© Agnese Sanvito | Courtesy of LFA

How do you create a context for good architectural work to be conceived and communicated, understood and valued, designed and built? The Architectural League of New York has been asking and answering this question since its founding in 1881, through lectures, design studies, symposia, exhibitions, prizes, publications and websites (like the one you are reading right now). The London-based Architecture Foundation (AF) has a shorter history — it was founded as the United Kingdom’s first independent architecture center in 1991 — but no less ambitious a mission: to “cultivate new talent and ideas” in architecture and urbanism. One of the many ways the Architecture Foundation does this is by helping to curate and produce the London Festival of Architecture (LFA), a biannual event that celebrates new design ideas in and for London. For its fourth incarnation in 2010, over 600 events, exhibitions, installations and tours responded to this year’s theme of “The Welcoming City.” Since Urban Omnibus is all about celebrating new design ideas in and for New York, we were curious to hear directly from some of the organizers about how to go about such an endeavor in the festival format. We were particularly interested in strategies to invite the public into a shared sense of transformative possibility about the built environment. So we caught up with Sarah Ichioka, director of the Architecture Foundation and co-director of the London Festival of Architecture, and Moira Lascelles, a consultant curator for the 2010 Festival. Read what they had to say about it below.

What is the London Festival of Architecture and how did it come about?
The London Festival of Architecture (LFA) is a citywide celebration of architecture in London. It consists of a series of installations, exhibitions and events that tackle key issues relating to architecture and the built environment today. The aim is to be as inclusive as possible and to bring awareness of the profession to a wide public.

The Festival originated in 2004 as the London Architecture Biennale and was focused in the Clerkenwell area of London – a neighborhood characterized by the large number of architecture and design firms based there. Since then, the Festival has grown and changed its name to appeal to an broad audience that extends beyond the professional design community.

The Festival has three core funders, two governmental (Arts Council England and the London Development Agency) and one private sector (Land Securities, a large property company). While core funding covers key central costs like our website, and some central project management salaries (the four LFA Directors all donate their time), the majority of Festival costs are met through individuals’ and firms’ in-kind support, through donation of labor, facilities, etc. There is a tangible spirit of enthusiastic volunteerism that really makes it happen each time.

How does the Festival’s stated connection to its local contexts play out, at the scale of the city and the scale of neighborhoods?
The Festival tends to focus on key areas, or ‘hubs,’ of London. These ‘hubs’ tend to be places that are experiencing a period of change or have projects or initiatives of architectural significance that the LFA feels are useful and relevant to highlight to a public audience. Curated core activities of the Festival are then located in these focus hubs.

In the past the Festival has focused on areas such as Canary Wharf, Kings Cross, Southwark and most recently the High Street 2012 area in East London and the Bankside Urban Forest in South London. Additionally, we actively encourage, and are incredibly grateful to, independent event organizers who stage events right across London allowing the Festival to be truly citywide. In the past, LFA events have been staged in Hammersmith, Barking, Croydon and Kilburn, to name only a few.

The Union Street Urban Orchard, designed by Heather Ring of the Wayward Plant Registry, has been employing the help of the local community and enthusiastic volunteers to regenerate this currently disused space. This collaborative project developed by The Architecture Foundation, Bankside Open Spaces Trust, ProjectARKs and the Wayward Plant Registry will run until 19 September. Photo (above): flickr user John999. Photo (below): James Nash

Final Review of the International Architecture Student Festival. Photo: LFA2010

Can you describe briefly two or three of the projects that the Architecture Foundation brought to the Festival and why?
The Architecture Foundation was responsible for delivering a wide range of events for the 2010 London Festival of Architecture, including the International Architecture Student Festival and the International Architecture Showcase. For the student festival, in collaboration with London Metropolitan University, the AF asked students from around the world to create site-specific installations to act as sign-posts for the LFA. For the showcase, the AF collaborated with the British Council to turn more than 30 international embassies and cultural institutes around London into presenting venues for a series of exhibitions, installations, events and talks programmes to highlight the dynamic architectural projects that are emerging from their respective countries and to address the theme of the ‘The Welcoming City.’

Both these initiatives reinforce two of The Architecture Foundation’s key aims: exploring international links and collaborations with overseas partners and nurturing new and emerging talent.

The AF also aims to influence the quality of the built environment through real-time, 1:1 scale engagement with stakeholders, and through the fostering of productive interdisciplinary dialogue. For example, the Architecture Foundation staged two large scale interventions in South London, one of which was the building of an urban orchard and community garden complete with 85 trees. Taking its cue from Witherford Watson Mann’s vision for the Bankside Urban Forest in South London, this installation creates a place of exchange for local Bankside residents and visitors to the Festival. The Union Street Urban Orchard lasts until September 19th, after which time all the trees and plants will be redistributed around the local community greening estates and existing community gardens.

Another intervention that reflects this spirit of engagement and dialogue is the Oikos Project, a 120-seater theater built entirely out of locally-sourced, salvaged materials. It’s still under construction. This project was designed by the Berlin-based architect Martin Kaltwasser, and produced in collaboration with the political theater company the Red Room.

The Jelly Fish Theatre, designed by Berlin based architects Köbberling and Kaltwasser, is the UK’s first fully-functioning theatre made entirely from recycled and reclaimed materials. Photo (above): Maja Mysliborska. Photo (below): The Oikos Project

Why do you think large-scale events such as this are important for cities?
These installations allow a broad public to interact with architecture and consider, in a very direct manner, changes — whether underway or yet to be initiated — to their local environment. It brings to life a subject that can at times seem intimidating or inaccessible.

In addition, temporary projects created in the spirit of a Festival can act as testbeds for longer-term strategies and solutions to a given problem. The ‘temporary state’ of these installations encourages people to allow activities to happen that they may usually deem to be too risky or expensive. Once they see how they work on a short-term basis they have more courage in pursuing longer term strategies.

Are there other comparable events taking place in London?
We are definitely the most comprehensive event of this sort in the UK, in terms of both geographic coverage and temporal length. For example, Open House London, a really great event that happens one weekend each autumn, is about getting people special access to see the inside of existing buildings. The Festival, in contrast or complement to this, is about creating new visions of how the city might be, whether this is through exhibition, debates, or full-scale interventions within the public realm.

In your opinion, to what extent does the Festival invite Londoners to share a sense of transformative possibility about the built environment?
Due to the wide variety of Festival events there is something for everyone! People can be affected on any number of different scales, from a debate or an exhibition to a transformative experience through an installation. The Festival makes these events and encounters possible.

What do you think are some ways that sense might be maintained after the event is over?
Legacy has been a key word for the LFA2010 and many of our projects have sought to plan for a longer life beyond the Festival closing date of July 4th. Two strong examples of this are The Union Street Urban Orchard, mentioned above, along with the Oikos Project, which saw the live build of a theater from recycled and reclaimed materials that will house specially commissioned plays on climate change in the autumn. The idea of legacy was also written into the International Architecture Student Festival Brief encouraging students to find local clients and building useful objects that could last. Our hope is that this aspect of the Festival will continue to grow in years to come.

Moss Your City. Design: by PUSHAK. Photo: The Architecture Foundation / Guy Archard. All Rights Reserved.

Five years ago, a collection of international urban experts convened in New York for the first conference of the Urban Age project, a worldwide investigation into the future of cities that has since visited Shanghai, London, Johannesburg, Mexico City, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Mumbai and Istanbul. One of these experts is Harvard Law Professor Gerald Frug, who shares with Omnibus readers his 2005 speech comparing the structures and powers of city government in London and New York. Five years later, the topic is even more relevant, with Bloomberg in his third term, the inefficiencies of Albany (and Washington) exacerbated by the financial crisis, New York’s PlaNYC in full effect and London’s replacing the London Plan with a brand new one.

Each week, Urban Omnibus presents an idea that, in some way or another, could make New York City a little bit better. But we’ve never asked what New York City itself, as embodied by its city government, can really do. Asking this question – and looking comparatively at precedents from outside our city and our country – must underlie how we design, plan and organize for urban change. – C.S.

Left: New York City by Flickr user Caruba; Right: London by Flickr user Jess J.

All city governments are dysfunctional. But each is dysfunctional in its own way.

Some people treat the city governments of London and New York as being a lot alike. After all, each has an elected Mayor and a separately elected city council or assembly; each is city with roughly 7-8 million people in a metropolitan area of roughly 18-20 million. If you compare the cities with this kind of similarity in mind, New York seems way ahead of London in terms of the authority it exercises. To give just a few examples, New York has the largest municipal hospital system in the country – with 11 hospitals and more than 100 community health clinics. It educates over 1 million children in primary and secondary schools, provides housing to 420,000 city residents, runs 29 job centers, has 60,000 children in child care programs, provides over 200 shelters for the homeless, operates 1,700 parks, manages the city’s water supply, admits 110,000 individuals to its prison facilities every year, and has more than 2,000 trucks picking up 12,000 tons of waste every day.

London’s city government – the Greater London Authority – does none of these things. None. All of these kinds of services are provided either by the national government or by the 33 local governments within London – London’s 32 boroughs and the its financial district, the City of London. New York City government is overwhelmingly a service government – it provides services of an incredible variety and scope to its residents. That’s not what London’s city-wide government is. New York City’s government in many ways is more comparable to London’s boroughs than it is to the Greater London Authority. In terms of service delivery, London’s city-wide government is very weak. From a service point of view, some people think that London should become more like New York.

I think that this is the wrong way to think about the comparison between the two cities. For our purposes, London’s city-wide government has a lot to teach New York. To think about issues such as work and home life, public space and private space, the neighborhoods and the region, cars and mass transit, immigrant businesses and high finance, policy making and urban design, the metropolitan region and the city block, New York and London both have to think about how and where they should grow. London has the capacity to do this, and New York City doesn’t.

Left: Cambridge Circus by Flickr user marttj; Right: 11th Avenue by Flickr user DavidMenting.

New York City lacks a vital ability: it doesn’t have the power to plan for, let alone determine, its own future. In 2004, the Greater London Authority published a document called the London Plan. It lays out a vision of the city in terms of transportation, economic development, housing, public space – along with the environment, social exclusion, tourism, culture, design and many other ingredients. The London Plan envisions London as connected to those around it – to its own Southeast Region in the UK, to northern Europe and the European Union more generally, and, finally, to the world. The London Plan examines both London as a whole and specific sites on specific blocks within the city. It seeks to understand how the different kinds of urban questions fit together – and what to do about them. It’s important to emphasize that the Greater London Authority didn’t just decide to write this plan. It was legally required to do so by an Act of Parliament. To an American reader, it presents the very kind of regional thinking urbanists long for – regional thinking that covers, and organizes, the work of 33 constituent municipal governments. True, the document focus only on Greater London, which itself is only part of the UK’s Southeast Region. And London is also only one actor among many focusing on these problems. It has to deal with boroughs, the private sector, other local governments – and above all, the national government. Still, because it comes with force of a statutory mandate, the London Plan is designed to be taken seriously.

For this kind of undertaking, New York City is completely dysfunctional. There is no document such as the London Plan for the City of New York – and no organization now exists with the authority to write one. There is also no government agency that is thinking about the future of the City of New York in terms of its connection even with the narrowest definition of its region – one that would include the parts of New Jersey right across the Hudson River. It’s not that no one is thinking systematically about New York City and its region. The Regional Plan Association has done absolutely terrific work over many decades thinking about our kinds of issues. They have a problem, however. It’s not merely that they are a non-profit organization, rather than a government agency. It’s that there’s no one they can talk to – the government authority in this region is so fractured that it’s hard to get any of the pieces to begin to fit together. Their problem is our problem. When we discuss ideas of transportation, labor, public space, and housing, we should keep in mind a fundamental question: who could possibly implement any of our ideas?

Left: NYC bus, by Flickr user Aqualung1981; Right: London buses by Flickr user TCDavis.

Like London, New York City can only exercise the power delegated to it by a central government. The Greater London Authority can only do things authorized by Parliament. New York City’s power does not come from the national government; the federal government in the United States plays a relatively minor and mostly destructive role in determining local power. Here, New York State exercises the kind of authority over New York City that Parliament exercises over London.  Don’t be fooled by the phrase home rule. Home rule gives New York City somewhat more leeway when confronted with its centralized government than London has. For example, it gives New York City the power to pass local regulatory ordinances, which the Greater London Authority cannot do. Still, notwithstanding home rule, New York State ultimately remains in control over such critical urban issues as housing, transportation, economic development, and the city’s finances.

In setting up New York City, New York State has denied it control over many of the most important ingredients of urban life. New York State has fractured government authority in the region by giving power not to the city but to state-controlled public authorities (or quangos, as the British call them). Much of the important development in the city is controlled not by the city but by the Empire State Development Corporation – an agency, appointed by the Governor not the Mayor, that, directly or through subsidiaries, dominates major projects ranging from Ground Zero to Battery Park City to Times Square. The two most important actors on transportation issues are the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is appointed by New York State’s Governor, with only 4 of its 17 members recommended by the city; the Port Authority is appointed by two Governors, without any city input. Public space is divided up into more than 50 business improvement districts governed by property owners and not city residents. For example, the Union Square Partnership – the oldest business improvement district in New York – manages the streets on a day-to-day basis.  Given all this fragmentation, New York City lacks a vital ability: it doesn’t have the power to plan for, let alone determine, its own future.

Left: New York City subway by Flickr user Ed Coyle Photography; Right: London tube by Ana Travas & Sergej Skrjanec (Flickr user ComplementaryDuo).

Consider mobility and transport. The Greater London Authority has responsibility for transportation in London – largely through an organization called Transport for London, whose board is completely appointed by the Mayor. And transportation is very widely defined: it includes the buses and the underground, highways and car traffic, cabs and mini-cabs, walking and cycling. The Mayor and Transport for London have the statutory obligation to make sense of how cars and mass-transit, along with cabs and bicycles, create a city-wide transportation system. Sure, the Mayor of London doesn’t control everything – the railroads, the airports, and major highways are in the hands of the national government (or the private sector) and local streets in the hands of the boroughs. But if the Mayor is energetic and proactive, he can be the key guy on the issue.

New York State has given New York City a heart, but no brain. Parliament has given London a brain, but no muscle. New York is miles behind London in thinking about transportation. The state has divided authority over transport in a way that no one could conceivably defend. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority runs New York City’s subways and buses, along with the Long Island Railroad; the Port Authority runs the airports, PATH trains to New Jersey, and the Air Train at JFK; New Jersey Transit, appointed by New Jersey’s governor, runs its own trains and buses into New York. The Transportation Authority operates nine bridges and tunnels; the Port Authority controls other bridges and tunnels, including the Lincoln Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge; the New York City’s Department of Transportation controls still other bridges and tunnels, such as the 59^th Street Bridge. The highways are run by the New York and New Jersey State Departments of Transportation. And the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission licenses the city’s taxis. Transportation, you should know, is the area for which the federal government is most insistent on metropolitan planning. The problem for New York is that there are many metropolitan transportation planning bodies in the area, not just one. One deals with New York City and a few nearby New York suburbs; another deals with New Jersey; yet another deals with Connecticut. No one, starting from scratch, would devise a transport and mobility structure like this one. To declare this set up a scandal would be a waste of time. Everyone knows it’s a scandal; it’s been a scandal for decades.

Left to Right: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Tower, Queensboro and Chelsea Bridges.

The basic difference between New York and London can be summarized very simply. New York State has given New York City a heart, but no brain. Parliament has given London a brain, but no muscle. And a brain is what a city needs at this moment on the kinds of issues we are addressing. By saying this I mean no disrespect whatsoever to the officials of either city – New York has many very smart people working on the city’s future and London has many who are physically strong. It’s the city government, not its employees, that I’m referring to here: it’s the New York City government that has been denied the ability to think about, let alone take control of, its own future.

London shows that this is not necessary. The State of New York could authorize the Mayor to work with others – public and private, regional and neighborhood – to prepare something like the London Plan. And it can give him the power to bring the multiple public authorities into compliance with his plan. If a more regional organization is thought better, the states of New York and New Jersey can together create a democratically accountable organization – democratically organized like the Greater London Authority – empowered to write such a plan. This could be done today if the political leadership took seriously the importance of nurturing New York as a global city. That’s the vision of London that animates the London Plan. Many people will call this idea utopian, but it’s only utopian because the state has set up the city – and the region – in a way that makes it so hard to do. Changing this requires the kind of political muscle that in 1986 abolished the London-wide government and that, now, has created a new one to help guide its future. We could use the exercise of that kind of muscle here in New York.


This text is adapted from a speech delivered at the Urban Age conference, February 2005.

As with all opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Gerald Frug is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, he worked as a Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in Washington, DC, and as Health Services Administrator of the City of New York. In 1974 he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, before joining the Harvard law faculty in 1981. Jerry’s specialty is local government law. He has published dozens of articles on the topic and is the author, among other works, of City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls (1999), and City Bound: How States Stifle Urban Innovation (with David Barron, 2008).