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.

Last week, I found myself in an almost endless queue of people hopeful to see a panel of international urban dons assembled at the London School of Economics to celebrate the launch of the book Living in the Endless City. This follow-up to 2007′s The Endless City is again edited by Deyan Sudjic and Ricky Burdett and charts the work of the Urban Age Project over recent years, bringing together the sometimes disparate communities of what Sudjic calls “observers, shapers and professionals.” The blockbuster line-up of academics, mayors and architects who write on Mumbai, São Paulo and Istanbul were represented on the panel and assembled in congregation.

Over the course of the evening, a unifying theme — or, perhaps, a unifying language — emerged despite the broad range of speakers and disciplinary approaches: specificity; the differences between cities as opposed to their commonalities. The globe-trotting group, who might be accused of “seeing cities from thirty thousand feet,” all honed in on what they called the DNA of the individual city: the built, social and economic variability of a particular place. It felt like a departure from the tired categorizations of mega, global and world cities and Burdett illuminated the quantitative distinctions with a succession of typically hard-hitting statistics which never fail to make his narrative powerful. Although he prefaced the evening with the customary cautionary tale of the rates of urbanization and prospective densities, there was an uncustomary tone of compromise or reconciliation. He asks, riffing off the old saying: “Can you build a place like Rome in twenty years? With its accumulated complexity and sense of accretion? The answer is No.” The built response to the demand placed on city-making is necessary and compromising but, as the opening line of the book suggests, “Cities are political programs made visible” and therefore always up for debate and subject to alternatives.

Wolfgang Nowak, Caglar Keyder, Joan Clos, Ricky Burdett

Joan Clos, a former mayor of Barcelona six months into his new role as executive director of UN-Habitat, chose to speak not about one of the cities or indeed continents presented in the book. Instead, he took the opportunity to pose what he feels is one of the most burning questions of the moment. Speaking on sub-Saharan Africa, he asked, “How are we going to deal with a continent that is going to double its urban population without industrialization in the next 15 years?” The uniqueness of this particular instance of mass urbanization, one unaccompanied by the industrialization that has traditionally instigated it in other historical contexts, proved a very interesting point to reflect on. Clos distinguished between the agrarian shift taking place in China and the migrants that arrive in the African city with no promise or even real hope of a job. Newcomers arrive to the informal city not as a platform from which enter the formal city but because the slums themselves represent urban opportunity. In the context of the continued urbanization of poverty, Burdett and the book emphasize the potential — and responsibility — that planners and urban shapers have in giving these cities a form that recognizes its impact on the ecology of the planet and the social well-being of the people who live there.

"Connecting by Sea" from Living in the Endless City

Mumbai Kamathuria density diagram from Living in the Endless City

Professor Caglar Keyder was invited to speak on Istanbul, a city whose cliché tagline of bridging East and West he immediately re-spatialized as one which in the 1980s regained its role as a central place in the region, a centrifugal urban force upon the former Soviet States, the Balkans and the Middle East which surround it. “It’s Istanbul (Not Globalization),” as Hashim Sarkis’ contribution to the book is titled, is a nice phrasing of the particular type of social and economic transformation the city has undergone. Keyder says that, while in its penultimate transformation Istanbul was a third world metropolis, with 60% of housing “illegal” and the majority of the economy informal, now a successful formalization of the built environment and economy has taken place. While being a city of considerable size before, it has increased by 1300% in the last century through previously informal and more recently formal ways. However, he suggests that Istanbul is succumbing to the homogenizing typologies of speed and a “Violence of Change,” as Asu Aksoy sets out in the book, which tells a familiar global story.

Saskia Sassen’s comments on the evening provided an economic twist on the homogenization of built form. She says of the office typology of central cities: ‘There is a homogenization of the visual order. No matter how brilliant or original the architect’s shaping of a building, you smell the homogeneity and there is no way around that.” She suggests that the “office” typology with “office work” out-sourced to back offices at the edge of the city hides the nuanced and specialized differences that occur inside. She proposes that the deep economic history of a place actually matters and that this should be made clear not just in the form of the city but in how cities compete. In a global or even national order the economic or productive differences should be a bartering tool to ask more of multi-national companies and sustain a real politics among cities.

Gareth Jones gave a compelling presentation on the associational life of young people in São Paulo and Latin America through their relationships in and to the city and representations of it. In his research he seeks out the dramatic variability of the social life of the city and implores that the impulse or event of originality in the city must be maintained even if its potential for change is as yet uncertain. Richard Sennett extended Jones’ argument and suggested that the money that accompanies most styles of development result in over-determined form of the high-rise type, and that this form impairs the originality that Jones admires. He asked how more complexity and more depth can be afforded to the act of making. His closing comments were in some way a response to the time question on Rome which Burdett posed at the beginning. Sennett noted a paradigm shift in what we mean by design and what everyone thinks of as design in the city, moving away from the notion of finished objects to an ongoing process of making and re-making: endless city-making.

Living in the Endless City. The Urban Age Project by the London School of Economics and Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society
Published by Phaidon 2011
Speakers: Dr Joan Clos, Dr Gareth Jones, Professor Caglar Keyder, Professor Saskia Sassen, Professor Richard Sennett
Chairs: Ricky Burdett, Deyan Sudjic
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Claire Mookerjee is an artist and urbanist living in London.

All photos courtesy LSE Cities.

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.

The Intelligent Cities Initiative, a project of the National Building Museum, is an effort to investigate the intersection of information technology and urban life and design. In partnership with TIME and IBM, and with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Museum has launched a multi-pronged effort to understand how we live in cities today, the choices we’ve made in the past, where we want to be in the future and how we can make better-informed decisions to reach those goals. And they want input from as many people as possible — that means you — to help them do so.

Intelligent Cities launched in November 2010 with the first of a series of polling questions centered around six scale-based topics: the home, the neighborhood, the community, the city, the region and the country. While gathering answers from the public, the Museum is also developing a series of explanatory infographics and preparing for an upcoming day-long forum, a publication and an Intelligent Cities exhibition to be held in 2013.

Here, Susan Piedmont-Palladino, the curator of the Intelligent Cities project, and Scott Kratz, Vice President for Education at the National Building Museum, tell us more about the initiative, how they have turned a typical curatorial process on its head, and what they’re doing to help people understand the broader implications of their individual choices and make better decisions through better information. -V.S.

Community | An infographic about physical and virtual networks | Click to enlarge the image

URBAN OMNIBUS: What is the Intelligent Cities Initiative?

SUSAN PIEDMONT-PALLADINO: Imagine the cloud of information that hovers over all of our cities, containing all the chatter, the communication, the patterns, the history and the data being collected and yet to be collected. Intelligent Cities is looking at how we can harness all of that information and put it in a form that people across disciplines and professions and the general public can use to make better decisions about making better cities. We want to make this stuff visual. We want to make these things present. The project is a comprehensive look at the world of information and the designed, planned, physical world of cities – the built environment, the natural environment, human behavior, a whole host of things.

SCOTT KRATZ: There are two phases to the Intelligent Cities project. In phase one, we are publishing infographics and ads in TIME magazine that drive people to the website, where we are posting polling questions for the public to respond to. In June, we will host a one-day forum in DC and then we will finish up phase one with a publication. Phase two, which is the culmination of the whole initiative, will be an exhibition held at the National Building Museum in 2013.

There is an enormous amount of information out there. But that’s the problem – it’s out there. It’s not visible and, much more importantly, it’s not useful.

SPP: In a typical curatorial process, I would be engaged in some pretty intense but also reclusive research. Gradually, that would turn into an exhibition, a catalog and a series of public programs and outreach. The Intelligent Cities initiative turns that process upside down.

The forum in June will be both a physical and a virtual gathering of people involved in design, planning, policy, resource conservation, cultural resource conservation, gaming, civic participation and more. The book will focus on conclusions and questions that emerge from the earlier parts of phase one and will also serve as a guide for developing the exhibition. But again, though the exhibition will definitely be a physical display, we hope it will have all sorts of virtual tentacles to reach out to places yet to be determined.

UO: Tell me more about the process. How does it work?

SPP: The first step is digital outreach, getting people to contribute content to the Intelligent Cities website. There, users can answer questions about decisions they have made about their own homes, their neighborhoods — their individual choices. We have ads in six issues of Time Magazine, centered around a set of infographics we are developing, that are another way to provoke curiosity and interest and drive people to the website to contribute their feedback.

SK: So far we have launched three topics — the Home, the Neighborhood and the Community — and are currently developing three more: the City, the Region and the Country.

Home | An infographic about energy use, house size, and household size | Click to enlarge the image

Searching for the data for the infographics has been fascinating. You might expect information about trends in these categories to be easily accessible – just do a Google search and you’ll figure it out. But it’s not. For instance, I have been researching the growth of big box stores in the US. Finding clear, accurate information about those trends has been incredibly difficult. I’ve had to read several PhD theses, reports by the Census Bureau, and data sets loaded with caveats. But every dead end that I hit underlines the value of the project. There is an enormous amount of information out there. But that’s the problem – it’s out there. It’s not visible and, much more importantly, it’s not useful. It’s not useful to the professionals who work in the built environment and its not useful to the general public.

UO: What kinds of information are you asking about?

SPP: We are setting this up according to scale, in a sort of expanding set of concentric circles. We start with the home and move out to the neighborhood, then to the community, the city, the region and the nation. Because all of the decisions we make about our homes, those decisions which seemed so personal, have ramifications at the next scale up and the scale after that, all the way up to the largest level.

We all need to start making better decisions — and that starts with clear, actionable information that more people can understand.

For example, in the Home infographic, we take a piece of information that many of us are aware of – the size of the American house has gotten larger while the size of the American family has gotten smaller – and treat it as more than just a quirky piece of trivia. That trend has huge implications for density, land use, transportation and energy use. We want people to think about what the consequences are of the decisions we are making. So we started exploring the topic by asking people what considerations they took when deciding where to live.

SK: We’ve been surprised by the polling results to date on the questions about what motivates people to live where.

SPP: You might think that everybody makes decisions on where to live based on money. But, by a wide margin, the top answer to ‘Why did you choose where to live?’ is ‘Because I can walk and bike to stuff I like.’ These questions are a little more nuanced than a lot of conventional wisdom might lead you to think. Of course, this is not a scientific sample, but still.

UO: How do you determine the questions?

SPP: I think of it as a design process, really. There’s a lot of tinkering, tossing out ideas, running word choice past our colleagues and advisors, until we eventually come to a consensus. We want the questions to be quite brief – we don’t want people to feel like they are taking a test or that there is one “right answer.”

We work a lot on the tone. I guess we could call it the Intelligent Cities Voice. The Intelligent Cities Voice is conversational and we use the second person regularly, which is very unconventional in academic writing. But we found that both the web and the character of the Intelligent Cities project lend themselves to that kind of voice.

Neighborhood | An infographic about how kids get to school and obesity rates | Click to enlarge the image

SK: We pose the questions from three angles. One asks people about their perception of the built environment. The second looks at what barriers to change exist. For example, the Neighborhood poll asks, Do you allow your children to bike or walk to school? If you don’t, why not? Are you are concerned about safety? That your kid might be kidnapped? Are there no bike lanes? Do you physically live too far from schools to bike or walk to your school? Thirdly, we want the general public to more actively consider those kinds of connections, to break down some of the silos of their thinking about the built environment.

The last question asked during phase one will be a crowdsourced question, voted up by our delegates. We’re really intrigued to see what that turns out to be.

UO: Tell us more about the delegates and what groups you are engaging outside of the public outreach effort.

SPP: We want to engage individuals on a number of different levels. We have gathered a Board of Advisors from the public and private sectors, design, planning and academia. And then we are collecting about 150-200 folks we’re calling “delegates.” The delegates aren’t necessarily people in positions of power or expertise. They are the next generation of tech-savvy design professionals, civic activists, young faculty, recent grads — people who just have a lot to offer, want to be involved and also are extremely savvy in the social media world. And we want them to communicate with us, form their own discussion groups, share ideas with us. I’m really looking forward to mining that wonderful group of people during the research phase for the exhibition.

TIME magazine ad

UO: So you are going to work to represent the results that you get from this series of questions and forums and then communicate that outwards again?

SPP: During each stage of the project, one month after another, we reflect on what we’ve learned, which generates more conversations, mini-forums, chats – more questions. We want the project to build on itself.

The polling question segment of the project will end in March, at which point we will lock ourselves in a room to reflect, digest and prepare for the June forum. We don’t want the forum to be the usual three panelists and a moderator, coffee break, three panelists and a moderator. And we use the term “forum” on purpose, as opposed to conference, symposium or convention, because the forum is a place of discussion. It’s a political space, an urban space, a physical space, a virtual space, a space where there are people who are invited, but where there is also room for people to step up and volunteer to take a seat and to converse.

We will also be fleshing out the structure of the publication. What works on a screen doesn’t always work in print. And once the forum ends in June, we will gather up those findings and feather them into the book as well. All the while, of course, I’m keeping a running outline of possible ways to structure the exhibition. That will remain extremely fluid for a while.

graphic from advertisement for TIME magazine

UO: That was my next question. How do you turn all this into a presentation that one encounters in physical space?

SPP: It’s a little premature to talk about it, but we have some ideas. The primary mission of the Building Museum is to educate the public about the built environment and one of the things that we can do in an exhibition that isn’t so easy to do on the website, and that we may not have room to do in the book, is to give context to this entire discussion. How do we know the city? How do we see ourselves throughout history? Citizens, artists, urban planners, and philosophers and writers have been engaged in this same task for generations, using whatever technologies were at hand. What can we learn from them?

So we’re envisioning something that is dynamic, immersive and interactive. Bits of the exhibition might be in other locations. It’s going to be an interesting challenge for whoever gets to be our exhibition designers. The Building Museum has a long track record of taking on subject matter that might, on the surface, have seemed, how should I put this…

SK: Daunting, maybe?

TIME magazine ad

SPP: Unlikely to make a good exhibition, you might say. We had a whole exhibition on air conditioning years ago that was just spectacular.

UO: What are your ultimate goals? Why is the National Building Museum doing this?

SPP: The Building Museum wants to remind us all that buildings, landscapes and cities are crucially important. Place still matters, even if we are all connected digitally – in fact, it matters more. We are adding this other layer of communication and representation to the built environment and we need to start to reveal to ourselves the new conditions, problems, beauty or other potential scenarios that come with that.

To achieve that goal, we are asking people to think about choices they have made and understand the choices made by others. What we get to do is add some reflection and contextualization.

For those of us in the professional world, it’s part of our ethical responsibility to learn how to communicate more broadly. And so with the infographics, with the polling, with the narratives, and eventually through the forum, the book and the exhibition, we are trying to get this project to as large an audience as we can. We want to talk to a multi-layered audience that includes the general public, but that also includes elected officials.

SK: The important thing is seeing the connections between these data sets, not necessarily seeing the individual pieces of data. There are connections between the size of the American home and the energy we use. There are connections between kids being driven to school instead of biking or walking and obesity. These elements inform each other. We want a larger audience to understand the community implications of individual choices.

SPP: Our agenda is a more sustainable world. And our contention is that we all need to start making better decisions — and that starts, not necessarily with more information, but with clear, actionable information that more people can understand.

This is an issue of democracy. We want to broaden the conversation and help the larger populace really understand the issues in front of them and realize that they can make meaningful contributions to the decisions about the future of their cities, their towns and their neighborhoods.

Cities | November 9, 2010 | Photo by Rachel Hillery, courtesy of Studio-X

At the outset of Cities, a conversation on the future of urbanism hosted by Columbia’s Studio-X and Lapham’s Quarterly at 92Y Tribeca, moderator Mark Wigley toasted to forging new friendships in a coming era of dynamic, if uncertain, city design. Considering the cumulative intellectual power behind the panel table, it was definitely a friendship worth celebrating — Lewis Lapham, National Correspondent for Harper’s and founder of Lapham’s Quarterly, NPR’s Robert Krulwich, GSAPP Professor of Historic Preservation Andrew Dolkart, and Jeffrey Inaba of C-Lab gathered to discuss what makes a city and how traditional tropes of urbanism will evolve in the contemporary metropolis.

Themes of science, myth and politics played out over the course of the evening, encompassing myriad approaches to the concept of the city. Though speculative and forward thinking, the panel turned to history, often personal histories, in answering questions levied by Wigley, BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh and audience members. Indeed, Wigley began the conversation with a glance to the past, asking if thinking about the city’s future today is akin to imagining the moon in the 1940s and ’50s — a project that necessarily combines speculative fiction with contemporary reality.

How does one build the future? Is it with lumber or the intellectual foundations of academics and critics?Lapham’s response set the tone for the ensuing dialogue. “The future is urban.” “The city is an act of imagination.” “The past is the lumber from which we build the future.” His poetic remarks are not completely novel, but they are essential and valuable points of departure for projective thinking. The appropriately architectural metaphor of course invites the question: how does one ‘build’ the future? Is it with lumber (or, more realistically, concrete and steel) or does it rise atop the intellectual foundations of academics and critics? One could say it is a synthesis of the two, but the panel ultimately suggested it is something more personal than that. Cities are experiential. And though they are defined by their critical mass, they are understood through their impact upon the individual. As Robert Krulwich pointed out, the city is consumed in personal ways and lived through private rhythms, and it is hard to see this reality changing.

Cities, Wigley proposed, will demand new types of research and new universities, a comment that seemed to consign today’s institutions to the same fate as the arguably outmoded medium of the print newspaper. Studio-X, with its research labs in in Beijing and Rio and Amman, may well be at the vanguard of new sites and institutional forms for the presentation of urban thought. But the conversation it curated was refreshingly old school, resisting the new media allure that has bewitched urbanism discourse lately. The atmosphere was convivial and boozy, and proceeded with such mild-mannered intellectual self-deprecation that I half expected Woody Allen to pop up. The event was, as Wigley announced, an homage to Lapham and a tribute to Lapham’s method: a sifting through of voices, distilling pertinent perspectives across a gamut of expertise. The panel assumed that the city, always relevant and unwieldy, cannot be pinned down nor assuredly predicted. No one is certain of the future of the city, hence the necessity of a conversation concerning it. Furthermore, the city, as such, is no one’s niche. Drawing upon a variety of sources enriches our exploration of what it means to be urban. Each panelist approached the topic from a different angle. Lapham is concerned with the city as it is represented; Dolkart, the architectural historian, looks to how its forms are documented; Krulwich sees it through the stories of individuals; and Inaba as a subject of research.

Corralling such varied commentators under one roof provided a moment to pause and reflect upon what the city has meant to us historically, how that is changing and how it will continue to change. The city has its own momentum. It does not need planners and theorists in order to adapt, but by considering recent history and commenting upon the contemporary city, the discussion was an intervention into developments already underway. Bringing together the gravitas of traditional media figures while keeping blog-based discourse in mind, the conversation artfully trod in both tangible media forms and the viral realm of online information.

Cities | November 9, 2010 | Photo by Rachel Hillery, courtesy of Studio-X

The breadth of the topic and the celebration of the event’s urbanity in and of itself, however, may have hindered probing analysis into issues currently plaguing many cities. Panelists shied away from questions about divided cities, turning from a discussion of design and war to more general metaphors of diversity in the urban milieu. When an audience member compared divided cities that foster mixing to ones that exist separately and in parallel, such as the Palestinian city he was from, Lapham and Dolkart both dismissed his question as “political.” Political it obviously was, but when has a city not been? The polis was formed as a political entity and given the political climate of the world today designers will clearly need to reconcile division to move the city forward economically. What will cities of the Middle East, centers of capital unfettered by architectural traditionalism, look like if they are conflict torn? We can’t just consider Amman as a paradigm, we have to look at Baghdad too.

Similarly, the discussion skirted an examination of what panelists dubbed the “failed” city. Krulwich compared growing cities like Rio and Beijing to contracting ones like Detroit and Cleveland. In neglecting a deeper study of a city’s “failure” he missed an opportunity to make a prognosis for the shrinking city. Such cities cannot be written off and forgotten. In light of the talk’s historic tack, it was surprising that guests did not dig into the past in efforts to bring fallen cities up to speed. China and the Middle East may be the locus of growth, but urbanization is not confined to their high rises and transit rails. Inaba, in explaining the C-Lab-run Metropolitan Research Institute, touched upon the need to find incentives, often non-infrastructure-based, to bring culture and amenities to the recession city. Underlying the evening was the idea that, given the knowledge and resources the history of the city offers us, today’s urbanists are charged with resuscitating and renovating its forms. Though this point may have been eclipsed by an affectionate narrative of the city and city life, with new friends made and the future at hand, it can hopefully be the topic of a conversation to come.

UPDATE: A video of the event is now available on Vimeo and more photos can be found on Flickr.

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Caitlin Blanchfield is a freelance writer and Urban Omnibus project associate residing in New York City. 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 Urban Omnibus, our very first Walk and Talk was with another urban sociologist. Richard Sennett took us on a stroll through the West Village – where he first moved in 1962 – and shared observations on everything from the difference between borders and boundaries to philosophies of craftsmanship. As it happens, Sennett also grew up in the projects, in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing complex that is currently undergoing demolition to make way for a “mixed-income neighborhood composed of a both high-rise and low-rise buildings.” And on his walk with us, Sennett mentioned that he is “a big believer in architectural determinism” and that the “details of urban design can make or break urban-scale propositions.” Dalton Conley has a different view. He believes that economics – specifically the economics of homeownership – determine opportunity. Planners and designers would do well to heed the advice of both scholars. -C.S.

Urban Omnibus: What do you do?

Dalton Conley: I’m a sociologist. You could say I’m an urban sociologist. Basically I study economic opportunity. Let me put it this way: my father is a horse player (and an artist) and he spends a lot of time handicapping the Racing Form, predicting which horse is going to win the race. So when I need to explain to my parents what I do, I say “Dad, I do what you do: I use statistics to try to figure out who’s going to win, except I’m doing it on humans instead of horses.” I predict socio-economic success based on the conditions of one’s childhood, birth, family background etc. And my work is definitely informed by my attempts to understand the experience of my neighbors growing up here vis a vis myself.

UO: Tell us about where we are right now.

Conley: We’re at the intersection of Delancey Street and Columbia Street [which becomes Avenue D north of Houston -Ed.]. Growing up here, the Williamsburg Bridge was an important structure: it really marked the edge of the neighborhood. I’ve always read about how the highway construction of 1950s urban renewal cut off certain neighborhoods from other places. In this case, the bridge was exactly that type of barrier. Below that bridge you still find remnants of the old Jewish Lower East Side. There’s a very real division between what was the Jewish Lower East Side and the Puerto Rican Lower East Side, which I would say extends from the Williamsburg Bridge up to the Con Edison building that you can see in the distance at 14^th Street. If you go east, of course you hit the river. And if you go west, it used to go all the way to Allen St – or 1^st Ave – but now, more and more, cultural elites and gentrifiers have pushed the neighborhood’s western edge further and further eastwards to the point where it’s in constant flux.

But I do understand that this is still a Million Dollar Block, meaning that the state spends a million dollars or more on incarcerating people just from this block. So, clearly the problems haven’t gone completely away. But it is quite different now. It’s very international, there’s been a lot more immigration from other countries. When I was here it was just a little bit after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 that opened up the gates, and so it really hadn’t yet changed the character of the population so much. 75% of the population in this census tract in 1970 was Puerto Rican and about 20% African American, and the rest was folks like me or Chinese people.

UO: Where did you grow up?

I would sell all public housing to its residents for a dollar… It would radically change the physical environment.Conley: I grew up in Masaryk Towers. When I was born we were living in that tower over there, #73 and then we moved to #81, the corner one back there. #81 borders on Hamilton Fish Park, which was a cement park filled with lots of broken glass, malt liquor bottles and the like. We would play our baseball there. Masaryk Towers is Mitchell-Lama. The Mitchell-Lama Housing Program is geared towards low-income families, but ones that were better off than the people across the street in NYCHA housing for extremely poor folks. Masaryk was sandwiched on the other side by more NYCHA housing. There are Mitchell-Lama projects all over the city, like Co-op City for example in the Bronx, which is pretty middle class now, I think. But by virtue of the fact that Masaryk Towers is sandwiched between NYCHA buildings, it shared much of the crime and other problems that were rampant in public housing in those days.

UO: Growing up, did the different housing complexes have distinct identities?

Conley: We definitely divided up the little league baseball teams based on which housing complex you came from. We were Los Piratas, and there was a baseball team for Baruch houses, for Lillian Wald Houses, etc. I think we won once, one year. We would all play on East River Park, which is of course being redeveloped right now. And despite what you see in the movies, we did not play stickball. We played baseball.

UO: I’m curious about your view of what role physical design plays in your analysis of inequalities of opportunity.

Conley: I’m really skeptical about the notion that physical design can be a tool for better or worse in aiding opportunity or affecting the lives of people who live in low income communities. We’ve seen the fads come and go. We’ve seen this kind of housing, the sort of high-rise Le Corbusier style, creating open plazas by stacking people in high-density vertical towers, now be blamed for all social ills. I think that’s ridiculous.

I think the issue is not design but economics and specifically ownership structure. When people don’t have a stake in the local community – an economic stake that is – based on their concern for their property values, then social ills follow. Banks know this. Banks – at least before the bubble –  would not lend to buildings where less than 50% of units were owner-occupied. Because they know that owners take care of and want to preserve the property values of the building.

I have a fantasy plan called “A Dollar and a Dream,” which used to be the New York State Lotto’s slogan. Basically I would sell all the public housing to the residents for a dollar and create this equity for the families, and you would see, all of a sudden, owners associations springing up. I think it would radically change the physical environment: change driven by economics affecting the physical environment rather than thinking of the physical environment as the driver.

UO: Since the subprime mortgage crisis, we’re hearing lots of voices arguing that we should shift our national priorities away from home ownership.

We’re focusing our racial inequality amelioration efforts on education and affirmative action when we should be working to build up asset ownership.Conley: Certainly, trumpeting home ownership these days is not very popular. But I think actually now is exactly the time to have low income home ownership strategies because the prices are low! It’s all about how you do it. If you’re doing it through sub-prime and exotic mortgages that have balloon payments and everything, of course you’re going to get high defaults and it’s going to create this crash. But if people don’t expect to be doubling their money every five years but maybe double their money every 40 years – which was the norm in the middle of the 20^th century with more responsible home ownership – then I think that’s a definitely viable strategy and a very effective one. Homes are both a basic consumption good that we need, shelter, but they also have an investment purpose, and as much as it doesn’t appear so now, ultimately given population pressures, real property and real estate is always going to have a long-term trend upward.

UO: Hearing this, I can’t help but be reminded of Margaret Thatcher privatizing affordable housing in the UK in the ’80s…

Conley: The difference is I’m trying to come at this from a position on the left actually, to argue that this is an empowerment strategy. At least for the post-civil rights generation – my generation – continued racial equality rests in the property dimension, the housing market and the securities dimension, rather than education or labor market primarily. It’s the property inequality that drives the other inequalities. We’re focusing most of our racial inequality amelioration efforts, through education and affirmative action in labor law, on the wrong side of the equation so to speak, when we really should be working to build up asset ownership among low-wealth minority communities.

UO: Getting back to your skepticism of spatial or environmental determinism for a second, what about the use of space? Is that something that urban sociologists are looking at these days? The layout here is so different from the rest of the Manhattan street grid, and I’m curious about how that enables or prohibits different kinds of uses on the part of, say, young people for example.

Conley: I’m not trying to say that space doesn’t matter or that architecture doesn’t matter – my mother moved to where we moved because she thought it was pretty and because of the Le Corbusier style layout that meant there were parks for us kids to play in, jungle gyms and open space and benches and so forth.

And also, the distribution of people geographically totally matters. Though I think it matters largely because of the tension between where we live and where we go to school. Given how segregated we are economically and racially, you basically end up with a Catch 22 if you’re growing up in a low income community. You either can go to your local school and have this integration between your school life and your home life. Or you can do what I did and commute across town – I did it illegally, but these days there are plenty of legal options through charter schools and so forth – wasting hours of the day getting to and from school.

Some people say we should pour money into the schools in low-income communities, but equalizing funding isn’t going to do it, because the dirty little secret is that the single most powerful of the effects of school is your peer group. And unless you mix folks up, kids tend to sort themselves back into class-based peer groups. So we constantly face this tension around how we socialize our kids, given the fact that we are spatially organized and spatially segregated.

UO: Where are we now?

Conley: We crossed Houston St. and we’re outside the Lillian Wald Houses where the friend to whom I dedicated Honky grew up. When we were 12 or 13, he was shot in the neck on 7^th Street and Avenue C by a stray bullet as he was standing, chatting with his friend, outside his friend’s apartment. He became paralyzed from the neck down and has since worked very hard to regain use of his arms. Just last summer he and I came back here, and he hadn’t been here – let’s see, he was shot in 1981, Jan 1^st, 1981 – so he hadn’t been here for 28 years or so. We took a tour, and he noticed how much the Lillian Wald Houses had changed as well. Of course all the playground structures are new and there’s been a lot of money put in here, but also there are even community gardens here that provide vegetables for the folks who work at them and such. He was kind of shocked at how much nicer even the NYCHA housing was than it was. A couple of generations before that, whether you’re coming from the South or Puerto Rico, or even just across the street, you were living in a walk-up tenement with no hot water half the time and no heat during the winter. These housing complexes were certainly a step up. But as to why it changed at some point and this type of public housing become housing of last resort – I really don’t know. I would argue that probably the ownership structure mattered a great deal, but one can never know, because unfortunately there haven’t been enough actual conscious experiments by social scientists or urban planners to test hypotheses to some of these questions.

UO: Which begs the question, what, in your opinion, can architects and planners learn from social scientists?

Conley: I think what social science can offer urban planning and design and so forth would be their methodology: experimental methods. The first step is to do small-scale, explicit experiments of different housing forms, and different community structures, and then following those up with ethnographies and with statistical analysis and so forth. I know that’s being done in urban planning to a certain extent. But not enough.

Watch a video excerpt of this conversation below:

Conley holds a B.A. from the University of California – Berkeley and an M.P.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, as well as an M.S. in Biology from NYU. He is currently pursing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU, studying transgenerational phenotypic plasticity and socially regulated genes.

Interview and photos: Cassim Shepard

Diagrams: Sarah Avvedimento with Andrew Balmer

At Urban Omnibus, over the next several months, we plan to offer several such walks with architects, planners, designers, scholars, artists and citizens. If there’s a particular individual you’d like to take a walk with, drop us a line and maybe we can call him or her up, take a walk, and share the conversation, observations and imagery.