The first edition of the New City Reader, "City," edited by Network Architecture Lab, posted on the facade of Storefront for Art and Architecture on Kenmare Street

The New City Reader is a weekly newspaper produced in the galleries of the New Museum throughout the duration of “The Last Newspaper,” an exhibition on view until January 9th, 2011. The show’s context, signified by the exhibition’s fatalistic title, is the existential crisis facing the newspaper industry. But the show’s content is more concerned with the variety of artistic explorations (including works by Hans Haacke, Wolfgang Tillmans and Dash Snow, among many others) into the ideological, political and material dimensions of the newsmedia and print journalism than it is with failing business models or the adoption of new information technologies. Alongside artworks that disassemble and recombine the politics and the lo-fi materiality of newsprint, a series of cultural producers are in residence in the galleries, making work within the confines of the museum itself: the Center for Urban Pedagogy, StoryCorps, Latitudes, the Slought Foundation and a partnership between Joseph Grima (editorial director of Domus magazine and the former director of Storefront for Art and Architecture) and Kazys Varnelis (director of Columbia’s Network Architecture Lab).

Grima and Varnelis conceived of the New City Reader as a newspaper of public space, whose content probes “the spatial implications of epochal shifts presently occurring in the information industry.” Over the phone, Grima told us that he is particularly interested in newspapers’ capacity to be “a laboratory for the production of knowledge,” and so he approached the project as a mechanism for mobilizing “a diverse network of collaborators” (about 300 people have taken part in making the New City Reader) to investigate “contemporary spatiality” by re-creating the traditional sections of the newspaper (Culture, Sports, Real Estate, etc.) Like Postopolis, another loose framework for networked knowledge sharing that Grima developed, he refers to the New City Reader as “a pyramid scheme of thoughts” in which he and Varnelis invited a series of guest editors for each issue who, in turn, invited a wide-ranging set of thinkers to probe the intersection where, in the words of New City Reader managing editor Alan Rapp, “urban space and information space converge.” According to Grima, what has emerged is “an incredibly heterogenous and kaleidoscopic snapshot that captures the conflictual nature of the relationship between information and public space.”

Kazys Varnelis recently sat down with Urban Omnibus to discuss how the New City Reader came to be and how it seeks to renew awareness of overlooked spatial and social practices in the context of current affairs. -C.S.

The third floor gallery of the New Museum has been turned into the site of an editorial residency where the New City Reader team edits, designs and produces each issue. Joseph Grima (seated, center) discusses the project with a museum visitor | Photo by Benoit Pailley, courtesy of the New Museum

Urban Omnibus: How did the New City Reader come to be?
Kazys Varnelis: Joseph Grima and I were already talking about working together when he received a call from Richard Flood at the New Museum who was beginning the curatorial process for “The Last Newspaper.” Joseph and I were talking about how in the 1960s, artists and thinkers connected to obsolete practices in order to re-imagine contemporary possibilities. Newspapers are not yet obsolete, but we wanted to go back to earlier methods of producing and consuming newspapers as a way to investigate critically a variety of trends and practices in the contemporary city.

Dàzìbào during the Cultural Revolution | via benoitvidal.com

Joseph immediately suggested a model he had seen in China, the Dàzìbào (大字报), or wall-mounted newspaper, meant to be read — and presumably discussed — in public. Then I began to do research into 19th century New York. A fascinating book called City Reading explains the proliferation of print culture in New York on the facades of buildings. In the 17th and 18th centuries there weren’t many signs on buildings. There actually weren’t any street signs until the 1820s – imagine wandering around New York without any street signs! I remembered from my childhood in Chicago seeing newspapers on walls, and wondered if there was something in this forgotten practice that was worth reclaiming.

Right now, each edition of the New City Reader is mounted on the façade of Storefront for Art and Architecture, in the window of New Museum and also up at Columbia. We had initially hoped for it to be posted in more sites but the realities of permissions, labor, etc. prevented that.

"Editorial," edited by Joseph Grima and Kazys Varnelis

So is the project more about interrogating the practice of sharing information in public or more about critiquing the shifts that the information industry finds itself in?
Both. On one hand, we have the ability to take advantage of some of the technological shifts that decrease the need for the heavy machinery of printing presses. It has only been a couple decades that we have been able to do this kind of thing on a computer, and only ten years that it’s been realistic to do this on a laptop. But while we are taking advantage of those shifts, we are also suggesting that some things are getting lost in the process: like this practice of collective reading, for example, which was pretty common here in the 19th century. If you think about collective television viewing, you might envision some images of people gathered around a TV set watching the Apollo landing or the JFK assassination. These days, I think, that kind of collective sharing of media is reserved exclusively for soccer matches.

"City" | Detail of a diagram showing the New York Times offices during the 1977 blackout

In one of your pieces for the New City Reader, you’ve written about the “interdependence of infrastructure, information and social stability.” Tell me more about that idea.
A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately is on this topic. And I think the moment of the blackout in July of 1977 – which was the subject of the “City” section, the first edition of the New City Reader – really signifies this interdependence. Twelve years previous, in 1965, there was a blackout that resulted in very little crime. But the 1977 blackout – with the economic stagnation, municipal bankruptcy and cuts to public services over the previous decade – resulted in mass rioting and looting, with parts of Bed-Stuy and the Bronx in flames, and the total breakdown of the kinds of societal networks that had previously kept the city afloat. We are now so comfortable with the idea that the City can’t possibly collapse. Yet the massive government debt and bad public-private partnerships that led to the fiscal crisis of the ’70s are perhaps not so unimaginable today: just the other day the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how problematic municipal bonds are.

As part of our broader objective to show how connected the newspaper is to the city, we were interested to probe a potential link between newspapers and the prospect of urban collapse. Harvey Molotch’s influential 1976 essay “The City as Growth Machine” described how certain interests see growth as the only possible move for cities. Growth, as we’ve seen in most recent economic crisis, often leads to unsustainable conditions. We’ve all heard that finance, insurance and real estate (the so-called FIRE economy) drive this ideology of growth. But newspapers have traditionally been a part of this as well, with business models based on growing circulation, real estate advertisements and so on. That’s why in times of economic contraction, the newspapers rarely raise any kind of alarm.

"Culture," edited by D-Crit (detail)

On one hand, it seems like the project seeks to critique newspapers as complicit with a lot of trends you find problematic in contemporary cities. On the other hand, it seems like it is issuing a call for civic activities that are shared among strangers, whether that’s reading in public or some other form of collective action.
There is certainly a call for more collective action. There is also a call for other kinds of voices to be included in newspapers. Typically when we think of newspapers, we think of them as media that simply communicates news. But they have a huge amount influence on the physical city. Just as the newspaper plays a role in Molotch’s growth machine thesis, the newspaper also helps to determine the architectural face of the city, particularly in the last ten or fifteen years, when I think there hasn’t been very good architecture at a top level. I think that, in a way, newspapers are partly to blame for this incredible embrace of starchitecture, of fame, of wanting to have dinner with the hot shots.

"Real Estate," edited by Mabel Wilson and Peter Tolkin (detail)

What does it mean to you that the New City Reader is “a newspaper of public space”? Does this subtitle refer only to the proposed act of collective reading? Or are there other spatial implications that you wanted to interrogate?
I think the idea has to do with the overlapping of different aspects of public space and the public sphere. For Habermas, whether it was the salon or the coffee house, the street or the city itself was a public space, and the public sphere required places where people read and discuss the things that they read.

You think of something like the old Berkeley tree stump — there used to be a tree stump in the middle of Berkeley where anybody could get up and give a speech at any time of day. You can imagine that people might, in public, respond to this condition, to someone making a proposal of some kind publicly, be it on the left or the right. And that’s something that I feel we don’t do much at all today. The Internet reinforces a kind of balkanization where I tend to read one political spectrum of information and other people tend to read another political spectrum. We also tend to live in places that fit us politically, I think.

"Leisure," edited by Beatriz Colomina, Spyros Papapetros, Britt Eversole and Daria Ricchi (detail)

So is the New City Reader an instrument to replicate the Berkeley Tree Stump or Speakers’ Corner, where contributors are invited to offer an opinion?
You could say the whole thing is an editorial project more than it is a reporting project.

My idea was to do it in a set of sections – Editorial, Sports, Culture, Real Estate, etc. – so, in the end, you have a giant newspaper. Then we decided we were going to look at the section titles and try to get interesting people with exciting things to say – in some cases very political, in some cases less so. In the end, pretty much every project had a degree of political content, which we welcomed.

As a newspaper, we certainly wouldn’t say this is a work of disinterested reporting. Everyone was motivated to do something. But the “disinterestedness” of traditional newspaper reporting is itself a bit of a mask. As an academic, I try to figure out the agenda behind everything. And I do feel like newspapers have a very clear stated agenda that does appear in their reportage, it just happens to be masked a little more. It appears at the level of editing, at a level of what content is selected, at a level of who is hired and what a newspaper chooses to cover.

"The Last Newspaper," 3rd Floor | Photo by Benoit Pailler, courtesy of the New Museum

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New City Reader contributing editors:
CITY: Network Architecture Lab | EDITORIAL: Joseph Grima & Kazys Varnelis | CULTURE: D-Crit, School of Visual Arts | SPORTS: Jeannie Kim & Hunter Tura | LEISURE: Beatriz Colomina, Spyros Papapetros, Britt Eversole & Daria Ricchi, Media & Modernity at Princeton University | FOOD: Will Prince, Krista Ninvaggi & Nicola Twilley | REAL ESTATE: Mabel Wilson & Peter Tolkin, SideProjects | BUSINESS: Frank Pasquale & Kevin Slavin | LEGAL: Eyal Weizman, Centre for Research Architecture at Goldmsiths | LOCAL: Geminidas & Nomeda Urbonas (Nugu) & Saskia Sassen | POLITICS: common room | MUSIC: DJ N-RON & DJ/rupture | STYLE: Robert Sumrell & Andrea Ching | SCIENCE: David Benjamin & Livia Corona | WEATHER: Jeffrey Inaba, C-Lab | OBITUARIES: Michael Meredith & Hilary Sample, MOS | CLASSIFIEDS: Leagues and Legions

New City Reader Staff:
EXECUTIVE EDITORS: Joseph Grima, Kazys Varnelis | MANAGING EDITOR: Alan Rapp | ASSOCIATE MANAGING EDITOR: John Cantwell | ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Brigette Borders, Daniel Payne | EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Pantea Tehrani | ART DIRECTOR: Neil Donnelly | DESIGNER: Chris Rypkema | EDITORIAL CARTOONIST: Klaus | BLACKOUT! CARTOONISTS: Momo Araki, Alexis Burson, Leigha Dennis, Kyle Hovenkotter | WEB DIRECTOR: Jochen Hartmann

detail from outside.in

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Detail from everyblock‘s map interface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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