Wait, the site in the image above couldn’t be in Manhattan, could it? It is, in fact. It’s one of the many overlooked spots of our dense urban island in which a recalcitrant nature has overcome vestiges of a forgotten built environment. For his Nowhere in Manhattan project, photographer Michael Jensen has found and framed such places and aspires to display the images on a billboard near you. Anyone out there got the hookup at Clear Channel?

As always, kind of hard to tame the beast. Another beast many New Yorkers would love to tame is the mass transit system. Last week, Mayor Bloomberg pledged reform and improvements, just as reports this week find many transit agencies slow to spend stimulus funding.

If it were up to you, what small or large changes – in the routes, timing, infrastructure, wayfinding, information display, aesthetic experience – would you make to the way you get to work and around the city? This is one of the questions we’ve been kicking around with our cityscapes buddies at WNYC Culture, so drop us a line or leave us a comment below with your thoughts and stay tuned for more discussion on this theme next month.

For starters, we can think of one simple change that would make deciding whether to wait for the bus or not a whole lot easier. Tell us the ETA of the next bus! And, guess what: miracle of miracles on 34th street.

Remember way back in 2007 and then again in 2008, when our friends at the Forum for Urban Design partnered with everyone’s favorite Storefront and others to prove that bike-sharing was not only fit for Parisians? Yet another way that use-on-demand systems can make our cities more efficient, convenient and fun. New York Bike Share may not yet have become a permanent reality for New Yorkers, but other American cities have taken the plunge, notably… Denver. Denver? Yes, Denver. Check out the video below from GOOD’s excellent green tech series:

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

Image courtesy of GoLoco

Tell us a little about the founding of Zipcar.
For some innovations, there really is a perfect moment of confluence. It was like that with Zipcar. Zipcar was launched in June of 2000. My co-founder is German, and car sharing as we know it originated in Germany. One day she was sitting at a café in Berlin, and she saw a shared car across the street.  She came back to Cambridge and she asked what I thought of this idea. I had just come from my 10th business school anniversary, and this was the height of dot-com mania. Starting a company seemed like an obvious idea.

At the time, wireless was being talked about endlessly. It was the new cool thing. But the only wireless application people had thought up was cell phones.  Zipcar was a very early application of wireless that wasn’t cell phones. I thought, “Wow, this is what the Internet was made for: sharing a scarce resource among many people. This is what wireless was made for: we can make transactions very easy for end users and brokering those transactions will cost us next to nothing.”

Besides, this is what I wanted personally. I have three kids and one car that my husband takes to an office where it sits, unused, for eight hours a day, so I never have access to a car. Plus, I live in a city and there’s no way in hell I want to have a second car that I have to maintain and own and park. The lightbulb went off: the costs for car ownership definitely outweigh the benefits for me in the city, and wireless and the Internet can make this easy.

The environmental piece of it was obvious, and if I hadn’t perceived a sustainable business model, I wouldn’t have started it. I don’t think I would have started a business that had no social benefits because I wasn’t interested in spending 120 hours/week for years doing something that was just to make money.

This is what the internet was made for: sharing a scarce resource among many people. And here we are nine years later. What’s really striking is how things have changed that people don’t even consider. When we started, 25% of adults had cell phones, and only 50% of people had access to the Internet, and that was at work. So we were operating in an environment, from a technology perspective, where I felt I knew where the trends were going, we just had to make significant strategic decisions based on those trends.  Looking back, one of the things that Zipcar taught me was that sharing an asset is incredibly fabulous for everyone involved. When you share a car, it’s great for companies, great for individuals, great for cities.

When I learned about mesh networking, I thought, “Wow! This is exactly the same kind of thing on a much bigger scale.” I love the beauty of the economics of it: individuals will happily pay for individual devices to perform a specific service, but in so doing build a communications infrastructure. I was totally fascinated with this concept. It’s so beautiful from an economic standpoint: just how huge the unanticipated benefits are when sharing a device.

I believe in a heartfelt way that energy efficiency has to do with behavior, and behavior is driven by price and ease of use. By simplicity. For cars, the only way we will change our driving habits is when we’re paying the real cost of driving: including the cost of carbon, the cost of congestion, the cost of building and maintaining the roads. And the easiest way to be able to pay the real cost of transportation would be if we had ubiquitous data grids. It’s the same thing that we talk about with the smart grid: dynamically priced power consumption, with the real price of what it’s costing.

Image courtesy of Zipcar

People love the idea of smart buildings, with sensors everywhere. But the sensors have to go back to someplace. They have to go back to someone who’s paying attention to what those sensors say. What we need is a ubiquitous database to help us A) price energy correctly, and B) not to have to think too hard about it. For example, no matter how many times I tell my son to turn the lights off before going to bed, he forgets to do it. Wouldn’t it be great to have all those sensor networks that we know about to turn it off for him! When it’s 2am and no one has moved in the house for the last hour, perhaps it’s time for sensors to turn all the lights off.

If you’re asking me to make the analysis of what times of day and night I use my hot water heater, and to turn it down accordingly, it will never happen. If you ask the gas company to do an analysis of people’s water heaters and then to ask me, “Robin, do you want us to turn it down and save yourself $40 over the year?” I’ll say, “Of course.” With a ubiquitous data grid, we could rely on technology to make it easy for us to use resources more efficiently. We could price things more accurately. Technology will play a big role in how we handle our energy consumption.

What do you see as the role of government in handling our energy consumption?
Some in Washington are willing to do what’s difficult, but many in the House and in the Senate are not. The political reality drives me crazy: people have been pushing off the need to raise gas taxes for 18 years now and there’s only so long you can go without maintaining your roads or building your bridges or financing your transit systems. We’ve kicked the can down the road and we can only do that for so long.

Infrastructure is destiny yet infrastructure, typically, is not adaptable… We need to make flexible infrastructure. In your city, in New York, the head of the MTA Lee Sander, just resigned under that particular issue. He was saying that we need to solve this now, and the governor was saying, “You know what? Let’s come up with some creative financing solutions that don’t involve us paying this year, or the next year, or the year after.”

Fundamentally, I think all scales of government need to work on public information. Politicians say they follow what the people want, and the people want cars and roads, and they don’t want to finance public transit, and they don’t want to think about CO2 emissions, and they don’t want to pay for congestion.

When I talk to people, they’re often quick to say, “I’m paying my gas tax, why aren’t you maintaining the road” or “I’m paying the toll, I’ve done my duty”, and they don’t realize that they’re paying the price that built it 20 years ago, but what about maintaining and operating it? The public doesn’t make that connection, and I think the government needs to do a lot more educating.

So, as you have moved from Zipcar to GoLoco, from car sharing to ride sharing, do you see ride sharing as more of a national set of strategies?
Yes, car sharing only works in dense metropolitan areas or in cases where people don’t need a car to get to work. If you need a car to get to work, you’re going to have to own your own car. The cost of car sharing is too high for a daily commute. But, then again, according to the National Households Consumer Survey, across the nation it costs $24 per day on average that people are spending in America on their car, day in and day out. If I were to tell you that it was going to cost $125 a week to go to work, you would say, no way, I’m not going to do it. But we are doing it – we just don’t realize we’re doing it.

That’s why I did GoLoco – I said, what about all those other people who are feeling similar transportation and mobility pains but they need a car to get to work? Ride sharing is for those people.

Screenshot: www.goloco.org

Can you give us ride sharing 101? How can GoLoco change how we get around?
The big idea for ride sharing and for GoLoco is to think of your car, your expenses, your friends, and your trips as part of your own personal public transportation system. Your friends and their cars and their trips are ways that you can get around. It builds on the idea of long tail media and long tail economics. Ride sharing is the long tail of public transportation. There are rides that serve little niches of demand way out there, in places where you’ll never see a bus service, or a public transportation service of any kind, but you would see ride sharing, because of the individuals who do go way out there. Basically, if you look at the long tail, ride sharing can meet the needs of small groups of individuals who need to get from a specific origin to a specific destination at a particular time.

I think when we look back at ourselves sitting alone in our 120 square feet of car, driving down these highways with incredible storage costs and incredible operating costs, I think we will look back at how we travel today and be just astounded: astounded at the cost, astounded at the waste. It’s such a wacky idea that we’d want to be alone in our cars spending huge sums of money and all that parking space, when it was less fun and more expensive and kind of crazy.

This is why I did GoLoco. We know that we can’t build our way out of congestion, so if things are increasingly, year after year, getting more congested, there’s only one solution for that: addressing the cost of driving over peak periods.

At $2 per gallon, people spend 18% of their income on their car, and that’s without paying for congestion pricing or tax increases or any other changes to transportation financing coming down the road. But it’s not in the control of any government to effect what the ultimate price of gas is going to be when we have increasing demand from India and China, and arguably peak oil. We have an increasing world population that will continue to drive cars with gasoline on our roads. Ride sharing is going to be significant while we transform our infrastructure to be less car-dependent. While we have such a high cost of car travel in such a car-dependent country, I don’t see another solution. 86% of trips made are alone in a car. Think about standing in a mall, looking at a parking lot. You know that a large number of people there are going exactly where you’re going in the next five minutes.

Photo: Tom Harrison

There are two ways to think about taxis. Taxis are great if we look at the percent of time that they’re in motion with someone going someplace. I bet it’s pretty high and they aren’t taking up parking spaces or any of that storage space, which is an excellent thing. But, if we think of taxis that are driving around in circles, that’s not so good.

And now there’s talk in New York of taxi sharing possibilities. I think the only time I ever shared a taxi was during the transit strike.
Exactly. People discuss whether ride sharing is something we can do or not do, culturally. But in a circumstance like a transit strike, or a taxi strike, within hours people were willing to share cabs. You could hop in a cab and instead of being one passenger in one car, suddenly we’re willing to have many people in a car.

The question of why we don’t share taxis is very similar to why we don’t share cars. One problem is that it seems culturally weird. When I get out at JFK, why can’t I ask the person standing next to me, “Where are you going, do you want to share a cab?” For some reason, that’s socially unacceptable.  And then when you’re not at an airport, the problem becomes where to stand to even hail a shared cab to begin with.

On the street, one of the issues is a lack of visibility. When I think about taxi sharing, it’s the same thing. If you could tell me on the exterior of the taxi, if there was a sign that said “going to LaGuardia” or “going to 42nd Street,” if that were displayed on the outside, then it would be more easy for me to realize “Oh, I can share cabs and I can stick my hand out and catch this particular cab.” But right now it’s all kind of hidden, it’s not an obvious option.

Photo by Flickr user Ykmm85

The Taxi and Limousine Commission just recently adopted the recommendation to develop group ride locations and ride share fares.
That’s great, and Manhattan has a good attribute that not very many cities have: it’s very vertical. Ride sharing relies on getting small groups of people together – you have to create critical mass. In Manhattan, if you have two people standing at on a corner there’s a good chance you’re both going uptown or downtown, so it’s possible to share a cab. But in a city where you have a lot more directions than uptown and downtown you’re going to have to have a lot more than two people standing at that corner to make it worthwhile.

Photo by Flickr user dmboyer

I’ve heard you say, “Infrastructure is destiny?” Can you elaborate?
Infrastructure is destiny. Think about how we built out the national highway interstate network in the ’50s. We built highways, we ripped out all the trolleys, and we didn’t build any trains. We created our destiny as a car dependent nation because that’s the infrastructure we built up. When we think about sprawl, we must remember that we built our houses on one-acre lots and now our choices for interaction are defined by that.

I think a lot about it in terms of the internet as well. Countries that have a robust and low-cost internet infrastructure are the ones that have access to information and the ability to innovate. Our infrastructure allows us to do things in an easy way or to do things in a difficult way. And we all like to do things easily. When our infrastructure makes things easy and convenient, we do more of those things. When things are made difficult, we do less of them. We have set up our infrastructure to make getting in your car, going door to door really easy, as the cheapest, fastest way.  Getting there by bike or by foot is frequently terrifying and dangerous, so which way do we go?  So, yes, infrastructure is our destiny.

Are there other innovations right now that are particularly exciting to you?
At this very minute I’m hard at work putting together a project to build an open platform for cars that would make getting technology in your car more like downloading things onto your iPod. What I’m hoping to do is to put a technology platform on there that enables an infinite number of applications to be downloaded to a vehicle, enabling us to innovate on modes of access, ways of using the vehicle, ownership, use of time, how we understand our environment around us in terms of congestion and pricing and information.

Technology has a potential of making data exchange between everything simple and easy, but it’s siloed. Transportation technology today is closed and proprietary, so only GM gets to decide what goes onto an OnStar when there are a thousand things that could be interesting to do with a more open platform. But GM is making the choices and look at the choices they’ve made!

Are there other sectors, beyond transit, that you think are ripe for shared, use-on-demand systems?
Through the car platform I’ve been doing some lobbying in Washington to raise awareness about technology investments in all sectors – the smart grid, education, health care, transportation, etc. Instead of producing closed proprietary devices and closed proprietary networks, I’d like our political leaders to realize that it benefits everybody and lowers costs if devices and networks are multipurpose.

I’m very interested in looking at excess capacity everywhere.

In New York City, you have an example of a failed sharing.  After 9/11 an emergency, wireless communication network was built. I think they spent 200 million dollars on that network just across Manhattan, and the network is not being used to capacity.  Emergency responders will tell you that they don’t want to use the excess capacity in case they need it down the line. But what people fail to realize is that networks can give priority and can guarantee delivery to the party who gets that first priority. We could say that that 200 million dollar network built in New York City goes to emergency services first, every time, no question. But when there’s not an emergency there’s extra capacity left over and we pay for it as taxpayers. I’m very interested in looking at excess capacity everywhere.

The next phase is to look beyond climate change to a more general understanding of sustainability. With 6.7 billion people on the planet growing to 9 billion, we’ve already taken our planet to the limit. We’re going to be taking it past the limit, and so every single resource that we use we should scale up to its maximum capacity. And I would put dollars in that list of scarce resources.

Building stock – especially office space that’s not used at night – is an important resource that has a lot of excess capacity.
I was in Holland a couple of years ago and I was looking at the old, merchant row houses. The merchants who lived there initially had their shops on the ground floor with their families living above.  With maybe three or four floors, each family could also have renters or storage space or a larger family. Those houses were so versatile.  Some of the industrial warehouses we built in this country are like that, highly versatile. But then you compare them to the giant office high-rises that are made for offices with floor plans so gigantic that once you stop doing AT&T call centers there, there isn’t another blessed thing that you’d want to do in that space.  We are building our infrastructure in a way that has almost no flexibility.  It’s this particular thing that you’re doing there or that’s it.

So, again, what do you do about $5/gallon gas?  Do we want to have four lanes of traffic for cars when maybe, sometime in the future, we may want to run a transit line down the middle, or do a dedicated bus lane, or have bicycles? My guess would be in 100 years it’s not going to be four lanes of single occupancy vehicles. I think the most successful solution is to produce things that can be adaptable, highly adaptable. Infrastructure is destiny yet infrastructure, typically, is not adaptable. That’s why it often plays out in bad ways. We need to make flexible infrastructure. Maybe that’s the new catch word.

Photo: Tor-Erik Bakke

Interview conducted by Jebediah Reed and Cassim Shepard. Edited and condensed.
Homepage illustration by Shumi Bose.

Work and the Open Source City. Illustration: Shumi Bose

One chilly Wednesday afternoon in late May, I joined a small group of technologists, researchers, architects and urban planners on a field trip through Lower Manhattan and three distinct neighborhoods in Brooklyn to get a glimpse of the future of work. The trip was organized by Todd Sundsted, an entrepreneur and co-author (with Drew Jones and Tony Bacigalupo) of the book I’m Outta Here! The group met around mid-day at New Work City, one of Manhattan’s first “coworking” communities. The space, located on the 5^th Fl. of the building adjacent to the famous music venue Sounds of Brazil (SOBs) on the corner of Houston and Varick, officially opened to members in November 2008.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge work among entrepreneurs, programmers, writers and even, as we learned during our visits, sustainable furniture designers. The majority of discussions of the social implications of the Internet on the evolution of work and cities revolve around concepts such as the virtual office, online collaboration, and telecommuting. But, coworking communities (and related phenomenon that have grown out of the culture of the open source movement such as MeetUps and BarCamps) illustrate the ways in which these emergent forms of organizing are deeply embedded in physical places and, at the same time, enabled by new technologies such as laptops and wireless networks.

New Work City. Photo: Tony Lupo / NWCNY

As the material artifacts of offices – messages, documents, photos and plans – are digitized and stored on servers, physical spaces have the potential to become increasingly open, flexible and sharable. Data security concerns aside, one can imagine a future scenario when most of the tools that we need to work effectively will be accessed and stored in “the cloud”. This allows the dynamic reorganization and co-location of people, firms and activities that have been separated since the early days of industrialization, the advent of the hierarchical firm and the rise of cities themselves. For example, an office building might house a conference room that doubles as an entertainment room for the co-located apartments. Such arrangements will require new ways of thinking about private and semi-private spaces, trust and security, and ownership and property.

Rather than lonely, pajama-clad programmers holed up in Grandma’s basement, a closer look at the nature of virtual work reveals that after several years of experimentation — ranging from working from home in relative isolation to slouching uncomfortably at Starbucks — mobile workers (including freelancers, the self-employed, remote workers and entrepreneurs) have begun to band together to form office communities of like-minded coworkers whom they don’t actually work with, but rather, they work alongside in order to “cross-pollinate.”

This cross-pollination comes in many forms, from the informal, water-cooler conversations about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica to intensive lunch meetings about bookkeeping for freelancers, and from quickly troubleshooting a Google Calendar feature to collaborating on events and projects. For example, while New Work City hosts regular workshops for technology entrepreneurs, it is also a hub for Open Government meetings.

In late January, on a trip to Kansas City to meet with the Kauffman Foundation, I stumbled into a Panera Bread directly across from my eco-friendly hotel in order to get some lunch within hours after landing. After devouring a bowl of chicken soup in one corner of the nearly-empty restaurant, I noticed two women and a man poised in front of their laptops with a small pink rectangle sign on the table that announced “Creative Club” in large letters and “Jelly” in smaller letters underneath.

Panera Bread, Kansas City. Photo: Laura Forlano

Jelly, founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February 2006, is a semiweekly casual coworking event that typically meets at someone’s apartment. It was only their second meeting, but nonetheless, to the surprise of the Kansas City group (a graphic designer, a public relations professional and a sustainable design consultant), I instantly recognized their effort and documented it as part of the larger coworking phenomenon. I presented it the following day at Kauffman.

In his work on social innovation and creative communities, Italian designer Ezio Manzini, presenting as part of the Stephan Weiss Visiting Lectureship at Parsons in early May, makes the point that small, locally-based initiatives such as co-housing have an unprecedented ability to scale globally. As such, the local is no longer an isolated, provincial village that seeks to return to the past but rather a connected cosmopolitanism according to Manzini.

In search of these small but scalable social innovations, our group squeezed onto the B train to Newkirk Avenue in Brooklyn where we visited Ditmas Workspace, a coworking community for writers and researchers located on a “Am I really in Brooklyn, New York?” street lined with large Victorian houses garnished with expansive flowerbeds and trees. Interestingly, Victorian houses are not subject to the zoning requirements that separate residential and office uses of the built environment. This has allowed the 12 members of Ditmas Workspace, half of which are full-time employees working remotely and half of which are freelancers, to create an affordable workspace of like-minded colleagues in the neighborhood where they also live and raise their young children.

Ditmas Workspace. Photo: Liena Zagare

Liena Zagare, an urban planner who founded the Ditmas space in September 2008, emphasized the benefits of the cross-fertilization of ideas and the synergies that take place in the community as well as the need to separate “quiet work” like writing with “loud work” such as doing phone interviews, which they do through the designation of specific rooms for these dissimilar activities.

Our next stop was to Treehouse Coworking, a community for designers in downtown Brooklyn. There, Matt Tyson, a sustainable furniture designer at EcoSystems, which is currently located on the 4^th floor, guided us through all 7 floors of the building. We climbed top to bottom one cold, dark and dusty stair after another since we had exceeded the elevator’s carrying capacity. The building is completely and meticulously filled with art, objects, antique furniture, old mattresses and junk collected over 27 years by the owner. In describing his motivations for opening the Treehouse space to the coworking community in January 2009, Tyson said, “I want to be surrounded by really smart people…I have a strong affinity for community.” Treehouse will soon be offering classes at their woodshop in order to train people interested in learning new hands-on skills, a boon in the ailing knowledge economy.

Treehouse NYC. Photo: Matt Tyson

All this talk of cross-pollination and social innovation throughout the day recalled a very different experience that I’d had several weeks earlier while away at a Pervasive Computing conference in Japan. While I had survived the rigorous one-hour swine flu quarantine procedure resembling a scene from The X-Files complete with men in green cover-ups, goggles and masks that scanned the passengers with a thermo-sensing camera, I had failed to reserve a hotel with Internet access.

While at the Asakusa Shrine in Tokyo, I noticed that I was dangerously close to the limit on the 20 MB data plan on my iPhone 3G and sought out the nearest Internet “café” (if one could call it that). I would, I had decided, call AT&T on Skype in order to upgrade to a bigger data plan. However, upon entering, I was told by the attendant at the counter that I was not allowed to make calls while in the café. In addition, only one person was allowed to accompany each laptop computer into the space.

Coworking is rapidly emerging as a meme for the reorganization of knowledge. Rather than spaces for mobile work, it is well-known that many of Japan’s Internet cafes are, in effect, living spaces for the country’s unemployed youth who have taken to holing up in private Internet cubicles about the size of an English telephone booth but without the distinctive red paint. The 24-hour cafes come equipped with instant ramen and vending machines, rows of pink comic books and showers; they even sell toiletry sets containing combs and shower caps for 160 yen in the women’s restroom so that their guests can freshen up in the morning.

But, rather than sites for community, collaboration and innovation (though I can’t claim that these qualities are completely absent after only a one hour visit), the spaces remain absolutely silent and devoid of social interaction, perhaps so as to not disturb the patrons that are sleeping? In the end, I found – to my utter surprise – that AT&T had finally created a page that allowed me to add and remove international data plan features without suffering through a redundant twenty minute conversation with a customer service representative. Problem solved, and without uttering a single word.

Back to Brooklyn. We ended the day, which was actually quite exhausting after all of the stairs at the Treehouse space, at The Change You Want To See Gallery in Williamsburg. Again, the conversation shifted to the importance of opening their space to coworking as a way of enabling collaboration on media interventions by artists and activists.

The Change You Want To See gallery. Video: Not an Alternative.

As we redesign our cities with these emergent open source models for the reorganization of knowledge / work in mind, we might ask ourselves about the changing nature of our relationship to our work that is reshaping our identities, loyalties and communities. In the future, New Yorkers won’t ask “What do you do?” over pints of German beer and currywurst in the East Village but rather “Where do you work?” Rather than merely a place to do work, the choice of a like-minded coworking community with the right amount of diversity and exposure to new skills and ideas could be as important as choosing a neighborhood to live in.

Laura Forlano is Kauffman Fellow in Law at Yale Law School. Her research interests include mobile and wireless technology, the role of space/place in communication, collaboration and innovation, entrepreneurship, organizational behavior, and science and technology studies.

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.

These days, the policy prescriptions that aim to limit city-dwellers’ reliance on cars tend to take the form of disincentives and prohibitions, such as congestion pricing or restrictive parking. While recent design initiatives in New York City, most visibly the Department of Transportation’s appropriation of street space for quiet zones or bicycle lanes, represent pro-active steps in a positive direction, rarely do they address how best to service the city through deliveries and removal. Building a new physical superstructure that would serve to segregate uses – as Franzen’s film argues – at first glance seems to be as unfashionable a grand projet as housing the poor in “towers in the park” or ramming expressways through vibrant neighborhoods. The challenges such large public works engendered did much to discredit the planning profession in the 1960s and 70s and pushed urbanism away from large-scale physical design and towards local, social-scientifically informed and policy-oriented interventions. Only in the last few years has there been a resurgence of the big vision in urban planning and design. Perhaps the new stimulus plan just approved in Washington will provoke – in reaction if not in implementation – a serious reconsideration of our country’s thus far inconsistent and uncoordinated approach to infrastructure, energy and transportation.

In this light, Franzen’s film has much to teach us. The challenges facing our cities are not new, and yet our historical memory is very short, particularly about radical propositions that went untested and unbuilt. This is not to suggest that we try to implement the plan expressed in this film wholesale, but rather that we learn from past arguments that simultaneously propose new infrastructural forms while advocating for sharing resources through use-on-demand systems. The boldness of Franzen’s vision and forms belies the intricacy of his thinking, the subtle interplay between street and city, between retrofitting and building anew, between applying design expertise and consulting citizens’ priorities, and lastly between two urban concepts that are uttered so often that they have almost lost their meaning: sustainability and infrastructure.

–Cassim Shepard
Project Director,
Urban Omnibus