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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Map of ideas from By the City / For the City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview conducted by Cassim Shepard.

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

Leagues and Legions (LGNLGN), a think tank that aims to provoke discourse at the intersection of architecture and publishing, has just launched City Sessions, an online dialogue about the practice of tactical urbanism and socially active design. Organized in conjunction with Urban Design Week, an upcoming public festival presented by the Institute for Urban Design (more on that in future posts), City Sessions asks critics, practitioners, academics, community organizers and the general public to weigh in on questions that address issues of tactical urbanism from four angles: the public, professional practice, evaluation and failure. Answers will be collected online through September 18, when a live debate about the responses will be held at Parsons The New School for Design.

Head over to to city-sessions.tumblr.com to contribute your answers or follow the discussion. You can also join the backchannel discussion on Twitter by following @IfUD and hashtags #lgnlgn and #citysessions.

More from the City Sessions press release:

Tactical urbanism uses the city as a site of experimentation, deploying pop-up parks, vacant retail reuse, or unsanctioned street furniture as a way to reprogram the urban realm. The practice traditionally takes an activist position in relationship to environmental, political, cultural and economic factors. However, as the practice is increasingly being absorbed into mainstream thinking on cities, it is critical that we look closely at both the underlying assumptions and resulting effects.

Questions:
PUBLIC
In a city, where myriad interests are often in competition at any given spot, “public engagement” is a slippery term that raises the important and oft-ignored question: Which public? Before the evaluation of urban tactics can begin, one must define the group or groups of people they are working to engage. As architects and designers develop tactics to address specific sites and conditions, how are they deciding which groups to orient their projects toward? Beyond that, how can various factors — demographics, geography, politics, et al. — change the way that different publics view and engage with different tactics?

EVALUATION
In recent years tactical urbanism has moved from the fringe of architectural and urban design practice to the center. However, because these works often skirt the edges of activist art and nonprofit community organizing it is difficult to determine a project’s success in relationship to design, outreach, and influence over policy. As tactical practices shift to the mainstream, how do we evaluate and critique this diverse range of architectural actions and urban interventions? What belongs on a post-occupancy punchlist for best tactical practices?

TACTICS AND THE DESIGN PROFESSIONS
As global political and social changes pressure how designers work, many practices are using their design skills to tactically confront environmental, political, and economic issues at all scales. Some of these tactical practices break with traditional disciplinary boundaries and expand the role of the designer. How is practice changing to tactically address environmental, social, and political issues in the built environment? What further changes are necessary to tackle these large problems with ever-decreasing funding? What steps should the profession take to address these contemporary pressures?

FAILURE
Where does the notion of failure come from and why is it rearing its head again now? While failure might work in software and startups, what happens when we apply that ethic to interventions at the scale of buildings and cities? How can the fail-early-fail-often tactic be used for urban change — such as hackathons, or pilot programs like San Francisco’s parklets? Is failure related to the temporary or the long term?

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.

Click images for captions.

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

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

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

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

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A CONVERSATION WITH VICTORIA MARSHALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Elinor Mossop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Colin McFadyen

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

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

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

Balloon Mapping Project | grassrootsmapping.org

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

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

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

INTELLIGENT INFRASTRUCTURE
Also next week, an impressive collection of minds from technology, government, architecture and academia will convene for a conference hosted by the Economist entitled “Intelligent Infrastructure: the Architecture of Progress.” We’re not only excited about this event because the title manages to cluster some of UO’s favorite words, but also because we will be on hand to report on the proceedings. Of particular interest to Omnibus readers will be talks by Frank Gehry, Saskia Sassen, Carlo Ratti, Thom Mayne, Petra Todorovich, Jaime Lerner, Liz Diller and Cas Holloway. Check out a full list here. Stay tuned!
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EMERGING PLAN FOR NATIONAL RAILWAY
The Infrastructurist offers some historical perspective on the $53 billion high speed rail plan announced yesterday by Joe Biden. The piece compares the administration’s proposal to FDR’s study for a national expressway system that eventually became the interstate highway system. The new plan would be implemented over the next six years and aims to cross the country with a network of connecting rail corridors operating at different speeds: core express, regional and emerging (we question a passenger’s eagerness to hop aboard the “emerging” train from New York to Boston). Of course, such a large investment has been met with scrutiny in Congress, so we will keep our eye on how the debate between budget concerns and infrastructure priorities plays out.
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TRIUMPH OF CITIES
“Cities thrive because they host quality conversations, not because they have new buildings and convention centers,” writes David Brooks in a column praising Edward Glaeser’s new book The Triumph of Cities. Brooks cites Chicago as an example of a vital city fueled by updated housing stock, incentives to small business, strong leadership and — crucially — face-to-face political communication. In an age of global information flows, Glaeser argues for the increased need for dense city centers where creative citizens can clash and collaborate in person, generating ideas and productivity. But the social implications of density and diversity go beyond its financial yield. As an insightful UO commenter notes, many of the complex dynamics Suketu Mehta discusses in this week’s feature reflect the kinds of complex processes Glaeser analyzes.
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SENSORED CITY
Complain excessively to no one in particular and apparently the powers that be will do something about it. Parking, seemingly everyone’s go-to rant, is now being sensored on Roosevelt Island. The Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation is creating a smart phone application that alerts drivers to parking spaces near their destination. As an article in Capital magazine points out, cities are already laced with sensors, detecting everything from noise pollution to temperature to red light violations. Sure, it sounds a little Orwellian, but municipal governments are looking for new ways to translate crowdsourced urban data into programs that will increase the efficiency and comfort of navigating the city. First step, finding a parking spot.
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A BROWNFIELD FAILURE
New York’s Brownfield Clean Up program is largely ignoring the lower income and minority neighborhoods it was intended to aid, according to the watchdog group Environmental Advocates of New York (EANY). Instead of allocating tax credit to developers for resuscitating sites in areas with incomes below the poverty line and in neighborhoods with large African American and Latino populations, funds are largely going more economically stable communities, as detailed in EANY’s analysis.
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HESTER STREET OBSERVED
Hester Street Collaborative (HSC) and parent firm Leroy Street Studio get some much deserved attention in a Change Observer piece that explores their partnership as a paradigm of architecture for public good. Hester Street has had its hands in many public space projects around New York, like the Allen street “mall-terations” and People Make Parks. HSC interfaces between community groups and public agencies to realize design/build initiatives in neighborhoods traditionally underserved by architects, making them a perennial Omnibus favorite.
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FIVE BOROUGH FARM UPDATE
If last month’s Omnibus interview with Nevin Cohen of the Five Borough Farm project piqued your interest, read the Design Trust for Public Space’s project update. A post on their blog recaps the conversations from a December workshop on the current state of urban farming and gardening and future plans for urban agriculture. The workshop touched on everything from the goals of the farmers to how they evaluate their success, and generated one-on-one discussions to expand the resources of the Five Borough Farm.
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CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS
Friends of the Pleistocene (authors of “Geologic City”) are looking for brief writings and visual essays “plumbing the geologic depth of ‘now’” for their upcoming book, Making a Geologic Turn. As explained on their blog, this “geologic turn” is evident in the artists, philosophers, and cultural commentators who prove that geology is “not only an area of scientific study – it’s also a condition of daily life.” Intrigued? Visit Friends of the Pleistocene for more information.

Connections: The Gowanus Lowline is design ideas competition for Brooklyn’s Superfunded Gowanus Canal. Sponsored by the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation and juried by a commanding panel of architects and urbanists, Connections invites “speculation on the value of urban development of post-industrial lands, and the possibility of dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engages with the Canal and the surrounding watershed.”
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CHINESE NEW YEAR PICTURES
If you missed last weekend’s Chinese New Year festivities, or just want to relive the joy of bringing in the Year of the Rabbit, check out Flavorwire’s New York City’s Chinese New Year Parade in Photos.

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

THE ENERGY REPORT
Continuing on their Roadmap 2050, AMO teamed up with WWF and Ecofys to envision a world completely run by renewable energy in the next forty years. Today, the organizations collaboratively launched The Energy Report – a comprehensive plan to harness and proliferate renewable energy that aims to convince governments and business of the economic benefits of  sustainability. The report is replete with infographics and images communicating the potential for energy production and its cultural implications. “Through the realization that future energy provision really is a universal issue which must be addressed at a global scale, we have developed a new perspective on the world,” AMO’s Reinier de Graaf claims. But, lest you think a well-designed pamphlet can fix the world, John Thackara unpacks The Energy Report in a Design Observer essay questioning the feasibility of implementing the report’s recommendations. Thackara decries the report as a “tragedy for WWF,” and through a careful meditation on the real repercussions of renewable initiatives – like spreading millions of wind turbines off our shores and through our forests – demonstrates that sustainability is rife with complexities best addressed by interrogating the “energy-intensive way of life that a spoiled 20 percent of us across the industrial world take for granted.”
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CHOKE POINTS AND KILL SWITCHES
Following the Egyptian government’s severing of the country’s internet connection, journalist and Omnibus contributing editor Andrew Blum examines the vulnerability of our online access in an Atlantic editorial covering Verizon’s purchase of computing company Terremark. Blum’s piece is an important reminder of the tangibility and physicality of information exchange. The internet is indeed a network of networks and, in America, one with “choke points” and “kill switches” located in Terremark’s highly-guarded Miami building. And when the locus of the most open medium of communication is bought and sold, it’s worth taking note.
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THROWDOWN REVISITED
The Boston Globe recaps the debate between New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism in a well-balanced article outlining the history of two movements over the last 30 years. Cambridge and the “intensely confident” Charles Waldheim may be the epicenter of Landscape Urbanism, but the school of thought has recently gained international traction — most significantly in the halls of urban planning programs, as writer Leon Nayfakh points out — and is vying to replace New Urbanism as the popular planning paradigm. With the ever-increasing relevance of environmental concerns in design, Nayfakh’s piece is a welcome revisitation of the laudable intentions behind the two schools of urbanism, and sheds light on their drawbacks (the hubris of the master plan and perpetuation of suburban sprawl among them). For more on the contentious debate between the two camps, read Genevieve Sherman’s analysis of the Harvard Design School’s 50th anniversary conference and the conversation it generated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then next Wednesday, February 9th, the Omnibus’ own editor Cassim Shepard will respond to a show of visual artists at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery. The panel discussion is titled “Taking, Leaving, Moving: mobility, evocative objects and a sense of home” and begins at 7pm.
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GONG XI FA CÁI
Yesterday we kicked off the Year of the Rabbit. On Sunday, Chinese New Year parades and cultural festivals will take place in both Manhattan’s and Flushing’s Chinatowns. Gong Xi Fa Cái!

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

The article takes issue with the kind of criticism that is found on popular architecture blogs. We know this brand of lament well: the web is killing everything that was ever good, and, in this case, Kelly is wringing his hands that “speculative” bloggers who focus more on cultural mashups than straightforward dissections of architectural projects — in the style of, say, Paul Goldberger — have failed to produce what he blandly calls “informed, intelligent criticism.” And because the blogosphere is the new establishment, this means that we can expect that this kind of writing and the figures behind it are here to stay.

Although Kelly takes aim at a few British bloggers (Bad British Architecture, Strange Harvest, etc.), I was most interested in his attack on BLDGBLOG, which he calls “probably the most influential architecture blog in the world.” Its author is Geoff Manaugh, whom Kelly calls an “institution.” Manaugh’s response to Kelly makes two key points: first, Manaugh has never attempted to replace traditional architecture criticism, nor does he hope to cultivate an audience that is looking for that kind of stuff; and second, he would welcome an alternative to his own style of blogging that might resemble the smart, level-headed approaches of the LA Times‘ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne or The Center for Land Use Interpretation‘s founder Matthew Coolidge. He then ends by saying:

Imagine a world, then, where critics like Peter Kelly actually step up and demonstrate how to do the things they so enjoy pointing out as lacking in others. If they could succeed at this — and find an audience, and push an agenda, and gather influence, and raise the stakes of what it means to be an architecture blogger — then we would all, as writers and readers and builders, be stronger because of it.

To my mind, the reason why there isn’t more of Peter Kelly’s kind of writing is that there aren’t enough places where one can make a living writing about architecture. There are probably fewer than a dozen people who make a living in the United States writing about architecture (and don’t get the majority of their incomes through editing, teaching or consulting). The problem, in other words, isn’t that Geoff Manaugh is a popular blogger, but that the vision of Peter Kelly’s ideal critic isn’t economically feasible these days. Until a new business model, or a better way of funding criticism through a smaller niche of avid readers, is figured out we can expect to see the number of pages (even webpages) dedicated to serious criticism dwindle: even the monthly critiques by Robert Campbell and Michael Sorkin had to be cut from Architectural Record‘s coverage in 2010.)

This economic impossibility needs to be recognized before proposing a utopian world where architecture critics have all the necessary resources to provide the informed, intelligent criticism expected of them. Otherwise it’s like saying our urban education system should rival that of private schools without recognizing that there aren’t unlimited funds to support that revolution.

A sense of responsibility for guiding public discussion about architecture is what I miss most.

So what is the appropriate response to this situation that we all find a bit disappointing? Is it to voice frustration with the new guard that is innovating? No. Instead, we should be asking: Why does the Old Establishment, which is adequately supported, suck so much? Why is Nicolai Ouroussoff still the lead critic for the Times when his writing, at its best, is greeted with a shrug? And while we all love Paul Goldberger, why hasn’t The New Yorker given someone else a chance to write the occasional piece of criticism for the magazine? If we’re going to be using new means to create a dialogue about architecture criticism, it might be interesting to do it in a way that is purposefully attempting to overthrow the PMS (pale, male, stale) guard.

Kelly presumes that BLDGBLOG is incredibly influential, and it is, in so far as it has widened the context and lens through which we see architecture. But it doesn’t shape the architecture profession (that’s not what it sets out to do) and it doesn’t serve as much of a reference about what’s happened in architecture over the past few years. Like most blogs, it’s really more of a catalog of Manaugh’s personal interests.

If the old architecture criticism establishment continues to be boring and a new establishment continues to mine the esoteric margins of architectural thought rather than the work of architects, what is at risk is a clear sense of who is debating the direction of architecture as practice or discipline. Kelly blames Manaugh et al. for lacking the right style or substance; Manaugh seems to shirk responsibility for the future of online dialogue about architecture.

Perhaps magazines like Architectural Record feel too much of a responsibility for charting what’s happening in highbrow, mainstream architecture and don’t allow for enough personal, tangential conversation. But that sense of authority and responsibility for guiding public understanding and discussion about architecture is what I miss most about the old establishment. I miss that much more than the writing style in which old media expressed itself or even the architecture that old media referenced. When Herbert Muschamp was the critic for the Times, he felt a responsibility to curate a series of alternatives to the SOM-designed replacement for the World Trade Center — is there anyone writing right now who would take on that role of architectural shaman?

What should someone with the privilege of being listened to do then? Manaugh’s call for a more vibrant criticism scene, which enriches the thinking of writers and architects, is just one example of how he can wield his power to greater effect. We all seem to agree that we need more online voices that are actively challenging architecture and architecture criticism as they are practiced. To use a Manaugh-style analogy: he’s shown us the playing field and now he’s kicking around a soccer ball waiting for a game of pick-up. Anyone else inspired to answer this call to action? At the very least, I think this debate has revived the On Criticism series on this website, so game on!

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This is the seventh in an ongoing series of posts that ponders the state of architecture criticism. To read all posts on this topic, please click here.

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

Diana Lind is a 2011 fellow at Van Alen Institute where she helped develop the ideas competition Life at the Speed of Rail. She is also the author of Brooklyn Modern: Architecture, Interiors & Design. Connect on Twitter @dianalindindex.