Paper solar panels | Image via MIT/Patrick Gillooly

PRINTABLE SOLAR PANELS
Solar energy has long been touted as a solution to our unending thirst for cheap energy, but traditional panels have always been difficult and expensive to construct and install. Worse yet, they tend to be ugly. Researchers at MIT have now come up with a way to print solar cells on paper, fabric or plastic, with a process that is easy, cheap and brimming with design potential. Akin to the silver coating inside potato chip bags, the printed cells have impressive endurance, retaining much of their structural integrity in the face of heat and wear. The efficiency of the paper units are still only at 1% (enough to power a small gadget) but the lightweight, printable cells have endless possibilities for practical application.

TIE THE KNOT
Pop Up Chapel, Architizer and The Knot have teamed up to celebrate last month’s historic passage of marriage equality legislation in New York. On July 30, the first weekend after the law takes effect, Pop Up Chapel will host an all-day wedding ceremony in a NYC park. They will provide officiants, photographers, witnesses and wedding cupcakes. What they need now is a wedding chapel. Architizer and TheKnot.com have launched a design competition to create two temporary structures — pop up chapels — for all that nuptial bliss. Submit your designs by July 21st. Read the competition brief here, and visit PopUpChapel.com for news and updates.

WEEKEND RIDE
New York City has used and maintained the same subway system for over a hundred years. MTA repairs have traditionally been done on the weekends, when ridership was at its lightest. But today, the MTA is faced with the heaviest weekend ridership in decades, partially due due to an overall rise in ridership stemming from the unlimited Metrocard, lower crime rates and newer cars. But this increased demand for weekend and late night access to trains is also indicative of changing work patterns as the city turns more towards a service economy and a work week that no longer excludes the weekend. Of course, increased use means heightened frustrations when service is suspended or rerouted. But when can the MTA complete repairs and renovations if not on nights and weekends? Read more about this conundrum in The New York Times.

Seanna Sharpe performing on Williamsburg Bridge | photo by Flickr user several seconds

AERIALIST ANTICS
On Monday night, aerialist Seanna Sharpe took to the skies, or rather to the upper reaches of the Williamsburg Bridge, for a 15-minute, mid-air performance without safety harnesses of any kind. Sharpe claimed no allegiance to larger political or social movements, but was motivated instead by a wish to “face [her own] fear and to inspire others to face their fears.” Claiming that she chose the Williamsburg Bridge because she would be obscured from the sight of drivers below, and thus would be less likely to cause traffic accidents, Sharpe was surprised to be hit with felony reckless endangerment charges that could leave her with seven years in jail. Read more on this from The Wall Street Journal and watch video of the event here.

TO DOs and EVENTS:

Weightless Pull, Public Summer 2011 | Image via SUPERFRONT

PUBLIC SUMMER 2011: This Sunday, July 17th from 3—6pm, make your way out to Sunset Park to see SUPERFRONT’s Public Summer installation, designed by architectural duo CO (Christina Ciardullo and Naomi Ocko). The installation will occur between two warehouse buildings hosting public art and performance all summer (July 23rd — August 28th) at 2nd Ave between 35th and 36th Streets in Brooklyn. See more info here.

FROM SHOETOWN TO BREWTOWN: On July 19th, Shoe Town to Brew Town: Craft Brewing Meets Green Development, will be held from 7:30-10:00pm at the Brooklyn Brewery in Williamsburg. Over food and drink, Paul Mankiewicz of the Gaia Institute will lead a discussion on how breweries can be the centerpiece of a sustainable regional development plan. Tickets are $40, buy them here.

PUBLIC SPACE POTLUCK: The Design Trust for Public Space is hosting their next Public Space Potluck at West Harlem Piers Park on Wednesday, July 20. A former parking lot, this 2-acre site was transformed into a waterfront oasis in 2009, bringing new open space to West Harlem and providing the final link in the Hudson River greenway. The group will meet at Fountain Plaza at 131st Street. RSVP via Facebook or rsvp@designtrust.org.

MTA APP CHALLENGE: Want to improve your subway ride in a meaningful way? The MTA and Challengepost have just announced a new competition for programmers and designers to create apps that improve travel experience and give the public more and easier access to information. The submission period ends September 24th, so check out MTAAppQuest.com for more information about the competition, or read more of the coverage at 2nd Ave. Sagas.

.MTA App Quest Competition | Image courtesy of MTA/Patrick Cashin

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

Thanks to everyone who came to hang out. Including the gentleman seen in the last photo below, who did not come to the atrium to participate in the event, but whose studious drawing on his giant scroll made us feel that we chose the location well for our design-minded crowd.

Stay tuned for the next one…

Photo by Kramer O'Neill | Courtesy of the Design Trust for Public Space

The Design Trust for Public Space has released a Call for Submissions for their 2011 Photo Urbanism Fellowship.

“Photography plays an integral role in the examination, discussion, and re-imagining of New York City’s public spaces,” the RFP states. “The Photo Urbanism program supports this role by offering fellowships to New York City-based photographers to produce new bodies of work exploring the city’s complex public realm in conjunction with active Design Trust projects.” This year, the theme of the fellowship is urban agriculture in New York City, to coincide with Five Borough Farm, an ongoing initiative to develop a citywide plan for urban agriculture (which you can learn more about in our recent interview with the project’s Policy Fellow Nevin Cohen). The Design Trust will provide access to urban agriculture practitioners and locations citywide, and in turn the photographs will help inform the ongoing initiative. The fellowship includes a stipend, a public presentation and a publication dedicated to the final work. Submission deadline: April 25, 2011.

For submission guidelines and more information, or to download a PDF of the Call for Submissions, visit the Design Trust’s site.

For more on urban agriculture here on the Omnibus, look back at Urban Agriculture: East New York, a five-part documentary video on the evolution of an urban agriculture movement in one neighborhood; Food and the Shape of Cities, an interview with the founders of the Foodprint Project about the impact of food systems on the physical city; and the aforementioned interview with food policy expert Nevin Cohen about the process of developing a citywide plan for urban agriculture and its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development.

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Public Space Potluck
UPDATED VENUE: IBM Building Atrium
590 Madison Avenue (SW corner of Madison and E. 57th St.)
Thursday, April 7, 2011
UPDATED TIME: 6:30-8:30pm

Today’s dismal weather has us thinking of warmer, sunnier days to come — and with that anticipated thaw comes a new season of Urban Omnibus field trips! To kick things off, we are once again partnering with our friends the Design Trust for Public Space for a Public Space Potluck on Thursday, April 7 at the IBM Building Atrium Lincoln Center’s David Rubenstein Atrium.

The IBM Building Atrium is one of approximately 503 Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS) in New York City created as a result of an incentive zoning program that offered private developers an increase in density in exchange for the inclusion of public space or improvements for public benefit on the site. The incentives gave rise to such highly visible pedestrian areas as those found around Lincoln Center, Times Square, Greenwich Village and central Midtown. But the quality and utility of these 503 POPS has been inconsistent, and many have fallen into disrepair or become inaccessible. On April 7, join us at one of the city’s active, thriving POPS — and stay tuned for more on privately owned public spaces in an upcoming Omnibus feature.

We’ll bring plates, cups and utensils. You bring a dish and/or drink to share along with your friends, colleagues and fellow public space aficionados.

Let us know if you can make it by emailing rsvp@designtrust.org with “Potluck” in the subject line, or RSVP on the Facebook event page.

David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center
5:30-8:30pm (presentation at 6:30pm)
Broadway between 62nd & 63rd Sts.
1, 2, A, B, C, D to 59th Street Columbus Circle

The David Rubenstein Atrium, formerly known as the Harmony Atrium, was once a neglected pass-through between Broadway and Columbus. Today, the space — now being billed as Lincoln Center’s new “front porch” — has been revamped into a vibrant (and LEED-certified) gathering spot. Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the space is now a ticketing venue and information area for Lincoln Center, complete with free Wi-fi, a media wall, vertical gardens, an art installation by Dutch textile artisan Claudy Jongstra and ample café seating.

Arrive by 6:30pm to hear Design Trust board member Sylvia J. Smith, FAIA, LEED AP, Senior Partner at FXFOWLE Architects and Partner-in-Charge of the Lincoln Center redevelopment, present an inside look at the renovation and expansion of one the world’s leading cultural institutions.

(Added bonus: Target Free Thursdays enliven the atrium with gratis public performances – stick around after the potluck to hear the Unsound Festival New York.)

Five Borough Farm is a project of the Design Trust for Public Space, in partnership with Added Value, to create the first citywide, comprehensive urban agriculture plan for New York City. Over the course of this year, the Five Borough Farm team will be evaluating the city’s existing urban agriculture activity, establishing a set of metrics by which to quantify the benefits of urban agriculture and creating policy recommendations for relevant city agencies. The project officially kicked off in December with a half-day workshop that tapped the minds and expertise of 90 urban farmers and urban agriculture advocates. Two people have been selected by the Design Trust to lead the effort: Nevin Cohen and Rupal Sanghvi. Sanghvi, who specializes in program evaluation and public health, is the project’s Metrics Fellow and therefore is responsible for quantifying and measuring the impact of urban agriculture on the city and its residents. Nevin Cohen, an urban food policy expert and chair of Environmental Studies at the New School, is the Policy Fellow, which makes him responsible for surveying the existing urban agriculture landscape in New York City and identifying new opportunities and recommendations.

We recently had an opportunity to talk with Nevin Cohen about Five Borough Farm. Read on to hear Cohen explain the challenges of developing a unified city plan for urban agriculture and talk about its promise as both social justice movement and model for community development. -V.S.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

Urban Omnibus: What is the Five Borough Farm Project?
Nevin Cohen: Five Borough Farm is a project by the Design Trust for Public Space and Added Value, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that operates one of the city’s largest farms, to create a citywide plan to support urban agriculture in New York City. The urban agriculture movement is booming here: demand for local food production is growing, and in every corner of the city New Yorkers are developing a broad range of community gardens, rooftop farms, composting projects, and farmers markets. But right now no one has a detailed understanding of all of these activities, or hard data or tools to evaluate the benefits of agriculture as an urban land use. So what you find is city officials are reluctant to adopt the many policy recommendations advanced by advocates, or to address local food production on a citywide scale. Often city agencies and the ever-growing number of practitioners – many of whom operate on city land – work largely in isolation, lacking the systemic resources to coordinate or scale-up their efforts. There are outstanding groups like the NYC Community Gardening Coalition and NGOs like Just Food but there isn’t yet an overall vision for how urban agriculture could really transform New York.

The benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Urban agriculture is a social justice movement.The Design Trust is engaging a diverse cross-section of experts and a network of hundreds of individual practitioners to move this project forward. Based on a detailed analysis of the city’s current urban agricultural landscape, we will develop an evaluation framework to measure, in quantifiable and replicable terms, the ecological, social, and economic value urban agriculture brings to the communities it serves and to the city as a whole. Together with Added Value and many other stakeholders, the Design Trust will help city government evaluate what their role should be, and identify specific opportunities for agencies to support urban agricultural activity. The project will also create an interactive website to allow everyone involved with urban agriculture (including practitioners, policymakers, and supporters) to use the project’s tools and findings and share their own expertise.

What is your role as Policy Fellow and Rupal Sanghvi’s as Metrics Fellow?
Rupal Sanghvi and I are working closely together on all aspects of the project. We’re examining what kinds of urban agriculture New Yorkers are practicing now, including the work of advocacy and other supporting organizations, by conducting in-depth interviews with people in all five boroughs, from relatively large-scale operations to individual community gardens, commercial farms to nonprofits.

My work focuses on the policy landscape of urban agriculture. I’ve been conducting case study research in other large North American cities — Detroit, Chicago, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco — to uncover best practices in urban agriculture policy that might be adopted by New York. Over the course of the project, I will evaluate existing New York City-based and national urban agriculture initiatives (e.g. schoolyard farms, urban farming plots on New York City Housing Authority grounds) and policy recommendations advanced by urban agriculture advocates, and will work with New York City policy makers to identify realistic measures that would support urban agriculture citywide.

Rupal Sanghvi has been focusing on developing reliable metrics that can help practitioners to achieve their goals while also providing data on the diverse impacts of urban agriculture on individuals and communities. When the project is complete we will have a set of indicators that address ecology (e.g., the ability of gardens to capture stormwater that would otherwise overburden sewage treatment plants) and stewardship; public health (improved access to fresh vegetables); education and youth empowerment (changes in behavior and academic achievement); community building (residents’ use of a garden as a public meeting space); and economics (revenue from food sales, job creation in ancillary food businesses).

Together, we will be creating a shared evaluative framework and tools that can help practitioners and guide both legislation and on-the-ground programming.

But this is really a multidisciplinary effort. In addition to the Design Trust, Added Value, Rupal Sanghvi and myself, the team includes Thread Collective, an architecture and design firm, post-doctoral fellow Kristin Reynolds, and an advisory committee of experts in urban agriculture, planning, and policy. And we are working in parallel with researchers at Columbia University who are estimating the productive capacity of New York City’s open space.

Also, students at The New School have helped gather data on urban agriculture activity in New York City. (My students mapped this information as part of an urban agriculture exhibition I co-curated at The New School with my colleague Radhika Subramaniam, called Living Concrete/Carrot City.)

Students mapping urban agriculture sites for Five Borough Farm project at The New School's Living Concrete/Carrot City exhibition | Photo by Nevin Cohen

Tell us about the workshop that kicked off the project. Who participated? What was discussed?
In December, we convened a citywide workshop for growers, advocates, and funders to discuss the project and to learn how practitioners measure their success, what information would help them to carry out their work more successfully, and the types of policy changes that would enable urban agriculture to expand in New York City. We asked: Why do you do what you do? What resources (revenue, volunteers, funding, etc.) do you rely on in order to do your work? How do you track what you do, and what do you wish you could track? What would help you measure the benefits of what you do?

Right now, we’re reviewing hundreds of pages of transcripts from all of the small group sessions we held. But I can tell you one thing we heard over and over that day: practitioners want a better way to communicate with each other, whether it’s sharing information about resources (where can I get these tools this week?) or technical assistance (we’re starting a farm-based learning program in the fall at a local elementary school and want some tips on monitoring the students’ progress). I think that’s where the tools and the website for Five Borough Farm will be really useful to people.

Urban agriculture engages people in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole.It’s clear that the complexity of urban agriculture extends far beyond the prevalent images of rooftop gardens and community plots. Questions of land use, community engagement, city policy, ecological effects and farming expertise, among others, all have to be addressed. What activities fall under the scope of Five Borough Farm? How much of this is about growing and how much is about distribution and access to healthy food? How much is about something else entirely?
That complexity is precisely why we are engaging so many practitioners and advocates in the process. For many urban farmers and gardeners, food access is their main objective: it’s about the fresh kale and tomatoes they grow and the weekly eggs they harvest, for themselves and others in their community. But urban agriculture is about far more than that. Urban agriculture engages people citywide in initiatives to strengthen and improve the social, ecological, and economic well-being of their communities and, by extension, the city as a whole. The scope of Five Borough Farm includes the youth leadership programs, school-based curricula, entrepreneurial rooftop farms, and related infrastructure – from composting projects to farmstands – that make urban agriculture such a powerful, multidimensional movement. The urban agriculture system — and it really needs to be addressed as a system — is a promising model of community development that has the potential to improve many aspects of urban life.

What are your ultimate goals for this project?
I hope that the tools we develop to measure the benefits of urban agriculture will enable gardeners and farmers to more effectively achieve their goals, whether it’s more sustainable food production, youth development, more revenue, or better health for the people in their neighborhood. We expect that reliable indicators of the impact of urban agriculture will also provide evidence to policymakers that urban agriculture is an important part of urban sustainability and should be supported like other municipal infrastructure. A broader goal is to influence City policy so that zoning, local laws, funding decisions, and City programs support the growth of urban food production.

What are the food security issues that urban agriculture can realistically address on a coordinated, large scale?
About three million New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with few or no grocery stores and supermarkets. These residents spend more of their limited income at bodegas and convenience stores for a narrow selection of poor quality food. While urban farms and community gardens are no substitute for full-service grocers, local food production can supplement the food budgets of low-income New Yorkers and enable people to eat healthier meals. A recent study in Philadelphia found that community gardeners in that city produced $4.9 million worth of summer vegetables alone, not including spring and fall plantings or fruits and berries. For low income New Yorkers, the ability to grow fresh, healthy food in the spring, summer and fall can be a godsend.

Five Borough Farm | Graphic by Manuel Miranda | Click image to enlarge

What land availability does New York City have for urban agriculture use? What kind of supply and distribution can be achieved?
Our colleagues at Columbia University are evaluating the productive capacity of open space in New York City to estimate how much food could be grown in the five boroughs. New York City doesn’t have vast unused tracts of land, but we do have quite a bit of open space, including rooftops and some 52,000 acres of yard space. If we gardened just 10% of our yards we could grow enough vegetables to feed 650,000 New Yorkers. One of the key design challenges is how to weave together these small patches of urban farmland to achieve a large impact. BK Farmyards (in Brooklyn) has given this a lot of thought, as have entrepreneurs in many other cities.

But the benefits are about more than just the quantity of food that can be grown. Community gardens make neighborhoods more livable, and also increase property values. Innovative entrepreneurial urban farms create jobs and make underused spaces safe and productive. Non-profit urban agriculture projects teach young people about ecology, food and nutrition, and help build skills and confidence. Productive green spaces keep rainwater out of our sewer system, reduce the urban heat island effect, and recycle organic matter. The impacts are far-reaching — as many practitioners will tell you, urban agriculture is a social justice movement.

What can the City itself do to promote or support an urban agriculture system?
People are already discussing policies about long-term stability for existing urban farmers, the use of vacant and under-used land and rooftops for new farms, municipal composting of organic waste for city gardens, and financial and technical support for urban farm projects that provide substantial social, economic and environmental benefits.

Several months ago, the departments of Parks and Recreation and Housing Preservation and Development issued new rules governing the use of city-owned sites for urban gardens. These were the subject of public hearings and extensive participation by community gardeners, and resulted in the proposed rules being modified. In addition, the City Council’s FoodWorks plan recommends policies to ensure the stability of community gardens, as did Scott Stringer’s FoodNYC. The specific local laws to put the ideas in FoodWorks into effect will be developed and introduced in the coming year or so.

What are the barriers? What can the City do to overcome them?
Policymakers need evidence of urban agriculture’s impacts to move public policy forward — especially in this economy. That’s why the metrics we are developing will be so important. It will help people see the tremendous value of each community garden or small urban farm in more than anecdotal ways. At the same time, we also need a broad understanding of urban agriculture in New York City and how it can best fit into the City’s food system. With this big picture view, people will understand the cumulative impact of hundreds — and potentially thousands — of those small community gardens and farms.

In terms of practical barriers, limited access to land, clean soil, skilled gardeners and farmers, technical expertise and efficient distribution channels all pose challenges. Our research is identifying which are most important and to what extent these limitations restrict urban agriculture’s potential. Like their rural counterparts, urban farmers are able to overcome many obstacles, and the wide range of urban gardens and farms is evidence of this, but the right public policies and targeted support could really scale up the movement.

Five Borough Farm Workshop, December 2010 | Photo by Dan Honey

How does a scaled-up, systematized urban agriculture network accommodate different farming models?
The key is to recognize that urban agriculture is a true polyculture. It ranges from window boxes and planters to multi-acre farms that grow many different crops. The efforts can be led by individuals, non-profits, or public and private institutions, like schools or hospitals. Cities can accommodate the entire spectrum of food production by removing unnecessary barriers and supporting the infrastructure to make diversified food production feasible. This might mean expanding programs to enable the produce from school gardens to be incorporated into school meals, or providing funding for commercial kitchen incubators so that food producers can add value to the food they grow.

The model that is most problematic is the vertical farm. It is highly capital intensive, and material- and energy-intensive as well. Fanciful schemes of high rises filled with tomato plants and pigs just doesn’t make sense from an economic, environmental or social perspective.

Does a city-wide plan call for a market-based system of farming? A more cooperative one? One that is reliant on volunteer networks? All of the above?
My sense is that the most vibrant urban agriculture system will be a civic agriculture system, to use a phrase coined by the late rural sociologist Tom Lyson. It will involve pure for-profit farms that are embedded in their communities, neighborhood-based community gardens run by volunteers, and hybrids — for-profit farms that rely at critical moments on “Crop Mobs” for extra labor, and non-profits that teach young people how to make a buck growing and selling fresh produce.

What’s next for Five Borough Farm?
Within the next few weeks, the Design Trust will release a workshop summary. By March, we’ll have completed about twenty-five in-depth interviews. Our whole team will be working on synthesizing and sharing this information with people in the urban agriculture community. We’re talking to photographers and graphic designers about how to visualize our findings, and we’ll have more events like the December workshop. Ultimately, we’ll end up with a Five Borough Farm publication and a website that we hope people will start using for their projects all over the city.
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Nevin Cohen is Chair of Environmental Studies at The New School, where he teaches courses in urban planning and food systems.  Dr. Cohen’s current research focuses on urban food policy, particularly innovative planning strategies to support food production in the urban and peri-urban landscape, public policies to engage citizens in sustainable food production, urban planning and food access, and civic agriculture in cities and suburbs. He has a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from Rutgers University, a Masters in City and Regional Planning from Berkeley, and a BA from Cornell.

TAXI OF TOMORROW
Want to pick the taxi of tomorrow? The ubiquitous yellow cab is being revamped, and the City is asking New Yorkers to make the final call. At a news conference on Monday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he is seeking the advice of the project’s “most important stakeholders” — New York City residents — to choose between three design prototypes. The City selected Ford, Nissan and Turkish manufacturers Karsan Otomotiv Sanayi & Ticaret AS as the final three contenders to redesign the entire fleet of cabs based on feedback from taxi drivers, owners and passengers. The winning design will be on the streets for the next ten years, though, because the average life span of a taxi is three to five years, cab owners fear that sourcing from one manufacturer could present problems if they fail to steadily supply replacements and parts. Survey takers are asked questions about what they think the priorities of the taxis of the future should be, from fuel economy to electric outlets to accessibility. Need more incentive? Not only will participants be able to influence the design of one of the most iconic symbols of New York City, they will also be in the running to win a year of free cab rides, sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space.
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OPPORTUNITY, MAPPED
The American Human Development Project has created an interactive map (designed and built by Zachary Watson and Omnibus Advisory Committee member Rosten Woo) charting what they call the Human Development Index. Considering factors of health, knowledge and standard of living, the index computes wellbeing and opportunity on a scale from one to ten. The index can be sorted by state, congressional district, metro area, ethnic identity or zip code to find stats on life expectancy, school enrollment, population demographics, income, and much, much more. New Yorkers should be pleased to note that the City’s Congressional District 14 ranks highest on the overall Development Index, with a score of 8.79 (Kentucky’s Congressional District 5 comes in last at 2.82). Well designed and informative, the maps let users explore the facts of interrelated economic diversity and standard of living geographically, and compare their own opportunities with those of other Americans.
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Subway to Secaucus proposal by Steve Lanset and Ralph Braskett | via subwaytosecaucus.com

SUBWAY TO SECAUCUS
There was a lot of talk this week about an idea to extend the 7 train to Secaucus, New Jersey. Planners hoped the 3 billion dollars that was freed up after Governor Christie tanked the ARC Tunnel last month might go to the project, but, according to Jeff Zupin, transportation fellow at the Regional Plan Association, the funds have disappeared and the extension is now being deemed financially unfeasible by local government. Though a popular topic this week, the subway to Seacaucus is not a new concept. The New York Times interviewed Steve Lanset and Ralph Braskett who proposed the idea five years ago. Though not involved with the recent proposal coming from City Hall, Lanset and Braskett “had a hunch that the new plan had borrowed from his older one.”
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SEXTON AS MOSES
Make way for NYU. New York Magazine profiled the school’s president John Sexton this week, boldly comparing him to Robert Moses. Sexton’s expansion plan, known as NYU 2031, will add 6 million square feet to the campus, substantially altering the built environment of Greenwich Village and putting the core of downtown New York on the path to becoming a college town. His idea for the school goes beyond new dorms and research labs – he sees the city and the university as a connected entity and believes the project will catalyze economic and cultural development. This comes to the chagrin of many neighbors and preservationists who don’t see the proposed 38-story hotel and residential hall fitting in with the Village’s historic buildings, and who won a victory last month when the City Council rezoned parts of the West and East Villages instituting an 80-foot height limit. The new code poises both camps for a debate on the character of the Village and the impact of educational institutions on culture in the city.
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SMART SYSTEMS
The Economist recently published a special report on Smart Systems, heralding the “virtualization of the real world.” Though the comparison of these systems to a 1990’s sci-fi movie is an easy one, the idea of information-linked objects has practical ramifications in growing cities, and potential for a more participatory urbanism. Roads and bridges can be equipped with sensors that update data mainframes, alerting agencies when repairs are needed. Through smart phone applications, citizens can download information about services in their area just by snapping a picture of the street, or report on needed improvements throughout the city. And that’s just a start. Though concerns about privacy, security and surveillance make many users nervous, smart systems are on a path to transform our cities, streets, infrastructure and buildings, and the more informed we are about the technology, the better we can engage it. “The biggest risk is that smart systems become black boxes, closed even to citizens who have the skills to understand them. Smart systems will make the world more transparent only if they themselves are transparent.” For more ideas on participatory software in the city, look back at Adam Greenfield’s Omnibus feature on citizen responsiveness and a “read/write urbanism.”

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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.

Screengrab of madeinmidtown.org

Earlier this month the Design Trust for Public Space and the Council of Fashion Designers of America released an initial study of New York’s Garment District called “Made in Midtown.” The study dispelled the myth that the district exists only in name, proving that—despite the area’s faltering manufacturing dominance—designers still rely on the Garment District as a hub for research and development and an integral launching pad for young designers and new labels.

To illustrate the study’s findings a website was created; and it’s definitely worth a visit. (Fair warning: You can lose a serious chunk of your day playing—there’s even something like a comic book!) It’s extremely visual — look for a series of charts, diagrams, and interactive features illustrating various facts and figures falling under one of three easy-breezy categories. They are: (1) What is the Garment District? (2) Why does the District Matter to Fashion? (3) Why Does Fashion Matter to NYC?

You’ll see how New York measures up to Paris and Milan (don’t worry, we kind of win); learn more about the process of fashion and why the neighborhood and other Creative Districts are an important part of the fabric (get it?) of any city; and delve into the minds of some of New York’s most New Yorkiest designers including Jason Wu, Nanette Lepore, Shelly Steffee, and Anna Sui.

Made in Midtown | Full Panel, June 8, 2010 | Photo by Giles Ashford

To get the word out and discuss exactly what to do next with the data, the Municipal Art Society of New York along with the Design Trust held two panel discussions at the School of Visual Arts Theater. The first such event was moderated by the always charming Tim Gunn and introduced by Deborah Marton, the executive director of the Design Trust. Additionally, it featured Sarah Crean from the New York Industrial Retention Network; Eric Gural, executive managing director at Newmark Knight Frank; Michael Meola, attorney and development consultant; fashion designer Yeohlee Teng; and Madelyn Wils of the Planning, Development and Maritime division of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

The second, held a week later, was moderated by Marton (who traded the Louboutins she rocked the previous week for a pair of turbo-fierce Lucite disco pumps) and included Sarah Williams, a co-director of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab and Made in Midtown Project Fellow; Simon Collins of Parsons School of Fashion; Fred Dust of IDEO (who talked mainly about Los Angeles…); Harvey Molotch, a sociology and metropolitan studies expert at NYU; and Andrew Oshrin, president and CEO of Milly (his wife, Milly designer Michelle Smith, was in the audience).

Everyone agreed that the Garment District isn’t dead. A “hub for research and development,” and central to smaller-batch and higher-end production, it also provides the opportunity for a young label, like Jason Wu’s, to go from raw sketches to showroom wholesaling without the massive capital investment or high-volume production required to bring talent in-house or inexpensively produce overseas. The process, next to impossible in cities like Paris or Milan, makes New York “the fashion start-up capital of the world.”

Furthermore, panelists agreed that zoning mandates created in 1987 to stave off real estate pressures and preserve manufacturing space were not working; and that recent controversial proposals for rezoning and/or consolidating the district’s businesses were not the answer. Zoning aside, most panelists also agreed that part of keeping the Garment District vital means improving life on the streets with interactive events and exhibits, beautification, pedestrian friendly features, and increased retail opportunity—improvements aiming to attract designers as well as tourists and residents who don’t necessarily have ties to the industry. Essentially, the area needed to become friendlier, more viable, “cool.”

Crean suggested a system calling for newly installed retail lessees and other higher-margin tenants subsidizing the rents of artisan and production tenants upstairs. Meanwhile, Gural envisioned a strange Colonial Williamsburg version of the Garment District in which tourists could watch newly-ordered clothing being made. Crean’s idea was better received than Gural’s.

Made in Midtown | Full Panel, June 15, 2010 | Photo by Giles Ashford

Collins—whose ties to Parsons and experience in the industry lends him a working rather than scholarly relationship to the area—balked at the notion that increased traffic was part of the solution. “Cool,” he said, creates foot traffic, higher rents, unnecessary retail and espresso bars and sidewalk beautification. Too much cool and the Garment District becomes SoHo—an area so removed from it’s artistic past it’s almost comical. That said, he supports another kind of “cool.” The kind of cool created by a buzzy upstart like Jason Wu basing himself in the area and paving the way for additional buzzy upstarts. And perhaps more importantly, the kind of cool that—through marketing and branding and special hang tags (and, more importantly, tax incentives)—makes producing clothing in the District cool. Using Ralph Lauren as his example, he commented that even if the label decided to produce a tiny percentage in New York (“maybe that tee shirt they make with the stars and stripes on it”) and publicize it, and make it cool, other labels would follow suit. Tradespeople, he said, “don’t need studies, they need orders.” Gee, how does he really feel?

Molotch—awakened by Collins’ frankness, or maybe just going for a laugh—agreed, saying the best way to ease real estate pressures on the area—or keep out the cool—is to stay seedy and reject any and all infrastructure improvements. In other words, “embrace porn.”

Teng, too, can do without the homogeneity cool generally creates. Her nightmare New York is a city of “bankers and brokers;” a place too expensive for upstarts or creative clusters brought up at the second panel. Additionally, and quite practically, she brought up a growing dearth of skilled craftspeople—pattern-makers, pleating experts, textile producers, fabric cutters—that could cripple the industry sooner than condos or Qdobas could. Training programs, she said, need to be created to ensure that designers have access to specific skill sets before an entire industrial sector dies with so many aging immigrant artisans.

Nonetheless, as Collins declared, the Garment District remains “absolutely bloody vital.” His Garment District is the perfect unofficial post-graduate environment for his Parsons students. He noted the relatively recent (and ongoing) successes of womenswear label Proenza Schouler. Founded by Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, two Parsons graduates, the pair simply returned to the businesses they came in contact with as interns to have their lauded initial collections produced. Eight years later the duo is at the helm of American fashion with dresses hanging in Barneys and grazing the backs Chloë Sevigny and Julianne Moore.

Which begs the question: Could Proenza Schouler—or any upstart for that matter—have happened without the support and the resources available to newbies within the loose confines of New York’s Garment District? Possibly, in some form or another, but why fix what’s working so well? Losing or moving the Garment District could endanger New York’s greatest fashion asset: fresh talent, start-ups, The Next Big Thing. We don’t have Burberrys or Guccis or Louis Vuittons, and we don’t have couture (just don’t tell Ralph Rucci that). But, New York’s apparel ecosystem introduced the world to Marc Jacobs and the slew of emerging talents (Alexander Wang, Phillip Lim, Richard Chai, the list goes on and on) who are in line to be the next Marc Jacobs. To that we can pretty safely say: In your face, Milan.

Photographs by Giles Ashford, courtesy of The Municipal Art Society of New York. 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.

Frank Gargione is a freelance graphic designer working within the fashion and publishing industries while studying textile and surface design at FIT. A lover of all things fashion, he is a frequent contributor for Racked.com. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.