Floating Pavillion, Rotterdam, NL, 2011 | Photo by Flickr user William Veerbeek

CLEAN TECH ROTTERDAM / GREEN TECH BROOKLYN
Bonnie Harken, the president of consulting group Nautilus International, gave a talk with Piet Dircke of the Rotterdam-based design/consultancy/engineering firm Arcadis and Christopher Zeppie of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on the Brooklyn-Rotterdam Waterfront Exchange vision for Sunset Park and Red Hook, a new program set to share knowledge about and strategies for economic development and environmentally sustainable industry in port areas. The City of Rotterdam has embarked on an ambitious climate change adaptation program that gave rise to some compelling and pseudo-radical ideas for water-based development, some of which are now being applied internationally.

One of the most inventive waterfront development ideas discussed was the potential use of barge-based structures, which are already being tested in Rotterdam and are being considered for inclusion in the Sunset Park and Red Hook visioning plans. Dircke discussed Rotterdam’s already implemented series of hydrofoil ferries, floating learning labs (transparent geodesic domes on the water) and luxury residential structures that support the city’s new Research, Design and Manufacturing (RDM) Center. This concept can inform plans for other uses as well. For example, Dircke suggested barge-based sports fields and stadiums for future Olympic Games as a solution to the wasteful creation of structures that so often lie unused in cities once the games are over.

TECHNOLOGY & PLANNING
There was a lot of buzz on the growing nexus between planning, technology and social media tools — especially the role open-source sites may play in the future of advocacy, government transparency and the sharing of best practices in planning. Judith Layzer led a great panel on the current work of MIT’s Urban Sustainability Project to develop an open-source, wiki-like resource for monitoring municipal sustainability programs nationally. Although the project is still a work in progress, the team has working papers for feedback and collaboration and is looking for research partners, and is definitely something to keep an eye on.

The entire weekend tapped into the growing bubble of “tech-ish minded” (young) planning professionals who seek to capitalize on the potential technology has for planning, and the skills of what Frank Hebbert of OpenPlans dubs IMMBYs (I Mapped My Back Yard) or “data and tech savvy non-planners, better informed, more technically capable and more agile than the ‘pros’.”

Plannovation’s graphic on most often used words in tweets at the conference using Wordle

SOCIAL MEDIA
A few workshops were dedicated solely to the usefulness of social media tools, like FourSquare, Twitter and Facebook, and real-time blogging in the planning world. New methods of technological communication are being seen as catalysts to participatory planning and valuable tools for public interaction with people who can’t or don’t attend public meetings. Twitter was being promoted full-scale this weekend with a whole APA booth dedicated to setting up planners with new Twitter accounts. The #apa2011 hashtag was full of good information over the weekend and was used for conference-goers to reflect and gather more information than was possible by simply attending a handful of panels. Kristen Carney (@cubitplanning) published a summary of all the Twitter activity at the conference on her blog Plannovation, with an in-depth look at the weekend’s Twitter trends and a slideshow documenting a complete Twitter transcript from the event.

Jennifer Evans Cowley of Ohio State University shared her take on the role digital micro-participation plays in Austin, Texas on transportation planning methodology. Another popular panel, with speakers from PlaceVision, SeeClickFix and Urban Interactive Studio, asked “What’s New for Planning Technology” and discussed the use of crowdsourcing, social media, interactive data and other digital tools in planning today.

ArcGIS | via esri.com

Some of the most well-attended sessions were offered by Esri, the makers of ArcGIS, to present their developments in mapping and data visualization. Highlights included a workshop on GeoDesign (ArcMap’s software tool combining urban design and mapping) and one the growing use of GIS as a public participation tool. The use of GIS in public participation has already taken off in NYC, one example being the Municipal Art Society’s CitiYouth program, in which local high school youth attend community board meetings to facilitate public discussion using GIS.

DIGITAL TOOLS FOR PLANNING
Harvard’s political philosopher Michael Sandel kicked off the weekend with a keynote calling the field of planning “a noble profession,” responsible for undoing the erosion of civic-mindedness in America today. As technology increasingly intersects with most aspects of daily life, it was heartwarming to see so many planners excited about the age of digitally-aided advocacy, communication and participatory planning and prepared to use these tools to further that noble ideal.

…

For more on the conference’s other topics, check out APA’s coverage and Marisol Pierce-Quinonez’s recap on SustainableCitiesCollective.com. Then explore for yourself some of the many planning tools that were discussed at APA2011:

Cityscape & Mapping:
OpenTripPlanner
By the City/For the City, a new initiative by the Institute for Urban Design and PPS
Urban EcoMap
City Forward
Grown in the City’s Interactive Urban Agriculture Map

Citizen Complaints:
Open311
SeeClickFix

Fundraising:
How to Raise Money for New Urban Planning Technology

ArcGIS extensions:
CommunityViz
Marine Map
I-Tree
CITYgreen

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Alicia Rouault is a Project Associate for Urban Omnibus, a Fellow at the Pratt Center for Community Development, and Masters candidate at the City and Regional Planning Department at Pratt Institute’s Program for Sustainable Planning and Development in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

I was intrigued by the post, Letting Off Some Steam, and would like to take a shot at answering the question, “What other infrastructures do you think are ripe for public involvement?”

My observations are based on real use of smart phone, mobile web and web reporting on SeeClickFix – a free web tool that I co-founded – that allows anyone to report non-emergency issues to those responsible for public space, including government agencies, public utilities, property owners. SeeClickFix provides a platform for communities to report and have constructive conversations around the issues that they feel will improve their community.

The basic municipal infrastructure that benefits from increased citizen-reporting includes potholes, littering, streetlight repair, clogged catch basins and dead trees. Deputizing citizens as city inspectors cuts the costs of paid city inspectors as well as the liability for municipalities: more thorough reporting by more eyes on the street. That’s the basics of 311 call centers and one of the ways SeeClickFix is connecting citizens to governments via its free reporting tools.

In addition to identifying infrastructure and public space issues, SeeClickFix enables public reporting related to crimes-in-progress and specific property complaints as well as broader urban planning priorities. Below are some of the other ways SeeClickFix is being used.

Crimes-in-Progress
Police Departments can benefit from increased reporting. On SeeClickFix, prostitution, drug dealing and speeding hotspots are all crime-in-progress types of issues that get reported. The benefit of allowing crowds to report anonymously on things they might not be comfortable putting their face behind has led to increased drug and prostitution arrests. In regards to speeding, the police have picked hotspots based on SeeClickFix reports and have been able to untangle the non-emergency phone line where there is little they can do at the time of incident.  Neighbors can also document crimes like muggings and car break-ins after they are reported to police through traditional means to show how the neighborhood needs greater enforcement. This might lead to neighbors forming a block watch and greater awareness around public safety.

Private Property
In regards to private property, neighbors weigh-in on what type of business they might want in the neighborhood such as grocery store or, in the case of New Haven, an Apple Store. Neighbors might also use the tool to demonstrate a blighted property to officials or to their other neighbors in an attempt to shame them publicly into improving the property. Halted developments that have lost financing during construction show up on the site frequently as well. Making private developers know that the neighborhood is watching while simultaneously alerting officials can be a powerful double punch.

Infrastructure and Transit
In regards to cycling and pedestrian improvements, faded crosswalks, dangerous intersections with no pedestrian lights and poor bike infrastructure all make the map. Citizens have used the tool to lobby for bike lanes and pedestrian in-road signs as well as new crosswalks. In some cases, citizens have offered to help pay for these services.

Utility Companies can use the tool to monitor their sub-contractors road work when replacing in road lines or their equipment such as the infamous AT&T V-Rad boxes which not so gracefully adorn telephone poles all over the country. AT&T monitors their boxes via SeeClickFix in New Haven.

In regards to transportation, we have seen public busing, trains, subways, school busing and private busing companies benefit from reports that range from unsafe operation to necessary infrastructure repairs. Neighbors have slowed University shuttle speeds as well as school bus speeds using video cameras to document speeding at Speed Signs.

Environment and Public Space
In Philadelphia and Prince George, British Columbia, the Clean Air councils have used SeeClickFix to encourage reporting of idling vehicles and have used those reports to force the ceasing of the practice by the companies who operators are violating city ordinance.

Urban and community planners can not only report the need for public and private space improvements but also use public reporting tools to collaborate on design solutions for the public space. On SeeClickFix, we have seen conversations about beautifying highway underpasses as well as design solutions for public land and new and improved streets.

Parks are great places for geo-located smart phone reporting when street addresses are not available for locating an issue. Parks Departments, Parks Groups and caring residents have responded to broken playgrounds, un-mowed grass, broken benches, abandoned garbage and lack of lighting to name a few.

University and other large-scale employers can use crowd reporting to keep tabs on their infrastructure and the physical needs of students and employees.

Elected officials at the State level may benefit the most from a municipal-level reporting system: they can receive alerts on issues for which they may have previously had trouble getting a pulse.

We kept the tool open to reporting of any type of non-emergency issues as we could never predict all the things that would need fixing in your community. These are some of things that have been reported so far. If New Yorkers started reporting, I’

m sure new uses would be found for the tool.

Tools meant to improve governance should embrace participation in solving problems as well as reporting. SeeClickFix is about empowering community and de-institutionalizing governance of the public space.  With that in mind, we made sure that anyone could assume responsibility and receive alerts.

So whom do you think should sign-up to start watching New York?

Here are my thoughts: City Council, 311, neighborhood groups, Con Edison, the water and gas companies, parks groups, block watches, CUNY, NYU, Columbia and other universities, police lieutenants and the concerned citizen. Http://www.seeclickfix.com/government is the URL, but anybody can sign up to help maintain.

SeeClickFix is business conscious as well socially conscious. Here’s our pitch to Con Edison: steam is definitely an emergency problem and any reporting to Con Edison should be endorsed by Con Edison with a promise to monitor the reports. If Con Edison wants mobile web reporting and iPhone and other Smart Phone reporting we can enable customized SeeClickFix reporting within a month and for very little cost to the utility. Contact team@seeclickfix.com if interested.

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.

Ben Berkowitz is Co-Founder and CEO of SeeClickFix.com, a free web tool that allows communities to report non-emergency issues to those responsible for the public space. In his volunteer life, he currently serves as President of the Upper State Street Association, a neighborhood and business group which he founded in 2007, in New Haven, CT. He has been a leader in the drive towards local government transparency as well a pusher of greater citizen participation in hyper-local news.

detail from outside.in

In 2003, as a grad student at NYU, I created a site called Neighbornode, which was a series of bulletin boards for local neighborhood residents to log on to and talk to each other in cities. The site was very simple, and to be totally honest a bit of a hack (I was never a fabulous coder). But the idea alone was enough to attract a good amount of attention and interest from people around the world. Just the notion of the web being overlaid on top of physical space, at such an ultra-local level was at that time newsworthy. The New York Times commented “If these do-it-yourself nodes catch on, a new form of urban communication may emerge.”

Skipping forward six years, Neighbornode is long gone (it was just a school project), but an entire class of web content, dubbed “hyperlocal”, has emerged around the notion of location-based news, information and discussion. And this week, Everyblock, one of the preeminent hyperlocal web sites, was acquired by MSNBC.

What does this merger, of a relatively small site built on aggregated geolocated data, and a news media mega-giant signify? Lots of things, to be sure. But mainly it signifies that the formerly niche concept of hyperlocal – that location matters as a component of online data, particularly in relation to where you, the reader, happen to be right now – has been accepted, validated, maybe even co-opted by the mainstream media.

The significance here is symbolic, more than anything else – the change has been happening for a long while now. News has been increasingly hyperlocal for the past two years. Outside.in, the website I co-founded in 2006 with Steven Johnson and Cory Forsyth, serves up millions of hyperlocal blog stories per month to readers all around the country, on its home site as well as on a wide variety of partner websites. News companies, once leery of anything written by anyone without a journalism degree, are now embracing local bloggers (though sometimes reluctantly) as a bona fide part of their future. And it’s not just the news that has gone local. Social networks have gone local (take a look at Foursquare). Politics online is local (look at the gov2.0 groups springing up in towns everywhere bent on reinventing local politics online). Most importantly, perhaps, advertising online is going local, allowing all of this localization of content to be supported with local ad dollars. So this local wave has been building for a long time.

But with the acquisition of Everyblock, that wave has now started to crest. And with that, I think it’s time we ditched the term “hyperlocal” and got beyond the idea that localized content is somehow niche, a tiny subset of the online experience, able to be regarded or disregarded at the whim of the user. Instead, as this wave breaks, we’re arriving at a place where everything is local, or is location-aware, and no special attention needs to be called to it. It is part of the makeup of the web, woven into it, seamlessly, fully expected by everyone. In the era of geolocative smart phones, geolocative browsers that know exactly where you are when you load a webpage, and geotagged data, calling anything hyperlocal begins to sound redundant, like vinyl records from the 60s that announced that they were “stereophonic”. Of course it’s hyperlocal – it knows where you are, it knows where it is, and knows exactly what the distance is between those two places. It can tell you everything that anyone has said about the place you’re standing right now, it can tell you where the nearest subway stop is, it can recommend the five best pizza places within half a mile of you, and it can tell you the name of the representative for that district and how he/she voted.

Just like every record is now stereo and that fact is taken for granted by all, the future of the web is fully local, and that local-ness will be taken for granted as well. The more noteworthy case becomes the site that is not location-aware. And in that scenario, why do we need the term ‘hyperlocal’ at all? We don’t, and the term will go away, to be replaced by the term “the web”.

That’s fine with me – let’s get on with it. The web of the future, local and all, is going to be great.


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.

John Geraci writes, consults and speaks on how to make cities more efficient, effective and livable with web technology. He started DIYcity, a site that invites people everywhere to personally reinvent the spaces around them using common web applications. Previously, he co-founded and served as Head of Product for Outside.in, a leading hyperlocal news site that lets people experience the news right around them in real time.

The Building as Microcosm
I run a communication design firm. We create projects that take design cues from insights on how people interact with information. Most recently we created an online platform called STACKD. It is a directory, a marketplace, a communications channel and a lens through which to view the city.

The idea for this project came from a number of observations after our company moved into a 20-story building on W 28th Street. First of all, we were new to the building; we did not know anyone here. Secondly, this building has some size to it. It may not be huge by New York standards, but there are over 100 tenants: four to six tenants to every floor, accessed via two main elevators with a freight elevator serving as back-up for when the mains fail (and they often do). Our previous location was a six-story building in which we knew everyone, for better or for worse. Eminem’s Record label Shady Records thumped away directly one floor above and sewing machines whirred from the sweatshop beneath us. Even though I knew who was in the building, the moment the elevator doors opened to reveal such different realities was always jarring. This sense of curiosity about what might be happening inside a large vertical building became even more pronounced once we had moved to our current, significantly taller location. I was reminded of writings by Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas that grapple with disjunction and multiplicity, so I spent some time rereading Architecture and Disjunction and Delirious New York. Tschumi distinguishes three basic types of relationships between the actual and intended uses of architectural space:

“Specifically, three basic types of relations can be distinguished: (a) the reciprocal relation, for example to skate on the skating rink; (b) the indifferent relation, for example to skate in the schoolyard; and (c) the conflictual relation, for example to skate in the chapel, to skate on the tightrope” (Tschumi 1996: p. 186)

The unexpected mix of program in a Manhattan highrise isn’t exactly “skating in the chapel” but it nonetheless excites and feeds the imagination. Rem Koolhaas sets the stage for multiplicity when he retells the birth of the skyscraper in 1909:

“The building becomes a stack of individual privacies … the use of each platform can never be known in advance of its construction…” (Koolhaas 1994: p. 85)

As we started getting familiar with our new neighborhood on the last street of the Flower District, I was curious who else was in our building. Being able to listen to the conversations in a class C building such as 150 W 28th Street would reveal much that is unexpected: a healing center that provides “scream therapy”; a wholesale-only purveyor of minerals and crystals; one of the city’s most prominent florists. The rent is reasonable for New York and the neighborhood has an ad-hoc, undefined quality that has attracted a wide range of businesses from a variety of sectors. Brief glimpses of floor directories revealed other creative industries such as design, advertising, architecture and photography. Even though some of them are the competition, it always makes me feel welcome to know there are other companies nearby that do something similar. The history of the neighborhood and its role as the Garment District has also left a trace. The last of the fur trimmers that once defined this part of the city are here, dustmotes of mink in every corner.

Supply and Demand
I caught glimpses of people in the buildings across the alley and noticed when offices were suddenly empty after they had housed busy bunches of people for months. It made me nervous, but I talked to people in the elevator, asked what they did and never had more than a few seconds to find out. Strange how we share the ride staring at our feet. People make crude flyers and notes posting items for sale or marketing their services in the elevator but they rarely pause to talk – maybe because the elevator is always moving and the chime urges you to get out quickly.

Sharing resources between multiple floors… can play a role in making the city – and its use of space – more legible. A palpable sense of the great story of New York City unfolding all around us appealed to my imagination. As an entrepreneur accustomed to identifying demand, I began to see the building as a potential market for our services. Craigslist and Ebay proved that there was a huge dormant need to connecting buyers and sellers on an individual scale. If we didn’t know already, Facebook showed that people are social animals and thrive on sharing something of themselves with each other. Twitter is taking the world by storm just by giving people a megaphone and 140 characters of broadcast time. As designers versed in proposing solutions we began to imagine whether we could create something that could make use of our specific physical location – something that would open doors for us but could also connect supply and demand on a larger scale.

One of the reasons our business is located in New York City, and I imagine the same holds true for many others, is opportunity. In my mind, opportunity is intensified by density – a density of potential clients, of talented people, of inspiration and also the density of competition. Kenneth Jackson recently lectured on the five reasons why New York will bounce back from the current recession to thrive in the next century: Density, diversity, tolerance, aspiration and the willingness to change. All of his arguments can be found above and below my desk on the 14th floor. With this in mind, we decided to narrow our focus for STACKD to an extreme. We wanted to create a way to reach the other businesses in our own building. Wouldn’t they have similar needs to our own?

How it works
STACKD emphasizes physical proximity in each feature that it offers. Users are prompted to act upon the information STACKD provides for the simple reason that updates are extremely timely and that someone else is easy to reach because they are located close by. You can see these qualities emerging in systems that did not originally account for them. For example, Craigslist users have introduced an informal feature dubbed “curb-alert” in which people post when and where they are going to put something out for free pick-up. If it’s close to where you are, you score.

Let me give you a quick tour through the STACKD user interface.

The current version does only a few things. On a map, it shows which buildings belong to the network. Once a user wants to know more and has selected a building they are prompted to log into the system (or join if they are not a member yet). Membership is important to track information and to ensure that only users who are willing to share information can also access it. Once you are logged in and click on a building you can see – listed in a vertical stack – the businesses located there. Selecting a particular business reveals contact information and industry as well as what the business offers and needs on a regular basis. If that’s all you need to know, then click on the contact email address and send the business a note or give them a call. Above this directory listing is an area that we call the feed. This is where the building does its talking and where you can listen in. Every building is set up with a twitter account so that others can tweet to it and follow the collective conversation. Once you have used STACKD for a while, the twitter feature becomes an important alert to information that is time-sensitive or changing. I could tweet that I have a chair to sell, or that I am looking for a tip on where to go for lunch. If we were to consider our building to be part of a network that can circumvent the borders of individual offices then I could also let other businesses know when our conference room is free or that we have a spare desk on Thursdays and Fridays.

Clearly, resource sharing requires an open attitude and the desire to change established conventions. However, with coworking communities emerging throughout New York City, sharing resources between multiple floors may not be far behind. As we continue to work on STACKD and as it expands to other buildings, perhaps it can play a role in making the city and its use of space more legible. Architectural typologies could adapt to contemporary needs and business cycles. The first step is seeing what is happening. One of the biggest challenges with large amounts of information is making sense of it all. As visual creatures, we’re equipped with sophisticated interpretative capabilities that yield insights at a glance far more readily than confronted with purely quantitative information. With the right interface and mapping capabilities we could gain a more fine-grained understanding of what kinds of activities are performed in what parts of the city.

Networked Spaces and the Future of the City

Urban Omnibus recently published a number of articles that address the issue of excess capacity. In a conversation with Rosalie Genevro, Frank Duffy commented on how corporations’ use of space leaves it underutilized much of the time. He posits that spaces must have the idea of change built into them in order to adapt. The theme of underutilization also drives an article with ZipCar founder Robin Chase, that introduced a ride-sharing platform to make use of the excess capacity of individual seats in a car heading to a shared destination. Laura Forlano reflected on the proliferation of coworking spaces in the city. Meanwhile, New York City has discussed ways to enable cab sharing and hopefully will soon find a way to implement bike-sharing.

All of these efforts share something simple: in order to make use of the excess capacity in a network, I have to see that it exists and I have to be able to access it. STACKD offers an interface that could fit this need. Individual offices could be transformed into a network that functions as a marketplace connecting supply and demand of services, products and resources. Planners could see a fine-grain use pattern result from zoning initiatives and open-space guidelines. Businesses such as restaurants could position their next location based on geolocated market analytics. Start-ups could join ad-hoc incubators by knowing where strategic partnerships might flourish. In the city of the future, I might be able to use space and do business more efficiently. Perhaps excess space could be allocated to form building-wide or neighborhood-wide amenities. Underutilized buildings would display why they are ignored and could be retrofitted with more flexible typological configurations. Owners could make decisions about their property portfolio by incorporating space utilization statistics. We just might learn which parts of the city will continue to thrive and why.

Sidney Blank runs the strategic communication design firm Supermetric. His background in architecture greatly influences the methodology and areas of interest of his work as a designer. STACKD is the first self-initiated project created by Supermetric that aims to tie people, architecture and business together. Sidney currently teaches in the Design & Management department at Parsons, The New School.

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.

Detail from everyblock‘s map interface

Yesterday’s reports of MSNBC’s acquisition of Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock have generally treated the latter as a “hyperlocal news service.” And to be sure, this is abetted by some of the language Everyblock itself uses to frame and describe what it offers: a “news feed for your block” which can help you “find news nearby.”

But for whatever it’s worth, I’ve never understood Everyblock’s fundamental proposition in quite this way, and here’s why I think understanding what it offers as “news” is giving it short shrift:

As an aggregator of information that is ultimately generated elsewhere, Everyblock is built on the notion of the “open API,” or application programming interface. We can think of an API as a conduit that allows Everyblock to draw upon, and re-present, a wide range of geographically-specific information from external sites and databases, including geotagged pictures from Flickr, restaurant reviews from Yelp, real-estate listings from Trulia, and police, transaction and utility reports generated as a matter of statutory compliance by local government.

Of course, such location-specific information has been gathered since time immemorial, by cities and citizens both. Most all of the formally recorded material even got disseminated, if only in some half-hearted way that barely clears a minimal definition of public disclosure. Squirrelled away in a heterogeneous sprawl of files, repositories, archives, newsroom “morgues,” and never least in personal memory, the time and effort required to compile these tenuous traces into a useful picture of a given time and place would have been exceedingly burdernsome, to say the least.

Nor, frankly, did a first pass at publishing this kind of information to the Internet help much. It was all nominally “on the Web,” yes, but deposited in such a scatter of incompatible formats (including natural language), and in such siloed and hard-to-query locations, that it was effectively as inaccessible to casual inspection as the status quo ante.

The genius of Everyblock isn’t simply that it automates the onerous process of collecting the traces of urban experience. It’s that everything, regardless of source or type, gets rolled up and presented in the easily comprehensible form of a precisely-placed dot on a neighborhood map. In a detail that speaks particularly well of Everyblock and its desire to serve its users, these are not the off-the-rack Google Maps most other sites make do with, but bespoke cartography of unusual clarity and refinement. The result renders the heretofore-obscure workings of neighborhood life explicitly, in something not too far off of real time, and in unprecedentedly high resolution.

Consider the picture that Everyblock offers me of what is, for better or worse, my own zipcode: 10016. At the release of a pulldown menu, I learn things about the streets I’m used to walking that would have remained latent at virtually any point in the past, from the fifty-six crimes reported in Precinct 13 for the week of August 10, 2009 (two robberies, three felony assaults, nine burglaries, no fewer than forty-one grand larcenies, and one grand larceny auto) to the massive tally of 64 violation points racked up by my now-former favorite Indian restaurant – Tiffin Walla, at 127 E 28th St – in the course of its most recent Health Department inspection.

Data points like these are what we interaction designers, mangling the English language somewhat, refer to as “actionable”: they’re direct influences on behavior, if not outright drivers of behavior. (I’d certainly think twice before hitting the lunch buffet at Tiffin Walla again.) But are they “news” by any meaningful definition?

This isn’t information to be consumed with the Week in Review section over Sunday morning bagels and coffee, summarized in the top-of-the-hour recap, or dribbled out across a Chyron feed. It’s information that’s of most interest and best use pushed to us when we’re out in the world. As I tell my students, nothing in the world is as interesting as information about place when you’re in that place, or (perhaps more to the point) about to be.

Laminating place-specific information from the panoply of available and relevant sources into an at-a-glance guide to real-time decisions, and doing so with Apple-quality interaction design, would – to my mind at least –represent an absolutely unbeatable value proposition. And while it’s true that Everyblock, as powerful and as useful as it already happens to be, is still a few crucial steps removed from offering this, nothing in its history or that of its developers suggests that such a thing would be unreasonable to expect as a next evolutionary step.

If, that is, new corporate owners MSNBC leave well enough alone, and don’t simply try to repackage the site as a wrinkle on their news offering.

MSNBC implies that they’ll have the wisdom to do just that: to harvest Everyblock for information that substantiates or otherwise enhances existing news stories, and even potentially use it to generate new ones, but not to meddle with the API design, the cartography, or the other provisions that make the site what it is. Whether or not this will actually prove to be the case, nobody can yet say, but I must admit there are two things about MSNBC that make me skeptical: the “MS” and the “NBC.”

Personally, I’m delighted that Everyblock has found a way to remain viable. In the wake of the 30 June expiry of its sustaining Knight Foundation grant, I’d been concerned that this tool of unparalleled (if, as we’ve seen, occasionally uncomfortable) utility would simply cease to exist. But those of us who love the cities it serves should insist that it continue to be understood properly, whatever the distractions of its new livery: as a platform that helps us compose an active response to the environments we inhabit, and not simply a generator of reportage to be consumed.


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.

Adam Greenfield is the head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia. He writes and consults on issues at the intersection of design, technology and culture. He is the author of Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, and the forthcoming The City Is Here For You To Use. He lives in Helsinki.

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