-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

Wait, what?

Checking in | Photo by David Bellona

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

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

Photo by David Bellona

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

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

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

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

SXSW as seen through Instagram | Photo by Katie Koch

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

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

Photo by David Bellona

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

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

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

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

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

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

Austin Convention Center | Photo by David Bellona

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

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

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.

The app, thanks to Irene and Brett’s wariness of function creep, is well edited. The speculative projects included all share what Irene called an aspect of unreality; not only were they visionary at the time they were introduced, but also unattainable. Quotes from the architects and a few architectural renderings are provided, but the user is left to draw conclusions about what the impact would have been.

Details about the Phantom projects are available to app users only once they are within range of the site, though they are accessible online at any time. This choice is intended to encourage people to treat the whole city as a museum, not just their mobile device.

After Irene and Brett’s talk we went on a short walk, exploring the projects accessible in Midtown, before finding a corner in a nearby bar to settle in and talk apps – the Great American iPhone App to be precise. A conversation about the Phantom City – what could have been – led to a discussion of what could be.  Everyone in the group, which ranged across age groups and professions, articulated what his or her dream app would be, some specific and some grand. An envisioned app that would track the daily route of the iPhone owner turned the conversation towards subjective mapping. Like a spatial journal, such an app could turn a map of the city into a personal checklist, encouraging urban exploration, as the Museum of the Phantom City’s bursts of light do, and prompting the user to fill in non-traversed areas. Or a user could access the paths other app users take through the city. Kevin Lynch’s theories put to the test. What could we learn about our city with that kind of information? What layers of the city might be revealed?

Besides the well-known GPS feature, the iPhone has several underused high-tech sensors like an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and an infrared sensor which can provide mass amounts of recordable data. But smartphones’ already demonstrated prowess at collecting information has not yet been matched by potential applications to centralize, disseminate, or make visible said data for advocacy or other productive uses.

Many hoped to find ways to use this technology for public information sharing beyond restaurant reviews. But close behind the utopian possibilities afforded by the new media, just as in all of the visionary sites that make up the Phantom City, are the dystopian ones. How do we ensure that this new public platform becomes something other than a new tool of consumerism? And when am I actually going to break down and buy one? At this point it doesn’t seem too far off.

Thanks to everyone who joined us, both on foot and in conversation. Check out a few photos of the event below. If you came along and have more pics to share, add them to our Flickr group and tag them “urbanomnibus.” To find out about more upcoming events, and to stay on top of our weekly features and forum posts sign up for our weekly email, become a fan of Urban Omnibus on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Check out other recaps of the event from our co-sponsor WNYC and Omnibus advisor Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, Executive Director of the Queens Council on the Arts.

Rachel Aland is project associate of Urban Omnibus. She lives in Brooklyn.

Video excerpts courtesy of Wayne Congar

Photos by Varick Shute

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.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones who think this is the coolest thing to hit our iPhones since Shazam. Coverage from the Times to BLDGBLOG has affirmed that these guys are onto something. As Cheng and Snyder discussed in last week’s feature:

iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.

Cheng and Snyder have built a new app that uses GPS technology to explore “how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.” The app is called “Museum of the Phantom City,” and it turns the iPhone into an “architectural dousing rod.” As you wander the streets of New York, it shows a city that could have been — 50 architecture sites that never got built.

WNYC’s Soterios Johnson took the iPhone tour with Irene Cheng. They started off at Bryant Park, the site of a proposed airport. Take a listen to the tour:

Cheng and Snyder developed the app with the help of the Van Alen Institute — the beta version of the app is available for free on iTunes, and you can see the whole tour on their website.

On Saturday afternoon, come join us and WNYC’s culture department as Cheng and Snyder take us on a mid-town tour of some of the sites. If you don’t have an iPhone, we’ll pair you with someone who does. RSVP to culture@wnyc.org.

Urban Omnibus and WNYC Meet-up
Museum of the Phantom City
Saturday, October 31
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Meet at the Bryant Park Fountain (6th Avenue side)
Drinks and conversation to follow
RSVP to culture@wnyc.org or on Facebook

This week, Museum of the Phantom City designers Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder talked about unbuilt city visions and app inspiration with us. We now have word that Irene’s appearance on Morning Edition with Soterios Johnson is set for Monday morning, October 26. So tune in and get your phantom on with NPR, or look out next week for more info from us about our Halloween-day meet-up in Bryant Park with Brett and Irene.

Also of interest to Omni-followers, Design Observer introduces us to Partly Sunny, a design showcase at RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design) highlighting initiatives that are addressing the challenges posed by climate change. The 36 featured projects include a number of urban infrastructure and transit initiatives, including GoLoco, the ride-sharing service developed by Zipcar founder Robin Chase, along with other topics familiar to the Omnibus reader, from urban agriculture to improved water system management. RISD’s Charlie Cannon writes: “To be sure, few of these projects were expressly conceived to combat global warming — but each illustrates how comprehensive thinking can produce near-term results as well as the long-term environmental improvements needed to address the unfolding challenges of climate change.” He adds: “The projects surveyed in Partly Sunny suggest that we need not wait for federal intervention or for the invention of new technologies to make demonstrable steps forward. Nor can we afford to.” Also, My Heart’s in Accra has a nice write-up of Mapping Main Street, the collaborative documentary project of James Burns, Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann, and Omnibus collaborator Jesse Shapins.

In legal news, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the owners of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, which include Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty, have been wrongfully charging market rents on thousands of apartments while receiving special tax breaks from the city. The ruling could have enormous implications for landlords and tenants of rent-controlled apartments across the city who have raised rents in a similar fashion, particularly as a lower court now decides whether tenants are entitled to back rent and damages.

The New York Times has started a new editorial series called Failed State, calling attention to the ways that Albany has made New York State, as they say, “a national embarrassment [and] a swamp of intrigue and corruption.” The map-obsessed among us will notice that in addition to ethics reform, campaign finance laws, concealed budget information, and pension investment mismanagement, specific mention is made of the strange (some might say ridiculous) way that district map borders are drawn – namely that the lawmakers draw the lines themselves. If the state heeds the Times‘ call for an independent commission to serve as a fair mapmaker, you can bet there will be an Omnibus feature about it.

We leave you with a short video, found via Wooster Collective, of the multimedia duo SWEATSHOPPE’s experimentation with “video painting.” It’s pretty much as cool as it sounds:

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about. Photo © 2008 Partly Sunny, courtesy of RISD.

Click any image to view a slideshow of all images.

Every building or neighborhood has a story to tell. As self-admitted archi-nerds, whenever we travel we often find ourselves wanting to know more about the places we pass. Yet as a genre, architectural information graphics seem arrested in the nineteenth century forms of the plaque and the guidebook – modes that are didactic and technologically primitive. We wondered how ubiquitous mobile devices might be harnessed to make the city’s hidden stories visible.

Such speculations led us to develop the Museum of the Phantom City: OtherFutures – an iPhone app that lets users browse visionary designs for the City of New York on their phones. The app is now available in beta form on the iTunes store, thanks to the efforts of a multidisciplinary team of programmers, researchers, a graphic designer, and an architecture historian.

Mobile Media and Urban Experience
iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition. We are inspired by the work of artists and urbanists like Janet Cardiff and the Situationists, who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange again. How might mobile media be used to reveal dimensions of the city veiled from everyday experience – to manufacture an augmented reality?

We are also interested in how architects might capitalize on the ubiquity of personal digital devices to reach an audience beyond the world of design, to inspire a greater interest in urban and design issues in the general public. Fortunately, this desire to reach a broader audience coincided with the Van Alen Institute’s mission to promote emerging works of “public architecture,” and we were able to develop the Phantom City project through the generous support of their New York Prize Fellowship.

The inaugural exhibition of the Museum of the Phantom City is OtherFutures, and it features speculative and sometimes fanciful visions of the city that were never realized. We launched the project on October 3 with a scavenger hunt sponsored by the Van Alen that began on Roosevelt Island.

How it works
When you open the app, the first screen to appear after the initial credits is a dark, nearly black, field punctuated only by several pink and white “bursts.” The screen is intended to be a kind of terrain vague, to make you feel like you are groping through some unknown territory. On closer inspection, you might notice that the black field conceals a Google map underlay, and that it is centered on your current location. The bursts indicate sites for which a designer has created a visionary proposal at some point in the past. A pink burst means you are close enough to access the site—to see the designer’s images and words. A white burst means you are not within range: venture closer to unlock that site’s content.

(Users outside of New York City are out of luck for now, until we can get additional funding to expand the project to other cities. Though the entire archive of utopian projects is also accessible on the Museum of the Phantom City website.)

The sites include well-known projects such as Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Midtown Manhattan and Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, as well as less famous proposals like Fuller’s “Mini-Earth”—a miniature globe that would have been suspended by cables across from the United Nations building, constantly reminding diplomats of the “bigger picture” of their actions. Or Raymond Loewy’s 1941 proposal for a helicopter landing field to be built on steel pylons over Bryant Park, which he claimed could double as an air raid shelter.

Phantom City in prospect
Combing through the archive of OtherFutures, one becomes aware of certain generational preoccupations: Visions at the turn of the twentieth century are full of soaring towers, bridges between skyscrapers, and flying machines, while mid-twentieth-century proposals, not surprisingly, reveal Cold War disquiet about bomb attacks. The 1960s generated myriad megastructures composed of prefabricated units that would purportedly leave the existing urban fabric intact.

On one level, such proposals can be viewed merely as quaint curiosities – the detritus of bygone hopes and anxieties. But on another, they serve as a pointed contrast to present-day urban proposals. Sure, an airport over Bryant Park seems far-fetched, but are we necessarily happy with the current status quo in urban transportation systems? How does the Related Companies’ West Side Railyards proposal appear when juxtaposed with Michael Sorkin’s whimsical, elegiac scheme for a homeless colony on the same site? OtherFutures provokes the question of whether our current designs for the city are imaginative enough, whether we are thinking big enough.

Users are free, however, to interpret the content of the app as they wish. A rating function allows one to vote on each proposal, and to see how others have voted: Was Paul Rudolph’s Lower Manhattan Expressway project utopian or dystopian? Beauty or beast? Yawn or yell? You decide. Then roam elsewhere and discover another city that could have been.


Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder are founders of Cheng+Snyder, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York City and Philadelphia. Brett teaches design at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and Irene is a doctoral candidate in architectural history at Columbia University.

Photos from project launch on Roosevelt Island © Van Alen Institute, 2009. All other images courtesy of Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder.

Project Credits:
Museum of the Phantom City is a public art project designed by Cheng+Snyder with generous support from the Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship.

PROJECT COLLABORATORS
Ray Cha, website programming and user interface
Michelle Chang, research and project development
Noah Keating, iPhone programming and interactive design
Olivia Wright, research and project development

Cheng+Snyder gratefullly acknowledges the following for their contributions and input: Alexander Arroyo, Inbar Barak, Maria Berman, Jessica Blaustein, Christy Cheng, Adam Dayem, Chris Dierks, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Sam Feldman, Abby Hamlin, Jamie Hand, Elizabeth Hodges, Steven Holl, Brad Horn, Joan Ockman, Brian Schulman, Liz Shearer, Michael Sorkin, Deborah Tchoudjinoff, Alie Thomer, and Bernard Tschumi.

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.

Remember when Jesse Shapins and Brian House showed us how citizens of all stripes could magically morph into “critical media artists,” using a handy little experiential dictionary as a point of departure? Well now Jesse has teamed up with Kara Oehler, Ann Heppermann and James Burns and the team has focused their collaborative documentary efforts on that most ubiquitous of place names – one often evoked by moose-hunting culture warriors and erstwhile vice-presidential candidates – Main Street. This just in: the Main Streets of America are as various as the country itself. In fact, the central places in our cities and town might be as good a place as any to showcase our country’s baffling internal diversity. Check out the new website they just launched and then read on below as they announce, in their own words, a bunch of fantastic media corollaries.

NPR Weekend Edition Series
As part of the project, we’re producing a series on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. Our first story was about Chattanooga, TN, where part of Main Street is a prostitution strip. Our second story explored San Luis, AZ, where Main Street is a border crossing. This Saturday, tune in to Weekend Edition, where we’ll raft under Main Street in Lewistown, MT. (Check out NPR.org to see when you can hear the show on your local member station.)

Mapping Main Street Songs
We’ve also commissioned four musicians to create original songs based on actual Main Streets. Listen to songs by:

A Collaborative Documentary Media Project
Mapping Main Street is an experiment in the new genre of collaborative documentary media. Anyone can contribute to this project. The only requirement is that all photos and videos must be taken on a street named Main. You can explore this interactive documentary on our website www.mappingmainstreet.org. Already, hundreds of people have contributed photos and videos from more than 400 Main Streets in all 50 states. The site is organized around geographical and thematic routes. We think some of the most interesting are:

Upcoming
This is just the first phase of the project. Now, we’re currently working with WNYC’s Radio Rookies Short Wave on a workshop to produce radio stories and take photos on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. And this winter, we’ll be journeying along the Main Streets of the Puget Sound region to produce stories and interactive features for KUOW’s Program Venture Fund, along with special experimental pieces for PRX’s Remix Radio Sirius stream.

Mapping Main Street is produced through the generous funding of MQ2, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, Inc. with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The project is also supported with funds from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The website was designed by the Mapping Main Street team and Local Projects.