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.

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.

Addressing and defining change and measurable progress often seems like the end result of a project or political campaign, rather than the starting point it ought to be. Last weekend, Creative Time, that hyper-dynamic creative engine for public art and its potential in New York (and increasingly elsewhere), held its second annual summit, a two-day conference in New York City, and succeeded in presenting a concrete conversation about design for change that went beyond the clichés to engage systemic approaches to political challenges.

In his opening remarks, Nato Thompson, the chief curator of Creative Time and of the summit, summed it up well with a quote from artist Tania Bruguera: “I don’t want art that points at the thing. I want art that is the thing.” Thompson emphasized the growing importance of cultural production beyond any perceived isolated world of art. He reminded us that now “the cultural landscape is the political landscape…and this makes culture producers extraordinarily relevant in society.” If it were not as apparent before, now it is glaringly obvious that people vote based on their cultural affiliations, making cultural production at the forefront of politics, across the spectrum.

2010 Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change recipient Rick Lowe

This year’s choice for the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change captures the approach of this year’s summit perfectly. Rick Lowe received the prize for his Project Row Houses, a far-ranging, community-based architectural and artistic project that aims to create sustainable dignity and culture-led potential within Houston’s Third Ward. As the project nears its third decade, its scope of commitment and practical yet inspired vision continues to typify the kind of contextualized public interest creative practice that this summit seems to exalt. The topics and projects ranged from the architecture of conflict to prison systems to artistic interventions in agriculture. And the old clichés that the personal is political, the local is global and, increasingly, that the cultural is political, were made plain.

Claire Pentecost, Art Institute of Chicago

In her presentation on food, Claire Pentecost of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose work investigates divisions of knowledge (for example, nature and artificiality), may have best articulated the necessary scope for a committed and systematic approach to change in the 21st century. She marvels at the deeply entrenched separation between man and nature and how this has led to, among other perverse dynamics, the lack of complex thinking about eating, which is, she reminds us, “our most intimate experience of the natural world.” Of course she is greatly encouraged by the progress of the last decade, in which complex thinking about eating has indeed gained traction, perhaps permanently. While many see this as merely a trend, she strongly believes it is a movement, a “long-brewing, popular response to deep structural conditions that degrade life across the board. As an issue, food is entangled with a host of other problems and possible solutions, from health care to climate change, from class to wildlife, from energy to sovereignty. Food is so cultural and certainly our ecological and political solutions are ultimately cultural.”

Lest anyone dismiss this movement as an expensive bourgeois flight of fancy, Pentecost listed a number of examples that show otherwise, including Detroit, “the capital of a failed paradigm” that also presents the largest urban farming network in the country. Other examples abound – Milwaukee, Oakland and many other places around the globe, including in India and Mexico, where it is indeed a movement, and one necessary for survival. But Pentecost appreciates the need to further bridge the gap between “what may be perceived for some as an elective desire for change [and] the work of those who are fighting for their lives.”

The other artists on the “Food” panel also presented deeply integrated projects that illustrate the prime importance the production and distribution of food has in almost every facet of life.  Amy Franceschini’s urban gardens, one of which was in front of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, consciously echo and draw upon such historical precedence for urban gardening as the government-promoted Victory Gardens of WWII, when one propaganda poster read “Victory Gardens March On To Freedom.”

Wheatfield — A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan, 1982. Commissioned by Public Art Fund | © 1982 Agnes Denes

Agnes Denes, an environmental land artist who can easily silence any murmurings about the aesthetic value of activist art, spoke about the need to address our existence as the first species that can control its own evolution. Her work has always integrated science and art, and many other fields that these two seemingly disparate disciplines subsume. Perhaps her most famous urban intervention was the beautiful wheat field she planted in Battery Park in 1982.  She made skyscrapers, golden wheat and a surrounding harbor all seem a wonderful accident of nature. She is presently involved with a 25-year master plan in Holland that aims to string together a 100-kilometer-long series of forts while implementing an extensive system of water and flood management, an example of how her work has evolved towards more committed interventions that aim to change a space permanently, but still just as beautifully.

Eyal Weizman, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London

A closer investigation of the role of the transformation of geography itself was presented by Eyal Weizman, the director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a member of the architectural research project Decolonizing Architecture. Weizman posits that the power of geography is not in its fixity but in its transformation. He sees space as something that “…goes through continuous transformation. That within that transformation lies its power, its oppressive power, but also its potential.” He speaks of a “political plastic” to describe the powerful potential of the elasticity of space. In more concrete terms, Weizman illustrated this notion by explaining that “In the West Bank, it is not only the fact of where military bases, roads, settlements, bridges are built, but the fact of constant transformation…its unpredictability that has actually become the mechanism for control.” An impetus for his project was Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and the very real physical and geographical dilemmas faced by Palestinians who had to inhabit the physical space of their recently departed enemy. While Israel/Palestine is in many ways a unique area of geographical conflict where land, space and structure carry special historical burdens, this work translates into any area of conflict, minor or major.  It is also, as Weizman points out, a way of entering the political process in a different way: from the ground up, so to speak.

Claire Doherty, curator, writer, and educator

Of the six regional reports about revolutions in public practice elsewhere in the world, Claire Doherty’s presentation about the use of public space in the UK, especially in light of the 2012 Olympics, resonated most. Doherty, a curator from Bristol, led the audience through a series of projects investigating the use of public space. At one end was the use of Trafalgar Square – the place of near-hysteric populist joy at the awarding of the 2012 Olympics and where Antony Gormley held his Fourth Plinth experiment, in which a total of 2,400 volunteers occupied a plinth over 100 days. Doherty described the experiment as “false democracy at its worst…the experience of watching the participants was akin to an excruciating episode of Big Brother.” She provided examples of projects that better feed the public’s very real need for shared cultural experiences, public art projects with long durations, such as the Liverpool Biennial, Grizedale, and Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland, a fascinating ongoing project in direct response to the 2012 Olympics. Nowhereisland is a micro-nation created by Hartley on an island that emerged from the melting ice of a retreating glacier near the North Pole. Hartley discovered this island while on an Arctic expedition in 2004 and will be sailing a scaled version along English shores during the Olympics. As Doherty described it, “This is our Cultural Olympiad — a riposte to the monolithic intervention in public space with an epic endeavor and call upon public time to become citizens of this new micro-nation — to imagine what laws and rules this landmass might accrue on its slow journey.”

Laura Kurgan, Spatial Information Design Lab

A project with more direct implications for New York and other urban centers was presented by Laura Kurgan, the co-director of the Spatial Information Design Lab in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia. For the past five years, Kurgan has been working on a project called Architecture and Justice, which was first exhibited at the Architectural League and is also part of MoMA’s permanent collection. Architecture and Justice used criminal justice statistics from courts in multiple American cities to literally map out the geography of incarceration and return. Kurgan and her team analyzed the home addresses of the incarcerated (the vast majority of whom are non-violent felons sentenced to 1-3 years) to visualize what they refer to as “Million Dollar Blocks,” so called because of the millions of dollars spent annually on incarcerating individuals from certain individual census blocks in places like East New York and the South Bronx. By illustrating the incarceration and return rate of these “million dollar blocks,” Kurgan offers an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between poverty and incarceration and the seemingly squandered opportunity to use that money more efficiently and effectively.

Million Dollar Blocks | Spatial Information Design Lab and the Justice Mapping Center

Kurgan has recently put those maps to use in a project in New Orleans, Louisiana, the state with the highest rate of incarceration in the country, and therefore in the world. An analysis of the Central City neighborhood revealed a rather disturbing portrait of a once-vibrant center both stricken by Hurricane Katrina and bisected by a newly-constructed highway. Using the resources and funding pouring into New Orleans after Katrina, Kurgan and her team were able to identify community groups and non-profits working separately in the area and help bring those groups together to implement several very effective projects. At present, Kurgan is working with New York’s Department of Probation to relocate Brooklyn’s central probation office. The office is currently in Brooklyn Heights, many miles and socio-economic levels away from the eastern reaches of Brooklyn where most offenders reside.

As Clare Pentecost emphasized, “We might say that the very concept of better living is what we are in the process of changing. To know how to live and soon how to coexist, it is not possible to be living well if others are living badly or if nature is damaged. To live well means to understand the deterioration of a species is the deterioration of all.”

While it is easy to dismiss some utopian visions for change as just that — utopian — the acceptance of a shared fate and the understanding of the systematic underpinnings that must be addressed are not easy to dismiss at all. The Creative Time Summit succeeded in both explaining this and providing viable models that make it real and provide clues to a more sustainable future.

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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 homely 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.

Acting responsibly in an era of climate change often requires choosing among worthy options: organic or local? Build a log cabin or move to a high-rise? Write to your Senator or stage a sit-in? For designers, the choices tend to be bound by measures to cut costs, save watts, or earn LEED points rather than informed by a deep understanding of the political, economic and social positions embedded within each choice. Choices about how to act must begin with analysis of the positions behind them. And Underdome, a project recently launched by Janette Kim and Erik Carver, performs that analysis: distilling each position it identifies to its essence, classifying each into broad themes – territory, power, lifestyle and risk – and then diagramming the relationships between positions, clusters of positions and themes. These themes provide the organizing framework for a series of panel discussions that Underdome is convening this month at Studio-X (you can read a little more about last night’s inaugural session at the bottom of this post). The next three discussions promise to advance the dialogue about energy, architecture and public life by linking it to examples of provocative interdisciplinary work while uncovering some of the overlooked narratives that influence thought and action around energy. Join the conversation this Thursday and again next week. But first, find out more about how Kim and Carver conceptualized and realized this ambitious project in the interview below. -C.S.

Using Fuller and Sadao's Dome Over Manhattan as a guiding metaphor, the Underdome project identifies a range of positions on energy and public life and assigns to each a corresponding architectural icon.

What is Underdome?

Janette Kim: Underdome is an architect’s guide to contending energy agendas. The project maps debates and classifies positions on energy in an effort to explore their implications for public life and the built environment. You could think of it as part architect’s handbook and part voter’s guide: it connects users to ideas by exposing them to writings, projects, and interviews about the use and distribution of energy.

Erik Carver: You could also think of it as a catalog of approaches to reforming energy use. While it is put together by architects for architects, Underdome looks at work from a number of disciplines, including economics, environmentalism, community advocacy, political science, policy, planning, and design. It’s launching with a website and a series of panel discussions this month.

How did it come about?

Erik: Last year, the stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) — and the attendant buzz of large projects and actual energy reform — provided a great opportunity to rethink the relationship of sustainability and public space. With the combination of the financial crisis and the ensuing atmosphere in which political realities seemed suddenly up for grabs, we saw how energy reform could work not just incrementally but instantly, and that inspired us to ask the question, what kind of disciplinary blinders have we as architects been wearing all along? We started off looking at the limits of architectural practice; is tweaking the efficiency in today’s buildings the best way to achieve energy goals?

Janette: Sometimes it seems that the role of the architect, when it comes to saving energy, is to source the right product or to calculate LEED points — as though the engineers and the bureaucrats alone can find the right way to minimize our energy usage. Or sometimes we push for design strategies — self-sustaining cities, locavore farms, town center densification — without interrogating some of the assumptions and belief systems behind them.

But when two contending approaches to energy are compared side-by-side, bigger issues emerge. Should we invest in market-based development of efficient products or support direct government investment in new infrastructures? Should we build zero-emissions cities in the desert, or revise the distribution networks of today? Should we buy better or consume less?

We started framing the project with the support of the Van Alen Institute’s New York Prize Fellowship in Systems and Ecology this spring and began a long research process which included interviewing energy experts and working with a team of excellent research assistants with backgrounds in architecture, political science and planning to develop the guide. Then came the exercise of classifying the positions and assumptions that emerged and organizing the information along the lines of a voter’s guide.

Homepage of www.theunderdome.net (detail)

Can you describe how you imagine the user’s experience of the website? Walk us through what she will see, read, learn, click through, etc.

Erik: If you go to the front page of the website, you’ll see a playful city map which charts out energy agendas as a series of architectural icons — small cartoon buildings representing the positions in the database. These icons are arrayed along four sets of axes which attempt to spatialize the agendas, almost like a structuralist game board.

Janette: The map on the front page can be read in a couple different ways: it imagines the built environment as a place in which various camps have created their own vision of how things should be. We’ve drawn a mini-Utopia to raise questions about the spaces and architectures that align with each position.

Erik: Clicking on one of the icons takes you to a page with quotes and images from thinkers, agencies, and policies advocating that agenda; as well as commentary and debate. From there, you can browse opposing positions, jump to advocates or commentators to see other positions that they address, or join in the discussion.

Janette: We strongly encourage users to make comments on these pages to contribute their own evaluation of these positions, or alternate interpretations of the issues outlined here. The guide can also be used to study the work of individual experts, policies, and projects, which can be found by clicking on the names of these examples in the policy pages or on the site map. And the guide also provides a bibliography and link resource for future reference.

How did you go about defining and classifying the various models of energy efficiency that will appear on the website?

Janette: The guide’s taxonomy covers the political, spatial, and cultural dimensions of energy, and revolves around four main topics: “Power” asks how governments, corporations, organizations and individuals have the potential to restructure energy performance. “Territory” asks how energy transforms and is transformed by the changing networks of today’s metropolis. “Lifestyle” asks what kind of norms and behavior energy performance schemes imagine. And lastly, “Risk,” as a kind of meta-category that cuts across these other fields, asks how we weigh priorities among a diverse set of interests and contingencies.

Erik: Each of these categories is populated by a number of clashing positions. If you look at the “Power” topic, for example, positions are tested against a individual-centralized axis and a socialized-free market axis. Approaches that call for a strong state investing in energy-related improvements tend to cluster along the centralized axis, while those supporting grass-roots organization or individual responsibility (as different as those approaches may be) fall on the individual end of the spectrum.

Janette: Similarly, approaches that emphasize a redistribution of resources can be compared to corporate-based models of investment and development along the socialized-free market axis. In this way, friends and foes are drawn on the map itself.

Many positions, of course, do not fit squarely within any matrix. At times examples challenge our very thinking about power. (Does the humanitarian non-profit fit under a socialized model because it is directing resources to the disadvantaged, or is it based on a free-market model through its financial relationship with companies?) Nonetheless, we hope that this kind of matrix can pose questions that might eventually rearrange these alliances and form new positions. And we invite users to use the comments section and, eventually, submit work that challenges and tests these viewpoints further.

Tell us about the precedents and references that guide this project, Buckminster Fuller’s Dome and the voter’s guide.

Erik: Our interest in the legacy of Buckminster Fuller’s work stems from his desire to to synthesize social reform, technology and architecture in his far-reaching visions of a better world. It was exactly 50 years ago that Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed a 2-mile dome over midtown Manhattan, which was intended to centralize climate control and quickly pay for itself in energy saved. It’s a perfect image for showing how reimagining building and infrastructure while hewing to an efficiency imperative could mean radical experimentation and the expression of new urban collectives.

Janette: The dome is often used as a symbol of the overreaching aspirations of grand Utopian schemes — and while this certainly warrants critique, what’s really interesting about the project to us is the way it rewrites equations of efficiency in relationship to a new public space of the city.

Erik: The official voter’s guide became a model for us of something that could condense a lot of complex information into something accessible and democratic. Of course, it has a meta-politics, a way of indexing political information that contains its own biases and assumptions, but this is something we were interested in taking on. Plus we just like voters’ guides.

Janette: Voters’ guides are an example of a way to lay out the issues without taking sides. They focus debate on certain issues and invite their users to make informed decisions. But the voter’s guide isn’t enough – of course the democratic process expands far beyond the polling station.

For architects, this question of how we vote is critical. Architects make their political and environmental priorities known in so many ways: by designing, writing, raising questions, framing research, promoting ideas, forming clients and educating them all at the same time.

Erik: It’s clear that energy and the environment are the topics of our generation. There is a lot of work being done on these problems, with competing and sometimes oppositional claims. Therefore, acknowledging the different political and social lenses that are informing agendas on energy use is important. Exploring an expanded spectrum of agendas might be a first step towards connecting them with architectural priorities. Because evaluating these programs in terms of dollar and carbon savings doesn’t get to the real questions: What city do we imagine for ourselves? What forms of political representation and authority work best, and who do they work for? What kind of lifestyles do we want to encourage?

And so, to explore these questions, we are using the strategy of debate. The process of testing agendas against their counterpoints asks you to articulate why you stand for one approach in the face of all other priorities. It defines what’s at stake. There is no clear answer to any of these issues, but through debate we publicly get to weigh the options, set priorities, and ultimately, take a stand.

How do you expect the user, armed with the information you present, will approach the topic of energy efficiency differently after she has explored the website? If she is a designer, how might the information presented inform her design process? How would you like visitors to the site to act and think differently after they have explored it?

Erik: We hope the site will help users think about energy as an ongoing conversation which has a history and connects with ideas about how the world is and should be, not just a list of products to buy or no-no’s to avoid. For architects, this could mean interrogating our assumptions about what is within our power, what the point of efficiency is, what the buildings we work on are saying and doing. For users in general, it might mean diversifying ideas of what sustainability could be, getting beyond skepticism, or confirming already-held suspicions. Hopefully, people will find it informative, go on to learn more about something we posted, and have more arguments with their friends.

Janette: For me, this project opens up some questions about how design can operate in the political field of energy. At hand are questions about how we research, relate, and weigh different models of efficiency in relationship to an ever-expanding range of criteria. I’ve taught several studios to architecture students using this guide as a basis: students were asked to research a given position, make a design proposal based on that position and then to argue it with their classmates. Through this process, some students found new hybrid positions, some developed projects that embodied debates, while others held their ground. My hope is that the guide will encourage designers and users to take positions. And, because climate change is an unpredictable threat, we begin to design for contingencies we might normally overlook, and anticipate broader constituencies that will maintain and monitor new spaces for years to come — models that might need to move beyond the traditional architect-client model.

…

Last night was the first of the Underdome Sessions, a series of public panel discussions that are an integral part of the project. The first theme to be discussed was Territory, and featured presentations by Petra Todorovich of the Regional Plan Association; June Williamson, co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia; Denise Hoffman-Brandt, a landscape architect whose work focuses on landscape design as a means for environmental sustainability; and Laura Kurgan, who teaches architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning at Columbia University, where she is Co-Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL) and the Director of Visual Studies. Georgeen Theodore, principal of Interboro, moderated. The discussion began with the question of how energy performance re-frames the networks of the contemporary metropolitan region. It soon expanded to address the variety of scales of investigation and intervention — from micro-ecosystems on urban streets to strategies for improving the performance of the suburban landscape, and from the cohesiveness of the metropolitan region to global flows of capital and migration. What emerged from the diversity of perspectives and precedents discussed was a passionate call to think holistically and systemically at every scale. The next three discussions promise to be equally provocative, so mark your calendars: on Thursday, October 14th at 6:30 is the Power discussion, featuring Moshe Adler, James Gallagher, Laurie Kerr and Reinhold Martin. Next Tuesday the 19th at 7pm is the Lifestyle discussion, with  Sarah Beatty, Jonathan Massey, Jerilyn Perine, Heather Rogers and Meredith Tenhoor. And next Thursday the 21st at 6:30 is the Risk discussion, with Scott Holladay, Cary Krosinsky, Jonathan Levy, Michael Osman and Rae Zimmerman.

In 1856, George Dodd, a Victorian historian, wrote, “The supply of food to a great city is among the most remarkable of social phenomena, full of instruction on all sides.” Thus far, Foodprint Project events have borne out the truth of this statement, bringing together an audience and speakers curious to relearn their city using food as a guide, and passionate about the potential for reshaping food systems through urban design. At both Foodprint Toronto and Foodprint NYC, we have learned about creative solutions, unique opportunities, and shared challenges — and yet we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Sarah Rich and I co-founded the Foodprint Project as an exploration of the ways food and cities give shape to one another. As we told Urban Omnibus back in February, days before our first event, we wanted to see what you could learn if you used food as a lens to look at the city.

So, with two cities — New York City and Toronto — under our belts, what have we learned?

Many extraordinary and peculiar factoids, certainly: enough to keep us well-stocked at dinner parties for years to come. Toronto, for example, is the second largest urban food processing hub in North America (after Chicago) and its food factories still occasionally overwhelm certain neighborhoods with the smell of roasting coffee beans, freshly-slaughtered beef, or potato and leek soup. We also learned that turning just 10% of NYC’s private backyards over to urban agriculture would produce 113 million lbs of vegetables each year, or enough to feed 700,000 people at current rates of consumption.

We have also confirmed one of the Foodprint Project’s founding premises: the best food conversations are hyper-interdisciplinary. As Nevin Cohen, urban planner and panelist at Foodprint NYC, put it, “Food is a social justice issue and a public health issue; it’s also an economic development issue, it’s a transportation issue, it’s a regional planning issue, it’s an ecological issue.” By inviting panelists whose work engages deeply with the city’s food systems, but who come from widely differing perspectives — such as a First Nations fisherman, a food scientist working to redesign salt crystals, an architect using urban agriculture to retrofit ‘60s tower blocks, and the health official in charge of drafting Toronto’s first city-wide food policy — we’ve created new connections, both personal and conceptual.

Map via the NYC Regional Foodshed Initiative of the Urban Design Lab, a Joint Laboratory of the Earth Institute and Columbia University GSAPP

But, perhaps most interestingly, by addressing the same four questions in both New York and Toronto, we have been able to start pulling out some of the larger issues that make feeding a city — any city — the most complex, potentially rewarding, and endlessly fascinating design challenge we can imagine.

Tackling urban planning, public policy, and economics in under an hour is perhaps a trifle ambitious. In both Toronto and New York, however, street food trucks proved to be a bite-sized introduction to the way economic and regulatory forces play out to shape an important urban food delivery system. Mapping the city through the lens of food, using either analytic or social measurements, can both clarify existing problems and uncover previously unseen opportunities. As a channel of communication as well as a marker of identity, an understanding of our edible history can help us imagine our urban food futures — futures that are inextricably linked to both local infrastructures and global systems.

Map of Toronto's foodshed by Nina-Marie Lister

So — at the risk of seeming self-congratulatory — perhaps the most important thing we have learned thus far is how important these conversations really are. Sitting architects and urban planners down with farmers, food scientists, public health officials, artists, activists, and CEOs, even for an all-too-brief panel conversation, seems to prompt fresh debate and insight — and some genuine surprises. At Studio-X in New York, our jaws collectively dropped as the CEO of Jetro Cash & Carry, purveyor of bulk quantities of chips to New York’s bodegas, issued a passionate plea for radical junk food taxation (“We need to tax the hell out of deep-fried products in this city!”). And I was not the only person taken aback when Toronto’s Senior Health Advisor told us that she’d taken the city’s food purchasing budget of $2 million to the Ontario Food Terminal, determined to demand more locally-grown produce, only to realize she had far too little money to negotiate effectively with the vendors there.

My hope, then, is that as the Foodprint Project expands its own footprint to visit new cities (we are fundraising on Kickstarter for Foodprint LA), as well as engage in more sustained conversations and interventions across cities, we can begin to map the kind of food system and cities we’d like to see, as well as understand the ones we have. As a start, follow the links below to watch video of each panel from both Foodprint NYC and Foodprint Toronto, and read more about what the two cities can learn from one another in light of the panelists’ conversations.

Graphic via streetvendor.org/vendys/

Zoning Diet
How do zoning, policy, and economics shape the city’s food systems?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

Street food vending provides something of a cautionary tale, as city planners use the design tools at their disposal to pursue frequently contradictory goals with varying degrees of success.

New York City caps vendor permits at three thousand (four thousand in summer), despite demand that Sean Basinski, Director of the Street Vendor Project (whose work Omnibus readers will remember from Making Policy Public: Vendor Power! -ed.) estimates at 20,000 to 30,000. A few years ago, the city launched its Green Carts program, hoping to leverage some of those wannabe street vendors to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to the city’s food deserts. “A great idea,” agreed Basinski, “but the way the city allocated permits means that people in the Bronx would get a permit to sell in Staten Island.” The result is that “maybe two hundred of the thousand available permits are being used, which is better than nothing, it’s true, but certainly didn’t realize the program’s full potential.”

But while New York gives with one hand and takes away with the other, Toronto has adopted a more enlightened, thoughtful, and utterly ineffective approach to mobile snacking. Until recently, archaic legislation that restricted street food to “cooked meats” translated into a streetscape filled with hot dog stands. Catalyzed by a 2007 design competition organized by urban innovation group Multistory Complex, the city jumped on board, and tried to leverage an expanded street food menu to achieve economic, health, and community building goals. Two years into its pilot project, however, Barbara Emanuel, Senior Policy Advisor at the Toronto Board of Health, readily admitted that the project has been “strangled at birth” by an overdose of well-intentioned regulations that handicapped vendors with 1,000 lb food carts (which can’t be stored on the street overnight, but which the city designed specifically so they couldn’t be towed), as well as more than $30,000 in start-up costs.

Clockwise from top left: Ravine City by Chris Hardwicke; Cover, A Gastronomical Map of Manhattan; Not Far From the Tree, Toronto; Photo © Naa Oyo A. Kwate

Culinary Cartography
What can we learn when we map a city using food as the metric?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

Looking at the city through the lens of food — or putting on your “fruit goggles,” as Toronto’s urban fruit forager Laurel Atkinson described it — requires redrawing the map. In both cities, food blurs administrative boundaries, creating a new cartography of need, opportunity, or community. But while in New York, we heard from panelists who used food mapping as a diagnostic (whether it be to trace hipster geography or obesogenic environments), in Toronto, our panelists used food’s map-redrawing capacity consciously, in order to break down social barriers and build new connections.

Edible Archaeology
How has today’s food culture been shaped by social changes, economic fluctuations, and technological innovations throughout the city’s history?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

A consistent narrative across both cities was the way that waves of immigration hava reshaped the urban foodscape — physically as well as culturally. New York’s pastrami and bagels are the result of Czar Nicholas III’s anti-semitic laws, but its pre-Prohibition network of German-style breweries (more numerous than Starbucks’ branches are today) not only owed their existence to German immigrants, but also to the opening of the Croton Reservoir, which brought copious amounts of clean water to the city for the first time. In Toronto, a wave of post-Second World War immigration spurred the construction of the Ontario Food Terminal — the first modern wholesale food distribution center on the continent and a model for New York’s Hunt’s Point, among others.

In addition to the aspects of edible history that continue to shape the present, panelists at both New York and Toronto pointed out the foods that have been lost forever — oysters the size of dinner plates, and vast shoals of Lake Ontario Atlantic salmon  — the natural bounty of both cities transmuted into old money and fancy mansions. But although it’s impossible not to feel some nostalgia for flavors and foods that have been lost for ever, perhaps the most interesting outcome of this panel is the way a vision of radically different historical food infrastructure — whether it’s oyster barges brokering deals along the East River, or beer caves dotting the Manhattan bedrock like swiss cheese — makes it easier to imagine, in turn, a radically different food future.

Foodprint Toronto | Photo by Stacy Lewis

Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios
What are the opportunities and challenges of the city’s possible food futures?
Foodprint NYC (iTunes U)
Foodprint Toronto (streaming video)

Any discussion of the future of food involves an equal measure of doomsday scenarios and creative solutions: in Toronto, we heard about wheat speculation, peak phosphorus, and food’s role in the fall of civilizations; in New York, we heard about 3D food printers, military rations, and synthetic meat. But perhaps the most important topic we have discussed is how to take these local, context-specific, good ideas to scale — and, indeed, whether that’s possible or even desirable.

In Toronto, The Stop’s Kathryn Scharf articulated the dilemma precisely: “The food movement — the alternatives that have been built over the past twenty or thirty years across North America — have been built on a shoestring. They’re volunteer-based, completely precarious, and often just one dynamic facilitator away from ruin. But that’s also the reason they work: they’re organically grown and shaped by the needs of a specific community.” The Stop itself has recently decided against further expansion (“We can’t just parachute into new communities and tell them what they need,”) in favor of a more thoughtful response: sharing its best practices to help other, smaller or struggling, local food programs move toward sustainability.

Although “many municipal authorities are way ahead of state or national governments in terms of food systems innovation,” according to Foodprint Toronto panelist Evan D. G. Fraser, each individual city is still inextricably bound to a global agricultural hinterland that operates at a much vaster scale. His book, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, advocates a policy-driven, “nested bioregionalism” in the urban supply chain, which would capture efficiencies of scale and climatic advantage, but balance them with a local food system that acts as an insurance policy.

But this is all an imprecise science, as both Scharf and Fraser made clear. “The hard science isn’t there,” Scharf acknowledged. The numbers don’t exist that predict the scale at which food system renewal and regeneration must happen, nor how large Fraser’s suggested “cash reserve” needs to be.

In other words, for all the innovation and success stories on display in both cities, there are enormous gaps in infrastructural analysis: understanding where and what supports are needed, as well as what role each of the food system redesign levers (consumer demand, for example, or regulation) could and should play.

The Foodprint Project is raising funds for Foodprint LA through August 26th. Visit Kickstarter.com to make a contribution. Pledge gifts include copies of The Foodprint Papers, seats at the Foodprint LA VIP dinner, and more.

Foodprint NYC | Photo by Rachel Hillery, Columbia GSAPP

Nicola Twilley is author of the blog Edible Geography and a freelance writer with work published in GOOD, Dwell, Wired UK, Volume, and more. She is also co-director, with Geoff Manaugh, of Future Plural; co-founder, with Sarah Rich, of the Foodprint Project; and co-curator of Landscapes of Quarantine, a group exhibition at New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture during March and April 2010.

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.

UPDATE, 8.21.2010: please see the comments for an important clarification from the author.

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Thomas Birke.

In his “A Country of Cities“ series on Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti recently described how he “attended a terrific conference on vertical density in Hong Kong.” The city-state, he suggested, has mastered the infrastructure challenge. He wrote:

I hadn’t visited in over a decade, and in that time more density has been built, a few more skyscrapers dot the stunning skyline, but the advances one really notices are on the ground. The new airport. The 20-minute train from the airport to downtown. The gleaming subways that glide under Victoria Harbor from Kowloon to Central. The stunning new bridges and tunnels. The lush country parks.

His argument presents examples that might rightly inspire New Yorkers and Americans to clamor for longer-range investment in infrastructure. Why doesn’t New York have a one-seat ride from its airports? Why shouldn’t high-speed rail connect Boston, New York, and Washington, DC?

Still, a notable irony was evident at two conferences organized by The Skyscraper Museum, Vertical Density/Sustainable Solutions, held in New York in October 2008, and Vertical Density: the Public Dimension, held this past January in Hong Kong. While Chakrabarti and other New Yorkers enthused about Hong Kong’s advances, many from Hong Kong worried about the cost of progress. As one top Hong Kong official observed in January, “People are complaining… enough is enough.”

At both conferences, those from Hong Kong invoked our city’s appreciation of history (or, to them, heritage), diversity of building types, avoidance of superblocks, rich street life, and relatively robust opportunity for citizen input. As became clear, density in Hong Kong was fostered by cultural, economic, and historical factors not present in recent-day New York, including top-down planning, warp-speed growth (driven by an influx of refugees from Communist China), an empowered mass transit agency, and a disengaged citizenry.

So while there’s a good argument to build residential density in New York — our city’s towers are primarily commercial — as well as infrastructure, the lessons from Hong Kong may be more aspirational than direct. (Metropolis columnist Karrie Jacobs, who covered the first conference, also teased out the contradictions in a December 2008 column headlined Boomtown Blues.)

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

The Hong Kong scene
Hilly and mountainous, more than three-quarters of Hong Kong territory is preserved as natural landscape, so the city-state has been forced to grow vertically. Complementing the dense central areas on Hong Kong Island, transit-based development creates cross-harbor New Towns out of dozens of identical apartment towers, typically 50-plus stories surrounding a shopping mall. Eminent domain is freely used, and the tax structure militates against warehousing land.

Given the constraints, there was no postwar suburbia to build, as in New York; there was no opportunity, as in New York, to have downzonings privilege wealthier transit-accessible low-rise neighborhoods while upzonings transformed their working-class counterparts, as New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy recently found (PDF).

Hong Kong. Photo by Flickr user -marten-.

Hong Kong’s thicket of towers has produced a system of upper-level walkways with their own retail and corridor life. Not that it’s fully beloved. While Hong Kong may be the freest economy in the world, “when it comes to pedestrian movement, [it] is one of the least free places in the world,” observed urban designer Oren Tatcher in January.

Hong Kong’s growth has been driven significantly by its transit system, the MTR (Mass Transit Railway), founded in 1975. The MTR (once a public company, now private) acts as a master developer to insure integration of property with the railway, explained Thomas Ho, MTR Property Director, to rapt listeners at the New York conference.

Carrie Lam, since July 2007 Secretary for Development of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, explained that leveling mountains and reclaiming the harbor created the old airport’s runway, the entire new airport, and parts of the Central Business District.  “The harbor is unlikely to argue with you whether it is right or not to reclaim from the harbor,” she said at the New York conference.

That statement pricked up New York ears. Here, “building something in the water today in New York is virtually impossible for a variety of political and environmental reasons,” observed Christopher Ward, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

American admiration
American respondents in New York expressed admiration for Hong Kong’s embrace of high-rises and the MTR’s ability to plan rationally. “There’s a dystopia associated with skyscrapers that we need to address,” suggested Ward, citing movies like Blade Runner.

Chakrabarti, then executive VP of the Related Companies, observed, “I think what we’ve seen today should make us, as New Yorkers, very humble, and should really give us pause.” While Americans reject “the culture of density,” he suggested that the real dystopia is evoked by movies like The Stepford Wives, which convey a “very isolated, scary, and fuel-inefficient suburban model.”

A veteran of the effort to build a Moynihan Station that would combine a new train station with mixed-use development, Chakrabarti said we should be “less scared” of public-private partnerships and should “capture land use value around train stations.”

The intangibles
That’s what they’ve done in Hong Kong, to an extent perhaps unique around the world. High-rise living, Ho suggested, can be achieved “in a very civilized way; it all depends on how you plan.”

But most units are smaller than 750 square feet. “We’re living in shoeboxes at extremely high density,” lamented architect Keith Griffiths at the follow-up conference. Local developer Keith Kerr added: “I’m all for building density around railway points, but we end up with a city that’s planned by a railway line.”

Kowloon Housing. Photo by Flickr user Photocapy.

People in Hong Kong, suggested real estate consultant Nicholas Brooke, pragmatically accept vertical living, though some New Towns residents have experienced “family feuds, suicides, things that build up from pressure from living in high-rise towers.” While planning “was very much driven by engineers” and an effort to maximize land revenues, now there’s a growing sense that intangibles should be considered, Brooke said.

Hong Kong’s functionalism, added Peter Cookson Smith, an architect, city planner and urban designer, is “producing an undifferentiated city form of standard blocks” in contrast to the diversity in New York that “simply takes your breath away.”

Christine Loh, CEO of the think tank Civic Exchange, showed pictures of Hong Kong people going through their daily activities. “How do we preserve the feel of these places?” She and others expressed admiration how issues like landmarking have been translated into New York’s policy. She also cited universities and think tanks as examples of a “tremendous civil society and engagement.”

Hong Kong matures
Secretary for Development Lam, in New York, suggested that, as Hong Kong’s growth has slowed, planners have more of a “luxury” to address issues like building height and bulk and the lack of street life. She described an intensive public planning process for the old airport site at Kai Tak in which more parks emerged, thanks to “an extensive reduction in density.”

Later, at the Hong Kong conference, Lam was more emphatic, asserting that, as much as possible, “We should balance redevelopment with building rehabilitation, revitalization, and preservation of some of our historic past.”

Battery Park City. Photo by Flickr user MD111.

Solutions in New York
Of course Hong Kong and New York have been traveling along different paths. Chakrabarti, in Hong Kong, suggested it was dangerous to compare the two cities’ responses to density, given that New York is “a city that may be very dense at its center, but is extraordinarily sprawling as a region.” And he pointed out that a “mature” city like London also surpasses New York in building infrastructure.

“It’s very difficult to build and finance infrastructure if you don’t believe in central authority,” Chakrabarti said, a hint at the regional inequities he’s highlighted.

It’s hard to disagree, as the main challenge remains regional and national. Still, New York’s record suggests that, even within the city, the rational planning process can be distorted. Consider how the Furman Center suggested fairness has been scanted in the city’s rezonings.

Or consider how the Port Authority’s Ward, at the New York conference, suggested that the resistance to the massive Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn stemmed from locals’ discomfort with a dramatic shift in density. While that shift surely generated dismay, an equal measure of discomfort derives from the perception that Atlantic Yards has been a sweetheart deal, with a single developer anointed public land before any planning process, and with public amenities such as open space coming late rather than early.

Chakrabarti observed that communities will accept density only if the infrastructure is there first; indeed, a showcase New York example at the Hong Kong conference was Battery Park City, with its parkland frontloaded and parcels bid out to multiple developers, though it was acknowledged that original goals for affordable housing were not met.

A former director of the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning turned developer turned academic, Chakrabarti knows New York’s constraints: “We cannot generate amenities, open space, even simple improvements to the subway system without harnessing new development.” If so, as in Hong Kong, it’s important to get the balance right between the development business and the central authorities entrusted with the public interest.

New York City. Photo by Flickr user Christopher Isherwood.

Brooklyn journalist Norman Oder, who’s written the Atlantic Yards Report watchdog blog for more than four years, attended the first conference and watched the second conference panels via webcast.

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.

Ilana Halperin, Boiling Milk (Solfataras), 2000.

After several years obsessively following a cluster of artists, investigators, cartographers and academics interested in varied approaches to human interactions with the land, I was excited to learn that the Experimental Geography exhibition, which showcases many of these projects and highlights the evocative associations that bind them together as a group, would be on view where I could see it, in the James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center.  The exhibition, on tour since September of 2008 with a corresponding book published by Melville House in early 2009, is here in New York City until the end of August.  On July 20th, I attended a panel discussion at CUNY featuring the curator, several contributing artists, and social theorist David Harvey, which drew out some of the themes of the exhibition in an attempt to define the ‘emerging’ practice of experimental geography.

Connecting a “growing body of culturally inspired work,” as curator Nato Thompson describes it, Experimental Geography asks many questions about the interaction between the aesthetic and the geographic, between urban and geological scales, between the poetic and didactic.  As he clarified in the panel discussion on July 20th, these questions are largely about the “aesthetic approach to the interpretation of space as a social phenomenon,” inspiring the discussion’s frequent name-dropping (and some works’ implicit referencing) of Karl Marx, the Situationists and Henri Lefebvre.   The exhibition ranges from an archive of 23 maps that include world governments and U.S. camp sites (the We Are Here Map Archive) to a listening booth of GPS-guided audio bus tours (e-Xplo) to a photograph of milk boiling in a tin from the heat of a live volcano’s sulfur spring (Ilana Halperin, above).

Looking toward a ‘politics of spatialization’ rather than one of representation, this is no traditional landscape photography fare.  How might we think about contemporary security culture in the city of Boston? Listen to kanarinka’s psychogeographic It Takes 154,000 Breaths to Evacuate Boston, a table of glass jars containing speakers, each of which plays the recorded sounds of her fearful breath as she ran out of the city on its different evacuation routes.  What subtle spatial elements structure our everyday urban experience, and how do they play upon our movement and subjectivity?  View Alex Villar’s Upward Mobility, a filmed performance of the artist subverting the conventions of city planning, absurdly/tragically attempting to navigate a horizontal city through vertical climbs.

None of the eighteen pieces fall strictly into “geography” or “art” camps, though the degree and direction of the interaction between the two disciplines varies.  Experimental Geography’s strength lies here, plainly enough, in the conjunction of the two elements in its title.  True to the meaning of experimental, none of the pieces offer conclusive answers, leaving room for an immense amount of interpretation and speculation.  This kind of artistic practice, taking place within a geographic sphere that encompasses all human activity, allows relations otherwise unrevealed in either field alone to emerge, connecting research, mapping, material production, and human subjectivity.

Images from Multiplicity's The Road Map, 2003.

Take, for example, Multiplicity’s The Road Map (above),  a two-channel video projection of drives through the West Bank zone surrounding Jerusalem.  The two journeys, one with an EU passport containing Israeli permissions and one Palestinian, measure the density of border controls in this area as experienced by two different possible travelers.  The results – 01:05 vs. 05:20 hours, respectively – convey an immersive sense of frustration, documented as well on smaller television screens displaying slowly scrolling maps of the two different drives along the same latitude.  Blending non-traditional academic measurement with a fresh, tangible experience of political space as constituted by highways, checkpoints, taxis and dirt roads, geography here acts as both an influence on and subject of visual research.

spurse, Micromobilia, 2008.

Some works are less successful in the context of the exhibition. Spurse’s Micromobilia (pictured above), a research station-cum-archive-cum-pseudo-classroom-space unfolded out of three crates, consists of a heady mix of dense chalkboard charts, books on systems theory/biology/geology/microbiology and beyond, catalogued specimens at numerous scales, and standard scientific equipment encased in Styrofoam (as if specimens of a different order).  Spurse’s intent here is to create a “geography of participation” in which the borders of disciplinary research collapse, allowing for a new site of engagement and co-production.  Yet when I tried to remove a folder from its encasement in an attempt to participate in this sort-of-laboratory, I was told by a gallery attendant not to touch it.  Seeing the work as an aesthetically-minded academic archive of possible engagements instead of an active space to use, I could now only imagine spurse’s process of crafting and assembling Micromobilia with a sense of envy for those who put it together with full access to its materials.

In some instances, Thompson’s curatorial intention to define experimental geography as a broad and inclusive practice did a disservice to some of the works on view. For example, a set of one dozen exhibition posters from the Center for Land Use Interpretation – an organization I share Thompson’s opinion about as an example par excellence of this sort of thing – did not convey a sense of CLUI’s hundreds of hours of meticulous research, documentation, and unique presentational formats.  Trevor Paglen’s contributions were a limited sampling of images from an otherwise very impressive and singular body of previous work.  The We Are Here Map Archive, gathered by Daniel Tucker, was on the other hand a sizeable collection of recent cartographical forms and tools, able to be taken out of a folio and examined up-close on a table. The prevalence of notebooks and pens among my fellow visitors suggested that the fragmentary nature of the exhibition materials left viewers hungry for more: I got the sense that many people looking around the James Gallery were going to go home and look up the vast tomes of research and information merely hinted at by the works displayed.

David Harvey speaks at the July 20th panel discussion. Photo: Independent Curators International

If participation and experimentation emerged as crucial aspects of my experience with Experimental Geography, July’s panel discussion missed the mark.  You may not have known from this review of theorist David Harvey’s contribution to the discussion, but a full panel was present, including Nato Thompson and three artists in the exhibition: radical cartographer Lize Mogel, military geographer/photographer Trevor Paglen, and spurse collaborator Iain Kerr.  Very interesting presentations by all present gave way to a familiar sense of academic stagnation as the Q&A concentrated almost entirely upon Harvey’s derision of the ‘suburbanization’ of New York City, a discussion which Mr. Kerr (and I, internally) severely questioned in relation to the more fundamental aims of the exhibition.  A Marxist analysis of the emancipatory potential of either an anti- or post-capitalist mode of spatial production is not what is most interesting, vital (or new) about the pairing of geography and art.

Signaling Experimental Geography as a practice is certainly valuable as a “platform for interpreting the world that makes us who we are,” as the exhibition brief states, but it is an expressly visual, often tactile platform.  Harvey’s work, in the tradition of Kropotkin, Reclus, and Lefebvre, does group together many of the relevant forces at work in contemporary spaces, but his position on the relationship between capitalism and urban experience did not inform a second viewing of the exhibition, nor reveal a sensitivity to the visual, tactile or experiential elements in the work displayed, nor provide many original avenues for a spatialization of politics.  (The ironically conspicuous presence of plastic Poland Spring water bottles on stage was also pointed out by an audience member in the beginning of the Q&A, but was generally ignored.)

Despite any qualms over ‘presentation vs. spatialization’, or the commentary at the panel discussion, the exhibition is something to be experienced and engaged by everyone.  There is plenty of work to see that I haven’t mentioned, including the ever-expanding gallery of visitor-created maps of New York City.  As Trevor Paglen notes in his essay on the exhibition, geography is not just about space, but entails its own space of inquiry.  And Experimental Geography (in both exhibition and book form) does just that.

Experimental Geography is on view June 24th-August 27^th at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016

Hours: 12 Noon–6:00PM, Tuesday–Saturday

Free Admission

Sam Silver is a project associate at Urban Omnibus. He is a student at Wesleyan University where he majors in environmental studies and philosophy.

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.

Photo: Giles Ashford

Last Wednesday the Municipal Art Society partnered with Manhattan Community Board 1 (Lower Manhattan) to host a daylong discussion, “Land Use and Local Voices: Is the City’s Land Use Process in Need of Reform?”. The event was organized in response to the 2010 Charter Revision Commission created by Mayor Bloomberg in March 2010, whose recently released preliminary report does not propose major reforms to the land use review and planning processes.

With the category of land use relegated to the back pages of the commission report, the day turned into a discussion of the issues affecting development and the inadequacies of the current land use review process for development proposals in the city, especially with respect to the input of local stakeholders.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer began the discussion by highlighting two points that would recur throughout the day: the need for professional expertise on community boards (CBs) and the necessity of long-range planning. Stringer cited the Planning Fellowship Program he implemented to have a planning student assigned to each Manhattan CB. In addition, his discussion of long-range planning focused on the idea of making planning and development an “apolitical process.” The prospect and possibility of land use planning without politics was disputed throughout the rest of the day.

The first panel discussed what distinguishes the city’s land use process in relation to other cities and municipalities in the US. Sandy Hornick, Deputy Director of Strategic Planning at the NYC Department of City Planning, noted that after failed attempts in 1940 and 1969, the city still does not have a comprehensive long-term plan that addresses land use. David N. Kinsey, a New Jersey planner and Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University, echoed the need for comprehensive planning. He noted New York was unique among US cites with its site-specific ULURP process rather then a comprehensive master plan.

The question of participation also arose as moderator Ethel Sheffer, Principal at Insight Associates and Adjunct Professor at Columbia’s GSAPP, asked Sara Logan, Bronx Community Board 6 member, to elaborate on issues facing community participation. Logan noted that, despite many active community members, participation rates are lower in the outer boroughs. Later on in the day Adam Friedman, Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, spoke to the necessity of engaging city residents and providing them with the necessary tools and attention – as they have “chosen to be New Yorkers.”

The questions of zoning and site-specific development were picked up by the second panel, “Time for Change? Perspectives on Planning in the Five Boroughs.” Josiah Madar, a Research Fellow at NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, presented a study of recent rezonings in the city (PDF). The study uses a lot-level analysis to demonstrate that the majority of rezonings between 2003 and 2007 were intended to preserve the existing residential character of neighborhoods with higher rates of homeownership and income level than the city’s average. Madar noted that while these rezonings help to “preserve the best,” there also needs to be more attention to zoning changes that help to “move the ball forward on ensuring housing affordability.”

Friedman stressed the “uncertainty” and “unpredictability” of ULURP. Yet in contrast to other speakers, Friedman did not suggest a comprehensive plan but rather the development of a land use matrix that would be used to understand how projects help city goals. Meanwhile, Eddie Bautista, Executive Director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, addressed the 1989 City Charter Commission’s addition of ‘Fair Share’ and how its lack of enforcement follows in a pattern of well-intentioned requirements that are not met or enforced and are thus rendered useless.

Moderator Eugenie L. Birch, Professor of Urban Research and Chair of the Graduate Group of City Planning at University of Pennsylvania School of Design and Co-Director of Penn Institute for Urban Research, ended “Time for Change” by asking her panelists what “the city of the 21st century should look like?” For Bautista, the hope is for a a city “that doesn’t adhere to 1962 zoning standards.” For Brian Cook, Director of Land Use and Planning for Stringer, the hope is for an adaptable land use planning body removed from the political sphere.

Stringer and Cook’s call for “apolitical” planning concluded the morning, but the difficulty of avoiding the political began the afternoon with the final panel, “Looking Ahead: The Future of Community Benefit Agreements in NYC.” CBAs are private contracts between a developer and a group of organizations who purportedly represent the community without political input. Moderator Vicki Been, Boxer Family Professor of Law at NYU School of Law and Director of the Furman Center for Real Estate, began the discussion by questioning whether CBAs are apolitical in New York. She went on to provide some background to the longstanding issue of private agreements between developers and community groups, often characterized by a lack of transparency in the decisions leading up to the siting of development.

The uniqueness of CBAs in New York compared to the rest of the US was noted by Benjamin S. Beach, Staff Attorney at the Community Benefits Law Center, who spoke of the potential for successful CBAs to complement the public process and serve as an enforceable contract. Following up on Been, he noted the problem of public officials involved in the CBA process. David Reiss, Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, may have put it best when he said CBAs in New York “face legitimacy issues.”

The day finished with a conversation between Julie Menin, one of the hosts and Chair of Manhattan CB1, and Eric Lane, who served as the Executive Director/Counsel to the 1989 NYC Charter Revision Commission. Asked why the charter commission decided not to take on land use, Lane suggested the commission wants changes that “will get done” — changes that require less effort than the creation of a land use regime and a long-term plan — and that land use should be addressed by a commission that has been given time and thorough briefings. Lane ended his comments by stating the need for land use to be evaluated every ten years, because beyond best intentions “even the greatest expertise has politics associated with it.”

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

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.