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 have 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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently spent the better part of five days sitting on a cinderblock in the courtyard of Museo Experimental el Eco, listening to various creative people, mostly from Mexico, talk about their work. I am not entirely certain why I did this, but I am glad that I did. The event, Postópolis, is described as “a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design.” I applaud the premise: to celebrate and take stock of the extent to which sophisticated discourse and debate about design and urban culture (and the creative forces which influence them) have migrated to online formats. And I appreciate the method: to instigate “a Ponzi scheme of ideas,” in which the organizer (Storefront for Art and Architecture) invites a set of bloggers to descend upon a particular city, each of whom then invites a set of individuals from that city to discuss their work in front of a live audience.

But I am not clear on the outcome. Certainly, as an audience member, I am today more informed of about the dizzying amount of creativity and innovation at the heart of Mexico City’s cultural life than I was pre-Postópolis. But I am at a loss as to how exactly the wealth of information and ideas I witnessed might be put to work. What comes next? Of course, the event was more esoteric snapshot than representative sample. But even then, if the point is to spotlight the fact that serious dialogue about cities now takes place on the internet and to apply that serious dialogue to a real time and place, then shouldn’t that attention and dialogue lead to some kind of action about how best to understand, represent or intervene in urban life?

Eduardo Terrazas | Photo by Cassim Shepard

What attracted me to Postópolis was the opportunity to experience the improvised and extemporaneous formation of a collective portrait of the creative energies defining a city at a particular moment. I did not participate in the first two incarnations of Postópolis — in New York in 2007 and in Los Angeles in 2009 — but I am told that what emerged were studies in contrast. How could a sophisticated portrait of a city be anything else? As I said in my own introductory speech on the first day, the complex challenges of urban portraiture define my own work as a documentary filmmaker and as the editor of Urban Omnibus. In both roles I rely on the evocative power of juxtaposing diverse fragments to tell stories that resist the tendency to reduce urban complexity into facile essences or prescriptions, with the goal of telling stories that amount to more than the sum of their parts.

But portraiture requires a kind of coherence that the frame alone — in this case the conceptual frame of Postópolis and the physical frame of the Museo Experimental el Eco — struggled to provide. Instead of coherence, we got a diffuse and diverse sense of Mexico City, composed of disparities. The unlikely juxtaposition of the opening presentations — Fernando Romero shared 100 hundred slides of his slick architecture and Ali Gadorki discussed the messy fusion of punk, cumbia and queer identity politics — telegraphed beautifully the primary lesson of Postópolis: that portraying Mexico City (or any city) requires engaging the stark contrasts within its creative community. Romero was invited by Sam Jacob, an architect based in London. Gadorki was invited by Daniel Hernandez, a Mexican-American journalist from L.A. who has spent the past few years infiltrating and documenting Mexico City’s various subcultures. Over the course of the following days, the audience was treated a similarly dizzying diversity of voices. To name just a few: we heard from Raúl Cardenas, one of the forces behind the excellent Tijuana-based research and design collective torolab. We heard from Julio Cou Cámara, a scuba diver charged with maintaining Mexico City’s sewer system. We heard from Captain Remigio Cruz, who directs the efforts of the Mexican military’s museum of narcotics to educate soldiers on the army’s “successes” in its war on drugs.

Derek Dellekamp | Photo by Ariette Armella

At root, Postópolis asserts that some sort of affinity or relationship exists between curatorial practice and blogging practice — between the institutions that select and present creative work and the individuals who offer commentary on whatever interests them — but the nature of this relationship remains unnamed. To be sure, it is still in formation; and Postópolis offers a good first step toward identifying how these two practices might inform each other.

Bloggers are often considered diarists, but I prefer to think of them as foragers: most blog posts take something that already exists — from the internet, popular culture or lived experience — as a point of departure for reflection that combines elements of essay, anecdote, news, analysis and speculation. That’s why bloggers make good portraitists, even if they don’t see themselves as such. The vantage of the scavenger/storyteller speaks well of her ability to inform a collective image of a city. As someone who directs an editorial website that has dozens of authors and advisors, is based at an established institution (the Architectural League of New York) and sticks to a weekly publication schedule, I felt slightly disingenuous masquerading as a blogger. Nonetheless, inasmuch as Urban Omnibus is an interdisciplinary index of innovative ideas conceived to make New York City smarter, greener and fairer, it also functions as a kind of ad-hoc portrait of the creative energies currently shaping urbanism.

Jose Castillo | Photo by Ariette Armella

Of the 70 or so presentations at Postópolis, one in particular resisted Mexico City’s tendency to splinter and fragment the moment anyone tries to define it. From the moment I was invited to take part, I knew that at the top of my wish list of speakers would be Eduardo Terrazas, the architect, designer and artist behind the Mexico ’68 identity program for the 1968 Olympics. In part, I wanted Terrazas to speak because I suspected that most of the other bloggers would be inviting practitioners from their own generation. But more than wanting to include mature voices, I also wanted to hear more about the historical moment (a decade before I was born) when all eyes were trained on Mexico City. I wondered: “How can a designer develop and establish a coherent identity for a place as complex as Mexico City?”

Terrazas was a young man when he got the massive job, in 1966, to use the tools of design — the job included everything from a logotype for the Games to an urban-scale communications and wayfinding system, from public transportation logistics to public art projects — to present Mexico’s varied and singular culture to the world. He explained how he found inspiration for the graphic identity in the Sierra Madre Huichol Indians’ use of parallel, curvilinear lines; how he carefully evaluated the balance between Mexico’s past and its future; how he found an ideographic system that was both distinctly Mexican and universally legible; and how the legacy of the work is forever intertwined with the tragedy of the Tlatelolco massacre, ten days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Derek Dellekamp, Pilgrim Route, State of Jalisco, Mexico | Courtesy of Dellekamp Arquitectos

Eduardo Terrazas, Pedro Ramirez Vasquez, Lance Wyman, Mexico '68 Identity | Image courtesy of Hespánica

Clearly, a great deal fed into that project, and great deal came out of it. But Terrazas did not confine his presentation to work from the late 1960s. He went on to describe several art exhibitions he organized about the material culture of Mexico City. He showed some of his paintings. He shared his proposal for jurisidictional reform that would expand the city’s current and outdated political limits — the borders of the Distrito Federal — to encompass its larger metropolitan region. And he showed one of his current architectural projects. He left out international highlights of a career that includes urban design and planning in Tanzania, Pakistan and India; teaching in Berkeley and New York; and art exhibitions in Paris, St. Petersburg, Caracas and Santiago. But he managed to detail a career trajectory that at every point critiqued, challenged and expanded the role of the architect.

The two other architects that I invited to Postópolis, Derek Dellekamp and Jose Castillo, also presented work outside the traditional understanding of what architects do. In Dellekamp’s case, this meant discussing social housing in Oaxaca and a pilgrimage route in Jalisco. (Watch an excerpt of Dellekamp’s 2009 Architectural League Emerging Voices lecture, in which he presents his work in Oaxaca, on the League’s website.) In Castillo’s case, this meant discussing the architect as public intellectual. The expanding role of the architect — as analyst, as storyteller, as urbanist — is certainly a theme I wanted to pursue at Postópolis (and why I invited Dellekamp, Castillo and Terrazas). To be honest, when I arrived in Mexico City, I was not thinking about the role of the architect as urban portraitist. Yet now that I am back in New York and again engaged in identifying and sharing good ideas for the future of New York’s built environment through Urban Omnibus, I suspect that the long-ago case study of Mexico ’68 and the recent experience of Postópolis each offer, in different ways, lessons for how to communicate what’s going on in a particular city. Once we have grappled with what those lessons might be, then we can start the messy process of how to use that kind of communication — that kind of portrait — to the greater urban good.

Cassim Shepard is the director of Urban Omnibus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screengrab of madeinmidtown.org

Earlier this month the Design Trust for Public Space and the Council of Fashion Designers of America released an initial study of New York’s Garment District called “Made in Midtown.” The study dispelled the myth that the district exists only in name, proving that—despite the area’s faltering manufacturing dominance—designers still rely on the Garment District as a hub for research and development and an integral launching pad for young designers and new labels.

To illustrate the study’s findings a website was created; and it’s definitely worth a visit. (Fair warning: You can lose a serious chunk of your day playing—there’s even something like a comic book!) It’s extremely visual — look for a series of charts, diagrams, and interactive features illustrating various facts and figures falling under one of three easy-breezy categories. They are: (1) What is the Garment District? (2) Why does the District Matter to Fashion? (3) Why Does Fashion Matter to NYC?

You’ll see how New York measures up to Paris and Milan (don’t worry, we kind of win); learn more about the process of fashion and why the neighborhood and other Creative Districts are an important part of the fabric (get it?) of any city; and delve into the minds of some of New York’s most New Yorkiest designers including Jason Wu, Nanette Lepore, Shelly Steffee, and Anna Sui.

Made in Midtown | Full Panel, June 8, 2010 | Photo by Giles Ashford

To get the word out and discuss exactly what to do next with the data, the Municipal Art Society of New York along with the Design Trust held two panel discussions at the School of Visual Arts Theater. The first such event was moderated by the always charming Tim Gunn and introduced by Deborah Marton, the executive director of the Design Trust. Additionally, it featured Sarah Crean from the New York Industrial Retention Network; Eric Gural, executive managing director at Newmark Knight Frank; Michael Meola, attorney and development consultant; fashion designer Yeohlee Teng; and Madelyn Wils of the Planning, Development and Maritime division of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.

The second, held a week later, was moderated by Marton (who traded the Louboutins she rocked the previous week for a pair of turbo-fierce Lucite disco pumps) and included Sarah Williams, a co-director of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab and Made in Midtown Project Fellow; Simon Collins of Parsons School of Fashion; Fred Dust of IDEO (who talked mainly about Los Angeles…); Harvey Molotch, a sociology and metropolitan studies expert at NYU; and Andrew Oshrin, president and CEO of Milly (his wife, Milly designer Michelle Smith, was in the audience).

Everyone agreed that the Garment District isn’t dead. A “hub for research and development,” and central to smaller-batch and higher-end production, it also provides the opportunity for a young label, like Jason Wu’s, to go from raw sketches to showroom wholesaling without the massive capital investment or high-volume production required to bring talent in-house or inexpensively produce overseas. The process, next to impossible in cities like Paris or Milan, makes New York “the fashion start-up capital of the world.”

Furthermore, panelists agreed that zoning mandates created in 1987 to stave off real estate pressures and preserve manufacturing space were not working; and that recent controversial proposals for rezoning and/or consolidating the district’s businesses were not the answer. Zoning aside, most panelists also agreed that part of keeping the Garment District vital means improving life on the streets with interactive events and exhibits, beautification, pedestrian friendly features, and increased retail opportunity—improvements aiming to attract designers as well as tourists and residents who don’t necessarily have ties to the industry. Essentially, the area needed to become friendlier, more viable, “cool.”

Crean suggested a system calling for newly installed retail lessees and other higher-margin tenants subsidizing the rents of artisan and production tenants upstairs. Meanwhile, Gural envisioned a strange Colonial Williamsburg version of the Garment District in which tourists could watch newly-ordered clothing being made. Crean’s idea was better received than Gural’s.

Made in Midtown | Full Panel, June 15, 2010 | Photo by Giles Ashford

Collins—whose ties to Parsons and experience in the industry lends him a working rather than scholarly relationship to the area—balked at the notion that increased traffic was part of the solution. “Cool,” he said, creates foot traffic, higher rents, unnecessary retail and espresso bars and sidewalk beautification. Too much cool and the Garment District becomes SoHo—an area so removed from it’s artistic past it’s almost comical. That said, he supports another kind of “cool.” The kind of cool created by a buzzy upstart like Jason Wu basing himself in the area and paving the way for additional buzzy upstarts. And perhaps more importantly, the kind of cool that—through marketing and branding and special hang tags (and, more importantly, tax incentives)—makes producing clothing in the District cool. Using Ralph Lauren as his example, he commented that even if the label decided to produce a tiny percentage in New York (“maybe that tee shirt they make with the stars and stripes on it”) and publicize it, and make it cool, other labels would follow suit. Tradespeople, he said, “don’t need studies, they need orders.” Gee, how does he really feel?

Molotch—awakened by Collins’ frankness, or maybe just going for a laugh—agreed, saying the best way to ease real estate pressures on the area—or keep out the cool—is to stay seedy and reject any and all infrastructure improvements. In other words, “embrace porn.”

Teng, too, can do without the homogeneity cool generally creates. Her nightmare New York is a city of “bankers and brokers;” a place too expensive for upstarts or creative clusters brought up at the second panel. Additionally, and quite practically, she brought up a growing dearth of skilled craftspeople—pattern-makers, pleating experts, textile producers, fabric cutters—that could cripple the industry sooner than condos or Qdobas could. Training programs, she said, need to be created to ensure that designers have access to specific skill sets before an entire industrial sector dies with so many aging immigrant artisans.

Nonetheless, as Collins declared, the Garment District remains “absolutely bloody vital.” His Garment District is the perfect unofficial post-graduate environment for his Parsons students. He noted the relatively recent (and ongoing) successes of womenswear label Proenza Schouler. Founded by Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, two Parsons graduates, the pair simply returned to the businesses they came in contact with as interns to have their lauded initial collections produced. Eight years later the duo is at the helm of American fashion with dresses hanging in Barneys and grazing the backs Chloë Sevigny and Julianne Moore.

Which begs the question: Could Proenza Schouler—or any upstart for that matter—have happened without the support and the resources available to newbies within the loose confines of New York’s Garment District? Possibly, in some form or another, but why fix what’s working so well? Losing or moving the Garment District could endanger New York’s greatest fashion asset: fresh talent, start-ups, The Next Big Thing. We don’t have Burberrys or Guccis or Louis Vuittons, and we don’t have couture (just don’t tell Ralph Rucci that). But, New York’s apparel ecosystem introduced the world to Marc Jacobs and the slew of emerging talents (Alexander Wang, Phillip Lim, Richard Chai, the list goes on and on) who are in line to be the next Marc Jacobs. To that we can pretty safely say: In your face, Milan.

Photographs by Giles Ashford, courtesy of The Municipal Art Society of New York. As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Frank Gargione is a freelance graphic designer working within the fashion and publishing industries while studying textile and surface design at FIT. A lover of all things fashion, he is a frequent contributor for Racked.com. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.