Writers (of both the fiction and non-fiction varieties) have engaged with the urban landscape for as long as we’ve had cities, and Urban Omnibus has enjoyed sharing writerly perspectives, including those of Richard Sennett, Dalton Conley, Andrew Blum and Suketu Mehta, each of whose books and articles rigorously examine some complexities of the urban condition. But what happens when you ask writers to engage with a medium, like blogging, not known for its sustained attention to detail or its ability to render nuance? What happens when you try to turn blogging into a new mode of creative urban investigation? With that in mind, Urban Omnibus asked each of the Open City organizing fellows to respond to a series of questions. We were interested to know how each of them personally defines urban change, goes about investigating it, finds blogging a useful medium of investigation and communication for this topic, and, finally, what each of them has found most surprising or notable in his or her explorations. Read selections from their answers below.

Or, read each blogger’s individual Q&A and check out some of the blogposts they’ve contributed to this collaborative project. Click here for Deanna Fei, a novelist who grew up in Flushing; click here for Jerome Chou, an urbanist with diverse experiences in community organizing, landscape architecture and public space advocacy; click here for Cristiana Baik, a writer with a background in affordable housing and architecture; click here for Peggy Lee, a poet, performer and youth worker who lives in Sunset Park; and click here for Sahar Muradi, an Afghan-American writer who has worked in both international development and youth development in Afghanistan and the United States. -C.S.

Everything Frosted | photo: Tom Giebel

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Deanna Fei

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been exploring my own hometown of Flushing, Queens, through various personal lenses: the Tai Chi scene that includes my dad, photo essays of Main Street by my sister, my own emotional associations to place names in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and pretty much anything else that moves me.

How do you define urban change?
When my parents first moved to the house where I grew up, my sister and I used to get taunted for being the only “Chinks” on the block, which was traditionally Italian. By the time I was in high school, the line for my bus, the Q26, was almost entirely composed of Asian Americans, and one day, I heard the (Caucasian) bus driver mutter, “Another handful of macaroni.” That line took me some time to parse (especially given the originality of the racial slur, not to mention its Italian roots), but I think these episodes, taken together, encapsulate so much of urban change: how rapidly it happens, how an entire population can go from alien to dominant, the dance between what is gained and what is lost… (To read more from Deanna Fei, click here).

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Jerome Chou

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I wanted to be in the area as much as possible, so last November I subletted my Brooklyn apartment and took a short-term room in the heart of Fujianese Chinatown. Living in the neighborhood makes it easier to talk to people. I’ve met Tai-chi students, Chinese opera singers, and soccer players in Columbus Park; restaurant workers and owners; heads of Business Improvement Districts and community design centers; a teacher with a Chinese American youth drum, fife, and bugle corps; A young woman who sketched on a napkin for me how her family fit eight people in two bunkbeds when she was growing up. The Chinatown Progressive Association is working with a group of local high-school and college students in a program called Shared Stories; I’m working with them to develop their own narratives about being a recent immigrant in Chinatown.

Whenever possible, I tie these personal stories to all of the forces that shape neighborhoods that are not immediately visible or accessible to most people: zoning, subsidies for new residential development, rent control laws and affordable housing guidelines, demographic shifts and real estate values. I think people often feel overwhelmed by neighborhood change because it happens quickly and seems outside of anyone’s control. But in fact there are many specific decisions and policies and campaigns that have an enormous influence on neighborhood change. That means there are tools people can use to guide change. And there’s a huge opportunity for urbanists from many disciplines (architects, landscape architects, planners, graduate students, graphic designers, photographers, etc.) to research and synthesize all of these complex and often controversial issues, to create visually engaging materials that make these issues more accessible to people who are most affected by neighborhood change, and to shape ongoing debates.

For instance, Community Board 3 just approved development guidelines for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, including several large parcels along Delancey Street that have been empty for 43 years. The guidelines propose a range of market-rate, moderate-income, and low-income units. Manuel Miranda and I produced an infographic juxtaposing this proposed mix against the incomes of Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. On a separate topic, Yeju Choi and I created a map of all of the bank branches in Chinatown, and I wrote about what the concentration of banks in the neighborhood means and where all of that money is going.

So this is an open call disguised as an answer to your question! I would love to hear from Urban Omnibus readers who want to get involved (opencityjc[at]gmail.com)… (To read more from Jerome Chou, click here).

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

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Cristiana Baik

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I think talking to people — local residents — is pretty much the heart of the blog, and probably the best way for us to think about the way urban changes have affected local communities. The process of interviewing has also been the most difficult aspect of the project for me — finding a non-invasive way to access people’s stories without feeling like you’re objectifying them. The role of a privileged writer coming in to tell someone’s story just really doesn’t jive with me, hence I am always a bit tentative/paranoid about how I go about conducting interviews or writing about interviewees, etc. On one hand, and for various reasons, I haven’t found it very plausible to get “life histories” of individuals. I don’t think the project necessarily asks or lends itself to this kind of process — it’s a daily blog, which, more often than not, calls for interviews that are tongue-in-cheek. As a writer, I think this degree of freedom/”openness” is one of the most interesting aspects of the project… (To read more from Cristiana Baik, click here).

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Peggy Lee

What have you particularly enjoyed writing about?
As one example, karaoke — a weekend passion of mine —  is one of my starting points. I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Open City has given me the opportunity to be more intimate and critical with my daily life, with its dailiness. I learn something new everyday walking in Sunset Park, my neighborhood. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying thinking about how karaoke sound and music night life in Chinatown connect to larger circuits of diaspora, immigration, in-translation, class, race, and, of course, urban change… (To read more from Peggy Lee, click here).

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Sahar Muradi

What have you noticed in particular?
What I’ve noticed and what I’ve enjoyed so much about this project is that people generally want to talk and tell you their stories. When I told my landlord about the project, she started slipping newspaper clippings under my door. This is her dad’s building, constructed in 1900 and the only one on the block with its original door and wallpaper. Ms. Fedorko is very proud of it and very interested in the history of the LES. A few weeks later, she eagerly brought me old city plans and guidebooks, with ominous “DEMOLISHED” stamps across the pages. It was the same with my friend Naomi, who relished giving me a tour of her neighborhood in Chinatown and its hidden art galleries, or Mr. Leung, who talked about the history of his shoe cobbling stand on Forsyth St. I’ve enjoyed meeting people and reflecting on the fact of our two lives intersecting in this city… (To read more from Sahar Muradi, click here)

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To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

For Open City, Peggy Lee has written about the food politics of the lunchtime rush and the Chinatown Soundscape Series, which investigates karaoke and gentrification,  among other topics. Find out more about her approach to this process in the interview below. For an overview of the project, click here.

Bruce Lee restaurant in Sunset Park | photo: Peggy Lee

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’m really interested in the blurry boundaries of crossovers: language, accent, race, immigration paths, sound, veneer, and etc.

How do you define urban change?
Urban change could be a time unit. Measured by changing storefronts, a nightlife scene, an avenue, it is a process that happens both at a snail’s pace and in a blink of an eye.

What have you particularly enjoyed writing about?
As one example, karaoke — a weekend passion of mine –  is one of my starting points. I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Open City has given me the opportunity to be more intimate and critical with my daily life, with its dailiness. I learn something new everyday walking in Sunset Park, my neighborhood. Lately, I’ve really been enjoying thinking about how karaoke sound and music night life in Chinatown connect to larger circuits of diaspora, immigration, in-translation, class, race, and, of course, urban change.

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
My point A is investigating my own daily habits and surroundings. Really, where else can you start? I’m getting to know the karaoke jockeys who work at my favorite venues in the three Chinatowns, which I write about in my Chinatown Soundscape Series on Open City. Song is place, identity, and it’s fun to think about gentrification through the medium of music and musicality in the context of nightlife.

As a writer and performer, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of or communication about this topic?
Blogging is useful because of the potentials for connection. The blogging world is such a cornucopia of personal thoughts, trivialities, and angles, both political and popular. It can be a bit of a black hole sometimes, easy to get lost in. That’s why intention is so important when you’re cruising through or writing in the blogging world.

A drawing from Peggy Lee's personal journal

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Peggy Lee resides in Sunset Park, Brooklyn where the neighbor’s cursed rooster crows at 5:30 in the morning, a neighborhood cat ritually pisses at her window, and she has had many Tecate-driven conversations interrogating “life” on her roof top over-looking the Upper New York Bay and Lady Liberty. It is home. Her sensitivities to location, space, place, threaded by sonic experience are owed to her erratic moving history. Peggy admits being touched deeply by the lagging grunge scene she experienced in St. Louis and later, the hip hop circuits of LA & the Bay Area. She loves how questions about her childhood begin with “military brat or foster care?” Neither. She graduated with her M.A. in Performance Studies from New York University and a B.A. in Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a poet, performer, youth worker, and hustling, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed writer in New York City.

Bush Terminal | photos: Christiana Baik

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
Specifically, I’m looking at Sunset Park, and although I initially started in Sunset Park’s Chinatown, my most recent research and conversations have veered towards the waterfront, especially the Navy Yard and Bush Terminal.

How do you define urban change?
In the past, I’ve defined “urban change” as a euphemism for gentrification. During this project, some of this view has shifted into something less pessimistic — meaning, urban change can describe shifts beyond the influences and impacts of real estate development. Demographic shifts, for example,  don’t always coincide with socio-economic changes. Most of the former definition (gentrification) comes from having lived in neighborhoods with very different political and demographic profiles that underwent significant urban changes definitively shaped by real estate development (including Echo Park in Los Angeles and Hyde Park in Chicago).

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
One way I’ve gone about writing on Sunset Park is simply walking around. Right away I noticed — at a time when I knew nothing about Sunset Park — the demographic divisions: 2nd, 3rd Ave. is mostly industrial/post-industrial (warehouses, Bush Terminal, Navy Yard), with a very small arts-related contingent (like Light Industry and the artist studios), 4th, 5th, 6th Avenues are heavily Latino (Dominican, Mexican), while 7th and 8th Avenues (around the late 30 and on) are spines of a growing Chinatown. It made me wonder when these demographic changes began to occur, which then led me to investigate recent city-wide revitalization plans that has, in some ways, helped shape these shifts.

I think talking to people — local residents — is pretty much the heart of the blog, and probably the best way for us to think about the way urban changes have affected local communities. The process of interviewing has also been the most difficult aspect of the project for me — finding a non-invasive way to access people’s stories without feeling like you’re objectifying them. The role of a privileged writer coming in to tell someone’s story just really doesn’t jive with me, hence I am always a bit tentative/paranoid about how I go about conducting interviews or writing about interviewees, etc. On one hand, and for various reasons, I haven’t found it very plausible to get “life histories” of individuals. I don’t think the project necessarily asks or lends itself to this kind of process — it’s a daily blog, which, more often than not, calls for interviews that are tongue-in-cheek. As a writer, I think this degree of freedom/”openness” is one of the most interesting aspects of the project.

As a writer with a background in anthropology and affordable housing, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of or communication about this topic?
I like blogging because it’s so different from formalized papers (or a well “crafted” poem). Obviously, you don’t want to spew out wrong information and dive into writing posts that are poorly informed! Yet, at the same time, blogs are a bit less formal and allow the author to float ideas out there: well formulated speculations, I would say. It’s also an interesting venue for people to read your work. Most of my writing has been intended for small, pretty specific audiences — either other poets or academics. But Open City appeals to a broad range of folks, from urban planners, architects, to activists, as well as artists and writers. It’s pretty cool.

What have you noticed in particular? From your observations so far, what jumps out at you? What have you particularly enjoyed writing about? What has most surprised you about the neighborhood(s)?
Specifically, with Sunset Park, I think the less obvious things have surprised me. For example, my expectation was that most of my posts would center around Sunset Parks’s growing Chinatown (which I still think is incredibly vital, important to think and write about), which hasn’t been the case at all. In this sense, it’s the way that I’ve experienced most writing projects: it’s the unexpected turns that are almost always what makes the work more interesting. Veering into Bush Terminal, the Navy Yard, has been surprising and interesting. And I knew almost nothing about it before Open City.

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Cristiana Baik currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, she concentrated in Anthropology and Gender Studies. She received her MFA in Creative Writing (2009), and is currently a graduate assistant, student at NYU. Her work has been published in various literary magazines, including American Letters & Commentary, Jacket Magazine, the Boston Review, and Conjunctions, and her chapbook The Victory of the Strange Heart Beating, was published by Blue Hour Press in 2009.

It was in Chicago that Cristiana first became interested in issues of urban planning. As a college student, she studied and lived in South Africa and Israel, to get a broader sense of how land distribution and power politics creates different forms of consciousness. She continued with her work, when she became a project management associate at the Los Angeles Community Design Center (now Abode Communities), a nonprofit affordable housing developer and architecture firm. She worked on various issues at LACDC, from relocation, mixed income housing, to demographic research.

Deli Gentrification | Photo courtesy of Jerome Chou

How do you define urban change?
Some basic questions that I’m trying to answer: What are the Lower East Side and Chinatown like now? How is that influenced by what has happened in the past? How are people trying to shape the future of these neighborhoods? Where these questions intersect is a definition of urban (or at least neighborhood) change. I hope all of the posts we’re writing contribute to an ongoing, working definition.

What have you been looking at specifically? And where? How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I wanted to be in the area as much as possible, so last November I subletted my Brooklyn apartment and took a short-term room (at double the rent) at 11 Monore St, in the heart of Fujianese Chinatown. In January I moved again to the former Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, a 100-year building converted to apartments on Henry Street, near the E. Broadway F train station.

Living in the neighborhood makes it easier to talk to people. I’ve met tai-chi students, Chinese opera singers, and soccer players in Columbus Park. Restaurant workers and owners. Heads of Business Improvement Districts and community design centers. A teacher with a Chinese American youth drum, fife, and bugle corps. A young woman who sketched on a napkin for me how her family fit 8 people in 2 bunkbeds when she was growing up. The Chinatown Progressive Association is working with a group of local high-school and college students in a program called Shared Stories; I’m working with them to develop their own narratives about being a recent immigrant in Chinatown.

Whenever possible, I tie these personal stories to all of the forces that shape neighborhoods that are not immediately visible or accessible to most people: zoning, subsidies for new residential development, rent control laws and affordable housing guidelines, demographic shifts and real estate values. I think people often feel overwhelmed by neighborhood change because it happens quickly and seems outside of anyone’s control. But in fact there are many specific decisions and policies and campaigns that have an enormous influence on neighborhood change. That means there are tools people can use to guide change. And there’s a huge opportunity for urbanists from many disciplines (architects, landscape architects, planners, graduate students, graphic designers, photographers, etc.) to research and synthesize all of this complex and often controversial material, to create visually engaging materials that make these issues more accessible to people who are most affected by neighborhood change, and to shape ongoing debates.

For instance, Community Board 3 just approved development guidelines for the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area, including several large parcels along Delancey Street that have been empty for 43 years. The guidelines propose a range of market-rate, moderate-income, and low-income units. Manuel Miranda and I produced an infographic juxtaposing this proposed mix against the incomes of Chinatown and Lower East Side residents. On a separate topic, Yeju Choi and I created a map of all of the bank branches in Chinatown, and I wrote about what the concentration of banks in the neighborhood means and where all of that money is going.

So this is an open call disguised as an answer to your question! I would love to hear from Urban Omnibus readers who want to get involved (opencityjc[at]gmail.com).

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

As someone who’s worked on diverse issues in contemporary urbanism (housing, organizing, landscape, public space, etc.), in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of and / or communication about urban change?
Blogging has a taint of obsessiveness, and of being on the margins. Those are very good things when it comes to covering neighborhood change. It’s relatively easy and cheap to set up a blog. People in any neighborhood can do it. They can cover something that might seem unconventional or not “newsworthy,” but actually contains a great story that would’ve otherwise gone unnoticed. And neighborhood blogs are rooted in that place. Sometimes mainstream journalists cover something, then it’s off to another story somewhere else. Neighborhood blogs develop deep local knowledge, and that’s all they focus on.

What have you noticed in particular? From your observations so far, what jumps out at you? What have you particularly enjoyed writing about? What has most surprised you?
One of the best things about Open City is you have an excuse to talk to people and ask around about things that you’ve always been curious about, but never acted on. My Brooklyn neighborhood is also gentrifying, and my apartment is upstairs from one of those outpost bodegas that sell organic kombucha long before the demographic that buys those things makes a more permanent mark on the built environment. I’ve always wondered how bodegas gentrify, and how you can map neighborhood change on their shelves. So when I found the one bodega in all of Chinatown that sells $8 pints of ice cream, I had an excuse to interview the owner. (Turns out, she went to Whole Foods every day for months, watching what people bought, to figure out what upscale items to stock in her store.)

Or, to take another pet topic: Why are there so many new galleries in the area? It’s startling to walk down Orchard Street and see them all—18 in a 3-block stretch. If you look at the years these Orchard St galleries opened, almost all of then are less than two years old, which corresponds to the opening of the New Museum in 2007. But there are other factors as well. The increasing number of art school programs and graduates. The financialization of the art market, so that it’s an investment opportunity very much like real estate (and is in fact bundled like mortgages). And then there’s something less quantifiable: many  gallery workers and owners talk about the neighborhood just like new residents do—they like the feel of being in a neighborhood interspersed with undergarment shops and printers, not a gallery district like Chelsea.

One last surprise: I’d always believed the cliché that New York changes so fast, it leaves no trace of history behind. Completely untrue. Evidence of the city’s history is everywhere, in the built environment and in the stories of people who live here. Once you start paying attention, it practically hits you over the head.

"Art for the Evicted" by Dennis Thomas and Day Gleeson | courtesy of Jerome Chou

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Jerome Chou is the Director of Programs at the Design Trust for Public Space, a nonprofit dedicated to improving New York City’s public realm. Prior to joining the Design Trust, Jerome worked at Field Operations as a project manager on Freshkills Park; as a community planner for Baltimore City Department of Planning; as an organizer for ACORN and the Working Families Party; and as an assistant editor with the nonprofit publisher The New Press. He has degrees in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Jerome has organized and produced numerous public space interventions. Most recently, in response to budget cuts in 2009 that eliminated Sunday public library services throughout Brooklyn, he helped create Branch, a temporary Sunday library in a parking lot in Fort Greene.

Store window during Lunar New Year festivities | Photo: Jessica Fei

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been exploring my own hometown of Flushing, Queens, through various personal lenses: the Tai Chi scene that includes my dad, photo essays of Main Street by my sister, my own emotional associations to place names in Ha Jin’s A Good Fall, and pretty much anything else that moves me.

How do you (personally) define urban change?
When my parents first moved to the house where I grew up, my sister and I used to get taunted for being the only “Chinks” on the block, which was traditionally Italian. By the time I was in high school, the line for my bus, the Q26, was almost entirely composed of Asian Americans, and one day, I heard the (Caucasian) bus driver mutter, “Another handful of macaroni.” That line took me some time to parse (especially given the originality of the racial slur, not to mention its Italian roots), but I think these episodes, taken together, encapsulate so much of urban change: how rapidly it happens, how an entire population can go from alien to dominant, the dance between what is gained and what is lost.

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
I take urban change as the given, the great, constant stream that we often forget to notice. And so any moment that I document, any snapshot that I take, is one drop of that stream frozen in time, held up as a tiny prism.

As a writer, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of or communication about this topic?
As a novelist, I work in long periods of isolation, always with the sense of building brick by brick by brick. Blogging, especially a collaborative blog such as Open City, provides a wonderful sense of immediacy. It’s an instant conversation. And I love the freedom of knowing that, on any given day, my little contribution can be just that. I don’t have to know how it fits into the grand scheme of things; I can trust that it’s part of a collective effort, that the interests and creative energies of my fellow bloggers and our readers and myself all add up to something bigger together.

As someone who grew up in Flushing, what can you tell us about your  personal perspective on the difference between noticing urban change in the place of your upbringing versus investigating it as part of a investigative writing project?
This is a really interesting and complicated question. I remember how my friends and I used to feel when a mob of Mets fans or tourists boarded the 7 train, gawking as if they were heading into some wild territory. Even now, I still feel irked if I sense that Columbus-style tone of discovery in, say, a Times review of a Flushing restaurant. For immigrant communities, there can be a sensitivity to simply being noteworthy. You know, why is it blog material for a group of middle-aged Chinese Americans to gather in Kissena Park and practice Tai Chi? To them, it’s just their morning routine. I get that, even as I’m drawn to investigating their personal histories, their daily journeys, what defines their place in this city. I don’t have any easy answers. I just know that this is a tension that often emerges, bidden and unbidden, in my writing.

Tai Chi in Kissena Park | Photo courtesy of Deanna Fei

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

Deanna Fei is the author of the novel A Thread of Sky (Penguin Press, 2010), the story of a family of six Chinese American women who reunite for a tour of their ancestral home. The New York Times Book Review calls it “timeless and of the moment,” while the Chicago Tribune says, “This is one of those rare novels that delivers on the promise of its opening pages. This summer, no smart woman should leave on vacation without it.” A Thread of Sky was recently named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and an Indie Next Notable Book.

Deanna was born in Flushing, New York, and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Chinese Cultural Scholarship. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches in public schools and is at work on a new novel. To read her blog, reviews, and more, visit deannafei.com.

Chinese New Year Parade | Photos: Sahar Muradi

What have you been looking at specifically? And where?
I’ve been looking up and around and inside—I’ve been trying to take note of interesting things, things that poke out, or don’t, the poetry in taking a walk or talking to a shoe cobbler or listening at a bus stop, all the pixels that make up the city.  That’s what I’m interested in: the multiplicities, the layers, the many ways we identify ourselves and relate to one another as neighbors and fellow NYers, how we rub up against each other, how our histories and maps meet, how, for example, a Bengali by way of Dubai is managing an Afghan restaurant in Flushing and marketing for the Chinese (my next post)!  The stories are vast and incredibly intertwined.

Because I live right there, I often write on the LES, with occasional trips to Flushing.

How do you (personally) define urban change?
I have trouble defining it, and I think that’s what attracted me to this project. The shape of Open City had a lot questions and a lot of room to it. I think the term “urban change” cannot be contained to demographics and landscapes shifting according to economic/political/social forces, cannot be whitewashed “good” or “bad”. Then this blog and all the work and talk on gentrification and urban change would be flat. It is contentious, it is complex, but the profound thing is how the topic is engaging people with their city, their government, their neighbors

How are you going about investigating urban change in this project?
My approach is varied, from walking and observing to interviewing people to reaching out to local organizations.  I also enjoy reading other local blogs, like the Lo-Down, the creators of which I recently had the opportunity to interview.  I think one thing that sets Open City apart from the many blogs chronicling different neighborhoods is that, coming from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, our approach is not from the perspective of city planners or sociologists or even community organizers, but from that of creative writers and artists. So our posts swing from poetry to personal narratives to soundscapes—they offer a different way of investigating the topic.

As a writer and as an engaged local citizen with a background in international development work, in what ways do you find blogging a useful medium of investigation of and / or communication about this topic?
I find blogging useful in a number of ways. As a writer who sits long with her words, it’s helped me to turn things over, to be timely, to be playful, to not toil with ideas of perfectionism, let alone grammar!  As a Gemini, it appeals to my infinite curiosities – posts do not need to be related or linear.  As someone who is keen on being engaged with her local environment, blogging prompts you to open your eyes and ears wider, to talk to people you might not have. It’s really a very connecting thing, even if your connection is over a disagreement about how you see the situation.

What have you noticed in particular? From your observations so far, what jumps out at you? What have you particularly enjoyed writing about? What has most surprised you about the neighborhood(s)
What I’ve noticed and what I’ve enjoyed so much about this project is that people generally want to talk and tell you their stories. When I told my landlord about the project, she started slipping newspaper clippings under my door. This is her dad’s building, constructed in 1900 and the only one on the block with its original door and wallpaper. Ms. Fedorko is very proud of it and very interested in the history of the LES. A few weeks later, she eagerly brought me old city plans and guidebooks, with ominous “DEMOLISHED” stamps across the pages.  It was the same with my friend Naomi, who relished giving me a tour of her neighborhood in Chinatown and its hidden art galleries, or Mr. Leung, who talked about the history of his shoe cobbling stand on Forsyth St.  So I’ve enjoyed meeting people and thinking of the fact of our two lives intersecting in this city like that.

Menu at Kabul Kebab House | Photo: Sahar Muradi

To find all full length interviews, including author bios and links to blog posts, click here.

From Kabul to Elmhurst, from rural Massachusetts to the East Village, Sahar Muradi writes to make sense of a snaking path. She is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) and on the editorial board of the forthcoming Boundaries and Borders, An Anthology of Women of Color.  For several years she worked in the nonprofit sector in Afghanistan, and most recently ran a high school youth development program in NYC, including at Pace High School in Chinatown. She received her MPA in international development from NYU and her BA in creative writing from Hampshire College.

Spanish-born, Rotterdam-based artist Lara Almarcegui’s Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River — at Ludlow38 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — carves an interdisciplinary niche at the intersection of photography, urban studies, and performance — a terrain every bit as ambiguous and enticing as the urban spaces documented in her work.

For her first solo exhibition in the U.S., Almarcegui turns her attention to the Flushing River in Queens.  The river bears the scars of last century’s discarded urban agendas: partially buried under Flushing Meadows Corona Park, sliced up by multi-lane freeways, fragmented and mostly abandoned following the decline of industry along its banks.  Almarcegui has exhaustively researched and photographed its litter-strewn remains, and her photos are displayed in a hypnotic slideshow projected on the gallery wall.  They are also printed, with explanatory text, in a pamphlet which gallery visitors are “invited to pick up [to] explore these sites at their own leisure”.

Guide to the Wastelands is the main attraction here, but taken in context with the other works on display (particularly Construction Materials Sao Paulo City, in which she catalogs the relative volume of building materials used to construct the city), the selection reveals a broader interest in the physical stuff that composes the built environment, and the voids that remain when it is removed.  Mostly, this interest is communicated through photographic documentation.  But the inclusion of a portable brochure reveals a hint of the political in Almarcegui’s didactic intent, as if to say “take a guide, get out of your apartment and go see the site for yourself — before developers drop cheap condos on it.”

This gesture places places the work in a lineage of conceptual artists who engage audiences by prompting behavior; Almarcegui’s approach is simply re-tooled for the soft-power, facebook era.  The more we know about the Flushing River (or the Gowanus Canal or Pennsylvania Avenue Landfill), the more likely we are to advocate for its sensitive reweaving into the urban fabric of New York.  Compared to the work of other international artists, Almarcegui’s work is not glamorous.  But by exposing the forgotten spaces in our midst, it just might be more important.

Lara Almarcegui
on view April 17 – May 16, 2010
Opening Hours: Friday – Sunday, 1–6pm and by appointment

All images: Lara Almarcegui,
from Guide to the Wastelands of Flushing River, Queens, New York City, 2010
courtesy the artist and Ludlow 38, 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.

Travis Eby is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Architecture. He loves his stoop in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

Not too long ago we introduced you to a new project conceived by Omni-collaborator Jesse Shapins and a group of dedicated media artists – namely Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann and James Burns – called Mapping Main Street. Well, several thousand miles later, the team has built an expansive and flexible online platform for a collaborative documentary media project that will eventually provide a vision of America unlike any we’ve seen before. Users from across the country have contributed photos via Flickr, and audio and video content via Vimeo. The only requirement is that all media “must be recorded on a street named Main.”

Over 400 hundred Main Streets have been documented so far. Which leaves about 10,000 to go. Get involved; each borough of New York has a Main Street. Brooklyn’s got a two-block long stretch in Fulton Ferry. In the Bronx, Main Street is a tiny residential lane near Locust Point and the Throg’s Neck Bridge. In Staten Island, Main Street runs across the southern tip of the island from Tottenville to Conference House Park. Roosevelt Island, weirdly, has a couple different Main Streets. There’s even one on Governors Island. And then there is the fabled subject of this week’s feature: the Main Street that’s the bustling terminus of the 7 train and the central commercial spine of Flushing, Queens.

We recently caught up with Jesse and Kara to talk about the project and where it fits into a constellation of issues including new challenges to political rhetoric, new directions in media production, and new lessons for urban planning and design.

The project was conceived last year in the context of the election. As an image of Main Street was being bandied about by politicians (often as a foil to Wall Street), the team was struck that the reductiveness of such political imagery goes unchallenged and is perpetuated by the media. Main Street is not, in Jesse’s words, “some abstract, general place; there’s a street named Main in almost every city and town across the nation!” So they went about setting up a way for citizens to complicate the presumptions that the image of Main Street, USA provides an accurate shorthand for a certain set of uniform values, economic interests and political opinions. The project’s goal is not to redefine the image of Main Street, but rather “to suggest a critical attitude toward the language and rhetoric around you.”

Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members. It just might also suggest a critical attitude toward conventional attempts to identify community priorities around such often contentious issues as growth, change, context, preservation and development. Jesse notes that “since the 1960s, since the rise of advocacy planning and its critique of modernist planning, there has been a strong emphasis on democratic and participatory processes.” But these structures have, for the most part, “emphasized deliberative decision-making, rather than expressions of experience or identity. Mapping Main Street adds another vector to the participatory process that allows for more subjective visions from community members or stakeholders.” And indeed, some communities out there are starting to use collaborative media production to inform policy goals. Case in point: Starksboro, Vermont, where an artist-in-residence assembled a team of students (elementary through college) to use the arts to draw the community into a conversation about the town’s future and support efforts to create a masterplan.

And the production of the media itself has broader applications. Schools, youth programs and local radio stations across the country have been getting in on the action, encouraging participation in the Mapping Main Street project both as a way to build storytelling skills and also to get youth to engage more deeply with place. The four portraits of Flushing’s Main Street below were produced by high school students from the East-West School of International Studies and the Frank Sinatra High School for the Performing Arts as part of WNYC’s Radio Rookies program. Over the next three years, the Mapping Main Street Project will roll out a distributed production model, partnering with a wide variety of NPR affiliates and educational institutions to document every single Main Street in the country. But while infrastructure to support that effort begins to develop, the first phase – producing the participatory platform, setting the tone and getting the word out – will conclude with an exhibition created with Red Antenna (which just happens to be the creative agency that designed and developed urbanomnibus.net) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago early next year as a part of the Third Coast Filmless Festival. Just as the website enables thematic relationships between Main Streets to emerge – in addition to the geographic relationships – the exhibit is certain to make manifest the elegance of the Mapping Main Street project: to infuse a cliché with all the contradictions and diversity of America itself.

And that diversity, of course, isn’t just apparent among small towns in different parts of the country. Big cities, like ours, have them too. And sometimes, as in the case of Flushing, Queens, street names harken back to a time when outer borough villages were independent of the growing metropolis that would eventually subsume them. Flushing, in fact, was one of the first Dutch settlements on Long Island way back in 1645. It was the site, according to New York City historian Kenneth Jackson, of the birthplace of religious tolerance by decree in America. These days, the neighborhood is more commonly associated with Queens’ incredible ethnic diversity and large foreign-born population. Flushing’s Chinatown “now rivals [Manhattan's] Chinatown as a center of Chinese-American business and political might, as well as culture and cuisine” according to the Times’ Kirk Semple. It’s a place of steam buns, old movie theaters, ethnic perceptions and interactions, and some particularly intriguing (and dapper) characters. -C.S.

Steam Buns ‘R’ Us from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Main Street Cinemas from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Culture Talk from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Searching For Main Street’s Flushing Pimp from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

Mapping Main Street is created by James Burns, Ann Heppermann, Kara Oehler, and Jesse Shapins. Production help from Ian Gray, Josie Holtzman, Sara Pellegrini and Baughman Reinhardt. The project features new original songs by High Places, Chain and the Gang, Jason Cady and The Hive Dwellers. Radio Rookie Short Wave stories in Flushing, Queens are reported by Tracy Leon, Edwin Llanos, Rachel Temkin, Helen Peng, Andrea Torres, Rayon Wright, Alexis Gordon, Hawa Lee and Melissa Best and produced by the Mapping Main Street team with Sanda Htyte and Veralyn Williams. The website was designed by the Mapping Main Street team and Local Projects.

The first phase of the project is produced through the generous funding of Maker’s Quest 2.0, an initiative between the Association of Independents in Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and KUOW’s Program Venture Fund. All broadcast radio stories aired on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.