Left: constructing a public interest design project in Brooklyn | Right: Bryan Bell leading a workshop and presentation

Before Urban Omnibus went live, we co-hosted a weekend-long event that invited teams to design a project in the public interest and build it from found materials in two days. The event was led by Bryan Bell, on the occasion of the launch of his 2008 book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, which surveys the field of “creative design carried out in the service of the greater public and the greater good.” Bell, founder of Design Corps and co-founder of SEED, has been working towards a better understanding of how design can affect communities and serve the under-served for over twenty years.

His most recent initiative, The Public Interest Design Institute is devoted to educating architects about how to fold public interest design into their practices. Starting next month, the Institute will be hosting two-day training events at universities throughout the country. According to Bell, despite increasing interest from designers, professional schools of architecture have not focussed on equipping students with the unique skills and knowledge relevant to public interest design. Therefore, specific training is urgently needed. With the support of the Surdna Foundation and the Architectural League, the Public Interest Design Institute will hold one of these training sessions at Yale University in January. For more information about the event or to register, click here.

Bell will lead the event with the support of instructors dedicated to public service from around the world, utilizing case studies that adhere to the standards and evaluation metrics set forth by SEED. Participants will earn certification in the SEED process, which means they will learn how public interest design is re-shaping the design profession, how to find new clients embedded within communities, how to identify new fee sources and structures, and how to measure and maximize its positive social, economic and environmental impact on communities.

Public Interest Design Institute at Yale University
January 13, 9am – January 14, 5pm, 2012
New Haven, CT
For more information, click here.

Bryan Bell is the founder of Design Corps, founder of the Public Interest Design Institute, and a co-founder of SEED. Bell has supervised the Structures for Inclusion lecture series for ten years which presents best practices in community-based design. He has published two collections of essays on the topic, Bell has lectured and taught at numerous schools including the Rural Studio with Samuel Mockbee. He has received an AIA National Honor Award in Collaborative Practice. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Cooper Hewitt Museum Triennial. He was a Harvard Loeb Fellow in 2010-11 and a co-recipient of the 2011 AIA Latrobe Prize which is focused on public interest design.

Three weeks ago, Mayor Gilberto Kassab of São Paulo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York met in São Paulo as part of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and shared their particular strategies to meet the challenges of climate change. It’s clear that both mayors take sustainability seriously, and their administrations have adjusted their priorities accordingly.

São Paulo is similar to New York in many ways. Both cities are big and growing. They attract the best and brightest, the dreamers and the strivers, and as a result they have a rich cultural life and diversity. They also both face similar problems, from housing solutions to open space access to efficient transportation.

Everything I think I know about good urban design comes from what I know about New York, and working at the New York City Department of City Planning. But recently, I had an opportunity to work for three weeks with the São Paulo city government as part of a professional urban design exchange organized by SP Urbanismo, a public-private agency under the Secretary of Urban Development. And so, equipped with the principles I’ve learned here — and barely any Portuguese — I briefly stepped onto the front lines of the enormous challenges of rapid and unplanned urbanization.

TRAFFIC
One of São Paulo’s priorities is to mitigate its notorious traffic jams. A Paulistano can spend up to three hours each day waiting in traffic and most of their traffic planners believe that the only way to reduce congestion is by adding more road. However, the land-use planners I worked with see the importance of investing in mass transit, and that adding more road results in more cars and more traffic. We talked a lot about how easily São Paulo could become a walkable city. A walkable city needs to have complete neighborhoods: a concentration of density around mass transit, a mix of uses, innovative architecture and design standards for streets and public space. These are the principles on which São Paulo was originally built.

In São Paulo’s old city center, a mix of Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts buildings crowd together around spacious pedestrian streets and continuous networks of public parks. Trolleys once ran on the tree-lined streets and every apartment building or office building had ground floor shops. In 1940, it was a city of about 1.3 million people living in an area roughly similar to the size of Brooklyn. The city center today retains the idyllic pedestrian-friendly DNA apparent in the grainy photos from the 1930s, but now the retail is low-end, many of the great old buildings vacant and covered with graffiti, and many of the parks have been revised over the years by architects fixated on the texture and plasticity of concrete. Since the 1960s, density has been dispersed throughout the city with no apparent pattern, housing has been separated from other land uses, and traffic engineers have guided the major public infrastructure expenditures to serve the unchallenged primacy of car-based transport.

Currently the planners in São Paulo are proposing several urban redevelopment projects that would recreate this vibrant mix of uses and density around transit. But it’s an effort being met with resistance and fear of change. Packed auditoriums of angry residents denounce the projects in fiery oratory, worried that adding density will add more cars and more traffic, not alleviate them as planned. New York sees its own share of conflict and debate over issues in the public realm, but here the City is working hard to create a mutually-supportive alliance between advocates for a greener city, transit-oriented development and safe affordable housing. The planners in São Paulo need more allies to help them make their case.

OPEN SPACE
Flying over São Paulo, you can see a seemingly endless expanse of city, a wide variety of single family houses and pencil towers. You might notice patches of green around the towers, but you won’t see much public open space. Working with São Paulo’s planners, I began to understand that this pattern of prioritizing private open space over public open space is deeply embedded in their regulations. Setback rules push buildings off the street; parking requirements are uniformly high, roughly one space per inhabitant; most of the city is zoned at a low floor-to-area ratio, between two and four. And there is a growing middle class that wants to live in high rises — which demand substantial parking provisions, security fences and significant open space on the lot, which is offered as a private amenity to the residents. But anyone on the other side of those tall fences is left walking on narrow sidewalks, creeping along what feels like a prison wall.

Mayor Kassab is pushing back against these regulations. He has made open space a high priority, constructing 66 new parks and planting nearly 200,000 new trees in the last five years, a much needed greening. Here in New York, we’ve seen Mayor Bloomberg lead his strategy for New York’s open space with a directive to bring each New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a public park. To achieve that goal, we’ve discovered new opportunities for public space where we can find them: on abandoned rail lines, former roadbeds like Times Square and formerly inaccessible waterfront industrial sites; and have worked with developers to provide high quality, publicly accessible, privately-operated open space.

HOUSING
A third priority for São Paulo is how to provide safe and affordable housing for the estimated three million people who currently live in precarious settlements. These notorious favelas occupy land that is often on steep slopes or flood prone areas. The daily conditions in these homes are fraught with poverty, crime and disease. Seasonal floods frequently cause landslides and lead to dozens of deaths.

São Paulo’s housing agencies are employing two major strategies to address this housing crisis. The first is to bring roads and infrastructure through the existing favelas, a process that the housing ministry calls “urbanization.” This model avoids displacing existing communities as much as possible, yet it fails to provide housing at the necessary scale — the government has set their target at providing one million new units in the next fifteen years. The second strategy is to find a very dense model of housing that can be expediently planned and constructed, safely located, strongly built and easily connected to roads and to the municipal infrastructure. To meet this vast demand, they have adopted a familiar model: “towers in the park.”

In the mid-20th century, Robert Moses and the authors of the 1961 Zoning Resolution adopted the towers-in-the-park model with the stated goal of replacing New York’s slums. But over time we’ve seen the shortcomings of this model. Yes, towers in the park offer great advantages in terms of concentrating infrastructure, and being able to execute projects quickly and affordably. They can also provide individual dwelling units that enjoy a lot of light and air and standardized layouts which simplify the economic model, making them easy to scale and repeat. But these virtues have to be weighed against the vices that we’ve come to know. Building gated housing complexes, cut off from the neighborhood street life, reinforces isolation and creates an insecure environment. New York is now turning towards affordable housing projects that are designed to integrate with the surrounding community to create a stronger sense of public life in the neighborhood and transform the urban design of the area.

RESILIENCE
Public transportation is good for cities… right? That’s something that I thought needed no explanation. But I had a debate recently with my boss, Alex Washburn, about which form of transportation has done the most harm to cities. To me, it’s obvious that automobile-centric urban design wreaked a sudden and complete havoc on the American landscape. It only took one generation for much of the United States to go from towns, farms and railroads to suburbs, strip malls, and interstates. Today, other cities all over the world, especially those that are experiencing rapid economic growth, seem to be following this bad example. As I sat in the back of a cab for two hours on my way to a meeting in São Paulo, I noticed the narrowness of the sidewalks, the absence of pedestrians or bikes, the ubiquitous walls, the apparent single-use zoning all around me. All of this to serve the consumer demand for cars. And it’s happening all over the world. It may be years before these cities feel the full effects: the degradation of civic space, the expense of providing services and infrastructure over a widely sprawled area, and the increase in chronic diseases because people walk less.

Even so, Alex says that airplanes may be guiltier, because for many years precocious urban designers (like me) have flown all over the world and put forward their big ideas to politicians and builders. You could call this “flyover urbanism.” On one such mission, Robert Moses came to Brazil in the 1950s to help plan highways, helping to set the direction of its current urban design trajectory.

But planning and prodding can only do so much, and no city can “leapfrog” past the mistakes others have made, or copy their successes. Great cities will always be shaped by forces of economy, politics, nature and pure chance. There is not one course of history which all cities will follow, nor one destination we all seek to reach. Also, cities don’t leap.

Cities might not leap, but every city has its own flow. The forces that govern that flow — “why” we do things — might be similar between places, and we may even learn together the “how,” but we must be wary of copying the “what.”

São Paulo has an elevated highway called the Minhocão that runs through a neighborhood that has strong potential for redevelopment. There is some debate about the utility of this highway to the traffic network, and so it has been closed on Sundays to allow people to use it recreationally. I was asked by officials if I thought this could be São Paulo’s High Line. With this internationally-acclaimed example in mind, architects and engineers have begun to make plans for capping the elevated highway with a park, thus creating even more obstruction of light and air to the public realm below. Trying to recreate the High Line on the Minhocão is copying the “what.” Great urban design projects cannot be dropped from an airplane. But perhaps principles can parachute in to offer a little help. The principle of the High Line is that we can create an invaluable resource out of something that had been thought of as an unwanted remnant of another age.

I have wondered if what Tolstoy famously said about families is also true of cities: that they are unhappy in different ways but happy in similar ways. It would be a boring world if all cities were the same. But it is not our particular unhappinesses that make us different. In fact, our problems seem to be getting more and more universal. What makes us unique is the way in which we deal with these problems, using our own local ingenuity. I once heard a story about an artist who lived in a beautiful, but sparsely furnished, house for very little rent. The landlord gave him a deal because once a year the house is completely under water. The genius is in the adaptation.

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All photos by Thaddeus Pawlowski.

Thaddeus Pawlowski is Associate Urban Designer for the Office of the Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning. He works on large scale neighborhood and infrastructure projects including the redevelopment of Penn Station area and Hudson Yards. He has previously worked at the Office of Emergency Management where he developed “What if NYC…” a design competition for post disaster urban housing. He earned a Master in Architecture and certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Pittsburgh.

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.

Last week, I found myself in an almost endless queue of people hopeful to see a panel of international urban dons assembled at the London School of Economics to celebrate the launch of the book Living in the Endless City. This follow-up to 2007′s The Endless City is again edited by Deyan Sudjic and Ricky Burdett and charts the work of the Urban Age Project over recent years, bringing together the sometimes disparate communities of what Sudjic calls “observers, shapers and professionals.” The blockbuster line-up of academics, mayors and architects who write on Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul were represented on the panel and assembled in congregation.

Over the course of the evening, a unifying theme — or, perhaps, a unifying language — emerged despite the broad range of speakers and disciplinary approaches: specificity; the differences between cities as opposed to their commonalities. The globe-trotting group, who might be accused of “seeing cities from thirty thousand feet,” all honed in on what they called the DNA of the individual city: the built, social and economic variability of a particular place. It felt like a departure from the tired categorizations of mega, global and world cities and Burdett illuminated the quantitative distinctions with a succession of typically hard-hitting statistics which never fail to make his narrative powerful. Although he prefaced the evening with the customary cautionary tale of the rates of urbanization and prospective densities, there was an uncustomary tone of compromise or reconciliation. He asks, riffing off the old saying: “Can you build a place like Rome in twenty years? With its accumulated complexity and sense of accretion? The answer is No.” The built response to the demand placed on city-making is necessary and compromising but, as the opening line of the book suggests, “Cities are political programs made visible” and therefore always up for debate and subject to alternatives.

Wolfgang Nowak, Caglar Keyder, Joan Clos, Ricky Burdett

Joan Clos, a former mayor of Barcelona six months into his new role as executive director of UN-Habitat, chose to speak not about one of the cities or indeed continents presented in the book. Instead, he took the opportunity to pose what he feels is one of the most burning questions of the moment. Speaking on sub-Saharan Africa, he asked, “How are we going to deal with a continent that is going to double its urban population without industrialization in the next 15 years?” The uniqueness of this particular instance of mass urbanization, one unaccompanied by the industrialization that has traditionally instigated it in other historical contexts, proved a very interesting point to reflect on. Clos distinguished between the agrarian shift taking place in China and the migrants that arrive in the African city with no promise or even real hope of a job. Newcomers arrive to the informal city not as a platform from which enter the formal city but because the slums themselves represent urban opportunity. In the context of the continued urbanization of poverty, Burdett and the book emphasize the potential — and responsibility — that planners and urban shapers have in giving these cities a form that recognizes its impact on the ecology of the planet and the social well-being of the people who live there.

"Connecting by Sea" from Living in the Endless City

Mumbai Kamathuria density diagram from Living in the Endless City

Professor Caglar Keyder was invited to speak on Istanbul, a city whose cliché tagline of bridging East and West he immediately re-spatialized as one which in the 1980s regained its role as a central place in the region, a centrifugal urban force upon the former Soviet States, the Balkans and the Middle East which surround it. “It’s Istanbul (Not Globalization),” as Hashim Sarkis’ contribution to the book is titled, is a nice phrasing of the particular type of social and economic transformation the city has undergone. Keyder says that, while in its penultimate transformation Istanbul was a third world metropolis, with 60% of housing “illegal” and the majority of the economy informal, now a successful formalization of the built environment and economy has taken place. While being a city of considerable size before, it has increased by 1300% in the last century through previously informal and more recently formal ways. However, he suggests that Istanbul is succumbing to the homogenizing typologies of speed and a “Violence of Change,” as Asu Aksoy sets out in the book, which tells a familiar global story.

Saskia Sassen’s comments on the evening provided an economic twist on the homogenization of built form. She says of the office typology of central cities: ‘There is a homogenization of the visual order. No matter how brilliant or original the architect’s shaping of a building, you smell the homogeneity and there is no way around that.” She suggests that the “office” typology with “office work” out-sourced to back offices at the edge of the city hides the nuanced and specialized differences that occur inside. She proposes that the deep economic history of a place actually matters and that this should be made clear not just in the form of the city but in how cities compete. In a global or even national order the economic or productive differences should be a bartering tool to ask more of multi-national companies and sustain a real politics among cities.

Gareth Jones gave a compelling presentation on the associational life of young people in São Paulo and Latin America through their relationships in and to the city and representations of it. In his research he seeks out the dramatic variability of the social life of the city and implores that the impulse or event of originality in the city must be maintained even if its potential for change is as yet uncertain. Richard Sennett extended Jones’ argument and suggested that the money that accompanies most styles of development result in over-determined form of the high-rise type, and that this form impairs the originality that Jones admires. He asked how more complexity and more depth can be afforded to the act of making. His closing comments were in some way a response to the time question on Rome which Burdett posed at the beginning. Sennett noted a paradigm shift in what we mean by design and what everyone thinks of as design in the city, moving away from the notion of finished objects to an ongoing process of making and re-making: endless city-making.

Living in the Endless City. The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society
Published by Phaidon 2011
Speakers: Dr Joan Clos, Dr Gareth Jones, Professor Caglar Keyder, Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett
Chairs: Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
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Claire Mookerjee is an artist and urbanist living in London.

All photos courtesy LSE Cities.

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

A full house greeted Henry N. Cobb on April 23rd, at the Center for Architecture in honor of the prestigious AIA 25 year Award, this year presented to the John Hancock Tower, designed in 1976 by Cobb and his firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. The acclaimed architect made a rare appearance to discuss “The Skyscraper as Citizen: Reflections on the Public Life of Private Buildings.”

The lecture began with the proposition that skyscrapers owe more to their surroundings than mere façades. Cobb, who has designed over forty skyscrapers (at least thirty of which have been built), has been haunted throughout his career by the status quo office building. His approach to design embraces waging a grand battle against the innate character of skyscrapers and revisioning how civically responsible skyscrapers should be.

Through an examination of the John Hancock Tower, Cobb found that buildings are a physical manifestation of confluent histories or narratives. He told the story of the city, the site, the client, and himself, and how all four narratives intersected in a building design that struggled to pay deference to the site, its history, and the need for interaction with surrounding buildings.

This tower was the first of Cobb’s buildings in his hometown of Boston, although not his first design. He saw this as a major turning point in his career — an initial resistance against some of the basic assumptions of Modernism, and his first attempt toward mediating misguided skyscrapers. To him, tall office buildings are inherently selfish and self-absorbed. They house private industry in huge volume, a tiny percentage of which is given back to the public at the ground level.

Place Ville-Marie, formerly the Royal Bank Tower | Image courtesy wallyg via Flickr

Schooled in architectural Modernism, Cobb initially reinforced such ideology in his building design. The modern skyscraper’s outer form was entirely dictated by private interior concerns, so that the façade provided transparency, but no accessibility. Add to that Modernism’s complete contempt for site, place, and total divorce from history, and you have selfish buildings — Cobb’s Royal Bank of Canada tower, renamed Place Ville-Marie, in Montreal included.

The design for the John Hancock Tower was a result of Cobb’s denouncement of selfishness in built form. His deference to the site and surrounding buildings and their histories shaped the tower, so that the exterior was no longer dictated by the interior, at odds with traditionally Modernist structures. He paid close attention to how the building met the ground and how it interacted with the pedestrian space of the square. He traced these attempts to design skyscrapers that give back to their surroundings, that were perhaps less selfish than they otherwise could have been. He formally designed tall office buildings against the grain of a typical skyscraper.

Goldman Sachs Building at 200 West Street, NYC. A mural by Julie Mehretu engages the public with the building. | Photo by Flickr user Andrew Russeth

Cobb spoke of the Goldman Sachs building at 200 West Street and how it was shaped in plan by the convergence of two alternate street grids, acknowledging both the history and future of the World Trade Center site. 200 West Street defers to its surroundings, making it unobtrusive, a very ‘self-conscious’ skyscraper. Security was also a primary concern in its design, which tends to make skyscrapers less accessible and separates them more from the public sphere. But by thoughtfully incorporating these concerns in the design of 200 West Street, the security process was made part of the entry sequence without limiting the structure’s approachability.

A building’s civic responsibility is complex in Cobb’s interpretation of the skyscraper. Due to size and privacy necessitated by function, the skyscraper will only ever be accepted as part of the city if it is designed to be quiet, to hide itself, to construct itself around the history of its site, and to be shaped by the histories of the surrounding buildings. It is surprising that, as someone who has built so many skyscrapers and is particularly known and influential for their design, Cobb has spent the bulk of his career loathing them, and trying with all his might to fight against what he saw as the inherent character of the skyscraper.

Cobb’s vision of what was owed to the city seemed to be more informed by a frustration with privately-interested form and the void between public and tower than a prescriptive advancement of idealistic design. His great success in building responsible and responsive high-rises lends itself to a discourse opened only in response to a typology and framework that has challenged him throughout his long career.

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Jessica Cronstein is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City.

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.

Floating Pavillion, Rotterdam, NL, 2011 | Photo by Flickr user William Veerbeek

CLEAN TECH ROTTERDAM / GREEN TECH BROOKLYN
Bonnie Harken, the president of consulting group Nautilus International, gave a talk with Piet Dircke of the Rotterdam-based design/consultancy/engineering firm Arcadis and Christopher Zeppie of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the Brooklyn-Rotterdam Waterfront Exchange vision for Sunset Park and Red Hook, a new program set to share knowledge about and strategies for economic development and environmentally sustainable industry in port areas. The City of Rotterdam has embarked on an ambitious climate change adaptation program that gave rise to some compelling and pseudo-radical ideas for water-based development, some of which are now being applied internationally.

One of the most inventive waterfront development ideas discussed was the potential use of barge-based structures, which are already being tested in Rotterdam and are being considered for inclusion in the Sunset Park and Red Hook visioning plans. Dircke discussed Rotterdam’s already implemented series of hydrofoil ferries, floating learning labs (transparent geodesic domes on the water) and luxury residential structures that support the city’s new Research, Design and Manufacturing (RDM) Center. This concept can inform plans for other uses as well. For example, Dircke suggested barge-based sports fields and stadiums for future Olympic Games as a solution to the wasteful creation of structures that so often lie unused in cities once the games are over.

TECHNOLOGY & PLANNING
There was a lot of buzz on the growing nexus between planning, technology and social media tools — especially the role open-source sites may play in the future of advocacy, government transparency and the sharing of best practices in planning. Judith Layzer led a great panel on the current work of MIT’s Urban Sustainability Project to develop an open-source, wiki-like resource for monitoring municipal sustainability programs nationally. Although the project is still a work in progress, the team has working papers for feedback and collaboration and is looking for research partners, and is definitely something to keep an eye on.

The entire weekend tapped into the growing bubble of “tech-ish minded” (young) planning professionals who seek to capitalize on the potential technology has for planning, and the skills of what Frank Hebbert of OpenPlans dubs IMMBYs (I Mapped My Back Yard) or “data and tech savvy non-planners, better informed, more technically capable and more agile than the ‘pros’.”

Plannovation’s graphic on most often used words in tweets at the conference using Wordle

SOCIAL MEDIA
A few workshops were dedicated solely to the usefulness of social media tools, like FourSquare, Twitter and Facebook, and real-time blogging in the planning world. New methods of technological communication are being seen as catalysts to participatory planning and valuable tools for public interaction with people who can’t or don’t attend public meetings. Twitter was being promoted full-scale this weekend with a whole APA booth dedicated to setting up planners with new Twitter accounts. The #apa2011 hashtag was full of good information over the weekend and was used for conference-goers to reflect and gather more information than was possible by simply attending a handful of panels. Kristen Carney (@cubitplanning) published a summary of all the Twitter activity at the conference on her blog Plannovation, with an in-depth look at the weekend’s Twitter trends and a slideshow documenting a complete Twitter transcript from the event.

Jennifer Evans Cowley of Ohio State University shared her take on the role digital micro-participation plays in Austin, Texas on transportation planning methodology. Another popular panel, with speakers from PlaceVision, SeeClickFix and Urban Interactive Studio, asked “What’s New for Planning Technology” and discussed the use of crowdsourcing, social media, interactive data and other digital tools in planning today.

ArcGIS | via esri.com

Some of the most well-attended sessions were offered by Esri, the makers of ArcGIS, to present their developments in mapping and data visualization. Highlights included a workshop on GeoDesign (ArcMap’s software tool combining urban design and mapping) and one the growing use of GIS as a public participation tool. The use of GIS in public participation has already taken off in NYC, one example being the Municipal Art Society’s CitiYouth program, in which local high school youth attend community board meetings to facilitate public discussion using GIS.

DIGITAL TOOLS FOR PLANNING
Harvard’s political philosopher Michael Sandel kicked off the weekend with a keynote calling the field of planning “a noble profession,” responsible for undoing the erosion of civic-mindedness in America today. As technology increasingly intersects with most aspects of daily life, it was heartwarming to see so many planners excited about the age of digitally-aided advocacy, communication and participatory planning and prepared to use these tools to further that noble ideal.

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For more on the conference’s other topics, check out APA’s coverage and Marisol Pierce-Quinonez’s recap on SustainableCitiesCollective.com. Then explore for yourself some of the many planning tools that were discussed at APA2011:

Cityscape & Mapping:
OpenTripPlanner
By the City/For the City, a new initiative by the Institute for Urban Design and PPS
Urban EcoMap
City Forward
Grown in the City’s Interactive Urban Agriculture Map

Citizen Complaints:
Open311
SeeClickFix

Fundraising:
How to Raise Money for New Urban Planning Technology

ArcGIS extensions:
CommunityViz
Marine Map
I-Tree
CITYgreen

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Alicia Rouault is a Project Associate for Urban Omnibus, a Fellow at the Pratt Center for Community Development, and Masters candidate at the City and Regional Planning Department at Pratt Institute’s Program for Sustainable Planning and Development in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

Tokyo, 2010 | Photos by Vishaan Chakrabarti

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

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

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

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

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

Farmland, Japan, 2010 | Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IDEO is a company that bills itself as a design and innovation consulting firm. The company initially found fame in the design of objects, particularly our physical interfaces with technology, like the design for Apple’s first mouse. But it is probably just as famous for being a cool place to work or for its evangelism about “design thinking,” which CEO Tim Brown describes as a problem-solving methodology founded on observation, storytelling, visual thinking, iterative prototyping, and experimentation. The firm has applied this approach to everything from Digital Experiences to Organizational Design.

In the last ten years, IDEO has branched into physical environments, starting with hospitals and hotels and eventually expanding into a “Smart Space” practice that Omnibus contributing editor Andrew Blum profiled for Metropolis Magazine in 2006. According to Blum, the approach of the Smart Space group is “part anthropology (with IDEO’s trained anthropologists), part site exploration (with IDEO’s trained architects), part documentary filmmaking (with IDEO’s trained media artists), … to seek the qualitative essence of the community from the perspective of the community.” This fall, IDEO is applying much of this same kind of thinking to the challenges and opportunities found in conditions of poverty. But rather than spinning off a new category of consulting, they are launching a whole new organization, IDEO.org, a non-profit that aims to “spread human-centered design through the social sector.” If you want to get involved, apply for a residency with IDEO.org. Applications will be accepted through April 18, 2011:

IDEO.org is seeking individuals with proven leadership experience in the social sector, business world, or design industry with a passion for improving low-income communities and spreading human-centered design. Residents will join senior designers from IDEO to form IDEO.org’s interdisciplinary design team for an 11-month period.

But first, what is human-centered design exactly? Check out IDEO.org executive director Jocelyn Wyatt’s answer to that and a few other questions below.

Jocelyn Wyatt, Co-lead and Executive Director of IDEO.org

What is human-centered design? How does it differ from other disciplines or categories of design? At what scales does it operate?
Human-centered design is an approach to problem solving that is rooted in what matters to people. It brings together what people want and need with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It integrates generating, building and testing ideas to create meaningful solutions.

The tools and approach of human-centered design can be applied to a range of challenges – from designing products and services to systems and businesses. IDEO.org will aim to spread human-centered design through the social sector with the goal of improving the lives of people in low-income communities.

In what ways does IDEO think cities can be improved?
Our approach to answering that question would be to spend time understanding the needs and desires of the people living in urban areas. There are a number of current trends related to improvement of cities that we are inspired by – things like provision of public services to people living in informal settlements, affordable private schools, urban gardens, and improved public transportation systems.

Are the “challenges related to poverty” defined by clients working in low-income communities? If so, who are the clients? Who are the stakeholders? And who is a part of the design process?
IDEO.org will work with non-profit and social enterprise partners to undertake poverty-related design challenges. We will select partners and projects based on the potential for implementation, scale, and impact. Projects will typically be funded philanthropically, by foundations, or by individuals who support the effort. We will likely work with a range of partners, including on-the-ground non-profit organizations, funders, local public sector groups, and private sector partners.

How will IDEO identify the challenges it will work on?
Health, water and sanitation, agriculture, financial services, and gender equity are some of the areas where IDEO.org will seek to have impact. Before taking on a challenge, we look at whether or not the place or people benefiting from the project is a low-income community or group; the partner organization is a nonprofit, foundation or social enterprise; and the result of the challenge is tangible – a product, service, business, or system – that will directly benefit the community or people for which it was designed. The projects IDEO.org undertake will be defined in conjunction with our partners to ensure they will be implemented and are truly demand-driven.

Wait, what?

Checking in | Photo by David Bellona

I attended South by Southwest Interactive for five days and experienced what it’s like to live in a truly connected environment. Every venue and every street had free and open wi-fi so I never worried about being able to access information using my mobile device. Every digital interaction felt easy, and every person had the power to download, create and share content with the tap of a button. The Austin Convention Center (ACC) — which covers four floors across four city blocks and offers its own dining facilities, lounges, power stations and transportation system — is ready to support the mass of people who have come to SXSWi expecting a comprehensive and immersive experience. For five days, we are living in a miniature city, an “app city.”

Austin is a relatively small urban scene with a population of about 800,000. The influx of 18,000 people in attendance for SXSWi transforms the city into a mecca for designers, developers, journalists, media representatives and, perhaps most importantly, entrepreneurs who are there to introduce a product they hope will become the next big thing. A trade show acts as a center of commerce where vendors and sponsors can share their latest work with attendees, an opportunity to show the human side of their digital products. There’s something new on every corner, with each scheduled time slot providing at least twenty different options for a panel, lecture, conversation or party.

Photo by David Bellona

Group Texting
The minute I landed in Austin I started downloading some of the new apps I’d heard about. Like many other groups, my friends jumped on the major buzz at this year’s conference: group texting.

Because of its simplicity and good design we decided to use GroupMe, an app that “lets you effortlessly group text with the people in your life that are important to you. It’s your real-life network, in your pocket. It’s totally free and works on every phone.”

The value of the service was clear the first time we lost each other in the giant SXSWi crowd. By sending a single “Where are you?!” homing beacon SMS, I could immediately locate my missing group members. Our text-based chat evolved to more interesting topics, including banter about entertaining presentations, crowded lunch spots and the quality of free party venues.

Time and Place
Like many conferences, a constant chatter of tweets created a back channel of commentary for the presentations and social events. The conference organizers assigned a unique hashtag for each speaker’s session to help audience members keep track of the conversation. Most attendees used the location-based apps Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places to check in to venues, report activities and locate friends.

SXSW as seen through Instagram | Photo by Katie Koch

On-The-Fly Creation
The ease of online publishing has made mass communication accessible for more people, and now that concept is being translated for our mobile devices. One of my favorite apps, Instagram, is a photo capturing, filtering and sharing app. It enables any user to take professional looking, retro-styled pictures and share them with their online networks. Instagram’s popularity reflects the growing trend of using on-the-fly creation and sharing tools to turn everyone into an amateur photographer, journalist or designer.

QR Codes
Paper fliers were plastered to every wall in the convention center, many of them featuring QR codes for passersby to scan and gain access to information. A QR code is a square barcode that can be read by camera phones and QR code readers to point a viewer to specific web or SMS content. A QR code is best used as a quick gateway to unexpected content. A great example at SXSWi was from Skype, who posted small fliers with a QR code and the handwritten words “scan me for a good time.” Upon scanning, I was quickly directed to the Skype SXSWi party page with all the details for when, where and how I might have a good time.

Photo by David Bellona

The Game Layer
The topic of “gamification” as a method for user engagement was on the agenda for many presenters at the conference. In his keynote, Seth Priebatsch asserted that we’ve just left the “decade of social,” predicting the next decade to be “the age of the game layer.” The success of badges and points in Foursquare has inspired a new class of designers interested in leveraging the competitive benefits of games into their app designs. A new topic in game design was transmedia gaming, or the idea that games don’t have to solely exist on a device or screen. They can involve real people in the real world, using mobile devices as a channel to connect individuals and groups. The idea of getting users off the screen and into the world creates new opportunities for engaging people within communities in a city.

From Local to Hyper-Local
Services like Yelp and Groupon, and the most recent iterations of apps like Foursquare, are now providing deals and community feedback for local venues, sparking the larger trend toward hyper-local community awareness. Users can read reviews from only their friends and trusted networks and get directed to services in their immediate area only. It’s a move away from the overwhelming flow of content we receive every time we use a social media app by enabling users to filter their feeds down to only the most important or relevant stories from their vicinity.

Apps in the Cities of the Future
With all of these new tools in our hands any person can observe and interpret the environment around him, instantly creating and sharing new ideas. In the near future the way we use our mobile devices will be less focused on content consumption and more focused on creation. It’s not important what we create or how we do it, but that we’re able to share it with the communities that matter most to us. In context of a city that means our hyper-local community: the neighborhood around us.

As cities adopt free, public wi-fi, more people will have the ability to create and share, and the need for better filtering will grow. The feed from our hyper-local groups could be the only content we’re interested in receiving, helping us create meaningful relationships in our physical communities through a virtual medium.

Overall, many of the over 18,000 patrons to this year’s SXSWi came to Austin expecting to see a new company or new product that would change their perception of interactivity. This year’s conference was hyped as bigger and better than ever before, but without any groundbreaking new release, all that potential energy fell flat. I hope next year’s festival trims some of the hype so it can reestablish its position as a hotbed for new ideas.

SXSW (South by Southwest) Interactive took place in Austin, Texas from March 11-15, 2011.

Austin Convention Center | Photo by David Bellona

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Katie Koch is a web designer from the Midwest, by way of Brooklyn. She has designed and developed interactive projects ranging from corporate and nonprofit websites, online communities, mobile applications, and user interface designs. A typographer at heart, Katie is a details and information enthusiast whose passion for simplicity drives every aspect of her work in design and user experience.

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.