape, scale, material and color to transform a dismal, leftover space into a comfortable and inviting environment for users and staff alike.

A Public Dialogue
The issues facing small-scale homeless service providers reflect a much larger dialogue on openness in institutional settings and privacy in public space. For us, this project has served as a laboratory in which to explore how small-scale design and minimal spatial choreography can address these large-scale social and spatial issues. We are currently developing a web-based, print-on-demand catalog of designs addressing these issues, including furniture, curtains, screens, signage, graphics, and print materials. We hope to engage the design community at large in the creation of this catalog by posing this design brief to a larger audience. We are interested in how this brief may be interpreted by others, how it might catalyze a larger discussion on homelessness and the public and private spheres. To start, we are running a workshop at Columbia’s architecture school inviting students to respond to our brief. We hope to expand this dialogue to other models of design collaboration: salons, charrettes, round tables, pin-ups, and more. In publicizing our brief, we hope to operate in the spirit of open source development, to create a platform for collaboration rather than competition. In the meantime, we hope to establish a model of practice that begins with the design of design itself.

Deborah Grossberg Katz and Terri Chiao are founders of Katz Chiao, a design and research collaborative based in New York City and Philadelphia. Deborah teaches architecture and urban design at Temple University / Tyler School of Art, Penn Design and Columbia GSAPP, and Terri is a designer at 2×4 Inc. All images courtesy Katz Chiao.

Public/Private is a research and design project funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, with sponsorship from the Architectural League of New York, Columbia University GSAPP Fabrication Lab and the Spatial Information Design Lab. Special thanks to Laura Kurgan and to our collaborators at St. Mary’s, CUCS and CHHMP.

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.

So, Mayor Bloomberg will be mayor for a third term. What will this mean for the architecture, planning and urban design that have received more policy attention from his administration than from previous ones? Thoughts, opinions, predictions? Send them our way.

Some will undoubtedly answer that question by pointing to megaprojects, such as Hudson Yards or Atlantic Yards, which have proved to be one of the pressure points of urban policy in the last eight years. A city always looking for creative ways to leverage market forces to develop local economies? A city in hock to developers? A city always reinventing itself? A city in paralysis? These themes and others are sure to be discussed at a major symposium taking place tomorrow convened by the Institute for Urban Design and its inimitable executive director, Omni-advisor Olympia Kazi. Arrested Development: Do Megaprojects Have a Future? will take place Saturday, November 7th at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, from 9:30am to 4:30pm. The roster of speakers – including stimulus-critic and train station aficionado Vishaan Chakrabarti – is a huge draw.

Another meeting of the minds that is sure to appeal to those of you passionate about transit is taking place at Barnard next week. Rights of Way: A New Politics of Movement in New York City will “examine the issues surrounding bikes and pedestrianization, and will explore sustainability, finance, public health, and the ways in which the street can serve as a fulcrum in debates about public space and urban life.” Next Thursday, November 12th in the James Room on the 4th floor of Barnard Hall (Broadway at W. 117th). Free and open to the public.

We’re always on the lookout for newfangled technologies and ideas, especially as they start getting installed and tested. East Londoners are the guinea pigs this time, as Pavegen Systems has installed a panel of energy-generating pavement on a busy stretch of sidewalk. The claim is that “just five slabs spread over a lively sidewalk has the ability to generate enough energy to illuminate a bus stop throughout the night,” so you can imagine the potential applications. The folks at MIT first brought this idea to our attention with their work on Crowd Farming, and it seems like harvesting energy from human motion is an approach ripe with possibilities. You can get all kinds of piezoelectric by dancing, driving, commuting, or even by walking through a door.

For one high-visibility project that we’ve been following, Coney Island, the question has been whether it will stay a mega-playground or become a mega-mall. The City came closer to ensuring that some of Coney’s most iconic amusements will remain in perpetuity with the Economic Development Corporation’s bid for the Wonderwheel.

Another way to fuse the recreational, architectural and the political is to… have a slumber party? An Arkitektur, a Berlin-based group of design radicals, will be hosting a live-in conference on Oppositional Architecture from the 12th to the 21st of November at a loft in Dumbo (Gair Building No 6, 81 Front Street). The discussions (and dinner parties) that will emerge while the group is in residence all critique the politics and production of space in capitalist society, and we’re especially looking forward to a discussion between economist David Kotz and architect Teddy Cruz on Saturday, November 14th. We were tipped off to this by Bryan Bell, who knows what it means to practice design as activism.

We’ll leave you with some further reading: Geoff Manaugh has tackled the question: Who would want to be an architect?, in response to an article by the same name in the Times. The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a taste that might spark interest in the Omni-fans out there: “architecture is the imaginative production of future worlds even as it is the act of building houses for the urban poor or the obtaining of technical skills necessary for rationally subdividing office floorplates.” If you’re on our site, you probably agree, and would expand the definition even more. Curiosity about the complexity of the architecture and design fields, and the infinite ways that design affects the world around us, is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Geoff concluded with a call for discussion – go join in.

Photo by Flickr user Herschell Hershey. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

So, CUP’s Nehemiah talk last night was dope. Reverend Dr. Youngblood and architect Alexander Gorlin delivered on their promise to share some of the fascinating back-story of how they teamed up to design and built the Spring Creek Nehemiah Houses and how, against the odds, East Brooklyn Congregations built almost 3,000 units of owner-occupied, single-family housing in East New York, Brownsville and other areas of East Brooklyn affected by years of disinvestment.

Gorlin doesn’t just do East Brooklyn, however. Today in the Daily News, he opines on the rare instances of modern architecture in the Bronx, most of which find their expression in community service buildings such as the courthouse by Rafael Viñoly Architects or the Bronx Charter School for the Arts by WXY (designers of the NYC Info Center featured recently at the Architectural League).

Gorlin and Youngblood spoke within The University of Trash, an installation by Michael Cataldi and Nils Norman, billed as “an experiment in alternative architecture, urbanism, and pedagogy taking place in SculptureCenter’s main space.” Check it out before it closes on August 3rd.

And speaking of our friends at CUP, last week their Making Policy Public jury convened to select the advocacy groups and issues they will be addressing in their next season of posters. Now they’re putting the call out for policy-friendly artists and designers who want to collaborate on the new editions. If you aren’t familiar with this excellent project, a series of foldout posters that use graphic and information design to explore and explain complex public policy issues, or if you’re curious to know more about past designers’ experiences, check out Candy’s piece on Vendor Power! and Glen’s on Predatory Equity. Then, check out the five briefs, get your portfolios and statements of interest ready, and get involved! This season’s topics are:

1. Keeping parks public with FIERCE
2. Participating in public housing with Community Voices Heard
3. Redistricting reform with the Brennan Center for Justice
4. Navigating the juvenile justice system with the Center for Court Innovation
and
5. Mapping the tomato supply chain with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and Just Harvest USA

We’ve been talking about public space a lot lately, but Metropolis points out a different angle on the topic. Secure Cities is a website that maps out how heightened security measures in a post-9/11 world have affected urban public space in terms of increased surveillance, reduced accessibility and mobility, and restricted activity (via either physical or legal barriers).

Since it’s a Friday afternoon — Look! There’s a video game about controlling gridlock! (via Streetsblog)

And wait! Who knew the Manhattan Bridge was so wobbly?

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

Making Policy Public (MPP) is one of CUP’s programs: a series of fold-out posters that use graphic and information design to explore complex public policy issues. Collaborations between graphic designers and community advocates are commissioned by CUP through a juried process. The series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared. CUP has recently issued the call for proposals for the next round of MPP’s. You can download it here.

This is the second Making Policy Public process narrative we’ve featured on Urban Omnibus; check out the first one here. Below, Glen shares his recollections of the process of making the Predatory Equity Survival Guide.

But first, CUP provides some context:

In the spring of 2008, we put out a request for proposals to advocacy groups to participate in Making Policy Public (MPP). One of the first submissions we received was from Amy Chan, a tenant organizer at Tenants and Neighbors (T&N). Her proposal was about a recently discovered but at the time almost totally unreported phenomenon, risky private equity investments in New York City’s housing stock. When the jury met in the early summer, the proposal was an immediate standout. The issues were complex, misunderstood, and it seemed like an MPP poster could be a vital part of an organizing and education campaign. That summer 2008, we posted the four policy briefs that the jury selected and issued a call for designers who were interested in collaborating with these advocates to create fold-out posters addressing public policy concerns. Again, Glen Cummings of MTWTF sent in a standout submission. At 2×4, prior to founding MTWTF, Glen had produced a lot of complicated infographics that maintained a sense of playfulness. The jury felt that the predatory equity issue was so complicated that having an experienced designer like Glen would be critical to making the project succeed. Glen worked with Amy of T&N and Dina Levy of Urban Homesteading Assistance Board (UHAB) to battle the predatory equity takeover of affordable housing in New York City.

And now, here’s Glen in his own words, images and – crucially – in the teams’ strong and effective word-image relationships:

I’ve been interested in interdisciplinary collaborations since around 2001, seven years before I started MTWTF, and I always try to facilitate them whenever possible. I was excited to be invited to collaborate as part of Making Policy Public.

What I liked about the MPP series was its inherent multidisciplinary focus, and the chance it offered to learn about the subject and then actually create an impact.

Meeting
I met Rosten Woo and John Mangin of CUP as well as the team of advocates I was going to be working with: Dina Levy from UHAB and Amy Chan from T&N, at CUP’s offices in Gowanus, Brooklyn.

Dina and Amy told us all about their recent research, and gave us printouts of the slideshows and handouts they had developed for their presentations. They had a deep knowledge of the history, legal aspects and current state of NYC subsidized housing that they needed to transfer to CUP and myself before we could begin. I introduced myself by showing a range of related design projects and describing why each was organized the way it was, and looked the way it did. Although no two projects are the same, showing related solutions can jumpstart a discussion about project’s structure and tone: Rosten and John presented the collaborations’ structure, which they had established. They had already begun setting up a schedule and a basecamp site for the project, taking on the organizational responsibilities that normally are the designer’s.

Underway
At out first working meeting, Dina and Amy staged a teach-in and brought us all up to speed on the finer points of predatory equity. To understand predatory equity we needed to know aspects of NYC housing law, finance, and federal banking regulations. Their knowledge was endless but because Dina and Amy were experts, I knew I’d be able to focus on the big picture knowing they would let me know if I was off track.

Here’s what I learned: predatory equity is when speculators aggressively buy up buildings that are covered by government programs that keep rents affordable. They evict tenants, convert the apartments into market-rate rentals or condos, and then resell the building for a big profit.

That’s only half of the problem. Most of these deals were made during the real estate boom for way too much money. The loans were huge and unsustainable. If the speculators can’t evict the tenants and sell the building quickly they default on their mortgages, putting tenants’ homes at risk, and leaving banks, insurance companies, and the federal government holding all the debt. It is a second sub-prime crisis ready to happen.

Just as we were beginning our collaboration, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a predatory equity building in the Bronx widely recognized as the birthplace of hip-hop, was being overleveraged by a predatory developer.

This was not only a case of people potentially losing their homes; but also of New York City losing its heritage and culture. The threats are social and cultural as well as economic.

Through their work helping tenants organize and speaking to lawmakers and media sources, Dina and Amy knew that the poster would have to address two different audiences: 1) Tenants who wanted to know how the law and predatory equity practices could directly affect them and 2) decision-makers who would need inside information to take action. They imagined the publication’s goal was to mobilize tenants in affected and at-risk buildings and to convince politicians and banks to recognize the problem and take immediate action. We agreed finding a way to visually explain predatory equity was the best place to start.

Comic by Chris Ware. Used without permission.

Progress?
At the start of our next meeting I presented some visual material for discussion. I hoped this discussion would help us decide how the booklets’ content would be organized, and that would help us determine what visual language would work best.  For example, if the information could be organized as a story, a narrative explanation, a comic strip format would work.

images from “Graphis Diagrams 1970”

If we thought that decision-makers would respond to numerical data we could create a vivid set of information graphics.

Of course it’s a porous situation. You could relate a set of facts and figure as a narrative, and you could relate narrative as a set of information graphics, but you have to start somewhere. It’s a reciprocal relationship between the information and the design. You move back and forth between saying “What format can deliver this information?” and “What information can be be delivered by this format?”

Rosten felt the tenants would respond best to something direct like a comic strip. Amy and Dina though the decision makers would respond best to words, but might be turned off by the tone of a comic strip. It seemed that combination of strong main text and a serious comic-strip could work.

I also had created a dozen rough sketches for the project. The idea was not to pick a final direction, but just to make visuals part of the discussion as early as possible. We looked at the sketches and discussed how the graphics worked and which ones were communicating  better than others.

Sketch no. 1 uses a simple narrative format to personify the different actors and institutions involved in predatory equity. It proposes two stories: why predatory equity is bad for tenants; and why predatory equity is bad for banks, the federal government and the general public, all in an extremely brief 12 frames.

Sketch no. 2 compare the usual flow of money between landlord, tenants and banks in an affordable housing scenario with the flow in a predatory equity scenario.

Sketch no. 3 addresses both sides of the situation through an imagined dialogue. The back features a poster.

Sketch no. 4 explains predatory equity then provides message templates to inform neighbors, local government, banks, and the news media about the impending crisis.

Dina and Amy thought the sequential images and iconic characters really helped explain some of the technical parts of the story, but that that a cartoony feeling would alienate the decision-makers who would receive the publication.

We also agreed that our goals weren’t ambitious enough. In addition to explaining the situation, we had to propose specific solutions, and convince people to act, if anything was going to get done. We moved forward without discounting anything. We knew we’d have several sections- an introduction, an explanation and a call to action- and that each section would address two audiences: one liking visual narratives one liking textual facts.

Crash
In October Dina and Amy told us the predatory equity situation was shifting. We’d been working on a poster to stop predatory equity, but the financial crisis seemed to be changing the nature of the challenge. This was the absolute trough of the financial crisis hysteria. Everybody thought the world was ending.

Dina and Amy asked that we pause for a month until they found out how the government would respond to the crisis and how that would affect predatory equity situation.

A month or so later our mission was clearer.

The predatory equity mortgages were like giant versions of the single-family mortgages that had crashed the economy and trashed the banking system.

The federal government had committed to bailing out the banks, and those bail-outs meant the federal government would have some leverage to tell banks what to do, and perhaps to keep them from foreclosing on at-risk buildings.

Dina and Amy had been working with a coalition of housing experts and federal elected officials on a plan to save buildings at imminent risk of foreclosure.

So now we would also need to promote viable short- and long-term solutions and tell all parties how best to proceed.

The short term solutions had to do with saving buildings that were already overleveraged. How could these buildings be saved from foreclosure? with loan modifications and a strategy we called “preservation short sales.” (Download the PDF at the end of this article if you want to get more details). With loan modifications, the federal government would press banks to modify loans to allow speculators to continue paying their mortgages and providing services. In a preservation short sale, the federal government would offer tax incentives for speculators to sell the buildings at a loss to responsible owners. The key goal in both scenarios was to keep the buildings affordable for current tenants.

Long-term solutions would involve new loan standards for banks that would dry up money for huge predatory equity deals.

The political and financial viability of these solutions kept shifting as Dina and Amy met with the various coalitions and elected officials so we had to develop language and a visual design that was general enough to be accurate in 6 months, but specific enough to deliver real information.

Establishing The Design
The publication design was developed around the outline below. Each section would provide a terse executive summary flanked by an illustrated narrative that either clarified the text or gave further information. This design established how much space was allotted to each part, how much text would fit, and what it would look like.

The front is divided into four panels that act as a booklet. The acts as a poster, so I consider that one panel as well.

Panel 1 cover and back cover
Panel 2 explains predatory equity
Panel 3 explains the short term problem and solutions
Panel 4 explains the long-term problem and solutions
Panel 5 the poster, shows solidarity and tells how to engage the situation

The pamphlet had to be inviting enough to suck a reader in but also contain a good amount of density. We wanted the cover to stand out on an elected official’s desk and really look nothing like something you’d expect a “policy brief” to look like.

The first spread breaks down the basics of the problem in a simple précis and cartoon narrative. But, when you open the gatefold, you are hit with a great deal of information. We thought the seriousness of the content here offset the playfulness of the graphics, hopefully hitting that space where it can be both inviting and taken seriously.

The other audience for the publication is of course tenants and tenant organizers. Instead of using the poster surface to contain a complicated diagram, we decided to keep it simple and graphic: something that could be read from 40 feet or more. (as in a window on a 2nd story. The poster would help create a visual “identity” for the issue.)

Development
Next Dina and Amy refined the language, finding the right balance of specificity and crafting it to fit in the allotted spaces, while Rosten, John and I worked together to finish the narrative graphics.

Rosten, John and I worked on the narrative graphics developing both the content and visual approach for each panel, and trying to find the right balance of clarity and personality for each illustration. You can see the details in various stages of completion above.

My favorite detail, and I believe John’s favorite too, is the “Eye of Providence” put in place to re-regulate banks.  We had a long discussion about whether or not we were somehow either promoting the freemasons with the ominous eye, or perhaps making the government appear too big brother-ish.

Each additional information panel was built up as an argument. This panel illustrates how federal underwriting standards could prevent future predatory equity deals.

All the panels fit together like this, because they are eventually printed on one side of a sheet.

At the last minute to we added a crowd at the bottom of the cover and poster that protests particular predatory equity speculators. The idea was to introduce a second level of information here to match the two levels throughout.

The “snake squeezing two towers to form a dollar glyph” remained the same throughout the process, but it shifted color several times, starting out red (too weird?), moving to bright green (too friendly?) and eventually becoming black (nice and scary).

Rosten and I were both particularly interested in how the colors conveyed the content, so we spent a lot of time looking at the color pallet of the publication and in the end, I believe, developed something unique. Rosten was excited about the prospect of using more than 2 colors, so we developed a palette with four. Even though the paper is quite basic, the printing itself is luxurious. It’s not often you see anything printed in 4 spot colors given away for free. We hoped people who received it would think it was attractive and hang it up.

CUP, T&N, and UHAB reviewed the final designs and after a few slight adjustments we were off to press, and then into the hands of the people who would use them.

The Process
One of the interesting things about the project was that the development of the content was 90% of the project, which is not always the case. That’s not to say that we sat around waiting for a master text to be written before beginning the visual design. Early visual designs helped us establish a structure that the content could be developed to fit.

It’s a particularly strong way that designing can act to prefigure the content, instead of waiting for content to be completed which in this case could have never happened without narrowing the parameters. The predatory equity situation was ever-changing and way too complex.

Dina and Amy were amazing to work with. Having a constant open dialogue between the content development and the publication design helped us reduce a complex set of information into an approachable publication.

The Launch
Advocates handed out The Predatory Equity Survival Guide as part of a crucial tenant association meeting in East Harlem where new plans to combat predatory equity were announced. Tenants were trying to educate themselves ahead of a big City Council meeting on predatory equity that was happening the next week.

Amy, Dina, and tenant leaders delivered charged presentations to the attendees. One part teach-in, one part pep rally. Several hundred people turned out. Attendees seemed enthusiastic about having concise information and a new tool to help them fight predatory equity.

Tenants took home stacks to distribute at their own tenant meetings. Plans are already underway to distribute a Spanish language version this summer.

We checked in with Amy and Dina this afternoon for a late-breaking update.

Amy says:

We have since distributed the survival guide through Stuyvesant Town, Riverton, and the City Council and we constantly get tenant requests for more.

And, according to Dina:

We’re advancing the campaign on individual buildings, primarily those run by Putnam, SG2, and Ocelot. All three have loans held by Fannie Mae. All are in decaying condition, some of the worst conditions in the city. We’re working to convince Fannie Mae to take responsibility for the maintenance of the buildings and to bring the debt back to a sustainable level. Meanwhile, the Federal Government is starting to pay attention to the multifamily housing crisis and is looking at strategies for preservation. To get more information or get involved contact me at Levy [at] uhab.org.

Glen Cummings is a graphic designer and writer based in New York City. He is a partner at MTWTF (Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday) and a lecturer in design at Yale University School of Art.

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

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that uses art and visual culture to increase the quality of public participation in urban planning and community design. CUP specializes in creating interdisciplinary collaborations that bring together designers, educators, advocates, and community residents to improve urban life in New York City and beyond.

Making Policy Public (MPP) is one of CUP’s programs: a series of fold-out posters that use graphic design to explore and explain public policy. Each poster is the product of a commissioned collaboration between a designer and an advocate. This series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared.

This winter, the MPP jury paired designer Candy Chang with Sean Basinski of the Street Vendor Project to work with CUP staff to demystify the rules and regulations of street vending in New York City. Here, she shares the process and product of this endeavor. In doing so, she makes a strong case for further extending the kinds of collaboration that Making Policy Public embodies, and for establishing more peer-to-peer platforms – identified by advocates and communicated through good design – for information exchange between citizens.

Stay tuned to the Omnibus for a process narrative of another Making Policy Public poster, Predatory Equity, coming up in a couple weeks.

Six pairs of sunglasses, five hand bags, two scarves, seven books, one DVD, six magazines, two hats, two umbrellas, one necklace, three photographs, one wallet, four t-shirts, one notebook, three pairs of ear muffs, eight pairs of slippers, one watch (that I still wear after five years), and countless hot dogs, pretzels, noodles, biryani, crepes, falafel, halal, dosas, rice wraps, roasted nuts, bagels, and coffee: these are some of the things I’ve consumed thanks to New York City’s 10,000+ street vendors. It wasn’t until recently, however, that I realized how much drama they have to endure to make an honest living.

I’m a big fan of CUP and when they posted an open call to designers and advocacy groups to work together through their Making Policy Public Program, I happily applied. Sean Basinski (The Street Vendor Project), Rosten Woo (CUP), John Mangin (CUP), and I collaborated for five months to translate NYC’s complex vending regulations into an accessible fold-out poster. CUP served as project manager and provided working stipends, research assistance, and direction throughout the process. Our goal was to make an educational resource for vendors that clarifies the rules and their rights when confronted by police officers. We also wanted the poster to serve as an advocacy tool that highlights the history of vending, personal vendor stories, and policy reforms to help develop a more just system. At the end CUP would publish several thousand copies of the poster, provide distribution support, and give 1000 copies to The Street Vendor Project for use in their advocacy and education work.

A lawyer and former vendor himself, Sean founded The Street Vendor Project in 2001 as a legal advocacy group for NYC street vendors. The organization has 700+ vendor members who collectively work together to make their voices heard. They publish reports to raise public awareness about vendor issues, file lawsuits to support vendor rights, and help vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans. While meeting at Sean’s office to learn more about vending issues and challenges, he pulled out a box containing heaps of pink tickets they’ve accumulated from local vendors:

The violations are mostly for the physical position of vendors’ carts and tables, which must be certain distances from curbs, crosswalks, and building doors. Vendors are also frequently ticketed for not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license and for setting up shop on restricted streets. It’s an uphill battle for vendors, whose interests have often been quashed by the City’s “quality of life” crackdowns. It’s virtually impossible to get a general vending license and the estimated wait is several decades! There are tons of street restrictions, partly due to the leverage of powerful business groups. And the fines are shockingly steep at $1000 – as a comparison, a parking ticket is $65. To top it off, all these regulations are buried in documents full of intimidating jargon and heinous text formatting that would make even the most patient person cry. Here’s an example page from the City’s vending regulations book:

Snap! Can the City be ticketed for bad formatting? These resources not only make it confusing for vendors but for the government too. Sean pointed out several tickets where even the police officers got the rules wrong. And worse yet, what if English is your second language? Ever since the first Jewish, Italian and Irish pushcart markets formed in lower Manhattan in the 1880s, immigrants have made up a large part of the vending workforce. Its low startup costs, independence, and flexibility make it a traditional first stop for small business entrepreneurs. Today over 80% of NYC vendors in lower Manhattan are born outside the U.S., particularly Bangladesh, China, Senegal and Afghanistan. Seeing a document like this makes me wonder how anyone has the moxie to vend at all!

We learned more at The Street Vendor Project’s monthly meeting where vendors join forces to inform each other about current issues and take an active role in making changes. City officials are proposing that vendors can never leave their cart (who needs bathroom breaks?) and that all vendors must display an unobstructed 36″ x 18″ sign that displays all their appropriate licenses. This would take up serious space on their size-restricted tables. Vendor and board member Larry McDonald said, “Forget about your goods. You’re going to be selling the sign!”

I also spoke with individual street vendors like Munnu, who sells hot dogs and pretzels at the corner of Lafayette and Reade. He moved to NYC from Bangladesh and has been a street vendor for 17 years, but it hasn’t been easy. “One time I got a ticket because my jacket covered my license, and then I have to pay $1000 fine,” he said, “Do you have $1000 in your pocket? You don’t have it! I don’t have it! This hand makes money and the other hand finishes it very fast. How do they think I can give so much?”

While learning about the challenges vendors face – and enjoying the best burritos, biryani, arepas and more at the annual Vendy Awards – we started thinking about the content of the poster. How much would be directed towards street vendors as a much-needed resource, and how much would be an educational/advocacy tool about street vendors and regulation reform? How much would be about clarifying the convoluted regulations into clear graphics and how much would be about showing just how convoluted it currently is?

After we established a general scope of content, I made “wire frame” mockups and marked each page of the fold-out poster with titles and image placeholders. This gave us a foundation to discuss the order, prominence, and general layout of the content. We placed vendor-targeted information in the first folds so vendors can easily access it on a day-to-day basis and within the small confines of some carts. We also started thinking about how to make the rules as pictorial as possible and include text translations in Bengali, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish.

The fully-opened poster was devoted to a few elements, including personal stories from local vendors, historical background (NYC vending started when four Jewish peddlers set up pushcarts along Hester Street), fun facts (Jerry Seinfeld was once a vendor, and Bloomingdale’s, D’Agostino and Macy’s all started as pushcarts), and recommended regulation reforms (lift the license caps, increase street access, reduce the fines, and reform administration and enforcement). While this spread was geared towards educating non-vendors, Sean noted its equal value to vendors so they could feel less informal and take pride in a profession that has been so integral to New York’s history.

I tried different visual styles, from old world LES charm to photographs of actual objects on the sidewalks. The guys were open to anything that best facilitated the content, and Rosten championed as much diagrammatic information as possible. Sean made a good point that, whatever the style, the poster should have a sense of “authority” so vendors could use it as a trustworthy-looking resource when dealing with police officers.

I eventually landed on a friendly Chris Ware-inspired style and had good times illustrating everything from hot dog stands to former Mayor Ed Koch. I printed a lot of homemade versions so we had hard copies to peruse and mark up during meetings. Here’s a look at the poster-in-progress at three stages:

Over the course of our bi-weekly discussions, many elements evolved. Things that were initially little (sidebar of fun facts) became a centerpiece. Things that got tossed to the wayside (John’s extensive timeline research) became useful fodder integrated into the policy reforms. And things that were once separate (vendor types, personal stories, policy reforms) became one coherent cityscape.

We got feedback from vendors about clarity, content, symbols, language and text translations. We tried to challenge all our assumptions – is “>” a universal symbol for “greater than”? Is a green check symbol the opposite of a red x’d circle? Are the abbreviations for feet, inches, and meters clear? Here’s the final version:

Vendor Power! Hopefully this fold-out poster not only saves vendors some headaches but allows the city to direct its energy (and our tax money) towards more pressing issues. In order to put this information directly in the hands of people who need it the most, CUP organized a citywide distribution event where volunteers handed out free copies to vendors across the city. Unfortunately I was way up in Helsinki, but here’s some photos of the big day from CUP:

And here are some first-hand thoughts from John:

“The poster went public with a citywide distribution extravaganza on a Saturday in late March. We got about 20 volunteers to take the posters to vendors on the job. Cheikh Fall, a vendor himself, helped us map the city’s vendor-dense areas and estimate numbers. The weather was iffy, but that wouldn’t matter, he said – April rent was due soon and the vendors would be out in force.

The volunteers met us downtown to pick up Google maps and a big stack of posters. From there they fanned out to Jackson Heights, Fulton Mall, Grand Concourse, Harlem – about 20 neighborhoods in all. (We talked about a Staten Island toe-touch, but it didn’t quite happen.) We put the poster in the hands of about 1,000 vendors. Reactions ranged from enthusiastic to what-took-you-so-long? — more than a few related stories of run-ins with cops or storeowners when the poster could’ve come in handy.”

Bryan Bell’s approach to expanding design’s role in addressing public needs, highlighted last week on the Omnibus, is a powerful step towards redefining the popular conception of what design can do. He is not alone in this effort, joined by design/build curricula like Auburn University’s Rural Studio or the Yale Building Project (see expanded list below), design activist organizations like Architecture for Humanity or Public Architecture, as well as the growing number of private firms and individual designers who bring their expertise to bear on issues of social concern. But alongside the grand gestures are the small interventions that subtly or overtly improve the experience of urban life in surprising and often playful ways. The Canadian Centre for Architecture has curated some of the most inspiring of these Actions:

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents the exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City, an exhibition with 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Seemingly common activities such as walking, playing, recycling, and gardening are pushed beyond their usual definition by the international architects, artists, and collectives featured in the exhibition. Their experimental interactions with the urban environment show the potential influence personal involvement can have in shaping the city, and challenge fellow residents to participate.

Actions: What You Can Do With the City documents and presents specific projects by a large and diverse group of activists whose personal involvement has triggered radical change in today’s cities. These human motors of change include architects, engineers, university professors, students, children, pastors, artists, skateboarders, cyclists, root eaters, pedestrians, municipal employees, and many others who answer the question of what can be done to improve the urban experience with surprising and often playful actions.

To extend the sense of transformative possibility beyond the exhibition (and for those of us who can’t make it to Montreal to see the show before it comes down next Monday), there’s a parallel online exhibit. And, General Assembly‘s Take-a-Bag-Leave-a-Bag project, one of the designs that emerged from Urban Omnibus’ Make a Difference in Two Days event, is part of the show. So, it seems that the smallest-scale of designs to improve the public realm can reverberate far beyond our neighborhoods: to inspire our fellow citizens to participate in the constant shaping urban experience, and maybe to enhance the understanding of what design has to offer. Get involved.

A partial list of design/build programs in American architecture schools:

Tulane School of Architecture’s UrbanBuild
A bunch of schools are involved in Tulane’s CityBuild Consortium
UVA’s ecoMOD
UT Austin’s Design Build Texas
Parsons Design Workshop
University of Miami’s Center for Urban and Community Design
Auburn University’s Rural Studio
Yale School of Architecture’s Building Project
Neighborhood Design/Build Studio at the University of Washington
and, of course, NC State

Let us know about your own experiences. And if you’re not in school or about to start, Architecture for Humanity New York has monthly meet ups where projects and volunteer opportunities are discussed.

Just in time for the warm weather, we wanted to share the process with citizen-designers across the city, in the hope of inspiring some small-scale, local interventions in your neck of the woods. If you stumble across, or initiate, a compelling design action in the public interest somewhere in the five boroughs of New York, we want to hear about it.

Below are descriptions of when the seven teams got up to over the weekend. First, check out a video that shows them in action:

Team NC State
Hans Hesselein, David Moses, Andrew Nicolas, Thomas Ryan
Bryan’s popularity as an educator precedes him. An interdisciplinary group of alumni from North Carolina State – two architects, a landscape architect and a graphic designer – some of whom worked with Bryan as undergrads before moving to New York joined in the fun. After raiding a New Jersey nursery for plants, piping and lumber, the team set about the task of creating sensory linkages across the divide of the Gowanus Canal. The eventual solution – a beautiful set of birdhouses – turned the site’s specific ecology into a point of connection rather than separation. And we weren’t the only ones to notice, check out blog coverage here that also got picked up here. [Update Sept. 15, 2010: For a look at the progression of this project from temporary design experiment to community-driven, multi-disciplinary operation, check out our feature Canal Nest Colony.]

Business Casual
Patrick Candella, Scott Corey, Philip Kuehne, Viren Patel, Mary Polites
This group of passionate young designers met while studying at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and most of them live in Jersey City. As such, they brought a fresh perspective to the sometimes parochial language in which New Yorkers articulate design challenges. Their site was a large parking lot that services several big box stores. The lot is ringed with an invisible and unmarked electric fence that, when crossed, renders shopping carts inoperable. The team observed dozens of paralyzed carts discarded around the periphery of the lot and very few deposited at the official corral at the center. If there were a corral before the fence, then maybe the employee whose job it is to return the carts wouldn’t have to manually unlock each cart one by one. If there were unlocked carts at the most popular points of pedestrian entry to the lot – near the path to the adjacent mall or near the light rail stop – customers arriving on foot could pick them up along their way. To address this problem, Business Casual scrounged around the NJIT woodshop for discarded plywood and built two shopping cart corrals that responded to actual observed use patterns. Imagine that.

Due North
Samuel John Reilly, Koren Sin, Stephanie Vito
These three young architecture students are new to New York. As undergraduates in Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning semester in the city program, the team responded to a simple problem they themselves faced as newcomers: directions. But instead of constructing orientation devices as an end in themselves, they assembled large amounts of discarded cardboard near their Flatiron District Cornell outpost into street furniture that points the passerby on her way while providing a resting spot for the road-weary.

Austin+Mergold and Company
Jason Austin, James Bowman, Alex Mergold, Denise Ramzy, and Sally Reynolds
Wayfinding was a recurring challenge that teams sought to address with simple design interventions. Austin+Mergold and Company closely observed tourists exiting the subway unable to locate themselves (see video below). Their solution borrowed less from street furniture and more from weather vanes, encouraging pedestrians to look upwards to find their way. And their careful consideration of New York’s skyline led them to evoke the horizon’s most conspicuous absence and place of remembrance for New Yorkers and out of town visitors alike, the twin towers and Ground Zero.

watch Austin+Mergold and Company’s site analysis video

General Assembly
Jaime Keeler, Josie Lawlor, Sarah Lawlor, Elle Przybyla, Jonathan Zames
This loose collective includes architects, writers and filmmakers whose research process for this exercise brought each of them home to his or her neighborhood only to discover a city-wide design challenge: too many plastic bags yet never one when you need one (to, you know, curb your dog, or cover your bicycle seat in the rain). Inspired by the practice of taking a penny and leaving a penny, General Assembly fashioned a simple series of perforated cylinders that attach to signposts, allowing citizens to put a ubiquitous piece of litter to good use. Check out more of their work here.

Columbia Students
Christina Akiskalou, Daniya Atta, Anastasia Choli, Elia Karachaliou, Pablo Perez Palacios, Eleni Petaloti, Pietro Todeschini
A group of international students in GSAPP’s Advanced Architectural Design professional program took inspiration from the rain on the first day of this two-day adventure. The rain stopped, the air was still warm, but who wants to hang out on a rain-drenched campus bench? So with rolls of altered bubble-wrap and containers made from takeaway soup canisters, a makeshift, reusable ground cloth was born.

Hester Street Collaborative & Leroy Street Studio
Anne Frederick, Morgan Hare, Dylan House, Marc Turkel, Jess Osserman, Shawn Watts
When it comes to making a difference through design, planning and organizing in the public interest, these collectives are professionals. The Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) is a design-build non-profit that works with schools and community groups in Manhattan’s Chinatown and the Lower East Side. The Collaborative emerged from the architectural practice of Leroy Street Studio, and the two groups took this opportunity to come together and to reconnect with their shared backgrounds in design and construction. One of the Chinatown elementary schools where HSC works lacks the street access to their playground that would make it a genuine public amenity, so the team went about creating a new gate, cutting out the chainlink, and creating a much needed connection point between school and neighborhood.

After 48 hours in the field, the teams reconvened at Cabinet Magazine‘s Gowanus space to share their processes, sites and projects with Bryan and the public. In the presentations, Bryan urged the teams to identify stakeholders affected, issues addressed and materials used. He encouraged all participants to check back on their projects and to continue to observe their sites. Observing real use patterns, talking to people about their needs, working in a community you know well: all these are hallmarks of Bryan’s philosophy of design as activism. The weekend proved that even the smallest-scale interventions can go a long way towards expanding the understanding of what design can do. Now it’s your turn, go out there and make something. The first step, as these designers experienced first-hand, is to watch closely and listen carefully.

As founder of the SEED Network, Bell promotes the idea of community-based design, which he said should be ecologically and culturally sensitive. Like LEED, a U.S. Green Building Council program that stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, SEED will have a scorecard system to measure how a development addresses the social, economic and environmental health issues of a community. (DJC Oregon 3.31.09)

Bryan’s infectious optimism about the potential for conscientious design action in the built environment to address inequalities might be exactly what this economy needs. Designers, small-scale interventions really can make a difference. If you want some real, live, built examples of this, stay tuned. Next week on the Omnibus: Make a Difference in Two Days.