INTRODUCTION
People become urban planners because they want to make life in cities better.

But change comes slowly. And planners often find themselves pigeonholed into repetitive or isolated work as technocrats whose role is to move along processes defined by local laws and regulations, department bureaucracy, or a particular professional culture.

Could planners reshape the process through which they apply their skills? Though architects and artists commonly use their skills to intervene in troubled cityscapes, planners are rarely asked to exercise their creativity in the same way.

My colleague Frank Hebbert and I were mulling over this question at the very same time that a group of concerned citizens in New York City were struggling to make changes in the deadly thoroughfare that dominated their commute: Queens Boulevard. So we asked ourselves: What might a planning intervention look like? Would it be possible to structure the process so that urban planners could offer their unique expertise directly to complex problems in cities?

To help answer these questions, Frank and I launched Planning Corps, a network of volunteer planners whose skills we match with non-profits or community-based projects that frequently confront the kind of planning-type decisions that might benefit from a little technical assistance.

Old Queens Boulevard in Forest Hills circa 1900 | Photo courtesy of OldKewGardens.com

QUEENS BOULEVARD: A BRIEF HISTORY
Queens Boulevard has long been one of the most dangerous corridors for pedestrians and cyclists in New York. But its origins were in the tradition of the grand promenade boulevards that marked great cities of its day. It was conceived as a redesign and connection of two boulevards, Thomas Boulevard and Hoffman Boulevard, to serve traffic coming from Manhattan over the Queensboro Bridge. A 1912 proposal called for a central roadway at 44 feet wide, two side roadways at 28 feet, trolley tracks along the side roads, two 30-foot-wide “malls” or medians separating the roadways, and 20-foot sidewalks on either side. Its combined width of about 230 feet supported multiple uses: a Sunday stroll, a bicycle delivery and a carriage ride. But by 1922, the population of Queens had developed so rapidly that planners widened the roadway to 200 feet to meet the needs of all the new cars on the road.

A proposal for the layout of Queens Boulevard by the Queens Chamber of Commerce. Good Roads magazine, June 1914.

In 1933, the Queens Chamber of Commerce created a Queens Boulevard committee to ensure that the development of the boulevard did not occur at the expense of “beautification.” The Chamber even sponsored a competition for ideas on the development of Queens Boulevard in partnership with civic organizations such as the Regional Plan Association, the American Institute of Architects, and the Society for the Beaux Arts. Cord Meyer, the Chamber’s chair at the time, explained:

We plan to study the development of the boulevard, first of all, from the physical angle… We shall try to hasten the completion of the subway, the laying of the water mains, electrical light conduits and gas pipes and the building of the sewers. Then we shall consider zoning.

No one predicted the rampant pace at which the Borough of Queens would grow, nor did they anticipate the traffic that would come with it. By 1963, the entire borough of Queens had experienced more construction than any other borough since World War II, investing over two billion dollars on over 90,000 structures between 1946 and 1962. But development was uneven and difficult to control. Real estate speculation drove up property values at the same time that public service needs were inadequately met. Queens Boulevard was only one of many development projects; in 1963, only half of the roads in the borough were paved. Transportation development lagged behind population growth and housing demand, and local civic leaders repeatedly requested additional funds from the City to keep up with necessary infrastructure construction.

As early as 1971, The New York Times reported on the dangers of Queens Boulevard to pedestrians:

There are times when it seems as though the light is in favor of the pedestrian and he has to look in all directions at once. When the light seems to be in favor in one direction, the cars are turning in another direction. And before he has taken a few steps the “Don’t Walk” signs are flashing.

Most recently, in 2005, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted a traffic safety study on the Boulevard and concluded that traffic volumes were so high that little could be done to improve it. The minor safety improvements that were suggested – the addition of turning lanes and few through-street closures – were either challenged by local stakeholders or lamented for their inadequacy. Opposition from business owners, who feared that changes in the traffic pattern would reduce sales, was the strongest. Mayor Michael Bloomberg shot back that saving lives was a bigger concern than making profit. Still, implementation of comprehensive safety improvements faltered. Signs cautioning pedestrians to be careful while crossing the street stayed up on their posts and became the butt of jokes for transportation advocates.

Detail from Planning Corps' study "Crossing Queens Boulevard: The Effects of Signal Timing at Broadway/Grand Ave"

Late one summer night 2009, James Langergaard — a committed cyclist and a volunteer at Transportation Alternatives (T.A.), a transportation advocacy organization in New York City – was struck and killed on Queens Boulevard as he biked his way home. Because a traffic safety study had been so recently completed, there was little faith among citizens that more could be done to make additional changes to the street. But the community’s questions remained: how many more lives should be lost and put at risk?  What could they do right now that could spur on the process for change?

Into this vacuum of viable ideas, T.A.’s Bicycle Advocacy Director Caroline Samponaro introduced the idea of offering realistic alternative cross sections (a flat drawing that shows how a street space is or could be used) to garner support from the public and from city agencies. But T.A., over-committed and cash-strapped, did not have the capacity to execute this idea. It did, however, have a significant asset: an organized volunteer committee of Queens residents who were interested in taking up the cause.

I was working at T.A. at the time, and pondering the role of urban planners in general with Frank. How might we imagine different ways for planners to make use of their abilities to bring about change? Planning processes tend to be drawn out, but community needs tend to be immediate. For example, changes even as seemingly small as traffic signal timing to prioritize pedestrians would require a large study and would need to be initiated by the Department of Transportation. But a volunteer corps of planners could, at a minimum, help draw the cross-sections.

ENTER PLANNING CORPS
From the start, we were curious about what we could accomplish if we deconstructed the process by which planners and non-planners collaborated on a solution. Working closely with the Queens Volunteer Committee, we began with standard problem identification and relied on residents to share their observations and expertise with us. The dedicated volunteers also ran a series of activities to support our research, such as a community walk along the entire length of the Boulevard that documented street design challenges. These observations proved invaluable.

The Queens Volunteer Committee on the Boulevard

The committee’s observations showed that there are actually five basic street and neighborhood contexts for Queens Boulevard, and for each there could be a different solution. A long boulevard that seemed to present new problems on every block and at every unique intersection now required five tailored solutions. This was much easier to digest and conceptualize and mirrored the intent of the neighborhood sub-committees formed by the Queens Chamber of Commerce’s Queens Boulevard Committee in 1933.

We had settled on cross-sections as the major deliverable of our efforts because local non-profit or community groups could express their unique knowledge through the drawn images. In addition, we thought that focusing on one specific product would ensure our ability to deliver good work, and we didn’t want the Queens Volunteer Committee to expect more than we could offer. As we worked, however, we realized that limiting ourselves to cross-sections was impeding our ability to tackle the full scope of the problem.

Planning Corps at work | photo: Dory Kornfield

PROCESS, PRODUCTS, PERSUASION
After five months of floundering in this cyclical workshop process and worrying about losing the attention of the Queens Committee volunteers and the volunteer planners, Eric Galipo of H3 Architects, a planner, came onboard. Eric reframed the issue. He asked: What would be the most persuasive way for the Queens Volunteer Committee to persuade their elected officials that something had to be done to the street?

Reframing our process made the flow of activity needed to build up to the demand for change more legible. Instead of fixating our time on producing a product, we became more aware of the questions at large and how the community would have to answer them to build support for the changes they wanted. We started to ask more specific questions about who the volunteers would need to talk to and what would help them make their arguments.

Typically these questions are answered for planners by a city or industry’s framework, for example, the Uniform Land Use Review Process in New York City for land use zoning changes. Developers work off of pro formas and in-house economic models that support development proposals. To make changes to Queens Boulevard, we needed to intervene in the City’s formal planning process for transportation capital improvements.

We determined that it was be the elected officials who needed to be convinced to set aside public funding for another traffic safety study. Elected officials are not usually trained in street design and they are usually short on time. The question every elected official had to field in public was how more space for bicycles would fit on a boulevard that experiences so much congestion already. Cross sections of street space allocation would be useful, but perhaps more useful if they were presented in a collection of boulevard cross sections taken from around the world – boulevards that had demonstrably fewer crashes. Mike Lydon, the founder and principal of the Streets Plan Collaborative, found examples of boulevards that matched the typology of Queens Boulevard but were demonstrably safer and served multiple modes. Eric helped reorganize the detailed information to demonstrate comparisons that support the concept that it is possible to redesign the street.

Two comparable boulevards from Planning Corps' Book of Precedents

Most street typology books force the reader to draw mental comparisons, but we could not afford to lose the attention of our target in that way. Given that the volunteers would be trying to start conversations with people who might not be disposed to having the conversation in the first place, the comparisons would have to be immediate, visual, and clear. Anthony Denaro from OpenPlans took all the content, worked out the necessary information design keeping all of these concerns in mind, and formatted them into a booklet.

Additional themes that surfaced during the original problem identification became starting points for other products. They included topics such as how much businesses would be impacted, and why it’s so hard to convince people that signal timing can make a big difference for pedestrian safety.  The main question that persisted was how all of the desired safety improvements for multiple modes could fit in the existing space of Queens Boulevard.

For example, to show a non-transportation specialist the basics of geometric street design, we finally arrived at what we called the “Julia Child Street Kit Model.” H3 Architects has a history of creating models that show clients the trade-offs between possible uses for a space and the constraints. These models of different parts can be combined in multiple ways to make different plans and programs, just as the ingredients and tools in Julia Child’s kitchen can be combined to create different dishes.

For instance, a new theater building may require a certain number of parking spots. The cheapest way to provide parking is through a surface lot. But this is also the most expensive in terms of land acquisition. Underground parking is more expensive in labor and materials, but much cheaper in terms of land and opportunity cost for that land. The Julia Child Kit allowed the designer to trade surface parking for structured parking on a model.

We made a huge list of street elements – bus lane, bike lane, parking, travel lanes, wider sidewalks, curb extensions, and street trees. Eric laid the pieces out in CAD (Computer-aided Design) and mounted it on foam core. Then we spent a few hours cutting them out. Once you have your pieces ready, you can line up all the pieces to represent the existing street; move the pieces around and take out a travel lane; add a bike lane and sidewalk extension as you see fit.

Dealing with small business owners who continuously feel threatened by any traffic or street design changes – as they have every decade since Queens Boulevard has experienced safety issues – was another significant challenge. We asked the volunteers, what would you like to have with you when you talk to them? How would you convince them? What would give you confidence to have that conversation? We had trouble imagining small business owners reading a report that provided evidence of the economic benefits of a more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly street so we did not conduct a literature review. Instead, we created an informal text document that listed common questions and a few possible answers. We listed resources and studies at the end of the talking points, in case anyone was so inclined to read more.

Over the course of our collaboration with the volunteer planners and community members, we did not produce anything that could be called new in terms of design. Our innovations were limited to reframing questions, discussions and tasks, and to designing the products to meet identified needs. Our discussions enriched our understanding of what was involved in seeking the urban change, and the products followed suit.

It is worth noting that we had the luxury of time. One could say that we ended up with typical planning products and we just took the long way around to it. Yet it is hard to imagine the group of us knowing from the beginning that we should build a street model kit, write talking points on economic benefits, or design a book of boulevards, without first having had all those discussions that revealed the layers of actors and information, and connected the points of engagement. Community members seeking drastic design changes on Queens Boulevard needed to deal with multiple stakeholders in their campaign to build public support, and each stakeholder group required a different approach and thus individual tools. Though we never lost sight of the ultimate goal – winning safer, more livable street design changes for Queens Boulevard – the deconstructed framework allowed us to experiment and hopefully end up with better tactical results.

Planning Corps continues to welcome members and is especially interested in planners who are enthusiastic about committing to more leadership. Sign up here or contact Shin-Pei Tsay if you’d like to learn more.
Queens Boulevard, 2010 | photo: Flickr user Haruko16

Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Planning Corps.

An earlier version of this article appeared on CoLab Radio.

Shin-pei Tsay is the director of Cities and Transportation in the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her research focuses on federal, state, and local transportation policy, climate change policy, and urban and regional planning issues, with an emphasis on economic development.

Prior to joining the Carnegie Endowment, Tsay served as the deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, a nationally renowned non-profit focused on transportation issues in New York City; as a founding member of the NYC office for ZGF architects where she was on the sustainability team; the chief operating officer of Project for Public Spaces, an international non-profit; and a strategy consultant with a company serving the Fortune 500. Most recently she contributed to New York City’s Street Design Manual, New York City’s Active Living Design Guidelines, and New York State’s Livable Communities Manual.

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.

DEADLINE: Wednesday, February 1st, 2012, 5pm. The deadline for this competition has passed.
Click here to download a PDF of this Call for Essays.

DESCRIPTION
How does the Manhattan street grid determine your experience of the city?

How does it affect your understanding of what a city is, what a city does, how you move through a city?

How does it embed itself in defining aspects of daily life in New York City: destinations, neighborhoods, intersections, commutes; where and how we live, work, explore or enjoy the city?

This year, the Commissionersʼ Plan, the framework that established Manhattanʼs famous street grid, celebrates its 200th anniversary. In honor of that event, and in connection with two exhibitions on the history and future of the grid, Urban Omnibus is soliciting essays that reflect on the Manhattan street grid as paradigm, rubric or muse for urban life. A jury of prominent designers, urbanists, writers and thinkers will review submissions. Up to three winning entries will be published on UrbanOmnibus.net and will receive a monetary award ($500 for first place; $250 for up to two second place winners). The essays submitted to this competition may reference either New York Cityʼs speculative futures or its storied past, but in either case, essays should reflect on its contemporary reality. A strong personal voice is encouraged. Essays can range from stories that take Manhattanʼs numbered streets and avenues as points of departure to journalistic descriptions of place-based urban subcultures to theoretical treatises on infrastructure, property or density.

The prize-winning essays selected for publication will complement a pair of exhibitions presented by the Museum of the City of New York and the Architectural League of New York that commemorate the Manhattan grid and explore its evolving legacy. The exhibitsʼ premise is that the grid has been subject to countless adaptations and transformations over the past 200 years and will be subject to more urban innovation in the years to come. The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, curated by Hilary Ballon, explores the 200 years since the creation of that foundational plan through the lens of the gridʼs enduring impact on land use, real estate and the public realm. The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, curated by Gregory Wessner, displays eight design proposals – selected from a pool of over 120 submissions from around the world – that project ways “to act on and within the grid to respond to the challenges and opportunities… that New York faces now and into the future.” The essays will contribute personal, reflective and contemporary voices into this conversation about the past, present and future of New York City. Writers interested in submitting work are encouraged to view the exhibitions as they shape their essays.

With this competition, Urban Omnibus seeks to advance its dedication to redefining the culture of citymaking by inviting writers to interpret a system that influences so many aspects of urban life, and yet is rarely considered in evocative or creative non-fiction writing.

AWARD
The jury will select one first-prize essay, whose author will receive an award of $500. Up to two second place winners will receive prizes of $250 each.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Essays should be between 800 and 2000 words. Suggestions of imagery that supports or illustrates each essay are strongly encouraged.

Email submissions as attachments to info@urbanomnibus.net with GRID: ESSAY SUBMISSION as the subject line. Please include your name at the top of the document.

Submissions must be received by 5:00pm on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012.

Questions about this call for essays can be sent to info@urbanomnibus.net.

ELIGIBILITY
Staff and board members of the Architectural League and the Museum of the City of New York are not eligible for this competition.

JURY 
Ken Chen, Executive Director, Asian American Writersʼ Workshop
Sina Najafi, Editor, Cabinet
Michael Sorkin, architect, urban designer, writer
Nicola Twilley, author, Edible Geography and Co-Director, Studio-X New York

Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director, Architectural League
Cassim Shepard, Editor, Urban Omnibus
Varick Shute, Managing Editor, Urban Omnibus
Gregory Wessner, Special Projects Director, Architectural League and curator of The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan

ABOUT THE EXHIBITIONS
The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011 celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Commissionersʼ Plan of 1811, the foundational document that established Manhattanʼs famous street grid. Featuring an original hand-drawn map of New Yorkʼs planned streets and avenues prepared by the Commission in 1811, as well as other rare historic maps, photographs and prints of the evolution of the cityʼs streets, and original manuscripts and publications that document the cityʼs physical growth, the exhibition examines the gridʼs initial design, implementation, and evolution. The Greatest Grid traces the enduring influence of the 1811 plan as the grid has become a defining feature of the city, shaping its institutions and public life.

The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan: On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the Commissionersʼ Plan, the Architectural League, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer, issued an international Call for Ideas, inviting architects and designers from around the world to speculate about how Manhattanʼs grid might be adapted, extended or transformed in the future. How might the grid accommodate growth or make possible new types of buildings; how could it be modified to respond to climate change or new transportation technologies? The Unfinished Grid presents eight proposals, selected by a jury of architects and historians, which offer provocative speculations for the future city. Proposals range from inserting a new north-south avenue, in order to introduce new street-level public spaces, to appropriating intersections as sites for new kinds of development, to envisioning fantastical vertical cities that claim the sky above Manhattan as a new realm for inhabitation. Together the proposals do not describe a literal vision of the future, but suggest the immense possibilities and catalytic power the grid still holds, after two hundred years, for organizing urban life and stimulating the imaginations of architects and urbanists.

Both exhibitions are on view through April 15, 2012 at the Museum of the City of New York.

In a deceptively modest-seeming exhibition hall on the first floor of the Museum of the City of New York is a show titled The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, a history of the 1811 plan for Manhattan’s grid, now celebrating its 200th anniversary. The size of the exhibit is cleverly misleading. Upon closer inspection its historic scale and range are immense and provide that rare feeling that one has discovered the secrets of the city.

One floor above the historical exhibit are, fittingly, projections for the future of Manhattan’s grid in the companion exhibit The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan – eight proposals chosen from over 120, in a call for ideas sponsored by the Architectural League in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer. [For more information about the two exhibitions, see this piece by Unfinished Grid curator Gregory Wessner. -Ed.]

At the Museum last Saturday afternoon, the Architectural League’s Gregory Wessner, the curator of The Unfinished Grid, moderated a panel discussion with Amale Andraos of WORKac, Ken Smith of Ken Smith Landscape Architect, and Mark Robbins, Dean of Syracuse University School of Architecture (Andraos and Robbins had served on the jury for the Unfinished Grid competition). The group discussed the living legacy of the 1811 plan and the new proposals imagining Manhattan’s infrastructural future.

L-R: Gregory Wessner, Ken Smith, Mark Robbins, Amale Andraos

The grand scale and defyingly disciplined solution that the 1811 Plan imposed on the map of Manhattan (in most instances keeping to the original plan within a hundredth of an inch) has had a humbling and inspiring effect on many architects and designers, including those on the panel. When asked to explain this enduring influence, Amale Andraos pointed out that, “Compared with the Roman grid, the Manhattan grid was created to create difference and expressiveness on its own. It’s funny that it seems so inevitable, so straightforward.  It’s also [a] very egalitarian ideology, not like the Continental grid. There’s no preferred access.” Indeed, as early as 1877, Frederick Law Olmsted made a similar observation, as provided in the exhibit along with quotes by other memorable observers: “Such distinctive advantage of position that Rome gives St. Peter’s, Paris the Madeleine, London St. Paul’s, New York, under her system, gives to nothing.”

While neutralizing and egalitarian in this respect, and in its use of a numbering system rather than the Continental preference for important names, the grid also presents to many as oppressive and constricting. Ken Smith noted that “it was criticized for its relentlessness at first; [but it also presented the] the genius of pure infrastructure – it frames and then individuates.” Mark Robbins then fondly recalled the tag line for The Naked City: “There are 8 million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.” The panelists pointed out this expressive effect of the grid, that most of the individual expression and innovation occur within the interstitial spaces in the city, the ones the grid gives rise to and organically encourages.

Of course, not everyone feels the grid’s oppressiveness as a catalyst to greater flourishing of city life. One member of the audience felt quite dismayed at the unanimous adulation the panel seemed to give the grid. He echoed a not unpopular sentiment when he said, “I’m a little disheartened that you are so cheerful about the grid. For example, every street is a through street — you can’t find respite, can’t get away from it.”

Andraos countered that what he perceives as problems natural to the grid may actually have more to do with how we conduct daily life in the 21st century — garbage collection, street cleaning and traffic issues. She pointed to Barcelona’s new pneumatic trash management system that helps reduce garbage truck traffic as an example of how creative solutions can address many of these issues. When prodded by another audience member, an Englishwoman who bemoaned the lack of green space, especially as compared with London, Andraos pointed out the immense environmentally adaptive qualities of the grid. Although it was created in the first half of the 19th century, when the city could only count a population of 100,000 on the island of Manhattan, the grid made possible an efficient future sewage system, subway system, and pedestrian traffic. Within its rigidity it provided a flexibility that could accommodate this ambitiously growing and densifying city.

One of the central questions of planning in New York did creep its way into the discussion when someone asked about he pros and cons of landmarking in New York City 200 years into the future. The panelists agreed that, as Andraos replied, “We can’t and shouldn’t turn the entire city into a museum.” It’s also a question of allowing for the life of the city to continue. Wessner added that “Preserving the spirit of New York as place of change and new ideas, and balancing that with the city’s past – it’s a big question. Also, there’s a difference between preservation for historic value versus preservation efforts that are meant to keep development from happening.” This tension between development and preservation seems to underlie almost every discussion about planning, those about grand scale projects especially. Mark Robbins acknowledged this “anxiety about fabric going away in New York,” but, he pointed out, “(it) seems to be remarkably resilient.”

The panel did appraise some of the eight projects on display that project the grid’s potential into the city’s future. However, the panelists and jury members seemed a bit surprised by what they saw as a common “back to the future” sensibility of many of the entries and a relatively timid approach to thinking 200 years ahead. For example, they noted that none of the environmentally-oriented submissions were chosen as winners, partly because they were not radical enough or because many of their plans for the future are already a contemporary reality. Green plans for rooftops in Manhattan and urban farms, for instance, have been sprouting for a while now.

Maintaining New York as a place that inspires big ideas and gives them traction seems a bit more difficult 200 years on. We may recognize that planning of such sweeping scope can’t or won’t happen today, but this show serves to kindle the desire to imagine on a grand scale — the resilience of the grid speaks well to the impact of ambitious spirit. Thinking big might be okay again.

Yael Friedman writes about art and culture, and often about sports. She lives in Brooklyn and grew up in Tel Aviv and Rockaway (Bauhaus heaven and unapologetically homey beach town, respectively). You can check out more of her stuff at Ida Post.

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.

The following was originally published on WNET’s MetroFocus. 

New Yorkers take it for granted that we can say things like “meet me at 85th Street and Third Avenue” and know that regardless of whether someone has been to that intersection, they will easily be able to get there. It’s all thanks to Manhattan’s legendary street grid, which celebrates its 200th anniversary this year.

A little history of the grid
In 1807, frustrated by years of uncontrolled development and a decade of public health epidemics attributed to lower Manhattan’s cramped and irregular streets, New York City’s Common Council (the predecessor to today’s City Council) petitioned the State Legislature to develop a street plan for Manhattan above Houston Street, at that time a rural area of streams and hills populated by a patchwork of country estates, farms and small houses. The adoption four years later of the Commissioners’ Plan established the grid of 12 north-south avenues and 155 east-west streets that, though it would take most of the 19th century to build, continues to fundamentally shape life in New York.

But is something so infrastructural, something that’s taken for granted every day, really worth celebrating?
The grid is definitely worth celebrating — without it, New York might not be the great city it has become. That’s why the Museum of the City of New York and the Architectural League of New York have organized a pair of exhibitions about its past and future. The first of these exhibitions, The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, curated by architectural historian Hilary Ballon, traces the creation, implementation and evolution of the plan from 1811 through the 20th century. A tour de force of historical research that constitutes the first sustained examination of this subject, The Greatest Grid tells the story of a young New York that is full of optimism about its future and unafraid to take on bold challenges.

Jon Meacham takes a tour of “The Greatest Grid” at the Museum of the City of New York with curator Hilary Ballon.

Top image: an oil painting from 1885 that imagines what the junction of Bowery and Broadway, the area that became Union Square, looked like during colonial times. Bottom image: Union Square today. Photos courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York and Flickr/U2wanderer.

Among its many keen insights, The Greatest Grid reveals how remarkably flexible Manhattan’s street grid has been over two centuries. To wit, the following were all later city additions unanticipated by the grid’s creators in 1811: Central Park and the superblock housing developments of 1960s urban renewal; Madison and Lexington avenues; the automobile and the subway; skyscrapers; the water system and the electricity grid; zoning resolutions and preservation districts. That the grid was able to accommodate them all while sustaining its essential character is a true testament to its flexibility, which Ballon has described as a “living framework, which enabled the city to grow and evolve over time.”

How might designers, developers and city officials continue to modify the grid in response to the challenges and opportunities that New York faces now and into the future?
To answer this question, the Architectural League and the museum, along with media sponsor Architizer, issued an international call for ideas that invited architects and urban designers from around the world to use the grid as a springboard for thinking about the city’s future. More than 120 teams from 22 countries submitted proposals, from which a jury of architects and curators selected eight they believed offer the most insightful and provocative ideas for Manhattan’s grid.

Click the images below to see and read about the eight selected ideas:

These eight proposals are now on display in The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, a sister exhibition to The Greatest Grid. If the submissions are any indication, Manhattan’s enduring power as architectural and urban muse is undiminished. The proposals are bold, ambitious and full of energy. They address a range of issues, from extending Manhattan’s edge to create sites for new building; to reconfiguring city streets to increase pedestrian space; to amending preservation and zoning regulations to foster alternative possibilities for development.

A portrait of Simeon De Witt, ca. 1804, one of the commissioners behind the 1811 grid plan | via Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University

How do idea competitions like this one benefit the city?
Many of the proposals will strike viewers as far-fetched or impractical, with little chance of ever being realized. But that is not the point. The proposals on view are not necessarily intended as literal recommendations for future projects, although there are certainly many good ideas in them that could be implemented to great impact. Rather, I hope that these eight proposals challenge us to remember that, like the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan itself, New York is a city that has the capacity and willingness to think big.

As inevitable — or invisible — as Manhattan’s grid may seem to us today, there was a moment, as Hilary Ballon points out, “when a set of city leaders reached a firm decision to establish [the street grid] and steadfastly held to it over strong objections from influential people.

None of the proposals on view in The Unfinished Grid are more outlandish than the idea of imposing a grid of 2,028 blocks on land that was largely rural, for a city with a population at the time of 100,000 people. But that is exactly what makes New York such a glorious and thrilling place to live. The absurd and impractical and far-fetched take root here to offer new possibilities for how to live and work and play.

Our 19th century forebears, resident in the city during the decades it took to fully realize the street grid, had to live through the blasting of Manhattan rocks and the clearing of soil, the laying out of streets and the endless building required to fill these new blocks with their first houses, shops and schools. I would expect that in true New York fashion, they complained and resisted and protested. But they also persevered. And it is only through their perseverance and their shared sacrifice that we have the dynamic city that we have today.

In 1886, this pile of rocks sat at the corner of what is now 81st Street and Ninth Avenue | via Museum of the City of New York.

It’s the job of every New Yorker to embrace change
Make no mistake: big ideas like the ones here require a commensurate level of commitment and sacrifice. But we should not forget that we ourselves are the beneficiaries of centuries of commitment and sacrifice on the part of the millions of New Yorkers who preceded us here.

New York City is perhaps one of human history’s greatest works-in-progress. It is a city that is and should continue to be about the future, about possibility, about reinvention, both personal and architectural. It is our responsibility to have big ideas and the corresponding commitment to realize them, even in the face of the inconvenience of scaffolding and torn up streets and the sounds of construction. I hope that the projects on view in The Unfinished Grid challenge viewers to think of their own big ideas, so that we hand forward a greater New York to the people who follow us than the one in which we live now. It is a project not just for architects and developers and city officials, but one that should occupy all New Yorkers.

Gregory Wessner is an architectural historian and the special projects director at the Architectural League of New York. He is curator of “The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan.”

In 2009, NACTO launched its Cities for Cycling project, through which the organization studies and champions best practices in bikeway design, and began crafting an urban-oriented manual to guide cities who want to invest in bike-friendly roadway infrastructure and traffic engineering. The NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide puts forth solutions for incorporating bicycle transportation options into the urban streetscape, based on a comprehensive understanding of the many bureaucratic restrictions and practical needs that dictate the design of our streets. In the face of design standards based on interstate highway travel, liability concerns, battles between State and City and competition between numerous stakeholders for use and right of way, this effort to overhaul our established ideas of how streets should work promises to be a struggle. And the folks at NACTO are dedicated to the challenge. In the following piece, Vega-Barachowitz looks at the example of the “cycle track” — a bikeway that is physically separated from motor traffic and is distinct from the sidewalk (such as the 9th Avenue bikeway here in New York) — to explain why our transportation networks are the way they are and how they should evolve. 

- V.S.

Photo by Harmony Blackwell, for the 2010 Architectural League exhibition The City We Imagined/The City We Made

In the taxonomy of city streets, the cycle track is the platypus. Sandwiched between the sidewalk and the parking lane — neither a trail, a sidewalk, nor a travel lane — it defies the conventional spectra of classification and challenges where the sidewalk ends and the street begins.

In spite of their curious and (as of now) sporadic cameos on American city streets, cycle tracks have long tradition in Northern Europe, and have more recently emerged on streets from Seoul to Seville. Since 2007, when New York City cut the ribbon on its inaugural Ninth Avenue cycle track, the movement for separated bikeways has accelerated in the United States; and culminated in 2011, with the publication of the National Association of City Transportation Officials’ (NACTO) Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a catalogue of innovative bikeway design concepts for US cities.

The NACTO Guide heralds a new era of thinking about our streets and public spaces, discovering in the asphalt tundra of the American metropolis an unlikely well of creative potential. Along with a growing cadre of city street design manuals, the guide beckons the twilight of the motor century and upholds the growing sentiment that the antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself. Today, as an emerging generation of designers and engineers rise to challenge the traditional rubric and protocol of traffic engineering, the first highly visible struggle will be that of the cycle track.

What follows contextualizes the cycle track in the lineage of transportation in the United States. Three persistent themes stand out: the tension between rural and urban transportation policy; the question of dedicating versus sharing road space; and the interpretation and limitations of conventional design standards and criteria.

This brief history will hopefully accelerate the launching of a new paradigm in urban transportation and street design, and thus engender more aggressive and creative streetscape interventions in the progress of design process and theory. This movement reinforces and reflects the recent cross-disciplinary shift from object to ground and from freestanding built form to landscape (set forth by architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton in 1990). It inverts the opportunity for design intervention from the built fabric of floors and facades to the dynamic spines and landscapes that weave around them and shape their context. City street design, though perhaps the least glamorous subfield in the dialogues surrounding landscape urbanism (or ecological urbanism), just might be its most highly contentious and politically volatile element — and therefore one of its most interesting.

Ocean Parkway bicycle path, c. 1894 | Courtesy of the New York City Parks Photo Archive

The Gospel of Good Roads
The first separated bikeway in the United States was constructed along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn during the bicycle fad of the 1890s. The bicycle craze produced many follies, including a short-lived, elevated, bicycle toll road between Pasadena and Los Angeles named the California Cycleway. Though the impact of the bicycle at the turn of the century was truncated by the emergence of the private automobile, an early group of bicycle advocates, the League of American Wheelmen (LAW), successfully lobbied Congress for smooth, well-connected country roads at the height of the bicyclist era.

The California Cycleway | via bike.arroyoseco.org

Catering to the populist sentiments of the day, LAW published a series of tracts in Good Roads Magazine, including one called The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer. The gospel, along with other materials issued by the League, called upon Congress to build a system of well-paved roads connecting towns and villages. Their literature appealed to farmers whose livelihood was compromised by inadequate road conditions and sought to leverage more effectively the railroads upon which they relied to get their goods to market. Though the energy behind the movement came primarily from groups of cyclists in cities, their political appeal to the peasant farmer struck a sympathetic chord with congressmen distrustful of city bosses and railroad tycoons.

The agrarian sympathies of a federal government reeling from a financial crisis sparked by railroad speculation set in motion the inequitable balance in transportation policy and funding geared away from cities towards rural areas. This bias persists to this day. Beginning with the establishment of the Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) in the Department of Agriculture in 1893, the government set a precedent for road and highway construction as a rural program based on rural needs and rural access — a decade before the advent of the automobile. As a consequence, from the early 20th century onward, the Bureau of Public Roads and its successor agency the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) charted a course that would spell the dissolution of railroads and urban transportation systems in favor of federally funded toll-free highways dominated by state interests and agencies.¹

League of American Wheelmen rally, 1880 | via ocbike.org

The establishment of the landmark Federal Aid Highway Act of 1916 carried with it a provision that enabled each state to establish a highway department to handle grants and funds allocated from the federal government. The highway departments, assembled from an already forceful and emergent group of regional highway lobbies (backed by national automobile associations), formed the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) in 1914 — a group which, over the course of the 20th century, “developed into ‘one of the most important, least known political groups in the country…part lobby, part professional association, part quasi-political agency. No effective national highway policy could be enacted without its agreement.’”²

Evolving Guidelines and Standards for Roads and Bikeways
AASHO’s lead role in the federal highway program was underscored by their publication in the 1920s and 1930s of a series of road design standards, which eventually came to be known as the Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets and the Manual for Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The former, a set of guidelines commonly known as the AASHTO Green Book (AASHO was renamed AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, in 1973), is often referred to as the “bible” for traffic engineers. The MUTCD is a federally mandated set of codes intended to create standardized roadway signs and markings. The Green Book guides a road’s geometric proportions, such the minimum width of a travel lane (typically 10 feet, though engineers prefer 11-12 foot lanes), while the MUTCD mandates its signage and markings, such as the appropriate dimensions of a stop sign or a striped buffer.

The antidote to traffic congestion is neither highway nor tunnel, but an imaginative repurposing and reallocation of the street itself.As cars became ever more prevalent on America’s roadways, the Green Book, guided by state highway engineers, continually added “safety” buffers to their street design standards to account for the growing frequency of accidents and driver errors. After 1966, based on the presumed inevitability of driver error,³ traffic engineers “became principally concerned with how to engineer [a] second line of defense, shifting the profession’s focus away from driver behavior and towards vehicles and roadside hardware.”⁴ Trees were routinely chopped down to improve sight distances on historic streets, sidewalks were narrowed to improve a car’s crumple zone, and intersection curb radii were altered to insure that trucks and other large vehicles could make smooth turns.

Ever more prohibitive traffic engineering standards regulated and regimented the city streetscape in the name of safety, even as these standards simultaneously eroded the urban realm and transformed ordinary commercial thoroughfares into high speed / high traffic urban arterials. Since only state-designated collector or arterial routes were eligible to receive federal funding, cities had an incentive to designate more of their city streets as state routes, and in doing so conform to AASHTO standards that compromised pedestrians, street life and commerce in favor of vehicle throughput.^5,6

Why AASHTO Excluded the Cycle Track
Among AASHTO’s supplemental publications released in the ensuing decades of the Interstate era was the 1975 AASHTO Guide to the Development of Bicycle Facilities. Demand for a better design policy for bicyclists emerged during the bike boom of the late 1960s and peaked in 1974, the year when, for the first time in decades, more bicycles were sold than cars.

Surging interest in the bicycle, then as now, sparked a reconsideration of the bicycle’s place in the roadway — specifically under what circumstances bicyclists ought to ride with or apart from traffic. At this juncture, despite a wealth of strategies being deployed in Europe, including the cycle track, the American standard fell curiously under the spell of John Forester, the champion of the vehicular cycling movement and author of Effective Cycling. Vehicular cyclists espouse the principle that cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.

In the early 1970s, Forester successfully fought (and continues to fight) against the inclusion of cycle tracks in the AASHTO Bike Guide. Though the vehicular cycling principle has many adamant advocates, the outright embrace of a behavioral approach to cycling coincided with a tacit rejection of the behavioral approach to traffic safety. In other words, as the engineering profession began to safeguard the built environment for terrible drivers and faster cars, a dominant group of bicyclists rejected the principle of separation in favor of “bicycle driving.”

At a point in history when the primary engineering solution was to segment users by grade and function, Forester may have seemed like a luminary. In practice, while cycling rates had a resurgence elsewhere, in the US, they stalled. 

9th Avenue, Manhattan | via NYC DOT's Street Design Manual

The Ninth Avenue Revolution
From the bike boom of the 1970s until today, efforts to make bicycling a mainstream form of transportation (rather than a child’s toy or an exercise regimen) have often focused on policy and education rather than engineering or roadway design. The few cycle track experiments that did take place were either situated outside of a large urban context, in left-leaning college towns like Madison, WI or Davis, CA; or quickly succumbed to political winds, such as New York Mayor Ed Koch’s infamous Midtown cycle tracks in the 1980s. A small but vocal group of engineers from the vehicular cycling community vehemently objected to changes to the AASHTO and MUTCD standards, propagating the philosophically sound but practically unrealistic “Share the Road” dogma that bicyclists should be accorded all of the rights and responsibilities of motorists.

Today’s call for cycle tracks differs, in part, because these interventions have been integrated into a bolder and more comprehensive reawakening and reconsideration of streets as public spaces for people. In 2007, when New York City constructed the city’s first protected bike lane pilot project on Ninth Avenue and transformed Times Square from a tumultuous interchange into a public commons, the city not only created a safe space for cyclists and pedestrians, they set a new precedent in the design of city streets. Cycle track projects, along with a host of bold engineering and communications strategies, have helped to revive the notion of the street as a place not solely for cars, but a front yard in which commercial and pedestrian activities may thrive.

In most cities, changes to city streets, beyond repaving or filling potholes, occur in geologic time. Transportation agencies and public works departments are (understandably) reluctant to attract bad press and political controversy by eliminating traffic lanes, and in much of the country, have little to gain from widening sidewalks or adding bike lanes. Moreover, innovation has often been discouraged by the threat of liability, as innovative cities and engineers fall back on prevailing standards (AASHTO guidance) rather than the immunity of good engineering judgment.⁷ In the 1970s, John Forester coerced the state of California and the federal government to withdraw proposals for cycle tracks by citing a lack of safety research and suing the city of Palo Alto for having mandatory sidepath⁸ laws — injecting a sword into the tender belly of the system.⁹ A steadfast reliance on research and the threat of liability created an untenable cycle, which New York City, by building the cycle track as a pilot project in 2007, may have finally broken.

The current movement to build cycle tracks and other innovative designs reflects a paradigm shift in the urban political-engineering-planning framework under which cities typically operate. City transportation agencies and public works departments are transforming themselves into public space departments to cater to a new generation, and are in turn finding that the dialogue of controversial new steps — such as an ambitious bike network expansion —helps them to transcend the business-as-usual approach to city streets and to forge new partnerships with community groups, businesses and advocates. When New York City built its first cycle tracks (as part of its larger complete street design initiative), it made the cycle track into an object of political capital, setting off a domino effect that now involves cities from Memphis to San Jose.

Excerpt from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

The quiet revolution of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide
The story of the cycle track does not end with the trials and successes of New York. In fact, despite the turmoil of the Prospect Park West Bike Lane in the winter of 2011, the imperative for cycle tracks has garnered even more momentum nationwide, with cities all around the United States prepared to lay their first miles of protected bikeways in 2012 and 2013. While controversy has a way of heightening interest and visibility, the publication in March 2011 of the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide set forth for the first time an accepted, long overdue national standard off of which cities could base their designs.

While the cycle track is what makes the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide pioneering, the manual actually includes guidance for bicycle signals, bike boxes, buffered bike lanes, and a host of other new traffic engineering strategies now being deployed across the country. The designs in the guide draw on the European experience as well as existing projects and precedents in the United States. Following the official release in March 2011, NACTO undertook an unprecedented endorsement campaign for the document, drawing the support of countless city transportation officials, as well as US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. These developments have set the stage for a thorough reconsideration of roadway design standards in cities across the country, and reflect the long-recognized fissure between the reality of urban design and the tenets of state highway design.

Whether or not federal transportation policy and state highway design evolve to achieve a more representative balance between state and local interests remains to be seen. Nonetheless, the recent emergence of the cycle track and the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide sets a positive precedent for the future of urban streets and spaces. The modern solution to traffic congestion is no longer a multi-billion dollar highway or tunnel, but a recalibration of investment away from traffic and towards people, and away from highways and towards transit and public plazas. It is through the reinvention and re-imagination of this ubiquitous public asset, the street, that the American city may discover its latent potential. While cycle tracks may be an ephemeral protagonist in this evolving drama (as their late 19th century counterparts were for the Good Roads movement), this subtle traffic operation sets the stage for a more ambitious reconquest of the street — its place, purpose and future in the American city.

Bikebox at a signalized intersection, from the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide | Click to enlarge

David Vega-Barachowitz is the Sustainable Initiatives Program Manager at the National Association of City Transportation Officials and coordinator for NACTO’s Cities for Cycling project. Mr. Vega-Barachowitz joined NACTO in 2011 to develop and disseminate the Urban Bikeway Design Guide, a national design guide which compiles innovative bikeway and street design in the United States. Prior to joining NACTO, he undertook a Henry Evans Travelling fellowship granted by Columbia University to study urban design, with a focus on bicycle and infrastructure planning and design, in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and France. His interest in bicycling as sustainable transportation was inspired by his time studying architecture and urban design in the city of Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2008-2009, Mr. Vega-Barachowitz worked at the New York City Transit Authority, where he worked on a State of Good Repair initiative to improve system-wide asset management and systematic rehabilitation for stations. He is a graduate of Columbia University with a degree in Urban Studies with Architecture.

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.

This week, two exhibitions opened at the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY) that celebrate the evolving legacy of Manhattan’s street grid. In one of the Museum’s ground floor galleries, urban historian Hilary Ballon has curated The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, a historical show that celebrates the 200th anniversary of the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan for New York through an astonishing collection of the maps, drawings and documents that moved the plan from a bold idea to a defining reality of New York. Upstairs, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, a display of eight proposals by architects — curated by Gregory Wessner, the Architectural League’s Special Projects Director — showcases a wide and provocative range of speculative futures for the grid. These proposals are the winning entries to an international ideas competition, organized by the Architectural League in collaboration with MCNY and Architizer.

This Saturday, three of the competition’s jurors will join Wessner for a panel discussion that will reflect on themes that emerged from the over 120 entries, the implications of the eight winning proposals and questions raised by the Call for Ideas. Taking the consistent adaptations to the grid over the past two centuries as a point of departure, these questions include: What new possibilities for the grid still exist? What can we expect for the city’s future and how will it be shaped and reflected by the street grid? What kinds of ideas as bold and visionary as the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan might New York undertake?

The Unfinished Grid: Speculations for Manhattan
Amale Andraos, Mark Robbins, and Ken Smith, moderated by Gregory Wessner
Saturday, December 10, 2011
4:00 p.m.
Museum of the City of New York
1220 Fifth Avenue

Amale Andraos is co-founder and partner of Work Architecture Company. Recent projects include the winning competition entry for a new cultural center on New Holland Island in Saint Petersburg, Russia; a museum extension for the Blaffer Museum, Houston; a branch library for Kew Gardens Hills in Queens; and the first Edible Schoolyard New York City with chef Alice Waters. WORKac’s entry for the redesign of Hua Qiang Bei Road, was recently awarded first place in the international competition for the redesign of Shenzhen’s busiest shopping street.

Ken Smith is principal of Ken Smith Landscape Architect. His background and training is in landscape architecture and the fine arts. Recent projects include the East River ferry landings, New York City; a rooftop garden for the Museum of Modern Art; and a major urban park for El Toro Marine Base in Orange County, California.

Mark Robbins is the Dean of Syracuse University School of Architecture. He was previously Director of Design at the National Endowment for the Arts and Curator for Architecture at the Wexner Center for the Arts.

Gregory Wessner is Special Projects Director for the Architectural League and the curator of The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan. He was curator of League exhibitions The City We Imagined/The City We Made: New New York 2001-2010 and New New York: Fast Forward.

Co-sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York and the New York Public Library.

Tickets
Tickets are $6 for League members and members of the museum; $8 for students and seniors; $12 for all others. Tickets include Museum admission. League members may register online at www.mcny.org and enter code AL1210 upon checkout for discounted rate.  For more information or to reserve by phone, please call 917-492-3395.

Top image: Projects in The Unfinished Grid (clockwise from top left) — The Informal Grid (Isaiah King, Ryan Neiheiser, Giancarlo Valle); The Plaid (Architecture Commons: Eric Ho, Rick Lam); Tabula Fluxus (Group Han Associates New York: Myung Kweon Park, Yikyu Choe, Michael Chaveriat); Flow My Tears, The Commissioners Said (GHILARDI + HELLSTEN ARKITEKTER: Franco Ghilardi, Ellen Hellsten, Espen Vatn, Erik Stenman, Einar Rodhe); 6 1/4 Avenue (Ksestudio: Kyriakos Kyriakou, Sofia Krimizi, assisted by Yubi Park, Jennifer Endozo, Inti Rojanasopondist, Pauline Caubel); NYCity2 (Fotis Sagonas, Ioannis Oikonomou); Dissociative New York (Joshua Mackley, Mathew Ford); Projective Exceptions (Grant Alford, assisted by Spencer Lindstrom).

Landscape designer, teacher and writer David Seiter has been researching the city’s underappreciated plant life and finding ways to highlight its value. Seiter is the founding principal of Future Green Studio, a firm that works “to reveal the nuances of our urban landscape in subtle, poetic ways that provide clues to the complex ecology of cities.” Here, he presents “Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants,” an effort to champion the ecological and aesthetic benefits of informal vegetation, and shares the Studio’s beautiful and charming series of illustrations, based on traditional botanical classification drawings, of the wild urban plants found surrounding their Gowanus office. (Click on any of the images to launch a slideshow.)

- V.S.

Dandelion, highlighted | 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Although we tend to think of our cities as concrete jungles, our post-new urban environment is awash in plant life. This becomes especially apparent when you begin recognizing all the wild urban plants that have taken root along roadsides and chain-link fences, between cracks of pavement, and within vacant lots, rubble dumps and highway medians. Spontaneously propagating, these resilient plants find distinctive niches to thrive in and inhabit our most derelict landscapes. The environmental benefits of these “weeds” go widely unrecognized when, in fact, this often invisible urban ecology can offer a fresh perspective on how cities perform.

With that in mind, we staged an intervention to reveal the overlooked nature of urban weeds to the passerby: we painted rough, bright geometries onto the sidewalk along 3rd Street in Brooklyn, outlining spots where spontaneous urban plants have made a home. Using a typical street paint yellow, we drew circles around particularly important weeds that have emerged up through our sidewalks and tree pits – essentially taking a highlighter to the streetscape. Most people walk by unaware, only to stop for a brief second to consider why someone would be drawing attention to the weeds in the sidewalk. Sometimes, observant urban wayfarers linger long enough to glimpse the inconspicuous museum placard identifying the plants name, origin and characteristics.

“Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants” is a project conceived by Future Green Studio, our landscape urbanism firm based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Our studio seeks to make urban interventions that reveal the nuances of our urban landscape in subtle, poetic ways that provide clues to the complex ecology of cities. Working out of a post-industrial neighborhood replete with sidewalk cracks, remnant gravel vestiges and dead end streets, overgrown urban weeds are ubiquitous in our daily experience.

Commelina Communis (Asiatic Dayflower)

Eragrostis Pectinacea (Tufted Lovegrass)

In colloquial terms, of course, these plants are most commonly referred to as “weeds,” but are also known as “invasive,” “alien” and “exotic.” Culturally, the prevailing usage of “weeds” relegates these urban plants to an inferior botanical category because humans did not intentionally cultivate them at the particular site in which they have appeared. It is an understandable human reaction, as we have been taught, generally, that things which require little to no effort to grow, create, or maintain are worth less. But competing perceptions of certain plants reflect the need to think differently about the stigma we attach to these weeds. For example, Dandelion is perceived by suburban homeowners as an omnipresent lawn invader. But by children Dandelions are seen as a thing to play with, and by urban foragers they’re understood as food.

The term “invasive” denotes the biologically aggressive and exceptionally hardy characteristics of a plant, habitually denounced for taking over natural areas and stifling biodiversity. In non-urban conditions, these plants can at times be destructive on rural ecosystems. Monocultures of Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) or Common Reed (Phragmites australis) have been known to alter radically existing landscapes and wildlife habitats. With many invasive plants dispersing seeds multiple times throughout a season and with seed counts in the thousands per plant annually, the potential for a quick colonization of rural and suburban sites is a major concern.

The prolific nature of these plants, which makes them so dangerous in certain areas, also makes them incredibility successful in our urban ecology. As such, there is a movement to categorize these plants not as weeds but as spontaneous urban plants, and to recognize their importance as a sort of renegade green infrastructure, thriving in places no native plant would grow and providing substantive ecological benefits.

Future Green Studio's intervention on 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Our contemporary urban streetscapes and post-industrial vacant lots in no way mimic the Northeast deciduous forests of our past — once suitable growing grounds for native plants. Rather than trying to control our new urban ecology with the assumption that invasive species are degrading our environment, we should instead understand that without extensive maintenance of intentionally planted landscapes, most urban landscapes would quickly revert to being dominated by spontaneous vegetation. What’s remarkable about all spontaneous urban plants is the fact that they require no human assistance to assert and maintain themselves in extreme, often volatile urban conditions, while providing the same ecologically performative benefits of traditional landscape plants and street trees. Rather than seek to discard and eradicate them, we now have an opportunity to harness their benefits and tell their histories.

In the hard, difficult landscapes of contemporary cities, wild urban plants can provide real ecological benefits, and are the overlooked backbone of an emergent green infrastructure. For whether Daffodil or Dandelion, intentionally-planted or not, all plants contribute to lowering the urban heat island effect and can help address the carbon imbalance in our urban areas. Unlike many traditional landscape plants, spontaneous urban plants can also colonize disturbed bare ground, help with erosion control and slope stabilization, and be used as food and habitat for wildlife. In addition, Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) or Lambsquarters (Chenopodium album), for example, have phytoremediation properties and can be used strategically on brownfield sites to absorb pollutants from the soil. Spontaneous urban plants are also being rediscovered as part of our edible lexicon. Both Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and Common Purslane (Portulaca oleracea) are edible and highly sought after, finding their way onto plates at trendy restaurants.

Chenopodium album (Common Lambsquarters)

Ambrosia artemisiifolia (Common Ragweed)

In New York City, as with most major urban areas, stormwater retention is a particularly hot-button issue. Our storm sewer system here in New York City is completely overwhelmed, with raw sewage being released into our local waterways nearly half of the times it rains. Wild urban plants play an important role in slowing down the first flush of stormwater and reducing the cumulative impact of major storm events.

Another concept currently being explored that could utilize wild urban plants is the idea of brown roofs. Brown roofs are essentially paired down green roofs without the highly engineered soil and specialty plantings. With a much higher drainage profile, a brown roof is much simpler than a green roof, and can use the existing soil from the site – degraded or not. Although there are issues of fire safety that need to be addressed through seasonal maintenance, brown roofs include less upfront cost, minimal upkeep and a lighter weight load than green roofs. This strategy could radically transform our urban rooftops – providing all the benefits of a green roof at a fraction of the cost.

Conyza canadensis (Horseweed)

Hieracium sabaudum (New England Hawkweed)

As an extension of the street intervention, we catalogued twenty wild urban plants we found growing on our street and in our garden. Individually set on a white background, each plant was photographed as a bare-rooted, singular specimen. Heavy shadows and sharp contrast play up the sense of plant specimen as object. Detail enlargements of the flowers or seeds are inset in each illustration and are accompanied by the plants’ place of origin, habitat preference, ecological function and cultural significance.

We applied traditional modes of botanical representation to these plants, which are not usually seen as “pretty” or “desirable,” and attempted to elevate them to the status of romantic illustrations of plants like lavender or thyme you might find hanging on someone’s kitchen wall. Using this whimsical approach, we intended to recontextualize these plants while at the same time revealing their cultural history, development and usage. For our work, Peter Del Tredici’s Wild Urban Plants of the Northeast: A Field Guide was an invaluable resource and has helped set the tone for recognizing this group of plants as an important part of our contemporary urban ecology.

As our cities grow in density, population and number, our urban landscapes must be both aesthetically pleasing and ecologically productive. By utilizing wild urban plants, we can design with a palette of greenery adapted to existing urban soils, widely available and attractive to pollinators and other wildlife. An informed combination of these factors can help create a pleasant urban meadow. As much as the upfront plant selection needs to play an important role, some designing will come through the process of subtraction. By removing diseased plants, those planted too close together or even the plants that are particularly unsightly or cause allergic reaction like Ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia), designers can help to make the wild urban meadow tidy and kempt – and more appealing.

Smooth Crabgrass, highlighted | 3rd Street, Brooklyn

Additional research and reporting by Patra Jongjitirat.

David Seiter is founding principal of Future Green Studio. His portfolio includes international, high-profile, large-scale urban parks and waterfronts, high-end residential garden and estate planning for celebrity clients, and green roof design and implementation. He manages a small working garden on a post-industrial site near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn which includes green walls, green roofs, raised beds for food crops, composting and a rainwater catchment system. In addition to designing and building, David also teaches and writes about emergent trends in landscape architecture. Most recently, David taught “An Introduction to Green Roofs & Living Walls” at the City University of New York. He’s also teaching a theory course on “Productive + Performative Landscapes” in the graduate program at Pratt Institute. Currently in the works is a book about sustainable urban landscape interventions. Prior to gaining a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, David spent two years in Japan, where he apprenticed with a prominent garden designer in Kyoto.

Patra Jongjitirat is a research intern at Future Green Studio, helping draft its upcoming book publication Emergent Trends in Landscape Architecture. She is also devoted to the public arts organization No Longer Empty, looking at how interim uses and small-scale interventions can catalyze the revitalization of urban spaces. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Architectural Studies from Brown University.

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 November 20, Nathan Kensinger, in collaboration with UnionDocs, presented “Block by Block,” a panel discussion with four of New York’s most active street historians. Author Kevin Walsh, location scout Nick Carr, urban explorer Moses Gates and guide Cindy VandenBosch exemplify a vital and contemporary iteration of the long-standing New York tradition of “un-official,” “informal,” “underground,” and “alternative” histories. The event presented each individual’s work, methodology, adventures and stories, and in so doing managed to challenge many of our assumptions about how history is traditionally written, and how subverting those traditions can open up new avenues of urban exploration.

Kensinger, no slouch in the business of New York underground documentation himself, began the panel by framing the practice of street history in New York. Kensinger described the explorations of George G. Foster, a pioneer of nonfiction urban sensationalism. In the 1800s, Foster was working to document the whole of the rapidly changing city, through books such as New York by Gas Light and Other Urban Sketches and New York in Slices. His writing laid the groundwork for many writers of the early 20th century known for their exploration of New York’s underbelly, including Joseph Mitchell (McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon) and St. Clair McKelway (True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality), both also known for their contributions to the early years of The New Yorker. Like Foster before them, these writers opened doors for other 20th century talents like columnist Meyer Berger and audio documentarian Tony Schwartz. Just as each of the previous generations of New York historians felt a duty to expand public understanding of the breadth and diversity of urban experience in New York, the panelists Kensinger invited to this event exhibited a sense of wonder, responsibility and anxiety about representing the city they call home.

The first presenter of the evening was Kevin Walsh of Forgotten New York. Walsh, by his own account, is now an author, but has always identified himself foremost as an urban explorer. A New York native, he came of age investigating the streets, fascinated by the stories they tell. And in 1997, when the Internet, as he said, “started getting popular,” he saw an opportunity and a platform upon which he could finally share his explorations. By 1998, he was out every weekend, photographing all along the way. During his many journeys, he has found the few remaining red-brick paved roads and some rare two-light stoplights that flash only red and green, explored New York neighborhood institutions like Red Hook’s Sunny’s Bar and Narrows Coffee Shop, and exposed the bucolic beauty of Park Slope’s Webster and Jackson Places with equal excitement as the gruesome history of Atlantic Terminal’s prior life as a meatpacking plant.

5 Beekman Street | Photo by Nick Carr/Scouting New York

Nick Carr is a location scout for the movie industry is the author of Scouting New York. After graduating from college, he wanted to work in film production. Following a couple twists and turns that involved figuring out where to locate trailers on the set and how to run telephone lines to them, he managed to find regular work in the locations department and worked his way up to being a scout. Working on films like Spiderman 3 and The Taking of Pelham 123, one would expect that Carr’s work has taken him to some of New York’s most inaccessible rooftops and abandoned buildings, but it has also found him in the last arcade in Chinatown and rooftop beach houses. He has tracked down rats in Grand Central Station and owls in Hearld Square. His words of advice on scouting the next spot? Keep your eyes open, New York is always changing.

Census Tracts, Current Progress | Courtesy of Moses Gates

Moses Gates of All City New York presented next. An urban explorer, planner and demographer, Gates has taken on a number of ambitious urban adventures goals. First, he decided to climb every bridge in New York, then to explore all of New York’s abandoned subway stations and most recently to walk all of New York’s census tracts. Gates began by showing some stomach-jolting photos of his bridge climbs and curiosity-sparking images of his subway explorations. Then, he dove into his census tract exploration. As of November 20th, Gates had walked 83.5% of New York’s census tracts as outlined by the census conducted in the year 2000. Over the course of his walks, he began to wonder about the totality of New York in contrast to image of New York. Does Chelsea or Ridgewood offer a more “real” New York? Jackson Heights or Bayside? Using census microdata, the demographer in him decided to figure out which neighborhood’s statistics most closely match the citywide averages for income, racial composition and other census categories. The winner? Pelham Parkway in the Bronx.

Cindy VandenBosch of Urban Oyster was the final presenter. Drawing on her background in anthropology, she wanted to create a tour company that would not just simply showcase a space, but allow the participant to experience it as a place. With topics ranging from food carts to churches to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, her tours expand the traditional visual tour experience by drawing in locals for discussion, tastings and oral histories. She took us through the makings of her Immigrant Foodways tour. In 2008, when a signature campaign stopped its repurposing, the Moore Street Market drew VandenBosch’s attention. The Market, she explained, was originally formed under the LaGuardia administration in an effort “to turn the peddlers of yesterday into the merchants of tomorrow,” by centralizing them indoors. With the market as a starting place, VandenBosch’s investigations expanded into the neighborhood. She found a wealth of food-centric stories from the butcher shops that once lined Moore Street to the steer drive that took place on Johnson Avenue. Through her connection to the neighborhood and communities with whom she works, her tours are filled with resident’s personal histories in equal amount as urban history, offering a well-rounded rendering of the places rather than simply the spaces through which she leads tours.

Co-owner of Anibal Meat Market, Angelo Santiago, offers up some pernil and roasted chicken to attendees of one of VandenBosch's tours | Photo by Andrew Gustafson, courtesy of Cindy VandenBosch

Following the presentations, Kensinger opened a question and answer session with audience. It took no time at all for the issue of change in the city to take over the discussion. Walsh lamented the loss of architectural individualism and the resulting aesthetic homogenization of the built environment. Carr took on the frequency of construction, adaptation, renovation and demolition. Gates discussed the city’s demographic changes — the city is more expensive than ever before, but remains socially diverse. VanderBosch queried the way in which the landmarking process occurs: should it be with reference to the narrative of the place or the structure?

Walsh summed up the crux of his argument with an anecdote. He was out walking and photographing when met a friend, to whom he complained that a beautiful old baroque building had been torn down and replaced with standardized box apartments (what he calls “Fedders,” in reference to the air conditioners that adorns their windows). His friend told him to stop complaining; this is what people can afford; this is what makes sense for the neighborhood as it is now. Her scolding was based in economics, demographics and practicality, while his sensibility lay in aesthetics and nostalgia. Hence Walsh’s question: where is the line? What amount of historic or aesthetic value is sufficient to justify deterring or slowing physical change, even when rapid change makes the most economic sense?

Not all development dilemmas are this clear-cut, and the discussion brought to mind the complex challenges of shaping the city’s future in a way that respects its past. Both economic development and historic preservation play important roles and, while it is impossible to single-handedly predict or determine the future, we can be sure that this group of street historians and urban explorers will remind us of the best of the past. In just a few hours, they led us through some of New York’s “secret” spaces, shifted the mythologies we believe about the city, and opened our eyes to the complex historical narratives that we pass by everyday. And, at the end of our exploration, they raise key questions about which of New York’s spaces, places and mythologies will continue to be preserved. What vestiges of this New York will we find in the next version of New York? It will be up to the next generation of street historians to explore, document and share.

Meg Kelly is a researcher and designer. As a Fulbright Fellow, she recently completed “Tracing Shifts of Place: Migration, Identity and Landscape in Dharavi,” a year-long oral history project that investigated and documented the physical, political and cultural landscape of one of Asia’s largest and most complex informal communities through the eyes of its youth. She is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and a current collaborator at UnionDocs.

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.