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.

Last Thursday night, a relaxed and candid Dan Doctoroff joined Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker, for the second of the Architectural League’s “Conversations on New York.” He discussed, with palpable affection for the city, some of the big plans he initiated while Deputy Mayor for Economic Development between 2002 and 2007.

Goldberger began the conversation by asking whether Doctoroff’s focus “on the physical city” as a strategy for economic development was a matter of administrative policy or a personal interest, and why that emphasis seems less strong since he left his position. For Doctoroff, the answer is both: he and Bloomberg came into office three months after 9/11, inspired by the extraordinary responsibility — and opportunity — to “remake the city.” His primary map for this remaking was the Olympic plan, developed by NYC 2012, an organization Doctoroff founded before joining City government. While the bid was unsuccessful, Doctoroff repeated throughout the event that many of the plans developed under the auspices of the 2012 bid have been set in motion anyway. The agenda underlying the Olympic plan was to use the event to catalyze the development of areas of the city that had suffered in the transition to a post-industrial economy, including the west side of Manhattan, the Brooklyn waterfront, Coney Island, the Queens waterfront, Flushing, the South Bronx and Harlem. He credits Alexander Garvin (the subject of the first of the League’s “Conversations on New York” last month) with making a workable urban plan that did not concentrate all Olympic activity in one part of the city, as is the case in London, which won the Olympics for 2012.

Alongside these physical objectives, Doctoroff stated that his desire to win the Olympics for New York was rooted in his deeply held belief in the symbolic power of the city. Invoking both the city’s singular diversity and the increasingly competitive global race in which it finds itself, he saw hosting the games as an “opportunity to remind the world what New York City means to the world.”

Some of Doctoroff’s most ambitious visions, such as the West Side Stadium and congestion pricing, fell afoul of the working processes of a tangle of municipal, state, regional and federal governance structures. With respect to the stadium, in addition to the opposition of state legislators and the extravagant lobbying efforts of Cablevision, Doctoroff admits that he failed to communicate what he saw as an essential argument for the project: it was to be more than a stadium; it was to be a state-of-the-art update to a woefully outdated Javits Center; it was to create a new neighborhood, a new boulevard, a new subway line. With respect to congestion pricing, Doctoroff remains optimistic that it will come up for discussion again.

Doctoroff emerged from his years in city government as a fan of the City’s uniform land use review process (or ULURP), stating that every project that went through ULURP benefited from it. He even evinced some regret that the plan for Atlantic Yards did not go through ULURP. Atlantic Yards, for Doctoroff, is an example of a project with a perceived “purpose for the city” that was “much bigger than the immediate community.” In this case, the purpose was the need for affordable office space in Downtown Brooklyn to counter the migration of back-office functions to New Jersey and elsewhere. When Goldberger asked him about the “Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs dialectic,” Doctoroff replied that he does not believe that community consensus and bold urban visions are mutually exclusive. And, perhaps more than anything else, he believes in the need for long-term planning, building constituencies around plans that transcend any one political administration.

Perhaps the most significant legacy of his tenure is, in fact, a long-term plan, PlaNYC, which grew out of the simple observation, in 2005, that for even the most banal municipal land use needs like salt piles and tow pounds, no sites seemed to be available. Given New York’s projected population increases over the coming decades, Doctoroff went about finding ways to accommodate the growth and turn it into an asset for the city. He cited a list of successes — hybrid cabs, a million trees, stormwater management interventions – and one major disappointment: congestion pricing. Doctoroff’s belief in long-term planning, in counter-cyclical investment, and in bold visions with broad constituencies, underpin his most powerful asset in helping to create the conditions for this future city to thrive: his passionate belief in the openness, tolerance, diversity and symbolism of New York itself.

UPDATE: A podcast of the event is now available on the League’s website. Click here to watch Doctoroff and Goldberger in conversation.

Cassim Shepard is the Project Director of Urban Omnibus.

In 1996, Doctoroff read Garvin’s The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t and subsequently approached him about the feasibility of New York hosting the summer Olympics. Garvin unequivocally agreed with its possibilities, and began seeking out all the city’s sizable and unused spaces for potential venues. He was only interested in vacant sites because, he joked, “I may be far to the right of Michael [Sorkin]… but I don’t believe in relocation.”

In the following excerpt, Garvin describes the back-story of meeting and working with Doctoroff to plan the infrastructural scheme for the NYC2012 Olympic bid. The plan, dubbed The Olympic X, emerged when Garvin placed a roll of trace paper over the map of proposed venues and connected them via the existing subway routes. Check out an excerpt from the story below:

New York, according to Garvin, is ready for a comprehensive rewrite of its massive zoning tome. For Garvin, the need for such a rewrite has just as much to do with financial feasibility as it does the physical edifice of the city, because current legal requirements make it too expensive for individuals and small businesses to build. Identifying himself as “pro-development”, Garvin’s position marks a distillation of public and private roles in the planning process. Nonetheless, his ideal zoning ordinance would focus on the public realm (streetscape, parks, transportation, infrastructure) rather than private property.

Ten years ago, Garvin might not have supported the zoning approach he now favors. Even during his Housing and Community Development work under the Lindsay administration in the 1970’s, Garvin helped develop floor-area bonuses for residential developers for planning in public resources. “It didn’t work,” said Garvin. Since their inception, bonuses have been used by City Planning to incentivize amenities considered beneficial to the general population, ranging from affordable housing to grocery stores providing fresh produce. If developer bonuses should not be included as incentive, Sorkin asked, “then how do you feel about the Inclusionary Housing Program?” Garvin replied that he simply does not favor bonuses. He feels that if we, as a city, want to provide subsidized housing, then we should subsidize housing. When he mentioned that a greater supply of residential units would bring down costs, Sorkin cited this year’s NYU Furman Center report (PDF) that revealed that recent rezoning efforts have effectively provided very little change to city-wide residential capacity.

Development bonuses have been the corrective to the imbalance of public/private power derived from the 1961 zoning ordinance, but Garvin was eager to share how his work at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation after 9/11 gave him new insight into this balancing act.

“It wasn’t until 9/11 that I realized how much power the state had,” Genevro commented. She cited a December 2002 plan by the city she favored because of its emphasis on transportation, the public realm, and removal of office space from the World Trade Center site and asked, “What happened to this plan?” Garvin reiterated that despite the plan’s inclusion of several policies he advocates, city agencies had no control over the site redevelopment, which was run by state agencies. Garvin reminded the audience and his interlocutors that the Port Authority always maintained control over redevelopment.. Because the Port Authority relied on the income from Silverstein Properties to make payments on its bonds, the authority believed it needed to replace the 10 million square feet of lost, rentable office space. He pointed out that Mayor Bloomberg has worked hard to reclaim control of some city agencies that were ceded to the state in previous administrations. Yet he noted that for Hudson Yards and Atlantic Yards, the Bloomberg administration chose to pass power to the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), a state agency, to circumvent ULURP, the land use procedures requiring community board reviews of such projects.

Nonetheless, he considers the amount of public participation to be one of the successes of his time at LMDC: “Lower Manhattan reflected that architecture mattered in New York City.” And he considers his greatest achievement from this period to be that Greenwich Street will continue through the WTC superblock to connect Tribeca and Lower Manhattan. Hear Garvin explain this episode in his own words in the excerpt below:

The conversation was stimulating, and invoked the complexity at the heart of New York’s built environment and any attempts to affect it. The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 touches only the surface of this tangled history, and Garvin’s talk reminded the audience of the extent to which large plans, built and unbuilt, helped launch an era of massive change in the history of New York. Don’t miss Doctoroff and Goldberger in conversation this Thursday.

UPDATE: A podcast of the event is now available on the Architectural League’s website. Click here to watch the complete discussion between Garvin, Genevro and Sorkin.
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Matthew Storrie is Associate Curator for The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 and former Project Designer at WW. He is a student in the Princeton University Master of Architecture class of 2012 and has resided in Brooklyn for the last two years.

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.

Conversations on New York 1: Alex Garvin with Rosalie Genevro and Michael Sorkin
Thursday, June 17, 2010
7:00 p.m.
Rose Auditorium, The Cooper Union
41 Cooper Square
1.5 CEUs
“Conversations on New York” are presented in conjunction with the League exhibition The City We Imagined / The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010.

Conversations on New York 1 will feature urban designer Alexander Garvin. Garvin played a major role in two of the most ambitious and discussed public planning initiatives of the decade, serving as managing director of the NYC 2012 effort and as director of planning, design, and development for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. The program will look at both of these projects as well as the role of urban design in the transformation of New York over the past decade.

Garvin is currently President of Alex Garvin and Associates, a planning and design firm based in New York City and president of the Forum for Urban Design. From 1996 to 2005, he was Managing Director of Planning for NYC2012. During 2002-2003, he was the Vice President for Planning, Design and Development at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. He served as a member of the New York City Planning Commission from 1995-2004.

Rosalie Genevro is executive director of the Architectural League. Michael Sorkin is director of the graduate program in urban design at the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture at City College and vice-president for urban design of the Architectural League board of directors, president of the Institute for Urban Design, and author of many books, including the recent Twenty Minutes in Manhattan. Tickets are required for admission to League programs. Tickets are free for League members; $10 for non-members. Members may reserve a ticket by e-mailing: rsvp@archleague.org. Non-members may purchase tickets from www.archleague.org.

Co-sponsored by The Cooper Union Department of Continuing Education and Public Programs. This program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council. The City We Imagined / The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 is supported by Sciame and by Kohn Pedersen Fox.

Image: NYC2012 Olympic Village, courtesy of Alex Garvin

Union Square is the latest stretch of Broadway that might soon become another one of Bloomberg’s “signature open-air concrete parks,” pedestrianized and plaza-ified like Times Square and Herald Square. The proposal will be presented on Monday to the local community board, and the NYC Transportation Department is currently considering the plan’s proposal to ban vehicular traffic along Broadway between 17th and 18th streets and to “reshuffle traffic patterns” around the square.

The New York times reports on the recent release of the New York City Transit’s yearly station-by-station breakdown of subway ridership. They’ve embedded the statistics into a pretty awesome interactive subway map – when you slide your cursor over a particular subway stop, the map displays the average number of daily riders in 2009 and the percent change since 2008. While transit officials attribute the decline to construction, economists tend to identify unemployment as the real issue.

Amongst the sea of thousands of smart phone applications available today, architecture-related app’s remain difficult to track down. So, Architectural Record has the run-down on the growing number of apps for architects, including “Project Photo”, which connects your iPhone photos of buildings with their architectural plans; “Concrete Calc”, which calculates the amount of concrete necessary for a project; and “EcoFlash”, which provides flash cards for LEED exam test-prep. “Dual Level” even turns your iPhone into a construction tool — it allows your phone to act as a level and measure when a surface is horizontal.

NY1 has featured the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center’s online software modeling system that offers a 4-D model of the World Trade Center redevelopment. The modeling software allows viewers to see 3-D renderings of the project’s estimated future progress at various points in time (the fourth dimension!) While the software was developed primarily for construction coordination, the LMDD is currently incorporating the 4-D modeling system into their website, which will allow residents to plan their lives around the development.

If you want to learn more about the World Trade Center redevelopment and other megaprojects, check out the New School’s summer course, “The Politics of Urban Megadevelopment.”  The urban planning class — that Curbed describes as “Development Battles become Homework” – will be based on some of the city’s most controversial megaprojects and will examine Atlantic Yards, the World Trade Center rebuilding, and the Jets Stadium/Hudson Yards proposal, among others.

Coney Island Dream from Joshua Brown on Vimeo.

Debates surrounding the future of Coney Island have raged for years, and many have voiced their concerns about the area’s demise. BoingBoing features photographer Joshua Brown’s beautiful and eerie short film that presents a wintery and seemingly-abandoned Coney Island. Scouting New York recently posted “Abandoned Coney Island,” a photo essay that ventures inside the now derelict Bank of Coney Island building. Those worried about the decline of amusements in the area might enjoy this animated virtual tour of Luna Park, the new amusement park set to open this Memorial Day. Located on 6.9 acres of land that the city bought from developer Joe Sitt for over $95 million, the park will feature 19 new rides, including a “Wild River” ride inspired by the original park’s ride, “Shoot the Chutes,” which you can see in all its 1903 glory below:

Top image by Flickr user acmace. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

If economic troubles haven’t already prompted us to reassess current development trends, a panel that assembled November 7 at Cooper Union’s Great Hall certainly could. That’s the hope, at least, for Olympia Kazi, Executive Director of the Institute for Urban Design and organizer of the symposium, Arrested Development. The goal for the daylong event was ambitious: exhort a panel of academics, architects, developers, economists, and politicians to explore what roles megaprojects have in future developments across a range of international contexts. As New York currently processes the most extensive rezoning and development changes since the early 1960’s, this discussion comes at an opportune time for our city.

In her introduction, Kazi set the tone by declaring that megaprojects are here regardless of what one thinks about them. She challenged the participants to analyze the models we are currently using and to identify where these models might overlap with broader social goals. Most of the 17 participants shared her sentiments, but each offered a nuanced perspective on why and under which circumstances this overlap should be taken as a given.

Session 1: Megaprojects in the Suburbs

Panelists:
Lawrence Levy, Executive Director, National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University
David Manfredi, Principal, Elkus Manfredi Architects
Myron Orfield, Professor of Law; Executive Director, Institute on Race & Poverty at University of Minnesota
Moderator: June Williamson, Associate Professor, Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York / CUNY

The morning segment focused heavily on the demographic changes in the suburbs. The panelists insisted that, without suburban diversity planning, cities force an innate long-term discrimination on poorer communities and exacerbate the suburban fragmentation along our city edges. Urban dwellers may not realize it, but this affects them, too. According to Levy, the additional tax revenues, lifestyle diversity, and cooperative planning methods all add up to a net-positive, and afford us greater cooperation in regional transportation planning.

The group also identified several towns that have tested new these planning strategies to plan for a changing population. In Levy’s opinion, development since the 1950’s has cultivated a certain “paranoia and parochialism“ about the changing immigrant demographic. The challenge is to realize that new immigrants arrive with more than a “dream and a down-payment,” and the communities that plan for the inevitable densification of the suburbs by new citizens will survive.

Possibly the most salient comment of this session came from Orfield, who made clear that our recession economy may have a silver lining in the form of a restructured national transportation planning policy. Federal stimulus funds, if conditioned correctly, would pull Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) out of city and county jurisdictions and incentivize regional planning cooperation. The 1980’s marked the decline of regional planning efforts due to government decentralization and a moment like this is a breath of fresh air to those waiting for regional planning cooperation.

Session 2: Megaprojects as New Towns

Panelists:
Chris Corr, Regional Chair, Planning, Design and Development, AECOM, Florida
Tom Jost, Director of Urban Planning, ARUP, New York
Emily Talen, Professor, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, School of Sustainability, Arizona State University
James von Klemperer, Principal, Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects
Moderator: Robert Fishman, Professor, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan

Drawing from historical utopian models, Fishman introduced the second panel by stating that the concept of ‘mega’ for a project of this nature comes not from a large scale, but from the enormous efforts necessary to establish a consistent community vision in the planning of new cities.

The panelists, some of whom were responsible for model New Urbanism communities and Asian boomtowns, were certainly drawing ire from session three panelists arriving in the audience. For the moment, however, they were free to discuss their development partnerships. Offering the sessions only detraction, Talen identified the key criticisms against heavy-handed development (monolithic visions, ersatz communities, incomplete lifestyles, no diversity, etc.) offering a natural transition into the final session.

Session 3: Megaprojects in the Metropolis
Keynote: Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President

Panelists:
Vishaan Chakrabarti, Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate Development; Director, Real Estate Development Program, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, Columbia University
Susan Fainstein, Professor, Department of Urban Planning and Design, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
Jeff Madrick, Senior Fellow, Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, The New School
Thom Mayne, Founder, Morphosis Architects
Moderator: Peter Grant, The Wall Street Journal

For what was certain to contain the day’s most hot-button issues, session three started with a chord of optimism. Scott Stringer, Manhattan Borough President, reminded everyone that New York City’s finest projects have been built in times of financial restraint. Federal and state stimulus funds intended for infrastructure and regional planning have been intercepted by other programs, but with a cooperative vision and prioritization, New York can achieve a multiplier effect in its future megaproject plans. The premature groundbreakings of the 2nd Avenue Subway line, Moynihan Station and Javits Center Expansion, he said, were a result of those concerned with leaving a political legacy rather than a successful urban intervention. The recent success of the High Line, on the other hand, is the result of a concerted devotion to quality of life standards.

Peter Grant, of the Wall Street Journal’s Real Estate group, echoed Stringer’s optimism. While federal tax credits have slowed the downward economic spiral, the housing crisis has not been abated and we have the breathing room to reassess our other eminent problems. With a looming environmental crisis and failing infrastructure, we could afford some time to establish a clear direction for when capital flow resumes.

The concern of Susan Fainstein, Professor of Planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, however, is the source of the funding. She pointed out that the successful megaprojects in New York (such as the 7 line Subway Extension and Hunt’s Point Greenway), London, and Amsterdam have been paid for by public funds, and the majority of failed megaprojects has been funded by the private sector. For those projects that were heavily subsidized, she questions the cost/benefit ratios. If developers are willing to pay for megaprojects despite their intensely speculative nature and lag-time, Fainstein remarked that the public should understand that they carry the brunt of risk and punishment.

Mayne dismissed Fainstein’s acceptance of successful bold public visions as reductive. Instead, Mayne advocated a massive reconfiguration of visualization and organization strategies that will continue to make urban interventions successful. Citing computing and visualization technologies employed by his architectural office, Morphosis Architects, Mayne declared that we’ve moved beyond the problems of Modernism and its universal aspirations. Instead, macro planning and dealing with “economic aggregates” are issues best handled by a hybrid designer/planner perspective, a strategy Morphosis used when planning for New York’s Olympic Village proposal.

Vishaan Chakrabarti’s presentation, however, revisited Modernist social change ambitions as he criticized the gluttonous way Americans use land. He views hyperdense planning strategies as the primary way to solve our complex economic and environmental problems, and he cautioned that our current Federal Stimulus distribution could put our nation at a disadvantage decades from now. A growing economy like China’s is spending a high percentage of its $585 billion federal stimulus funds on public transportation and infrastructure, but America remains devoted to the automobile and regional domestic flights. If federal funds subsidized all transportation equally, the general population would see that auto-centric development is much more expensive to maintain. Instead, Chakrabarti would like to see Moynihan Station do for rail transportation and density on the West side of Manhattan what Grand Central did for the East. (check out Vishaan’s perspectives on the stimulus and Grand Central Terminal shared right here on the Omnibus. – ed.)

Wrapping up the presentations, Jeff Madrick explained that he just wants to see some optimism. In his words, our nation came to believe we were poor sometime in the 1970s and 1980s and we stopped investing in public infrastructure. Projects funded by the New Deal were pragmatic forces in keeping our nation employed and optimistic even through World War II reconstruction. According to Madrick, our economy needs a comparable program to build confidence.

Discussion for the day was heated, many questions were asked, and the panels represented a good cross section of perspectives. While the discussion may not have determined a singular role for future megaprojects, (in fact, final Q&A seemed to hit an insurmountable impasse) the Institute for Urban Design’s attempts to assemble and present a diversity of opinions sent a clear signal about the complexity of the issue.

Matthew Storrie is the Exhibitions Intern at the Architectural League of New York and former Project Designer at WW Architecture. He enjoys the views from his rooftop in Brooklyn.

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.

So, Mayor Bloomberg will be mayor for a third term. What will this mean for the architecture, planning and urban design that have received more policy attention from his administration than from previous ones? Thoughts, opinions, predictions? Send them our way.

Some will undoubtedly answer that question by pointing to megaprojects, such as Hudson Yards or Atlantic Yards, which have proved to be one of the pressure points of urban policy in the last eight years. A city always looking for creative ways to leverage market forces to develop local economies? A city in hock to developers? A city always reinventing itself? A city in paralysis? These themes and others are sure to be discussed at a major symposium taking place tomorrow convened by the Institute for Urban Design and its inimitable executive director, Omni-advisor Olympia Kazi. Arrested Development: Do Megaprojects Have a Future? will take place Saturday, November 7th at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, from 9:30am to 4:30pm. The roster of speakers – including stimulus-critic and train station aficionado Vishaan Chakrabarti – is a huge draw.

Another meeting of the minds that is sure to appeal to those of you passionate about transit is taking place at Barnard next week. Rights of Way: A New Politics of Movement in New York City will “examine the issues surrounding bikes and pedestrianization, and will explore sustainability, finance, public health, and the ways in which the street can serve as a fulcrum in debates about public space and urban life.” Next Thursday, November 12th in the James Room on the 4th floor of Barnard Hall (Broadway at W. 117th). Free and open to the public.

We’re always on the lookout for newfangled technologies and ideas, especially as they start getting installed and tested. East Londoners are the guinea pigs this time, as Pavegen Systems has installed a panel of energy-generating pavement on a busy stretch of sidewalk. The claim is that “just five slabs spread over a lively sidewalk has the ability to generate enough energy to illuminate a bus stop throughout the night,” so you can imagine the potential applications. The folks at MIT first brought this idea to our attention with their work on Crowd Farming, and it seems like harvesting energy from human motion is an approach ripe with possibilities. You can get all kinds of piezoelectric by dancing, driving, commuting, or even by walking through a door.

For one high-visibility project that we’ve been following, Coney Island, the question has been whether it will stay a mega-playground or become a mega-mall. The City came closer to ensuring that some of Coney’s most iconic amusements will remain in perpetuity with the Economic Development Corporation’s bid for the Wonderwheel.

Another way to fuse the recreational, architectural and the political is to… have a slumber party? An Arkitektur, a Berlin-based group of design radicals, will be hosting a live-in conference on Oppositional Architecture from the 12th to the 21st of November at a loft in Dumbo (Gair Building No 6, 81 Front Street). The discussions (and dinner parties) that will emerge while the group is in residence all critique the politics and production of space in capitalist society, and we’re especially looking forward to a discussion between economist David Kotz and architect Teddy Cruz on Saturday, November 14th. We were tipped off to this by Bryan Bell, who knows what it means to practice design as activism.

We’ll leave you with some further reading: Geoff Manaugh has tackled the question: Who would want to be an architect?, in response to an article by the same name in the Times. The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a taste that might spark interest in the Omni-fans out there: “architecture is the imaginative production of future worlds even as it is the act of building houses for the urban poor or the obtaining of technical skills necessary for rationally subdividing office floorplates.” If you’re on our site, you probably agree, and would expand the definition even more. Curiosity about the complexity of the architecture and design fields, and the infinite ways that design affects the world around us, is what gets us out of bed in the morning. Geoff concluded with a call for discussion – go join in.

Photo by Flickr user Herschell Hershey. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

First off, save the date: on Tuesday, July 7th, please come and join us and our friends and neighbors, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), for a different kind of SUPERFUND conversation called… “Goo Gone: a live talk show about risk, responsibility and toxins in the landscape.” Panelists will include artist Brooke Singer, environmental justice advocate Anne Rabe, congressional community coordinator Dan Wiley, and other cool cats who will offer new perspectives on the history of the Superfund program, the politics of designation, and the changing legal definitions of toxins, risk, and responsibility. This will be free and open to the public, but space is limited so please let us know if you’re coming by emailing info [at] anothercupdevelopment.org. This will go down at the Old American Can Factory, HQ for both Omnibus and CUP and the site of a recent Architectural League shindig that was off the proverbial hook.

While you’re down in this neck of the woods, check out the exhibit at Cabinet reviewed in our forum this week.

Speaking of environmentally hazardous canals, Newtown Creek is also near and dear to our hearts. But its peculiar beauty in no way diminishes the huge cost its pollution has wrought on the public health of the area. the Daily News reports on a new study that is looking in to the mysterious ailments that plague nearby residents.

This week we toured some Midtown West megaprojects with Bob Yaro. His arguments for a coordinated approach to intercity transportation recommend that New Yorkers develop a more sophisticated understanding of how New York fits into a megaregional political economy. This point of view echoes Nate Berg’s call, in Planetizen, for a national infrastructure policy. Yaro also has some opinions on other large construction projects closer to home – like the radically reconfigured plan for Atlantic Yards. In advance of the ESDC’s vote on Forest City Ratner’s new, Ellerbe Becket-designed scheme, Yaro opined that ”the horse is already out of the barn.” He was right; the MTA has accepted the developer’s deferred payment proposal.

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