Yesterday’s protest of the Atlantic Yards groundbreaking seems to have received almost as much media attention as the groundbreaking itself – one eye-witness estimated the press-to-protester ratio outside Freddy’s bar as nearly 1 to 1. And we admit, we were so taken with the bobbleheaded masks that we failed to assess what this groundbreaking actually means in the context of a project where the meaning of each projected dollar or job is hotly contested. Thankfully, Atlantic Yards Report, as always, presents a measured and comprehensive account of the events that took place yesterday both inside and outside the tent.

This week brought news that the city is taking the reins of the Brooklyn Bridge Park project from the state after years of struggles and delays while the two sides attempted to partner on the development. The city is now considering ways to bring new funding streams in — including an idea to bring a Floating Pool back for permanent installation.

The New York Times opened its “Taking Questions” series to inquiries about the Gowanus Canal’s designation as a Superfund site. Answering is Jack S. Nyman, the director of the Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute at Baruch College, CUNY, who initiated a study in 2009, to be released next month, entitled “Reconsidering Gowanus — Opportunities for the Sustainable Transformation of an Industrial Neighborhood.” Questions are closed, but the three part post of Nyman’s answers is worth a read.

The New York Times reports that the city has finally agreed to a settlement with workers whose health was damaged while cleaning up the wreckage of the World Trade Center after September 11th.  The survivors will be allowed access to a $23.4 million insurance account. The decision comes as a relief for many, but for others it was too little, too late.  One of the main witnesses is already dead from cancer tied to the toxic fumes at the site.

On Tuesday, NYCDOT submitted two projects to provide safer bike and pedestrian connections on the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge. The proposals include the addition of new curbside bike routes that circumnavigate around the treacherous Delancey Street, and a raised, planted center median on Bowery between Canal and Division Streets, which would alleviate the congestion of the highly trafficked highway while providing safer crossways to pedestrians. Both proposals were approved by the CB3 committee.

As you’ve probably noticed from the ads littering the landscape of the New York streets, the census season is upon us.  This season is not quite like the others, though — this decade’s census is largely being promoted by local governments instead of the feds. As Governing magazine notes, this sets up a new dynamic and new incentive to stand up and be counted.  Local municipalities stand to gain thousands of dollars in federal funding for each additional person counted.  To paraphrase a recent Prince Street subway ad, the census will deliver better healthcare, better education and even better transportation to New Yorkers.  The census is still hiring and pay starts at $18.75/hr for census taker.  Count and be counted.

One city who the census surely has not benefitted is Detroit. Having lost 50% of its population over the past half century, what to do with the sagging city has been a hot topic of debate lately. Since Detroit became the poster child for post-industrial American city, seeing its population drop from a peak of 2 million to about 900,000 today, no one has known quite what to do with the blocks of valueless houses and factories. An article in Fortune explores a new proposal that calls for letting the city go to seed — literally.  Money manager John Hantz wants to turn broad swaths of suburban neighborhoods into the largest urban farm in the United States and possibly in the world.

At the VOLTA art fair last weekend, artist Jan Vormann showed New Yorkers how to patch up our city’s cracks. With LEGOs. Check out INHABITAT’s slideshow of his charming installations throughout the city.

Image via Inhabitat

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

Taco Bell sign in Georgia

A few days ago I wandered through a gigantic Barnes & Noble in a Baltimore mega-mall. Overwhelmed by the acreage and options, I drifted down the aisles: Literature. Astrology. Manga. Cooking. Investing. When I saw a section labeled ‘Urban Fiction’, I got excited and rushed toward it, imagining a bookshelf bursting with paranoid novels by JG Ballard, Don Delillo, Luc Sante, and Georges Perec. Instead, the shelves were lined with pulp paperbacks: Ride or Die Chick 2, Thug Lovin’ and The Dopeman’s Wife. It was a sharp reminder that the word ‘urban’ is remarkably elastic.

Urban. Is it a positive or a negative word to you? Does it conjure images of a bustling business center or grim housing projects? Does it describe a physical environment or does it suggest a lifestyle?

I often wonder how growing up in a Detroit suburb defined — and distorted — my perception of the city. Although we lived only seven miles north of Detroit, my parents rarely went downtown in the 1980s. I remember the ker-chunk of the doors locking whenever we crossed Eight Mile Road. “It’s safer,” my dad said. And so I began to conjure elaborate and bloody scenarios of masked robbers ripping open the doors of our Pontiac and dragging us onto the pavement. This was my introduction to the city.

In high school, I snuck into Detroit every chance I got. Sometimes I went to late-night parties in clubs and factories. More often, I simply drove around aimlessly and looked at things (much like I do these days, now that I think about it). The city was forbidden and therefore fascinating. After a few successful trips downtown, my childhood fear of the city was replaced by fetishistic teenage awe: the city was exciting, aspirational, and (to deploy another tricky word) underground. Although my sense of all things ‘urban’ became positive, it remained warped and unrealistic until I actually lived in a city. I wonder how this experience compares to someone raised in New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Imagine being a kid with a MetroCard, a lot of mobility, and no fear.

Urban decay. Urban radio. Urban legend. Urban slang. Urban renewal. Urban chic. ‘Urban’ is a screwy word, loaded with axe-grinding and assumptions. We bring our personal baggage to it. Same with ’suburbia’, ‘rural’ and ’sprawl’. As Robert Bruegmann writes, these terms aren’t so much “an objective reality as a cultural concept”. Writing about the repopulation of the Lower East Side in Sprawl: A Compact History, Bruegmann argues:

Gentrification at the center and sprawl at the edge have been flipsides of the same coin. In a typically paradoxical situation, no matter how much the new, more affluent residents profess to like the ‘gritty’ urban character of the place, so different in their minds from the subdivisions of the far suburbs, what makes the neighborhood attractive today are less the things that are actually traditionally urban but those that are not. The most important of these are sharply lower population densities, fewer poor residents, less manufacturing activity, and the things that the Lower East Side finally shares with the suburbs: reliable plumbing, supermarkets with good produce, and a substantial cohort of middle-class residents.

It’s a provocative comparison, although Bruegmann’s confusion of ’traditionally urban’ with ‘poor’ is a red flag. Bruegmann downplays the reasons people enjoy living in the Lower East Side (and he seems primed for a cage match with James Howard Kunstler). Plumbing and produce aside, I believe people move to cities for three obvious reasons:

1. To be freed from the demands of the car
2. To enjoy dignified building stock.
3. To be close to other people (and hence have more options for work, food, friends, etc.)

The last item is the most important. As William H. Whyte observed in his series of groundbreaking films from 1979 called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, “The number one activity is people looking at other people.”

Watch the entire series here. It may seem a little old-timey at first, but stick with it. After five minutes, Whyte’s narration hits a stride that becomes oddly soothing and addictive. Many thanks to Candy Chang and Jan Chipchase for turning me on to Whyte.

Whyte’s work endures because he connects distinct urban behaviors to the shape of our buildings, plazas, and sidewalks. He connects social behaviors to physical space and vice versa. There is no agenda with Whyte. There is no baggage if you stay curious.

This post originally appeared on KinoSport, the notebook of James A. Reeves. Reeves is a writer, educator and designer. He is currently working on a book about America called ‘The Awful Making of an Optimist.’ He lives in Greenpoint.

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.