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

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

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

Subway Construction | photo by Flickr user MTAPhotos.

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

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

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

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

EVENTS and TO DOs

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

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

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

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

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

Screengrab of the Just City video via Ford Foundation

On July 14th, a conference on the “Just City” was held in honor of the Ford Foundation’s 75th year, bringing together national and global experts in urban development. Set to “discover a new geography of possibility,” the day included a diverse range of panels to discuss challenges and solutions for urban regions. Some of the most influential panelists included Alejandro Echeverri, Former Director of Urban Project Medellín, Colombia; Kasim Reed, Honorable Mayor of Atlanta; Bruce Katz, VP of the Brookings Institution; John Hickenlooper, Governor of Colorado; Shaun Donovan, US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary; Van Jones, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress; Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts; and Jean Quan, Honorable Mayor of Oakland. With a mixed crowd of policy analysts, elected officials and technologists, the room was filled with a sense of dynamic energy about what cities and systems can do for the future, what problems the future will hold, and how we can all get involved.

“We’ve got to connect the Macro to the Metro. We have to commit to making things again. We can’t rely on ideas industries to save cities.”
—Bruce KatzA NEW VISION OF METROPOLITAN OPPORTUNITY
equity, race, inclusion, economics, technology and participation

The first panel kicked off with an uptempo conversation on how cities have long been engines of opportunity, creativity and vitality. As global economies rapidly shift towards cities, how will metropolitan regions continue to connect all citizens to opportunity and ensure economic growth? What is the new urban vision — and how can we break through old assumptions to make it a reality? Panelists Robin Willner of IBM’s Global Community Initiatives, Bruce Katz (@bruce_katz), Mayor Kasim Reed (@KasimReed) and Alejandro Echeverri responded. Angela Glover (@policylink), Founder and CEO of PolicyLink, moderated the panel. Delving deep into the challenges today’s cities face and what their futures hold, the discussion was optimistic. The panelists moved beyond the frequently cited statistic that 75% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050, taking care to describe real world scenarios, share best practices and bring global lessons to the stage.

“We’ve got to connect the Macro to the Metro,” Katz said. “We have to commit to making things again. We can’t rely on ideas industries to save cities.” Meanwhile, Echeverri’s vision for an urban future would require solving inequality first. Mayor Reed of Atlanta drove this point home, drawing on the disconnect between policy and language: “We have to get comfortable talking about poor people and working people! We have to re-frame the way we address economic opportunity so that the dialogue includes working people, not just middle class and up.” Robin Willner chimed in with IBM’s perspective on opportunities for future cities. Calling cities “a system of systems,” Willner described the complexity of urban centers and the need for the use of technology not just in developed cities, but in the large, developing cities across the world.

Katz then emphasized the untenable state of the American economy: “This country needs 20 million jobs right now. Last month only 17,000 were created.” Tying the conversation back to equity, he stressed the need to consider who will be employed, and how new jobs can be used to lend help to our already disadvantaged communities. Mayor Quan of Oakland California (a later panelist) raised a point about the need for regionally-based manufacturing — what is made in Silicon Valley doesn’t necessarily make sense in Atlanta — and how that could be encouraged through national policy. As the leaders in the room closed a conversation on challenges and needs, the stage was set to discuss solutions.

Panorama of San Diego / Tijuana, Mexico Border | Image via Political Equator 3

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS
successful cities, scarcity, collaboration and local movements

Discussion moved toward opportunities and innovations in cities today. Teddy Cruz, architect and founder of UCSD’s Center for Urban Ecologies, presented a video showcasing his research on the San-Diego/Tijuana border to spark debate on how solutions are met. The US/Mexican border lies between a manicured San Diego suburb and, just meters away, Tijuana’s 80,000 person shantytown. Cruz and his team designed affordable housing for Tijuana using a broad, citizen-based design process that successfully linked urban design and public participation to provide livable and affordable housing for residents.

“We have to get comfortable talking about poor people and working people.”
—Mayor Reed The next panel connected economic vitality and equity to the equation for a successful city. Moderator Andrea Bernstein, Director of Transportation National, appropriately requested that panelists limit their use of development jargon to reach a broader audience than the present room. UCSC Professor Manuel Pastor Jr. unveiled findings that support a connection between equity and economics: “When you have less racial segregation, you have more economic growth.” Other panelists offered specific examples of cities that have achieved local success. John Hickenlopper, Governor of Colorado, called “collaboration the new competition” when describing how Denver successfully raised taxes (by vote) to develop better transportation infrastructure. MarySue Barrett, President of the Metropolitan Planning Council, explained the economic profitability of improving workers’ quality of life and their working environment.

Bernstein then asked the panel: what is the “special sauce” necessary for successful, sustainable and locally-motivated cities? Ben Hecht, President and CEO of Living Cities called for good and responsible leadership, strategic philanthropy and community-based collaboration, specifically pointing to the need for greater government accountability: “Too many cities say we’ll non-profit or private-sector our way out of it.” Pastor’s “special sauce” lies within social movements organizing around working families. Governor Hickenlooper felt that municipalities need to run more like high-yield businesses. If and when governments meet frequently and get things done, bureaucracy can function more like a business and less like a dysfunctional system.

Ken Snyder (@kennysnyder), President and CEO of PlaceMatters, closed with a film on an interactive mapping project in Nairobi’s formerly unmapped slum Kibera. Home to thousands, this informal settlement was a blank spot on official maps. PlaceMatters used local residents and the OpenStreetMap platform to hold government accountable to a community and space invisible on paper. (See the fascinating project here.) Ending on a note that called for accountable governance combined with hope for smarter, publicly sourced solutions, discussion moved to a global scale over lunch.

URBAN LEADERSHIP ON THE GLOBAL STAGE
regionalism, social capital and targeted resources

Lunch was spent with HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan (@HUDNews) and UNHABITAT’s Joan Clos i Matheu. Donovan, like many panelists of the day, advocated for the need to rebuild social capital in cities. Matheu identified significant problems with developing governments’ failure to take advantage of potential economic agglomeration by not building densely. Secretary Donovan emphasized the need for regional planning and regional urban policy, and asserted that resources in blighted cities must be applied strategically — that the “spreading the peanut butter” approach, loosely applying resources over an entire city, doesn’t work. Instead, we should look at cities like Detroit that are focusing on small, targeted areas (areas with the most promise) to revitalize economic and urban growth. Both Donovan and Matheu advocated for strategies of strategic investment, densification and regionalism, applied at the global and national scale.

GETTING CONCRETE: URBAN INNOVATIONS THAT WORK:
economic justice and citizen government

Solutions exist — so how do you find them? How can we create prosperous, equitable and sustainable metropolitan regions? The third session on urban innovations answered this question, featuring discussion with Professor john a. powell, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity; Ellen Dunham-Jones, architect and professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology; Van Jones (@VanJones68), senior fellow at the Center for American Progress; Madeline Janis, co-founder and executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy; and Daniel T. Kildee, co-founder and president of the Center for Community Progress; moderated by Carol Coletta, director of ArtPlace.

“It’s about conceptualizing the government as ‘us’ and then advocating for change.”
—Madeline Janis Van Jones spoke on the need for making an economic case for justice — at one point it cost the same to send a child to Yale as it did to send him to jail. Ellen Dunham-Jones urged a re-framing of the American Dream, from suburbs and single-family homes to denser, smarter living. Dunham-Jones pointed out that, despite the fact that living in cities costs less, when you consider transportation and living costs, people still choose to live in the suburbs (a subject she touches on in her latest book Retrofitting Suburbia, which explores how community-based retrofits are reclaiming lost suburban spaces). Lastly, Madeline Janis spoke up on the need for citizen government: “In order to collaborate to solve problems on the local level, there must be a combination of ideas and government — looking at it as ‘our’ government. It’s about conceptualizing the government as ‘us’ and then advocating for change.”

Just City Upon A Hill panelists | Photo by Martin Dixon, courtesy of Ford Foundation

A JUST CITY UPON A HILL
future, investment and reclamation

The final panel of the day touched on governance and policy with Isabel Wilkerson, journalist and author (@IsabelWilkerson); Jean Quan, Mayor of Oakland, California (@JeanQuan); Christine Todd Whitman, president of The Whitman Strategy Group; and Governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick (@DevalPatrick); moderated by E.J. Dionne Jr., columnist for The Washington Post. Asked to discuss what cities will look like 25 years from now, Governor Patrick drew on the need for investment in social capital: today there is a great sense of longing for community. Mayor Quan felt that tomorrow’s adults need help today: “Children who have adequate resources do amazing things. Children who don’t have resources struggle to succeed.”

The discussion moved from goals for the future to how cities can balance social justice and economic opportunity. The panel reached somewhat of a consensus around the need for quality of life in cities — that a great concern for the future success of cities falls on a disinvested public. Touching on gentrification, Wilkerson suggested it was a force neither good nor bad, and Governor Patrick felt that city renewal relies on a multi-pronged effort that includes education, transportation and housing, not just small business investment. Regional planning and connecting transportation to healthy neighborhoods are key: “Every place a train has ever stopped has been economically viable.”

Metropolitan regions are the centers of today’s global economies and governments. The Ford Foundation’s Just City conference provided a forum for reflection on what that means for their futures. A room full of decision-makers and advocates is valuable in itself. Sharing best-practices between global movers and shakers shifts leadership out from behind closed doors and towards transparency and accountability. Calling for conversation and rumination on equity, the day encouraged us to find solutions for our cities and economies in regionalism, transparency, strategic investment, local movements and public participation.

For more on the event, see in-depth coverage from the Ford Foundation’s official live-blogging here; on Twitter, check out the hashtag #JustCity and tweets from @johncary and @buttermilk1; for another recap of the event, see Sarah Goodyear’s piece at Grist.org.

Ford Foundation Atrium | Photo by Alicia Rouault

Alicia Rouault is an assistant editor at Urban Omnibus. When away from her UO desk she spends her time working for the City of Newark’s Division of Planning and Economic Development assisting Waterfront Planner Damon Rich. She is currently a Masters Candidate in City and Regional Planning at the Pratt Institute with an interest in urban waterfronts, data visualization, community advocacy, graphic design, and mapping.

The future of our country’s landscape — how and where we will accommodate demographic, economic and environmental changes in the coming decades — is a matter of concern for all Americans, regardless of preference for urban, suburban, exurban or rural conditions. In “A Country of Cities,” a provocative series of opinion pieces published on Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti takes the country to task for its wasteful attitude towards land use. But his voice is one among a crowded field of urbanists and regionalists with diverse views on what the prevailing trends of where we live and what we build indicate about our future. Two other voices that currently command some attention at the national scale are those of Joel Kotkin, urban historian and author of The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050, and Christopher Leinberger, land use strategist and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institute.

Last Wednesday, July 7^th, the Forum for Urban Design hosted a discussion on the future of the American metropolitan landscape with Kotkin and Leinberger. Kenneth T. Jackson, Professor of History and Social Sciences at Columbia University, moderated and Armando Carbonell, Senior Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, served as a respondent. The discussion centered around what kind of urban spaces should be developed for America’s growing population in the coming decades. Kotkin made the argument that the demand for suburbs remains strong as the millennial generation begins to settle. Leinberger advocated for the creation of walkable urban spaces (read more about Leinberger’s view in his post on “The Avenue,” The New Republic‘s metropolitan policy blog, and check out Greg Lindsay’s analysis of the discussion over at Fast Company.)

Kotkin began the evening with a discussion of how statistics show a changing American population—but a population that still desires a suburban lifestyle. He based this on polls that show that people want to live in suburbs close to the city. Respondents cite safety, sound, privacy and resale value as key motivators. Other data sets suggest that between 2000 and 2009 most growth occurred in suburbs– employment grew in suburbs as compared to central business districts; immigrants are increasingly moving straight to the suburbs. Quoting a 1992 advertisement for a development in Valencia, CA, Kotkin imagines an urban future where one “… can be in my classroom one minute and riding my horse the next. I don’t know whether I’m a city or country girl.” Kotkin offered little in the way of a vision for drastic spatial change for how Americans live. Instead, he emphasized the idea of “reconstituting suburbia” as multi-generational and multi-ethnic in which the same spaces are used in multiple ways by a variety of lifestyles and generations.

While Kotkin relied mostly on poll and government data to show that people still want to live in the suburbs, Leinberger drew attention to the need to move beyond the data that is available and look toward creating new data sets; for social scientists to stop using “existing light” and look for new ways of defining the urban. For Leinberger, this entails escaping the vocabulary and subsidies of the post-war decades, as well as creating new data to recognize the structural changes that have occurred as America has moved away from an industrial economy.

Leinberger views ‘city’ and ‘suburb’ as obsolete terms that do not reflect structural changes that have occurred in the past 10-15 years. He moved beyond Kotkin’s affirmation of the norm to assert the need for a new foundation: walkable urbanism. Using transportation as the driver of development, Leinberger distinguished between drivable suburbs, reliant on highways as the predominant transportation infrastructure, and walkable urbanism, in which multiple modes of transport (trains, car, sidewalks) are available to residents. Leinberger stressed the extent to which the built environment should be seen as a “reflection of the underlying economy,” and how the surplus of drivable suburbs in America is the result of government policy dating back to the 1950s—what Leinberger deems “the largest social engineering project” in our country’s history. In discussing the government policy that built the suburbs, Leinberger brought up the difficulty of constructing other forms of development as drivable suburbs are often the only legal forms. More dense and mixed-used development are often not permitted within existing zoning regulations. For Leinberger, the result is a pent-up demand for walkable urban space, for places with high walk scores and density, access to transit, “Disney-fied” mixed use place management—for New Urbanism.

The follow-up responses and Q+A yielded a more complete conversation on the role and potential of transit in shaping how Americans live. When asked about the rising cost of vehicle ownership and the environmental impact of suburbs, Kotkin maintained confidence in the ability of technology to adapt the vehicle, or come up with a replacement. For his part, Leinberger focused on the need for large scale investment by both the public and private in alternative transportation options.

A discussion of the differences among America’s cities and the difficulty in changing America’s urban form brought the visions of the two speakers together to the point where Carbonell asked: are these really two different visions? Both emphasized the need for a national planning regime, changes in zoning, the ability to give people options, and growth in smaller, sometimes recovering industrial, cities through the construction of new developments. Leinberger’s “walkable urbanism” that collapses the city/suburb binary doesn’t look that far off from Kotkin’s “reconstructed suburbia” with increased commercial use, especially through the lens of new urbanism.

The conversation drew out the crucial changes and issues affecting America’s urban areas—yet chose to address them selectively. Dialogue about transit-fueled development might have benefited from the acknowledgment of how low-income populations are the most dependent on public transport and the potential that development at transit nodes offers for mixed-income housing. Leinberger’s discussion of private and public investment addressed dated subsidies and the potentials of transit infrastructure, yet neither speaker discussed in-fill development or retrofitting existing infrastructure.

What struck me as most problematic about both Kotkin’s and Leinberger’s views is their assumption, reinforced by the lack of opposition in the Q+A, of a population that is composed almost entirely of economically mobile, highly educated whites and immigrants between the ages of 30 and 70. Topics such as affordable housing — especially mixed-income development — were absent. Much in the way “urban” was once coded as blighted minority, the suggested move away from “urban” and “suburban” towards something new, regionalism perhaps, seems to code for a vision of white neighborhoods that have shed the economic and social baggage of both the urban and suburban. While Kotkin and Leinberger diverge in the specifics of answering the question “what will we build?” they may be more alike than not in the ways they imagine future urban spaces and what they omit when imagining them.

Jane Kelly is a Project Associate at Urban Omnibus. She attends Colgate University where she concentrates in Geography and Studio Art. She was born and raised in New York City.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Courtesy of the Regional Plan Association | Photo by steveladner.com.

Our economic and environmental crisis is building consensus that we need new ways of doing business, making policy, and building infrastructure and investing in our communities. We know that these issues are interconnected, yet we are only beginning to understand the deep complexity of those interactions. Innovations in decentralized technology – social media, GIS data, locative software and smartphone applications – provide us with rich new sources of localized and distributed information that have the potential to identify new trends in how we use our built environment and, therefore, might uncover new efficiencies and opportunities for planning our built environment.

Yet the full meaning and scope of the innovations we seek have no consensus. New efficiencies might yield better price signals, reduce power consumption or provide better transportation. But efficiency alone cannot address the larger issues of sustainability and equity. All the information and embedded intelligence we can imagine will not represent input from the full breadth of our society if the digital divide is not addressed or continues to grow. We need innovations not only in technology, but also in how we perceive our cities, and in how and what we choose to learn from the ever-growing stream of information that people produce about themselves and their communities every day.

These issues were the topic of discussion at the Regional Planning Association’s annual assembly on April 16. Designers, planners, and policy-makers gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria to take part in a discussion of this year’s conference theme, Innovation and the American Metropolis. The day-long event comes at the halfway point between the release of RPA’s last Regional Plan in 1996 and the next plan to be released around 2025. RPA’s goal is to begin looking forward and to think about how innovations in technology can lead to innovations in policy and planning. Recently, Urban Omnibus sat down with some of RPA’s leadership to discuss the premises behind the event in the context of the organization’s history. The event itself aired a range of responses and approaches to new technological opportunities for metropolitan areas already underway, and it also provoked new and difficult questions about how these innovations might fit into a larger vision of design and planning.

Regional Assembly 2010 Keynote: William McDonough from Regional Plan Association on Vimeo.

Efficient vs. Effective
In a keynote speech, William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle and renowned sustainable design architect and educator, cautioned the power-brokers in the room – from NRG to the Port Authority – about the difference between being efficient and being effective: that when efficiency alone is a goal, the formation and implementation of policy begins with metrics and never goes beyond the mere measurable to include values and principles. It was a reminder that when we plan and design our environment, we must think about values before metrics in order to be effective. McDonough’s point seemed to resonate throughout the remainder of the conference. When Robert Atkinson, CEO of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, talked about a future city in which embedded intelligence allows efficient pricing or when Chris Ward of the Port Authority embraced these efficiencies as a way to support new infrastructure investments, the trends seemed promising. As previously guarded and proprietary information becomes open source, as in the recent decision about MTA scheduling data, new data-gathering intelligence from the private sector can work in the public interest. This model of public/private partnerships in the areas of energy, transportation, and infrastructure seemed to dominate the interest of both the individual participants and the corporate sponsors. Yet for all the technological optimism, there was little discussion about how this technology could or should affect our values and principles, or any attempt at articulating a larger vision. Among the smaller workgroup sessions offered, the two outliers in this context, “Radical Housing” and “New Tools for Civic Engagement and Community Design,” seemed to represent the best opportunity for a discussion that might engage these larger themes.

How to Use the Data

Audio of the New Tools for Civic Engagement and Community Design workshop courtesy of RPA.

“New Tools for Civic Engagement and Community Design” presented many of the potential benefits and pitfalls for the use of new technology in planning. The panel ranged from those skeptical of technology to those who openly embrace it. For instance, the moderator, Ed Blakely, represented the skeptics, concerned with the digital divide and the ease with which a true participatory process could be hijacked by others. Michael Keating of the Open Planning Project represented the technological optimist, telling the design and planning community that they no longer have control of the message, and that they have no choice but to learn to use social media and to referee the free flow of input. Barbara Faga of AECOM and Robert Lane of RPA stood somewhere in between, believing in the role of technology with limited application. Damon Rich, urban designer for the city of Newark and founder of the Center for Urban Pedagogy had a unique stance on the issue, saying that good participation demands very clear goals about the type and level of participation that is being asked for. He also advocates a kind of grassroots educational campaign, akin to organizing, to build the decision-making capacity of those we seek to consult. The comments of Mr. Keating and Mr. Rich point to the use of marketing tactics and social media already developed by advertisers trying to reach new consumers, but repurposed to be used in the interest of the public realm. In general, though, the session and audience comments seemed to reveal unease in the design and planning community about the loss of control that comes with new social media and new technologies. There was also ambivalence towards real engagement with community participants and perhaps a lack of imagination as well. A real opportunity was missed when a decision was made early on not to show a demonstration of some of the new tools available to planners. Some of them require both sides to realize that once the input is given, it can no longer be under anyone’s complete control. For instance, Amsterdam Real Time represents a new kind of data-gathering tool that is still more art than application. Yet, the potential is enormous. Once we understand how to use the data, it may tell us things about our environment nobody had considered or thought possible. This is the kind of radical, innovative tool that may allow us to get beyond our ambivalence towards real participation and our desire to control the outcome.

Housing as Part of a Larger Social System

Audio of the Radical Housing workshop courtesy of RPA.

The “Radical Housing” session, in the afternoon, included Jonathan Rose, Rosanne Haggerty of Common Ground, Jerilyn Perine of Citizens Housing and Planning Council (CHPC), Michael Kelly of NYCHA, with Julia Vitullo-Martin of RPA serving as moderator. Ms. Perine gave the most thought-provoking presentation, painting a portrait of New York as a community of people trying to fit into a housing stock that does not reflect new social realities. For Perine and CHPC, innovation in housing would require a radical rethinking of housing standards and a real increase in density matched by an increase in services for that density. For Kelly and NYCHA, the goal is to re-integrate public housing into neighborhoods with mixed-income communities where the homes of those who receive subsidies are indistinguishable from those who do not. Haggerty’s account of her work with Common Ground, an organization dedicated to housing the homeless, highlighted new unit typologies and living arrangements that echoed some of Perine’s comments. Jonathan Rose spoke of the focus of Rose Companies’ projects on social and environmental concerns. The session catalogued a series of approaches that attempt to deal with housing as part of a larger social system. Given this country’s history of planning and policy in subsidized housing, the projects shown were more encouraging than radical, and the ways in which they represent the cutting edge of housing delivery has very little to do with new technologies. As Ms. Perine mentioned in answer to an audience question, there are typically two tools, and only two tools, that planners have to make affordable housing – land-use policy and tax structure, policy areas where decentralized sources of information can only do so much.

Complex Systems
Lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch, speaking of the grave economic situation in the state, at one point leaned into the microphone and told us in his gravelly voice that we are eating our seed corn, using tomorrow’s wealth today. Adolfo Carrión, Jr., now White House Director of Urban Affairs and former Bronx Borough President, struck a much more positive tone. The contrast in tone can be attributed partly to politics and partly to the reality that the Federal Government has funds that the State does not. Both are looking to cities to innovate in the development of a new economy and a more sustainable future. In a country where past Federal administrations have usually lacked faith in cities and failed to invest in them, this new message is welcome. But innovation is a funny thing. It can lead to tremendous efficiencies when implemented on a large scale, but it is borne out of a process that is messy and inefficient – it is a creative act. Cities are always messy, sometimes inefficient, but they are creative. They are complex systems that function in a non-linear fashion, sometimes producing surprising results. The conversations at the conference revolved around the idea that we are just beginning to understand the nature of these complex interactions. Planners, designers, and policy-makers need to embrace the laboratories that are our urban environments precisely because they are not under our complete control. They must also be open to the idea that what is efficient according to one set of metrics may not be effective under another. In the population densities of major metropolitan areas, localized and distributed information sources reach a critical mass that produces a constant feedback loop, allowing us to constantly reevaluate our goals, values, and policies. With greater access and fewer barriers to technology, more density, and more embedded intelligence, we will have more and more information about our environment and ourselves. Real innovation will involve a blurring of the boundaries between the environments and communities that we seek to shape and those who seek to shape them. And it may also require a leap of faith that sometimes solutions can present themselves outside of anyone’s control.

Samir S. Shah, AIA is an architect and writer based in New York City. He is a former Fulbright Fellow in Art & Architectural History and has written for various publications, including the Architect’s Newspaper. Samir has taught courses in architecture at the City College of New York and abroad, and is currently principal at Urban Quotient, P.C., a full-service architecture design firm and research collaborative.

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.

On April 16th, 2010, business, civic, philanthropic, media and government leaders will convene at RPA’s annual Regional Assembly. This year, the theme is “Innovation and the American Metropolis” and the event seeks to ponder the impact of emerging trends in technology and data on new approaches to the design and management of cities and regions (check out the day’s agenda here). Urban Omnibus recently sat down with Tom Wright, RPA’s executive director, and Rob Lane, director of the Design Program at RPA, to talk about the meanings and uses of innovation in the context of the history and future of RPA and the metropolitan region itself. -C.S.

New York and its Environs, 1928

Urban Omnibus: First, can you sketch a brief history of the Regional Plan Association?

Tom Wright: In the 1920s, about 25 years after the creation of greater New York City, a group of civic leaders got together to create a single comprehensive metropolitan plan. Today, RPA is still dedicated to pushing those regional ideas that transcend political boundaries and might be too controversial for elected leaders to take on. RPA produces one of these plans each generation and then goes about advocating for its implementation.

Manhattan Land Values, 1923

The 1929 plan projected that the size of the metropolitan region would double by the 1960s, and it recommended that we build the systems to support that growth: highways, mass-transit, airports, housing, and community development. By the early 1960s, the plan was largely implemented with one glaring exception: the transit connections. The failure to invest in recommended transit projects hastened the region’s suburbanization. By the late 1950s, the RPA was already worried about our land use patterns and was publishing reports with names like “The Race for Open Space.” In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a series of reports came out that are collectively considered the Second Regional Plan. These reports argued for re-centering the region in a constellation of centers, such as New Brunswick, White Plains, the Nassau hub, Bridgeport and Stamford, based on transit networks.

The Second Regional Plan resulted in some big successes, like the creation of the MTA and NJ Transit. But the ethos of the time was the advocacy planning movement, which meant we didn’t feel it was appropriate to dictate, in a top-down way, what the region’s priorities should be. So instead, rather than publish a definitive Second Regional Plan, we put out a “Draft for Discussion” in 1968.

Land Use in the Metropolitan Region, 1954

The Third Regional Plan, released in 1996, had more robust recommendations: build the 2nd Ave subway, connect the LIRR to Grand Central, dig a new commuter rail tunnel under the Hudson River, and charge drivers coming into Manhattan to pay for it. Right now is about the halfway mark for the Third Regional Plan. So, 15 years after the publication of the Third Regional Plan, we’re at the point of asking what we need to do before the fourth one.

Urban Omnibus: Which brings us to the upcoming Regional Assembly, whose theme and title is “Innovation and the American Metropolis.” In the context of RPA’s work, what does innovation mean?

Tom Wright: The Regional Plan Association has been looking at innovation since its inception. One example is a 1930s photomontage that we used as an advocacy vehicle to stop Robert Moses’ proposed bridge from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn. We painted a bridge on top of a photograph of lower Manhattan to demonstrate what this proposal would mean. It’s what Photoshop does now everyday. But in the 1930s, it was an innovative use of technology.

A Rendering of the Brooklyn-Battery Bridge, 1939

Like the 1929 and 1968 plans, the Third Regional Plan in 1996 advocated creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth. But the Fourth Regional Plan might end up being less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.

This kind of thinking around innovation connects extremely well to things like IBM’s Smarter Cities program. And it fits well with previous proposals we have made, such as on congestion pricing. The next time we advocate for congestion pricing we will come up with a much “smarter” proposal. It will not just look at tolling East River bridges but will think about how to develop an innovative policy that actually manages traffic and uses, for example, the GPS systems currently in thousands of Manhattan taxis in order to determine how to get the most capacity out of the system.

A vision for Times Square, from "Urban Design Manhattan", one of the reports that constitute the Second Regional Plan, 1968

Urban Omnibus: In the past few years I think we’ve seen a return of the big vision. Yet the kinds of innovative practices that will be discussed at the Regional Assembly seem to have a bottom-up nature. Which leads me to wonder, where is innovation coming from and how does it find its way into the system?

Tom Wright: Part of the answer lies in the incredible amount of data that we can access. But an even greater part of it comes from new networks and dialogues. In the 1920s, RPA was one of a handful of civic organizations in New York City. By the 1960s, we were seeing a flowering of community-based organizations, but they weren’t coordinated in any way. By the 1990s, our entire implementation strategy relied on local organizations doing the advocacy work while we provided the research. We sometimes refer to this as putting rocks in local organizations’ snowballs. In 2010, we see new kinds of networks – epitomized by things like Streetsblog – and the ways they have matured. If the bottom-up ideas that come from blogs and online communities can be coupled with the new data collection, then we can learn so much more about how systems work.

Railroad Commuting Times, New York, 1922

Rob Lane: It’s interesting to think about the role that new social media have had on RPA. In the twelve years that I’ve been at RPA, we completely changed the ways we present ourselves and the way we make our information available and accessible to people.

RPA stays with certain projects for fifty years or more. But these days, people expect a much shorter turnaround time between accessing information and being able to move on things. So how does RPA keep its profile out there and stay effective in a 24-hour news cycle? Part of the answer is in graphic media: making the data and the policy recommendations more accessible. The days of thick reports rich with wonderful data but not compelling to look at are over. And part of it is in social media, which we exploit to build coalitions and constituencies around the initiatives we’re supporting.

But it’s important to remember another kind of digital divide that exists within the region: between the city and the suburbs. Even though we’re an incredibly rich and sophisticated region, the world of iPhone apps and see-click-fix and design-your-own bike paths is a New York City-specific phenomenon. We’re resolved to use social media to get people engaged. But the level of complexity will be limited compared to the New York City world of open-source apps for urban planning.

Bus Service in Bergen County, New Jersey, 2009

Urban Omnibus: Is part of RPA’s mission to foment a regional political identity on the part of citizens?

Tom Wright: Trying to build a regional identity has always been part of our goal. We want people to understand that a tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York benefits both sides of the river equally. There’s a diversity of needs in the market and when we talk about regional development we have to be providing for all of those different needs.

We also want to understand how people are using the system. For example, reverse commuting is the fastest-growing piece of the major transit authorities’ ridership right now, and it’s very poorly understood. Up until very recently, data on this trend has been really expensive and difficult to obtain. New forms of data capture and analysis should be able to make it possible for, say, NJ Transit to learn who is reverse commuting and whether the trend will be growing in the future.

Commuting to Downtown Hartford, 2009

Urban Omnibus: Is there a place for the sort of institutionalized structures for community-based planning – such as community boards – in New York? Which points in the system are most open to innovation?

Rob Lane: Most of the tools available to those community groups and community boards that want to be part of a planning process are tools for collecting local information, getting the word out and organizing via social networking. But there’s a huge divide between collecting information and actually planning and designing. When it comes to actual urban design and planning work, finding the points where the stakeholders can insert themselves into the process is still very difficult, and the new forms of social media don’t help with that that much. Therefore, the role of the planner and the designer is still significant – it has just changed somewhat. The planner/designer has become more of a referee of all this new information that’s coming in.

Tom Wright: Participatory approaches often turn up very conservative designs. When we get all this data and we try and reflect it back to community groups, it often takes the form of very vernacular and common images.

Long Island Index interactive map by CUNY Mapping Center, with data from RPA, 2010 www.longislandindexmaps.org

Rob Lane: I think there’s a scale issue here. In terms of new media, it’s one thing to have bicycle advocates provide the information to locate places for better or worse bike routes, but compared to the scale of complex urban systems, that problem is relatively small. The social media model can only get you so far. If you have to make a decision about where you’re going to build a new tunnel under the Hudson, does social media really play a role in these kinds of big infrastructure decisions? I think it does; its role is diagnostic. Locating and building a tunnel will eventually involve a highly technical design exercise that broad-based social media cannot help to address. But you can’t really bring the technical resources to bear in an intelligent way until you’ve really done the diagnostic work. And social media – by which I mean the stakeholder driven world of blogs and websites and Facebook and Twitter – have a huge role to play in defining what the problems are that we are trying to solve.

The Centers of the Region, 2006

All images ©Regional Plan Association. All rights reserved.

Special thanks to Frank Hebbert, Jeff Ferzoco, Ben Oldenburg and the staff of the Regional Plan Association.

Tom Wright is the Executive Director of Regional Plan Association (RPA) the nation’s oldest private regional planning organization. Mr. Wright lectures widely on growth management and regional planning. He is a Visiting Lecturer in Public Policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He has taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; and the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture.Previously, he was the Deputy Executive Director of the New Jersey Office of State Planning, He resides in Princeton, NJ with his wife and three daughters.

Robert Lane is the Director of the Design Program at RPA, where his urban design projects include the Comprehensive Master Plan for Stamford Connecticut and Transit-Friendly Communities for New Jersey. Before coming to RPA, Robert Lane was an Associate at Kohn Pedersen Fox Architects, PC.