-C.S.

What is Seeing Green and how did it come about?
Erik Facteau: Seeing Green is a research project that studies specific urban agricultural sites in the New York City area in order to demonstrate how urban agriculture should be considered as a viable and important component of a city’s green infrastructure. One of the sites we’re currently looking at is Brooklyn Grange, a rooftop farm in Long Island City; another that we will be looking at is Added Value, a raised bed farm in Red Hook. We’re also looking at the rooftop farm atop the Parks Department’s Five Borough Administrative Building on Randall’s Island.

By measuring evaporation and evapotranspiration rates, we are looking to create metrics to calculate how much water urban farms are managing, through both detention (meaning the temporary storage of excess stormwater) and retention (the indefinite storage of excess stormwater). This will tell us how much water urban farms keep from entering the sewer system, therefore reducing combined sewer overflows.

When you start to get these numbers, you can begin to extrapolate over larger areas of land – whether it’s exisiting farms or underutilized land with farming potential – to determine how much water can be managed and what the best practices are for doing so. Right now, we are looking at a couple different sites as a base line and moving forward from there.

Testing the water at the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso: This project began as a graduate research project and as it has evolved to include a series of interesting collaborations; and the sponsorship of the Open Space Institute has helped us pursue these partnerships. In one project, called “Farming Up,” Alec Baxt and Lise Serrell look at nutrient quality of crops growing in urban environment compared to rural environments. “Don’t Flush Me” is a project that puts sensors in sewage outflow points and notifies individuals about how much wastewater they produce during and immediately after those weather events that cause sewage to overflow into the harbor. Another one is called “Farming Concrete,” for which Mara Gittleman has been calculating the area, weight and monetary value of food grown in community gardens in New York City.

Facteau: Another project we’ve been involved in has been to set up a demonstration project on the roof of the Association for Energy Affordability‘s headquarters in the Bronx. We emulated the green roof condition on part of the roof and installed a container underneath so we could measure the amount of water running through the green roof and then compare that to the amount of water rushing off the impervious surface of the regular rooftop.

Caruso: If you take all of these metrics and you collapse them – you look at the nutrient level of both the soil and the crop, you look at the stormwater management potential, the energy rate reduction, the food production potential — the combined analysis is much more powerful. The guiding idea is this: if you can first define the benefits and know what they are and research them, then you can quantify them, and then you can monetize the benefits — and that’s when it really becomes valuable to private property owners and cities. At that point, the research can begin informing policy. And it can begin informing the development of best management practices around the design of farms. For example, if we observe nutrient run-off, we can help design small wetlands around the drain. If we know how much water an urban farm can manage at a particular soil depth, and how much productivity and costs would be affected by increasing its depth, then we can inform building owners about the best investment to reach the desired productivity and the desired environmental outcomes. It’s a necessary step if we want to see urban agriculture grow in New York City.

Soy Plant tested for Farming Up | Photo: Catherine Yrisarri

How did you both get involved in this topic?
Facteau: My background is in microbiology and mycology, working mostly on plant restoration projects and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants. I studied environmental science and forestry in college. And I met Tyler while in the graduate program in environmental systems management at the Pratt Institute.

Caruso: Before this, I was working on landscape design and urban agriculture projects and designing and installing grey water systems in San Francisco. When Erik and I started the discussions that eventually led to Seeing Green, we were looking for a thesis project and decided to work together. At the time, there were lots of projects around that dealt with urban agriculture, and most of them were primarily concerned with the economic or social benefits. They might mention the environmental benefits of farming in the city, but not in great depth. The potential of urban agriculture as green infrastructure was a connection that hadn’t yet been made. In 2010, we started noticing how much City agencies were talking about green infrastructure, and realized that if we wanted our cities to support urban agriculture under the banner of green infrastructure, we would have to quantify the environmental benefits.

Brooklyn Grange | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Facteau: The green infrastructure documents from the City that we were looking at all seemed to focus on traditional green roofs. So we started researching how much water these systems could actually handle while simultaneously looking at how rooftop agricultural projects are performing.

Caruso: The grants that Erik is referring to include a green roof tax credit incentive, issued through the Department of Buildings, that specifically prohibits urban farms because of plant selection and because of speculation that irrigation – traditional green roofs don’t require irrigation; agricultural green roofs do – would make rooftop farms less able to retain stormwater than a traditional green roof. That’s a clear example of the city implementing progressive green infrastructure policies that exclude urban agriculture. And in this case, the policy is based on hypotheses that are scientifically untested.

We also find the language of these policies to be more prescriptive than performative. Our methodology for the Seeing Green project looks closely at performativity: how well urban farms and green infrastructure perform over time.

A common criticism of LEED certification system for green buildings is its focus on the design of a building as opposed to looking at how it performs in the long-run, through energy audits or other measurements. With LEED, there is currently no follow up once a building is certified. The next wave in green design – whether it’s buildings, landscapes or infrastructure – is ways to measure performance. That’s what inspired us to develop our thesis project into a larger initiative: to support urban agriculture by defining and quantifying its environmental benefits and seeing how performative it can be.

What kinds of tools or precedents were out there to help you analyze, monetize, to quantify or identify proper metrics?
Caruso: I know everyone says this, but I think social media – Twitter, Facebook, etc. – has really helped empower people with a DIY attitude, has helped citizens’ groups to form, has helped individuals collaborate with a science lab.

Platforms like Kickstarter have created more of a sense of “we’re all in it together,” and that attitude has definitely benefited us.

Facteau: Kickstarter was a huge help in getting this off the ground. We had worked out our methodology as part of our thesis project at Pratt, and when we finished that we asked ourselves, “Where do we go from here?” We knew the equipment that we needed, and we knew that farmers and communities would really value the information we wanted to collect. So we used Kickstarter not only to raise money for equipment but also to raise awareness. Groups from England, from Australia, from the west coast contacted us because of their interest in the research.

Caruso: I just spoke to someone preparing a research report on the potential for urban agriculture in San Francisco. Another group in Minneapolis recently requested our collaboration on a large-scale urban agriculture initiative out there. Around the country, and the world, it’s a really supportive community. There are also some big research initiatives right here in New York….

Like “Five Borough Farm,” which Urban Omnibus featured last year. That effort is also trying to push the idea of metrics.
Caruso: Exactly. I think one of Five Borough Farm’s contributions to the field is its focus on the public health perspective. There’s also the work Kubi Ackerman is doing at Columbia’s Urban Design Lab to evaluate New York’s capacity for urban agriculture. We’ve used some of his preliminary numbers to help us make the case that if we have x amount of stormwater, and if we extrapolate from the knowledge of how many vacant lots or rooftops could be used to scale up urban agriculture, then we can start to talk about how to address the combined sewage overflow problem. If we know that we could manage this many gallons through urban farms, and how much money the city spends per gallon on treating stormwater and wastewater, then we can calculate how much money the city could save if urban agriculture were considered one of many pieces of the green infrastructure puzzle. When you compare that to the cost of retrofitting or constructing new sewage treatment plants, and factor in the amount of energy that goes into treating wastewater, the savings become astronomical. Plus, there are all the benefits that urban agriculture advocates have made well known: vacant land is being re-utilized by communities, increasing property values, supporting economic micro-enterprises, contributing to healthy living, decreasing public health costs. Once you start layering all those factors, the potential of these farms or community gardens is phenomenal. 

Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm | photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Speaking of that kind of layering, and the multiple ways to discuss the benefits of farms and community gardens in the city, how did you decide to focus specifically on the intersection between stormwater management and urban agriculture?
Caruso: Our primary goal was to support urban agriculture in whatever way we could. We started by talking to farmers and asking them what would help their efforts. What we heard from people was the need to preserve existing urban farms and expand the agricultural capacity of the city. To do that, we wanted to make a quantitative case for the benefits. Our initial plan was to look at more metrics beyond stormwater.

Facteau: We also wanted to look at carbon capture as a way to show farms as potential carbon sinks and look at temperature differences in order to see urban agriculture’s role in mitigating urban heat island effect. Existing equipment for measuring carbon capture are suited for huge plots of land much more than an acre-size roof. There is definitely potential to look into that more in the future.

Stormwater emerged for us as a focus because of the rooftop tax credit issue we mentioned earlier – that it’s unfounded to exclude urban agriculture from green roof incentives without considering the numbers. We thought this was a good opportunity to initiate a policy change.

But of course we are very interested in some of the other environmental factors. For example, comparing different soil mediums  — what is used on rooftops is not technically soil, because dirt would be too heavy for most building capacities, but an engineered alternative – in terms of drainage, nutrient leaching, nutrient run-off, the remediation quality of the engineered growing medium and of the plants themselves, temperature fluctuations, etc. Those are some of the things we want to look at down the road. I think the more metrics you can get together, the more powerful a statement you can make. The social benefits – from filling in gaps in the foodshed to bringing people together in a shared community project – are well known. The environmental issues, particularly related to roofs, require more research.

Weighing produce at Two Coves, Queens | photo courtesy of Stephanos Koullias via farmingconcrete.org

You have discussed the potential for this research to affect policy and to help building owners understand their options. What are some other lessons to be learned from this research? What else do you hope will be done with your findings?
Caruso: The green roof tax credit is being amended. And the hope is that other plans put out by city agencies or reports by national organizations will factor some of this into their thinking. The American Planning Association, for example, puts out a guide for agriculture; if city planning institutions start to consider urban agriculture as a viable step for cities to strengthen local economies, expand regional foodsheds and isolate and address environmental challenges, that would be great.

The US Green Building Council’s recent announcement that the retrofitting of existing buildings is eligible for an innovation credit is an interesting tactic and a change in the right direction. I think as LEED begins to move more towards performativity and long-term monitoring, we’d like to see services such as Seeing Green becoming inextricable parts of measuring performance.

Some city agencies have legitimate concerns about scaling up rooftop gardens. The Fire Department is worried about the height of plants allowed and how that affects fire safety. The Buildings Department is worried about buildings’ structural load capacity. But hopefully the Parks Department will be a leader in this effort; working with them has been a great partnership for us. Their experimental roof garden on Randall’s Island is intended specifically to inform what kind of green roof systems they should be implementing on their buildings. If other City agencies did the same thing and committed to doing pilot projects on City-owned property, it would have a huge impact.

Recently, some have voiced skepticism about the viability of urban agriculture, dismissing it as a phenomenon only relevant to small portions of the population. What’s your response to those voices?
Caruso: I think when people hear the term urban agriculture, they make the mistake of thinking that its advocates are postulating that a city the size of New York or San Francisco or Chicago could grow all its food within its borders. Most farmers would laugh at that, given the amount of effort it takes to productively and intensively grow on even an acre of land. But I think it’s incredibly important that urban agriculture is part of a regional foodshed, is part of supporting local, decentralized economies and healthy, active and safe communities.

Once again, I think layering the environmental benefits, the social benefits and the economic benefits is really important to counter skepticism about urban agriculture’s viability.

AEA roof demonstration project | Photo courtesy of Seeing Green

Tyler Caruso works as an Environmental Planning consultant and researcher for such companies as Great Ecology and Environments, Roy Co. Architecture, thread collective, Gowanus CDC, and Advancement for Rural Kids, Inc. His area of focus is urban agriculture and ecological sanitation programs, designing closed loop systems using composting toilets, agriculture and greywater and rainwater harvesting systems. He has a Master’s of Science from the Environmental Systems Management Program (ESM) at Pratt. Tyler is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute in ESM Masters program. This summer he is co-teaching a design/build urban agriculture course that he helped to develop. He also co-founded and runs New York City’s Youth Food Council.

Erik Facteau is a biologist, with a Master’s of Science in Environmental Systems Management from Pratt Institute. He has a strong interest in the creation of local food systems and has worked at the NYC Greenmarkets for the last 5 years. Previously, Erik worked in a microbiology laboratory as an environmental air quality analyst. As an undergraduate, at SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, Erik Facteau studied Biology with a focus on Microbiology and Mycology. While at SUNY ESF, Erik conducted lab and field research on two ongoing plant restoration projects (The American Chestnut-Castanea dentata and The Pinedrop-Pterospora andromedea).

Connected States of America | Image via MIT SENSEable City Lab

CONNECTED USA

A NEW BRAND OF BUSES
Transportation think tank EMBARQ has released “a creative guide to making public transport the way to go,” calling for a re-branding for public transit services in efforts to attract new users, retain existing riders and encourage government support. In a competitive marketplace in which the auto industry spends $21 billion on card ads annually, EMBARQ says creative marketing must be seen as an investment, not a luxury. The report highlights efforts of global public transportation administrations that have developed branded identities and boosted user-friendliness by increasing accessibility, streamlining design and using non-traditional language. Read more coverage on The Dirt or download the full guide here.

FOODPRINT L.A.
For our Los Angeles readers: Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich have just launched an experiment in crowdsourcing data collection to find out more about the food Angelenos eat and where it comes from. Every two weeks, volunteers will be asked to document their food purchases using Kullect‘s new app. The data collected will be used to create infographics, maps and charts to foster a better understanding of Los Angeles’ foodscape. The project is in anticipation of the next installment of the Foodprint Project, coming to L.A. this fall.

TreeHouse on Governors Island | Image via Inhabitat

GOVERNORS ISLAND TREEHOUSE
Artist Benjamin Jones has officially opened the Governors Island TreeHouse, built from all-sustainable materials that were sourced from non-profit reclaimed material warehouse Build-It-Green! NYC. The installation features a few interactive add-ons: games like an FSC See-Saw, a cell phone charging station, a Scratch N’ Sniff stand, and a greywater peddling fountain to teach visitors about sustainable energy sources. This weekend, Jones has invited the public to help paint the structure and enjoy a picnic party, on Saturday, July 9th. Read more about the TreeHouse on Inhabitat.

EVENTS AND TO DOs:

Fast-Tracked With CUP: Two years and two billion dollars from now, New York will get its first new subway stop in 22 years. Join CUP’s teaching artists Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer and Jeff Maki on July 12th at The Lot under the High Line at 30th Street for the debut presentation of Fast-Tracked, an investigation into how subways are developed, with particular attention paid to the hidden history of the 7 line extension and the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project. The program is free and open to the public. Find out more on the CUP Facebook page or RSVP to info@welcometocup.org.

Sarah Nelson Wright’s Oculus at Bring to Light Festival 2010 | Image via Sarah Nelson Wright and Nathaniel Lieb

Light Bright: Bring to Light has released a request for proposals for their second annual event. The festival fosters a new kind of engagement between temporary art installations and public space, “creating an immersive spectacle for thousands of visitors. … Whether boldly monumental or quietly engrossing, Bring to Light fosters contemplative, multi-sensory and participatory experiences in the public sphere with lasting impact.” The RFP invites artists at all stages of their careers to propose site-specific installations of light, sound, performance and projection to transform the streets, parks and industrial waterfront of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The RFP is open until July 25th.

Vertical Urban Factory Closing Reception: Next week is your last chance to see Vertical Urban Factory at the Skyscraper Museum, closing on July 17th. On July 13, from 6—8pm, architectural historian and exhibition curator Nina Rappaport will lead a gallery tour and discussion about the exhibit, followed by a closing party. Find out more at skyscraper.org.

Fixing the Great Mistake: Why have we let cars take over our streets? Mark Gorton, founder of OpenPlans, noted entrepreneur and advocate for livable streets, will look at the history of transportation in New York City at the Center for Architecture next week. He will focus on unpacking some of the myths that are often cited to defend car-centric planning, providing evidence against them and offering a vision of livable streetlife in New York City.

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

Manhattan’s density, supported by its mass transit infrastructure, is the principle reason the average New Yorker has a smaller carbon footprint than her counterpart in another large US city. At the urban scale, this density is, of course, enabled by a singular combination of geographic, economic, social and political factors. But at the scale of the city’s individual buildings, high-rise living and working are made possible by technological factors. And some of the technologies developed for lifting people, water, hot and cool air to great heights currently work in much the same way as they did when initially introduced. How often do we stop to consider the systems required to make a building function?

This question bears more urgency than casual wonder. 39% of CO2 emissions derive from building operations, including plumbing, electricity, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (or HVAC) and, in the case of high-rise buildings, the elevator system. To be sure, innovative work in architecture and engineering is improving the performance and efficiency of building operations, yet many people are unaware of the scope of energy intensive activities required for a building to function. So, with this in mind, we spent a day with Jim Ferrari, the chief mechanic of 515 Madison Avenue, a midtown Manhattan office building designed by J.E.R. Carpenter and completed in 1931, to find out more about what exactly goes on behind doors that typically only maintenance workers pass through. What Ferrari revealed was a series of day-to-day systems that many of us — those concerned with the environmental sustainability of our building stock — talk about improving without necessarily being able to visualize.

-C.S.

This Urban Omnibus video is the third in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

515 Madison Avenue | Photo courtesy of Newmark Knight Frank

The music in the video, “Mistral” by Loscil, appears courtesy of kranky.

GDNYU curators Peder Anker, Louise Harpman and Mitchell Joachim in the Gallatin Gallery | Image courtesy GDNYU

Always educational and entertaining, keynote speaker Bjarke Ingels of BIG began the day by presenting ways his firm has used new technology to create environmentally conscious design, with a particular focus on how to create new typologies of public space by better weaving new buildings into the existing urban fabric. Ingels’ presentation set the tone of the day: “green” cannot be a driving design agenda; it must be part and parcel with a broader program in order to make both the building and its sustainability successful.

Bjarke Ingels of BIG giving the morning keynote | Image via the GDNYU Facebook page

The following panel, “Research by Design,” was populated by practitioners who straddle both approaches: those who incorporate research into their design practices (WORKac, Interboro Partners, and ARO) and those who incorporate design into their research practice (SIDL). Dan Wood of WORKac framed the firm’s built work within the context of their published work, showing excerpts from 49 Cities, their recent compendium of research presented as a series of maps that graphically contrast the physical attributes of 49 global cities. Interboro Partners’ Georgeen Theodore identified their research practice as having a “journalistic approach,” and presented a series of the firm’s self-initiated projects that have stemmed from that work. Overall, the discussion focused on the idea of “visionary pragmatism,” where we have come to another point in history when it is necessary to propose wholly unfeasible, if well-researched, design solutions to interminable problems in order to forward disciplinary conversation.

Research by Design panel. L-R: Adam Yarinsky and Steve Cassell of ARO, Dan Wood of WORKac, Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams of SIDL, Georgeen Theodore of Interboro, and Alfredo Brillembourg of urban-think tank | Image via the GDNYU Facebook page

In “Global History and Ideas,” Mark Jarzombek took UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) head-on. He made the case, quite convincingly, that the type of historic preservation UNESCO practices creates false design histories and enthrones them. In so doing, UNESCO sites have become tourist destinations rather than preservation sites. He argued that, in the pursuit of authenticity and preserving heritage, UNESCO has created a picturesque world history, creating a worldview that has permeated art historical practice. Using Art History department listings, he argued for a declassification of art historical research areas in order to assuage the “culture of rupture” that sets “modern” against “traditional.” These false national histories have completely influenced how art historians teach, how practitioners think about their history and how designers design for regional sites. Jeffrey Inaba’s presentation, in contrast, showcased the breadth of C-Lab’s research, emphasizing the non-linearity of a design/research practice: research does not bleed into design. At a certain point a designer has to make something, has to stop researching. The design may be well informed and the process can go back and forth, using design to influence research and then research to influence design, but design is not a result of research.

Mark Jarzombek and Jeffrey Inaba | Image via the GDNYU Facebook page

In “Critical Green Design,” historians of science and technology reframed the history of design’s relationship with their fields, citing the changing relationship between the terrestrial world and the marine, the use of solar technologies, and the evolution of the language of scientific categorization in design. According to Daniel Barber, solar technologies were used as design elements long before commonly thought. The “World Solar Energy Project” was launched in 1954 and the MIT Solar Houses began as early as the 1930s.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, was the highlight of the day with a fluid presentation that combined design with science, social ritual and rigorous observation. He played excerpts of his acoustic portraits of ice and presented portraits of himself as an explorer, one who carries his studio on his back. To DJ Spooky, everything is sampling. Citing the cultural sampling that came out of colonization, serious objects and rituals that have become games (Snakes and Ladders, bungee jumping), as well as more current examples of cultural sampling (bamboo bicycles), he placed his own work in a long line of “samplers.”

The “Super Green” panel also explored sampling, though more implicitly, capturing the integration and development of new technologies in design. Peter Yeadon of Decker Yeadon spoke about one of his firm’s projects, the Homeostatic Façade System, to exemplify this type of integration. The system reacts to sunlight and expands between two panes of glass to provide shade for the interiors based on heat and light. And Nina Edwards Anker shared her “Latitude Lamps,” a series of solar lamps designed to suit specific latitudes, directly informed by solar declination arcs. Fueled by solar panels, they can be configured as modules at the scale of a screen, they can exist as single lamps and they can be scaled to be habitable.

The day closed with a keynote address from Sanford Kwinter. As Kwinter himself noted, it seemed strange to end a symposium on design and the implementation of new technologies with an address from a theorist, but in many ways he tied the day together. In what he termed the “post-sustainable age,” he called for thinkers to rethink the possible, bringing to mind the morning panelists who had spoken of “visionary pragmatism,” designing what is impossible now in order to make it possible later. Inherent to the GLOBAL design initiative is its interdisciplinary nature, and the symposium reflected that, weaving together the discourses of climate change, globalization, localized design interventions and design education.

Sanford Kwinter giving the closing keynote | Image via GDNYU Facebook page

Jessica Cronstein is a designer and writer interested in the point at which the social, cultural and physical growth of a city intersect. She has just completed her M.Arch at Rice University and lives in New York City.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Image by Ryan Heshka | via wsj.com

GETTING TRANSPORTATION POLICY RIGHT
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, the Brookings Institution’s Robert Puentes calls for an overhaul to the way our country spends its transportation dollars. Moving away from the transportation infrastructure improvements that have built enough new highway lane miles since 2000 to circle the world four times, Puentes instead advocates for a necessary alignment between transportation and the new economy with private and public sectors joining forces to cut carbon emissions and increase connectivity. Puentes spells out a series of national goals, concerning export corridors, commuter connectivity, greener infrastructure and better technology, ”and how transportation policy can — no, must — be rethought to achieve them.” Read the full article here.
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PLANYC’S MISSING PIECE
Last month, the City unveiled its latest update of PlaNYC, addressing what various City agencies, community groups, businesses and others can do to further the administration’s sustainability goals, calling for a multi-stakeholder approach to implementation. In an article for Gotham Gazette, Pratt Center fellows Eve Baron and Alyssa Katz see things differently. For them, participatory planning is “The Sustainability Plan’s Missing Piece.” Calling the plan “top-down” and pointing to the remarkable fact that New York is the only major metropolis without a comprehensive plan, Baron and Katz also outline some mechanisms to improve the administration’s track record. Many of the city’s progressive planning voices (Hunter’s Tom Agnotti, the Pratt Center/NYIRN’s Adam Friedman, NYU’s Furman Center, et. al.) have published complimentary pieces raising flags over PlaNYC’s process, in a series of working papers and articles called Sustainability Watch.
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MAKING NYC ACTIVE
Last month, ASLA’s blog The Dirt interviewed Joyce Lee, Director of the Active Design Program at the NYC Department of Design and Construction, about the City’s Active Design Guidelines. The guidelines explore ways to take on the obesity and fitness crisis through interdisciplinary design of both indoor and outdoor environments. Lee goes into the framework behind the plan and points to ways that New Yorkers, despite their use of public transit, suffer from the car-related physical fitness problems that the rest of the country is dealing with. Lee describes the guidelines’ multifaceted approach, from covering sustainable construction and design to changing walking and movement habits. By connecting the design guidelines to the LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) rating system, the guidelines offer credit to developers for including things like bike storage areas and tree-lined streets. The design guidelines are being applied now to cities across the country and, although voluntary, are part of public discourse which will trickle its way into legislation. For more information about the Active Design Guidelines, look back at Samir Shah’s recap of the program’s launch last year or dive into the full Active Design Guidelines Plan at nyc.gov.
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EVENTS AND TO-DOs:

VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY | If Nina Rappaport’s recent Omnibus feature Vertical Urban Factory caught your eye, check out two related upcoming events. On Wednesday, June 1st, the New York Design Center is hosting a panel discussion on the future of manufacturing at Trespa, 62 Greene Street. Then, on June 2nd, a tour of the Brooklyn Navy Yard as an American model for sustainable urban manufacturing will meet at the York Street F subway stop at 5:15pm to board a shuttle bus. Suggested contribution is $35, to be paid online at verticalurbanfactory.org (under the “contribute” tab), or bring a check made to New York Foundation for the Arts to the event. The tour will end at Re-Bar in Dumbo for a drink. Rain or shine. RSVP by May 31 to: jamie.chan@gmail.com

Rainbow City at Art Basel Miami Beach | via friendswithyou.com

POP UP PLAZA PARKING LOT: FOOD AND INFLATABLES | The New York Times announced the latest development planned near the High Line’s 30th Street and 10th Avenue entrance. Currently a parking lot, the “Lot at 30th Street” will soon to be transformed into a multi-dimensional art and food mecca planned by Friends of the High Line. The space will feature public art installations, a 350-seat bar called Lot on Tap, managed by chef Tom Colicchio’s restaurant Colicchio & Sons. Collichio will also curate a rotating roster of five high-quality, lower-cost food trucks to compliment the bar. In its 20,000-square-foot eastern section, the Lot will also house a public art exhibition, “Rainbow City,” a collection of huge, brightly colored inflatables from Miami-based artists Friends With You.

BOB the Pavilion | via bobthepavilion.com

BOB the PAVILION | In line with the recent trend in inflatable art, Columbia is unveiling a “floating pavilion” named BOB. This “cloud” will float above a public pavilion and bathroom site, conceived by Columbia’s GSAPP and SoA students. Open June 1 – 25, the pavilion includes composting public restrooms, a projection screen, 12 student-designed seats and a bar. The pneumatic roof is re-pressurized by the toilets’ exhaust. Derived from the idea that “a society that does not provide public restrooms, does not deserve public art,” BOB pushes the link between the necessity for public space and provision of basic amenities. To learn more about BOB, click here.

Stillspotting NYC | via guggenheim.org

STILLSPOTTING NYC: SANITORIUM | The Guggenheim has launched its latest series of off-site, public installations called stillspotting nyc, in response to the idea that “ever-present cacophony of traffic, construction, and commerce; the struggle for mental and physical space; and the anxious need for constant communication in person or via technology are relentless assaults on the senses.” This two-year project will identify “stillspots” across the five boroughs and, every three to five months, will transform these areas with public tours, events or installations by artists, designers, composers and philosophers. The first installation of the series debuts in Brooklyn, from Mexican artist Pedro Reyes. Sanatorium, a temporary therapeutic clinic offering visitors 16 distinct “urban therapies,” will be located at the storefront level of 1 Metrotech Center (entrance at 345 Jay Street) in Downtown Brooklyn. Thursdays, June 2 and 9, 2–10pm; Fridays, June 3 and 10, 2–10pm; Saturdays, June 4 and 11, 10am–10pm; and Sundays, June 5 and 12, 10am–10pm; advance tickets only.

ARCHITECTING THE FUTURE CONFERENCE | The Buckminster Fuller Institute is hosting a three-day series of events and lectures around the announcement of the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge finalists. The annual competition asks participants to design workable solutions to significant world challenges. Architecting the Future kicks off with a lecture from John Thackara on June 8th at 6pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; followed by “Urban Solution Sets —Visionary Strategies for the Future of Cities” at the Center for Architecture on Thursday, June 9th, from 2-4pm; and the announcement of winners and presentation of the selected solution at the CUNY Graduate Center on June 10th, from 6-8pm. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to bfi.org.

CALLS FOR ENTRIES | Now through July 4th, BOFFO is inviting architects to submit design proposals for the second annual Building Fashion, which pairs fashion designers with architects for a series of temporary installations in Tribeca that explore the interesection of architecture and fashion. See more details at Architizer. Meanwhile, at the intersection of architecture and urban agriculture, suckerPUNCH is hosting an international ideas competition for a Center for Urban Farming, to be imagined for a site adjacent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Registration deadline is August 15.

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

Transit Efficiency
The watchdog group Citizens Budget Commission has released a report evaluating the MTA’s budget efficiencies, noting, surprisingly, that the subway system is one of the most efficient in the nation and offers the lowest cost per passenger trip. It’s not all good news for the agency — our bus and commuter rail systems seem to be two of the least efficient in the US. Second Ave. Sagas has more on the CBC’s findings, or you can download a PDF of the full report here.
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America's Great Waters | via nwf.org

City Harbor: Officially Great
This week we spoke with two of people responsible for keeping our local waterways safe and functioning. It looks like they’re doing a good job — the New York/New Jersey Harbor has been designated one of “America’s Great Waters” by the America’s Great Waters Coalition, an alliance of national, regional, state and local water-related organizations. The coalition seeks to restore natural glory to selected bodies of water and, by elevating the profile of each individual ecosystem, to advance regional priorities in the national political spotlight. Other great waters include the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River, the Everglades and the Chesapeake Bay, all with active remediation strategies.
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City Council Passes Roof Efficiency Bills
The New York City Council just passed three new Green Building bills developed by the Green Codes Task Force to encourage more energy efficient roofs in NYC, as part of a larger effort to remove bureaucratic obstacles to green development in the city. Starting in 2012, the first bill will require that all newly constructed buildings and renovations to older buildings’ roof materials (where more than 50 percent or 500 square feet is being replaced) will be more reflective to absorb less heat in summer months and more emissive in cooler weather. Taking effect immediately, the second bill changes the building code to exclude rooftop solar installations from buildings’ height limitations. And the third adds heat and power systems to the list of allowable rooftop structures.
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Coney Island Boardwalk | Photo by Flickr user blhphotography

Coney Island’s Concrete- and Plastic-walk
Coney Island’s iconic boardwalk has come under threat by a recent Parks Department proposal to replace a third of the wooden boardwalk with recycled plastic lumber. On March 21st, Community Board 13 voted against that proposal, which was an alternative to an even more extreme plan to convert all 3 miles of the boardwalk into concrete. The City is basing their concrete-leaning stance on cost benefits and the need for car-ready surfaces along the boardwalk. Coney Island’s community board will receive another revised plan next month to deliberate further.
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City Chickens
With urban farming on the rise in the city, Just Food has taken their City Chicken program to another level by offering community groups live chickens for egg production. The program builds coops for the groups and provides 3-20 chickens for them to raise in community gardens or other spaces across the city. Aspiring backyard chicken farmers take note: this year’s deadline for City Chicken applications is April 15th.
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Coming Up
The Center for Architecture is hosting their monthly Oculus Book Talk this Monday, April 11th from 6-8pm, with Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities, to discuss the evolution of urban planning theory and practice today from the twentieth century.

Also on Monday night, Pete’s Candy Store is hosting a talk on “The Once and Future Squatter,” with the Lower East Side Squatter Homesteader Archive Project, Matt Metzgar (Director) and Peter Spagnulo (Co-founder). The evening will address current efforts by squatters and homesteaders to create a research archive “from the ground up” — collecting, preserving and organizing the evidence of an underground, insurgent movement — as well as the significance such a collection may have for scholars and the public.

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

GSD Territories of Urbanism | Photo © Justin Knight Photography

The several hundred students, alumni and guests that gathered at the Harvard Graduate School of Design this past Saturday were ostensibly there for the final day of the school’s 50 Year Anniversary conference, “Territories of Urbanism: Urban Design at 50.” Anticipation however, was most reserved for the afternoon session featuring the trenchant Andres Duany, who recently laid down the gauntlet in an article for Metropolis, challenging the efficacy of the GSD’s new focus on Ecological Urbanism, a showpiece of the conference.

A booklet passed out to attendees entitled “Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?” asserted that Ecological Urbanism will respond to climate change by situating sustainable architecture and green technology within the urban landscape through “nothing short of a new ethic and aesthetic” of design.

In Metropolis, Duany had written that the GSD’s recent hiring of landscape architect Charles Waldheim and its pedagogical shift to Ecological Urbanism indicated that it was abdicating its responsibility to teach urban design. Aptly titled “Duany vs. Harvard GSD,” the article seemed to suggest that by abandoning any and all “urbane urban design sensibility”, Duany, and by extension New Urbanism (he is the co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism), now represents the only viable aesthetic in the vanguard of urban design.

Alex Krieger, former Chair of the GSD Urban Planning and Design Department, shot back that Landscape Urbanism has long been “the design discipline that has most consistently retained consciousness of humanity’s impact on land and environments.” Therefore, it is the most appropriate discipline to shape the future of urban design, as concern about climate change and our ecological footprint becomes more pervasive.

Tit for tat, Krieger added that Duany’s mockery was likely a “sign of uncharacteristic insecurity” and “personal worry that the term Landscape Urbanism will soon supplant New Urbanism amongst the purveyors of design sloganeering.” Krieger was correct to point out that Duany is an unabashed lobbyist for the preeminence of his New Urbanism, as the conference proceedings illustrated. The stage was set to settle the debate on whose urbanism will provide the most sustainable principles for urban design in the future.

GSD Territories of Urbanism | Photo © Justin Knight Photography

At the GSD on Saturday, a very confident Duany listed three reasons why the recent financial and intensifying environmental crises favor New Urbanism to offer sustainable urban design solutions. First: peak oil will make it more costly to drive, thus favoring creation of the dense, walkable neighborhoods advocated by New Urbanism. Second: the mainstay metric for ecological footprint analysis is carbon emissions, which will incentivize walking and public transit over cars as favored modes of transportation. Third: the residential, mixed-use typologies championed by New Urbanism were too complicated to be included in the mass securitization of mortgages and thus were resilient to the housing crisis.

“Let’s make humane, equitable, sustainable and beautiful cities. Enough said? Any disagreements?” -Michael SorkinFinally, as Duany put it, “it’s all about age.” He pointed to the fact that the suburban landscape does not provide for the aging Baby Boomers, who eventually will be unable to drive. The professional future for the next generation of urban designers, he stated, is greyfield work. Translation: retrofitting suburban parking lots into “Jacobsian” neighborhoods according to a nifty 6-step plan.

GSD Associate Professor Pierre Bélanger provided the Ecological Urbanism counterargument. He stated that the financial and environmental crises in fact exposed a serious weakness in traditional urban forms. Dense, vertical cities formed by Euclidean zoning, he said, were totally dependent on centralized infrastructure – including water extraction, waste landfilling, oil importing, food processing, and uniform transportation – that is crumbling, costly to maintain, and environmentally detrimental.

The future of infrastructure planning, therefore, is paramount, and the project of Ecological Urbanism is to design and integrate infrastructure into the city in a way that is both environmentally sound and economically productive. Civil engineers, Bélanger argued, are the true planners of the modern city, but landscape architects will play a critical role in mediating how infrastructure meets the urban interface. Trained in constructing ecologies, landscape architects are the only professionals poised to consider how all infrastructure types – energy, food, waste, communications and transport – can be synthesized into a living system that covers the entire regional urban footprint.

Diverse and decentralized infrastructure is a critical component of sustainability that decreases a city’s ecological footprint and increases resiliency to climate change and economic unpredictability. But should infrastructure, as ecological urbanism suggests, be the ordering force of the urban form?

Bélanger said:

“Whether in slums, suburbs or skyscrapers, paradigms are changing. Dispersal is subbing in for density, pace instead of space, sequence over speed, design instead of technology, concurrency over control, culture instead of growth…Releasing the pristine ideals of the city for the sake of security or permanence or density opens a horizon of new social equities…”

The alliteration is catchy, but the concept may be misleading. Increasing density and urban growth are well-documented phenomena worldwide. An environmental expert might rightfully point out that densifying suburbs increases environmental impacts by overburdening unsustainable infrastructure and cementing unsustainable patterns of urbanization. But that same expert would probably be suspicious of encouraging unlimited sprawl, irrespective of how sustainable the infrastructure supporting it was or how artfully knitted into the environment.

Moreover, “pristine ideals of the city,” such as personal mobility, active public space, and human-scaled environments, are some of the greatest forces for social equity in a city. In reference to a plan by James Corner of Field Operations (frequently cited as a leader of the Ecological Urbanism practice), Michael Mehaffy wrote:

“Non-designers might be forgiven for wondering why designers would employ such arbitrary, even perhaps deranged, forces, at the apparent expense of requirements for walkability, social interaction, access to transit, dynamics of public space – perhaps even social justice and equity. After all, there is no reason to suppose, say, that a frail or poor or elderly person can navigate such a vast no-man’s land of space to access transit or other daily needs.”

Charles Waldheim said, at a previous lecture, that Ecological Urbanism was “specifically meant to provide an intellectual and practical alternative to the hegemony of the New Urbanism,” and it has. Ecological Urbanism points out that New Urbanism, in its slavish devotion to density, ignores the urgent need to leave space for new, sustainable forms of urban infrastructure. Conversely, New Urbanism provides a counterweight to Ecological Urbanism’s obsession with infrastructure that ignores practical patterns of human settlement.

L-R: Jose Luis Vallejo, Georgeen Theodore, Michael Sorkin, Andres Duany | GSD Territories of Urbanism | Photo © Justin Knight Photography

It is probably best that these two urbanisms are fighting to dominate intellectual territory of urban design, for both will be necessary to promote real sustainable solutions. This was made quite clear when Duany suggested that the best use for Ecological Urbanism was biophilia: greening buildings to make them more aesthetically pleasing to the middle class.

Duany was right about one thing. The sustainability battle among the next generation of urban designers will be fought on fields of grey and brown – the parking lot and the post-industrial site – whether they are being “retrofitted” for mixed-use development or converted into infrastructural landscapes. Either way, it appears that there is ample room and need for both.

As the ever-entertaining and chatty Michael Sorkin (also on the panel) summarized:

“Let’s make humane, equitable, sustainable and beautiful cities. Enough said? Any disagreements? We really can’t screw around. Precipitous decline in the planetary environment may annihilate us. We need a lot of new cities and a lot of better old ones. They should assume many morphologies. We are very far from done with inventing the form of the city. Neither the reflexive reproduction of historic types … nor the ‘go with the flow’ of urban capital sluts will work it out alone. Any problems so far?

Cities need to supply their own food, energy, water, thermal behavior, air quality, movement systems, building and cultural and economic institutions. This urban self-sufficiency is a means to political autonomy and planetary responsibility. Sustainable, equitable, and beautiful. Anybody got a problem with that?”

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Genevieve Sherman is currently a master’s candidate in City Design and Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is interested in how urban planners can mediate the politics and science of climate change to make cities more environmentally sustainable and resilient places.

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.

Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, Greenpoint, Brooklyn | Copyright Adam Gol

What do you want from your city’s soil? There are many homegrown and local agriculture ideas in Living Concrete/Carrot City, an exhibition currently on view at Parsons The New School for Design, and they’re worth a look. The projects range from farm visits for families to bodega research, education and empowerment. There are mapping projects that do the basic chore of charting urban gardens and farms, and there are maps that gather information about harvests and how they translate into economic terms. There are rainwater harvesting kits and partnerships on water. There are sustainable food projects for kids in the Bronx and for adults on the Lower East Side (PDF). There are biological cocktails made out of frogs and gelatin, and there are sculptures of apples visualizing their carbon footprint. There is the ubiquitous traveling planter bag. And there are bees: beehives, bee sound projects, and bee videos.

The Living Concrete/Carrot City project is described as “a cross-institutional dialogue” between the newly produced Living Concrete, co-curated by Nevin Cohen and Radhika Subramaniam and featuring work by faculty and students at Parsons, Eugene Lang College and other parts of the New School, and Carrot City: Designing for Urban Agriculture, an initiative of the Department of Architectural Sciences at Ryerson University in Toronto that came to fruition under the green thumbs of Mark Gorgolewski, June Komisar and Joe Nasr. Wall panels feature some of the projects shown at Ryerson, international in scope and conceived by students and design professionals alike, which are also listed in detail on the Carrot City website. The projects are organized by category: City, Community & Knowledge, Housing, Rooftops, and Products. We should hope that NYC designers will be inspired by projects from Berlin or other cities where urban agriculture used to be a necessity and has only become a privilege in its own right quite recently.

One of the things that is hard to reconcile in the realm of urban agriculture is the seeming lack of cohesiveness between certain groups ostensibly seeking similar outcomes. The accretion of projects in Living Concrete/Carrot City serves first and foremost to put everyone on the same page. In that vein, what becomes interesting is the partnership between Parsons and Ryerson. Nevin Cohen and Radhika Subramaniam knew an important piece of urban agriculture documentation when they saw it and decided to follow suit with their own version of the show, adding more projects, people, and media attention to the movement.

A pamphlet has been published to accompany the exhibition, which emphasizes the growing role of the university in the development of urban agricultural ideas and initiatives; Scott Stringer’s participation in the Food and Climate Summit hosted by NYU and Just Food last December is exemplary of this. The idea of urban farming as an educational utility is inescapable. The exhibition can be lauded for its efforts to create a visible, public platform for pedagogy, something that targeted local organizations sometimes miss. And the show is indeed down-to-earth, in the sense that it is not looking for the perfect vertical farm or the tomato of the future. Rather, they are testing how the existing urban landscape can be used to challenge the agro-industrial complex.

New York Tribune, April 29, 1917

Urban agriculture is not a new phenomenon. My friend Daniel who is trying to put a mobile vegetable garden in front of City Hall sends me articles from his research into the history of urban agriculture in the US. The latest was about an architects corps managed by our very own Architectural League in 1917 to till and cultivate 40 acres of urban farmland. Architects were encouraged to donate half of their vacation time over 3 to 4 months during the growing season to cultivating fields, or to pay the equivalent of $21 towards the effort. Over 100 responded for work, with the women in the offices handling the administrative work and the Mayor’s committee distributing the harvest.

Symbolically these things say a lot, but they are fraught with sexism, economic inequality, pro bono labor and problems of access. And what is sustained as a result of these efforts — before, during and after? Things like efficiency, value, health (one of the projects uses PVC planters – not on my plate, please), and inclusion need to be further investigated, which is why the Design Trust’s Five Borough Farm project exhibited is so important. Five Borough’s analysis of existing urban farming initiatives and the development of metrics for grading success will be key in assessing the long term viability of urban agriculture as a source of food, in addition to its pedagogical and community-building aspects.

But where do we turn journalism into activism, a documentation of projects into policy? The DIY or DIT (do-it-together) component is lacking in the project selection. Many require a city agency, a student (if not professional) design team, in part due to permits required and acquisition of land. But I wonder where Atom Cianfarani is, with her green-it-yourself roofing kit, and all the guerrilla gardeners out there — does their harvest count in the Farming Concrete total? I am of the opinion that urban agriculture is not a fad and will continue to inform community design and city-based health campaigns, but some people think the urban agriculture design trend will be exhausted, expire and we will move on.

But even if the urban agriculture design movement falls flat, the DIY/DIT urban agriculture movement will continue to grow. There is an enormous sense of community that goes with it. Picking up a CSA share once a week and exchanging recipes with people who are eating the same things is fun. Dropping off compost at the community garden is rewarding. Fresh herbs from the backyard are tasty and free.

In the meantime, while the urban agriculture design movement is booming, Living Concrete/Carrot City is presenting a tremendous opportunity to see some great designers and speakers who know a lot about these things, from New York City and beyond, every Wednesday night at the Parsons gallery on 13th Street. You can download the public program schedule here to join in the conversation. There is also a question-answer board in the gallery and a place to post fliers about your own upcoming food and urban agriculture events – don’t miss it.

LIVING CONCRETE/CARROT CITY
October 1–December 15, 2010
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
66 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street
New York, NY

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Sarah Snider is the Executive Assistant at the Architectural League of New York. She has lived in London, Paris, and the Bay Area, and she works with Co-op NYC, a network for NYC based housing cooperatives.

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.