Photo by Iwan Baan | via thehighline.org

HIGH LINE PHASE 3
On November 1st, Mayor Bloomberg announced that all of the major stakeholders in the West Side Rail Yards have agreed to preserve the final section of the High Line for use as public space. CSX Transportation, a private freight rail company that still owns the undeveloped stretch of the elevated tracks, has committed to donating the remaining portion of the structure to the City; and the City, State and site developer Related Companies have all agreed to retain the structure and turn it into parkland. Meanwhile Friends of the High Line have been working hard to secure funding for phase three, helped by a recent $20 million donation from the Diller-Von Furstenberg Foundation. In his press statement, Mayor Bloomberg made it clear that this project was part of a collaboration between the City of New York and Related Companies to revitalize the West side of Manhattan in order to encourage commercial activity and in turn to promote the creation of jobs. Legal details and final negotiations are still in process, but confidence is high that a complete High Line, from Gansevoort to 34th Street, is in New York’s future. For more information, check out the Friends of the High Line website.

City Lights | photo via tphifer.com

SLEEK CITY LIGHTS
Head down to Church and Warren Streets to see the latest addition to New York City’s streetscape design. In 2004, a team led by Thomas Phifer and Partners won City Lights, a juried design competition led by the Department of Design and Construction and the Department of Transportation to conceive of a new streetlight for New York. Now, thanks to a reduction in cost of energy efficient LEDs over the past seven years, these sleek new lights are starting to appear on the city’s streets. For more pictures, check out The Architect’s Newspaper Blog and Thomas Phifer’s website.

TOKYO’S BACK-UP CITY
A consortium of Japanese political officials have proposed building a “back-up city” for Tokyo. — Wait, what? — After the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan in March, and with seismologists warning that Tokyo itself is long overdue for a major quake, people are looking for a contingency plan. The Integrated Resort, Tourism, Business and Backup City, or IRTBBC, would house 50,000 residents and a working population of 200,000 (a far cry from the 13 million that currently live in Tokyo), and would serve to take over the major functions of the capital city in the case of a crippling disaster. The plan suggests using the site of the outdated Itami Airport outside of Osaka, 300 miles away. ”The idea is being able to have a back-up, a spare battery for the functions of the nation,” said Hajime Ishii of Japan’s Democratic Party. For more coverage, check out The Telegraph.

via theatlanticcities.com

SELLING HOUSING
The Atlantic Cities has a a delightful collection of vintage posters that tell the story of how New York City originally sold the idea of public housing to the pubic. The New York City Housing Authority was the first of its kind in the United States. While strategies for redevelopment of housing have evolved past in the past eighty years, the posters reflect the fundamental motivations behind the founding of NYCHA in 1934, to provide safe and secure housing for low-income city residents. Check out the series of posters advertising the new program and buildings here, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

EVENTS and TO DOs

Making Room Symposium: Tickets are still available for Monday’s Making Room symposium, where teams of architects commissioned by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council and the Architectural League present innovative ideas for new types of housing that might better match the contemporary demographic make-up of New York and how New Yorkers choose to live now. For an introduction to Making Room, click here. For more information about the symposium, click here.

Performa 11, the fourth edition of the visual art performance biennial, is now in progress. Performa brings together dozens of arts institutions and curators to present discipline-meshing performances that explore visual art, music, dance, poetry, fashion, architecture, graphic design and the culinary arts, in public and private spaces throughout the city. There’s also a Performa magazine, online TV show, radio program, film screenings, bookshop and lounge. For a complete list of events, running now through November 21, visit the Performa 11 website.

Poem Forest: This weekend, the Poetry Society of America is hosting Poem Forest, a walk along Thain Forest’s Sweetgum Trail designed by Jon Cotner (who recently took us on a walk through Fort Greene Park). Weaving together poetry and space, the self-guided tour relates lines of poetry from all different eras and regions with fifteen specific spots chosen along the trail.

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

Frustrated by the lack of a cohesive vision for the neighborhood and concerned by a failure to connect development plans with broader issues of community services, infrastructure and sustainability, architects and Brooklyn residents David Briggs and Anthony Deen founded the advocacy group Gowanus by Design in 2009. Briggs and Deen wanted to encourage new clean-up and development strategies based on community input and the needs and opinions of those who work and live along the Gowanus. They soon realized that what they saw as the primary challenges for the site could be addressed through a series of design competitions, which would serve to provoke conversation, encourage community engagement and, hopefully, steer future development of the area. The first of these competitions, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, invited designers across disciplines to explore the potential for pedestrian-oriented development that engages with the canal and the surrounding watershed. Here, Briggs and Deen tell us more about the motivations behind and future plans for Gowanus by Design, and share the winning designs from Connections. —C.B.

The Gowanus is a canal and neighborhood under constant assault. For every contamination clean up there is an illegal dumping; for every marine species that returns to the canal there is a toxic overflow from the local CSOs. The nearby areas of Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill and Boerum Hill are neighborhoods of four and five story buildings, but the City has approved 12-story buildings for two separate major development projects in Gowanus. The fact is, the area suffers because there is no master plan. When the Gowanus Canal was listed on the EPA’s Superfund National Priorities List in early 2010, it was a welcome pause to what was becoming a rapid development process that did not address vital urban issues, such as contextual zoning, mass transit, community services or infrastructure.

The pending development of the Gowanus can also be seen as a local case study of a global trend. As more of our population move to cities — if current trends continue, 70% of the global population will live in urban environments by mid-century — pressure will increase to develop brownfield sites and other contaminated urban areas that were previously considered off-limits due to the extensive remediation they require.

In 2009, we founded Gowanus by Design as a community-based urban design advocacy group in response to these global shifts, our concerns about the trajectory of the proposed development and our desire to help remake our corner of the city. Our mission is to promote sustainable development that enhances the Gowanus Canal community without replacing the historic character and working class origins of the neighborhood, while responding intelligently to the environmental damage wrought by local industry over the past 150 years. Our members are local residents and industry professionals — architects, planners, cartographers and transportation experts. Our aim is to propose and advocate for new strategies for the development of the Gowanus area and to explore the larger urban planning challenges that the world will face as the global population migrates to the world’s cities.

After the Gowanus Canal was designated a Superfund site, our focus shifted towards documenting the cleanup process and taking a step back to consider long-term planning challenges. When discussing how to effectively move forward, we realized that we had to sort through the myriad complex issues being raised in a comprehensive, yet understandable way. By identifying a series of broad questions about the latent problems at the canal, and connecting them to the future of transportation, education, sustainability, infrastructure and community services, we hoped that we could spark conversations that would lead to more research and community input. As our list of questions developed, we decided that each one could form the basis of a design competition, the results of which could create a mappable, online database that would serve to inspire new thinking on urban development.

The Gowanus Lowline jury

This year we launched our inaugural competition, Gowanus Lowline: Connections, as an ideas competition open to the international community. We invited speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engaged with the canal and the surrounding watershed. We ended up with 188 submissions, from 14 US States (26 entries came from right here in Brooklyn) and from 14 countries around the world, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, Finland, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, Lithuania and the Netherlands.

On a Friday afternoon in June, the jury convened at the SET Gallery in Brooklyn, located just one block from the canal, for several hours of review and discussion. Comprised of leaders in the design community Julie Bargmann (landscape designer and founding principal of D.I.R.T. Studio), David Lewis (architect and partner of LTL Architects), Gregg Pasquarelli (architect and founding principal of SHoP Architects), Richard Plunz (urban planner and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation), Andrew Simons (designer and chair of Gowanus Canal Conservancy) and Joel Towers (architect and the Dean of Parsons School of Design), the jury focused on thoughtful and rigorous solutions to the problems of urban brownfield sites in general, and the canal area specifically. After much deliberation, they selected first and second prizewinners and four honorable mention winners.

FIRST PLACE
Gowanus Flowlands
Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle, Brandon Specketer
New York, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Gowanus Flowlands. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

The first prize winner, “Gowanus Flowlands,” was submitted by Tyler Caine, Luke Carnahan, Ryan Doyle and Brandon Specketer of New York, NY. The jury appreciated the team’s understanding of density and environmental remediation as part of a broader sustainable urban strategy. The proposal creates a compelling urban condition through a series of residential and academic buildings that extend above a commercial zone and hover over a series of filtering wetlands. Gowanus Flowlands creatively demonstrates how the area could be inhabited while living with remediation.

SECOND PLACE
[f]lowline
Aptum/Landscape Intelligence: Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen
Urbana, Illinois

Click thumbnails to see images from [f]lowline. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

“[F]lowline,” submitted by Aptum/Landscape Intelligence (team members Gale Fulton, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen of Urbana, Illinois), was awarded second prize for its clever adaptation and response to changing environmental and urban conditions. As with “Flowlands,” “[f]lowline” proposed living with remediation through a series of insertions, such as pooling parks and floating forest barges, and by doing so, offered a vision of a possible hybrid urban condition.

HONORABLE MENTION
Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow
Agergroup: Jessica Leete, Claire Ji Kim, Shan Shan Lu, Winnie Lai and Albert Chung
Boston, Massachusetts

Click thumbnails to see images from Domestic Laundry. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
Gowanus Canal Filter District
burkholder|salmons: Sean Burkholder, Dylan Salmons
University Park, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from Filter District. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Originally, the competition brief indicated that there would be three honorable mentions. But as the deliberations proceeded through the afternoon, the jury focused on four entries that formed two pairings: “Gowanus Canal Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry: Flush Basin Curtain Mattress Pillow”; and “Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry” and “B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge).”

“Filter District” and “Domestic Laundry” both accepted the existing conditions as a starting point, yet offered different solutions: “Filter District” proposed that three areas south of 3rd Street on both sides of the canal be depressed to promote tidal flushing and create a node point for peripheral development. “Domestic Laundry” offered a range of solutions along both sides of the canal, suggesting a phased, realistic approach that embraced the myriad technologies that the canal cleanup would require.

HONORABLE MENTION
Made in Brooklyn: Bridges For Local Artisans & Industry
Nathan Rich and Miriam Peterson
Brooklyn, New York

Click thumbnails to see images from Made in Brooklyn. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

HONORABLE MENTION
B.Y.O.B. (Build Your Own Bridge)
Austin+Mergold LLC: Jason Austin, Alex Mergold, Jessica Brown, Sally Reynolds
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Click thumbnails to see images from B.Y.O.B. Click here for a PDF of the complete entry.

Both “Made in Brooklyn” and “B.Y.O.B.” relied on a more traditional typology to link the neighborhoods on both sides of the canal: the bridge. However, each team was careful to expand on the structure’s conventional use. “Made in Brooklyn” proposed the bridge as a catalyst for growth on either side of the canal by creating a commercial spine on the crossings that would nurture current interest (and pride) in Brooklyn industry. “B.Y.O.B.” proposed various bridge prototypes, designed by local stakeholders, that reflect the existing neighborhood character while connecting current and proposed adjacencies.

After deliberations concluded, we asked the jurors to reflect on Gowanus Lowline and comment on what they’d like to see in future competitions. Several of them noted that more emphasis should be placed on understanding Brooklyn, its character, the local climatic conditions, and, in this particular case, the topography around the canal. Additionally, since the science required to properly remediate the area is truly complex, they suggested that future competitions be designed around some of the specific remediation solutions currently being developed by the EPA as part of the Superfund cleanup process.

As we move forward, our competitions will take the ideas and feedback generated from Gowanus Lowline and continue to explore the broad questions that we think will help people better understand the changes taking place at the canal and in the surrounding neighborhood. We will advocate for new strategies and a sustainable approach to urban development and plan to share our work with local groups, other like-minded professionals, and New York City’s Department of City Planning.

These winning entries from Gowanus Lowline: Connections, along with approximately twenty other thought-provoking entries selected by the committee, and three projects from the seventh grade class of the Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies, a local middle school, will be on display at the SET Gallery, 287 Third Avenue, Brooklyn for two weeks in September. The show will open on Thursday, September 15, from 6—9pm. For more information, click here.

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After graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, David Briggs worked in upstate New York and for William McDonough in New York City. He opened his own office in 1993 and began working on residential, commercial, and restoration projects that addressed sustainable design issues. In 1997 Mr. Briggs was awarded the AIA New York City Chapter Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant. He has also served as a Visiting Critic for the Weimar Bauhaus-Universitat “Summer Academy in Rome” as well as the University of Pennsylvania and taught as an adjunct professor at Philadelphia University. Since 2002, he has served on the Board of Trustees for the Amber Charter School in Harlem where he chairs the Facilities Committee and has been Board Secretary for the past four years. Mr. Briggs is a LEED Accredited Professional and is licensed to practice architecture in New York, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Washington DC. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons.

Anthony Deen is a co-founder of Gowanus by Design, and owner of deenstudio. His projects include work for jetBlue, British Airways and Chelsea Market in New York. Prior to starting deenstudio, Anthony was the Senior Design Director at The Phillips Group, and served as Vice President of Design and Development for the Virgin Megastores in North America. Anthony was also a senior architect with the Rockwell Group where he helped found the Interaction Lab, developing digital media for built environments. Anthony began his career with Samuel Anderson, Winka Dubbeldam and James Garrison, where he won an AIA-NY Project Award. Anthony earned his undergraduate degree at the Cooper Union, graduate degree from Parsons School of Design and did additional study in urban design at the City College of New York. Anthony teaches design studio in the School of Art, Media and Technology at Parsons School of Design where he was the founding director of Parsons’ Design + Technology department. Anthony is also a member of the EPA’s Gowanus Community Advisory Group and lives in Carroll Gardens with his family.

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.

Stargazing in Times Square | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

When artificial light shines upward, it bounces off particulates in the air, causing a haze — some have described it as a “luminous fog” — that prevents us from seeing the stars and skies above. As our powerfully-lit built environment expands across the planet, so does this dome of light. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson contends that a connection to the night sky offers us a sense of “cosmic perspective” that, when denied, causes us “to not live to the full extent of what it is to be human.” The stars have inspired mythology, poetry, curiosity, inquiry and exploration throughout history. So, what happens when we lose the night sky? That question is at the heart of The City Dark, a new documentary film by Ian Cheney that explores the effects of light pollution on our environment, our society, our bodies and our psyches. (See the trailer here.)

The most obvious implications of light pollution are to astronomers. The stronger the light pollution, the harder it is to see the universe beyond. But, as Cheney explores in the film, the consequences of our pervasive use of artificial light reach much further. Biologists who study habitat disruption are tracking how city lights disorient, and ultimately cause the death of, hatching sea turtles and migrating birds. Epidemiologists are investigating the hypothesis that night shift work, and the disruptions to circadian rhythms and melatonin production that come with it, is a carcinogen.

But light activates space, improves public safety and facilitates social interaction. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. We equate light with progress and achievement. So what do we do when, as Cheney says, “though we might love light, we might need the dark”? That’s where lighting designers, architects and planners can help. A darker city can come from, not just less light, but less wasteful light. Careful, thoughtful lighting design is economically and environmentally beneficial, and can help reconnect us to the majestic skies above.

Tonight, Wednesday, August 17, The City Dark is being screened at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in New York City. In anticipation of the event, we sat down with Ian Cheney to learn more about light pollution, the disappearance of the night sky and what we can do to get it back. —V.S.

Sky Village, Arizona | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Tell us about The City Dark.
The City Dark is a documentary about light pollution — which ought to be called night pollution, if you think about it. Air pollution is pollution of the air, water pollution is pollution of the water and what we are really talking about is pollution of the night by light.

I have found that light pollution as an urban and environmental concern isn’t a topic on everybody’s radar screen. But once one mentions the disappearance of the night sky, people instantly connect. There’s something so fundamental and present to all of us about that.

Throughout the film, evocations about the poetry and mythology of the night sky interweave with scientific inquiry into the effects of artificial light on ourselves and our environment. Though a complete telling of the story seems to demand both poetry and science, did you come to the subject matter from one side or the other?
The film began much more with the intangible questions and what I might categorize as the more philosophical or spiritual question about what we lose when we can’t connect with the night sky. I knew next to nothing about most of the ecological or human health issues related to light pollution. But I knew that astronomers, of course, were worried about the loss of the stars. So it was with them that we started the film. The astronomers were the ones to point out that this topic touches a much broader range of people. But even as the film snowballed into explorations of the scientific issues, there was no way to tell the story without the intangible aspects. What we lose as individuals, as a culture, when we lose the night sky is what underpinned the whole project for me.

Is that what you hope people with take away from the film?
I’d be happy if people took different ideas away from the film. One person might be energized by the idea of writing a new lighting ordinance for their town and introducing legislation that helps preserve the night sky, whereas another might be reminded to step outside and look up from time to time, to take his kids outside the city to find darkness, or to think differently about how to design lights on a building.

We are setting up a lot of screenings this fall with a whole range of people, from astronomers to ecologists to wildlife groups, but also with lighting designers and architects who are very much engaged in rethinking the way we light our cities.

The High Line, New York | screen capture from The City Dark

Speaking of which, in the film you say “a darker city is a matter of design.” You also spend some time with Hervé Descottes, the lighting designer of the High Line. Talk a little bit about the design of a darker city, and the role that architects and designers can play in preventing light pollution.
The way we have come to light our cities, perhaps unintentionally, is extremely wasteful, haphazard and careless. The idea that light can trespass, can pollute, can be damaging, is relatively new. Maybe because you can’t hold light in your hand like you can water or garbage — if someone were spewing garbage into your window, you would object.

There’s a fair bit of generalizing and mudslinging directed towards architects and lighting designers by people who think they all just love to blast light up their buildings. Some do, and you see that walking around the city, but there are an increasing number of lighting designers that are trying to do things differently.

It’s not that advocates of “re-darkening” the city want to turn off all the lights. Hervé Descottes is one of, hopefully, a growing number of designers who are thinking about light in a more sophisticated way than we may have in the past, when we were responding to a centuries-long legacy of having too much darkness and seeing more light as better. His approach to lighting design is as much about celebrating the darkness and the shadow spaces as it is about the beauty of light. Whether that comes from a respect for the beauty of the night sky, a regard for people’s melatonin levels or aesthetic choice, I think it’s a profound and interesting shift in the way we think about lighting cities. It may seem ironic that a lighting designer would be talking about the need to use less light, but fortunately lighting designers aren’t paid by how many lumens of light they use in a design.

The International Dark-Sky Association has done a lot of wonderful work in helping people rethink the way we light our spaces, from introducing and modeling lighting ordinances to conducting nuts-and-bolts research on fixture design and how light affects space. There are so many strategies and technologies available to people that I think suggest a promising future. It’s similar to the way we talk about green design — in fact, smarter nighttime lighting is a LEED green building point, which is a sign that people are recognizing that lighting our environment means more than just the loss of the stars. We can use better lighting as a way to create different and, in the end, more livable spaces, where people will be able to sleep better, birds can find their way and we can connect to the stars.

Trespassing Light | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

You spend some time in the film talking about the enormous cultural impact of light. Light is used as art, as celebration, as tribute. Light is equated with safety, with social activity, with progress, with development. With light so often linked to positive notions, when and how did the idea of light pollution, and the need to “re-darken” the city, take hold? And does the cultural significance of light present obstacles to popular acceptance of light reduction?
It’s fascinating — even though the recent attention to light pollution paid by groups like the Dark-Sky Association is new, the idea that people think their city is over-lit is not. The introduction of new lighting technology has always made people long for the way the city used to be. When arc lighting and electric lighting were introduced in the late-19th century, people were immediately nostalgic for the quiet, orange glow of the gas-lit city. In the film we speak with Bill Sharpe, a historian of the way people wrote and created art about the night in New York City, whose book New York Nocturne documents some of the rich history of that nostalgia effect. But today, people dismiss that nostalgia as overly romantic because it looks back to something none of us have experienced. We’ve had electric lighting for over a century.

As you mentioned, there is an involved relationship between light and safety or crime. People feel safer in well-lit spaces. But when you start getting into the data about whether introducing light alone will consistently make a neighborhood safer or not, there are instances where it does and instances where it doesn’t, where light just moves crime elsewhere or even makes it easier for criminals to operate. But it’s inarguable that people continue to feel safer in the light. I suppose it’s in our genes. We don’t see as well at night — though we can see and navigate through shadowy space better than we think. It’s a complex issue, one that I only touch on briefly in the film.

What are some other ways that people are addressing light pollution through technological advances, legislation or individual action?
The way people are starting to rein in the light runs the gamut. There are volunteer measures, such as In New York City, where some people have signed on to shut off lights in buildings or on bridges at certain times during migration season. Then there are cities like Tucson, Arizona, where you can see the Milky Way from downtown because they have such a robust lighting ordinance.

Many lighting ordinances are designed to be gradual and realistic about what is expected of the community. They don’t require everyone change their lights immediately, which would be quite costly, but any new lights that are introduced have to be cut-off lights, which direct the light downwards, to the ground, where you actually need it, rather than through someone’s windows or up into space. Which is almost a boringly obvious idea, to not waste something.

When you get right down to the nuts and bolts of better lighting, it’s pretty easy to grasp, even if implementing those ideas isn’t always easy. It involves years of wrangling, because there’s money to be made burning fuel to waste light, and there’s an instinctive resistance to reducing the way we light. It often goes back to the question of crime that we discussed earlier. People think that if the city turns off lights, crime will follow. It’s instinctive.

New York City and New York State have seen their fair share of lighting measures introduced and failed time and again. Maybe a city like New York seems like too much of a lost cause, maybe there are other things to worry about, or maybe there’s real pressure coming from people with an interest in maintaining the status quo. But whatever the reason is, those efforts haven’t been able to gain traction as more than volunteer measures.

Brooklyn, New York | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

As you travelled from city to city, region to region, did you see differences in the way more vertical cities were tackling these challenges as compared to more sprawling cities?
This is a bit of a roundabout way to answer your question, but it ties in with how we think and talk about wilderness and the environment. Environmentalists and conservationists are often arguing about where to put our money and energy – should we conserve and preserve fenced-in parks as pure wilderness, where urban residents can visit to enjoy trees, bugs, birds, ponds and stars? Or — and it really shouldn’t be an either/or — should we put our energy into making the spaces where we live every day that much more green and livable? At the end of the day, there are limited resources and one has to figure out where to put one’s efforts.

That same debate applies to light pollution and the disappearance of the night sky. In a city like New York, should we put any effort into restricting lighting given how few stars we can see? Or should we put more energy into the suburbs, where you have at least a fighting chance of seeing the Milky Way? Or should we dedicate ourselves to preserving rural skies, where both urban and suburban residents can escape to see the night sky? Of course, I think all should be done.

But I do think bringing back even one more star to a city sky is worthwhile. Maybe that one star — and I’m paraphrasing a comment by Neil deGrasse Tyson that didn’t make it into the film — will be the star that catches some young scientist-to-be’s eye and enthralls him or her with the idea of becoming an astronomer. Or connects someone with the idea that there’s a larger world, which I think ultimately is the most important thing. The most profound risk we’re taking by losing the night sky is becoming a completely downward-looking species.

There’s something mesmerizing and unparalleled about a truly dark night sky. It’s hard not to get really cheesy, really fast when talking about it. And, just like seeing the Grand Canyon or a great whale, there’s something different about experiencing it yourself than seeing it on a television screen or in a magazine. But Neil deGrasse Tyson’s story of discovering astronomy through the planetarium, because he never saw the stars from his home in the Bronx, is a great example of how, on the one hand, the proxies we create for wilderness experiences, whether it’s Central Park or planetariums, are meaningful and important. Tyson wondered aloud whether, if he’d grown up on a farm, seeing the night sky every night, it would have inspired the same sense of awe that it did for him, having grown up in the Bronx.

As the night sky recedes from view, what do you think it means for our collective imagination, curiosity or inspiration? What happens when we don’t have access to that sense of awe?
It’s an experiment in progress. We’re doing this to ourselves. As a country, and now as a world, as we tip towards being a dominantly urban population, we are mostly growing up without the stars. On some level it remains to be seen what it will do to us. This whole film was in a way my own attempt to engage with some of those questions. I certainly don’t have all the answers.

I think we all gain wonderfully different things from our experiences with the night sky. For me, it has been a profound reminder of our place in space and a perspective on my own moment in the lifetime of the universe. It has made me really value what time I have on the planet, but I think that’s probably not a bad thing to value and to keep in mind, how remarkably unique life on the planet is.

At times the environmentalist community and the astronomy community have been at odds with one another, arguing about whether limited financial resources should be dedicated to cleaning up our mess here on this planet or exploring elsewhere. But I think the more we learn about outer space, our place in space and our relationship to the stars, the more it makes us careful citizens of the planet. That, weirdly, was one of the things I was most interested in exploring in the film – I don’t think it actually comes through very much at all, but so it goes. But I do think that the more we see the stars the more we actually care about our planet.

Haleakala, Maui, Hawaii | Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Are there other topics you wanted to explore further than didn’t make it into the film?
Sleep science. I would love to make a whole film about how we sleep. There weren’t really sleep scientists before the industrial revolution, so we don’t know that much about how we naturally sleep. Experiments have been done where people are locked away for weeks at a time to see how they sleep “on a natural cycle.” The results echo how sleep patterns used to be described in literature — people often sleep in two segments of time, waking up once in the middle of the night.

There is so much about a city that is a shock to the human immune system. Think about what you learn in seventh grade: animals exist in habitats and if you disrupt those habitats, the animals suffer. And yet somehow we don’t turn that same attention to our own habitat.

I realized — and I never used to think of it this way — that we keep exploring this question of disrupted habitat from different perspectives through our films. In King Corn, we looked at the way we eat and how it’s completely out of whack with how we’ve evolved to eat. With The Greening of Southie, a film about green building in Boston, we explored the physical spaces we find ourselves living in. And now we’re looking at this question of how we light our world and how it represents a real disruption in our circadian rhythm. We’ve evolved for many, many generations with certain cycles of light and dark. It’s very interesting to live in an urban environment and think about how can we design spaces to give us the things we want out of a city, which are many, and yet not make us sick or unhappy or solipsistic in the process.

Really we just take these recklessly boring topics like watching corn grow and watching buildings go up and star gazing — its not blockbuster stuff — and we try to suggest ways that they are fundamental to our lives.

For the film, you developed a letter-grade system for rating star visibility in different locations. Sky Village, Arizona (?) received an A; Times Square an F. The highest grade for NYC – at least of the areas you list in the film  — is a C+ (Staten Island). Did anywhere in New York City get a better grade? Are there any secret corners that are still good for stargazing?
I bet there are places in New York City that can rock a B—. Maybe Floyd Bennett Field? That’s where all the astronomers go. There’s also a wonderful guy named Jason Kendall who runs an astronomy program up in Inwood. He leads groups, does stargazing and meteor-gazing there.

What’s next for Wicked Delicate Films?
We got a little development grant from SilverDocs, in partnership with Whole Foods, for a film called BlueSpace, which will be a film about urban waterways around New York City. We’re looking at the idea that the city’s waterfronts and harbors — its “blue space” — should be considered as powerful and important a resource as its green space. I’m infatuated with that idea, especially given the city’s history of thinking of our water as a toilet. We’re just digging into that.

Courtesy of Ian Cheney

Ian Cheney is a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. He grew up in New England and earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Yale. After graduate school he co-created and starred in the Peabody Award-winning theatrical hit and PBS documentary King Corn (2007), directed the feature documentary The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008), and co-produced the Planet Green film Big River (2009). Ian maintains a 1/1000th acre farm in the back of his ’86 Dodge pickup, which is at the center of his recent film Truck Farm (2011). He has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, on CNN and on Good Morning America. An avid astrophotographer, he travels frequently to show his films, lead discussions and give talks about sustainability, agriculture, and the human relationship to the natural world.

Artist Rendering of new Whitney Museum | Images by Renzo Piano Building Workshop with Cooper, Robertson & Partners

THE WHITNEY’S NEW HOME
Following last week’s groundbreaking at the Whitney Museum’s future downtown location, New York Magazine’s architecture critic Justin Davidson castigated the museum for what he considers a “monumentally lost opportunity.” The new museum space was designed by acclaimed architect Renzo Piano, whom Davidson accused of capping the High Line “with a pale, metal-clad tower, interlocked with a stack of horizontal blocks that step back in the manner of a clunky cruise ship.” The museum is set to open in 2015. To decide on the design for yourself see it in detail here, and to read more of Davidson on Piano, see the full New York Magazine story.

Gowanus Canal | Image via the New York Daily News

GUNKY GOWANUS
In the latest on the Gowanus Canal cleanup, the New York Post and the New York Daily News reported that two sites readied for development around the Canal for the City’s $300 million “Gowanus Green” housing project still contain toxic contaminants even after a state-monitored clean-up effort seven years ago. One of the largest sources of pollution currently sits under the Lowe’s Home Improvement store, where a black, tarlike substance was found deep in the ground and is still polluting the Canal. Black gunk and yellow liquid containing cancer-causing PAH’s (poly-aromatic hydrocarbons) were discovered recently in the area where Toll Brothers, a development company, had planned an enormous condo project (which they subsequently abandoned following the site’s Superfund designation). The presence of such highly toxic chemicals has alarmed the EPA and raised eyebrows around the effectiveness of the Superfund site’s original clean-up. To read more, see the New York Daily News coverage.

Brownfield Remediation | Image via Omi Industries

GENTRIFYING BROWNFIELDS
CUNY Professor Melissa Checker analyzed the city’s new brownfield redevelopment program in a recent piece for Gotham Gazette, noting development trends in former brownfields geared toward high-income residents and tourists. Brownfields are common in our city (we have an estimated 7,000 acres according to PlaNYC) and are typically characterized by vacant sites contaminated with toxic chemicals such as old gas stations, factories and dry cleaners. Brownfields have historically been avoided by developers due to liability concerns and costly remediation. Up until recently, the City relied on federal and state tax credits to deal with brownfields, classically awarded to higher-income neighborhoods and not to smaller-scale organizations who lack resources to deal with hefty remediation costs. The City’s new Brownfield Cleanup Program (BCP), launched in August 2010, will provide $10 million to remediate brownfields in the city by subsidizing developers’ clean-up costs. The program rewards development in lower-income neighborhoods, which risks gentrifying neighborhoods without public planning processes in place, since generally no community board approval is necessary. To read her full take on brownfields, see Checker’s piece here.

East River Ferry Map | via NY Waterways

EAST RIVER FERRY LAUNCH
The new East River Ferry service will launch on June 13th and, for the first 12 days, the ride is free! After June 25th, the ferry will cost $4 one way, $12 for an unlimited day pass and $140 for an unlimited monthly, as reported by DNAinfo. This much anticipated ferry service is seen as a sustainable, if costly, pilot project for alternative transportation in New York. The ferry line will begin in Long Island City, stop at 34th Street in Manhattan, and make stops in Greenpoint, North Williamsburg, South Williamsburg and DUMBO, ending at Pier 11, just north of the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. In the summer months, ferries will also make stops at Atlantic Avenue (Brooklyn) and Governors Island. Although service is expected every half hour, ferries stop running at 8:30pm on weekends and 9pm on weeknights. The fare cost is subsidized for riders by the City, but will not be a part of the MTA’s fare system. Check out the official East River Ferry Site for full schedules.

Image via NYCwireless

DUMBO’S FREE WiFi
Following the goals outlined in the newly unveiled Roadmap for the Digital City, a developer and non-profit partnership will be providing DUMBO with free, unlimited WiFi. The new network is financed by a developer and is first in the city that offers free wireless, which will be available outdoors between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. The Dumbo Improvement District collaborated with Two Trees Management Company, a real estate developer in the area, to offer the service as an amenity to attract residents. The neighborhood is currently host to a number of tech start-ups and is an example of what may be in store for the rest of the city.

ANTI-OBESITY BUILDING
The New York Times covered a new eight-story, 63-unit co-op in the Bronx, called ‘The Melody,” which incorporates active living into the design of the building. Host to several anti-obesity design features, the building includes outdoor space with exercise equipment, a naturally-lit gym and signage posted next to strategic, art-lined, music-filled staircases, reading: “A person’s health can be judged by which they take two of at a time, pills or stairs.” The Melody is the first development project to incorporate the City’s Active Design Guidelines, covered in depth in a UO piece by Samir Shah.

EVENT
Our friends at SUPERFRONT Brooklyn invite young designers to develop a temporary installation for SUPERFRONT PUBLIC SUMMER, a design charette to create public space for local performers, non-profits, community groups and other civic-minded groups in formerly industrial space in Industry City. Jurors Vito Acconci (Acconci Studio), K8 Hardy, Mitchell Joachim (Terreform ONE), Olympia Kazi (Van Alen Institute), and Ada Tolla (LOT-EK) will be judging the designs created for Industry City in Sunset Park. The charrette will take place on June 11th, from 2 – 5pm, at 55 33rd Street, 2nd Floor, Brooklyn. Click here for tickets, and to read up on SUPERFRONT, check out the UO piece on them here.

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

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.

Last night, a crowd of one hundred assembled at the Old American Can Factory to join us and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) for a different kind of Superfund conversation. The stormclouds decided to cooperate for a change, so we set up folding chairs in the courtyard, and our friends and neighbors Rooftop Films graciously donated time and equipment to make the night a huge success.

CUP Executive Director Rosten Woo got things going by contextualizing this event as part of CUP’s People and Buildings series of live talk shows, which aims to bring together unlikely pairs of speakers with complementary but distinct approaches to issues in our shared urban landscape. The issue at hand was, of course, the raging discussion about the designation of the Gowanus as a Superfund site (today is the EPA’s deadline for public comments on the designation; send in your thoughts here). But this event delved deeper than the immediate context, to draw connections between toxicological history, information networks, environmental art practice, and the financial and legal issues challenging Superfund at local, state and national levels.

Dan Wiley, community liaison for Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, kicked things off by providing some local context. He presented a comprehensive overview of the canal’s history, from the settlement of Chief Gowane and his tribe through the rapid urban development of Brooklyn to the canal’s current state of extreme environmental degradation. I learned many new things (and I’m pretty nerdy about the Canal as it is), including the fact that a canal restoration feasibility study completed by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2002 provided the information for the EPA to recommend placing the Gowanus on its National Priorities List (NPL). Our other fave canal, Newtown Creek, never benefited from the same level of investigation, which is why despite tireless community advocacy, it has received less attention from federal agencies than the Gowanus has to date.

The first panelist to speak was the artist Brooke Singer. (Check out a video excerpt of her talk here.) Singer is the creator of the web-based, interactive art project Superfund365, in which she investigates a different Superfund site each day for a year. Her documentation explores the alarming lack of public information on each of these sites: she found Superfund sites demarcated only with common “keep out” signs or fenced-off lots, and, in one case, a very large shopping mall.

Singer began her investigation of Superfund sites around the country immediately following 9/11, after a conversation with Robert Martin, the EPA’s ombudsman at the time. His passionate advocacy for greater awareness of the environmental hazards posed by the pulverized electrical, chemical and building material – essentially an enormous unlicensed toxic waste incinerator – ran afoul of other political priorities in the tragedy’s aftermath. The political construction of environmental hazards was a theme the recurred throughout the night.

Historian Sarah Vogel picked up this thread. (Check out a video excerpt of her talk here.) Vogel was quick to caution the audience that she does not work on Superfund issues. Her research – which she characterized as asking the question “how did we all get a little plastic?” – focuses more on the body than the environment. Her approach enabled her to invert the question of hazards and clean-up to probe the meanings of chemical safety.

For Vogel, chemical safety operates in a “kind of nexus between science, politics and law.” The ways we differentiate environmental hazards from safe compounds is deeply political. She sketched a history of the petrochemical revolution since 1945, complicating the presumptions that the modern environmental movement began in 1962 with the publication of Silent Spring and reached its apex in 1970 with the commissioning of the EPA.

This history supported her argument against one of the basic principles of mainstream toxicology, that “the dose makes the poison.” In other words, she called into question the notion that as the degree of exposure decreases so does the risk. The facts do not bear this assumption out. Nonetheless, we continue to operate in a system in which risk = hazard × degree of exposure, and in which all ages and stages of life (pregnancy, for example) are presumed to be equally vulnerable. We mitigate risk by limiting exposure, rather than challenging the composition of the hazardous materials itself.

To rethink this problem, Vogel offered a powerful call to action to designers. How could the design of our environments be informed by acknowledgment of continuous exposure to heavy metals, PCBs and organochlorines? Let’s build remediation into the design process.

The final speaker was environmental activist Anne Rabe, who has been working on these issues for over twenty years. (Check out a video excerpt of her talk here.) She outlined some of the history of the Superfund program, beginning with President Carter’s response to the advocacy of Lois Gibbs, a homemaker who discovered, in 1978, that her neighborhood of 20,000 homes was built on top of a toxic waste dump. Gibbs is currently the executive director of Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ), where Rabe is currently the BE SAFE Campaign Coordinator.

Rabe presented the pros and cons of Superfund designation, explaining the very real challenges currently facing the program: the Polluter Pays tax expired in 1995 and the interest in the trust fund was spent by 2003. In other words, since the fund is bankrupt, American tax-payers are bearing far more of the weight than was originally envisioned.

Nonetheless, she said, federal Superfund is a strong law, with a good pool of money, and a clear set of policies guiding clean-ups, including remedial investigation at every stage. President Obama’s budget reintroduces the Polluter Pays fees. Rabe made the most convincing argument of all when she said that if she lived in this area, she would want it designated a Superfund site.

According to Rabe, there is always a direct conflict between those who clean up for the purposes of redevelopment as opposed to those who clean up for the purpose of public health. The first goal should be to protect to public health, she said; redevelopment should be subsequent. The city’s new Office of Environmental Remediation is located in the Mayor’s Office, therefore subject to political priorities and political appointees. The EPA has no redevelopment agenda. Therefore, the agency is free of the conflicts that could lead to financially expedient solutions, such as remediation to an industrial standard as opposed to a residential standard.

Her broad and intimate understanding of how various Superfund clean-ups have gone over the past thirty years also contains some valuable lessons for the neighborhood: well organized community groups have proven, once again, that the squeaky wheels get the grease. Therefore, she advised that if the Gowanus is designated, a well-organized community watchdog must be vigilant in monitoring progress.

Regardless of what whether the Gowanus is designated or makes the National Priorities List, stakeholders should prepare for a long process. The effects on financing are difficult to predict, the cooperation of polluters may require litigation, and clean-ups can take up to fifteen years or more. And whatever the mechanism, robust community involvement will be needed to keep the project on track. Get involved.

Photos by Varick Shute

So, last week we warned you that we were going to be pushing hard to get you to come to our live talk show next Tuesday. We are all over the walls and feeds of a Facebook or Twitter user near you (BTW, why haven’t you become a fan yet? Why don’t you follow us on Twitter? Come on, people). And we’ve hit the streets, papering our local coffee shops and watering holes with flyers (that can be sustainably repurposed into handy coasters, paper airplanes or shopping lists).

But we want to stress that this is NOT something that is only relevant to our fellow Gowanus Canal aficionados and abutters. This is the kind of conversation that anyone who is interested in the relationship between art, ecology, urban history and land use will be way into. The idea is to go beyond the slugfest community meetings about whether to designate or not to designate the Gowanus as a Superfund site. No, the idea is 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 le interweb. 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. And, of course, to hang out with the cool kids at the the Center for Urban Pedagogy and to chill at the Old American Can Factory.

Plus, it doesn’t take the rainiest June we can remember for us to wonder about New York’s combined sewage system (check out the video below). Or to wonder what remediation would actually look like – legally, socially and physically. So bring your friends and come over next Tuesday.

Here’s all the relevant info:

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

Our friends over at WNYC’s Cityscapes gave architect Stephen Cassell a flipcam to explore the Gowanus and discuss the possibility of spongeparks along its banks. The vid also provides a great overview of why New York’s combined sewage system is gross.

Check it: