More than five years later, Atlantic Yards continues to provoke web innovation, with the advent of Atlantic Yards Watch, not a platform for opposition but a self-described “community-based initiative to protect the health and livability of neighborhoods” impacted by the now-under-construction Barclays Center arena and the planned 16 towers. While the arena is the only project building under construction, demolition, utility and railyard work continue, as well as construction staging and development of a massive surface parking lot.

Atlantic Yards Watch, the product of three civic groups concerned about gaps in State oversight, is more than a web site; the sponsors — the Boerum Hill Association, the Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council and the Park Slope Civic Council — have already partnered with Transportation Alternatives on a survey of illegal parking and hope to hire consultants to analyze issues like traffic.

Very Tight Fit
Atlantic Yards represents a very tight fit — an effort to shoehorn an arena into a residential neighborhood, at its southern and eastern borders, by overriding city zoning that requires a 200-foot buffer zone between arenas and residential districts. So residents near the project site have been submitting regular incident reports — emails, photos, and video — along with links to the associated 311 service requests.

The incident reports offer fodder not only for the Atlantic Yards Watch blog, but also for other media outlets. For example, Atlantic Yards Watch has highlighted the proliferation of rats in the blocks near the 22-acre site, helping focus the attention of a city task force and adding pressure on developer Forest City Ratner to extend abatement efforts beyond the project perimeter. Indeed, on July 14 the developer announced it would buy neighbors new garbage cans as part of a multi-faceted response to the problem.

Atlantic Yards Watch has posted numerous photos of apparent parking violations, including some by construction workers and police officers, leading to sympathetic television coverage. Also, partnering with Transportation Alternatives, Atlantic Yards Watch conducted an offline survey to document the scope of the problem. After that, a representative of Empire State Development (ESD) — formerly known as the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) — and neighborhood residents said that the police have finally cracked down on scofflaws.

Filling a Niche: Transparency
Atlantic Yards Watch, which launched in May and was developed with the help of a graduate class at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, fills a niche that remained despite established advocacy groups and blogs. And it responds to a widespread local perception that the ESD, the State authority with the inherently complicated role of promoting development while overseeing it, has “done the developer’s bidding,” in the words of Brooklyn Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries. “Atlantic Yards Watch is intended to address gaps in oversight that we hope will eventually be closed through the establishment of a local development corporation or authority that is accountable to the public,” said Howard Kolins, President of the Boerum Hill Association, one of the co-sponsors of the site.

The three groups behind the project are part of the coalition known as BrooklynSpeaks, initially spearheaded by the Municipal Art Society (MAS), which, beginning in 2006, pursued a “mend it, don’t end it” strategy regarding Atlantic Yards. By contrast, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), formed in 2004, led opposition to Atlantic Yards via lawsuits challenging the use of eminent domain, the legitimacy of the environmental review, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s revision of the deal to sell development rights to the Vanderbilt Yard in Brooklyn.

Pushing for Transparency in Court
By late 2009, however, BrooklynSpeaks (sans MAS) had joined DDDB in court challenging the ESD’s decision to re-approve the project while maintaining, despite significant reason for skepticism, that Atlantic Yards would be finished in ten years. The lawsuit, which included as petitioners three local elected officials, charged that the ESD, in its rush to approve a slightly reconfigured project, had failed to study the neighborhood impacts of a potential 25-year buildout.

That lawsuit was initially dismissed by Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman in March 2010, a day before the arena groundbreaking. It was reopened, remarkably, as Friedman agreed to admit into the record the Development Agreement — which allows a 25-year buildout — that the State withheld until after the court argument in the first stage of the lawsuit.

In the latest twist, on July 13 the judge ruled for the community groups, ordering the ESD to produce a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) detailing the impacts — such as noise, traffic, and safety — of the longer construction period. (The ESD has not announced whether it will appeal.) Such a ruling is highly unusual, given that judges rarely second-guess agencies, but in this case Justice Friedman deemed the ESD’s actions “arbitrary and capricious.” What was behind the agency’s rush in 2009? The lawyer for BrooklynSpeaks suggested that the ESD was driven by a end-of-2009 deadline to get tax-exempt bonds issued for arena construction.

Community Contributions
While ESD documents, conducted by the ubiquitous environmental consultant AKRF, used the bloodless language common to environmental reviews (e.g., “significant adverse neighborhood character impacts”), Atlantic Yards Watch brings the impact of construction home, posting video of trucks idling outside a residential building at 5:45am, photos of trucks leaving the construction site with piles of dirt uncovered, violating an agreement with the State, or photos of a wrong-way truck blocking traffic.

It also serves as a longitudinal archive of area conditions. In response to widespread belief that the construction site contributed to the rat problem, City health officials recently surveyed the Forest City Ratner-controlled site, and announced that it appeared to be well-maintained. However, it’s plausible that the developer had stepped up site maintenance in anticipation of that walk-through. After all, Atlantic Yards Watch had previously posted photos of lingering piles of garbage. And Forest City did agree to add new trash receptacles in the construction site for food waste only.

The Atlantic Yards Blogosphere
Atlantic Yards Watch complements an established, and evolving, blogosphere regarding Atlantic Yards. The most prolific site is NoLandGrab, a daily anthology of articles and blog posts related to the project, often with critical commentary appended. Prospect Heights photographer Tracy Collins has been documenting both the neighborhood around the project and Atlantic Yards-related events; photographers Adrian Kinloch and Jonathan Barkey also chronicle events. All have been vital for my own daily blog, Atlantic Yards Report, which features original reporting, plus analysis and commentary.

Both DDDB and BrooklynSpeaks use a blog format for announcements and articles. Other Atlantic Yards-related blogs have been published for shorter periods, such as the urban design-focused Brooklyn Views. A more personal blog, the Footprint Gazette, in 2008 chronicled the significant disruptions faced by a smaller number of Prospect Heights residents within the project footprint, as pre-construction utility work went on outside their windows.

“If Jane Jacobs had the tools and technology back when she was fighting Robert Moses’ plans to bulldoze Lower Manhattan, I bet The Death and Life of Great American Cities would have been a blog,” Brooklyn blogger and activist Aaron Naparstek told the Times in 2006. Perhaps, though Jacobs and her allies also had the Village Voice, which crusaded along with them. These days, established media outlets, with shrinking numbers of staff and a universe of topics to cover, give projects like Atlantic Yards relatively little scrutiny.

Can it be Duplicated?
While the overall response to Atlantic Yards may seem a salutary example of citizen media, using widely available innovations like blogs and YouTube, it also relies on several educated professionals with formal or informal journalistic, programming and photographic skills, and the capacity to put in significant volunteer hours.

Regarding Atlantic Yards Watch, said Peter Krashes, an artist (and Dean Street Block Association president) who helped develop the initiative, “I think it is duplicable.” After all, he observes, most community controversies are far less complicated, involving fewer problems and fewer agencies. A community board, he mused, could even adopt the model of establishing on online repository to register and track concerns.

Making an Impact
Atlantic Yards Watch sponsors hope to do more. With $4,000 in support from Council Member Letitia James, the aim is to hire consultants and/or reach out to other community groups in areas impacted by the project.

The initiative has already changed the ecosystem for discussing Atlantic Yards. Arana Hankin, Director of the Atlantic Yards Project for the ESD, gave Atlantic Yards Watch an off-the-cuff compliment at a June 23 community meeting on rats, calling the web site “fantastic and wonderful,” but at the same time — to the frustration of some — suggesting that complaints must be filed directly with the agency to provoke changes. However, thanks to Atlantic Yards Watch and that public meeting, the media had become aware of the “rat tsunami,” spurring official concern.

This weekend, the site’s most prolific contributor posted another incident report, documenting how trucks delivering steel idled on the public street rather than used the designated staging area. Once again, citizen watchdogs were making sure that government overseers could not plead ignorance.

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Journalist Norman Oder has written about the Atlantic Yards development — and other urban issues — in his watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report since 2006 and is now working on a book about Atlantic Yards. Until late 2010, he spent 14 years as an editor at the magazine Library Journal. In 2000, he began operating a tour guide business specializing in Brooklyn, New York Like a Native. He lives 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.

Now, architects, artists, planners and leaders of arts institutions are working to articulate why so many people lost, and are continuing to lose, their homes, and what opportunities for aid were lost or ignored as the country sank into a recession. To say the financial crisis is not at its root a problem for architects is to overlook the inherent ties between success, investment and dwelling that define a national identity.

In an effort to harness the ideas of the creative community to provoke change, the Whitney Independent Study Program and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) have embarked on curatorial projects that deconstruct “foreclosure” in markedly different ways. Essentially, both ask for a new, creative perspective on how to fill the vacant, unused and struggling spaces produced by the financial crisis.

Photograph of public program City as Stage, in conjunction with the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, The Kitchen, NYC, 11 June 2011 | © Maria Rapicavoli

FORECLOSED: BETWEEN CRISIS AND POSSIBILITY
In Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, a group exhibition and series of public programs curated by Whitney Independent Study Program (ISP) Curatorial Fellows Jennifer Burris, Sofía Olascoaga, Sadia Shirazi and Gaia Tedone, “between” is the operative word. Well, that and “foreclosed.” Using foreclosure mainly as a point of departure, the show and discussions posit multiple approaches to looking at and utilizing the forgotten spaces that embody the aftershocks of a declining economy and ask how artists, architects and planners grapple with a culture of crisis.

“City as Stage,” a conversation between GSAPP Professor Emeritus and planner Peter Marcuse, urban planner/architect/artist Damon Rich, Director and Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center Radhika Subramaniam and artist Tania Bruguera, moderated by Sadia Shirazi, was held at The Kitchen on June 11th. The afternoon began with a screening of Beau Geste by Yto Barrada. In Beau Geste, Barrada patches a malignant hole in a palm tree in a vacant lot in Tangier, trying to thwart a developer who gouged it in hopes of killing the tree, thus allowing him to build up the lot. This guerilla-style urban intervention set the tone for the ensuing discussion on several levels: the scale was small, the action direct, and its consequence indeterminate.

Yto Barrada, still from Beau Geste, 2009. 16mm film transferred to digital video, color, sound; 3 min | Courtesy of Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut, and Galerie Polaris, Paris

The crucial question facing the arts community, the panel seemed to agree, is: what actions can artists or arts organizations take to resist the consequences of foreclosure and fight the momentum of their underlying causes by empowering marginalized populations and interrogating systems of power? “It is easier to see the consequences than the causes of foreclosure,” Marcuse observed. He went on to say that the globalization of capital and a crisis of taxation have led to increased segregation, polarization and reallocation of urban space internationally.

Radhika Subramaniam discussed the challenges of engaging with catastrophe in the urban landscape. Ground Zero, she offered, is a site perceived as uniquely American, even uniquely New York. Visiting a memorial at that site is an experience of specific remembrance, not necessarily of reflection on tragedy more generally. Neighbors in Lower Manhattan, Subramaniam recalled, thought it would be inappropriate to include a memorial to Hurricane Katrina victims at Ground Zero, preventing a larger conversation about a shared vulnerability. As the urban landscape changes, physical sites become locations of selective remembering, or of selective amnesia. By locating art performances in these spaces and purposefully soliciting the narratives of affected communities, she suggested, we will come to a better understanding of what is being lost and what can be produced to take its place.

Tania Bruguera, an anchor of both the discussion and exhibition, dissected the ways that artistic practice can team with cultural institutions to bring agency to individuals. Bruguera, whose project Immigrant Movement International is sponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art (QMA) in conjunction with the exhibition, emphasized the importance of “arte util” — art that is useful. Util in Spanish translates into both useful and tool, Bruguera noted, and for art to be useful one needs to work with the correct tools: in this context, knowledge of politics and the ability to communicate with politicians. Bruguera encouraged audience members to form counter organizations in opposition to existing government bodies and to align with politicians to reverse the aggressive attitude many officials have towards activist art groups. The purpose of these counter organizations was unclear — would they serve as protests in and of themselves or establish themselves to provide services? Tania’s description of the outcome of her own project in Queens had an equally indeterminate direction — is the art the action itself or is it what that action produces?

Other panelists’ opinions on this topic, it became apparent, were mixed. Damon Rich agreed that in order to effect change one needs to be able to “talk the talk and walk the walk.” But gestures, which Subramaniam defined as “small actions of imagination that get lodged in your shoe and build up over time,” Rich felt to be an ineffectual romanticism. Coalition building, in Rich’s experience, is the surest way to guarantee change, and arts institutions, he argued, should become the nexuses around which activists and communities can converge. Returning to the Queens Museum of Art, Rich noted that it is the only museum he has worked with that has a community organizer as a defined staff position. For Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, the QMA 2009 exhibition of Rich’s work, he worked with the community organizer to engage housing advocacy groups, elected officials and a range of advocates in Queens neighborhoods affected by the foreclosure crisis to make the show both informative and useful.

Sam Dufaux of WORKac (left) and Michael Bell of Visible Weather (right) | Photograph by Don Pollard via The Museum of Modern Art Inside/Out blog.

FORECLOSED: REHOUSING THE AMERICAN DREAM
Reinhold Martin and Barry Bergdoll, curators of MoMA’s forthcoming exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream, hosted the first in a series of open studios at PS1 on June 18th. Participating teams pinned up the early stages of proposed architectural interventions in “megaregions” — metropolitan areas that lies within a corridor between two major cities – that have been dramatically affected by foreclosure. Where the Whitney ISP/Kitchen exhibition and discussion aimed to be open-ended, so as to allow for interdisciplinary connections at all scales, MoMA grounded itself in real sites where architecture as a specific discipline can alter an environment and thus change the course of an economic downward spiral. The exhibition, as the title suggests, will interrogate and, one hopes, reframe the “American Dream” that has shaped our flawed housing policies and design preferences. It remains to be seen if the plans imagined by assembled firms will go farther than MoMA’s walls, but the show has the potential to popularize innovative and economically sustainable design themes.

Responding to ideas in the soon-to-be-published Buell Hypothesis (a screenplay style research publication from the Temple Hoyne Buell Center investigating the housing crisis and the American dream), the proposals retrospectively pretend that when the foreclosure crisis hit, the government had turned to architects to help build a solution. Zago Architects, the firm designing new housing for Rialto, California, moved forward from the hypothetical premise that when stimulus money was allocated the Federal government had devoted funds to architects. With this imagined money in mind, the team proposed new typologies that blended the natural botany of the region with biodiverse landscaping in swooping flows of dense housing that create pockets for privacy and play by relaxing coincident boundaries.

Richard Zago and Jeanne Gang | Photograph by Don Pollard via The Museum of Modern Art Inside/Out blog.

Perhaps MoMA’s exhibition will spur the administration to think more creatively when doling out cash in the future. As Andrew Zago pointed out, what came before the crash can continue after, and it is imperative to consider how to reuse the investment already made on the ground. However, as the exhibition moves forward and the emerging conversation surrounding foreclosure continues among cultural institutions, the creative minds at work must be cognizant of their objectives: to truly aid those who are losing their homes and to build a new platform on which Americans, and citizens internationally, can construct housing paradigms and approaches to ownership, investment and property.

At “City as Stage,” Damon Rich remarked that often when a cultural phenomenon arises as a popular subject of study in arts institutions, it simply serves to let institutions air grievances about a contemporary topic while business proceeds as usual. Given the grave and wide reaching effects of foreclosure, we should hope this won’t be the case. Instead, as both the Whitney ISP and MoMA shows articulate, we have reached a point of reflection where now scholars, artists and architects can create inventive partnerships that intervene directly to patch cracks through which marginalized people can fall. To do this will require a marriage of agency, responsibility and an inclusive creativity.

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Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer and Urban Omnibus project associate residing 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.

Three weeks ago, Mayor Gilberto Kassab of São Paulo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York met in São Paulo as part of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and shared their particular strategies to meet the challenges of climate change. It’s clear that both mayors take sustainability seriously, and their administrations have adjusted their priorities accordingly.

São Paulo is similar to New York in many ways. Both cities are big and growing. They attract the best and brightest, the dreamers and the strivers, and as a result they have a rich cultural life and diversity. They also both face similar problems, from housing solutions to open space access to efficient transportation.

Everything I think I know about good urban design comes from what I know about New York, and working at the New York City Department of City Planning. But recently, I had an opportunity to work for three weeks with the São Paulo city government as part of a professional urban design exchange organized by SP Urbanismo, a public-private agency under the Secretary of Urban Development. And so, equipped with the principles I’ve learned here — and barely any Portuguese — I briefly stepped onto the front lines of the enormous challenges of rapid and unplanned urbanization.

TRAFFIC
One of São Paulo’s priorities is to mitigate its notorious traffic jams. A Paulistano can spend up to three hours each day waiting in traffic and most of their traffic planners believe that the only way to reduce congestion is by adding more road. However, the land-use planners I worked with see the importance of investing in mass transit, and that adding more road results in more cars and more traffic. We talked a lot about how easily São Paulo could become a walkable city. A walkable city needs to have complete neighborhoods: a concentration of density around mass transit, a mix of uses, innovative architecture and design standards for streets and public space. These are the principles on which São Paulo was originally built.

In São Paulo’s old city center, a mix of Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts buildings crowd together around spacious pedestrian streets and continuous networks of public parks. Trolleys once ran on the tree-lined streets and every apartment building or office building had ground floor shops. In 1940, it was a city of about 1.3 million people living in an area roughly similar to the size of Brooklyn. The city center today retains the idyllic pedestrian-friendly DNA apparent in the grainy photos from the 1930s, but now the retail is low-end, many of the great old buildings vacant and covered with graffiti, and many of the parks have been revised over the years by architects fixated on the texture and plasticity of concrete. Since the 1960s, density has been dispersed throughout the city with no apparent pattern, housing has been separated from other land uses, and traffic engineers have guided the major public infrastructure expenditures to serve the unchallenged primacy of car-based transport.

Currently the planners in São Paulo are proposing several urban redevelopment projects that would recreate this vibrant mix of uses and density around transit. But it’s an effort being met with resistance and fear of change. Packed auditoriums of angry residents denounce the projects in fiery oratory, worried that adding density will add more cars and more traffic, not alleviate them as planned. New York sees its own share of conflict and debate over issues in the public realm, but here the City is working hard to create a mutually-supportive alliance between advocates for a greener city, transit-oriented development and safe affordable housing. The planners in São Paulo need more allies to help them make their case.

OPEN SPACE
Flying over São Paulo, you can see a seemingly endless expanse of city, a wide variety of single family houses and pencil towers. You might notice patches of green around the towers, but you won’t see much public open space. Working with São Paulo’s planners, I began to understand that this pattern of prioritizing private open space over public open space is deeply embedded in their regulations. Setback rules push buildings off the street; parking requirements are uniformly high, roughly one space per inhabitant; most of the city is zoned at a low floor-to-area ratio, between two and four. And there is a growing middle class that wants to live in high rises — which demand substantial parking provisions, security fences and significant open space on the lot, which is offered as a private amenity to the residents. But anyone on the other side of those tall fences is left walking on narrow sidewalks, creeping along what feels like a prison wall.

Mayor Kassab is pushing back against these regulations. He has made open space a high priority, constructing 66 new parks and planting nearly 200,000 new trees in the last five years, a much needed greening. Here in New York, we’ve seen Mayor Bloomberg lead his strategy for New York’s open space with a directive to bring each New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a public park. To achieve that goal, we’ve discovered new opportunities for public space where we can find them: on abandoned rail lines, former roadbeds like Times Square and formerly inaccessible waterfront industrial sites; and have worked with developers to provide high quality, publicly accessible, privately-operated open space.

HOUSING
A third priority for São Paulo is how to provide safe and affordable housing for the estimated three million people who currently live in precarious settlements. These notorious favelas occupy land that is often on steep slopes or flood prone areas. The daily conditions in these homes are fraught with poverty, crime and disease. Seasonal floods frequently cause landslides and lead to dozens of deaths.

São Paulo’s housing agencies are employing two major strategies to address this housing crisis. The first is to bring roads and infrastructure through the existing favelas, a process that the housing ministry calls “urbanization.” This model avoids displacing existing communities as much as possible, yet it fails to provide housing at the necessary scale — the government has set their target at providing one million new units in the next fifteen years. The second strategy is to find a very dense model of housing that can be expediently planned and constructed, safely located, strongly built and easily connected to roads and to the municipal infrastructure. To meet this vast demand, they have adopted a familiar model: “towers in the park.”

In the mid-20th century, Robert Moses and the authors of the 1961 Zoning Resolution adopted the towers-in-the-park model with the stated goal of replacing New York’s slums. But over time we’ve seen the shortcomings of this model. Yes, towers in the park offer great advantages in terms of concentrating infrastructure, and being able to execute projects quickly and affordably. They can also provide individual dwelling units that enjoy a lot of light and air and standardized layouts which simplify the economic model, making them easy to scale and repeat. But these virtues have to be weighed against the vices that we’ve come to know. Building gated housing complexes, cut off from the neighborhood street life, reinforces isolation and creates an insecure environment. New York is now turning towards affordable housing projects that are designed to integrate with the surrounding community to create a stronger sense of public life in the neighborhood and transform the urban design of the area.

RESILIENCE
Public transportation is good for cities… right? That’s something that I thought needed no explanation. But I had a debate recently with my boss, Alex Washburn, about which form of transportation has done the most harm to cities. To me, it’s obvious that automobile-centric urban design wreaked a sudden and complete havoc on the American landscape. It only took one generation for much of the United States to go from towns, farms and railroads to suburbs, strip malls, and interstates. Today, other cities all over the world, especially those that are experiencing rapid economic growth, seem to be following this bad example. As I sat in the back of a cab for two hours on my way to a meeting in São Paulo, I noticed the narrowness of the sidewalks, the absence of pedestrians or bikes, the ubiquitous walls, the apparent single-use zoning all around me. All of this to serve the consumer demand for cars. And it’s happening all over the world. It may be years before these cities feel the full effects: the degradation of civic space, the expense of providing services and infrastructure over a widely sprawled area, and the increase in chronic diseases because people walk less.

Even so, Alex says that airplanes may be guiltier, because for many years precocious urban designers (like me) have flown all over the world and put forward their big ideas to politicians and builders. You could call this “flyover urbanism.” On one such mission, Robert Moses came to Brazil in the 1950s to help plan highways, helping to set the direction of its current urban design trajectory.

But planning and prodding can only do so much, and no city can “leapfrog” past the mistakes others have made, or copy their successes. Great cities will always be shaped by forces of economy, politics, nature and pure chance. There is not one course of history which all cities will follow, nor one destination we all seek to reach. Also, cities don’t leap.

Cities might not leap, but every city has its own flow. The forces that govern that flow — “why” we do things — might be similar between places, and we may even learn together the “how,” but we must be wary of copying the “what.”

São Paulo has an elevated highway called the Minhocão that runs through a neighborhood that has strong potential for redevelopment. There is some debate about the utility of this highway to the traffic network, and so it has been closed on Sundays to allow people to use it recreationally. I was asked by officials if I thought this could be São Paulo’s High Line. With this internationally-acclaimed example in mind, architects and engineers have begun to make plans for capping the elevated highway with a park, thus creating even more obstruction of light and air to the public realm below. Trying to recreate the High Line on the Minhocão is copying the “what.” Great urban design projects cannot be dropped from an airplane. But perhaps principles can parachute in to offer a little help. The principle of the High Line is that we can create an invaluable resource out of something that had been thought of as an unwanted remnant of another age.

I have wondered if what Tolstoy famously said about families is also true of cities: that they are unhappy in different ways but happy in similar ways. It would be a boring world if all cities were the same. But it is not our particular unhappinesses that make us different. In fact, our problems seem to be getting more and more universal. What makes us unique is the way in which we deal with these problems, using our own local ingenuity. I once heard a story about an artist who lived in a beautiful, but sparsely furnished, house for very little rent. The landlord gave him a deal because once a year the house is completely under water. The genius is in the adaptation.

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All photos by Thaddeus Pawlowski.

Thaddeus Pawlowski is Associate Urban Designer for the Office of the Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning. He works on large scale neighborhood and infrastructure projects including the redevelopment of Penn Station area and Hudson Yards. He has previously worked at the Office of Emergency Management where he developed “What if NYC…” a design competition for post disaster urban housing. He earned a Master in Architecture and certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Pittsburgh.

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.

I feel compelled to respond to a recent article and photo essay (PDF) published by a group of communications scholars led by Keith Hampton. Hampton is best known for his doctoral research under Barry Wellman, in which he studied the impacts of broadband on a wired suburb of Toronto. His conclusion was that while broadband didn’t increase strong social ties, the use of email amongst neighbors did expand the circle of weak social ties for residents. Overall, the impacts of broadband on social cohesion were deemed modest but positive. In the decade since that study, we’ve seen a similar dynamic play out on online social networks like Facebook, which have greatly expanded our weak social ties.

So it was with great interest that I approached Hampton’s newest study of social behavior of users of wireless public spaces. In fact, I played a major role in lighting up two of the spaces examined in the study, Bryant Park and Union Square in New York City, and have been studying them myself for nearly a decade. The researchers collected an enormous amount of data, observing some 1,400 people using mobile wireless devices in these parks as well as three others in Philadelphia and Toronto. Their mixed conclusion: “We explored how wireless Internet access brings new uses and new life to public spaces‚ and how it pushes out existing public life. Some wireless users are cut off from their surroundings, but for most, interactions between on- and off-line experiences increase exposure to social diversity.” Not exactly an indictment, but not a ringing endorsement either. Given the attention that this study is likely to get, and the potential it may have to dampen interest in public wireless by civic leaders and park advocates, I wanted to point out a couple areas where this study failed to capture “the complex relationships between Internet use in urban public spaces” it sought to understand.

The first point to make is that Hampton isn’t the first to discover the risks of social isolation for and around wireless users in public space. Literally from the very first day in June 2002, when my colleagues at NYCwireless first fired up the free public wireless network in Bryant Park, we were on the lookout for negative impacts on the park’s public life. This is because we were working closely with the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, a sort of neighborhood level quasi-governmental body that was the brainchild of William “Holly” Whyte and the organizational mechanism for the park’s revitalization in the 1990s. During the project planning, we had discussed many times that the wireless network was a pilot project, and it was made clear in no uncertain terms that if nerds with laptops took over the park, they’d pull the plug. Of course, that didn’t happen — wireless use became a small niche within the rich ecosystem of uses of the park. Furthermore, NYCwireless actively sought to create mechanisms to “undo” social isolation and reconnect Internet users back to the park — a portal with park information had to be passed before gaining access to the Internet, and we created games and chatrooms that could only be accessed on the local area network. That is to say, we created web-based services that were only accessible if you came to the park.

The troubling part of the study is where it implies that by attracting non-sociable users to public space — in particular, workers seeking an “escape” from their office — wireless connectivity is reducing the vitality of those spaces. To me, having spent a decade working in wireless public spaces around the world, this is an incredibly archaic view of what public space is for, and it is one that conflicts with the long legacy of working in public space throughout urban history. Granted, as the study documents, today, many of those working in wireless public spaces are solitary. They found that  ”Internet users rarely travel in packs: most come alone and stay alone (79 percent).” They describe the way in which Bryant Park, at certain times of the day, “functions primarily as a workers’ park” for wireless Internet users, who “typically seek empty tables and desks.”

Yet, why would we not expect Bryant Park to be primarily used for work? It is, after all, situated smack dab in the largest cluster of office buildings in the world. To think of it as some kind of bucolic retreat from the real Manhattan world of commerce is deluded at best, and destructive of the social fabric of the city, much of which is structured around work. More importantly, by making public space available for private work, we also create the opportunity for collaborative work. Laura Forlano has extensively documented the way that new forms of collaborative work are emerging in wireless public spaces such as cafes. My favorite anecdote tells of the graphic designer who leaves samples of work in progress out on display, in the hopes of soliciting casual comments from passersby. While intensely focused on his computer-based design software, he’s left a trigger for others to approach him. Other freelancers use stickers and buttons displayed on their computers to provide hooks for conversations. (Mine just says “I am making the future.”)

Thus, while Hampton’s study either misses or doesn’t address this phenomenon, it’s becoming clear that public wireless is allowing groups to work in public space in novel ways. And so, two years ago, working on one of five projects commissioned by the Architectural League of New York for its Toward the Sentient City exhibition, Forlano and I organized a series of experimental collaborative work sessions in wireless public spaces. Using a dedicated social app developed by NYCwireless’ Dana Speigel, and a backpack full of office supplies and work-facilitating doodads like a tabletop whiteboard assembled by Antonina Simeti of workplace design consultancy DEGW, we appropriated the parks and plazas of Manhattan for our work. Dubbed “Breakout: Escape from the Office,” this weeklong effort demonstrated that public space provides an ideal platform for the kind of creative, collaborative, cross-organizational work that so many companies now do. And it showed that the door is opening for us to bring work back to the streets for the first time in a century, since the office building, as architectural solution to bureaucracy — managing lots of people and paper in close proximity — sucked them away.

Finally, the study fails to address two rapidly emerging trends in mobile devices and information services that are changing the way wireless users interact with public space, and are likely to render many of the conclusions irrelevant in the near future. First, the most critical element of how online and face-to-face worlds now interact, is the widespread and diversifying use of social media and electronic communications to coordinate face-to-face meetings. “The more devices present, the less in-person interaction: the majority of public Internet users are online communicating with people they know, but who aren’t physically present.” That’s fine, but what are the consequences of those communications? Invariably, they are about planning activities that will take place in or around the park in the near future. Bryant Park receives hundreds of check-ins daily on the mobile social network Foursquare. Surely these people are creating opportunities for sociability even as they are momentarily distracted from their surroundings while leaving a digital breadcrumb. Second, the study places far too much emphasis on personal devices, especially the laptop. But laptops are already on their way out, as we enter what urban informatician Adam Greenfield first called the “post-PC era.” As tablets, game consoles and gestural and spoken interfaces to computers become more widespread, we’ll see wireless public spaces become laboratories for a kind of civic computing that lets groups large and small experience new kinds of collective computed activities.

In conclusion, while Hampton’s study of wireless public space takes great effort to be neutral and objective, its conclusions are already outdated. And I fear the nuances of its mixed conclusions will be lost on the practitioners who manage our public spaces, or, even worse, interpreted as a warning. But this great experiment with mobile connectivity in civic spaces is just getting started. We shouldn’t be so hasty to draw conclusions about its larger social impact. From an urban design standpoint, the opportunity to bring work back out of office buildings far exceeds the risks. That’s exactly why Bryant Park put the lectern desks in the park: to encourage that new and highly desirable use for a park in a business district.

And yes, I wrote this in Bryant Park, while still managing to chitchat here and there, and flirt with a girl or two. I like to think that wherever he is, Holly Whyte is looking down and smiling.

All photos of Bryant Park visitors enjoying wireless by Ed Yourdon.

Anthony Townsend is the Director of Technology and Development of the Institute for the Future, and focuses his research on the impact of new technology on cities and public institutions. His interests span several inter-related topics: mobility and urbanization, innovation systems and innovation strategy, science and technology parks and economic development, and sustainability and telework.

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.

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…

Much has already been said about how everyone is an architecture critic these days, how the Internet has sped up the criticism cycle, and how the ubiquity of imagery has made architecture magazines that much less valuable. But Alexandra Lange noted another problem with Internet criticism: Nowadays most architecture “criticism” is really just commentary on renderings. Rare is a critic’s response to experiencing an actual building. In fact, a building’s merits are so thoroughly debated while in rendering form that writing about the built work can seem almost besides the point. As a result, the experiential quality of buildings has become less of a focus for design criticism — a potentially dangerous problem for architecture.

We’re a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.Indeed, very little of the evening’s conversation even touched on buildings themselves. While the Internet has enabled commentary on projects far from our backyards, it has encouraged a kind of watered-down criticism that lacks real reporting. Mimi Zeiger defended the Internet’s merits by giving a great example of how the Internet’s speed and conversational tone can enable a fast debate about the value of a building. Recently the LA Times critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a short blog post about a Michael Maltzan building (yes, still in renderings!) at San Francisco State University. The building, which will cost $265 million, was then criticized by blogger Javier Arbona on the grounds of its financing — though it is paid for by a public university, which is getting less and less money from the bankrupt state of California, the money will come through a complex financial arrangement with Wall Street. Kazys Varnelis, Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), then chimed in about the corporatization of universities. Zeiger used this example of fast-paced dialogue to show how lively the Internet criticism sphere is — it drew in a “traditional” critic, a non-traditional blogger, and an architect, plus all the archi-Internet nerds through comments and Twitter. This debate has the additional effect of shaping future reviews of this building and other public-financed projects.

But as the editor of a print publication and the person responsible for the overhaul of Domus’ online presence, Grima voiced a fair amount of nostalgia for the heyday of print architecture magazines in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, magazines like Domus or Casabella would publish all important buildings, and yet criticize many of them. Today’s architecture criticism is stifled by the fact that most magazines do not publish stories about buildings the editors don’t like — or can’t criticize. Zeiger noted it’s too expensive to print a story on a building an editor hates.

I’d argue that there’s something else at play here. Perhaps part of the reason we are nostalgic for the mid-20th-century coverage in print magazines is that the United States was then the center of the skyscraper and urban planning boom. Now the industry has moved to Asia. But where is the commentary on Zaha’s opera house in Guangzhou or Moshe Safdie’s Marina Bay? Architectural Record will still cover it, but three months later. And certainly not with the same kind of first-person knowledge and passion that Maltzan’s SFSU building inspired. Isn’t it problematic that this blogger community is not able to respond to the work going up in Asia and the Middle East with the same kind of authority and visceral response as they might to one in California?

Eva Franch noted that this lack of “criticality” isn’t confined to print magazines. Rather than criticism, she sees the Internet encouraging more exposure of architecture and commentary on it. She noted that blogs are “reporting an obsession, not taking a position.” It’s a comment that gets right to the heart of my last On Criticism piece. A lack of editorial vision or critical position is the final element that many blogs are missing — the thing that keeps us pining for print.

Shannon Mattern helped to conclude the evening with a reminder: the unsettling aspects of Internet “microculture” pervade all art forms and are not particular to architecture criticism. We assume that most architecture blogs, which pursue niche interests without establishing broader socio-political values, fail to inspire a broader debate about architecture. But I’m beginning to think we’re a little too critical of the dialogue happening online, and a little too nostalgic for a kind of magazine culture that may not have been as robust as assumed.

In the drafty Storefront space, without adequate seating and headache-inducing microphone problems, I felt an honest desire to be back at home, in a comfortable chair, with my laptop and Twitter feed. I never thought I’d become the kind of person who occasionally prefers virtual communication to the real kind. But increasingly I think we are living in a golden age of online conversation, one that has more in common with “happenings” than the print journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. Happenings had a great influence on the development of conceptual art; could the same be said one day about blogging and architecture?

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This is the eighth in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.

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.

What follows is the ninth in a series of opinion pieces in which Vishaan Chakrabarti casts key current events — the climate talks in Denmark, the Gulf Oil Spill, the canceling of the ARC tunnel project — as rallying cries in his evolving argument for urban density, for a Country of Cities. In this installment, he examines the protests unfolding across the Middle East in terms of how urban space, specifically spaces of public assembly, reflects the political priorities of those in power and enhances or prohibits social change. -C.S.

Tahrir Square, February 2011. Photo: Al Jazeera English. Some Rights Reserved. For a clickable interactive map of the protest camp in Tahrir Square produced by the BBC, click here.

As the revolution in Egypt has unfolded, much attention has been paid to the significance of Facebook and Twitter as organizing platforms for the revolutionaries. Indeed, the Mubarak government shut down the Internet over the past few weeks to limit communications, a move that proved futile in either suppressing the uprising or prolonging his rule.

Of equal, if not greater, importance has been the platform (a word that once referred to something exclusively physical) provided by Tahrir Square in central Cairo, the geographic epicenter of the revolt. The breathless images of men and women, young and old, civilian and military, galvanizers and galvanized, together setting up encampments and protests in Tahrir Square, also known as Liberation Square, give us faith not only in humanity’s common right to assemble but our common expectation that cities, by definition, must provide ever-restless places of assembly.

Public spaces like Tompkins Square, Tiananmen Square and Tahrir Square have been stages for history because they provide the loci for urban gathering, particularly for a city’s youth. After all, if the revolution is to be televised, from where else would it be broadcast? One could argue that without cities and the spaces they inspire, nations themselves would never change.

Escalators in a shopping mall, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Photo: Vishaan Chakrabarti

It’s hard to imagine a nation without public spaces that foster urban values of mixture and inclusion: the closest I have experienced is Saudi Arabia, where I traveled last year. While there are major developed cities to be sure, one must question whether they fulfill basic standards of urbanity. Such standards are not a Western invention or imposition. Islamic civilizations have created some of the world’s great cities, starting with the religion’s original site of refuge and political organizing, the city of Medina (which means “city” in Arabic), and its holiest site, Mecca, to which the pious make pilgrimages in their millions every year.

Yet the unique morphology of contemporary Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, by contrast, stifles the very development of a public realm. With four million inhabitants and growing, Riyadh is virtually devoid of the public space in which forbidden activities such as the sharing of facilities between men and women, fraternizing between unmarried couples, or protests by abused “guest workers” could ever occur. There are very few places of gathering on the streets. There are virtually no cultural institutions that invite the public, such as movie theaters or performance halls. The most significant convening spaces used by the public are shopping malls, prized of course for their air conditioning, but also for the tight control of public behavior by the religious police that malls enable. In other words, the great social and creative mix of cities extolled throughout centuries of urban thought is made impossible in the urban agglomerations of Saudi.

Deera Square, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Photo via Wikipedia

This is not to say there are not public squares in Riyadh. Perhaps the most famous is Deera Square, which ex-pats call Chop Chop Square in reference to the public decapitations meted out to criminals convicted of murder, rape, even witchcraft, for all to witness. For the state-sanctioned activities in Deera Square alone, Saudi Arabia would be an international pariah if it weren’t for the vast oil reserves that fuel our SUVs and McMansions.

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China | Photos, clockwise from top left by Flickr users Jere Dow, Aaron Olaf, Scott SM.

By contrast, Tiananmen Square, also the site of considerable oppression, plays a substantially more nuanced role in both Beijing and for greater China. To be sure, Tiananmen in the summer of 1989 witnessed one of the greatest crackdowns on public dissent in history, but it’s also a place where young children learn to ride their bikes. By dusk, couples stroll through the Square. One encounters the occasional drunk. Even the events of 1989 did not emerge from a unified opposition with a uniform vision of change: organized workers and elite students held down separate parts of the Square with separate goals in mind. To date, I have few Chinese friends who believe the country should have a one-person-one-vote democracy, and generally there is a degree of faith in the central government that would be unthinkable in the United States.

August 28, 1963 | Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. | via arcweb.archives.gov

In the US, we tend to take public spaces and the activities they enable for granted. From the history of protests in Tompkins Square Park, to Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech on the Washington Mall, to the makeshift memorial built in Union Square after 9/11, it is deeply embedded in our psyche that civil discourse should have a stage on which to play out. While some moments of dissent occurred in contained surrounds like Rosa Parks’ bus, the majority of democracies worldwide will continue to see their hopes and pains played out in sweeping public spaces.

Surrounding Tompkins Square Park, Lower East Side residents protest the forceful closure of Tompkins Square Park. June 1991. Photo by Q. Sakamaki, via Gaia Photos.

In the weeks and months to come, it would be wise for us not to take for granted any emerging democracies that may unfold upon the public squares of the Middle East. The past few weeks were not our best as a nation, with President Obama and Secretary Clinton contradicting each other over the desired timing of Mubarak’s departure. There has been a pervasive sense that our foreign policy establishment, which helped establish the status quo, would prefer that very status quo to the risks of Egyptian self-rule. Instead of giving full-throated support to Egypt’s protesters, some seemed to be arguing that stability may need to overrule democracy as a practical matter, a realpolitik that has consistently placed us on the wrong side of history dating back to our support for the Shah of Iran. People may wearily point to the rise of the Ayatollahs in post-revolution Iran, but do they consider that had we not actively backed a vicious dictator for so many decades prior, Iranians may have been less tempted by such an extremist government? Instead we continue to play the lead role in our “axis of stability” formed by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which understandably wants to maintain our primary peace treaty in the Middle East, but is just as concerned about the movement of oil through the Suez Canal. Again, we seek this so-called stability to perpetuate a lifestyle the world can no longer afford, and we can only resolve by urbanizing our great nation. As Thomas Friedman wrote in Sunday’s Times, “stability has left the building…good riddance.”

And perhaps this is the primary lesson about public space. That beyond our day-to-day needs for it be clean, amenable, and safe, it also has to allow for the expression of instability, for the expression of a world ever in need of change. Change is the essence of urbanity, and Egypt has reminded us that urban space can drive us towards a changed, perhaps unstable, but in the end better world.

This is what we imagine when we imagine a Country of Cities: a country and a world in which urbanity drives us towards a new, untested reality. We imagine our nation as dense and transit-based, so that our needs for gasoline and home heating oil don’t cause our government to back oppressive Middle Eastern regimes. We imagine a country and world in which a horrifying place like Deera Square can someday truly be public. We imagine a world in which pharaohs exit, and liberty prevails.

Protests in Manama, Bahrain, February 2011. At the time of posting, protests were entering their third day in Pearl Square, a traffic circle in central Manama. | Photo by Flickr user Chan’ad

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This is the ninth 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…

In the most recent of its annual “Year in Ideas” issues, the New York Times Magazine devoted a lengthy feature article to the topic of how cities function and how we understand them. Entitled “A Physicist Solves the City” the article purports that the physicist Geoffrey West has, in the few short years he has been studying urbanism, solved the “problem” that is the city. On the Times website the article was listed as the most read magazine article for some weeks, and it appears to be well-disseminated among popular media outlets and especially on science and technology websites. Despite proposing to have radically reinvented the field in which architects and urbanists work, the article appears to have garnered little attention among commentators and blogs from within architecture and urbanism. Perhaps the article’s lack of substance explains professionals’ reluctance to engage with the implications of West’s work. Nonetheless, it is crucial for those of us interested in the serious study of urbanism to look closely at the article, if only because many of the assumptions it advances strike me as undermining an understanding of cities as complex and important things.

Perhaps never before has the search for a totalizing “urban science” been more inappropriate.Throughout the article, author Jonah Lehrer continually refers to “the city” (though never a specific one) and how it is a “problem.” This characterization seems symptomatic of a larger trend occurring when popular media sets its gaze on our cities and our collective “urban future.” I’m talking about articles that lead off with the statistic, “In 2008, for the first time ever, more people live in cities than not” and then go on to presume that “thus, the earth’s collective urban future has now arrived.” Articles of this sort tend to invoke the terms “cities” and “urban” in pre-packaged, discrete and generic terms on which we are all supposed to agree. Such reductive definitions belie a much more complex reality of “urban” places that are neither discrete, uniform, nor comparable by the same metrics. Further, such an approach should be read as dangerous to all of us who see cities as phenomena formed at the collision of dynamic economic, historical, social, political and ecological forces.

Instead of recognizing cities as the products of these complex forces, the object of West’s study is purposefully contextless and unspecified. Describing how he applies his scientific principles to a specific city he’s studying, he says, “I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” West goes on to qualify this assertion by saying that, essentially, the differences between cities that we so often discuss are merely superficial, material ones, related to how a city functions rather than to each city’s unique history.

After stripping the city of its context and all of the attendant complexities in which social scientists deal, West is finally able to realize an “urban science” that has until now been elusive. In his scenario, there has been no serious study of the city, necessitating his invention of the field of urban science akin to how Kepler advanced physics in the 17th century with his theory of planetary motion. As C. Emory Burton puts it in his letter to the Times, “West could hardly invent it [urban science], because social science — particularly the field of urban sociology — has been working on this for many decades.” And urban sociology is by no means alone: urban anthropology, economics, geography and number of other disciplines in the social sciences have investigated cities, not to mention the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. The failure of one discipline to account totally for the study of the city is not a failure of methodology, but rather the recognition of the dynamism of cities and the different ways in which they can be read according to our different experiences of, and interests in, them.

This leads to the broader problem facing those interested in cities who recognize that “urban science” cannot totally explain the city and, more generally, those who believe that social relations cannot be observed through a microscope. Surely statistical analysis and demography are important aspects in understanding urban areas, and aspects about which the reductive powers of the “hard sciences” have much to teach. But to listen to West struggle with the problem of whether his prototypical amorphous city is itself an organism or not is painful. Cities are amalgamations of forces natural as well as man-made and cannot be viewed objectively from a disembodied viewpoint; cities cannot be objectively observed any more than human consciousness can. They are not organisms external to us but rather dynamic and ephemeral assemblages of which we are a part.

If some of us cringe when hearing West recount that, “One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, ‘You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics,’” it is because, while making foundational contributions to the field of urban economics, we are most indebted to Jacobs for the recognition that much of the study of the city is about understanding perspective, and the realization that our experience of the city is inextricable from our subjectivities. Her criticism of modernist planning retains relevance today for how it elevated the power of individual observation of the city over that of objectivist viewpoints of the city. An imminent task before those of us interested in studying cities is to read the broader forces at work on the city through the lens of our individual experiences of the world.

In interpreting our “urban future,” the territory has never been more ambiguous and uncharted than it is now, as cities find themselves at the collision points of global shifts in capital, governance, demographics, climate change as well as political and cultural identity, and each in different ways. Perhaps never before has the search for a totalizing “urban science” been more inappropriate. Perhaps never before has asserting the importance of human experience and embodiment in studying the city been more important. The stakes are no less crucial than making our cities more sustainable, but also debating what kind of cities we want to live in, and making those visions into reality.

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Eric Peterson sometimes writes things and sometimes designs things. He is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and lives in Brooklyn.

Image: Coruscant at night. Rendering by Yannick Dussealt for LucasFilm LTD’s Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith

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.