MORE STATE OF THE CITY – Wi-Fi and WASTE-TO-ENERGY
In addition to the familiar Mayoral priorities reported in last week’s Omnibus Roundup (the economic potential of building projects, more jabs at the teachers union, etc.), Bloomberg’s speech last week also mentioned some tech initiatives, including partnering “with AT&T to bring Wi-Fi service to a dozen city parks – so even if you’re enjoying a beautiful day, you can still work or study or play ‘Words with Friends.’” And, as Next American City highlights, he also spoke about new sources of renewable energy, claiming New York City will “become one of the first cities in the country to turn wastewater into renewable energy and we’ll explore the possibility of cleanly converting trash into renewable energy.” Read the full text of the address at NYC.gov.

Undercity on MyBlockNYC

MYBLOCKNYC GOES UNDERGROUND
Before the holidays, we spoke with Alex Kalman and Alex Rickard about their video hosting site MyBlockNYC. Now they’re teaming up with Gothamist to bring viewers an exclusive glimpse at the world below ground with the series “Undercity.” The makers of the Undercity films, Steve Duncan and filmmaker Andrew Wonder, have been taking viewers on adventures into the unknown underground world of New York City, and now those adventures will be geographically located, visually correlating the world beneath our streets with the city above. Check out the series at MyBlockNYC and the coverage at Gothamist.

PARKING APP
This week the DOT started testing sensors in 177 parking spaces on both sides of 187th Street in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx. The sensors send information to a smart phone app that tells the user when fewer than two or more than four spaces are available on a given block. So instead of circling the block, searching for the right spot, a driver will know their chances of getting a spot and head towards a block with available space. The app will purportedly save drivers from endless frustration, alleviate traffic in shopping areas and help relieve “pollution associated with those people who are cruising around looking for parking,” according to Janette Sadik-Khan of the DOT. The sensors, bright yellow and about the same diameter as a hockey puck, are being tested over the next three months for how they withstand the weather and street sweepers of New York City streets. If they last the testing period, the city will launch a free app for drivers to try. Read the coverage at the Daily News.

CONGRESS INCENTIVIZES DRIVING TO WORK
For the past two years, commuters taking public transportation and those driving private vehicles have been granted the same pre-tax benefit of up to $230 per month. But starting this year, thanks to Congress, all pre-tax benefits are no longer equal: drivers can now set aside as much as $240 pre-tax per month for commuting costs, while the benefit for commuters taking public transportation has dropped to $125. The change means non-drivers will pay up to $550 more in taxes each year. Read more of the coverage at GOOD or in an editorial from The New York Times.

Manhattan Skyline | Photo by flickr user Marcin Wichary

SKYLINE PEAKS AND TROUGHS
The heights of New York City skyscrapers have long been thought to correspond to the depth of the bedrock beneath them. Conventional wisdom has held that the peaks of the Manhattan skyline, Downtown and Midtown, were situated atop the island’s most solid foundation, and that building high on the spaces in between was too difficult, and thus costly, to be worth the effort. Not so, according to “skyscraper economist” Jason Barr. Taking 173 core samples from the Battery to Central Park South, the study shows no correlation between the likelihood of skyscraper construction and bedrock depth. Read more from Matt Chaban at the Observer.

EVENTS AND TO DOs

Stargazing in Times Square | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

THE CITY DARK AT THE IFC CENTER
Last year we spoke to Ian Cheney about The City Dark, his documentary about the loss of the stars in the night sky to light pollution. The documentary takes a winding journey through the unforeseen repercussions of losing the stars, from Maine and back again. Now, The City Dark is showing at the IFC Center for one week only. More information and show times here.

007 URBAN SONGLINE
How can a space become a musical instrument? And how would one play such an instrument? Answer these questions and many more by visiting 007 Urban Songline at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, a project by Allard van Hoorn that turns Storefront’s iconic façade into an interactive and responsive acoustic device through a network of strings activated by vistors’ bodily movements. Through February 18th, you can play the building yourself, listen to performances the artist has recorded in and with the space, or take part in a series of discussions and events on the relationship between space, sound, tension and materiality. Once you’ve added to the cacophony (or symphony) of New York City, or partaken in the playing of a space, you can revisit Storefront at 5pm to hear the daily concert of the song of the day. You can find more information about the installation here, and prepare for your visit with the “Instructions for 007 Urban Songline” here.

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

PREFAB YARDS
SHoP Architects and developer Bruce C. Ratner this week unveiled designs for the first Atlantic Yards tower, a 32-story, 350-unit building that will be the world’s tallest prefabricated steel structure. SHoP has worked with ARUP and XSite Modular to develop a bracing structure that will ensure stability and safety for the modular building at a reasonable cost. The use of prefabrication reduces waste, costs and construction time — which all sounds good, except to workers who might see fewer jobs or lower wages than promised, adding more friction to the project’s already contentious debate about jobs. Though the research and technological development of this bracing system is sure to change the game for the application of modular construction moving forward (the tallest prefab structure currently standing is 25 stories, in Wolverhampton, England), Ratner may still choose to build this first tower using more conventional methods — though the Times reminds us that there are fourteen more buildings planned for the site, including a 50-story structure expected to be the second tower built, any or all of which might be constructed modularly. For more, see The New York Times, with more renderings on CurbedNY, and more questions about time frame, affordable housing and jobs raised by this latest announcement on Atlantic Yards Report.

The 10 megapolitan clusters and 23 megapolitan areas of the contiguous 48 states by 2040 | Adapted for Places from map by Grace Bjarnson, Metropolitan Research Center, University of Utah / Brookings Mountain West

MEGAPOLITAN AMERICA
Is the U.S. a nation of megapolitan regions? This week in Places, Robert E. Lang and Arthur C. Nelson question the misconception that America is a low density country in an effort to argue for planning policies that more accurately reflect our nation’s settlement patterns. By excluding park lands and areas that are totally unpopulated from the density calculations, they’ve identified ten megaregions that encompass the majority of the population, and are continuing to grow, with densities that rival Western Europe and even Asia in parts. Recognizing these clusters of economic activity and population density for what they are, the authors argue, calls for a reexamination of resource management, transportation planning and regional governance. Read the full piece.

Subway Construction | photo by Flickr user MTAPhotos.

MTA BLITZES
NYC Transit and the MTA are offering a new option to subway riders annoyed by weekend service delays and re-routings due to maintenance and construction. The MTA, in a plan being presented to their board’s transit committee next week, wants to experiment with shutting down full line segments on consecutive weekday nights (10pm to 5am) for repair “blitzes” that would concentrate and shorten inconvenience while speeding up construction time, improving worker safety and reducing costs. It’s a drastic change for a city used to 24/7 subway service, but a few nights of suspended service compared to weeks or months of weekend service changes seems like a reasonable tradeoff. Read more in the Daily News and on 2nd Ave. Sagas.

MAKING ROOM and THE GRID EXTENDED
Last week, Fred Bernstein published a review of our recent Making Room symposium. Continuing the coverage this week, Michael Kimmelman published a follow up in The New York Times‘ Critic’s Notebook. He reviews a couple of the projects more intensely, but focuses primarily on the work of Jonathan Kirschenfeld in the Bronx. He uses Kirschenfeld’s most recent Single Room Occupancy (SRO) project as a lens through which to view the difficulties of building an SRO in the city, the necessity of this housing type, as well as the neighborhood’s reaction to SROs. Read the full article here, and check out the videos on the Making Room website of the symposium if you didn’t make it.

Another of the Architectural League’s special projects that will surely capture the interest on all the urban enthusiasts reading the Omnibus these days is the League’s upcoming exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY), The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan. Eight visionary proposals, selected by a distinguished jury from over 120 submissions to the League’s international Call for Ideas, will be on view from December 5th, in a show that complements MCNY’s historical exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan for Manhattan: 1811-2011. While we get ready to contemplate the grid’s impact on the past, present and future of New York, ExtendNY has been busy applying the grid’s locational logic to every single point on the surface of the Earth. Imagine, as in the image below, if the ordinal system of streets and avenues made it all the way to Houston:

The Intersection of S 23,441 St and 5,484 Ave in a hypothetical extension of the Manhattan Street Grid

EVENTS and TO DOs

URBAN SUSTAINBILITY IN THE AGE OF CLIMATE JUSTICE: Drawing from his personal research in the metro Phoenix area, Andrew Ross, professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, will discuss issues pertaining to sustainability in core urban centers. Focusing on key concepts related to eco-friendly design in cities such as water management, urban growth, pollution and energy supply, he will show that solutions to climate change and efforts to create sustainable communities are fundamentally social rather than technical. Tonight, Friday, November 18, 5pm, at The Cooper Union.

BLOCK BY BLOCK: NEW YORK STREET HISTORIANS: On Sunday, UnionDocs will present a conversation among some of New York’s “modern-day storytellers… [whose] work is part of a tradition of ‘unofficial,’ ‘informal,’ underground’ and ‘alternative’ histories” of the city. The panel, curated by Nathan Kensinger, will include author Kevin Walsh of Forgotten New York; location scout Nick Carr of Scouting NY; urban explorer Moses Gates of All-City New York and walking tour guide Cindy VandenBosch of UrbanOyster. Sunday, November 20, 7:30pm, at UnionDocs.

GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY NEW YORK CITY ARCHITECTURE: Author and architect John Hill, best known for his blog A Daily Dose of Architecture, has published a new guide to more than 200 new buildings that have come to New York City’s streets in the last decade or so. To celebrate the launch of the Guide to Contemporary New York City Architecture, Van Alen Books will host a party on Monday, November 21st. But first, Hill is offering a free copy of the book to the winner of his architecture trivia quiz on his website. Today’s the last day to enter — take the quiz by 11:59pm to qualify. Monday, November 21, 7pm, at Van Alen Books.

BRACKET CALL 3 – CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: As part of their mission to encourage new forms of thinking revolving around cities, Bracket is constantly inviting the public to contribute to a platform of ideas based around the intersection of architecture, environment and digital culture. Their third issue, entitled Extremes, will explore the architectural, technological and infrastructural mechanisms that enable cities to function and, crucially, to manage an increasing variety and frequency of economic, ecological, infrastructural and social crises. February 20, 2012, is the deadline for submissions, via Bracket’s website.

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

Tokyo, 2010 | Photos by Vishaan Chakrabarti

This, my tenth and final entry for a Country of Cities on Urban Omnibus, is in essence a highly personal love letter to Japan. For over a year, the wonderful readers of the Omnibus have cheered and jeered as I have relentlessly argued that the United States faces a series of deeply connected challenges: economic decline, energy dependence, oil wars, terrorism, xenophobia, protectionism, mounting debt, and spiraling health care costs. These challenges, while vexing when taken together, are surmountable with the silver bullet of the city. The combined growth of the skyscraper and the subway, I continue to posit, is the best path to keep our nation and our developing planet economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable. The recent catastrophe in Japan has shaken me into remembering, however, that the real trailblazers in truly dense urban living have been the Japanese, for which they have largely prospered, and because of which they will overcome the unthinkable triple tragedy they now face.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, 2010, during the annual ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing | AFP/ Getty Images / Kazuhiro Nogi

Twenty years ago this August, a group of us went to Japan as graduate students fresh from two months of study in China (where skyscrapers were under construction on the then dirt roads of Shenzen, next to its new train station). I was enthralled by and enamored of a Japan whose towers and trains redefined the West as the underdeveloped world. We rode Tokyo’s surface rail for two days before realizing we hadn’t even been on the subway system yet. Knowing my time in Japan was limited, my father gave me the lifelong gift of a two-week rail pass on the Shinkansen, the world’s first bullet train, which unbelievably had opened in 1964. August 6th would be the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, and we were inspired to see a memorial service that included the coming together of school children from all over the country. Every hotel in Hiroshima was booked, but we discovered that the bullet train made the journey from a distant farming village with an inexpensive, immaculate ryokan in mere minutes. To witness the service was a privilege, as we three were the only gaijin in sight in Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Park that morning. At 8:16am, the time of the bombing, thousands around us young and old dropped to the ground, essentially playing dead. The city went silent. An ambulance wailed in the distance. Minutes passed like hours, drums started to beat, the people rose from the sidewalks and went about their day, as we, dazed, found ourselves wandering shopping streets replete with American flags and statuettes of Liberty. We would go on to Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, and ultimately, with a larger group from MIT, to Tokyo to study the densification of Marunouchi.

The lessons from that trip — the lessons of atrocity morphed into forgiveness, of farm juxtaposed with city, of park transformed to memorial, of verticality imbued with life, of hyper-density enabled by hyper-infrastructure, and ultimately of adversity repurposed for prosperity — would go on to color all that I know and feel about cities, all that I have advocated on these pages, and all that would form my own approach to the memorial at the World Trade Center, to the High Line, to the Hudson Yards and #7 line, and now to both of my ongoing professional passions, urban development pedagogy and the rebuilding of Pennsylvania Station.

Recently and on short notice, I was asked to be the host for a Columbia conference on building technology in Tokyo. Remarkably, because of the tightness of the schedule, I was afforded a helicopter ride from distant Narita Airport to the top of a skyscraper near the conference. During that heavenly twenty-minute joyride I sat gobsmacked by a Tokyo transformed. Twenty years earlier, while smaller towers abounded, skyscrapers were still a controversy, but today they define the morphology of the city. As so exquisitely described in Ian Buruma’s recent article for the Wall Street Journal, the permanence of skyscrapers is a relatively new development in a country so susceptible to natural disaster. Buruma points to traditional construction of wood and paper, and of course to the periodic twenty-year reconstruction of the Ise shrine, as embodying the premise that for Japanese architecture, “the only permanence is its impermanence.”

Farmland, Japan, 2010 | Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

Yet, in a mountainous country the approximate size of California but with the arable land area only twice the size of Massachusetts, Japan houses some 127 million people in a condition that is roughly ten times denser than the United States. In this situation, skyscrapers became inevitable given Japan’s prowess in manufacturing, shipping, information technology, financial services and the arts. Beyond economic rationale, however, density is a way of life in Japan. It is commonplace to find a bar on the eighth floor of a sliver building. In farming communities, freed from the moralizing madness of the Jeffersonian grid, housing is clustered together into tight communities with crop fields dispersed on the perimeter. Urbane society is the glue that holds the entire nation together.

And today, it is that glue that we are witnessing. In their fine nightly reporting, Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta and Soledad O’Brien continually comment on the civility with which the populace responds to water running out at shelters, or long waits for transport, or caring for the elderly. To be sure, this civility can also be linked to an unwillingness to confront bad news at the institutional level, as witnessed by baffling statements from the government, by obfuscation from Tokyo Electric Power, and by the general bureaucratic malaise that has stagnated Japan’s economy for well over a decade.

But it is at the individual level that we will witness the rebirth of a nation. It is individual workers who hopefully will return power to the cooling systems at Fukushima Daiichi. It is individuals who will rebuild the coastline, the retirement communities, and the country’s sense of self-confidence and pride.

To be sure, we should pause to give the Japanese, particularly their architects and engineers, some praise in this calamity. For all the failures of seawalls and power plants, little is said about the fact that most engineered buildings seem to have withstood the massive temblor and tsunami. With some of the strictest building codes in the world, Japanese skyscrapers were not weaponized in this disaster. Astonishing video of Tokyo skyscrapers swaying “like trees in the breeze,” as one onlooker noted, did their job by swaying as designed. In the extraordinary before-after photos of Sendai airport, amidst the flood damage, it is remarkable to see the air traffic control tower and terminal still standing. One can only hope our cities can boast the same in a similar consequence.

Sendai Airport Terminal after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami | Top: Roberto De Vido, Yokosuka, Japan. Bottom: AFP/HO/NHK

It is natural, in the face of this tragedy, to question density and infrastructure. After all, it is one thing to see the horror of earthquakes and tsunamis ravage largely rural nations, yet it is another to see them ravage a nation that in many ways is more technologically advanced than our own. But it is critical to remember that Tokyo rebuilt after both a major earthquake in 1923 and the bombings of World War II. New York is rebuilding after 9/11. Beirut has rebuilt a stunning city on the Mediterranean. Bahrain will hopefully someday rebuild Pearl Square. In their excellent book The Resilient City, Campanella and Vale reveal the capacity of dense modern cities to rebuild.

Density has served Japan well and will continue to do so. One could argue that if their population were spread out, fewer would be susceptible to disaster. Similar arguments were waged during the Cold War in the US, when the Federal government subsidized the sprawling girth of the American middle class to flee both the arms race and race riots. But, as I have attempted to illuminate in these pages, spreading out only leads to oil dependence and further environmental degradation, which in turn leads to sea level rise and fiercer storm surges.

Admittedly, the alternative of densification leaves many questions unanswered. Cities may use less petrol per person, but they require vast amounts of electricity that must be generated efficiently, and with the advent of electric buses and taxis, this demand will only grow. Many hoped that nuclear energy was a partial solution, or at least a bridge to truly renewable energy, but this is an assertion that must be fully scrutinized, with the question of how to store spent fuel again at the forefront. To read that active reactors in California like Diablo Canyon were built to withstand earthquakes of magnitude 7.5 is cold comfort. Perhaps hope can be found in burgeoning waste-to-energy technology.

This earthquake, even at magnitude 9.0, cannot shake our resolve. To the contrary, with the oil fields of the Middle East in ever deepening turmoil, we must extend our hands, heads and hearts to our dear friends across the Pacific, and learn to be more like them in their civility, to live as they do in their density, to build our world much as they have, in Japan, the ultimate Country of Cities.

"In a mountainous country the approximate size of California but with the arable land area only twice the size of Massachusetts, Japan houses some 127 million people in a condition that is roughly ten times denser than the United States." Photo by Vishaan Chakrabarti

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This is the tenth and final installment in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. 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.

Vishaan Chakrabarti, AIA, is the Marc Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of the Real Estate Development program in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the founding principal of Vishaan Chakrabarti Design Collaborative (VCDC, llc), an urban design, planning, and strategic advisory firm based in Manhattan. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and lives in Tribeca. Read more…

This week New York City was fascinated by the unearthing of a portion of an 18th Century ship during excavation at the World Trade Center site. CityRoom provided an account of the discovery and of the urgency of its archaeological documentation, noting that the 30-foot segment of the wooden vessel began deteriorating as soon as it was unearthed, “no longer safe in its cocoon of ooze.” Archaeologists state that it was most likely discarded as part of an intentional landfill that lay ground for what, by 1800, had become Washington Street. That conclusion inspired BLDGBLOG to dig up a 2007 post about San Francisco’s ship-hull foundations, in which another history buried in New York City landfill is reference: the FDR Drive is built atop rubble from World War II Britain.

Relics of more recent histories can be found in cities worldwide, often in the shape of industrial infrastructures left abandoned or deteriorating. Few (so far) have been able to come up with a successful solution for adaptive reuse, but eyes are turning to New York for inspiration. The success of New York’s High Line has prompted calls and visits from public officials and planners from Chicago, Memphis, Rotterdam and Hong Kong, just to name a few, who hope to create similar public amenities back at home.

Record heat has been hitting New York City, but, compared to during heat waves in years past, power outages have been noticeably few. GOOD credits smart-grid technology and demand-response initiatives that alleviate consumption during peak usage to avoid brownouts and blackouts. Two-way digital connections between power providers and consumers’ thermostats or air conditioners can slightly reduce or cycle on/off air conditioning when a threat of an outage occurs. Meanwhile smart meters that allow residents to monitor their usage are becoming more common, a technology that is also being implemented by New York City to track individual water use.

Another way to reduce energy consumption is to turn off the A/C and go outside. New York Magazine has compiled a list of the top nineteen New York City playgrounds for your summer enjoyment. And on three Saturday mornings in August the Department of Transportation will again bring Summer Streets to Park Avenue — but this time with dumpster-style swimming pools!

On Wednesday, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled an electric car charging station in a parking lot near the Lincoln Tunnel. The mayor was joined by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, who explained that the pilot program is about more than reducing our reliance on fossil fuels: “By creating jobs manufacturing and installing charging stations for electric vehicles in nine metropolitan regions around the country, we are partnering with industry to provide a low-cost transportation option for tens of thousands of families.”

A few weeks ago we featured Kirsten Hively’s visit to the Candela Structures at the World’s Fair Marina. If that piqued your interest, she just uncovered a research paper from 1966 dealing with the design and construction of those structures themselves.

Plans for a mixed-use development — set to include 600 housing units, 420,000 square feet of commercial space, a YMCA and a park – in what is currently a 1,100-car parking lot is stirring up ethnic tensions between Chinese and Korean business owners.  The businesses surrounding the lot are predominately Korean and rely on the lot for customer parking, while the majority of the Chinese businesses are blocks away, and many Korean owners fear that without nearby parking, their customers will simply turn elsewhere.

And finally, happy 75th birthday to the parking meter!

Photo by Flickr user misplacedparadox.

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

Update: You can now view Archipelago, an original Urban Omnibus video production, exhibited in The City We Imagined / The City We Made, that explores a day in the life of five New York neighborhoods: Hunts Point, Jamaica, Mariner’s Harbor, Downtown Brooklyn, and Chelsea, here on Urban Omnibus.

From tomorrow until June 26th, we are bringing you a unique opportunity to take stock of the range of design and planning activity that has reshaped New York City over the past ten years. The City We Imagined / The City We Made is the sixth in an ongoing series of Architectural League exhibitions about contemporary architecture in New York City. This installment chronicles the transformation the physical city in light of the convergence of an array of powerful forces: the events of 9/11, the policies and priorities of the Bloomberg Administration, the volatility of global and local economies, advances in material and construction technologies, and a new interest among the public in contemporary architecture. The exhibition consists of a chronological display of major projects, proposals of the past ten years; an installation of one thousand photographs, taken by a volunteer corps of nearly one hundred design professionals, that depicts New York today; video interviews with leading New Yorkers; and an original Urban Omnibus-produced video about the city as experienced in five neighborhoods that we’ll share with you guys in the coming weeks.

You should definitely come check it out. The show is at 250 Hudson Street, entrance on Dominick Street. Exhibition hours: Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 7pm. It’s quite an undertaking, and installing it has prevented us from rounding up the week’s worth of news and updates. But, nonetheless, here are some links to check out:

The Brooklyn Grange finds a site in Queens for its 40,000-ft rooftop farm.

A competition for data visualizations to “make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American public.”

Speaking of data visualization, while we may have exhausted the Icelandic volcano eruption, check out this amazing visualization of what happened to plane traffic.

And also check out MIT’s progress on printable solar cells, MetroCard art in Williamsburg, and a simpler, safer Grand Army Plaza which reminds us of our detailed look at the plaza and the design competition to reinvent it. Check out the video we made about it below:

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

Since the Omnibus crew decamped from our previous digs on the banks of the Gowanus Canal this past fall, we’ve tried to hold ourselves back from reblogging every time its tortuous path to cleanup makes the news. But today that path became a little clearer – the Canal has been designated a Federal Superfund site. According to The New York Times, “The E.P.A. estimates that the federal cleanup will last 10 to 12 years and cost $300 million to $500 million.” The City expressed disappointment; its own plan claimed to be “a faster route to a Superfund-level cleanup and would have avoided the issues associated with a Superfund listing” including costly litigation and a stigma that will likely change development priorities. Nonetheless, spokespeople for City Hall have promised to work closely with federal agencies to achieve everyone’s stated goal – a clean canal.

In addition to following canal news closely in our roundups, we’ve reviewed art projects about it, shared videos shot along it, and co-hosted (along with our friends at the Center for Urban Pedagogy) a live talk show that went beyond the slugfest community meetings about Superfund designation to mine the environmental and biological histories of toxins. To analyze the EPA’s Superfund program in the context of emerging art forms informed by both eco-visualization and internet-based art practice. To connect the local landscape to national precedents. To ponder what any of this has to do with the ethics of risk, the implications for financing local development, the design of our environments. Given today’s news, maybe it’s time for a look back at some of the ideas that emerged from that event. Below are video excerpts from the presentations of our three panelists last summer, artist Brooke Singer, environmental historian Sarah Vogel and environmental activist Anne Rabe.

Cabrini-Green once housed over 15,000 people, but developed a reputation for high levels of crime and poverty. Its razing is part of a wave of high-rise project demolitions that have occurred in many US cities. Here are a few – among many – significant events in the history of public housing demolitions:

1972: Demolition begins on St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe housing project, less than twenty years after it was built. The massive complex was unsuccessful from the beginning, with violence and high vacancy rates. Because it was such a high-profile failure of a modernist housing scheme, Charles Jencks called the day of its demolition “the day Modern architecture died.”

1993: President Clinton starts the HOPE VI program, with the goals of improving public housing and reducing dense concentrations of poverty. Between 1996 and 2003, the program provided $395 million in grants towards the demolition of 287 public housing projects. Although it has funded rehabilitation and construction programs, HOPE VI has presided over a net loss to public housing units nationwide.

2007: The last of the buildings that comprised Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes is demolished. Once the largest public housing project in the country, the Robert Taylor Homes housed 27,000 people. It has since been replaced with “Legends South,” with low-rise, mixed income homes and apartments, community facilities, and retail spaces.

2010: The New York City Housing Authority announces plans to demolish Prospect Plaza, a complex of three high-rise towers in Brooklyn. The complex was not known for high rates of violence or drug use; rather, NYCHA claims that on this site, new construction is more financially and logistically feasible than rehabilitation. Heretofore, the City’s strategy has been to rehabilitate existing public housing rather than replace it. The Prospect Plaza project is the first significant exception to this approach.

NYU sociology professor Dalton Conley has argued that the form of a housing project does not affect the behaviors and overall living conditions of residents nearly as much as its socioeconomic makeup and ownership structure does. Coming soon on the Omnibus, we’ll hear some of Conley’s insights in his own words as he takes us on a walk up Avenue D, part of one of the largest swathes of public housing in New York. The destruction of Cabrini-Green reminds us that public housing – as public investment, as design product, as homes of choice or housing of last resort – is very much a reflection of broader cultural attitudes towards poverty, the role of government and the function of architecture, regardless of whether we decide to replace existing high-rises with new, low-rise facilities at great cost or focus on improving conditions within existing buildings.


Andrew Balmer is Project Associate for Urban Omnibus and a senior in the Barnard + Columbia Architecture program.

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.