WHY’S EVERYONE HATING ON CHRIS WARD?
Michael Powell, Gotham columnist for The New York Times, questions the accuracy and consistency of calls for reform at the Port Authority issued by Governors Christie and Cuomo in the face of what Chris Ward, the former head of the bi-state agency, managed to achieve at Ground Zero in his four-year tenure. In the article (but not in regional politics) the final word goes to Mayor Bloomberg, who dismisses the way an audit ordered by the governors characterizes spending under Ward’s leadership, pointing out that the “site is perhaps the most complex construction project in the history of the world, legally, politically, engineering-wise.”

US INTERSTATES, TUBE-MAP STYLE
By systematically compressing distances and limiting all angles to 45 or 90 degrees in his map of the London Underground in 1931, Harry Beck, an engineering draftsman who devised the scheme in his spare time, revolutionized urban cartography and created an icon of modern design. New York’s answer to the diagrammatic Tube map, designed by Massimo Vignelli in 1972, was passed over in favor of more geographic fidelity in the current version, designed by Michael Hertz in 1979. But the influence of Beck’s design still looms large in information graphics, and this week Co.Design highlights a smart and useful take on the US highway system whose clarity benefits from the Tube map’s principles of simplicity and elegance.

WHAT SPELLS ROMANCE BETTER THAN “AN INTERACTIVE, URBAN EMOTICON?”
Times Square has never been high on subtlety, and the architectural installations that appear when Valentine’s day is nigh — part of the robust public art program that we explored with Glenn Weiss last year – are no exception. In years past, designers of the iconic heart have included Gage / Clemenceau and Moorhead & Moorhead. This year, Bjarke Ingels has assembled a heart cube out of 400 special LED-filled tubes to create what Architizer has called “an interactive, urban emoticon.” So for those of you who like a little public art with your romance, bring your valentine through Father Duffy Square. Check out photos on The Observer.

DESIGNING GOVERNMENT SERVICES
When Laura Forlano investigated the emerging field of service design in 2010, the clients cited as the profession’s early adopters were primarily in the private sector: finance, health care, media. But often the services most in need of a design tune-up are those provided by government. This week in The Architects’ Newspaper, Branden Klayko looks at the work of a new non-profit called the Public Policy Lab to “to improve interactions between public services and those served by them through research, advocacy, and technical assistance.” First up, an “out-of-the-box” collaboration with the City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development and Parsons’ DESIS lab to streamline how the agency interacts with developers, property owners and residents. The Public Policy Lab also has its sight set on improving user experience at the DMV. We wish them luck.

MAKING PLANNING POPULAR
This week we heard from Shin-pei Tsay about how urban planners could intervene directly in neighborhoods, just as artists and architects have increasingly found ways to do in recent years. Meanwhile, BLDGBLOG points to an exhibit that recently closed in London that aims to make planning not only more relevant and responsive to community needs, but also more popular, principled and understood.

"Wendy" HWKN's design for MoMA / PS1 | Image courtesy of HWKN via ArtInfo

WARM-UP 2012 DESIGNERS ANNOUNCED
While the summer may seem impossibly far away, the announcement this week of the winners of MoMA / PS1′s coveted Young Architects commission means we now know what one recurring summer-in-the-city tradition will look like in 2012: HWKN’s design, “a doozy, a mass of fabric spikes christened ‘Wendy,’” has been selected for its innovative merger of green engineering — the structure will literally clean the air — and the exuberant shelter and shade it will provide for summer party-goers. The air cleaning function is accomplished by coating the structure  with Titania nanoparticles, in which sunlight “triggers a catalytic and chemical reaction that neutralizes nitrogen dioxide.” Read a Q&A with the designers, Mark Kushner and Matthias Hollwich, on ArtInfo.

EVENTS and TO DOs

FORECLOSED OPENS
Next Wednesday, the Museum of Modern Art’s anticipated new exhibition, Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, will open to the public. On view will be the work on five interdisciplinary teams of architects, urban planners, ecologists, engineers, and landscape designers — led by MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang, WORKac, and Zago Architecture – who worked in public workshops at MoMA PS1 “to envision new housing and transportation infrastructures that could catalyze urban transformation, particularly in the country’s suburbs.” In advance of that event, Jeanne Gang and Greg Lindsay, two members of team Studio Gang, authored an op-ed in today’s Times that looks at the under-reported phenomenon of new immigrants in suburban America as an inroad to understanding the role — and responsibility — of design and urban planning in redressing some of the damage wrought by the foreclosure crisis and our country’s extravagant land use patterns that precipitated it.

GRID LOVE CONTINUES…
Many thanks to the 87 people from around the world who submitted to our first essay competition, which urged writers to reflect on the Manhattan street grid as a paradigm, rubric or muse for urban life. We’ll announce the winner(s) early next month, but in the meantime, if your fascination with the grid and its evolution over the past 200 years is not yet sated, you have until April 15th to check out a pair of exhibitions at the Museum of City of New York (organized in collaboration with the Architectural League), and next week, the Museum is hosting a panel discussion with traffic and planning experts called “Gridlock!: Congestion and Flow on New York City Streets” that will look at the reshaping of traffic flows in the city thanks to the introductions of pedestrian malls, bike lanes, bus-only lanes and other traffic engineering innovations. Wednesday, February 15th, 6:30 pm at the Museum of the City of New York. For more information or to book tickets, click here.

LIVE INTERVIEW @ STUDIO_X: STANLEY GREENBERG
When we spoke with Stanley Greenberg about his photographs of infrastructure and construction projects, he mentioned his forthcoming book Time Machines, which chronicles the machinery of large-scale physics experiments around the world. The book is now available, and  he’ll be sharing stories, images and reflections on his process next week. Join him Thursday, February 16th, 6:30pm, at Studio-X New York.

DELANCEY UNDERGROUND / LOWLINE
That same night, the Tenement Museum is hosting Dan Barasch and James Ramsey to discuss the ”history, current state, and potential future of the abandoned trolley terminal below Delancey Street” and to ask if “it can be transformed into a cutting edge subterranean green space for the Lower East Side.” Thursday, February 16th, 6:30pm, at the Tenement Museum.

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

INTRODUCTION
People become urban planners because they want to make life in cities better.

But change comes slowly. And planners often find themselves pigeonholed into repetitive or isolated work as technocrats whose role is to move along processes defined by local laws and regulations, department bureaucracy, or a particular professional culture.

Could planners reshape the process through which they apply their skills? Though architects and artists commonly use their skills to intervene in troubled cityscapes, planners are rarely asked to exercise their creativity in the same way.

My colleague Frank Hebbert and I were mulling over this question at the very same time that a group of concerned citizens in New York City were struggling to make changes in the deadly thoroughfare that dominated their commute: Queens Boulevard. So we asked ourselves: What might a planning intervention look like? Would it be possible to structure the process so that urban planners could offer their unique expertise directly to complex problems in cities?

To help answer these questions, Frank and I launched Planning Corps, a network of volunteer planners whose skills we match with non-profits or community-based projects that frequently confront the kind of planning-type decisions that might benefit from a little technical assistance.

Old Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills circa 1900 | Photo courtesy of OldKewGardens.com

QUEENS BOULEVARD: A BRIEF HISTORY
Queens Boulevard has long been one of the most dangerous corridors for pedestrians and cyclists in New York. But its origins were in the tradition of the grand promenade boulevards that marked great cities of its day. It was conceived as a redesign and connection of two boulevards, Thomas Boulevard and Hoffman Boulevard, to serve traffic coming from Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. A 1912 proposal called for a central roadway at 44 feet wide, two side roadways at 28 feet, trolley tracks along the side roads, two 30-foot-wide “malls” or medians separating the roadways, and 20-foot sidewalks on either side. Its combined width of about 230 feet supported multiple uses: a Sunday stroll, a bicycle delivery and a carriage ride. But by 1922, the population of Queens had developed so rapidly that planners widened the roadway to 200 feet to meet the needs of all the new cars on the road.

A proposal for the layout of Queens Boulevard by the Queens Chamber of Commerce. Good Roads magazine, June 1914.

In 1933, the Queens Chamber of Commerce created a Queens Boulevard committee to ensure that the development of the boulevard did not occur at the expense of “beautification.” The Chamber even sponsored a competition for ideas on the development of Queens Boulevard in partnership with civic organizations such as the Regional Plan Association, the American Institute of Architects, and the Society for the Beaux Arts. Cord Meyer, the Chamber’s chair at the time, explained:

We plan to study the development of the boulevard, first of all, from the physical angle… We shall try to hasten the completion of the subway, the laying of the water mains, electrical light conduits and gas pipes and the building of the sewers. Then we shall consider zoning.

No one predicted the rampant pace at which the Borough of Queens would grow, nor did they anticipate the traffic that would come with it. By 1963, the entire borough of Queens had experienced more construction than any other borough since World War II, investing over two billion dollars on over 90,000 structures between 1946 and 1962. But development was uneven and difficult to control. Real estate speculation drove up property values at the same time that public service needs were inadequately met. Queens Boulevard was only one of many development projects; in 1963, only half of the roads in the borough were paved. Transportation development lagged behind population growth and housing demand, and local civic leaders repeatedly requested additional funds from the City to keep up with necessary infrastructure construction.

As early as 1971, The New York Times reported on the dangers of Queens Boulevard to pedestrians:

There are times when it seems as though the light is in favor of the pedestrian and he has to look in all directions at once. When the light seems to be in favor in one direction, the cars are turning in another direction. And before he has taken a few steps the “Don’t Walk” signs are flashing.

Most recently, in 2005, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted a traffic safety study on the Boulevard and concluded that traffic volumes were so high that little could be done to improve it. The minor safety improvements that were suggested – the addition of turning lanes and few through-street closures – were either challenged by local stakeholders or lamented for their inadequacy. Opposition from business owners, who feared that changes in the traffic pattern would reduce sales, was the strongest. Mayor Michael Bloomberg shot back that saving lives was a bigger concern than making profit. Still, implementation of comprehensive safety improvements faltered. Signs cautioning pedestrians to be careful while crossing the street stayed up on their posts and became the butt of jokes for transportation advocates.

Detail from Planning Corps' study "Crossing Queens Boulevard: The Effects of Signal Timing at Broadway/Grand Ave"

Late one summer night 2009, James Langergaard — a committed cyclist and a volunteer at Transportation Alternatives (T.A.), a transportation advocacy organization in New York City – was struck and killed on Queens Boulevard as he biked his way home. Because a traffic safety study had been so recently completed, there was little faith among citizens that more could be done to make additional changes to the street. But the community’s questions remained: how many more lives should be lost and put at risk?  What could they do right now that could spur on the process for change?

Into this vacuum of viable ideas, T.A.’s Bicycle Advocacy Director Caroline Samponaro introduced the idea of offering realistic alternative cross sections (a flat drawing that shows how a street space is or could be used) to garner support from the public and from city agencies. But T.A., over-committed and cash-strapped, did not have the capacity to execute this idea. It did, however, have a significant asset: an organized volunteer committee of Queens residents who were interested in taking up the cause.

I was working at T.A. at the time, and pondering the role of urban planners in general with Frank. How might we imagine different ways for planners to make use of their abilities to bring about change? Planning processes tend to be drawn out, but community needs tend to be immediate. For example, changes even as seemingly small as traffic signal timing to prioritize pedestrians would require a large study and would need to be initiated by the Department of Transportation. But a volunteer corps of planners could, at a minimum, help draw the cross-sections.

ENTER PLANNING CORPS
From the start, we were curious about what we could accomplish if we deconstructed the process by which planners and non-planners collaborated on a solution. Working closely with the Queens Volunteer Committee, we began with standard problem identification and relied on residents to share their observations and expertise with us. The dedicated volunteers also ran a series of activities to support our research, such as a community walk along the entire length of the Boulevard that documented street design challenges. These observations proved invaluable.

The Queens Volunteer Committee on the Boulevard

The committee’s observations showed that there are actually five basic street and neighborhood contexts for Queens Boulevard, and for each there could be a different solution. A long boulevard that seemed to present new problems on every block and at every unique intersection now required five tailored solutions. This was much easier to digest and conceptualize and mirrored the intent of the neighborhood sub-committees formed by the Queens Chamber of Commerce’s Queens Boulevard Committee in 1933.

We had settled on cross-sections as the major deliverable of our efforts because local non-profit or community groups could express their unique knowledge through the drawn images. In addition, we thought that focusing on one specific product would ensure our ability to deliver good work, and we didn’t want the Queens Volunteer Committee to expect more than we could offer. As we worked, however, we realized that limiting ourselves to cross-sections was impeding our ability to tackle the full scope of the problem.

Planning Corps at work | photo: Dory Kornfield

PROCESS, PRODUCTS, PERSUASION
After five months of floundering in this cyclical workshop process and worrying about losing the attention of the Queens Committee volunteers and the volunteer planners, Eric Galipo of H3 Architects, a planner, came onboard. Eric reframed the issue. He asked: What would be the most persuasive way for the Queens Volunteer Committee to persuade their elected officials that something had to be done to the street?

Reframing our process made the flow of activity needed to build up to the demand for change more legible. Instead of fixating our time on producing a product, we became more aware of the questions at large and how the community would have to answer them to build support for the changes they wanted. We started to ask more specific questions about who the volunteers would need to talk to and what would help them make their arguments.

Typically these questions are answered for planners by a city or industry’s framework, for example, the Uniform Land Use Review Process in New York City for land use zoning changes. Developers work off of pro formas and in-house economic models that support development proposals. To make changes to Queens Boulevard, we needed to intervene in the City’s formal planning process for transportation capital improvements.

We determined that it was be the elected officials who needed to be convinced to set aside public funding for another traffic safety study. Elected officials are not usually trained in street design and they are usually short on time. The question every elected official had to field in public was how more space for bicycles would fit on a boulevard that experiences so much congestion already. Cross sections of street space allocation would be useful, but perhaps more useful if they were presented in a collection of boulevard cross sections taken from around the world – boulevards that had demonstrably fewer crashes. Mike Lydon, the founder and principal of the Streets Plan Collaborative, found examples of boulevards that matched the typology of Queens Boulevard but were demonstrably safer and served multiple modes. Eric helped reorganize the detailed information to demonstrate comparisons that support the concept that it is possible to redesign the street.

Two comparable boulevards from Planning Corps' Book of Precedents

Most street typology books force the reader to draw mental comparisons, but we could not afford to lose the attention of our target in that way. Given that the volunteers would be trying to start conversations with people who might not be disposed to having the conversation in the first place, the comparisons would have to be immediate, visual, and clear. Anthony Denaro from OpenPlans took all the content, worked out the necessary information design keeping all of these concerns in mind, and formatted them into a booklet.

Additional themes that surfaced during the original problem identification became starting points for other products. They included topics such as how much businesses would be impacted, and why it’s so hard to convince people that signal timing can make a big difference for pedestrian safety.  The main question that persisted was how all of the desired safety improvements for multiple modes could fit in the existing space of Queens Boulevard.

For example, to show a non-transportation specialist the basics of geometric street design, we finally arrived at what we called the “Julia Child Street Kit Model.” H3 Architects has a history of creating models that show clients the trade-offs between possible uses for a space and the constraints. These models of different parts can be combined in multiple ways to make different plans and programs, just as the ingredients and tools in Julia Child’s kitchen can be combined to create different dishes.

For instance, a new theater building may require a certain number of parking spots. The cheapest way to provide parking is through a surface lot. But this is also the most expensive in terms of land acquisition. Underground parking is more expensive in labor and materials, but much cheaper in terms of land and opportunity cost for that land. The Julia Child Kit allowed the designer to trade surface parking for structured parking on a model.

We made a huge list of street elements – bus lane, bike lane, parking, travel lanes, wider sidewalks, curb extensions, and street trees. Eric laid the pieces out in CAD (Computer-aided Design) and mounted it on foam core. Then we spent a few hours cutting them out. Once you have your pieces ready, you can line up all the pieces to represent the existing street; move the pieces around and take out a travel lane; add a bike lane and sidewalk extension as you see fit.

Dealing with small business owners who continuously feel threatened by any traffic or street design changes – as they have every decade since Queens Boulevard has experienced safety issues – was another significant challenge. We asked the volunteers, what would you like to have with you when you talk to them? How would you convince them? What would give you confidence to have that conversation? We had trouble imagining small business owners reading a report that provided evidence of the economic benefits of a more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly street so we did not conduct a literature review. Instead, we created an informal text document that listed common questions and a few possible answers. We listed resources and studies at the end of the talking points, in case anyone was so inclined to read more.

Over the course of our collaboration with the volunteer planners and community members, we did not produce anything that could be called new in terms of design. Our innovations were limited to reframing questions, discussions and tasks, and to designing the products to meet identified needs. Our discussions enriched our understanding of what was involved in seeking the urban change, and the products followed suit.

It is worth noting that we had the luxury of time. One could say that we ended up with typical planning products and we just took the long way around to it. Yet it is hard to imagine the group of us knowing from the beginning that we should build a street model kit, write talking points on economic benefits, or design a book of boulevards, without first having had all those discussions that revealed the layers of actors and information, and connected the points of engagement. Community members seeking drastic design changes on Queens Boulevard needed to deal with multiple stakeholders in their campaign to build public support, and each stakeholder group required a different approach and thus individual tools. Though we never lost sight of the ultimate goal – winning safer, more livable street design changes for Queens Boulevard – the deconstructed framework allowed us to experiment and hopefully end up with better tactical results.

Planning Corps continues to welcome members and is especially interested in planners who are enthusiastic about committing to more leadership. Sign up here or contact Shin-Pei Tsay if you’d like to learn more.
Queens Boulevard, 2010 | photo: Flickr user Haruko16

Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Planning Corps.

An earlier version of this article appeared on CoLab Radio.

Shin-pei Tsay is the director of Cities and Transportation in the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on federal, state, and local transportation policy, climate change policy, and urban and regional planning issues, with an emphasis on economic development.

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Tsay served as the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, a nationally renowned non-profit focused on transportation issues in New York City; as a founding member of the NYC office for ZGF architects where she was on the sustainability team; the chief operating officer of Project for Public Spaces, an international non-profit; and a strategy consultant with a company serving the Fortune 500. Most recently she contributed to New York City’s Street Design Manual, New York City’s Active Living Design Guidelines, and New York State’s Livable Communities Manual.

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.

Elisha Otis moved to Yonkers, New York in 1852 to convert an abandoned sawmill into a bed frame factory. Endless trips hauling debris from floor to floor gave the tinkerer a challenge: wasn’t there a better way? With the help of his sons, Otis designed and built the first “safety elevator” to manage the task. Two years later, Otis presented his invention dramatically at New York City’s Crystal Palace Exhibition, where he drew himself, on the elevator platform, high above the crowd, then cut the cable from which the platform was suspended. To the crowd’s astonishment, the platform fell only a few inches. The elevator proliferated, allowing people and goods to be hauled to new heights and clearing the way for taller buildings. Today, express elevators shoot up more than 100 floors, double-decked and kitted-out with electromagnetic brakes. These new technologies push the limits of even a New Yorkers’ need for speed: in the city’s elevator lobbies, “morning wait times ranging from 20 to 25 seconds are considered good, while those between 30 and 35 seconds are generally considered unacceptable.” Faster, higher, stronger: we watch our buildings zoom up and kiss the sky.

The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, by Kate Ascher. The New Press, 2001. Click image to purchase.

The image of the elevator frames Kate Ascher’s new book The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, a form-centered analysis of the towering building typology. Ascher underscores her focus on the technologies that have enabled the skyscraper – like the elevator – in the book’s organization: she takes the reader from the ground level introduction up, through “Building It”, “Living In It”, “Supporting It”, and “Dreaming It.” Ascher’s elevator, however, doesn’t reach other, crucial floors. Like her previous book The Works: Anatomy of a City, this is intended to be a graphic investigation of the inner workings of our urban environment, and as such, it is a success. But Ascher, with an extensive career in real estate, corporate finance and municipal government that has primed her to take this investigation further, has sacrificed a more thorough exploration of the social implications of living and working at greater heights in favor of a review of construction processes and technology.

The skyscraper’s “original purpose was to make money from real estate,” an intention that has given rise to its characterization as “the ultimate architecture of capitalism.” Skyscrapers, Ascher writes, are the invention of 1880s urban America, first debuted in New York and Chicago once the elevator became a mainstay and building technology hurled forward. The Beaux-Arts period filled New York City blocks with masonry giants, but all were surpassed by the summit of the Empire State Building, the world’s tallest building for almost four decades — until a new generation of “supertall” American skyscrapers built in the 1970s outdid their forebears, especially the Willis (Sears) Tower, bolstered by load-bearing steel tubes, reinforced concrete, and glass curtain walls. Soon enough, though, supertall skyscrapers were widespread in Asia, where the form began to include not only commercial but also residential, retail and recreational functions. Growing economies (and a new class of developers within them) have fueled the desire for tall buildings, and for the last two decades, the world’s largest and most advanced towers have been based in Asia and the Middle East, crowned by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, opened in early 2010 as the world’s tallest. The Burj and others like it, Ascher says, “represent a new extension of the skyscraper as an urban form.” This new class may not all push to new heights like the Burj, but they will certainly be multifunctional cities-within-cities, where 21st century citizens need only stroll to an adjacent floor to go grocery shopping, see a movie, and pick up the kids from soccer practice. At least, that is the idea.

A massive team of designers, architects, engineers, and builders is required to plan, develop, design and construct the behemoths. A solid foundation is key to structure, as tall buildings must battle multiple physical forces, particularly vertical and wind loads, that, according to Ascher, “really drive skyscraper design.” The higher a building is built, the greater the wind pressure, and the horizontal (wind) load that increases with height can multiply by twice as much as the vertical (gravity) load. But even strong foundations and structure can’t stop a building from swaying in the wind or during earthquakes, nor should they. Buildings are designed to be slightly flexible, just not to the point of breaking: this is where dampers come in. Dampers act as a pendulum at the tops of skyscrapers “to shift weight around to counteract the forces of the wind against a building.” The Comcast Center in Philadelphia has a giant water tank on the top of the building acting as its damper; the water oscillates to offset the buildings movement. Skyscraper facades, or skins, have also rapidly changed; today, most skyscrapers are clad in glass, which allows for more light and more useable square footage – but also more exposure to the outdoor elements from noise pollution to weather conditions.

Once the skyscraper is built, though, how is it managed? Power, air and water must be distributed throughout the building, utilizing mechanical floors and various other infrastructure efficiently. Considering the ubiquity of cell phones and wireless signals, buildings must also allow for signal continuity and enhancement, particularly for those important moments when rescue crews – like firefighters – need to communicate to each other. Life safety, in fact, is an important aspect of a skyscraper’s operations, and Ascher notes systems for prevention, rescue, and shoring up the building’s structure. For example, intumescent paint covers a building’s steel beams, puffing up when heated into a layer of foam to protect the steel from heating too quickly and losing strength. After safety, maintenance is central to building operations, and Ascher explores various mechanisms for window cleaning, waste removal, and facade and structural repairs. Skyscrapers’ systems are increasingly efficient, incorporating more self-sustaining and “green” systems, like black and grey water recycling. Black water is what comes from used sinks and toilets, and it can be treated and used to water green roofs, for example. Greening, both adding natural features to a building as well as making it more sustainable and environmentally friendly, will likely continue to be prominent in the future, along with a rise in mixed-use functions and, and of course, height.

No matter how tall or how green they become, skyscrapers exist within complex layers of society, culture, and politics; topics that Ascher skirts. I would have hoped that Ascher, the former vice president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation and someone who lists The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a favorite book on architecture, would have dedicated more of her attention to the socio-cultural complexities of skyscrapers, from occupants’ health to the balance between safety and surveillance. I would have preferred she explore the implications of a phrase like “segregate users” (in terms of entrances and use), for example, rather than explaining the intricacies of communications technology. Her assertion that skyscraper design is “about money” is undermined by the absence of a discussion of who benefits from the construction and use of a skyscraper, what its economic impacts are, or how the abundance of the form affects the city as a whole. Ascher succeeds in breaking down the typology to what it takes to get it made in technological and physical terms, but reducing a skyscraper to an exclusive object of engineering misses an opportunity to explore the relationship between architectural forms and the social context of their use.

…

Mercedes Kraus is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She co-founded and publishes Womanzine and has worked to engage the public in the built environment at both Van Alen Institute and the Institute for Urban Design. She loves pizza, outer space, and .gifs of both.

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.

-C.S.

What is Seeing Green and how did it come about?
Erik Facteau: Seeing Green is a research project that studies specific urban agricultural sites in the New York City area in order to demonstrate how urban agriculture should be considered as a viable and important component of a city’s green infrastructure. One of the sites we’re currently looking at is Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City; another that we will be looking at is Added Value, a raised bed farm in Red Hook. We’re also looking at the rooftop farm atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Administrative Building on Randall’s Island.

By measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration rates, we are looking to create metrics to calculate how much water urban farms are managing, through both detention (meaning the temporary storage of excess stormwater) and retention (the indefinite storage of excess stormwater). This will tell us how much water urban farms keep from entering the sewer system, therefore reducing combined sewer overflows.

When you start to get these numbers, you can begin to extrapolate over larger areas of land – whether it’s exisiting farms or underutilized land with farming potential – to determine how much water can be managed and what the best practices are for doing so. Right now, we are looking at a couple different sites as a base line and moving forward from there.

Testing the water at the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso: This project began as a graduate research project and as it has evolved to include a series of interesting collaborations; and the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute has helped us pursue these partnerships. In one project, called “Farming Up,” Alec Baxt and Lise Serrell look at nutrient quality of crops growing in urban environment compared to rural environments. “Don’t Flush Me” is a project that puts sensors in sewage outflow points and notifies individuals about how much wastewater they produce during and immediately after those weather events that cause sewage to overflow into the harbor. Another one is called “Farming Concrete,” for which Mara Gittleman has been calculating the area, weight and monetary value of food grown in community gardens in New York City.

Facteau: Another project we’ve been involved in has been to set up a demonstration project on the roof of the Association for Energy Affordability‘s headquarters in the Bronx. We emulated the green roof condition on part of the roof and installed a container underneath so we could measure the amount of water running through the green roof and then compare that to the amount of water rushing off the impervious surface of the regular rooftop.

Caruso: If you take all of these metrics and you collapse them – you look at the nutrient level of both the soil and the crop, you look at the stormwater management potential, the energy rate reduction, the food production potential — the combined analysis is much more powerful. The guiding idea is this: if you can first define the benefits and know what they are and research them, then you can quantify them, and then you can monetize the benefits — and that’s when it really becomes valuable to private property owners and cities. At that point, the research can begin informing policy. And it can begin informing the development of best management practices around the design of farms. For example, if we observe nutrient run-off, we can help design small wetlands around the drain. If we know how much water an urban farm can manage at a particular soil depth, and how much productivity and costs would be affected by increasing its depth, then we can inform building owners about the best investment to reach the desired productivity and the desired environmental outcomes. It’s a necessary step if we want to see urban agriculture grow in New York City.

Soy Plant tested for Farming Up | Photo: Catherine Yrisarri

How did you both get involved in this topic?
Facteau: My background is in microbiology and mycology, working mostly on plant restoration projects and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. I studied environmental science and forestry in college. And I met Tyler while in the graduate program in environmental systems management at the Pratt Institute.

Caruso: Before this, I was working on landscape design and urban agriculture projects and designing and installing grey water systems in San Francisco. When Erik and I started the discussions that eventually led to Seeing Green, we were looking for a thesis project and decided to work together. At the time, there were lots of projects around that dealt with urban agriculture, and most of them were primarily concerned with the economic or social benefits. They might mention the environmental benefits of farming in the city, but not in great depth. The potential of urban agriculture as green infrastructure was a connection that hadn’t yet been made. In 2010, we started noticing how much City agencies were talking about green infrastructure, and realized that if we wanted our cities to support urban agriculture under the banner of green infrastructure, we would have to quantify the environmental benefits.

Brooklyn Grange | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Facteau: The green infrastructure documents from the City that we were looking at all seemed to focus on traditional green roofs. So we started researching how much water these systems could actually handle while simultaneously looking at how rooftop agricultural projects are performing.

Caruso: The grants that Erik is referring to include a green roof tax credit incentive, issued through the Department of Buildings, that specifically prohibits urban farms because of plant selection and because of speculation that irrigation – traditional green roofs don’t require irrigation; agricultural green roofs do – would make rooftop farms less able to retain stormwater than a traditional green roof. That’s a clear example of the city implementing progressive green infrastructure policies that exclude urban agriculture. And in this case, the policy is based on hypotheses that are scientifically untested.

We also find the language of these policies to be more prescriptive than performative. Our methodology for the Seeing Green project looks closely at performativity: how well urban farms and green infrastructure perform over time.

A common criticism of LEED certification system for green buildings is its focus on the design of a building as opposed to looking at how it performs in the long-run, through energy audits or other measurements. With LEED, there is currently no follow up once a building is certified. The next wave in green design – whether it’s buildings, landscapes or infrastructure – is ways to measure performance. That’s what inspired us to develop our thesis project into a larger initiative: to support urban agriculture by defining and quantifying its environmental benefits and seeing how performative it can be.

What kinds of tools or precedents were out there to help you analyze, monetize, to quantify or identify proper metrics?
Caruso: I know everyone says this, but I think social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has really helped empower people with a DIY attitude, has helped citizens’ groups to form, has helped individuals collaborate with a science lab.

Platforms like Kickstarter have created more of a sense of “we’re all in it together,” and that attitude has definitely benefited us.

Facteau: Kickstarter was a huge help in getting this off the ground. We had worked out our methodology as part of our thesis project at Pratt, and when we finished that we asked ourselves, “Where do we go from here?” We knew the equipment that we needed, and we knew that farmers and communities would really value the information we wanted to collect. So we used Kickstarter not only to raise money for equipment but also to raise awareness. Groups from England, from Australia, from the west coast contacted us because of their interest in the research.

Caruso: I just spoke to someone preparing a research report on the potential for urban agriculture in San Francisco. Another group in Minneapolis recently requested our collaboration on a large-scale urban agriculture initiative out there. Around the country, and the world, it’s a really supportive community. There are also some big research initiatives right here in New York….

Like “Five Borough Farm,” which Urban Omnibus featured last year. That effort is also trying to push the idea of metrics.
Caruso: Exactly. I think one of Five Borough Farm’s contributions to the field is its focus on the public health perspective. There’s also the work Kubi Ackerman is doing at Columbia’s Urban Design Lab to evaluate New York’s capacity for urban agriculture. We’ve used some of his preliminary numbers to help us make the case that if we have x amount of stormwater, and if we extrapolate from the knowledge of how many vacant lots or rooftops could be used to scale up urban agriculture, then we can start to talk about how to address the combined sewage overflow problem. If we know that we could manage this many gallons through urban farms, and how much money the city spends per gallon on treating stormwater and wastewater, then we can calculate how much money the city could save if urban agriculture were considered one of many pieces of the green infrastructure puzzle. When you compare that to the cost of retrofitting or constructing new sewage treatment plants, and factor in the amount of energy that goes into treating wastewater, the savings become astronomical. Plus, there are all the benefits that urban agriculture advocates have made well known: vacant land is being re-utilized by communities, increasing property values, supporting economic micro-enterprises, contributing to healthy living, decreasing public health costs. Once you start layering all those factors, the potential of these farms or community gardens is phenomenal. 

Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Speaking of that kind of layering, and the multiple ways to discuss the benefits of farms and community gardens in the city, how did you decide to focus specifically on the intersection between stormwater management and urban agriculture?
Caruso: Our primary goal was to support urban agriculture in whatever way we could. We started by talking to farmers and asking them what would help their efforts. What we heard from people was the need to preserve existing urban farms and expand the agricultural capacity of the city. To do that, we wanted to make a quantitative case for the benefits. Our initial plan was to look at more metrics beyond stormwater.

Facteau: We also wanted to look at carbon capture as a way to show farms as potential carbon sinks and look at temperature differences in order to see urban agriculture’s role in mitigating urban heat island effect. Existing equipment for measuring carbon capture are suited for huge plots of land much more than an acre-size roof. There is definitely potential to look into that more in the future.

Stormwater emerged for us as a focus because of the rooftop tax credit issue we mentioned earlier – that it’s unfounded to exclude urban agriculture from green roof incentives without considering the numbers. We thought this was a good opportunity to initiate a policy change.

But of course we are very interested in some of the other environmental factors. For example, comparing different soil mediums  — what is used on rooftops is not technically soil, because dirt would be too heavy for most building capacities, but an engineered alternative – in terms of drainage, nutrient leaching, nutrient run-off, the remediation quality of the engineered growing medium and of the plants themselves, temperature fluctuations, etc. Those are some of the things we want to look at down the road. I think the more metrics you can get together, the more powerful a statement you can make. The social benefits – from filling in gaps in the foodshed to bringing people together in a shared community project – are well known. The environmental issues, particularly related to roofs, require more research.

Weighing produce at Two Coves, Queens | photo courtesy of Stephanos Koullias via farmingconcrete.org

You have discussed the potential for this research to affect policy and to help building owners understand their options. What are some other lessons to be learned from this research? What else do you hope will be done with your findings?
Caruso: The green roof tax credit is being amended. And the hope is that other plans put out by city agencies or reports by national organizations will factor some of this into their thinking. The American Planning Association, for example, puts out a guide for agriculture; if city planning institutions start to consider urban agriculture as a viable step for cities to strengthen local economies, expand regional foodsheds and isolate and address environmental challenges, that would be great.

The US Green Building Council’s recent announcement that the retrofitting of existing buildings is eligible for an innovation credit is an interesting tactic and a change in the right direction. I think as LEED begins to move more towards performativity and long-term monitoring, we’d like to see services such as Seeing Green becoming inextricable parts of measuring performance.

Some city agencies have legitimate concerns about scaling up rooftop gardens. The Fire Department is worried about the height of plants allowed and how that affects fire safety. The Buildings Department is worried about buildings’ structural load capacity. But hopefully the Parks Department will be a leader in this effort; working with them has been a great partnership for us. Their experimental roof garden on Randall’s Island is intended specifically to inform what kind of green roof systems they should be implementing on their buildings. If other City agencies did the same thing and committed to doing pilot projects on City-owned property, it would have a huge impact.

Recently, some have voiced skepticism about the viability of urban agriculture, dismissing it as a phenomenon only relevant to small portions of the population. What’s your response to those voices?
Caruso: I think when people hear the term urban agriculture, they make the mistake of thinking that its advocates are postulating that a city the size of New York or San Francisco or Chicago could grow all its food within its borders. Most farmers would laugh at that, given the amount of effort it takes to productively and intensively grow on even an acre of land. But I think it’s incredibly important that urban agriculture is part of a regional foodshed, is part of supporting local, decentralized economies and healthy, active and safe communities.

Once again, I think layering the environmental benefits, the social benefits and the economic benefits is really important to counter skepticism about urban agriculture’s viability.

AEA roof demonstration project | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso works as an Environmental Planning consultant and researcher for such companies as Great Ecology and Environments, Roy Co. Architecture, thread collective, Gowanus CDC, and Advancement for Rural Kids, Inc. His area of focus is urban agriculture and ecological sanitation programs, designing closed loop systems using composting toilets, agriculture and greywater and rainwater harvesting systems. He has a Master’s of Science from the Environmental Systems Management Program (ESM) at Pratt. Tyler is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in ESM Masters program. This summer he is co-teaching a design/build urban agriculture course that he helped to develop. He also co-founded and runs New York City’s Youth Food Council.

Erik Facteau is a biologist, with a Master’s of Science in Environmental Systems Management from Pratt Institute. He has a strong interest in the creation of local food systems and has worked at the NYC Greenmarkets for the last 5 years. Previously, Erik worked in a microbiology laboratory as an environmental air quality analyst. As an undergraduate, at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, Erik Facteau studied Biology with a focus on Microbiology and Mycology. While at SUNY ESF, Erik conducted lab and field research on two ongoing plant restoration projects (The American Chestnut-Castanea dentata and The Pinedrop-Pterospora andromedea).

Also this week in the Omnibus roundup: Kimmelman looks at towers in the park; New York goes convention center crazy; Verdant Power gets a green light for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project; President Obama forsakes infrastructure investment in “An America Built to Last”; the Asian American Writers’ Workshop calls for Creative Nonfiction Fellows; the South Street Seaport Museum reopens; Studio-X hosts a discussion on Roosevelt Island’s pneumatic trash tubes; the DOT calls for public art proposals; and Lead Pencil Studio exhibits in Boston.

“ARCHITECTURE IS NEVER DESTINY”
A viewing of the The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary by Chad Freidrichs, prompted Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, to question the limits of architecture’s role in determining the success of failure of a public housing project. The piece once again confirms the writer’s commitment to interrogating the social and urbanistic implications of the built environment. He contrasts the fates of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis — a complex whose rapid descent from model low-income housing community to a national symbol of urban deprivation and crime led to its demolition in 1972 — with Penn South — an example in Chelsea of the same towers-in-the-park building typology that has, according to the residents Kimmelman interviews, thrived. He notes that part of Penn South’s success has to do with the ways it serves the needs of older residents, which led to its official designation as a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community, or NORC, in 1986 (the nation’s first). Using the phenomenon of NORCs as a lens through which to reconsider towers-in-the-park — a typology maligned in the popular imagination specifically because of examples like Pruitt-Igoe – is an argument that the urban design firm Interboro introduced to Omnibus readers in “NORCs in NYC.” Read that feature again, wander by Penn South or some of the other NORCs in the city, and then go see The Pruitt-Igoe Myth at the IFC Center.

WAIT, HOW MANY CONVENTION CENTERS DOES NEW YORK NEED AGAIN?
If the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe signalled an end to a particular philosophy of urban problem-solving, what would the demolition of the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center on 11th Avenue in Manhattan signify? Especially if Governor Cuomo gets his wish of a replacement venue — intended to be the nation’s largest — at the site of the Aqueduct racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens, a place whose vibrant flea market we visited just before redevelopment plans shut it down for good. Skepticism about the long-term financial viability of a convention center has not dimmed the governor’s enthusiasm for the project. Nor has the new plan changed Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s mind about the need for a second convention center in Willets Point. Critics of both projects cite evidence that this kind of megaproject is rarely the panacea it claims to be, an economic analysis explored in depth in this 2009 article in Next American City.

Power Grid Scenarios | Illustration: Michael Loverich for Urban Omnibus, "East River Power," February 9th, 2009

GREEN LIGHT FOR TIDAL POWER 
The kind of urban infrastructure investment that looks forward rather than looking back is one that capitalizes on New York’s unique assets and seeks to provide viable and affordable energy alternatives. In the hope that tidal power might be the energy source to make that possible, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission awarded Verdant Power Inc. the first license for a tidal energy project for the Roosevelt Island Tidal Energy Project, or RITE. Verdant will use the ten year pilot contract to test the commercial viability of the project as well as the environmental impact on fish and the river’s sediment. In an Urban Omnibus feature from way back in 2009, “East River Power,” we looked at some of the questions that the prospect of tidal power raised for New York City’s waterways, and for the framework of energy generation and distribution. As the first grid-tied system of tidal turbines, RITE will hopefully be a sign of things to come. Read more at Bloomberg and Inhabitat.

AN AMERICA BUILT TO LAST, SORT OF
Infrastructure investment was once a policy priority for President Obama, but was all but absent from his State of the Union Speech this week, entitled, “An America Built to Last.” Gone are the promises of high-speed rail included in his 2011 speech; gone was mention of an urban agenda. The President did cite America’s past endeavors to revitalize its economy during the Great Depression through large-scale building projects like the Hoover Dam or the Golden Gate Bridge, or to knit the nation together through the interstate highway system after World War II. But the larger focus of the address, the point to which he returned again and again, was to try to bridge the chasm between the two parties and redress growing income inequality. Check out more of the coverage at The Atlantic Cities and The Transport Politic.

South Street Seaport Museum | Photo by Andrew Hinderaker via dnainfo.com

EVENTS and TO DOs

OPEN CITY CALL FOR NONFICTION FELLOWS
The Asian American Writers’ Workshop is about to start a new year of its Open City project, profiled last year on the Omnibus, for which a competitively selected group of writers documents and reflects on urban change in the three New York Chinatowns. The call for Creative Nonfiction Fellows has just been announced, so if you’re an emerging creative nonfiction writer passionate about New York City neighborhoods, apply today. The application deadline is February 17. Check out the call here.

SOUTH STREET SEAPORT MUSEUM REOPENS
The South Street Seaport Museum is reopening this week after an eight-month hiatus during which the museum was renovated to respond to its expanded scope under the creative direction and management of The Museum of the City of New York, which has thrown its full weight into the project. The re-opened space aims to connect more powerfully with its surrounding neighborhood, avail itself of the top two floors as exhibition space, and make the museum more easily navigable through signage and other measures. Read more of the coverage in The New York Times.

TRASH TUBES OF THE FUTURE
A couple of years ago we spoke to Juliette Spertus about her exhibition Fast Trash, about the Roosevelt Island AVAC (Automated Vacuum Collection System). Since then, she and Benjamin Miller have been studying the feasibility of upgrading Roosevelt Island’s AVAC system and also expanding the system to Manhattan using existing transportation infrastructure. Join them as they discuss their preliminary findings, followed by a discussion on the future of waste disposal in New York City featuring Vishaan Chakrabarti, Claire Weisz, Marcia Byrstryn, Juliette Spertus and Benjamin Miller. Tuesday, February 7, 6:30-8:30pm, at Studio-X. More information available here or here.

URBAN ART CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The New York City DOT has announced its open call for proposals for their pARTners and Barrier Beautification Projects. Both projects seek to create a more livable city with public art. The Barrier Beautification project asks artists to imagine how they would decorate the barriers that have become necessary in our bike friendly city, separating bikers, pedestrians and drivers from one another. For pARTners, the DOT commissions artists to produce site-responsive art in collaboration with community-based organizations for high priority sites owned by the agency. Check out the full call for proposals.

LEAD PENCIL STUDIO HITS BOSTON
Back in April we spoke to Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo of Lead Pencil Studio about their firm’s work with LIDAR. For our Boston area readers, Lead Pencil Studio will be in Edifice Amiss: Constructing New Perspectives, an exhibition about the constructed world opening January 30th at the Stephen D. Paine Gallery of MassArt. The works in the exhibition reveal the secret lives of the architectural spaces in which we live and work. More information available here.

Lead Pencil Studio in Edifice Amiss

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

Current conditions on the Queensway | Photo: Neil Sullivan via Old NYC

WILL QUEENS GET ITS OWN HIGH LINE?
The High Line is in many ways unique, but it’s by no means the only disused urban rail line in New York in need of repurposing. In Queens, the 3.5 mile leg of the Rockaway Beach Branch rail line, out of service since 1962, runs from Rego Park to the Ozone Park Trailhead, over auto-body shops, through Forest Park and a number of residential neighborhoods. While the current proposals reference the success of the High Line, they differ in intended audience and scope. Friends of the Queensway, the group leading the effort to create a new public space, is prioritizing providing amenities for the surrounding community — such as much-need bicycle infrastructure and community garden space — rather than primarily serving as a tourist attraction. Read more coverage on Treehugger.

The George Washington Bridge in Heavy Smog. View toward the New Jersey Side of the Hudson River | From the Documerica collection.

WHAT AMERICA LOOKED LIKE BEFORE THE EPA
In the 1970s, one of the early acts of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), was a documentary effort called Documerica, for which EPA photographers travelled the country to capture the state of the nation in ecological terms. Forty years later, the National Archives has released 15,000 of the 80,000 photographs the project produced, many of which portray the harsh reality of our national landscape prior to an overhaul in environmental regulation. Be sure to explore these powerful photographs on the National Archive Flickr database and check out more about the collection on Grist.

MetroChange

METROCHANGE
When there’s not enough money left on your MetroCard for a trip, do you toss it? Apparently, lost or discarded MetroCards account for millions of dollars in wasted funds. So, NYU students Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman and Paul May have collaborated to create a charity donation platform, called “MetroChange,” intended to turn these losses into gains for the city’s neediest families. The project calls for MetroChange kiosks to be installed in the subway, where commuters can swipe their cards (and recycle them) to donate the remainder of the value left of the car to charity. Read more about this project on the MetroChange blog.

RETHINKING AMERICA’S PARKING CULTURE
For those commuters who don’t use a MetroCard to get around this city, the availability, price and logistics of parking your vehicle often determine driver behavior. In most of the rest of the country, however, parking is abundant and takes up uncalculated amounts of land. Eran Ben-Joseph explores the problems and possibilities of parking in Rethinking a Lot, a new book published by MIT Press, that advocates for a transformation of parking lots into appealing, environmentally sound and better integrated features of our built environment. Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, explores Ben-Joseph’s argument that parking lots need to be taken seriously by designers and urbanists. Accompanying the article is a fascinating slideshow that encourages a reconsideration of this ubiquitous form that has, until recently, somehow eluded critical investigation by scholars of architecture, urbanism and the American landscape.

NYC HOUSING AUTHORITY TO CONSIDER SELLING AIR RIGHTS, RAISING RENT CAP
On Monday, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) released its five year plan, in which it announced the selling of air rights — the space that can be developed above buildings — as one potential strategy to redress its budget deficit. According to WNYC, NYCHA has also proposed raising the current $2000 rent cap and requiring all households to pay 30% of their income in rent.

BUS TIME
BusTime, the real-time bus tracking website, is now available for all of Staten Island. By allowing users to view exactly how far their bus is from their chosen stop, the real-time bus information “means more time at home with your family, relaxing with a cup of coffee,” according to MTA chairman Joe Lhota. Riders can access the information online, on a mobile phone (simply text a bust stop code to 511123), or — starting this spring — by scanning a QR code at the bus stop. Previously the MTA was having trouble reliably tracking buses through the tall buildings in Manhattan, but Bus Time’s opening up to all of Staten Island bodes well for the other four boroughs, all of which should have complete Bus Time service by 2013 . Read more on StreetsBlog.

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

PLACEMAKING THROUGH LIGHTING
The City’s plan to make Lower Manhattan more vibrant after dark goes beyond simply installing more lights. The title of the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Request for Proposals, “Placemaking through Lighting,” explains the initiative’s priorities: to use creative illumination to enhance Lower Manhattan’s identity, to attract visitors and investment and to create a sense of place for the area. Some of the vanguard lighting technologies mentioned in the brief include projection mapping, 3D effects and a range of interactive strategies, including motion-activated lighting. According the The New York Times’ City Room, EDC officials and local Community Board members cited the fact that the Financial District loses out on the after-dark tourist foot traffic that small businesses in other neighborhoods enjoy, a concern that motivated the desire to use lighting to “transform the experience of Lower Manhattan at night.”

TRANSIT POLITICS
Transit advocates are angry at the implications of Governor Cuomo’s new tax code on MTA funding. Essentially, Cuomo sets to eliminate a payroll tax from which the MTA receives roughly $320 million and substitute it with a direct state government subsidy. This transformation of dedicated MTA revenue to discretionary funding makes the MTA particularly susceptible towards future budget cuts. Moreover, the new bill, rushed forward by Cuomo, avoided public discourse and “eviscerated” the previous lock box legislation, which made the government responsible for reporting fully the effects of funding cuts ahead of any fiscal re-appropriations. Assuming the MTA subsidies do wither out in the future, Charles Komonoff of Streetsblog did some number crunching to demonstrate the negative effects. In short, New York’s $320 million in tax savings would be offset with nearly $580 million in extra costs. Apparently the difference between $320 million from payroll taxes versus $320 million from direct subsidies is much more than semantics.

IT MIGHT BE GETTING EASIER TO BE GREEN
This week, officials from the Department of City Planning announced the beginning of the approval process for new zoning regulations that would remove impediments for property owners to build green buildings or to retrofit existing buildings with renewable energy technologies such as windmills or solar panels. Other energy-efficient measures that will become easier to implement if the regulations are adopted by the City Council include stormwater retention systems, height exemptions for greenhouses, and the building of walls thick enough to allow for external insulation. According to Amanda Burden, the City’s Director of City Planning and the chair of the City Planning Commission, the changes will amount to “the most comprehensive citywide initiative dealing with energy efficiency and green building in the U.S.” Read the full article on Crain’s.

THE HENRY HUDSON BRIDGE TURNS 75
On December 12th, the Henry Hudson bridge celebrated its 75th birthday. Originally built to accommodate light traffic, it is now one of the most vital and dense transportation nodes in the city, linking Manhattan to the Bronx across Spuyten Duyvil Creek. In celebration of this iconic landmark, the Riverdale Public Library will open a photo exhibit featuring historic photos of the construction and evolution of the bridge over time as well as an archival collection on other bridges built during the Depression. For more background about the history of the bridge, read the press release from MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

PUBLIC AUTHORITIES BLOG
For another view of the government agencies and lawmakers that preside over public works, the Public Authorities blog, a project of the Government Law Center at Albany Law School. Its one of the more recent finds added to our increasingly geeky feedreader and offers an excellent overview of the “laws, practices and proposed reforms relating to state and local public authorities in New York.” Its comprehensive links roundups and its concise and measured summaries of bills or court cases or major capital projects (like the reconstruction of the Tappan Zee Bridge, reportedly among the largest public works projects currently being planned in the nation) will be of interest to anyone whose ears perk up at the mention of terms like “eminent domain” or “utilities reform.” The authors also dip into the history and culture of public decision-making, like in this recent post that recapped a live conversation with Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, a tome sure to be on the shelf of every self-respecting urbanist.

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

In 2009, NACTO launched its Cities for Cycling project, through which the organization studies and champions best practices in bikeway design, and began crafting an urban-oriented manual to guide cities who want to invest in bike-friendly roadway infrastructure and traffic engineering. The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide puts forth solutions for incorporating bicycle transportation options into the urban streetscape, based on a comprehensive understanding of the many bureaucratic restrictions and practical needs that dictate the design of our streets. In the face of design standards based on interstate highway travel, liability concerns, battles between State and City and competition between numerous stakeholders for use and right of way, this effort to overhaul our established ideas of how streets should work promises to be a struggle. And the folks at NACTO are dedicated to the challenge. In the following piece, Vega-Barachowitz looks at the example of the “cycle track” — a bikeway that is physically separated from motor traffic and is distinct from the sidewalk (such as the 9th Avenue bikeway here in New York) — to explain why our transportation networks are the way they are and how they should evolve. 

- V.S.

Photo by Harmony Blackwell, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

In the taxonomy of city streets, the cycle track is the platypus. Sandwiched between the sidewalk and the parking lane — neither a trail, a sidewalk, nor a travel lane — it defies the conventional spectra of classification and challenges where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

In spite of their curious and (as of now) sporadic cameos on American city streets, cycle tracks have long tradition in Northern Europe, and have more recently emerged on streets from Seoul to Seville. Since 2007, when New York City cut the ribbon on its inaugural Ninth Avenue cycle track, the movement for separated bikeways has accelerated in the United States; and culminated in 2011, with the publication of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a catalogue of innovative bikeway design concepts for US cities.

The NACTO Guide heralds a new era of thinking about our streets and public spaces, discovering in the asphalt tundra of the American metropolis an unlikely well of creative potential. Along with a growing cadre of city street design manuals, the guide beckons the twilight of the motor century and upholds the growing sentiment that the antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself. Today, as an emerging generation of designers and engineers rise to challenge the traditional rubric and protocol of traffic engineering, the first highly visible struggle will be that of the cycle track.

What follows contextualizes the cycle track in the lineage of transportation in the United States. Three persistent themes stand out: the tension between rural and urban transportation policy; the question of dedicating versus sharing road space; and the interpretation and limitations of conventional design standards and criteria.

This brief history will hopefully accelerate the launching of a new paradigm in urban transportation and street design, and thus engender more aggressive and creative streetscape interventions in the progress of design process and theory. This movement reinforces and reflects the recent cross-disciplinary shift from object to ground and from freestanding built form to landscape (set forth by architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton in 1990). It inverts the opportunity for design intervention from the built fabric of floors and facades to the dynamic spines and landscapes that weave around them and shape their context. City street design, though perhaps the least glamorous subfield in the dialogues surrounding landscape urbanism (or ecological urbanism), just might be its most highly contentious and politically volatile element — and therefore one of its most interesting.

Ocean Parkway bicycle path, c. 1894 | Courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

The Gospel of Good Roads
The first separated bikeway in the United States was constructed along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn during the bicycle fad of the 1890s. The bicycle craze produced many follies, including a short-lived, elevated, bicycle toll road between Pasadena and Los Angeles named the California Cycleway. Though the impact of the bicycle at the turn of the century was truncated by the emergence of the private automobile, an early group of bicycle advocates, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), successfully lobbied Congress for smooth, well-connected country roads at the height of the bicyclist era.

The California Cycleway | via bike.arroyoseco.org

Catering to the populist sentiments of the day, LAW published a series of tracts in Good Roads Magazine, including one called The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer. The gospel, along with other materials issued by the League, called upon Congress to build a system of well-paved roads connecting towns and villages. Their literature appealed to farmers whose livelihood was compromised by inadequate road conditions and sought to leverage more effectively the railroads upon which they relied to get their goods to market. Though the energy behind the movement came primarily from groups of cyclists in cities, their political appeal to the peasant farmer struck a sympathetic chord with congressmen distrustful of city bosses and railroad tycoons.

The agrarian sympathies of a federal government reeling from a financial crisis sparked by railroad speculation set in motion the inequitable balance in transportation policy and funding geared away from cities towards rural areas. This bias persists to this day. Beginning with the establishment of the Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) in the Department of Agriculture in 1893, the government set a precedent for road and highway construction as a rural program based on rural needs and rural access — a decade before the advent of the automobile. As a consequence, from the early 20th century onward, the Bureau of Public Roads and its successor agency the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) charted a course that would spell the dissolution of railroads and urban transportation systems in favor of federally funded toll-free highways dominated by state interests and agencies.¹

League of American Wheelmen rally, 1880 | via ocbike.org

The establishment of the landmark Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 carried with it a provision that enabled each state to establish a highway department to handle grants and funds allocated from the federal government. The highway departments, assembled from an already forceful and emergent group of regional highway lobbies (backed by national automobile associations), formed the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in 1914 — a group which, over the course of the 20th century, “developed into ‘one of the most important, least known political groups in the country…part lobby, part professional association, part quasi-political agency. No effective national highway policy could be enacted without its agreement.’”²

Evolving Guidelines and Standards for Roads and Bikeways
AASHO’s lead role in the federal highway program was underscored by their publication in the 1920s and 1930s of a series of road design standards, which eventually came to be known as the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets and the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The former, a set of guidelines commonly known as the AASHTO Green Book (AASHO was renamed AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, in 1973), is often referred to as the “bible” for traffic engineers. The MUTCD is a federally mandated set of codes intended to create standardized roadway signs and markings. The Green Book guides a road’s geometric proportions, such the minimum width of a travel lane (typically 10 feet, though engineers prefer 11-12 foot lanes), while the MUTCD mandates its signage and markings, such as the appropriate dimensions of a stop sign or a striped buffer.

The antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself.As cars became ever more prevalent on America’s roadways, the Green Book, guided by state highway engineers, continually added “safety” buffers to their street design standards to account for the growing frequency of accidents and driver errors. After 1966, based on the presumed inevitability of driver error,³ traffic engineers “became principally concerned with how to engineer [a] second line of defense, shifting the profession’s focus away from driver behavior and towards vehicles and roadside hardware.”⁴ Trees were routinely chopped down to improve sight distances on historic streets, sidewalks were narrowed to improve a car’s crumple zone, and intersection curb radii were altered to insure that trucks and other large vehicles could make smooth turns.

Ever more prohibitive traffic engineering standards regulated and regimented the city streetscape in the name of safety, even as these standards simultaneously eroded the urban realm and transformed ordinary commercial thoroughfares into high speed / high traffic urban arterials. Since only state-designated collector or arterial routes were eligible to receive federal funding, cities had an incentive to designate more of their city streets as state routes, and in doing so conform to AASHTO standards that compromised pedestrians, street life and commerce in favor of vehicle throughput.^5,6

Why AASHTO Excluded the Cycle Track
Among AASHTO’s supplemental publications released in the ensuing decades of the Interstate era was the 1975 AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bicycle Facilities. Demand for a better design policy for bicyclists emerged during the bike boom of the late 1960s and peaked in 1974, the year when, for the first time in decades, more bicycles were sold than cars.

Surging interest in the bicycle, then as now, sparked a reconsideration of the bicycle’s place in the roadway — specifically under what circumstances bicyclists ought to ride with or apart from traffic. At this juncture, despite a wealth of strategies being deployed in Europe, including the cycle track, the American standard fell curiously under the spell of John Forester, the champion of the vehicular cycling movement and author of Effective Cycling. Vehicular cyclists espouse the principle that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

In the early 1970s, Forester successfully fought (and continues to fight) against the inclusion of cycle tracks in the AASHTO Bike Guide. Though the vehicular cycling principle has many adamant advocates, the outright embrace of a behavioral approach to cycling coincided with a tacit rejection of the behavioral approach to traffic safety. In other words, as the engineering profession began to safeguard the built environment for terrible drivers and faster cars, a dominant group of bicyclists rejected the principle of separation in favor of “bicycle driving.”

At a point in history when the primary engineering solution was to segment users by grade and function, Forester may have seemed like a luminary. In practice, while cycling rates had a resurgence elsewhere, in the US, they stalled. 

9th Avenue, Manhattan | via NYC DOT's Street Design Manual

The Ninth Avenue Revolution
From the bike boom of the 1970s until today, efforts to make bicycling a mainstream form of transportation (rather than a child’s toy or an exercise regimen) have often focused on policy and education rather than engineering or roadway design. The few cycle track experiments that did take place were either situated outside of a large urban context, in left-leaning college towns like Madison, WI or Davis, CA; or quickly succumbed to political winds, such as New York Mayor Ed Koch’s infamous Midtown cycle tracks in the 1980s. A small but vocal group of engineers from the vehicular cycling community vehemently objected to changes to the AASHTO and MUTCD standards, propagating the philosophically sound but practically unrealistic “Share the Road” dogma that bicyclists should be accorded all of the rights and responsibilities of motorists.

Today’s call for cycle tracks differs, in part, because these interventions have been integrated into a bolder and more comprehensive reawakening and reconsideration of streets as public spaces for people. In 2007, when New York City constructed the city’s first protected bike lane pilot project on Ninth Avenue and transformed Times Square from a tumultuous interchange into a public commons, the city not only created a safe space for cyclists and pedestrians, they set a new precedent in the design of city streets. Cycle track projects, along with a host of bold engineering and communications strategies, have helped to revive the notion of the street as a place not solely for cars, but a front yard in which commercial and pedestrian activities may thrive.

In most cities, changes to city streets, beyond repaving or filling potholes, occur in geologic time. Transportation agencies and public works departments are (understandably) reluctant to attract bad press and political controversy by eliminating traffic lanes, and in much of the country, have little to gain from widening sidewalks or adding bike lanes. Moreover, innovation has often been discouraged by the threat of liability, as innovative cities and engineers fall back on prevailing standards (AASHTO guidance) rather than the immunity of good engineering judgment.⁷ In the 1970s, John Forester coerced the state of California and the federal government to withdraw proposals for cycle tracks by citing a lack of safety research and suing the city of Palo Alto for having mandatory sidepath⁸ laws — injecting a sword into the tender belly of the system.⁹ A steadfast reliance on research and the threat of liability created an untenable cycle, which New York City, by building the cycle track as a pilot project in 2007, may have finally broken.

The current movement to build cycle tracks and other innovative designs reflects a paradigm shift in the urban political-engineering-planning framework under which cities typically operate. City transportation agencies and public works departments are transforming themselves into public space departments to cater to a new generation, and are in turn finding that the dialogue of controversial new steps — such as an ambitious bike network expansion —helps them to transcend the business-as-usual approach to city streets and to forge new partnerships with community groups, businesses and advocates. When New York City built its first cycle tracks (as part of its larger complete street design initiative), it made the cycle track into an object of political capital, setting off a domino effect that now involves cities from Memphis to San Jose.

Excerpt from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

The quiet revolution of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide
The story of the cycle track does not end with the trials and successes of New York. In fact, despite the turmoil of the Prospect Park West Bike Lane in the winter of 2011, the imperative for cycle tracks has garnered even more momentum nationwide, with cities all around the United States prepared to lay their first miles of protected bikeways in 2012 and 2013. While controversy has a way of heightening interest and visibility, the publication in March 2011 of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide set forth for the first time an accepted, long overdue national standard off of which cities could base their designs.

While the cycle track is what makes the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide pioneering, the manual actually includes guidance for bicycle signals, bike boxes, buffered bike lanes, and a host of other new traffic engineering strategies now being deployed across the country. The designs in the guide draw on the European experience as well as existing projects and precedents in the United States. Following the official release in March 2011, NACTO undertook an unprecedented endorsement campaign for the document, drawing the support of countless city transportation officials, as well as US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. These developments have set the stage for a thorough reconsideration of roadway design standards in cities across the country, and reflect the long-recognized fissure between the reality of urban design and the tenets of state highway design.

Whether or not federal transportation policy and state highway design evolve to achieve a more representative balance between state and local interests remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the recent emergence of the cycle track and the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a positive precedent for the future of urban streets and spaces. The modern solution to traffic congestion is no longer a multi-billion dollar highway or tunnel, but a recalibration of investment away from traffic and towards people, and away from highways and towards transit and public plazas. It is through the reinvention and re-imagination of this ubiquitous public asset, the street, that the American city may discover its latent potential. While cycle tracks may be an ephemeral protagonist in this evolving drama (as their late 19th century counterparts were for the Good Roads movement), this subtle traffic operation sets the stage for a more ambitious reconquest of the street — its place, purpose and future in the American city.

Bikebox at a signalized intersection, from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

David Vega-Barachowitz is the Sustainable Initiatives Program Manager at the National Association of City Transportation Officials and coordinator for NACTO’s Cities for Cycling project. Mr. Vega-Barachowitz joined NACTO in 2011 to develop and disseminate the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a national design guide which compiles innovative bikeway and street design in the United States. Prior to joining NACTO, he undertook a Henry Evans Travelling fellowship granted by Columbia University to study urban design, with a focus on bicycle and infrastructure planning and design, in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and France. His interest in bicycling as sustainable transportation was inspired by his time studying architecture and urban design in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008-2009, Mr. Vega-Barachowitz worked at the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked on a State of Good Repair initiative to improve system-wide asset management and systematic rehabilitation for stations. He is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Urban Studies with Architecture.

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.