Last night, Urban Design Week (profiled in last week’s Urban Omnibus feature) wrapped up with the US premiere of Urbanized, a documentary film by Gary Hustwit that introduces viewers to the key issues, projects and individuals affecting the design of cities around the world. Fresh from its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last week, the movie played to a packed house at Landmark Sunshine Cinema, followed by a Q&A with Hustwit and three of the urban thinkers featured in the film, Brookings’ Bruce Katz, NYC Department of City Planning Director Amanda Burden and architect, critic and educator Michael Sorkin. The panelists, who were seeing the final cut for the first time, responded to the film with enthusiasm. The discussion, which was kept short to make way for the night’s second screening of the film, touched on questions of confidence in US vs. world cities (Katz, distinguishing between leadership at the metropolitan level and the national, stated that he is “phenomenally confident that we can rebuild America from the bottom up, not from the top down.”); innovations in New York (Burden pointed to the City’s ongoing efforts to activate the waterways and waterfront, to “reclaim New York as a world class harbor city.”); and what initiatives they hope to see come next (Sorkin wished for a shift of 50% of urban street space currently dedicated to the car to be given to the pedestrian; and Katz called on cities to “take our nation back” by innovating locally, working regionally and advocating nationally. “Cities are engines of change,” he concluded, “but we don’t act like it.”)

As Omnibus readers know well, the full range of forces at play in urban form is enormous and diverse enough to seem impossible to reduce to a mere 88 minutes. But Hustwit achieves the impossible, criss-crossing the globe from Mumbai to Stuttgart, from New Orleans to New York, to talk to some of the architects, urban planners, historians, artists and citizens responsible for defining or advancing the design of cities. But much more than the individuals and projects featured, what makes Hustwit’s film so engrossing is the way he distills the complexity of urban design and planning without resorting to gross oversimplification of how much thought and action goes into making our cities what they are, from the improvised construction processes of informal settlements in the megacities of the developing world to architectural innovations in the public realm to the policy choices of municipal departments of city planning. We sat down with Hustwit to hear more about Urbanized and the processes, ideas and people that shape our cities.

House models by Elemental/Alejandro Aravena | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

How did the film Urbanized come about?
During the process of making and promoting my last two films, Objectified and Helvetica, I traveled to over 100 cities and became immersed in their design communities. I became fascinated with the similarities and the differences between the cities, and in the ways some architectural or urban development project would inevitably come up in conversation in each place. I thought about that being the theme of a third film. I’ve always been interested in architecture and I hadn’t seen a film expressly about architecture in the context of the city, the design of our cities and people that shape them. At the end of the day, all three films are personal explorations into subjects that I don’t know that much about but am really curious about.

Each of the films explores a different kind of design — graphic design, industrial and product design, and now urban design and planning. What interests you about design as a subject matter in general?
It started with my interest in graphic design. Ever since I got my first Macintosh I’ve been interested in digital fonts and reading design magazines. Helvetica really came out of my being a huge fan of graphic design. I just wanted to see a film about these people whose work I love. I didn’t have any intention of making any other films, much less a trilogy of design-themed films. But the world we created with Helvetica was a world I liked and wanted to stay in a little bit longer. It was only after I started shooting Objectified that I realized how much it felt like an extension of the ideas, questions and visual style of Helvetica. That’s when I kind of saw it as a sequel and then ultimately as part of a three-film cycle.

Amanda Burden at the NYC Dept. of City Planning | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

In professional circles, there is no real consensus as to what urban design is. It’s a matter of incredibly contentious debate. Did you go into this process with a specific definition of what goes into the design of cities? How has your understanding changed over the process?
I didn’t have a specific opinion or idea or definition of urban design going into the project. I learned about all of this over the two and a half years I was making the film. I spent about six months before shooting going to conferences, talking to architects and other people in the field, asking them their opinions about the state of cities and what interesting people and projects they think define the essence of what urban design is. Each person we interviewed would suggest a few other names, and we kept going around, learning more at each subsequent step. After ten interviews I had a little better grasp, and after 30 interviews I got a much better grasp. The narrative of the film developed organically through all these conversations and what the interviewees thought was important. I didn’t start out with a thesis or agenda.

I knew right away that a film like this can’t be comprehensive. You could easily do a full documentary or more on any one of these cities. So we decided to reframe it by looking at specific issues that face all cities and then looking at projects that address those issues. But even when I watch it now I think about things we didn’t get to address — for example, we barely talked about natural disasters. We didn’t get into a project about disaster preparedness.

Protest in Stuttgart, Germany | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

I was amazed at the range of issues you were able to cover. The film moves from public art to public works to public protest. I particularly appreciated that the role of the public in the design of cities was addressed, from the building practices of slum dwellers in India or Chile to the protests of organized, politically active citizens in an advanced economy like Germany’s. Tell me more about how you see the role of the public in the design of cities in years to come.
I hope the film helps people to become more aware, more involved and more critical about the decisions that are made by both city government and private developers. I believe the public should have a huge role both informally and formally. But the idea of participatory design — of using the public as a design compass instead of just getting a reaction to projects that are already proposed — is not being employed as much as it might. It’s really inspiring when you see it happening and working, like the VPUU (which stands for Violence Prevention by Urban Upgrading) project in Khayelitsha in Cape Town.

The township of Khayelitsha, which is outside of Cape Town, was created during the Apartheid era to concentrate the black South African population at the periphery of the city. It was a dormitory settlement — workers just slept there and then commuted back into to the city for work — so there was no real economic base; it’s just houses. It’s one of the poorest and most dangerous areas of the city. So the VPUU of Cape Town started 10 years ago to look at how that settlement had been designed — both the original, formal design from the ‘80s, and also how it had informally developed — and to try to make interventions that would improve safety and combat crime in the area.

Khayelitsha township | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

They spent two years talking to residents before they even started thinking about their first plan. They trained volunteers to go out into the community and talk to people about the problems they face. The biggest priority turned out to be pedestrian walkways, which were where most crime was happening. Khayelitsha has a series of stormwater overflow channels that run through the settlement that were just undeveloped, garbage-strewn land. They weren’t lit, and harbored gang activity and all kinds of criminal activity. But those stormwater floodways were also the informal pedestrian route between the train station and the township. So what VPUU did was formalize the informal pedestrian paths, or desire lines, by paving and lighting the barren channels and turning them into these amazing walkways and public spaces. People are now turning their homes to face these routes because they’re so well designed, and that increases passive surveillance, puts more eyes on the spaces. The murder rate has dropped by 40%. It has become a great pilot program, which they’re now expanding into other townships and to other areas in South Africa. Also, they have trained the people who live in the area to maintain and program it. The project is still evolving. They didn’t just say, “here you go, we built a path, see you later” and step away from it.

What drew me to VPUU’s work was the citizen involvement, even in determining what the project would be. They didn’t come in with an answer — they didn’t even know what the question was when they came in. But they spent years finding out what issue needed a response and then came up with plans that were developed step by step with the community. They spent years designing what the intervention should be and then getting design professionals involved to implement it. That’s the kind of idea that I think should get mainstreamed. It’s not about proposing a project and getting feedback from the public about whether they like it or not. It’s getting people involved in what a project should be, or if there should be a project.

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

That’s a lesson that applies whether the city is in a developed or a developing country. DId you see any patterns that cut across the divides of north and south, developed and developing?
Mobility seems to be one of the main issues that drags cities down. The amount of energy and time and resources that get wasted because of poor mobility solutions, especially in places like Mumbai, or São Paolo, or any of these big cities in the Global South. Think of those famous traffic snarls. It just seems like such a massive waste of energy, waste of resources and also just a total environmental nightmare.

There are so many challenges there, but also so much opportunity, because it’s so universal. Everybody needs to get around. If there are better mobility solutions that can be scaled and mainstreamed, there’s a lot of opportunity to change the way cities operate. I don’t have the answers to those questions, but the purpose of doing a film like this is to generate questions and discussion and awareness and debate about it. Not to tie it all up in a little bow, saying here’s what we should do, go do it.

What role do you see for designers — architects, urban designers and others — in determining the form of cities? The film brings up a lot of forces that shape cities that don’t necessarily rely on design proceeses, such as political processes, for example.
Those political processes are a design process too. It’s all design: any structure of information, built environment, or government process. I think it’s all about the workings of those really complex systems; that is design. And I think it’s the role of designers to improve, change or reframe it incrementally.

The idea of imagining something differently is the kernel is what I think of as design. What really drew me to Candy Chang’s “I Wish This Was” project (which invites city residents to voice what they want to see in their communities) is how that really simple little sticker just gets people who don’t normally think about how their city is shaped to think about it. To imagine what they would want in that vacant lot, or in that burnt out building. To imagine something different. It’s about thinking differently, or being provoked to think differently about the status quo. It seems so simple, but it is just getting people to do that, just getting people to think, “Oh, what could this be? God, I wish it was…” and then fill in the blank. Just that act is so, so powerful. That’s what I think is the future of getting the public involved. It is getting them to and encouraging them to make that step.

"I Wish This Was" by Candy Chang | Film still courtesy of Courtesy Swiss Dots Ltd.

What’s next for you?
Well, we finished the film literally last week. So we’ll spend the next three months touring, screening it in different cities. I’m actually more excited about this tour than that of either of the other two films because these issues resonate in different ways in different cities. I’m really excited to see what issues face each of these individual cities and how they relate to the film. The film had its premiere in Toronto, where there’s been a whole debate about bike lanes and a lake front development. The screening sort of capitalized on all those things happening in the city and made it much more of a public debate. So I’m excited to see how the audience reacts in other cities, in the North America and all over the world.

Gary Hustwit is an independent filmmaker based in New York and London. Hustwit worked with LA punk label SST Records in the late-1980s, ran the independent book publishing house Incommunicado Press during the 1990s, was Vice President of the media website Salon.com in 2000, and started the indie DVD label Plexifilm in 2001. Hustwit has produced eight feature documentaries, including the award-winning I Am Trying To Break Your Heart about the band Wilco; Moog, about electronic music pioneer Robert Moog; and Oddsac, an experimental feature with the band Animal Collective.

In 2007 he made his directorial debut with Helvetica, a documentary about graphic design and typography. The film marked the beginning of a design film trilogy, with Objectified, about industrial design and product design following in 2009. Urbanized, about the design of cities, will have its world premiere at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival. A longtime advocate of self-distribution and directly engaging his audience, Hustwit will be self-releasing Urbanized with a global screening tour, theatrical runs, and DVD and digital releases.

Many of the events during this week hinge on By The City / For The City, a crowdsourced ideas competition for New York’s public realm for which the Institute solicited design challenges from people across the city and then invited designers to respond. Tomorrow’s opening night event at the BMW Guggenheim Lab will launch a book and exhibition of the designs from By The City / For The City, and the rest of week will see events that range from discussing the historic significance of Isham Park in Inwood to participating in a 72-hour “urban action” in Long Island City, from open air film screenings on the High Line to helping to design a new skatepark under the Manhattan Bridge, from a picnic in the Financial District to a walking tour that explores the ways women have contributed to the creation and life of the Brooklyn Bridge. With over 35 happenings, openings, screenings and designings, Urban Design Week seeks to increase public understanding of how living in the city fits into larger systemic questions of what cities are and how cities work. What’s more, it promises to foster a sense of transformative possibility about those systems and how design can improve them. We sat down with Anne Guiney, executive director of the Institute for Urban Design to find out more about how it came about and what to expect from…  

Tell me about Urban Design Week.
Urban Design Week is six days of events – starting this Thursday, September 15th – organized by The Institute for Urban Design that seeks to engage New Yorkers in the complexity of the public realm, to get people thinking about the streetscapes, sidewalks and public spaces at the heart of city life. This week of activities is about celebrating what makes New York the city it’s known to be: it’s dynamic public realm.

None of it is accidental. There are a thousand decisions that go into shaping and reshaping the city and its public realm; it’s an ongoing process. There are a lot of wonderful ways to insert one’s opinions, desires and hopes into those processes. The traditional apparatus for citizen involvement in New York is absolutely necessary and hugely important. But existing mechanisms for participation have limitations. Some people can’t afford to spend three hours on a Monday night at a community meeting. With that in mind, we made our project “By the City / For The City” the centerpiece of Urban Design Week. The project combines crowdsourcing methods with a design ideas competition to ask New Yorkers to articulate how the city’s public realm could be improved. It’s about trying to find different ways — ways that feel less official or restrictive — to get people involved in conversations about what works in the city.

How does “By The City / For The City” work?
We conceived “By The City / For The City” as a way to figure out how non-designers imagine that design can change the physical fabric and systems of the city, the things they use and think about every day. We wanted to explore what the potentials and limitations of design to make meaningful change are by asking New York City residents to identify challenges. And then we invited designers to respond to those challenges. The range of ideas that came in was amazing. There were 600 in total. Some are incredibly modest and small in scale — for example, “This corner always floods.” Others were much grander in scale: “Please rethink how to get from Brooklyn to Queens.”

Map of ideas from By the City / For the City

We started by asking people to respond to a very simple question: “Wouldn’t it be great if…” Then we worked on how to ground this hypothetical in spatial and physical terms, because we wanted to avoid kvetchy responses like “Wouldn’t it be great if… my neighbor didn’t yell so loud.” So we encouraged respondents to give some context: a location and an explanation of why. So we provided four prompts: “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” “Where?” “So that people could…” and the final one was “Because I want the city to be…” Here’s an example of a response, #362:

Now this is, I think, a great example of somebody thinking, “this road is a nightmare to get across,” but then imagining that as a challenge that design — whether it’s traffic calming or planting or everything in between — could solve. It’s so important to get down to the perceived social benefit of a design intervention. That helps ground it in an important way.

Location was a great way for respondents to give some context for the challenge they were articulating. We worked with Project for Public Spaces to develop a system that allowed people to drop a pin on a map where their ideas would happen. But we wanted more than just, say, “wouldn’t it be great if this intersection in Throgs Neck had a park?” We wanted to get each respondent to explain why he or she would want a particular goal to be met: “I want the people of Throgs Neck to have a place to sit outside because right now there is no public space that actually makes sense.”

Design proposal submission Park in a Box | Cadence: Gage Couch and Rebecca Bradley | Courtesy of IfUD

What was the audience for your call for challenges? Who suggested ideas?
Our hope was to be able to reach out to people who might not customarily participate in projects like this. So we worked with local newspapers, community boards and neighborhood blogs to get the word out and begin to take the temperature of how people see the physical city and how it could be better. For some people, that’s a flooded corner at Astor Place. For others, it’s the transportation system. Someone else wants the Steinway Mansion saved, or is concerned with waste removal practices. Now that we have gathered all the ideas that came in from this process into a website, a book — An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York — and an exhibition, we can start to help people understand how these concerns, at both small and large scales, are the concerns of urban design.

So the next phase was bringing those concerns to designers.
Exactly. And that was a totally open invitation. Designers looked through the challenges that were contributed by respondents, chose one and worked out a design scheme to address it. The designers took the respondents’ ideas very seriously, and it was interesting to note which challenges designers took on. There were a lot more system-based projects than there were building-specific proposals. The designers who participated seemed interested in challenges like how to deploy green roofs all over the city, or what you could do if you took away one parking space per block. There were a lot more solutions that took a “kit-of-parts” approach than there were solutions for what should be done in a specific building.

from An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York | Courtesy of IfUD

The “kit-of-parts” approach is huge right now.
Along with tool kits and field guides! And that points to the ways that this project taps into the zeitgeist; it takes the pulse of what people are thinking about in the urban realm: green roofs, urban agriculture, cycling systems. It’s not a scientific sample, of course, but it’s revelatory nonetheless.

Crowdsourcing is also very popular at the moment, particularly in the context of urbanism and civic improvements. What do you think about the potential and the limitations of crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing is a powerful tool we have enjoyed using but I think I’ve learned as much about what its limitations are as I have about its potential. I’d be the last person to say it’s the silver bullet. It operates at a certain scale and is great for providing a certain kind of data. But there are certainly limitations. We talked to some experts in the design of forms and surveys who made clear that it’s best not to ask more than four questions on a form, such as the one we were putting out there, and that questions have to be short. We went back and forth for weeks and weeks crafting the questions that would yield the information that we wanted to get but would not discourage participation. We have to be completely honest with ourselves about the potential of these tools and when it’s appropriate to use them.

So what’s actually going to happen during Urban Design Week?
We’re going to kick off with a party at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, where we will launch an exhibit and a book of the results of By The City / For The City. Then there’s a full calendar of events all week, many of which are public conversations. We’re trying to do less stuff in lecture halls and more stuff in venues that are open. For example, Open House New York and Alex Gilliam of Public Workshop are going to run a community charrette with the organizers of the Gowanus Lowline competition.

Challenges from respondents | from An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York | Courtesy of IfUD

Some of the events will appeal to a wide public, others are more specialized. Mimi Zeiger and her loose consortium of writers and thinkers, LGNLGN, are really interested in talking about some of the issues around public interventions and how we define communities. So she is hosting more of a salon-style conversation. There will be an event at the Queens Museum of Art – related to their show on Detroit that’s opening on September 18th – that looks at citizen interventions on a small scale. Mitch McEwen is involved in connecting that work to community-based efforts. And we’re going to hang out on the Museum’s incredible panorama and talk about some of these issues and precedents in relationship to both New York and Detroit. Those are just a few examples of everything’s that’s going on.

We will wrap up Urban Design Week with the US premiere of Urbanized, Gary Hustwit’s new movie and the third in his trilogy of design documentaries that also includes Helvetica and Objectified. I think that his goal in all three of the movies is to convey some of the complexities of design in a way that is popular. For Urbanized, over the last year or so, he’s been interviewing mayors, policy people, designers, everybody in between, to talk about how cities are designed and made.

How does all of this advance the mission of the Institute for Urban Design?
The Institute for Urban Design has tended to operate as a practitioner’s think-tank, where professionals working at a pretty high level in architecture, planning, design, urban policy, energy, etc. convene and work through issues. They then brought the benefit of this thinking back to their work.

Now, we’re at a wonderful point at which conversations about the city fabric and city systems are much more commonplace. The kinds of conversations that fellows of the Institute for Urban Design in the past have had just with each other are now heard in public settings throughout the city. Look at the kerfuffle over the Prospect Park bike lanes: you’ve got people all over the city passionately for or passionately against what is essentially an urban design issue. So I think this is a really good time to try and crack that open. There are people who care passionately about bike lanes and people who care passionately about streets and people who care passionately about dog runs or transit funding or housing prices. All of these fit into or are part of the conversation about urban design. That conversation becomes more productive when you’re not talking about bike lanes as just a transit problem, but you’re talking about them as a streetscape issue, a livability issue, a public health and sustainability issue. This is a great time to try to connect the disciplinary dots to be part of a larger public dialogue.

What do you hope someone who attends some part of Urban Design Week — someone who is perhaps interested in some of these issues but not involved in them personally or professionally other than being a neighborhood resident and a subway user — will get out of it?
I’d love for people who attend some of the events at Urban Design Week to start to think of the parts of the city that they use as part of a much larger, shared system. I would like that person to have a more straightforward understanding that taking the subway is more than just getting to work. It fits into a larger constellation of questions and issues.

That seems to me like a goal one could set for Urbanism Week or City Week. This is Urban Design Week. Where does design fit in?
I think the book, which showcases the designers’ responses to the ideas that came in from the crowdsourced search for urban challenges, helps to show how design strategies can address public realm challenges in multiple and overlapping ways. Take the area around the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. A sophisticated design proposal for that space would look at it as a traffic problem, as an aesthetic problem and as a greenspace problem. Design helps us get from “this space is a nightmare” to more productive and positive thinking about how planning, architecture and landscape architecture can be applied to mitigate that space, to make it much more pleasant and functional.

This is about showing what design can do. Not in the sense of implementation, but to get people thinking. People don’t even agree on a common definition of urban design. I don’t expect that Urban Design Week will be able to establish that urban design is X, Y or Z in a neat little package. But it will, I hope, get people to ask questions and posit some, perhaps contradictory, answers.

Design proposal submission Tunne (Re)Visions | Jaklitsch / Gardner Architects PC | Courtesy of IfUD

Interview conducted by Cassim Shepard.

Before joining the Institute for Urban Design as Executive Director in January 2010, Anne Guiney was the editor of the New York edition of The Architect’s Newspaper, and was part of the original team that launched the newspaper in 2003. Prior, she was an editor at Architecture magazine and Metropolis, and has written widely on architecture and design for other publications, including Architect, MARK, ID, and Details. She has also worked as a consultant organizing high-profile architecture competitions (working with Jones | Kroloff), including the commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Parrish Art Museum, and the Portland Aerial Tramway.

New York Next: The Future City
Betty Chen, Guy Nordenson, Richard Olcott, Rob Rogers, and Claire Weisz
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
6:30 p.m.
McGraw-Hill
1221 Avenue of the Americas, 50^th Floor
1.5 CEUs

Over the last decade a new generation of architects and engineers has helped guide New York City’s development, through significant public projects produced by their practices and through work with public commissions and agencies.  Five of these influential designers—Betty Chen, Guy Nordenson, Richard Olcott, Rob Rogers, and Claire Weisz – will discuss the city’s trajectory since 2001 and look at the issues, and neighborhoods, that will demand attention in the coming years.

Architect Betty Chen is a member of the New York City Planning Commission and was until recently the Vice-President for Planning, Design and Preservation for the Trust for Governors Island.

Guy Nordenson is a partner of Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers and professor at Princeton, and has served as Commissioner and Secretary of the New York City Public Design Commission since 2006.

Richard Olcott is a founding partner and design principal at Ennead Architects, and a member of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission from 1996 to 2007.

Rob Rogers is a principal of Rogers Marvel Architects; recent New York projects include security and streetscape design for Manhattan’s financial district and flood mitigation strategies and street furniture for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Recent projects of Claire Weisz’s firm, WXY Architecture + Urban Design, include the Zipper bench system in Peter Minuit Plaza and public realm plans for Astor Place and Canal Street.

New York Next: The Future City is held in conjunction with the publication of the September Architectural Record, a special issue devoted to New York in the decade since 9/11, when a new focus on superior architecture and urban design helped fuel the revitalization of the city. New York Next: The Future City is co-sponsored by the Architectural League of New York and Architectural Record. Support for the program has been provided by Trespa.

Tickets are required for admission to League programs. Tickets are free for League members; $15 for non-members. To reserve a ticket e-mail: rsvp@archleague.org. Tickets will be held at the check-in desk; unclaimed tickets will be released fifteen minutes after the start of the program.

League programs are made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Photo: Courtesy of Architectural Record

..

NYC SOLAR MAP
A new interactive map was launched by New York City Solar America City Partnership, led by Sustainable CUNY, to show the potential NYC has for solar panel placement. Showing both existing solar photo voltaic (PV) panels and solar thermal installations in NYC, the map also gives an estimate of solar PV potential for every rooftop in the five boroughs. The map allows users to assess any building’s solar panel capacity and estimate a financial payback. Created by gathering imagery and data using LIDAR technology, Inhabitat reports that the map shows that 66.4% of all buildings in the city are suitable for panels, and could generate up to 5,847 megawatts of power. To put this in perspective, the city currently outputs 6.5 megawatts of solar energy. The map represents opportunities for building owners to assess solar capacity on their rooftop for free. See Inhabitat’s piece on the map here, and to find out your building’s solar potential, check out the new NYC Solar Map.

1,000 Nike+ runners in NYC | Image via Cooper Smith

RUNNING IN NEW YORK: MAPS
Graphic design student Cooper Smith developed a striking series to visualize the location, route popularity and time of day people run in New York City. The series was produced for an SVA course with visionary designer Nicholas Felton using the Nike+ GPS-synced mobile app. By geolocating 1,000 runners’ paths, Smith produced beautifully mapped stills and time-lapse videos showing multiple facets of New York runners’ paths. See Infosthetic’s piece on the topic and the full work here.

Underground construction on the 7 Line | Image via MTAPhotos on Flickr

7 TRAIN EXTENSION
Official MTA photographer Patrick Cashin caught some beautiful shots of subterranean work currently underway on the 7 train’s extended line. The extension is expected to be complete in three years, after which passengers will be able to reach 11th Avenue and 34th Street. See the full Patrick Cashin slideshow on Flickr.

9/11 MEMORIAL AND MUSEUM UPDATE
The Architect’s Newspaper reported on developments around the much anticipated opening of the World Trade Center 9/11 Memorial and Museum scheduled for the tenth anniversary of the tragedy this coming September. The new complex will feature a subterranean museum and memorial space, an aboveground museum pavilion and a landscaped plaza with reflecting pools in the footprints of the Twin Towers. However, due to serious security concerns, a temporary ring of chain link fences and concrete barriers will limit public access to 1500 people at a time. After September 12th, visitors will be required to buy a ticket and pass through a series of metal detectors and x-ray machines in order to enter the plaza. Eventually security measures will be moved into the museum itself, but for the time being, security features trump accessible open space.

Artist’s rendering of +Pool | Image via +Pool

SWIM IN THE EAST RIVER?
Brooklyn designers Dong-Ping Wong of Family and Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeffrey Franklin of PlayLab have launched a Kickstarter campgain around their latest project +Pool, a project to build a floating pool in the East River, similar to Berlin’s famed Badeschiff. The designers have developed a comprehensive plan with engineering/design/planning firm ARUP and other experts to help make the pool a reality. The proposed pool will filter river water through its wall to remove bacteria, contaminants and odors, making it swimmable and safe by City standards. Four pools (Children’s pool, Lap pool, Lounge Pool and Sports Pool) will join together to create a giant plus sign in the East River. Their latest round of fundraising will support the physical testing of the proposed filtration system. See the full project description here. To read up on floating pool ideas UO has covered in the past, see Jonathan Kirschenfeld and Ann Buttenweiser’s take on the topic.

NATION’S LARGEST URBAN CAMPSITE IN BROOKLYN
According to a recent press release from the National Parks Service, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has announced that the nation’s largest urban campground will be established at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, a former airport used by Amelia Earhart and Howard Hughes. The park’s current five campsites will be expanded to 90 over the next two years, and may eventually reach 600. Special outreach to underserved communities around the area will introduce families to camping skills and equipment in their home neighborhoods and will facilitate participation in overnight use, complete with campfire programs, kayaking and swimming opportunities.

EVENTS + TO DOs:

New York City in 2040 Image via Interboro Partners (left) and Amsterdam in 2040, Image via Space&Matter (right)

GLIMPSES of New York and Amsterdam: 2040
The Center for Architecture has teamed up with the Amsterdam Center for Architecture (ARCAM) to present “Glimpses of New York and Amsterdam in 2040,” a new exhibit showcasing visions of the future for two cities that share an extensive waterfront and similar climate challenges. The organizations commissioned architects and landscape architects in both cities to conceptualize the “future of the future,” with five basic necessities for living: breathing, eating, making, moving and dwelling. The exhibit features five firms from each city: New York’s dlandstudio, Interboro Partners, Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu (SO-IL), W Architecture & Landscape Architecture, and WORKac, and Amsterdam’s Barcode Architects, DELVA Landscape Architects / Dingeman Deijs Architect, Fabrications, Space & Matter and van Bergen Kolpa. GLIMPSES will be shown through September 10th at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place. Read Inhabitat’s coverage of the exhibit or, for more information, see the official site.

COME OUT & PLAY NEW YORK
Come Out and Play, the annual festival of citywide street games, will begin on June 19th and run until July 16th. In years past, the festival has “turned New York City into a playground for a weekend,” with satellite city festivals held in San Francisco and Amsterdam. This year, Come Out and Play will begin in Lower Manhattan in partnership with the River to River Festival. Come Out and Play will run the series over the summer, culminating in a one-day field day in mid-July on Governors Island. For more information, see the official site.

GRANT OPPORTUNITIES
The Awesome Foundation is offering multiple $1,000 grants each month to “people devoted to forwarding the interest of awesomeness in the universe.” Although no New York City projects have been funded as of yet, the NYC Chapter is now accepting applications. To apply, click here.

Sappi has announced a call for entries for grants up to $50,000 with the “Ideas that Matter Grant Program.” Ideas that Matter is open to individual designers, design firms, agencies, in-house corporate design departments, design instructors, and individual design students and design student groups. To apply for an Ideas that Matter Grant, click here. The deadline to apply is July 15th.

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

UPDATE June 27, 2011: Calling all designers! IfUD and PPS are now accepting submissions for a “collaborative re-imagining of New York City’s public realm.” Through July 14, 2011, individuals and teams are invited to submit designs inspired by the more than 500 ideas submitted by the general public for improving the city’s public spaces, systems, and social fabric. Ten projects will receive cash prizes and all of the entries will be published in an exhibition and book: An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York. For more information and submission guidelines, click here.

Wouldn’t it be great if…?  With By the City / For the City, the Institute for Urban Design (IfUD) and Project for Public Spaces (PPS) are offering you the opportunity to finish that sentence with suggestions for the future of the physical fabric of New York City, its neighborhoods or even a specific block. We can all think of some element of our beloved city that could use some fresh thinking or that holds unrealized potential. From now through April 30, you can propose the part of New York you think needs some re-imagining on the By the City / For the City website. To enter your idea, click here.

Get your suggestions in while you can – from May 16 – June 17, IfUD and PPS will invite architects, planners and designers to respond to the sites and challenges nominated by the public. The ideas generated from this two-part call will be compiled in a publication and exhibition By the City / For the City: An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York. This dynamic exchange will also set the stage for the first-ever Urban Design Week, “a public festival created to engage New Yorkers in the collaborative process of city-making, including the complex issues of the public realm, and to celebrate the streetscapes, sidewalks and public spaces at the heart of city life.” Urban Design Week will take place from September 15-20, 2011.

“Urban Design Week is aimed at connecting the personal scale at which many of us think about the physical spaces of the city — the experience of about one’s own corner or block — to larger civic issues such as access to the waterfront or congestion pricing,” says Anne Guiney, Executive Director at IfUD.

Rethink your New York here. Or browse through other people’s ideas, in list form or on the project’s interactive map. And stay tuned for more information from IfUD and PPS about Urban Design Week 2011.

Among the major initiatives spearheaded by the Urban Design Group was a rethinking of density bonuses for the provision of public space, the so-called plaza bonuses. As a result, in New York, privately owned public space has become a category of place unto itself, so much so that Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design worked with the Municipal Art Society and DCP to to catalogue the sites in his book Privately Owned Public Space: The New York City Experience (Wiley, 2000). Kayden profiled 503 POPS — outdoor seating areas, through-block arcades, interior plazas and other pedestrian spaces across Manhattan. His findings revealed the inconsistent quality of execution and maintenance of these public spaces, and DCP used his analysis to develop new design standards adopted in 2007, with further amendments added in 2009.

Next week, Urban Omnibus and the Design Trust for Public Space are offering an opportunity for you to come check out one of these privately-owned public spaces for yourself, and continue this conversation. For more information about our April 7th Public Space Potluck at the IBM Atrium, click here.

40 West 57th Street through-block arcade

What do you do?
My company, Raquel Ramati Associates, works on urban design, planning, development and consulting projects. Much of our work concerns site feasibility, primarily in New York. And the rest of the work is master planning projects around the world. Most of my consulting work deals with partnerships between the public and private sectors. I also teach in the real estate programs at NYU and Columbia.

In both of these roles, consulting and teaching, I am a great believer that we have to bridge the interests of those of us who are concerned with urbanism and architecture with the interests of real estate developers. Because too often there is a tension between architecture and real estate development. I think it’s crucial to understand and to respect the needs of the client. The best projects that we see are those with good clients who understand what makes architecture, what makes urban design.

How did your thoughts on the relationship between the public sector, the private sector and design form?
I started my career at the Urban Design Group. When I started, I was very junior on the staff, doing the Zip-a-Tone and Xeroxing. At that point in time, I’d say real estate developers were vastly uninterested in architectural quality. And as architects, we felt that real estate developers were “the bad guys” and that we had to educate them. At the time, architecture and developers working together effectively was a rare occurrence. Even today, it still amazes me to see an article in the Times that mentions who the architect of a project is. Of course, these days architecture is branding, and the architect is one of the most important marketing tools real estate developers have. But when it came to urban design, our interest at the Urban Design Group was in how we could affect the city, not necessarily by dictating architecture or attracting a brand-name architect, but by creating rules and objectives with a cohesive vision. The Urban Design Group started with the approach that unless you involve the real estate developers, the city will continue to be built without any thought towards urban design whatsoever. As a result, there were two or three major interventions that I think were very important.

General Motors Building Plaza, 5th Avenue at 59th Street

One was special districts. Lincoln Center, the Theater District and Fifth Avenue are some early examples of how the Urban Design Group was able to create master plans of these distinctive areas. On Fifth Avenue, the goal was to push back against the fact that the avenue was starting to be a street only of banks and travel agencies by mandating the inclusion of other kinds of stores that bring life into the city. In the Theater District, there was a danger of the theaters themselves disappearing, so the master plan included the transfer of air rights to ensure that certain kinds of buildings, certain kinds of uses, were retained.

Another significant initiative was plaza bonuses. Previously, density bonuses for public space had been mostly unsuccessful. We sought to translate the idea into a more organized, comprehensive urban design plan.

Of course, incentive zoning really started earlier on, when the influence of the International School and Le Corbusier influenced the city to develop “towers-in-the-park.” The term “Towers-in-the-park” refers to the inclusion of open space around a high-rise building to create access to air and light. In order to accomplish that, you allow the developer to increase the density of the high-rise by 20%. The idea was that these open spaces would be provided for public use and enjoyment, with landscaped areas and so forth.

Citigroup Center sunken plaza, Lexington Avenue at 53rd Street

But the language was written in a way — “you create the open space, and we will give you the 20% density bonus” – that never really defined what this open space should be or how it should work. Developers, of course, will want to build 20% more because, since the buildings already have foundations, it’s much less expensive to build more, and the units you build at the top of the building become the most valuable space.

But ultimately, developers didn’t really want to provide amenities for the general public. Instead, those mandated open spaces often became dead areas, sometimes consciously designed to discourage anyone sitting on anything. And sometimes the plazas were sunken, which were even less attractive. A lot of these plazas had blank walls with no retail, because the idea of having retail in a corporate or residential building was not what the developer was looking for. Even when well-designed public space was promised, there was no way to enforce its implementation. Developers would bring plans for beautiful plazas, filled with trees and flowers, to the Department of City Planning, but once approved they were never built that way. The way the plaza bonuses were implemented turned a good initial idea into spaces that were quite anti-city, actually.

William H. Whyte: The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces – The Street Corner from MAS on Vimeo.

When the plaza legislation was changed in the early ‘70s, the rules became very strict. William H. Whyte had been analyzing pedestrian activity in the plazas and his results greatly influenced these revised mandates [see video excerpt above]. The plaza’s location relative to the sun was specified, as was the maximum amount (3 feet) it could be above or below street level, and the need for retail and for easy access (it could not be fenced). In every plaza there was a plaque that said exactly how many trees, how many seating areas, and what kind of amenities must be provided. And if the public space was not being maintained the way it was supposed to be, there was a bond that said that if, let’s say, trees die, then the developer has to replace them.

General Motors Building Plaza, 5th Avenue at 59th Street

The City also introduced other pedestrian amenities. Legislation was implemented for covered pedestrian space, which you see in the old IBM building on Madison Avenue; through-block arcades, which you see in the Sony building; and sidewalk cafes, to increase street life in the city – today sidewalk cafes are all over the city, but when we started, I think there was only one, on Central Park South, and it completely changed the life of the surrounding area. Then we also legislated subway easements, which required certain developments to incorporate transit access into the building, so that the entrance is in sight and not just a hole in the sidewalk.

Advancing interest in the street — in the continuity of street walls and in creating public spaces that are usable — is a major part of what the Urban Design Group accomplished. Looking back on this period, I think it was really the approach of public-private partnerships that was key to the creation and refining of these spaces so that they work.

590 Madison (IBM Building) atrium, Madison Avenue at 57th Street

For example, I think the covered pedestrian space and through-block in the IBM building (now owned by E.J. Minskoff) are extraordinary. If you go to that space, you will see that it’s a very big accomplishment and it works very nicely. Most cities don’t have the financial resources to purchase that kind of central real estate to use for public space. There’s no way. It would cost them millions of dollars. Public-private partnerships are the only way to do it and I think it has worked well.

But I have mixed feelings about it today. On one hand, I think that having green, open space in the city is a very important thing. But on the other hand, I see the problem of having plazas that don’t really work. Contextual zoning has changed a lot over the years. It’s difficult to legislate how often public spaces should occur along a particular street because the city is not owned by one person. It is a living thing, and it grows organically, and not necessarily the way that you want it to grow.

Have your thoughts on what makes for “good” urban space evolved over the years?
Now more than ever, I believe in opening up the waterfront – I always have, but I see now, on the Upper West Side for example, the influx of young people moving there because of the public space improvements on the West side, the pedestrian pier and so forth.

I still like interventions of open space and public spaces. Of course, everybody talks about the High Line, which is one way of intervening to create a public space. But there are many strategies. I hear people say things like ”Oh, I love Manhattan! I just walked 20 blocks and it was so great!” as if the excitement of walking through Manhattan was the result of ad hoc activities rather than the result of coordinated plans and policies.

For me, urban space is like an urban room. It needs to have some borders or some enclosures in order to work. And it needs to have some life! Whether that life comes exclusively from retail or not, I don’t know. But I do think that when it is all open, without borders of any kind, then it doesn’t work as effectively.

It seems like a big principle that you’ve been trying to enact in a number of ways has been street life and pedestrian life. So how do you feel about some of the more recent interventions, like the pedestrianization of Broadway?
I like the idea, but I’m not sure I like the execution. Instead of closing the middle of the street, I would have liked to see widening the sidewalks while creating lanes for buses. Which they did very, very well in Barcelona. There is something very strange about having Times Square a little closed and a little open. It looks temporary. I like the idea of people having the space – the pedestrian as king — but I’m not sure I love the way it’s done. I’m not a great believer in closing streets to cars altogether. I can see the benefits of how it has been done in Europe, like in Rome, where the city center is closed to private cars, but buses, taxis and people who live in the area are still allowed.

What other things have you seen from your work abroad? How are other countries and cities thinking about some of the issues we’ve been talking about: public-private partnership, street life, ways to use public policy as an instrument of good design principles?  Have you seen any lessons? Or cautionary tales?
New York is a pioneer, in a way. A lot of cities have copied us. Not design-wise, not architecture-wise, but urban-design-wise, in the sense of getting developers to engage in certain ways. The problem in other places that I’ve found, like in Israel for example, is that urban design is done on a lot-by-lot basis. And that doesn’t work. That’s how it was in New York before we started thinking about urban design systematically, through policy.

Rockefeller Plaza

One thing that worries me is the branding of architecture, in the interest of getting all these great architects to work here. For some of them — I won’t say all of them, but some of them — urban design is secondary in their thinking, and the architectural form is predominant. And that’s not limited to New York City, it’s all over the world, because developers want an icon, a signature building. Therefore, if the city doesn’t create linkages between the buildings, or pay attention to the linkages between the buildings, then the city is going to be like a cocktail party full of women wearing different hats.

How would you characterize what urban design is?
Urban design, to me, is the connectivity between buildings and places. It could be the subway or a building, but it’s those places that connect, whether vertically or horizontally. And it’s not just in urban centers. If you look at villages around the world, I think what makes a good rural or suburban public place is the relationship between the village and the natural environment. In cities, I think the relationships between open spaces and buildings is what makes more “urban-ness.” It’s like a necklace — if you don’t have the string that threads in between, the necklace falls apart.

.

Raquel Ramati, architect and urban designer, is president of Raquel Ramati Associates Inc. She has earned an international reputation as an urban designer and planner, first in New York City’s government, and later as a private consultant working with developers, government agencies, not-for-profit organizations and community groups. The author of a signature planning book How to Save Your Own Street, she is presently teaching at the Real Estate Graduate Program at the Columbia University School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

All photos by Jessica Cronstein.

Click images for captions.

If you’re reading this, chances are you are into cities or you are into design. Most likely, you think both are pretty interesting. But “urban” plus “design” does not necessarily equate to urban design, at least not as the term is understood in professional circles. Certainly, designers have helped to determine the physical form of cities throughout the history of human settlement, but in this country, a specific professional expertise or body of knowledge applied directly to the design of urban space has been a long time in coming.

The individuals we most commonly associate with the design of cities came from a variety of professional and educational backgrounds. Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who oversaw the modernization of Paris in the 1850s and ’60s, was a lifelong civil servant, educated in law. Pierre Charles L’Enfant, responsible for the original design of Washington D.C., and Ildefons Cerdà, responsible for the 19th Century expansion of Barcelona, were civil engineers. Le Corbusier, Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, who designed the new capitals of Chandigarh, India and Brasilia, Brazil, were all trained as architects. And then, of course, are the countless designers of the streets, plazas, parks, campuses and interstitial spaces that are no less designed than the buildings of the city.

Some date the “birth” of the urban design discipline to a 1956 conference at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design organized by Josep Lluis Sert, or to the establishment of the first graduate degree programs in the subject that emerged at places like Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania a few years later, or to the raft of seminal texts on the subject published in that period, including Chermayeff and Alexander’s Community and Privacy (1960), Lynch’s The Image of the City (1960), Mumford’s The City in History (1961), Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Cullen’s Townscape (1961), Spreiregen’s Urban Design (1965) and Bacon’s Design of Cities (1967).

In the five decades since, the period in which degrees in urban design have existed in American higher education, urban design qualifications have required students to have pre-existing professional degrees in architecture, landscape architecture or, to a lesser extent, urban planning. This year, Parsons The New School for Design is launching the nation’s first undergraduate degree in urban design, which prompted us to ask the program’s director, Victoria Marshall, what exactly is being taught and what exactly it means for the training of a new generation of urbanists with a different relationship to the urban realm than the designers that came before. Marshall says she is most interested in teaching “how to see the city as a designer” rather than, say, how to design the city or its spaces. And from the diverse coursework offered, the education the program provides is, indeed, much closer to an overview of urbanism — the history, the theory, the social science — mixed with fundamentals of design — section, plan, model, 2D layout — than it is to a foundation course in how to propose physical interventions to shape the constituent elements of urban space. With that in mind, there’s a chance a degree offering such as this just might respond to the tremendous civic interest in cities and how they work, especially on the part of young people less and less interested in the traditional disciplinary alignments of the 20th century.

Click images for captions.

A CONVERSATION WITH VICTORIA MARSHALL

UO: How do you define urban design?
Victoria Marshall: I think I define it differently than how others tend to do so. I think of urban design in terms of comfort with multi-scalar thinking, the ability to link the big and the small, from large landscapes to small urban interventions.

I’ve done a lot of research with ecologists, working a lot to translate ecology theory into urban theory: how do we read cities as ecosystems? Whether I’m teaching a class on building a little garden or conducting a big studio looking at the Meadowlands as a site, these topics translate across scales.

Other definitions of urban design might link it more to urban planning – to the writing of reports or codes – or to the scenographic presentation of how an architectural project in an urban context might appear for the purposes of the real estate market, for example. For me, urban design is neither a subset nor a superset of other categories. I’m more interested to talk about what the work is than to define the discipline.

A Google image search for urban design yields a combination of architectural plans, streetscape renderings and aerial photographs.

Tell me a little bit about your educational and professional background.
I studied landscape architecture as an undergraduate in Australia, where I’m from. In graduate school, I studied landscape architecture and urban design at the University of Pennsylvania. I have my own practice and have taught urban design for many years at all different institutions — Columbia, Harvard, University of Toronto, Pratt and Penn — and was exposed to many different types of graduate students. But my challenge here at Parsons is to teach urban design to undergraduates. Previous to this, urban design education at the undergraduate level hasn’t existed.

Did the desire to create an undergraduate urban design degree come from the institution or was it in response to student demand?
I’d say it’s institutional. The belief is that once we create the space, students will fill it.

Image: Elinor Mossop

What do you think someone who might want to declare urban design as her concentration is looking for?
We’re getting students who want the strong liberal arts component, but also want the design component, students who want a balance. They like the theory, they like the reading, they like the deep discussion, but they also like to make things and do things in class.

What kind of classes are offered?
On the history and theory side, we have “History of World Urbanism,” which digs into the history of cities since there was ever a city. There is another survey called “Urban Design since 1945.” And then there’s a lab sequence that students majoring in urban studies at Eugene Lang, the New School’s liberal arts college, can also access. That’s one of the reasons why the program was created. The New School is this amazing university, in New York City, with all these urban classes being taught to undergraduate and graduate students all across the university, from international affairs and urban policy at Milano, to design-specific classes at Parsons, to urban studies, environmental studies, the list goes on…

There’s also a core studio for urban design students, in which each student is given a complex problem on a complex site. Each has to do a lot of fieldwork, make a lot of drawings, talk to a lot of people. The studio teaches students how to research, how to do a pin-up, how to present and talk about their work.

Additionally, I taught a class called “Streetlife,” which was about exploring the street through drawing. Other classes are more about fieldwork: observation, taking notes, different ways of documenting a site photographically or otherwise. There’s also a class called “Sensing,” in which students build sensors, collect environmental data, do mapping and create their own aerial photography using balloons. They launch their own satellites and collect infrared data.

Is there a cohesive or canonical body of knowledge you want your students to graduate with? Do you think that exists yet in urban design? Is it emergent? Necessary?
Of course it’s necessary! “Urban Design since 1945,” as one example, looks at how all cities have changed in that period of time, which is also the period where the field of urban design emerged as a profession in this country. But we are careful not to place everything in an American context. Last year I had the opportunity to travel to China as a fellow of the India China Institute and more seriously study the way cities are being built now. If the students can have a sense of some of those dynamics in relation to all the work we’re doing in New York, then that’s a success for the program. Having a love for cities everywhere is key. Being interested in any city, anywhere a student might go, and being able to see it as a designer.

Do you see that interest and passion reflected in your students?
Absolutely!

Image: Colin McFadyen

What kind of professional opportunities do you see this program preparing students for?
I‘m not sure yet. Some of the students have said to me they’ve chosen this because it’s the kind of solid foundation they want for their university education. Others, I think they might work for a non-profit, like a neighborhood group. Any of our students would be an amazing asset for such an organization. They’ll have a strong design toolbox and an ability to participate with people and to propose collaborative ideas.

Given the extent to which ecological thinking informs your approach to urban design, where does architecture figure into this?
Part of the ecological approach for me has to do with how you understand yourself in relation to your environment. I think the way that architecture comes in has to do with measure and specificity. How do you understand what are you measuring? How do you get very specific? Architectural measures include how you work with scale, how you draw a plan, how you draw a section, how you understand the relationship between drawings and the three-dimensional space, between material qualities and material behavior.

So architecture inserts itself as visual language and as a set of methodological tools?
Yes, perhaps. But a lot of it comes from testing different things out and figuring out as we go what I think the students should know. The balloon mapping project actually ends up teaching students how to hack a camera, and then how to stitch all that data together. This serves as one example of new types of technological ‘knowledges’ in which students need fluency these days. They’re learning how to hybridize that with how to draw a plan or how to build a physical model.

Balloon Mapping Project | grassrootsmapping.org

So are the design skills students learn primarily in the service of analysis and representation? As opposed to proposing a design scheme?
No, you have to propose change. Even if I might, as a teacher, tend to move away from intervention, I will still require my students to design, say, a device that somehow transforms a condition.

What do you want your students to understand about cities and cities’ role in the world?
I’m very interested in cities as urban ecosystems. Our students start to become very sophisticated in navigating the rhetoric that gets produced around cities, but then, very strategic in ways that they can intervene or engage the city that is meaningful ecologically. For example, we had a discussion in class last week about things that are sustainable but not necessarily ecological. You can design a zero-waste shoe, or buy one, but does that kind of thinking actually change the way one acts in the world? The ecological approach is supposed to build a sustainable city, but we’re teaching them to approach it socially – and this harkens back to the social activist legacy of the New School – to approach it in terms of equality, difference, justice. If our students can perceive and communicate and strategically design how to engage and propose change, or allow the imagination of change to be engaged by others, I think that would be a success.

.
Victoria Marshall is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Parsons the New School for Design and the director of the BS Urban Design Program. She is a fellow of the India China Institute practicing landscape architect and the founder of TILL, a Newark based landscape architecture and urban design office which offers design services that transform contemporary landscapes such as reclaimed river beds, brownfields, rooftops and environmental justice neighborhoods.

THE ENERGY REPORT
Continuing on their Roadmap 2050, AMO teamed up with WWF and Ecofys to envision a world completely run by renewable energy in the next forty years. Today, the organizations collaboratively launched The Energy Report – a comprehensive plan to harness and proliferate renewable energy that aims to convince governments and business of the economic benefits of  sustainability. The report is replete with infographics and images communicating the potential for energy production and its cultural implications. “Through the realization that future energy provision really is a universal issue which must be addressed at a global scale, we have developed a new perspective on the world,” AMO’s Reinier de Graaf claims. But, lest you think a well-designed pamphlet can fix the world, John Thackara unpacks The Energy Report in a Design Observer essay questioning the feasibility of implementing the report’s recommendations. Thackara decries the report as a “tragedy for WWF,” and through a careful meditation on the real repercussions of renewable initiatives – like spreading millions of wind turbines off our shores and through our forests – demonstrates that sustainability is rife with complexities best addressed by interrogating the “energy-intensive way of life that a spoiled 20 percent of us across the industrial world take for granted.”
.

CHOKE POINTS AND KILL SWITCHES
Following the Egyptian government’s severing of the country’s internet connection, journalist and Omnibus contributing editor Andrew Blum examines the vulnerability of our online access in an Atlantic editorial covering Verizon’s purchase of computing company Terremark. Blum’s piece is an important reminder of the tangibility and physicality of information exchange. The internet is indeed a network of networks and, in America, one with “choke points” and “kill switches” located in Terremark’s highly-guarded Miami building. And when the locus of the most open medium of communication is bought and sold, it’s worth taking note.
.

THROWDOWN REVISITED
The Boston Globe recaps the debate between New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism in a well-balanced article outlining the history of two movements over the last 30 years. Cambridge and the “intensely confident” Charles Waldheim may be the epicenter of Landscape Urbanism, but the school of thought has recently gained international traction — most significantly in the halls of urban planning programs, as writer Leon Nayfakh points out — and is vying to replace New Urbanism as the popular planning paradigm. With the ever-increasing relevance of environmental concerns in design, Nayfakh’s piece is a welcome revisitation of the laudable intentions behind the two schools of urbanism, and sheds light on their drawbacks (the hubris of the master plan and perpetuation of suburban sprawl among them). For more on the contentious debate between the two camps, read Genevieve Sherman’s analysis of the Harvard Design School’s 50th anniversary conference and the conversation it generated.

.

On Melancholy Hill – NYC Lights from Chateau Bezerra on Vimeo.

OMNI-UPDATES
A lot of updates on projects and happenings we’ve recently covered came across our desks this week. Here’s a brief rundown of the highlights:

In light of this week’s feature Project Neon, we thought we’d share Chateau Bezerra’s On Melancholy Hill – NYC Lights, a music video made entirely from footage of New York’s neon signage. (Embedded above.)

Two weeks ago, we saw a preview of Alexander Chen’s in-progress musical subway map, “Conductor.” The project is now live on his site, so play away! At least the subway inspires mirth in some fashion — Governor Cuomo this week announced a decision to cut $100 million in transit dollars in efforts to balance the State’s budget, which looks grim for the MTA’s promise to improve service but not hike fares.

If you enjoyed reading Alan Rapp’s review of “Unseeing Modernism,” an exhibition of Ezra Stoller’s architectural photography at the Yossi Milo Gallery, check out A Daily Dose of Architecture’s notes on “The Photography of Ezra Stoller,” a recent Center for Architecture panel discussion that brought together Erica Stoller, Kenneth Frampton, Brook Mason and John Morris Dixon, moderated by James Sanders.

Superfund! Next Tuesday, February 8th, at 6:30pm the Museum of the City of New York is hosting a panel discussion entitled “NYC Superfund: Toxic Solution or Toxic Label?“ that ponders what the recent Superfund designations of Newtown Creek and the Gowanus Canal will mean for residents, real estate development, and the natural environments themselves. Reservations required: 917-492-3395 or e-mail programs@mcny.org. Tickets are $6 for museum members, $8 for non-member seniors and students, $12 for non-members — but only $6 when you mention the Architectural League or Urban Omnibus. Thanks MCNY!

And then next Wednesday, February 9th, the Omnibus’ own editor Cassim Shepard will respond to a show of visual artists at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery. The panel discussion is titled “Taking, Leaving, Moving: mobility, evocative objects and a sense of home” and begins at 7pm.
.

GONG XI FA CÁI
Yesterday we kicked off the Year of the Rabbit. On Sunday, Chinese New Year parades and cultural festivals will take place in both Manhattan’s and Flushing’s Chinatowns. Gong Xi Fa Cái!

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