-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

What is MyBlockNYC?
Alex Kalman: MyBlockNYC is a site that allows users to share videos on a map. It’s an interesting balance between a video sharing website and a new kind of map, and we are still asking ourselves which one is primary. You can explore the videos geographically — through a video’s location on a map of New York City — or thematically — through basic thematic categories like food, or sports, or transportation, or crime.

It started with a very simple idea: we found ourselves excited by the constant capturing and sharing of little moments in people’s daily lives. Yet the platforms for hosting, sharing, organizing and presenting these videos are limited: they don’t put the individual videos together in a way that says something larger or builds them into a cohesive language. The impulse to use MyBlock isn’t just “Oh, I heard about this video; let me find it and watch it.” The impulse is “I’m interested in this idea or this part of town; let me explore that.” The idea of exploration is very important to us.

Alex Rickard: On most video sharing websites, if you want “A,” you type “A,” and you get “A.” There is no sense of exploration beyond “A.” Those sites are big buckets into which everyone can pour material and then dig through to find videos to watch.

Kalman: With MyBlock, we wanted to do something more meaningful with user-generated videos. We had the idea that the moments people document on video and share are the building blocks, in a way, of a new city, one that can be explored by anyone in the world.

Users can start to take trips through areas based on their interests. And they can also define their own landscape, they can build their own city that’s an amalgamation of so many different personal visions and interpretations – as opposed to the singular perspective of a Hollywood film about a city. Taken together, these multiple moments create the whole picture of a community.

The various ways to search MyBlock content include thematic categories such as food, sports, crime, community, news, work, landscape, landmarks and music. Additionally, users can search based on the age and sex of the filmmaker, whether he or she is a local or a tourist, and other identifying characteristics. MyBlock is currently developing finer grained categories of searchability.

So, it differs from a narrative film about a city and it differs from the current crop of video-sharing websites. How does it differ from other mapping platforms or sites?
Rickard: Some people have compared MyBlock to Google Maps. We love Google Maps; we love Street View; these are incredibly powerful tools. One way to characterize the difference is that with Street View, you can see the cars parked on a particular street or the fronts of buildings; you find the closest subway station or which side of the street a restaurant is on. But does it give you a sense of the life or cultures or communities in that neighborhood? On MyBlock, you can go behind the visible surface to get an idea of the life of a certain block: what it sounds like, what people look like, what kind of action is going on. We’d like to add an experiential and explorative dimension to mapping that hasn’t existed before.

A selection of videos from the Morris Park neighborhood of the Bronx

It also seems to have an archival sensibility. What makes it distinct from other databases or archives of urban images and storytelling?
Rickard: We want the site to become a living archive of the city, documenting neighborhood change over time. I think that is going to be an immense resource for future historians and for people curious about how places change.

Kalman: I’m not sure I’ve come across databases of information that are as visually seductive as MyBlock. The stories contained within it will certainly be of value to, say, a sociologist gathering information, but its value also comes from being fun, engaging entertainment. It’s great for kids; it’s great if you’re bored; and it’s great as a source of a certain kind of data about how we live now. For me, it’s important to mix the high and low. That’s why the fact that MyBlock was included in Talk To Me at the Museum of Modern Art was so exciting for us. For an institution of high art to be displaying videos made by high school students in the Bronx demonstrates the way an interface such as this can create opportunities for distinct communities to intermingle in ways they otherwise might not.

Click image to play video

Tell me about your partnerships with the schools.
Kalman: As we were developing the concept for MyBlock, we started thinking about the teenage journey through New York City and the richness of that experience. We felt it was very important to include teenage voices. And we also felt that in this age of the prevalence of video technology, it was important for teenagers to understand the potentially powerful uses of creating their own media.

So we thought to ourselves, how wonderful would it be if making a MyBlock video – a mini-documentary about your block – were a homework assignment for students? It would be an opportunity for high school students to represent their own identity as part of the community. And so we approached the Department of Education, which advised that we create some relationships with schools and test out our crazy idea. So we did that, and based on what we learned we created a curriculum and lesson plan. The program is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any school’s preferences or limitations. If they don’t have cameras, we loan them cameras. If they don’t want to spend a whole semester on it, there’s an abbreviated version that takes a couple of weeks. If they don’t have any money, that’s okay because the program is free.

Image excerpted from "The Field Guide to Street Filmmaking" produced by MyBlockNYC for New York City public high schools | Illustration: Victor Kerlow

Rickard: As of now, we’re working strictly with public schools. Most of the students have never picked up a video camera before. One teacher expressed to us that after seeing her students’ videos, she had a far better grasp of what they go through every day.

Give me some examples of students and the kinds of videos they made.
Rickard: One powerful example is Jamal’s video. He was one of the high school students in our pilot program who has since become one of our interns. He made a really strong video about a murder that took place in his building. It documents the crime scene, the community’s response, and provides this incredible firsthand access and a deeper level of awareness about our city and its inhabitants’ daily experiences.

Click image to play video

The curriculum you developed invokes the “civic possibilities of video.” What does “civic video” mean to you?
Rickard: Maybe this is overly romantic, but I think of uploading a video to MyBlock as means of participating in the defining and redefining of our city. It’s almost like a way of voting, of taking responsibility for a full and true representation of who is in our city, what our city is like, what we like and don’t like about the way our city is.

I also think that humanizing issues — including personal perspectives on urban challenges like crime — can be a very effective way of addressing problems. Video is a tool that can bear witness to social conditions in powerful ways. When harnessed properly, it can be very powerful.

Why else do you think making videos is an important skill for young people to learn?
Kalman: Video can travel all around the world within a matter of moments, and the language of moving images is universal. And many, many people have this tool in their pockets that can create video, that can create hard proof of what happened in a given situation – like the documentation of police tactics with Occupy Wall Street, for example.

Rickard: And beyond bearing witness, there’s video’s potential for citizen journalism. I think the key thing about video is its accessibility – both for creators and consumers. Everyone with a cell phone has the capacity to document his or her life, so let’s give each of them the tools to craft that documentation into whatever it wants to be, whether that’s advocacy-based citizen journalism or a memento of a first date.

MyBlock’s inclusion in Talk to Me seems to put it in a group of technological innovations that foster the communication between people and objects. What does that mean to you?
Kalman: A lot of the objects in Talk To Me had a very specific application, like here’s a pair of shoes that make you seem taller or here’s a pill that makes your poop different colors in order to diagnose you with various diseases. But MyBlock differs from those projects in that it doesn’t really have a precise and singular goal in mind; it’s very open-ended.

Rickard: MyBlock is about the city speaking for itself, citizens speaking for the city. Talk To Me took all that communication and re-inscribed it within the museum. The installation was a large touch screen monitor that was positioned like a drafting board. Museum visitors could physically play and drag around the map of New York, then zoom into a particular block and have it come to life within the walls of the museum.

Kalman: And I liked the ways in which MyBlock knocked down those walls, in a sense. In the context of Talk To Me, MoMA wasn’t just a temple of high design and art for the presentation of artefacts selected by curators. And it wasn’t like a spotlight on this precious design object. Any moment, uploaded by anyone, anywhere in New York City could be found within the museum’s walls. In a way, we flooded the museum with New York City.

Click image to play video. For this video, a MyBlock user visiting from Singapore recorded himself in Times Square proposing to his girlfriend via a series of iPad notes. He then brought her to the Talk To Me exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and watched as she selected the video and experienced the proposal on the MyBlock kiosk in the gallery. When the MyBlockNYC team learned of this plan, they made sure to document the unfolding of events themselves; watch their video here.

When and why did the emphasis on the block as the organizational framework for these place-based videos emerge?
Kalman: When we started to narrow down our vision, we started to ask ourselves,  “what is the tangible unit of New York City?” An entire world exists on a block of New York.

Rickard: I think the idea was to work with the preexisting organization of the city and not try to pin drop or abstract it, but to facilitate the predefined associations.

Kalman: Exactly. Integration into the city’s landscape as it is experienced was important for us. Most map services use the concept of the pin drop to denote location, but the pin drop is not a tangible aspect of urban experience, it has no preexisting relationship to the architecture or layout of the city.

What do you think the users of MyBlock can learn about New York City from exploring the content on the site?
Kalman: It’s less about the facts and more about the nuances of place. One example is a Japanese woman who had previously lived in New York and missed it terribly when she returned to Japan. Someone shared the site with her, and she let us know that she started crying when she was checking out the site. Finally, she said, there was a way to reconnect emotionally with a place she loves.

Rickard: New York is such a diverse place. When you see a video somewhere else on the internet, even if it is labeled as taking place in New York, there is no immediate way to juxtapose it to another view of the same place or some other geographic relationship. But with MyBlock, users can look at one block and see the interplay of all these different worlds within finite locations.

Kalman: And (as long as its not pornographic or inappropriate) it isn’t controlled or dictated by any editorial voice.

Do you think this way of engaging with images and stories of New York challenges some of our assumptions our iconic city and the ways we are used to imagining it?
Kalman: I think so far what’s it’s doing is re-affirming the common notion of New York as having this raw energy, this amazing mix of unique strong characters that makes itself known to you as you walk the city’s streets.

Rickard: I think that we also get really excited with the idea that politicians and policymakers could use this website to get a better sense of what is going on in the city. The statistics and data points that generally guide daily decision-making at City Hall are limited by their lack of faces or tangible personal experiences. Another way it could be used is simply to get a better sense of a neighborhood, whether you’ve lived there your whole life or you’re a visitor preparing to do an apartment swap.

Where is the project going next?
Kalman: We’re trying to figure out how to take this simple idea and start to focus on what our users want, as well as how this can be actually used beyond entertainment and exploration. So the next steps are to develop ways to help people use the site to improve their understanding of some aspect of New York, lo learn what the city’s like from a first-hand perspective.

Rickard: It’s at the proof of concept stage right now: we needed to design it, get it out there and see how people use it. Now, we are really excited to optimize what we have launched. I think once we figure how it can work best for New York City, we are excited to bring it to other cities, both in this country and around the world. We want to continue to mature our search engine and how people filter through this content, and to find more practical uses for the site. I think that right now it’s fun, it’s entertaining, it’s leisurely, it’s art. But the next step is to get some practicality out of it for our users without weakening our commitment to art, self-expression and exploration.

Alex Kalman, co-founder of MyBlockNYC, is a first-generation American. The son of a graphic designer and magazine editor from Hungary and a writer and illustrator from Israel, Alex grew up walking the streets of New York with his eye on the vernacular. Alex is a founding member of renowned New York City production company, Red Bucket Films, whose features, shorts, docs, and commercial works show in theaters, festivals, galleries, and publications around the world. Alex currently lives in New York City.

On November 20, Nathan Kensinger, in collaboration with UnionDocs, presented “Block by Block,” a panel discussion with four of New York’s most active street historians. Author Kevin Walsh, location scout Nick Carr, urban explorer Moses Gates and guide Cindy VandenBosch exemplify a vital and contemporary iteration of the long-standing New York tradition of “un-official,” “informal,” “underground,” and “alternative” histories. The event presented each individual’s work, methodology, adventures and stories, and in so doing managed to challenge many of our assumptions about how history is traditionally written, and how subverting those traditions can open up new avenues of urban exploration.

Kensinger, no slouch in the business of New York underground documentation himself, began the panel by framing the practice of street history in New York. Kensinger described the explorations of George G. Foster, a pioneer of nonfiction urban sensationalism. In the 1800s, Foster was working to document the whole of the rapidly changing city, through books such as New York by Gas Light and Other Urban Sketches and New York in Slices. His writing laid the groundwork for many writers of the early 20th century known for their exploration of New York’s underbelly, including Joseph Mitchell (McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon) and St. Clair McKelway (True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality), both also known for their contributions to the early years of The New Yorker. Like Foster before them, these writers opened doors for other 20th century talents like columnist Meyer Berger and audio documentarian Tony Schwartz. Just as each of the previous generations of New York historians felt a duty to expand public understanding of the breadth and diversity of urban experience in New York, the panelists Kensinger invited to this event exhibited a sense of wonder, responsibility and anxiety about representing the city they call home.

The first presenter of the evening was Kevin Walsh of Forgotten New York. Walsh, by his own account, is now an author, but has always identified himself foremost as an urban explorer. A New York native, he came of age investigating the streets, fascinated by the stories they tell. And in 1997, when the Internet, as he said, “started getting popular,” he saw an opportunity and a platform upon which he could finally share his explorations. By 1998, he was out every weekend, photographing all along the way. During his many journeys, he has found the few remaining red-brick paved roads and some rare two-light stoplights that flash only red and green, explored New York neighborhood institutions like Red Hook’s Sunny’s Bar and Narrows Coffee Shop, and exposed the bucolic beauty of Park Slope’s Webster and Jackson Places with equal excitement as the gruesome history of Atlantic Terminal’s prior life as a meatpacking plant.

5 Beekman Street | Photo by Nick Carr/Scouting New York

Nick Carr is a location scout for the movie industry is the author of Scouting New York. After graduating from college, he wanted to work in film production. Following a couple twists and turns that involved figuring out where to locate trailers on the set and how to run telephone lines to them, he managed to find regular work in the locations department and worked his way up to being a scout. Working on films like Spiderman 3 and The Taking of Pelham 123, one would expect that Carr’s work has taken him to some of New York’s most inaccessible rooftops and abandoned buildings, but it has also found him in the last arcade in Chinatown and rooftop beach houses. He has tracked down rats in Grand Central Station and owls in Hearld Square. His words of advice on scouting the next spot? Keep your eyes open, New York is always changing.

Census Tracts, Current Progress | Courtesy of Moses Gates

Moses Gates of All City New York presented next. An urban explorer, planner and demographer, Gates has taken on a number of ambitious urban adventures goals. First, he decided to climb every bridge in New York, then to explore all of New York’s abandoned subway stations and most recently to walk all of New York’s census tracts. Gates began by showing some stomach-jolting photos of his bridge climbs and curiosity-sparking images of his subway explorations. Then, he dove into his census tract exploration. As of November 20th, Gates had walked 83.5% of New York’s census tracts as outlined by the census conducted in the year 2000. Over the course of his walks, he began to wonder about the totality of New York in contrast to image of New York. Does Chelsea or Ridgewood offer a more “real” New York? Jackson Heights or Bayside? Using census microdata, the demographer in him decided to figure out which neighborhood’s statistics most closely match the citywide averages for income, racial composition and other census categories. The winner? Pelham Parkway in the Bronx.

Cindy VandenBosch of Urban Oyster was the final presenter. Drawing on her background in anthropology, she wanted to create a tour company that would not just simply showcase a space, but allow the participant to experience it as a place. With topics ranging from food carts to churches to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, her tours expand the traditional visual tour experience by drawing in locals for discussion, tastings and oral histories. She took us through the makings of her Immigrant Foodways tour. In 2008, when a signature campaign stopped its repurposing, the Moore Street Market drew VandenBosch’s attention. The Market, she explained, was originally formed under the LaGuardia administration in an effort “to turn the peddlers of yesterday into the merchants of tomorrow,” by centralizing them indoors. With the market as a starting place, VandenBosch’s investigations expanded into the neighborhood. She found a wealth of food-centric stories from the butcher shops that once lined Moore Street to the steer drive that took place on Johnson Avenue. Through her connection to the neighborhood and communities with whom she works, her tours are filled with resident’s personal histories in equal amount as urban history, offering a well-rounded rendering of the places rather than simply the spaces through which she leads tours.

Co-owner of Anibal Meat Market, Angelo Santiago, offers up some pernil and roasted chicken to attendees of one of VandenBosch's tours | Photo by Andrew Gustafson, courtesy of Cindy VandenBosch

Following the presentations, Kensinger opened a question and answer session with audience. It took no time at all for the issue of change in the city to take over the discussion. Walsh lamented the loss of architectural individualism and the resulting aesthetic homogenization of the built environment. Carr took on the frequency of construction, adaptation, renovation and demolition. Gates discussed the city’s demographic changes — the city is more expensive than ever before, but remains socially diverse. VanderBosch queried the way in which the landmarking process occurs: should it be with reference to the narrative of the place or the structure?

Walsh summed up the crux of his argument with an anecdote. He was out walking and photographing when met a friend, to whom he complained that a beautiful old baroque building had been torn down and replaced with standardized box apartments (what he calls “Fedders,” in reference to the air conditioners that adorns their windows). His friend told him to stop complaining; this is what people can afford; this is what makes sense for the neighborhood as it is now. Her scolding was based in economics, demographics and practicality, while his sensibility lay in aesthetics and nostalgia. Hence Walsh’s question: where is the line? What amount of historic or aesthetic value is sufficient to justify deterring or slowing physical change, even when rapid change makes the most economic sense?

Not all development dilemmas are this clear-cut, and the discussion brought to mind the complex challenges of shaping the city’s future in a way that respects its past. Both economic development and historic preservation play important roles and, while it is impossible to single-handedly predict or determine the future, we can be sure that this group of street historians and urban explorers will remind us of the best of the past. In just a few hours, they led us through some of New York’s “secret” spaces, shifted the mythologies we believe about the city, and opened our eyes to the complex historical narratives that we pass by everyday. And, at the end of our exploration, they raise key questions about which of New York’s spaces, places and mythologies will continue to be preserved. What vestiges of this New York will we find in the next version of New York? It will be up to the next generation of street historians to explore, document and share.

Meg Kelly is a researcher and designer. As a Fulbright Fellow, she recently completed “Tracing Shifts of Place: Migration, Identity and Landscape in Dharavi,” a year-long oral history project that investigated and documented the physical, political and cultural landscape of one of Asia’s largest and most complex informal communities through the eyes of its youth. She is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and a current collaborator at UnionDocs.

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.

On Saturday, October 8, Cinebeasts presented Gowanderlust!, an event combining a neighborhood walking tour with quick, guerilla-style film installations. Just after dusk, a group gathered at the Bell House, a bar in Gowanus, Brooklyn, where we met Nathan Kensinger, photographer, documentary filmmaker, festival programmer and our tour guide for the evening. Kensinger is best known for his work documenting off-limits spaces along the industrial waterfront of New York City. After many years living and working in Gowanus, he knows the neighborhood well and our walk was enlivened by his tales of neighborhood’s politics, environmental issues and urban legends.

Photo by Matthew Caron

Moving towards our first stop, a truck depot at 5th Street and 2nd Avenue, we took a moment to discuss the industrial history of the Gowanus Canal, its designation as a Superfund site and why, unlike many of New York’s other post-industrial waterfront areas, it has yet to be redeveloped (extreme pollution combined with the economic downturn was the group consensus). After a quick turn, we rambled across railroad ties to a vacant lot, the site of our first screening. On a screen tacked to an unsuspecting van, we viewed Silo and Camera Roll for Taylor. Silo is a single-shot time-lapse of ISSUE Project Room at its former location in a converted silo alongside the Gowanus Canal. Camera Roll for Taylor is what director Joel Schlemowitz calls a “camera roll city cine-poem.” Made as a filmic postcard to a friend, Schlemowitz refracted his frames through a crystal, shooting only sites in the vicinity of the canal.

Our second stop landed us just across from Dykes Lumber Yard on 6th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Projected just below the Dykes sign, we viewed SSS by Henry Hills. Shot in 1988, the film is composed of footage of instances of dance-like spontaneous movement in the streets of the East Village. SSS provoked conversation about ways to inhabit and appropriate under- and un-used urban space — and, it turns out, the film was the inspiration for the Gowanderlust event.

Photo by Matthew Caron

Our third stop landed us across from The Old American Can Factory, at 3rd Street and 3rd Avenue, facing a long abandoned landmarked building. Built in 1872-3, the Coignet Stone Company building was built entirely of cast concrete as a prototype to demonstrate the material’s versatility. The building sits at the edge of what was once an industrial park and is now an expansive, locally-infamous vacant lot. It has housed squatters, provided space and inspiration to artists, been termed a part of “Brooklyn’s biggest toxic playground,” and is now owned by the Whole Foods Company. Projected onto the doors of the Coignet building, we viewed Autumn Leaves, a short film by Brooklyn-based artist Donna Cameron. Cameron uses a unique method that combines photo emulsion and paper to create her work. In Autumn Leaves, she recreates the beauty of autumn by ripping, tearing and rustling the papers, simulating both the sounds and appearance of falling leaves.

A short walk across the 3rd Street Bridge brought us to our fourth stop, at the edge of the canal by the Gowanus Dredgers’ boat launch. Founded in 1999, the Gowanus Dredgers Canoe Club is dedicated to providing waterfront access and education along the canal and throughout other waterfront communities in Brooklyn. Just next to the launch site, we screened our final film, Kevin T. Allen’s What the Sea Left Behind. Depicting a “journey above and below one of America’s most polluted waterways,” Allen used a homemade hydrophone and binaural contact microphones to record the sounds of a canoe on the canal.

Photo by Matthew Caron

On our way back to Cabinet magazine’s offices for a final slideshow and some Brooklyn Brewery brew, we took a break on the Carroll Street Bridge. Built in 1888, it is the oldest retractile bridge in the United States. Instead of rising up, the bridge swings to the bank to allow oncoming boats to pass. From the silo in Joel Schelmowitz’s film to the vacant lands and, of course, the canal itself, the view from the bridge perfectly linked all the pieces of our walk together and offered us a moment to discuss the past and the future of the canal and Gowanus.

Hosting everything from off-the grid communes turned drug houses, to houseboat pioneers, to innovative work spaces, to dumpster swimming pools, post-industrial Gowanus has acted as a refuge for the artistic and the eccentric, for the communal enthusiast and the anarchist. And so, the days when the police would comb the canal for bodies, and the density of toxic waste would cause the canal to self-ignite now seem both long gone and not so long gone. With a massive rezoning complete, construction and development efforts stalled, and the Superfund clean up just beginning, I was left wondering what the future will hold for Gowanus. Are the days of dumpster pools and guerrilla film exhibitions on their way out, soon to be replaced by condos and nondescript commercial development? Or, thanks to the economy, are they just warming up?

Photo by Matthew Caron

Meg Kelly is a researcher and designer. As a Fulbright Fellow, she recently completed “Tracing Shifts of Place: Migration, Identity and Landscape in Dharavi,” a year-long oral history project that investigated and documented the physical, political and cultural landscape of one of Asia’s largest and most complex informal communities through the eyes of its youth. She is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and a current collaborator at UnionDocs.

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.

Meeting Bowls | via Times Square Alliance

MEET ME IN A BOWL
Times Square is now host to an outdoor urban furniture installation titled “Meeting Bowls,” created in partnership with the Times Square Alliance and design firm mmmm… The Meeting Bowls are three, 8-person, slatted bowls (highly reminiscent of salad spinners), which are meant to offer a place for intimate social experiences in the midst of one of the city’s busiest spaces. The bowls also offer the option to to record dialogue that may take place during your encounter on laptops and smartphones. The installation will be open to the public through September 16th, from 8am to midnight. Read more about the Meeting Bowls from The Architect’s Newspaper and see more on the concept from mmmm…

NYC AT A GLANCE
The 2011 update of NYC At-A-Glance, the New York City Economic Development Corporation’s report on New York City’s economy, covers data on standards of living, length of commute, economic growth and employment statistics. Some of the more compelling stats: 91.7% of New Yorkers live and work within the city (placing us way ahead of the rest of the country, with runner-up Houston coming in at 81%) — though New Yorkers also have the longest commute in the country, as only 33% of us spend less than half an hour en route to work, and a whole quarter of the city have over an hour of commute time. New York’s private sector had the highest average income in the country at $81,800, a reflection of a hugely stratified sector, in which 250,800 people in “Accommodation and Food Services” earned $28,600 per year at the low end, and 161,600 people in “Securities” earned, on average, $361,300 per year. Download the full report here for a detailed look at the state of the city.

NYC Play Street | via Transportation Alternatives

POP-UP PLAYGROUND
Pop-up chapels, pop-up labs for urbanism, pop-up roller rinks — NYC is on a pop-up roll. The latest in imaginative structures to hit New York’s streets are pop-up playgrounds or play-streets designed to combat childhood obesity. Seven civic organizations are leading an effort over the next two months to close streets to traffic and instead use those spaces to accommodate instruction in activities ranging from yoga to rugby to tennis to jump-rope. By re-defining the traditional “play street” in areas where open space and obesity are an issue, these pop-up structures might be as fun as they are good for public health.  Read more in The New York Times.

via Scientific American

ON CITIES: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
The special September issue of Scientific American is all about cities. There are some heavy hitters in the roster of authors — geographers, economists, sociologists and architectural critics who tackle the idea of “the city” from vantage points of efficiency, livability, scale and geography. Look out for the issue, featuring articles by Edward Glaeser, Anthony Townsend and Mark Lamster, and an interview with William Gibson, at newstands next month, or check it out online.

EVENTS and TO-DOs:

Image via stillspotting nyc

TO A GREAT CITY
Stillspotting nyc (the Guggenheim’s 2-year multidisciplinary installation series) has announced its upcoming exhibit To a Great City, a sound-and-space walking tour of Lower Manhattan that was created in collaboration with Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (known for his compositional style tintinnabuli and his search for an absolute essential sound) and architecture and landscape design firm Snøhetta. Starting in Battery Park and traveling underground and into the private recesses of some of the city’s most famous skyscrapers, the tour will explore five typically inaccessible Manhattan spaces. A ticket buys access for a full day of visiting and revisiting as many times as the experience begs. Tours will run Thursdays through Saturdays, September 15-18 and 22-25. See more from Architizer and on the stillspotting website.

Dialog in the Dark

DIALOG IN THE DARK
This weekend, Dialog in the Dark opens as a new form of exhibition/participatory experience at the South Street Seaport. Led by blind or visually-impaired guides, exhibition-goers will be given canes as they enter a complete and total darkness where they experience simulations of familiar New York places and environments through sound, texture, temperature and smell. See more on the exhibit here and read Edward Rothstein’s review in the Times here.

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

Today marks the launch of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a partnership between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, BMW, a team of curators and consultants, and the public. This participatory and generative “mobile laboratory,” now open in the East Village at Houston Street and 2nd Avenue, aims to be a catalyst for “the exploration of new ideas, experimentation, and ultimately the creation of forward-thinking solutions for city life.” In the planned investigations and explorations of the spaces, systems, structures, culture and people that are the city, the project recognizes that the wellbeing of citizens is inseparable from the wellbeing of the built environment.

The Lab will be based in the East Village from August 3 — October 16, 2011. Over the next two years, it will make its way from the United States to Europe and Asia, during phase one of a “six-year migration” around the world. The space is envisioned as a “traveling toolbox” in which the architecture acts as a frame for a series of interdisciplinary urban investigations. In this phase, the mobile structure has been designed by Japanese team Atelier Bow-Wow, a Tokyo-based firm known for urban residential and “micro public space” design.

“Confronting Comfort,” the theme of the first two-year cycle, will explore both individual and collective comfort in the context of environmental and social responsibility. To address the theme, Guggenheim curators Maria Nicanor and David van der Leer and an international advisory committee assembled a Lab Team of experts working across a range of fields — an environmental justice activist and cooperative developer, a journalist and “urban experimentalist,” a microbiologist and inventor, and two architects — to concoct a program of conversations and events that will transform the Lab space into a public forum.

Olatunbosun Obayami, microbiologist and founder of Bio Applications Initiative; Elma van Boxel and Kristian Korean of architecture and urban design firm ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles]; Charles Montgomery, writer on happiness and climate change; and Omar Freilla, environmental justice activist and founder of Green Workers Cooperatives, collaborated to create an itinerary of lectures, debates, screenings and workshops that question how individuals and institutions can create comfort in the city, and how that comfort will enhance the lives of city dwellers. From there they will venture out into the city to accrue data on how people use urban space and infrastructure, to gain crucial understanding of both the physical and emotional needs of their citizens, and to expose private and public sites in New York City where our comfort has led to complacency.

Urban Omnibus recently had a chance to speak with one of the Guggenheim curators and all four members of Lab Team New York. Click on the images below to read more about issues of “segrification,” hedonistic utility, and how the city operates like a living microbe. —Caitlin Blanchfield

	Maria Nicanor “This is a lab, an experiment. It’s about the process. It’s about awareness and about getting people to think about the city in new ways.”
	Omar Freilla “We have a game at the Lab, Urbanology, that’s kind of a mix between Red Light, Green Light, 1, 2, 3 and civics class. It gets people to rethink what their priorities are for the city, and what the city’s priorities should be.”
	Charles Montgomery “We want to map out the emotional landscape of public space in Lower Manhattan, to learn how design influences the emotional experience of the city. The answers might help city builders design systems that are not just more efficient, but happier.”
	Olatunbosun Obayomi “A city is like a living microbe. It operates as a combination of systems (transportation, sewer, governance) coming together to aid movement and production. In science, a microorganism also combines various systems (cell walls, mitochondria, plasma) to move and produce.”
	ZUS: Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman “Acupunctural ‘green’ infrastructure is a good start, but the real challenge in this city is to equally distribute wealth and health within its territory. This demands a political infrastructure in which global and local parties and institutions are equally represented.”

All photos © 2011 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Obscura Day Poster | Image by Oliver Munday

Happy April Fool’s Day! For a little urban planning humor, be sure to check out Planetizen’s April 1st Edition — who knew those guys were so funny?
.

INTERNATIONAL OBSCURA DAY
For its second annual International Obscura Day, Atlas Obscura offers excursions into unexpected corners of world cities — New York, of course, included. On April 9th, you have the chance to explore the inside of the Catacombs at the Greenwood Cemetery, tour the Ghost ships of Coney Island Creek (with promised tales of rum-runners, whalers and a home-made submarine), or grab a beer and hop on a bike for a bike tour through the historic breweries of Brooklyn and Queens, among other urban adventures.
.

BRINGING MANUFACTURING BACK TO THE CITY
The Times reports on the place-based future of manufacturing in an opinion piece that heralds a field often assumed outsourced for good as an opportunity to create jobs and strengthen urban communities. The piece profiles the organizations SF Made and Made in NYC, which serve as networks for local manufacturing businesses, provide resources for small start-ups and connect consumers to locally-sourced products. This reinvigoration of the manufacturing sector and the press it’s getting suggest that people are increasingly turning to independently-owned, small-scale enterprises to boost the economy, perhaps hoping that acting local can accomplish the financial resuscitation larger corporations have been slow to spur. It also demonstrates a demand to integrate production with community in what Mike Dwight, founder of SFMade, calls “geographic ingredient branding,” which he defines as “a way to ‘brand’ the history, culture, personality and natural beauty of [a] city as a means to uniquely differentiate local manufacturers.” .

A BIG NIGHT FOR APPS
Redefining the “networked city,” urban apps are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous way to connect with a city and its citizens. Last night a committee of technology innovators and municipal leaders announced the winners of the 2011 NYC BigApps2.0 competition, selecting applications that alert users about important urban information ranging from nearby public art to restaurants in violation of health code. Architizer reports on the event, with a run down of some of the winning apps. Roadify, the Grand Prize winner last night, was profiled recently on Transportation Nation. This handy app fuses the urban trends of crowd-sourcing, smart phone navigating and MTA updates, allowing subway riders to update one another on the conditions of their commute and thus provide more immediate transit news than the MTA’s site. While the subway may not be wired, the creators of Roadify hope info from users entering and exiting the station will piece together an accurate picture of whats going on underground.
.

STATES AND THE METRO ECONOMY
Over on The Avenue (a collaborative blog from Brookings and The New Republic), Jennifer Bradley asks when states will finally recognize their dependence on metropolitan economies. Her piece summarizes a longer article, co-written with metro-area evangelist Bruce Katz, in Democracy Journal and posits that the reflection prompted by the Great Recession should lead to a restructuring of state government, one that prioritizes the needs of metro areas. The argument is not new, but the historical overview, which reaches back to the pivotal ceding of states’ rights during the 1789 ratification of the US Constitution, is helpful and refreshingly well informed.
.

TURNING TRAFFIC INTO ELECTRICITY
Feeling good vibrations in California, State Assemblyman Mike Gatto proposed a bill that will test the use of vibrational energy emitted by automobile traffic to harness electricity. Employing piezoelectricity – a technology that converts the work of physical motion into electricity (which Omnibus readers may recall from Carmen Trudell and Jenny Broutin’s fluxxlab project) — and following the design of similar systems in Italy and Israel, California’s plan will place sensors under roadways and then convert the strain placed on them by cars into an electric charge, which is then channeled into the grid. According to Gatto, a one-lane highway is able to produce 44 megawatts over the course of a year. As a post on the Freshkills Blog points out, piezoelectricity has been used to capture energy in wind, walking and even dancing, so lets hope more permutations of its technology travel to this city.
.

Eduardo Souto de Moura's Braga Stadium | photo by Luis Ferreira Alves via Architectural Record

PRITZKER PRIZE WINNER ANNOUNCED
On Monday, the Pritzker Prize Committee announced Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Mora as its 2011 winner. De Mora’s designs, mostly built in Portugal, are softly modernist, employing smooth geometries and a design lexicon that reflects local heritage and a sense of place. As an article in Architectural Record points out, his attention of scale and subtlety affirms a trend among the Pritzker jury in recent years to favor “craft, local scale, and sensibility over architectural extravagance” – welcome values that preserve longevity and strong aesthetics in a time when we need to re-evaluate the impact of hasty, ostentatious building.
.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
High-speed rail has been a hot topic for discussion of late, after the Obama administration committed $53 billion to the construction of a high-speed rail network and set a goal to connect 80% of Americans to its service by 2050. This project will undoubtedly transform the American landscape, and the Van Alen Institute is asking architects, planners and artists to envision what our high-speed future may look like. The Life at the Speed of Rail competition seeks design projects and imagined narratives that will address the impacts of new infrastructure, aiming to better inform the design decisions for the construction of the network. The deadline is May 21st, 2011.
.

EVENTS
Over the next month, the downtown landscape will be transformed by a host of artists and cultural institutions – Urban Omnibus among them – leading up to the Festival of Ideas for the New City. Held from May 4-8, the festival is a collaboration between the New Museum, the Architectural League and a long list other cultural institutions, that will host an array of discussions, events and urban interventions to explore the themes of the Heterogeneous City, the Networked City, the Reconfigured City and the Sustainable City. Stay tuned for many more updates from us, including more details about Urban Omnibus’ own contribution to the event.

Next Wednesday, Omnibus Editor Cassim Shepard will be discussing some of the ideas behind and projects presented on Urban Omnibus in the context of other work he’s done at the intersection of urbanism and creative media-making. The lecture, at noon at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge (20 Cooper Square at 5th Street), is free and open to the public.

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

Click to launch slideshow

On December 3rd, I was two weeks into a new job on the Upper East Side. I have rarely spent time on the Upper East Side over my 17 years in New York. It is not a neighborhood that has ever felt welcoming to me, especially in the dark days of mid-winter, when the streets are pitch black at 5pm. So, I was looking for a reason to like this neighborhood where I suddenly found myself five days a week — and that’s when I discovered my love of neon.

The Upper East Side has quite a few excellent neon signs: Goldberger’s Pharmacy, Cork & Bottle Liquors, and the original location of Papaya King, just to name a few. I was charmed. So, when I saw that December 3rd marked the one-hundredth anniversary of neon signage (more on that history in a moment), I decided to take my camera and follow the glow.

And so, I set out to document the neon of New York — working signs only and, for the most part, avoiding chain-store signs that can be found all over the city. I have been told that New York’s neon is unexceptional in comparison to Chicago’s or Portland’s. I wanted to prove otherwise. I also wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) that the quirky, independent New York is still here — it’s not all chain stores, standard-issue vinyl awnings and luxury condos. I too often hear about all the great things that are gone, going or about to go. I needed, in the dark depths of winter, to find good stuff that’s still here.

Click to launch slideshow

The history of commercial neon signs really begin in 1902, when French inventor Georges Claude perfected a technique for liquefying and slowly reheating air, which allowed him to separate out the component gases and thus cheaply extract the trace amounts of the noble gas neon from air. Although the trick of making certain gases glow with electric voltage had already been discovered, suddenly neon was plentiful. Claude demonstrated a long, glowing tube of neon at the Paris Motor Show on December 3, 1910, one hundred years ago. But if you missed this anniversary, don’t worry — there are other neon landmarks to celebrate, including November 8, 1911 when Claude filed for a patent for a “system of illuminating by luminescent tubes,” or January 19, 1915 when the patent was granted. There’s also 1923, when the first neon sign appeared in the US, for a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles. (You can read more about neon’s early history at the American Sign Museum’s website.)

Neon signs, I have learned, don’t always contain neon gas. Different colors are obtained by using neon, argon, helium, krypton, and xenon (all noble gases) singly or in combination, with each other or with mercury, though neon and argon are the most common. The interior of the tube is often coated with phosphors to increase the glow.

Click to launch slideshow

I love neon signs that have a sense of place, that mark a place, that feel unique and evidence their hand-made origins. The glow, the colors, the hum when you get close, the flicker when they need repair. They are lively and engaging. They are landmarks or even icons. A familiar sign can seem like a helpful friend in the dark of the city at night. If I have forgotten which street Old Town is on (as I often do), I know I can just walk up from Union Square and the glow of the sign will catch my eye.

Smaller neon signs often gather in the neighborhood of a great one. Every glimmer seemed to lead me to the next. Are the smaller signs inspired by the glow of the larger? Or do neon sign sellers concentrate their efforts on key locations? Do certain neighborhoods have the right characteristics to encourage the population of neon to grow? I haven’t figured it out yet, though I suspect a combination of all three. Of course, certain business types are more likely than others to feature neon. Liquor stores, bars and strip clubs are all classic spots for neon — but so are parking garages, drug stores, Chinese take-out places and shoe-repair shops. All places you might be in a hurry to find, at night, possibly in an unfamiliar neighborhood — hence the neon.

Not that neon is confined to the metropolis — some of the best neon signs on earth are lighting up old motels off the beaten path or in small towns at the local movie palace. But the neon sign is, for the most part, a cosmopolitan creature.

Click to launch slideshow

I have spent hours darting all over the city in the last two months, visiting neighborhoods I’ve never been to, discovering new signs I’d never seen, stumbling upon half-forgotten landmarks, revisiting old favorites, and encountering for the first time great signs I’d only seen in pictures or during the day time.

So what are New York’s best neon signs? We all have our own aesthetics, of course, and I have to admit I sometimes find it difficult to separate my love for a sign from my love of the place it advertises, but there are more than a few stand-out signs worth a visit. The images in this post’s slideshow are some of my favorites.

Click to launch slideshow

Project Neon has only just begun. I’m continuing to explore and document the neon of New York, and I plan to visit one neon-signed establishment each week (both places I have already photographed and new locations) to have a drink, get my shoes repaired, or eat some BBQ. I want to photograph Sunny’s in Red Hook — one of my favorite signs in the entire city — and, of course, the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, which is also a gem. I’ll write about each visit on my Project Neon blog and you can track my progress on this Google Map (blue markers are places I haven’t yet photographed, green markers I have already documented and the red markers indicate my favorites so far). I’m also assembling a field guide to New York City neon, which I hope to expand to other neon-filled cities in the future, and exploring the possibility of making this into an iPhone app.

Some have said that neon’s days are numbered. LED technology has been steadily improving, but the quality of LED light is not even in the same league as that of neon. LEDs are appropriate for many uses, but neon is worth preserving because nothing — not fluorescents, not incandescents, and not LEDs — can replicate its glow. And so I’m going to continue working on Project Neon, documenting the great signs of New York, mapping them, and visiting the businesses that support them. I hope Project Neon will inspire more New Yorkers to appreciate our metropolis’ treasure trove of neon, encourage shop owners to maintain fading or damaged signs, and persuade citizens to support the businesses that light up our city. New York would be a much poorer city without neon.

Click to launch slideshow

What is your favorite New York neon sign? What other cities do you think have good neon? Would you be interested in a field guide to neon for New York or any other city? Speak up in the comments below!

.

All photos by Kirsten Hively. Hively received her MArch in 2007 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. When not architecting she can often be found photographing or writing about New York City, where she lives and works.

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.

American Community Survey 2005-2009 | Household Income Distribution | screengrab from nytimes.com

CENSUS MAPS
This week, the Census Bureau released its first 5-year American Community Survey (ACS) estimates, based on data about economic and social trends collected from 2005-2009. The ACS is an annual survey that gathers information from a sampling of US citizens to evaluate of economic and social needs in between the comprehensive, population-wide census, conducted every ten years. (Speaking of which — the first round of 2010 Census stats will be released on December 21st.) The New York Times has done a stellar job, as usual, of visualizing this data in a collection of interactive maps that chart racial distribution, income, home value and education statistics on the level of the city block. The maps expose greater, and probably predictable, demographic patterns nationwide, and let you poke around to check out who your neighbors are (at least according to their numbers). Zooming in on New York, it is interesting to note how rent control and gentrification have likely lead to the fairly jumbled distribution of income in Manhattan and, as the Times highlights in a separate piece, the migration of ethnic populations from Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Greenpoint to different pockets in the boroughs over the past decade.
.

COMPETITIVE REDISTRICTING
“A fundamental part of democracy is ensuring that voters have viable choices, and that elected officials are accountable to their constituencies. High rates of uncontested elections and consistent, double digit margins of victory are anathema to these goals,” concludes a report on competitiveness of legislative elections available on the New York City government website (PDF). With redistricting in New York scheduled for 2011, after the results of this year’s census are released and before the 2012 elections, a cadre of local politicians calling themselves NY Uprising are pushing for redistricting reform. The group, led by former Mayor Ed Koch, cite the technological ease of mapping tools in drawing non-competitive districts and creating “safe” seats and recall a history of redistricting for political gain in America – perhaps explaining the 18th century federalist ring to their moniker. They suggest using an independent party to redraw district lines for the next election, implementing early voting and extending registration deadlines. Their report reminds us that competition is essential in stimulating democracy and that unseen political boundaries effect election results.
.

The City Concealed: Park Slope Armory from Thirteen.org on Vimeo.

THE CITY CONCEALED
New Yorkers love to discover the city’s hidden sites. When the urban core seems so jam-packed, there is a thrill in finding the unnoticed, especially when it’s in plain sight. With this in mind, THIRTEEN/New York Public Media created The City Concealed, an online video documentary series that explores the “unseen corners of New York.” Their latest installment looks at the history of the Park Slope Armory, from its inception as the home for National Guard’s 14th regiment to its conversion into a YMCA. Be sure to check out the rest of the series — part urban exploration, part architectural and city history, The City Concealed can take you to a Washington Heights theater described as “sort of Neo-Classical Cambodian, with influences of Hindu, Mayan, and Moorish architecture. Gilded and covered in red velvet.”; the 19th century Hunterfly Road Houses of Weeksville; and the protected heron habitat of North Brother Island. “Visit the places you don’t know exist, locations you can’t get into, or maybe don’t even want to.”
.

Walki, 2010 | Swoon | three-layer screenprint on handmade Indian jute paper

WALKI
By now, regular readers of Urban Omnibus are quite familiar with the artist Swoon and, among other things, the work she’s been doing with the Konbit Shelter Project to build sustainable, durable and low-cost housing in post-earthquake Haiti. This week, we received word that Swoon has teamed up with Upper Playground to release a limited edition print, all proceeds from which will go to support the Konbit project. The portrait of Walki, a boy who spent time with the Konbit Shelter team at their building site last summer, will only be available until January 1st. At $125, the screenprint is a worthy addition to any last-minute holiday gift list.
.

FILM SCREENING: PEOPLE AND BUILDINGS
Need something to do in that sluggish time between Christmas and New Years? On December 27th at 7pm the Center for Urban Pedagogy is hosting a People and Building’s film screening at Anthology Film Archives. The selected films relate to welfare and complement CUP’s recently completed project on Cash Assistance. RSVP to info@anothercupdevelopment.org to attend this free event.

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