HUMAN IMPACT ON THE EARTH
It’s Earth Day! First up, take a look at this series of maps and graphics from NationalJournal.com that shows the extent of our impact on our land and in our oceans as a result of population density, land transformation, accessibility, electric-power infrastructure, commercial fishing, cargo shipping and more.

NEW BUILDING BENCHMARKING GRADES
A new benchmarking law will take effect on May 1st. According to The Architect’s Newspaper, owners of buildings over 50,000 square feet will be required to report water and energy use through the EPA’s Portfolio Manager Tool; non-compliant owners will get hit with fines. The data submitted will lead to an efficiency grade that tenants — or potential buyers — will be able to check on the Department of Buildings website. The hope is that as owners and tenants begin to understand how their buildings are performing, the market will shift toward efficiency, helping reach broader, zero-emission goals.

2009 Vision for High-Speed Rail via whitehouse.gov

HIGH-SPEED RAIL FUNDING: DE-RAILED
Last weekend marked the official elimination of the original $2.5 Billion set aside for high speed rail. Transportation on the whole was damaged by the cuts — as President Obama said at a DNC event last week, budget cuts do not just fail to include high-speed rail, but is “a vision that says we can’t afford to rebuild our roads and our bridges.” See more on the cuts to transportation in Infrastructurist’s coverage of the news or read a detailed report on the budgetary amendments in this House Appropriations Committee summary PDF.

BLUE URBANISM
“More than half of the U.S. population lives in coastal counties adjacent to the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, the Gulf of Mexico and Great Lakes.” Blue Urbanism begs the planning and design world to think about this fact, and see cities through the lens of the open water. As our planet gets bluer, cities are noticing. Traditional borders are moving and port cities are looking at the oceans a new ways. Beyond monitoring water quality or noticing the loss of marine biodiversity, coastal cities across the world are redeveloping plans to include sustainable waterfronts. The Cape Cod Planning Commission recently expanded an Ocean Management Planning District, including a half million acres of open ocean, to evaluate the scale, location and efficacy of offshore wind turbines. New York City just released the Comprehensive Waterfront Plan to increase use of waterways. Rotterdam is practically designing their city around the water. Read more on the growth of Blue Urbanism in Design Observer’s fascinating piece on this growing movement.

PROCRO NO MORE
Sick of hearing neighborhood names like SoBro, ProCro or SoHa — or trying to figure out where they are? The New York Times City Room blog recently reported that Brooklyn Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries is reeling about the realty practice of renaming NYC neighborhoods to feign desirability. Jeffries wants to introduce a new bill that would require a series of approvals for neighborhood renaming from the City Council, the mayor and community boards. “It’s the Wild West in New York City right now,” he said. “Brokers are allowed to essentially pull names out of thin air in order to rebrand a neighborhood and have the effect of raising rents or home prices.”

PRATT CENTER AND BROOKINGS REPORT ON URBAN MANUFACTURING
A report by the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program and the Pratt Center for Community Development, “The Federal Role in Supporting Urban Manufacturing,” points to the changing geography of our nation’s production sector and how federal and municipal government should work to support its growth and development. The report highlights the need for smaller urban manufacturer support. To take a closer look at the recommendations see Pratt Center’s coverage, download the full report or download the case studies. In 2009, Adam Friedman, Director of the Pratt Center, gave Omnibus readers a primer on the importance of manufacturing to New York. Check it out here.

EVENTS + TODOs
The Skyscraper as Citizen: A Lecture by Henry N. Cobb. Center for Architecture is hosting an event to discuss “Reflections on the Public Life of Private Buildings,” with special attention to Boston’s John Hancock Tower. Monday, April 25, 6-8 PM, Monday, April 25th.

MAS Walking Tour: Rethinking the Sheridan: From Bronx River to Hunts Point Explore the impact of the Sheridan Expressway on the neighborhoods that border it from a pedestrian vantage point, Saturday, April 23, 11:00 a.m. Register here.

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

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

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

Everything Frosted | photo: Tom Giebel

_______________________________________________________________________________

Deanna Fei

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

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

Jerome Chou

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

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

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

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

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

_______________________________________________________________________________

Cristiana Baik

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

Peggy Lee

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

Sahar Muradi

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

_______________________________________________________________________________

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

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

Bruce Lee restaurant in Sunset Park | photo: Peggy Lee

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

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

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

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

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

A drawing from Peggy Lee's personal journal

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

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

Bush Terminal | photos: Christiana Baik

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deli Gentrification | Photo courtesy of Jerome Chou

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bank Map | Jerome Chou and Yeju Choi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tai Chi in Kissena Park | Photo courtesy of Deanna Fei

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

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

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

Chinese New Year Parade | Photos: Sahar Muradi

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

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

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

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

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

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

Menu at Kabul Kebab House | Photo: Sahar Muradi

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

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

When searching the web for dictionary definitions of “cultural district,” amid academic articles and policy papers, Wikipedia’s is actually the most concise: “a well-recognized, labeled, mixed-use area of a settlement in which a high concentration of cultural facilities serves as the anchor of attraction.” Cultural districts can be found across the globe – there are over 100 in the US alone – but I continue to be fascinated by how these districts came to be. In some cases, visionaries, city authorities and business leaders visualized places, such as Lincoln Center, as a part of city building, economic development, livability, creativity, local “spirit” and fun. Others, such as Fourth Arts Block (featured last week on Urban Omnibus), develop organically as a result of circumstances that attract artists and creative communities to one place. But this distinction is not just a matter of origin, but of audience as well. In one case, the audience is (often) identified and imported by the developers of the district, while in the other, the audience is the generator of the district itself. How do you design a city – any city – for culture? Or should you let the culture design the city?

Those questions were at the core of the discussion “Designing for Culture: Hong Kong – Chicago – New York,” held by the Asia Society last week. Hong Kong was represented by Rocco Yim, one of three finalists in the competition for the West Kowloon Cultural District master plan (the other two finalists are Norman Foster and OMA). Edward K. Uhlir, the executive director of Millennium Park, presented that project’s process in the context of Chicago’s cultural environment. And architect Hugh Hardy talked about a variety of cultural projects in New York. The intent of the projects in these three cities differed at their core. The discussion was moderated by Kristy Edmunds, Consulting Artistic Director for the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Rocco Yim, an architect based in Hong Kong, presented his master plan proposal for the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong. The proposed district spans nearly 100 acres (40 hectares) and would be home to 14 major cultural institutions. Yim’s design is organized in three layers: Green Terrain, City Link and A Cultural Core. His design focuses on a public space network and connectivity to the city, but it is unclear how the activity of the new cultural district would be linked to the arts that already exist in Hong Kong. This project is part of an effort by the Hong Kong government to invest in the arts through the physical infrastructure of the city. Presently there is no cultural district in Hong Kong, hence the need for such spaces. But one question remained unanswered: Is there enough of an audience to bring an arts district of this magnitude to life?

Millennium Park, Chicago. | Photo by Flickr user Serge Melki.

Edward Uhlir offered insight into the potential economic impact of a cultural venue or district. He walked us through the process of developing the 24.5-acre Millennium Park, from the initial opposition to the idea, partially fueled by a poorly articulated economic plan, to what he described as a public amenity that has made a tremendous economic impact in Chicago. With pavilions, sculptures and built features by well-known artists and architects, such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Zaha Hadid, Anish Kapoor and Jaume Plensa, this cultural destination, according to Uhlir, now attracts more visitors in the summer months than any other public project in the nation.

Hugh Hardy, founder and partner of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, widely known for his work with theaters, performing arts facilities and other cultural institutions, shared his thoughts on planning a city around the idea of culture. Hardy expressed his constant fascination by how the visual arts and the performing arts come together in the urban environment. Citing examples of Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Times Square’s Theatre Row, he argued that it is the integration of culture within the urban fabric that ultimately builds a city.

After the Chicago and New York cases were discussed, a question presented to Yim — Who’s the audience for all this? — continued to linger.  Thinking back to the Wikipedia definition of a cultural district – well-recognized, mixed-use, and anchored by concentrated cultural amenities — made me wonder about how deliberate design, policy and real estate projects can realistically be in creating cultural districts. Certainly both a planned cultural district and a naturally occurring one can serve as an anchor of attraction, and can contribute to a city’s economic development. New York City’s examples, from Fourth Arts Block to Lincoln Center, certainly demonstrate that. But whether increasing a city’s supply of cultural offerings will eventually increase citizen’s demand for cultural opportunities remains a question for another panel to ponder.

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Purva Jain is an architect and urban designer and currently works part-time as a project associate at Urban Omnibus. She is from India and now lives in New York City.

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.