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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Queens Volunteer Committee on the Boulevard

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

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

Planning Corps at work | photo: Dory Kornfield

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

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

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

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

Two comparable boulevards from Planning Corps' Book of Precedents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless otherwise noted, all images courtesy of Planning Corps.

An earlier version of this article appeared on CoLab Radio.

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

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

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

Curbside Haiku Samples

TRAFFIC SAFETY HAIKU
With ubiquity comes invisibility. And words can be arranged with the same economy and elegance as high quality graphic design. These two precepts are the inspiration behind the DOT’s latest spate of traffic signs. By combining a little bit of poetry with well-designed visuals, the DOT hopes to call attention to hazardous intersections. According to The New York Times City Room, twelve curbside Haiku signs have been installed in over twenty locations (PDF) around Brooklyn and Manhattan with more locations slated throughout the boroughs, all of which correspond to highly trafficked intersections near major cultural institutions. Apparently, the notion of traffic sign haiku is catching on, as City Room’s readers have responded with some entertaining, seventeen-syllable poetry of their own.

DELANCEY UNDERGROUND
A couple months ago, a proposal to build an underground park at the site of the the abandoned Essex Street Trolley Terminal at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge began to circulate around the Internet. Dubbed “Delancey Underground,” the proposal excited interest, and, while its fate is still uncertain, the MTA definitely wants to open the space up to development. To that end, the MTA has released a video tour led by Peter Hine of the MTA’s real estate office (blogged earlier this week by Second Avenue Sagas). While leading the tour, Hine offers up some suggestions of what kinds of retail or commercial uses could inhabit the space, and he is particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a nightclub: the former dispatch tower of the trolley terminal could serve as the DJ booth and revelers could enjoy views of active trains at the adjacent Delancey Street – Essex Street subway station. The video ends with an invitation to developers to get in touch with ideas about the “creative redevelopment and reuse” for this and other spaces belonging to the MTA throughout the city. For more information check out the MTA Real Estate Department’s website.

David Brooks' new installation at 46th street and 8th Avenue.

SUBURBAN DUNESCAPES IN TIMES SQUARE
A couple weeks ago, we spoke with Glen Weiss, former manager of the robust public art program at the Times Square Alliance. With the help of the Art Production Fund, Times Square has recently inaugurated a new series of installations ”that focus on raising environmental consciousness,” the first of which is a new, 5,000-square-foot sculpture by the artist David Brooks entitled Desert Rooftops. Constructed out of asphalt-shingled rooftops, the piece evokes strip malls, McMansions and other typologies we commonly associate with suburban sprawl right in the heart of New York City. Brooks’ synthetic landscape “examines issues of the natural and built landscape by comparing the monoculture that arises from unchecked suburban and urban sprawl with that of an over-cultivated landscape.” The installation is on view now through February 5, 2012 at Times Square, at The Last Lot project space on 46th Street and 8th Avenue. More information is available at the Times Square Alliance website.

DREAM CITIES
Reimagining cities has long been a favorite topic of discussion among architects and urbanists. Increasingly, the topic is capturing the attention of mainstream audiences as well. In September, The Atlantic unveiled its new online section, Atlantic Cities, which is devoted to “[exploring] the most innovative ideas and pressing issues facing today’s global cities and neighborhoods.” This week, Salon.com is widening the audience of those concerned with the future of cities even further with their new series, Dream City. The series, created to “explore the way we’re designing our cities of the future, cities in which we want to live, right now,” opened with a look at the possibilities of floating, water-borne architectures followed by a post on the removal of inner city highways. Both of these entries referenced New York City precedents: the Floating Pool and the proposed removal of the unloved Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx. We look forward to reading more.

DESIGNER SCAFFOLDING
While fun for the acrobatically-inclined child or cyclist looking for bike parking, the ubiquitous sidewalk scaffolding that protects pedestrians from falling debris at construction and demolition sites has always been an eyesore. In response to the ugliness, in 2009 the Department of Buildings invited architects and designers to submit proposals to the UrbanShed competition. The winning entry, from the team of Young-Hwan Choi, Andres Cortes and Sarrah Kahn of Agencie Group, was announced last January and their design is finally making it to the streets. For more of the coverage, check out the New York Times City Room and the Village Voice.

EVENTS and TO DOs

RAIL YARDS COMMUNITY INPUT MEETING: Now that all stakeholders have pledged to retain the final section of the High Line for recreational use, the team at Friends of the High Line are ready to move ahead with plans and designs for phase three. On December 6th, join them for a project update from representatives from the High Line design team, James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and voice your suggestions or ideas for the site. For more information about the Community Input Meeting, visit the Friends of the High Line’s website. Tuesday, December 6th, 6:30pm, at Public School 11 Auditorium, 320 West 21st Street.

Button Agreement Map, Day 5 | Stanley Greenberg

EVERY STREET IN MANHATTAN
Photographer Stanley Greenberg, who spoke with us last year about his long history of documenting infrastructural spaces and systems, has embarked on a new project, the Button Agreement. Greenberg will walk every street in Manhattan. He will go on at least one walk a week, documenting the walks with photographs and maps showing which streets he’s been on. The documentation will be made public on his blog.

A book of his previous project, Time Machines, photographs of high energy physics experiments, is now available. Join Greenberg for a discussion and book signing next week in Brooklyn. Wednesday, December 7th, 7pm at BookCourt, 163 Court Street.

AIDS MEMORIAL COMPETITION: When the AIDS epidemic hit New York City in the early 1980s, St. Vincent’s hospital was at the epicenter of the crisis. St. Vincent’s has closed and the hospital is being redeveloped as luxury condominiums, but the NYC AIDS Memorial Park Campaign has succeeded in designating the triangle adjacent to the hospital a future park and memorial space. The triangle, bounded by Greenwich Avenue, West 12th Street and 7th Avenue, which has traditionally served as the loading dock for the hospital, will now serve as a “memorial park and teaching space to honor and recognize the more than 100,000 New Yorkers who have died from AIDS.” Architizer and Architectural Record have launched a competition to design the memorial park. The competition will be juried by Michael Arad, Kurt Andersen, Barry Bergdoll, Liz Diller, Ken Smith, Robert Hammond, Bill T. Jones, Richard Meier, Dr. Marjorie Hill and Suzanne Stephens. Find more information at the competition page. Deadline: January 21, 2012.

JOIN YOUR LOCAL COMMUNITY BOARD!: Community boards serve a vital role in the life of New York City. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is hosting a series of informational meetings about the roles and responsibilities of community board members, the newly increased role the borough’s community boards play and how to become a board member. The meetings will be held Tuesday, December 6th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm in the Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th Floor; Wednesday, December 14th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm, at 163 West 125th Street, Room 8C; and Thursday, January 5th, from 6:30 – 8:00pm in the Municipal Building, 1 Centre Street, 19th Floor. RSVP to conference@manhattanbp.org.

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

Gorton’s involvement with urban issues began in 1999, when he founded OpenPlans, a non-profit devoted to the pursuit of smart planning and civic engagement through media and digital tools. Since then, he has helped launch the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign, which advocates for a more dynamic use of public space, and the online media outlets Streetsblog, Streetfilms and Gotham Schools.

Last week, Gorton took me on a walk through the Flatiron District to talk about cars, people and the future of New York City. He painted a picture of a New York free from car dependency, in which both policy and the design of our streets give priority to people, social vitality and safety. (Look back at this 2009 Omnibus feature on Ulrich Franzen’s 1969 short film “Street” to see another bold vision of how to reclaim our congested streets.) Read on to hear Gorton’s thoughts about the largely car-free city he has envisioned and how it can come to be. —Alicia Rouault

Mark Gorton | photo by Alicia Rouault

In 1999, you founded OpenPlans, a non-profit organization that uses technology to improve the way that cities and citizens interact. How and when did you start moving towards transportation reform specifically?
Five years ago, nobody was talking about transportation in NYC. It was a non-issue. There was this sense that New York is a big city, it has a lot of traffic, so what?

We consciously launched an agenda to raise awareness of different policy options. We started Streetsblog and Streetfilms. We formed something called the New York City Streets Renaissance Campaign and talked a lot about the potential of Bus Rapid Transit, programs like Summer Streets and bike lanes. We initially focused on leaders at the Department of Transportation (DOT), the mayor and other transportation policymakers, and we were very effective within that circle.

Now, thanks to the work of the DOT, people have seen change on the ground. It’s no longer theoretical. So all the people who couldn’t be bothered for years are taking notice. Whether it’s in The New York Times, The New York Post, on CBS News or amongst people in neighborhoods, there is a citywide debate about what we should do with our streets and people understand that there are policy alternatives.

So now that the current administration is supportive of your work and many of your initiatives have been enacted, how do you engage with transportation reform today?
The main point that I’m trying to make now is that cars are bad for New York and that the incorporation of the automobile into the fabric of the city was a big mistake. I want people to question, at the most fundamental level, the role of the car in the city.

Through both street design and policies, our city is programmed for driving and for maximum automobile throughput. But the needs of people and the needs of the automobile are completely different. The automobile asks for very simple, straight, distraction-free — people-free — places. Activity in a human context, at a human speed, won’t work with cars flying by.

Streets used to be safe places for kids to play, places where neighbors would gather. Now we have this definition of the street that was essentially promulgated by the automobile industry and the oil industry, in which cars dominate and people are considered only when absolutely necessary. It’s been incredibly pathological and as a result we have a much worse city than we could have otherwise. The automobile industry has been happy to tell people that the car is about freedom. It’s not about freedom for me. It’s an oppressive burden on my kids and my family.

Broadway and Houston, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

Why do you think people are so protective of cars?
There are a number of reasons. First of all, I think there’s just an inherent bias towards the status quo. Most people are inherently resistant to change. Also, our society has been indoctrinated to see cars as exciting, fun and sexy, not dangerous, selfish, rude and annoying. Most people think that if they drive around and don’t crash into somebody, they haven’t done any harm. But much of the damage done by the automobile is social harm, invisible harm that degrades our neighborhoods and makes the city unpleasant and dangerous.

Donald Appleyard, a professor at UC Berkeley, did a series of studies on the societal impact of traffic. He looked at three streets in San Francisco, similar in every way possible except for how much traffic passed through. He found that people who lived on the lightly-trafficked street had more friends than those who lived on the heavily-trafficked street. 3.0 friends per person versus .09. The same went for acquaintances, people in heavily-trafficked areas had fewer. He also tracked where people congregated and how they engaged with their surroundings. He then asked the residents to draw their “home territory.” On the heavily-trafficked street, people drew their apartment building or maybe a piece of the sidewalk in front of their building. On the lightly-trafficked one, people included their entire street. At a certain level, Appleyard showed that traffic destroys people’s social connections with their neighbors and friends. [Watch a Streetfilm on Appleyard's study below. -Ed.]

Streetfilm: Revisiting Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets

So is the primary challenge to change the discourse? What comes after that?
This is going to be a decades-long process. There are a number of things we have to do. A lot of people assume that the car is important, essential and properly used. Therefore, if there’s not enough space to park, you need to create more parking. If there’s not enough road space, you should create more road space. That’s essentially what the story of the 20th century was. Sidewalks were narrowed, parking was added, the city became more friendly to cars and more hostile to people. But all of those efforts still failed to make the car work in New York City. The automobile does a bad job as a transportation technology in the city because it’s so spatially inefficient.

We want to communicate an alternative vision. We’re talking about changes that will get people out of their cars, that will make it difficult and expensive to drive. Of course, some drivers just don’t want to get out of their cars. And some people don’t want to consider alternatives, because it forces them to question their own behavior, to accept that every time they get in their car, they somehow, in some small way, harm their neighbors and use an unfair share of the scarce public space of the city. They don’t see how change can give us healthier children, improved social activity and a better economy.

What is your alternative vision? Do you want to completely eradicate cars?
I don’t want to eradicate cars, but I think we could reduce them by 90%. The automobile is one of the most significant technologies in this country, but it is fundamentally misused. Capable, healthy people should not be driving within the city at all. Any trip that you make on a regular basis, whether it’s going to school, work or the grocery store, should be possible without driving a car. Automobile trips should be limited to those where people are leaving the city or the occasional trip that requires a vehicle, such as carrying cargo.

The remaining traffic, whether it be automobile or truck, could be concentrated in space and time. Some streets could be fully pedestrianized and some could be auto-oriented. Maybe a street allows traffic from 6am until 10am, but then from 2pm until 5pm, when kids get out of school, auto access is radically reduced. You can concentrate the harm onto the auto-oriented streets and free up more space to be beautiful, peaceful and safe.

I think 20% of the streets in Manhattan alone could be fully pedestrianized, with no cars, buses or bikes. We should have a comprehensive network of pedestrian streets. Broadway, for the whole length of Manhattan, could be fully pedestrianized. On the east side, maybe Lexington Avenue. We could do that.

This is also good for business. Kalverstraat, a fully-pedestrianized street in Amsterdam, has the highest retail rents in all of Holland. Here in New York, the street with the highest retail rents outside of Manhattan is Brooklyn’s Fulton Street on Fulton Mall — which has no cars. No one wants to live on a street that’s choked with a lot of nasty traffic. No one wants to work, shop or eat dinner on a street that’s polluted, loud, dangerous and unpleasant. Automobiles are bad for business.

Property owners are one of the constituencies we want to reach. The easiest way to increase property value in the city is to get rid of cars on the street. When the real estate industry realizes that, we’ll start to see more change.

Of course, the transportation dynamics in Manhattan are different from those in eastern Queens or parts of the Bronx. There are neighborhoods in which getting rid of cars simply doesn’t work. But things can be done in every neighborhood. It’s just a question of engaging the residents and finding how they want their streets to be.

Fulton Mall, Brooklyn | photo by Varick Shute

You say that automobiles are bad for business, but what about car-dependent businesses, necessary truck traffic or the taxi industry?
Yes, I want to be sure to distinguish between truck traffic and automobile traffic, because you certainly need freight delivery, garbage trucks, things like that – though I think with conscious effort we can probably improve efficiency and reduce truck trips by 30-50%.

But there are very few auto-dependent businesses, particularly in Manhattan. Restaurant and store owners worry that their patrons won’t be able to show up without their cars. They will, they’ll just be using different means to get there. The idea that people need to drive to go shopping is simply not true. Only 6% of shopping trips in the central business district of Manhattan are done by car.

That’s not to say there aren’t losers if there are fewer cars – parking garages, auto-parts supply stores, there are businesses directly related to vehicles. But in New York there is always a process of creative destruction in the economy. And the alternative is endangering our children and having an obesity epidemic because people can’t live an active lifestyle.

The taxi industry is more of a grey area. Cabs produce noisy, dangerous traffic. But in some ways taxis complement the public transit system. They make cars available for people who need to use them without relying on private ownership. There are also options like car sharing. We’re not talking about banning cars, we’re talking about making them available for the rare trips where people really need them.

What else needs to be done in order to make your vision a reality?
We need to improve our buses and expand Bus Rapid Transit. Buses are much more spatially efficient than cars. And the surface route infrastructure is mostly there. The select bus service routes that New York City has already put into place have increased bus speeds by 20% and that number can definitely increase. But it takes funding, innovation and willingness to dedicate road space to bus-only lanes.

We also need to take the bicycle seriously as a transportation technology. Other big cities do: in Tokyo, 20% of all trips are carried by bicycle; Osaka 25%; Berlin 13%; Amsterdam 40%; Copenhagen, 37%. Without much difficulty, we could see 20-25% of all trips in New York being taken by bicycle, which would reduce congestion, increase mobility and make the city safer and more livable. But right now, our street network is implicitly hostile to the bicycle. And it’s unreasonable to expect people to take their lives in their hands just to get around, so they’re going to resort to other alternatives. The city has begun to take steps to make our streets safer but we still have a long, long, long way to go.

In some ways this is a generational issue. The automobile used to be a symbol of progress and economic might. But it doesn’t represent the future anymore. Now it’s part of this nasty, mechanized, dystopian world that we have to deal with.

Madison Square, Manhattan | photo by Caitlin Blanchfield

How does your work with participatory planning come in to all of this?
In order to achieve significant change in how the city behaves, you have to engage the public as deeply as possible. People have to understand why this in their own self-interest. I’m talking about creating a process where people come together and decide how they really want their streets to function. Do we want them to be thoroughfares for people outside the neighborhood or places for our children to play?

Do you see a role for the recent crop of web-based, interactive, democratic tools, like ChangeByUs or SeeClickFix, in doing what you’re talking about?
Software and internet tools definitely have a role to play in this participatory democracy, because they can help disseminate information and create a forum in which to build social consensus for change. Each of the tools you mentioned is good for what they do. But to really see change, I think we need more government agencies deploying them. Because the government controls the streets. It doesn’t matter how many people join a group or “like” something on Facebook, that doesn’t change government policy.

But if we can integrate these tools into a public input process and get the DOT to adopt them, there’s significant potential to galvanize communities. A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. New York is a huge city, and the only mechanism the DOT has to gather input from communities — Do you want a bench here? Do you want to put in a loading zone? Do you want that intersection daylighted? — is to have its staff facilitate tens of thousands of local dialogues, which is impossible. As a result, that happens only in a rare handful of circumstances.

What’s your strategy moving forward? Are you still focusing your advocacy efforts on policymakers?
The strategy now is to try and engage with and talk to the media and the thought leaders in the city. We’ve been faced with a lot of knee-jerk reactions against change. It amazes me how thoughtless a lot of coverage in the media is on this topic. Many reporters who don’t know anything about transportation show up to cover these issues — and much of the media drives around the city as they cover it, which gives them a very windshield-oriented perspective. The Post has been particularly awful. CBS news too. So what I’m trying to do now is to speak more publicly about these things, to reach both the media and a broader audience.

Will you continue to work with smaller groups or do you want to focus on changing the way the big outlets cover the topic?
It’s a combination. We’ve been working through the more niche-oriented media channels for the last five years, and we’ve made great progress. But to take it to the next level and get people all over the city who are now seeing the changes on their street to understand what these changes are for, why they should want them, and why they should ask for more, then we have to talk to them through the media that they’re used to consuming.

A lot of people feel that they aren’t being asked about changes made to their streets. I want people to understand that the automobile is a flawed technology for our city and that we need change. I want them to see the positive things that can happen if they embrace that change. I want my street to be safe for my kids so they can play. And I’m not content to wait for that. I want it to happen now.

Interview conducted by Alicia Rouault.

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Mark Gorton, the founder of a series of innovative financial and technology companies, is a leading advocate for alternative transportation and livable streets. He is the founder of Tower Research Capital LLC, a money management firm specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies, as well as the founder of Lime Brokerage LLC, Lime Wire LLC, Lime Labs LLC, and OpenPlans. In 2005, Mark founded the New York City Streets Renaissance campaign in partnership with the Project for Public Spaces and Transportation Alternatives. Through his philanthropy, his leadership at OpenPlans, and his public and media appearances, Mark Gorton continues to advocate for alternative transportation, livable streets, and open government.

Mark holds a B.A. in Electrical Engineering from Yale University, a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a MBA from Harvard University. He lives on the Upper West Side and bikes regularly to his offices in Lower Manhattan.

High Line Rink | Image via Friends of the High Line and UNIQLO

HIGH LINE ROLLER RINK
What do you with an empty lot that’s the terminal point of an extraordinary, linear park? You build a roller skating rink! At least that’s what James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro have created, in partnership with HWKN and UNIQLO. This temporary 8,000-square-foot roller rink will last through the summer, featuring old-fashioned roller skate rental, themed events and night-time DJs. The High Line Rink will be open from July 28 through September 26. Admission will be $10 for kids, $12 for adults. See more details here.

HUDSON RIVER OUTFALL
Stay out of the Hudson! Due to a massive engine fire at the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant yesterday, raw sewage has been redirected to 56 outfall sites which pour directly into open water. Since the plant’s shut-down, 120 million gallons of raw sewage have entered the waterway. Officials have banned canoeing, kayaking, swimming and fishing in the Hudson River, including advisories for Midland, Cedar Grove, Seagate and South Beach today. Harlem’s Riverbank State Park, located next to the plant, was shut down until further notice. See more coverage from The New York Times.

MTA CHIEF RESIGNS
Jay Walder, MTA Chairman since 2009, resigned on Wednesday to take over Hong-Kong based transportation company MTR Corporation. Transportation Alternatives’ Paul Steely White commented on Walder’s contribution to the city: “Facing a daunting fiscal situation brought on by the Governor and State Legislature’s repeated budget raids, Walder kept our trains and buses serving millions of New Yorkers 24 hours every day.” The Wall Street Journal pointed to the dramatic pay bump Walder will receive — in Hong Kong he will earn more than $900,000 as base salary, a 157% increase above his current $350K salary at the MTA. Denise Richardson of General Contractors Association of New York noted that his departure really “says more about our collective unwillingness to properly fund our transportation network than it does about new opportunities for his career.” Benjamin Kabak of Second Ave. Sagas analyzed some of the probable driving forces behind Walder’s departure and continues to post updates on the latest news.

Screengrab of MyBlockNYC.com

BLOCK PARTY
What if you could explore and interact with user-generated video that captures each unique, interesting and sometimes crazy moment around New York City’s 90,000 blocks? That’s the mission of MyBlockNYC.com, a site dedicated to bringing the experience of exploring New York to the Internet. What separates it from other video sharing sites is that MyBlockNYC’s clips are superimposed on a map, infusing the typically static Google Streetview with a certain liveliness. Anyone can contribute content, from residents to tourists to professionals. Co-creator Alex Kalman wants to give users “the most intimate and human way to explore New York City without being here.” The team behind the site was recently invited to set up an interactive exhibition at MoMA’s new exhibition Talk to Me: Design and Communication Between People and Objects. Read more about the site on Design Observer.

EVENTS & TODOs:

ReinventNYC.gov | Courtesy Social Media Week

REINVENTNYC.GOV: As part of the City’s constant efforts towards transparency and abiding interest in crowdsourcing, the NYC Office of Media and Entertainment and the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications in partnership with General Assembly have announced the City’s “first ever digital programming event”: Reinvent NYC.gov. Teams of designers, engineers, copywriters, photographers, interface designers, web developers and product managers can enter, by submitting a profile and examples of their work, to participate in a two-day “hackathon” to make NYC.gov more accessible and fun to use. The hackathon will take place from July 30-31, but all entries must be submitted by today, July 22! Find more information here.

MAPPING THE CITYSCAPE: Manhattan has seen many changes since 1811, but one thing that has stayed constant is the grid. It’s the foundation on which the city has evolved and grown– layer by layer. Just as intrepid cartographers explored and documented the island’s landscape in its nascent days, modern mappers are returning to the grid, armed with new technology to compile information about how the contemporary urban landscape has developed and how it can be further utilized. Mapping the Cityscape, the exhibition currently up at the Center for Architecture, celebrates a history of mapping NYC through a graphic examination of, “the ways in which mapping influences our perception of the environment.” Mapping the Cityscape is on view through August 27th.

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DOT rendering of potential wayfinding signage | Image via NYCDOT

WALK THIS WAY
This week, the New York City Department of Transportation released a request for proposals to develop a comprehensive pedestrian “wayfinding system” in four districts: Long Island City, Queens; Prospect Heights/Crown Heights, Brooklyn; and Chinatown and parts of Midtown in Manhattan. The RFP is, in part, a response to the DOT statistic that 9 percent of New Yorkers and 27 percent of visitors admitted to being lost in the past week. The selected system will cater to both locals and visitors, allowing people to better gauge travel time and navigate unfamiliar neighborhoods. “As our streets become safer, more inviting places, it’s even more important that a common language unite these spaces and open them up in new and exciting ways,” said Commissioner Sadik-Khan. See more from the DOT here.

Chart from US and Canada Green City Index

GREEN CITIES
The US and Canada Green City Index report was recently released by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), commissioned by Siemens, ranking NYC as the third greenest city in North America. The survey took into account 31 factors developed by a panel of experts in environmental sustainability, which rated cities on environmental impact in land use, waste, air, transportation and a variety of other environmental categories. New York beat out all other cities in Transport and Land Use (scoring major points for density and public transportation), but was ranked 16 out of 27 on waste management. To read the full report on New York and other cities, see the full report here.

SAFE STREETS
Last month, Mayor Bloomberg revealed new safety measures as part of the DOT’s revamped pedestrian safety plan. Calling for a reduced speed limit of 20 mph in the Claremont neighborhood of the Bronx, this is the first manifestation of the DOT’s plan to introduce new slow speed zones around the city. DOT will also be placing radar-equipped signage throughout the boroughs to notify motorists of their speed and intimidating digital displays of skeletons to discourage dangerous driving. Mayor Bloomberg was joined by DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon (to support the “Decade of Action for Road Safety”) to announce the safety initiative. A report released by Transportation Alternatives states that 39 percent of observed motorists drive in excess of the 30mph limit, vindicating what many bikers and pedestrians know all too well. Secretary General Ki-moon noted that the chance of surviving after being struck by a vehicle traveling at 40mph is only 30 percent, and that nationally road fatalities kill 1.3 million people per year and injure another 20 to 50 million more. Read more on the story in coverage from Streetsblog.

Image via FOP

NYC WATER: GEOLOGIC CITY
Friends of the Pleistocene published a fascinating Geologic City Report on New York City’s relationship with our drinking water, how aquatic architecture shapes dynamic space, and what happens to road salt, waste, and other solvent undesirables once they “disappear.” Even with some of the cleanest and tastiest water in the country, sources of NYC drinking water are still exposed to “microbial contaminants, inorganic contaminants, pesticides and herbicides, organic chemical compounds, and radioactive contaminants.” Thankfully, the city has intricate sanitation and delivery infrastructure in place to safeguard consumption, much of which remains generally unknown to the public. 97 percent of water reaching the city every day is carried solely by gravity via channels, tunnels and pipes. The system itself, which you can read more about in this 2008 story in The New York Times, provides water for 9 million residents through a network of turn-of-the-century reservoirs and aqueducts. City Water Tunnel No. 3 is currently under construction with a completion date slated for 2020 and a budget of $6 billion dollars. The new tunnel will help to ease the demand on the two older tunnels, both of which are in dire need of inspection and repairs. Read the full story at FOP and learn more about their Geologic City Reports in a piece they wrote for Urban Omnibus last year.

EVENTS & TO-DOs:

BEAUX ARTS BALL
Save the Date: The Architectural League of New York’s annual Beaux Arts Ball will be held this year on September 17th, 2011! Stay tuned for more details about this year’s location, the designers who will create the environment for the event and how to buy tickets. In the meantime, take a look at photos from past Beaux Arts Balls over on archleague.org.

FIELD GUIDE TO PHYTOREMEDIATION: NYC-based design project A Field Guide to Phytoremediation has launched a Kickstarter campaign ending July 30th. Kaja Kühl, founder of youarethecity and creator of A Field Guide to Phytoremediation, hopes the guide will reflect her research on vacant lots and provide a methodology for DIY phytoremediation. The funds will directly support a print version of  FIELD GUIDE (a DIY guide book for phytoremediation) and help build an on-site installation at La Finca del Sur, a community farm in the Bronx. Find out more about phytoremediation in Kühl’s 2010 Urban Omnibus piece.

ELASTIC CITY TOUR: Elastic City is premiering four new walks with women in July, with Andrea Polli hosting “City Island Hop,” a walk to discover City Island. Although technically part of NYC, City Island remains isolated, sitting just on the border of Nassau County. Incorporating anthropological field study techniques, this walk will use the island as a living laboratory for exploring New York City’s history and future. Participants will be engaged in exercises designed to observe the environment and decipher its visual and aural cues and uncover the relatively unknown wonders of this “island existence.” See here for more on the tours and to read up on Elastic City’s past work, check out our interview with EC founder Todd Shalom and participating artist Neil Freeman.

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Three weeks ago, Mayor Gilberto Kassab of São Paulo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York met in São Paulo as part of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit and shared their particular strategies to meet the challenges of climate change. It’s clear that both mayors take sustainability seriously, and their administrations have adjusted their priorities accordingly.

São Paulo is similar to New York in many ways. Both cities are big and growing. They attract the best and brightest, the dreamers and the strivers, and as a result they have a rich cultural life and diversity. They also both face similar problems, from housing solutions to open space access to efficient transportation.

Everything I think I know about good urban design comes from what I know about New York, and working at the New York City Department of City Planning. But recently, I had an opportunity to work for three weeks with the São Paulo city government as part of a professional urban design exchange organized by SP Urbanismo, a public-private agency under the Secretary of Urban Development. And so, equipped with the principles I’ve learned here — and barely any Portuguese — I briefly stepped onto the front lines of the enormous challenges of rapid and unplanned urbanization.

TRAFFIC
One of São Paulo’s priorities is to mitigate its notorious traffic jams. A Paulistano can spend up to three hours each day waiting in traffic and most of their traffic planners believe that the only way to reduce congestion is by adding more road. However, the land-use planners I worked with see the importance of investing in mass transit, and that adding more road results in more cars and more traffic. We talked a lot about how easily São Paulo could become a walkable city. A walkable city needs to have complete neighborhoods: a concentration of density around mass transit, a mix of uses, innovative architecture and design standards for streets and public space. These are the principles on which São Paulo was originally built.

In São Paulo’s old city center, a mix of Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts buildings crowd together around spacious pedestrian streets and continuous networks of public parks. Trolleys once ran on the tree-lined streets and every apartment building or office building had ground floor shops. In 1940, it was a city of about 1.3 million people living in an area roughly similar to the size of Brooklyn. The city center today retains the idyllic pedestrian-friendly DNA apparent in the grainy photos from the 1930s, but now the retail is low-end, many of the great old buildings vacant and covered with graffiti, and many of the parks have been revised over the years by architects fixated on the texture and plasticity of concrete. Since the 1960s, density has been dispersed throughout the city with no apparent pattern, housing has been separated from other land uses, and traffic engineers have guided the major public infrastructure expenditures to serve the unchallenged primacy of car-based transport.

Currently the planners in São Paulo are proposing several urban redevelopment projects that would recreate this vibrant mix of uses and density around transit. But it’s an effort being met with resistance and fear of change. Packed auditoriums of angry residents denounce the projects in fiery oratory, worried that adding density will add more cars and more traffic, not alleviate them as planned. New York sees its own share of conflict and debate over issues in the public realm, but here the City is working hard to create a mutually-supportive alliance between advocates for a greener city, transit-oriented development and safe affordable housing. The planners in São Paulo need more allies to help them make their case.

OPEN SPACE
Flying over São Paulo, you can see a seemingly endless expanse of city, a wide variety of single family houses and pencil towers. You might notice patches of green around the towers, but you won’t see much public open space. Working with São Paulo’s planners, I began to understand that this pattern of prioritizing private open space over public open space is deeply embedded in their regulations. Setback rules push buildings off the street; parking requirements are uniformly high, roughly one space per inhabitant; most of the city is zoned at a low floor-to-area ratio, between two and four. And there is a growing middle class that wants to live in high rises — which demand substantial parking provisions, security fences and significant open space on the lot, which is offered as a private amenity to the residents. But anyone on the other side of those tall fences is left walking on narrow sidewalks, creeping along what feels like a prison wall.

Mayor Kassab is pushing back against these regulations. He has made open space a high priority, constructing 66 new parks and planting nearly 200,000 new trees in the last five years, a much needed greening. Here in New York, we’ve seen Mayor Bloomberg lead his strategy for New York’s open space with a directive to bring each New Yorker within a 10-minute walk of a public park. To achieve that goal, we’ve discovered new opportunities for public space where we can find them: on abandoned rail lines, former roadbeds like Times Square and formerly inaccessible waterfront industrial sites; and have worked with developers to provide high quality, publicly accessible, privately-operated open space.

HOUSING
A third priority for São Paulo is how to provide safe and affordable housing for the estimated three million people who currently live in precarious settlements. These notorious favelas occupy land that is often on steep slopes or flood prone areas. The daily conditions in these homes are fraught with poverty, crime and disease. Seasonal floods frequently cause landslides and lead to dozens of deaths.

São Paulo’s housing agencies are employing two major strategies to address this housing crisis. The first is to bring roads and infrastructure through the existing favelas, a process that the housing ministry calls “urbanization.” This model avoids displacing existing communities as much as possible, yet it fails to provide housing at the necessary scale — the government has set their target at providing one million new units in the next fifteen years. The second strategy is to find a very dense model of housing that can be expediently planned and constructed, safely located, strongly built and easily connected to roads and to the municipal infrastructure. To meet this vast demand, they have adopted a familiar model: “towers in the park.”

In the mid-20th century, Robert Moses and the authors of the 1961 Zoning Resolution adopted the towers-in-the-park model with the stated goal of replacing New York’s slums. But over time we’ve seen the shortcomings of this model. Yes, towers in the park offer great advantages in terms of concentrating infrastructure, and being able to execute projects quickly and affordably. They can also provide individual dwelling units that enjoy a lot of light and air and standardized layouts which simplify the economic model, making them easy to scale and repeat. But these virtues have to be weighed against the vices that we’ve come to know. Building gated housing complexes, cut off from the neighborhood street life, reinforces isolation and creates an insecure environment. New York is now turning towards affordable housing projects that are designed to integrate with the surrounding community to create a stronger sense of public life in the neighborhood and transform the urban design of the area.

RESILIENCE
Public transportation is good for cities… right? That’s something that I thought needed no explanation. But I had a debate recently with my boss, Alex Washburn, about which form of transportation has done the most harm to cities. To me, it’s obvious that automobile-centric urban design wreaked a sudden and complete havoc on the American landscape. It only took one generation for much of the United States to go from towns, farms and railroads to suburbs, strip malls, and interstates. Today, other cities all over the world, especially those that are experiencing rapid economic growth, seem to be following this bad example. As I sat in the back of a cab for two hours on my way to a meeting in São Paulo, I noticed the narrowness of the sidewalks, the absence of pedestrians or bikes, the ubiquitous walls, the apparent single-use zoning all around me. All of this to serve the consumer demand for cars. And it’s happening all over the world. It may be years before these cities feel the full effects: the degradation of civic space, the expense of providing services and infrastructure over a widely sprawled area, and the increase in chronic diseases because people walk less.

Even so, Alex says that airplanes may be guiltier, because for many years precocious urban designers (like me) have flown all over the world and put forward their big ideas to politicians and builders. You could call this “flyover urbanism.” On one such mission, Robert Moses came to Brazil in the 1950s to help plan highways, helping to set the direction of its current urban design trajectory.

But planning and prodding can only do so much, and no city can “leapfrog” past the mistakes others have made, or copy their successes. Great cities will always be shaped by forces of economy, politics, nature and pure chance. There is not one course of history which all cities will follow, nor one destination we all seek to reach. Also, cities don’t leap.

Cities might not leap, but every city has its own flow. The forces that govern that flow — “why” we do things — might be similar between places, and we may even learn together the “how,” but we must be wary of copying the “what.”

São Paulo has an elevated highway called the Minhocão that runs through a neighborhood that has strong potential for redevelopment. There is some debate about the utility of this highway to the traffic network, and so it has been closed on Sundays to allow people to use it recreationally. I was asked by officials if I thought this could be São Paulo’s High Line. With this internationally-acclaimed example in mind, architects and engineers have begun to make plans for capping the elevated highway with a park, thus creating even more obstruction of light and air to the public realm below. Trying to recreate the High Line on the Minhocão is copying the “what.” Great urban design projects cannot be dropped from an airplane. But perhaps principles can parachute in to offer a little help. The principle of the High Line is that we can create an invaluable resource out of something that had been thought of as an unwanted remnant of another age.

I have wondered if what Tolstoy famously said about families is also true of cities: that they are unhappy in different ways but happy in similar ways. It would be a boring world if all cities were the same. But it is not our particular unhappinesses that make us different. In fact, our problems seem to be getting more and more universal. What makes us unique is the way in which we deal with these problems, using our own local ingenuity. I once heard a story about an artist who lived in a beautiful, but sparsely furnished, house for very little rent. The landlord gave him a deal because once a year the house is completely under water. The genius is in the adaptation.

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All photos by Thaddeus Pawlowski.

Thaddeus Pawlowski is Associate Urban Designer for the Office of the Chief Urban Designer of the City of New York, Department of City Planning. He works on large scale neighborhood and infrastructure projects including the redevelopment of Penn Station area and Hudson Yards. He has previously worked at the Office of Emergency Management where he developed “What if NYC…” a design competition for post disaster urban housing. He earned a Master in Architecture and certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA from University of Pittsburgh.

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.

HIGH LINE PHASE TWO NOW OPEN
Section 2 of the High Line is open to the public after a surprise soft launch on June 7th, between 20th to 30th Street along 10th Ave. The latest phase has doubled the length of the park to one mile. Some of the best new features to check out: the 4,900 square foot 23rd Street Lawn; an elongated, wooden radial bench (between West 28th and 29th Streets); and the 26th Street Viewing Spur, a glass framed lookout over West 26th Street with cascading teak sitting steps. See the official High Line site for more information on Section 2.

BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN REVIEWED
Norman Oder, resident expert on Atlantic Yards and author of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, recently reviewed Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s documentary on the seven-year development controversy, Battle for Brooklyn. Oder finds the film to be “most valuable in the camera’s witness to the palpable insincerity and cold-blooded indifference of the developer-government alliance” and wonders if Ratner’s deputy Bruce Bender asked the right questions. Read Oder’s full film review over on Dissent and his comment on Forest City Ratner’s response to the film.

BAD HABITS = DANGEROUS STREETS
SVA Masters student Ron Gabriel has created a compelling video campaign called “3 Way Street” drawing on the dangerous behavioral tendencies bikers, people and cars play out on NYC streets. Gabriel’s project exposes how “pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights and motorists plowing through crosswalks” make our streets unsafe. Catch the cleverly annotated video here.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SOUTH STREET SEAPORT
Gotham Gazette covers the latest land use controversy over plans for South Street Seaport, following a 40-year string of unsuccessful development strategies. The Howard Hughes Corporation has been in preliminary discussion with SHoP Architects to redevelop the neighborhood, which, although it has some of the oldest architecture in Manhattan, has been home to many struggling businesses over past few decades. A 2008 plan sought to tear down the Pier 17 mall and construct a huge condominium, which was heavily critiqued by Community Board 1. Competing area demands like public retail needs and newer businesses like the New Amsterdam Market make for a complex design challenge. Stay tuned for updates and see the full story here.

Graphic via Architecture Magazine

IS LEED TOO POWERFUL?
On ArchitectureBoston, Michael Liu outlines the debate surrounding the legitimacy of LEED certification. Starting in 2010, Henry Gifford filed a class-action lawsuit against the non-profit US Green Building Council (USGBC) on a number of accounts, claiming USGBC’s claims to improved energy performance of LEED-certified buildings were unsubstantiated and contributed to a defrauding of the public en masse over the actual benefits of LEED-certified buildings. LEED-certification currently charges significant sums for construction and professional credits, turning LEED into what Gifford calls “a fee-generating monopoly.” Gifford provides a relevant contribution by opening up discourse around who makes what rules and unpacking the added complexity of charging money for institutionalized standards. Nevertheless, LEED certification also represents the need to formalize and codify design standards to move toward a sustainable future. Gifford points out that we need to be wary of how these standards are met; he critiques the “process of certifying buildings and the creation of a fee-generating bureaucratic structure” rather than green design standards themselves. Read Michael Liu’s full op-ed here.

HIGH-TECH TOURISM
CultureNOW, an organization formed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 specifically to illustrate the cultural and historical richness of Lower Manhattan, has mapped out the history, art and architecture of New York’s public realm to create a “museum without walls” iPhone app. CultureNOW President Abby Suckle calls the app, which won an honorable mention in the New York City’s 2011 BigApps 2.0 contest, a “treasure hunt, almost like urban archaeology.” Users can explore with maps, photos, tour routes and renderings of former buildings, all while listening to timely podcasts from experts like Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Pratt Professor Bill Menking and architect Hugh Hardy. Download the app here.

Poe Park Visitor Center | Image via NYC PARKS/Malcolm Pinckney

EDGAR ALLEN POE AND DESIGN EXCELLENCE IN THE BRONX
The new Poe Park Visitor Center, located in the Bronx between the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road, sits on a 2.3 acre park that was home to the last residence of famed author Edgar Allen Poe. The visitor center is the first parks project to be completed from the Bloomberg Administration’s Design and Construction Excellence Initiative. Designed by architect Toshiko Mori, the new center is a 5,400-square-foot visitor center that includes a gathering space for community use and a display area showcasing the Poe farmhouse vista. A modest structure, Mori did not want to overwhelm Poe’s tiny farmhouse. See Archinect’s full coverage on the center.

EVENTS + TO DOs

BY THE CITY / FOR THE CITY CALL FOR DESIGNS
Last month, we told you about Institute for Urban Design’s call for ideas for its By the City/ For the City project, which asked New Yorkers to share their ideas for how to improve NYC. IfUD has now opened up the second phase of the program to designers who want to visualize these ideas. The ideas and designs will eventually be published in a public atlas. The Call for Designs will be open through July 14th. Submit your designs and visit the competition’s site here.

CITY AS STAGE: CONVERSATION ON ‘FORECLOSED’
On Saturday, June 11th, the Whitney will host a free, public platform lecture on Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, at 3pm at The Kitchen, 512 W 19th Street. As part of the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, the discussion will explore urban space as a site of contestation and possibility. It will begin with a screening of Yto Barrada’s video Beau Geste (2009), followed by a conversation between Tania Bruguera (Artist), Peter Marcuse (Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University), Damon Rich (Urban Designer, City of Newark) and Radhika Subramaniam (Curator, Parsons The New School for Design). See full details here.

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

Earlier this year, Urban Omnibus sat down with TMC Director John Tipaldo, a systems engineer who oversees the facility, to learn firsthand about some of the priorities and technologies that influence the operation of traffic signals. Stoplights, it turns out, aren’t about limiting vehicular speed. They are about organizing who has the right to travel across a certain intersection at a particular time — cars going in this direction, cars going in that direction, pedestrians — and who has to wait until the other does so. In other words, traffic signals are about negotiating the interests of different users. What could be more urban than that? Find out more in the video below.

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

Most talk of urban systems these days seems to focus on efficiency and effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on using digital technologies to increase both. At IBM Smarter Cities New York in October of 2009, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano posed questions to illustrate the significant role that technology plays in building smarter cities. With four billion cell phones, 30 billion RFID tags and two billion internet users constantly providing and collecting data, what happens when we apply analytics to guide more strategic resource allocation as our digital and physical infrastructures converge?

Urban Omnibus and the Architectural League, as part of our mission to foster excellence in the design of the built environment, want to infuse this conversation about what’s technologically possible with informed debate about what kind of urban future is desirable. The Architectural League has been looking at the implications of computing embedded in our everyday environments, or situated technologies, for several years. Through a symposium, pamphlet series, exhibition and recently-published book called Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, the Situated Technologies project has engaged architects, artists and technologists in a provocative exploration of what design has to offer, and how design can critique, the ubiquity of sensors and automatic data generation in our urban experience. Gregory Wessner, who has overseen the project as the League’s exhibitions and digital programs director, characterizes the central issues as an urgent question: “At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact are they having on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?”

Meanwhile, Urban Omnibus has been reporting on what some of these trends and technologies have to offer the evolving conversation about infrastructure investment, public participation and open data. But for all the innovations and policy recommendations that emerge from these multiple and overlapping convergences (digital and physical, dematerialized and apparent, data and visceral experience), our primary objective is to encourage greater intimacy with the choices and operations that give shape to the urban environment. To that end, we want to foster appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of the urban systems that currently enable us to go about our day, those systems that we take for granted — like the expectation that a stoplight will always, eventually, turn green.

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