-C.S.

A selection of videos from blocks in Manhattan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click image to play video

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

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

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

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

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

Click image to play video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The immense distances trash travels (and the amount of cost and energy used to transport, transfer, recycle, incinerate or dump it) pose obvious questions about how we expend environmental resources in support of our country’s vast consumption practices. According to Rit Aggarwala, former director of the Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, it’s time to shift the ways we measure environmental impacts “from combustion towards consumption.” He was speaking at a conference of city planning professionals entitled Zoning the City, but the implications of his words extend far beyond land use: he was expressing the far-reaching truth that there’s more than just carbon in our footprints. And while engines and energy usage are the primary metrics used to calculate degrees of green, zooming out to a broader inquiry into the infrastructure that supports both the supply chain and the removal chain raises larger questions about the life-cycles of the products and materials that pass through our daily lives.

Two years ago, for its landmark exhibition Toward the Sentient City, the Architectural League commissioned five innovative design projects that interrogated the convergence of digital technologies and the urban systems. One of the projects, Trash | Track, started with a simple question: “why do we know so much about the supply chain and so little about the removal chain?” To close this gap in public awareness about where stuff goes after we throw it away, the team behind Trash | Track (MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory) devised sensors that would track the movements of a variety of everyday objects on their often convoluted routes to their final destinations. They completed a pilot project in partnership with the City of Seattle that visualized these journeys and documented the ultimate fate of pieces of trash that are barely considered after being tossed in the garbage (see introductory video below).

Trash | Track from senseablecitylab on YouTube.

To be sure, sensors and analytics can help us make more intelligent choices about how we use resources, but as we go about enhancing or improving complex urban systems through technology, we must also provoke discussion about what kind of city we want. What are the values that should guide our quest for efficiency, reliability and convenience in the technologies that support the urban environment? And how can those values be informed by careful consideration of those infrastructures that may be out of sight, but should never be — if we want ecological, economical and resilient cities – out of mind.

-C.S.

This Urban Omnibus video is the fourth and final in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities. 

Garbage Truck at Night | Photo: Drew Geraets

Elizabeth Royte is the author of Bottlemania: How Water Went On Sale and Why We Bought It; Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash; and The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest. Her writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.

UPDATE: Michael Kimmelman’s New York Times coverage of the CHPC/Architectural League Making Room project and symposium is now available at nytimes.com.

UPDATE: Making Room symposium details announced: Monday, November 7, 2011, 8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. at the Japan Society. (NOTE: This event has passed.)

New York City has a remarkably diverse population and, in many respects, a remarkably heterogeneous housing stock to provide it shelter. From Riverdale to Tottenville, Flushing to Chelsea, Washington Heights to Jackson Heights to Brooklyn Heights, New Yorkers inhabit an amazing spectrum of residential building types, developed and accumulated over the history of the city. At many critical junctures over the last century and a half, New York City has been an innovative leader in housing regulation and finance, encouraging and shaping development to ensure that dwellings are safe and respond to evolving standards of livability.

But even with the great resources of its varied housing stock and its strong tradition of housing advocacy and reform, New York has a hard time producing enough housing to meet demand. And in moments of economic and social transition, housing supply and housing need can get seriously out of whack.

Over the last several years, the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) has been researching and analyzing how and where New York’s residents live and the housing that is available to them. Their findings have revealed many discrepancies between the kinds of houses and apartments people need and those they can find. CHPC has identified New York City’s accreted mass of housing regulations and standards — all created with progressive and worthy goals in mind — as one of the factors that contributes to this mismatch. For example, regulations have tilted what the housing market produces towards larger units, for households assumed to be “families,” even though only 17% of New York’s dwelling units are occupied by traditional nuclear families. A huge underground or improvised housing market has developed over the last two decades as people try, often in desperation, to find places to live that are affordable and can accommodate their particular needs.

Around the world, architects, developers and policymakers are responding to the shifting demands of urban dwellers with new forms of housing in ways New York is not. If our city wants to continue to respond to the needs of its dynamic population, it must continue to innovate in the types of housing it produces. In 2009, CHPC brought architects from Tokyo, Barcelona, San Diego, Montreal and Leipzig to New York for a landmark symposium (read UO‘s coverage of that event here) that introduced an audience of housing experts from design, development, law, policy and government to the vanguard of housing design for 21st century cities.

This symposium was part of a broader project — called Making Room — to take a fresh look at how housing and space standards constrict the choices architects and developers are able to introduce into New York’s housing market. To move that project forward, CHPC asked the Architectural League to join with them to carry out a design study to produce new models for comfortable, desirable dwellings. Four teams of leading New York architects, each with expertise and a particular perspective, have been asked to respond to this challenge. On Monday, November 7, the architects and their teams — Stan Allen and Rafi Segal; Deborah Gans; Peter Gluck; and Jonathan Kirschenfeld — will present their ideas in an all-day symposium. This event is only one part of a much larger research and advocacy project that will include exhibiting these designs publicly and identifying what laws and codes currently on the books are preventing new modes of residential living from becoming available.

In the video above, CHPC Executive Director Jerilyn Perine (who was formerly the commissioner of the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development), Architectural League Executive Director Rosalie Genevro, Chhaya Community Development Corporation Executive Director Seema Agnani, and Blesso Properties President and Founder Matthew Blesso discuss the state of the city’s housing, the underground housing market and some of the kinds of changes that could make New York housing more responsive to the ways we live now. Over the coming months, Urban Omnibus will be providing regular updates on the Making Room project as it develops. Stay tuned.

Seema Agnani is Executive Director of Chhaya CDC and was one of its initial founders. Before returning to Chhaya as Executive Director in 2007, she was the Coordinating Consultant to the Fund for New Citizens at The New York Community Trust, a donor collaborative supporting immigrant rights work. She was also the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at Citizens for NYC. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American Community Development. She is a former recipient of The Charles H. Revson Fellowship at Columbia University, earned her Bachelors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a Masters of Urban Planning and Public Administration at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Matthew Blesso is President and Founder of Blesso Properties. Prior to founding Blesso Properties, he worked as a commercial lender, most recently in the Real Estate Finance Group at BHF Bank (now PB Capital), a German bank. Matt is a member of the Real Estate Board of New York, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the Municipal Arts Society, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Urban Land Institute, the New York Preservation Archive Project, and the Manhattan Real Estate Network. He is also a member of Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for the Citizen Housing and Planning Counsel and a founding member and the chairman of the Leadership Board of the Fourth Arts Block as well as Board member of the Institute For Urban Design.

In over 20 years as executive director of the Architectural League of New York, Rosalie Genevro has pursued the League’s mission – to nurture excellence and engagement in architecture, design and urbanism – through consistent innovation in the content and format of live events, exhibitions and publications (both in print and online). She has conceived and developed projects that have mobilized the expertise of the League’s international network of architects and designers towards applied projects in the public interest, including Vacant Lots, New Schools for New York, Envisioning East New York, Ten Shades of Green, Worldview Cities and Urban Omnibus.

Jerilyn Perine is the executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council (CHPC) where she spearheads a high impact agenda to improve the quality of public debate, inform public policy, promote new ideas, and engage a wide audience as well as a diverse and active Board Membership to improve NYC neighborhoods. Ms. Perine is an urban planner with 30 years of experience in housing and community development. She was appointed Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development by both Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to lead America’s largest municipal housing agency with more than 3000 employees and an annual operating and capital budget of $800 million. As Commissioner, Ms. Perine was the author of Mayor Bloomberg’s New Housing Marketplace Plan, announced in December 2002 that provided $3 billion over 5 years to preserve and create over 65,000 units of affordable housing. Under Mayor Giuliani she designed and oversaw the management and operation of programs designed to return a significant inventory of tax foreclosed residential property to local, private ownership. Ms. Perine is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and was a member of the International Brownfield Exchange between 1998 and 2002. She serves on the board of Highbridge Voices, a children’s choir in the South Bronx; West Side Federation for Senior and Supportive Housing; and the New York Housing Conference.

L-R: Jeremy Soffin, JP Chan and Chi-hui Yang at Telling Transit Tales | Photo by Aubrey Gallegos, courtesy of UnionDocs

On Sunday, September 25, UnionDocs and the Metropolitian Transportation Authority (MTA) co-hosted a screening and discussion of videos from the MTA’s YouTube channel. Since its launch last January, the channel has logged over 900,000 views and now features nearly 100 videos surveying MTA operations from many angles. Sunday night’s discussion, titled “Telling Transit Tales,” was organized and moderated by curator and film scholar Chi-hui Yang and included MTA Director of Media Relations Jeremy Soffin and Manager of Strategic Initiatives and Chief Videographer JP Chan.

Soffin and Chan have integrated the role and purpose of the YouTube channel with the MTA’s larger public relations overhaul. Working on a modest budget, they conceptualized and created what they term “leaner” videos. Moving the MTA away from more corporate documentary styles, Chan and Soffin replaced the talking heads with whomever was in charge of the specific project, be it disaster clean-up or changing the lights in the ceiling of Grand Central Station. They place an increased value on cinematic aesthetics, shooting only in HD and at 24 frames per second, and capitalize on the MTA’s expansive resources both in content and dramatic location. They hope the feel, length and watchability of these pieces will set them apart from other video content that the MTA has produced in the past, and corporate video more generally, expanding the audience and increasing transparency into the bureaucracy of the MTA.

The conversation was arranged in three sections, each following a large theme within the MTA’s body of work. The first section of films was entitled “Why Things Are.” These offer an opportunity for the MTA to visually explain new policies and introduce new key-figures to the public. When Jay Walder, the new (at the time) CEO took charge, he used an MTA video as a way to discuss both his background and his specific vision for the future of the MTA. This type of video is also used for direct and at times apologetic explanations for shifts in service. A recent example came after Hurricane Irene, when Chan traveled north to meet with Frederick Chidester, the line superintendent for Metro-North Railroad’s Hudson and West of Hudson Lines. The visual narrative paired with Chidester’s explanation becomes an incredibly successful method of explaining why the tracks on the Port Jervis line will take months to fix.

The second section, “How Things Work,” explores unsung and inaccessible spaces and topics by tapping the knowledge of MTA employees. This ranges from an animated short that explains the origins of the subway annotation system to a number of city symphony-style pieces that explore the city. This series, Chan noted, is where he tries to bring a narrative bend to the films. For example, by closely documenting the progress of the Second Avenue subway, Chan reveals the nuts-and-bolts story of how subway construction happens while also informing viewers about the MTA’s broader service expansion plans.

The final section, “The Culture, History and People of the MTA,” includes archival films, character studies and event pieces. Whether atop the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge banding young Peregrine falcons or tracing the route of the New York City Marathon, this series opens windows into the wide variety of activities that take place in MTA-controlled spaces. When asked about these pieces, Chan lit up, promising that more character studies are in the works and will explore topics in greater depth. He listed the archival films as his personal favorites, citing their ability to let the MTA show a lighter side, and noted that they are among the most popular videos on the channel — an educational video about the consequences of graffiti vandalism from the 1980s is the second most-viewed entry, and has been frequently re-blogged (often by pro-graffiti websites, and often commenting on its near-ridiculous message and soundtrack).

At the end of the day, the MTA’s YouTube channel is all about being “cheap and cheerful” and bringing a more intimate understanding of one of New York City largest and most important agencies. That importance was something both the audience and the panel spoke of often, and not just because so many of us rely on the system to travel through the city. New Yorkers identify themselves with the subway lines they use, and track neighborhood transition by when they’ve frequented which stops. What does it mean to live off the L line today as opposed to 20 years ago? How do you experience the city differently if you travel across a bridge every day rather than take the train? The MTA helps define how we live and move in our city, and the agency’s effort to make the mechanics and motivations of their work accessible through a platform like YouTube is worth noticing.

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

Correction: An earlier version of this article misattributed comments about past video content produced by the MTA to JP Chan. 

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.

This past winter, I had the opportunity to teach a Visual Studies workshop at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation entitled “Montage City: Filmmaking as Urban Observation.” The point of the workshop was to encourage students of architecture to engage with the collection and arrangement of moving images as an exercise in interpreting the existing conditions of urban space. As a formal strategy, cinematic montage — the juxtaposition of distinct moving images to form a cohesive whole — is uniquely suited to the study of urbanism, particularly for designers learning how to propose sensitive and sophisticated interventions in the landscape.

11 students went out and documented New York locales far and wide, from City Island to Roosevelt Island, from Willets Point to the Inwood Railyards. While the methodological framework of the workshop invoked site analysis, the sites in question were not bounded in the terms of a real or imagined architectural or urban design project. Rather, the focus was on a slightly larger scale: the scale of experience that corresponds roughly to the size of a small neighborhood; or, the scale at which New Yorkers are typically able to identify a particular look and feel for a particular place.

Students were encouraged to investigate these ineffable essences in repeated visits, by shooting video of people doing things (such as shoveling snow or fixing bait to a fishing pole), of people moving through space (such as commuting on the Roosevelt Island Gondola or driving over the Brooklyn Bridge), and of details of the built environment (such as housing stock or streetscape design). Some of the sites, like Willets Point, Coney Island or Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, are facing large-scale redevelopment; others, like City Island or 138th Street in Harlem, are buffeted by subtler and slower forces of urban change. All of the sites students chose to document are undergoing some form of transformation, yet these videos are less about preserving a moment in time than about interpreting what makes a place feel a certain way.

Check out three of the student videos below:

Coney Island by Julie Jira
Julie Jira’s exploration of Coney Island opens with a subway journey to the end of the line that literally and figuratively frames her gaze on a storied landscape defined by the interaction between natural and built components: gulls alighting on docks, fishermen preparing for a catch, children playing along the shoreline. The video manages to resist the visual clichés of Coney Island without abandoning careful observation of the neighborhood’s icons: the boardwalk, the rides, the beach.

…

Willets Point by Andrew Kim
For his video, Andrew Kim lit out for Willets Point and captures a mundane task we can all relate to, digging a car out after heavy snow. In the Iron Triangle, however, with its concentration of auto body shops, scrapyards and potholes and its lack of sidewalks, sewers or the kind of stormwater drainage systems found elsewhere in the city, the rhythms of daily life are highly specific. With a subtle and consistent approach to sound as a formal element, this video sketches a brief portrait of a unique urban context and repeatedly refers to the neighborhood’s points of contact — trains entering, cars leaving, airplanes flying overhead — with the city and world beyond its borders.

…

Brooklyn Bridge by Alok Shetty
In Alok Shetty’s paean to a beloved landmark, the architectural iconicity of the Brooklyn Bridge coexists with its functional role as a vital part of the city’s traffic system. By cleverly switching between these two modes of looking at the bridge, underscored by his use of timelapse videography and music, his video articulates both the crucial necessity and the timeless indeterminacy of infrastructure.

…

These days, most use of moving images in architectural practice seems to prioritize illustrating a potential future: the proposed result of a design project as visualized by an animated fly-through or 3D massing diagram. “Montage City” was intended to get architecture students thinking about how to use the craft of nonfiction filmmaking to look closely at what’s there already and to represent aspects of urban form and experience that are not always captured in traditional site analysis: the actions and interactions of individuals; the relationship of light and shadow; the interplay of texture, shape, pattern and line; the inextricability of the social and physical attributes of the urban fabric.

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Cassim Shepard is the editor of Urban Omnibus. He makes non-fiction media, especially films and video, about architecture and urbanism. He lives in Brooklyn.

Top image: Row 1 (left to right): Ji-Hye Ham (Hunters Point), David Anderson (City Island) | Row 2: Julie Jira (Coney Island), Mary Calvani (Roosevelt Island), Cristina Nguyen (Admiral’s Row at the Brooklyn Navy Yard) | Row 3: Alok Shetty (Brooklyn Bridge), Kooho Jung (Inwood Railyards), Rachel Barnard (138th Street) | Row 4. Andrew Kim (Willets Point), Seungwon Song (Inwood Railyards), Irene Brisson (Columbia University Campus)

HIGH LINE PHASE TWO NOW OPEN
Section 2 of the High Line is open to the public after a surprise soft launch on June 7th, between 20th to 30th Street along 10th Ave. The latest phase has doubled the length of the park to one mile. Some of the best new features to check out: the 4,900 square foot 23rd Street Lawn; an elongated, wooden radial bench (between West 28th and 29th Streets); and the 26th Street Viewing Spur, a glass framed lookout over West 26th Street with cascading teak sitting steps. See the official High Line site for more information on Section 2.

BATTLE FOR BROOKLYN REVIEWED
Norman Oder, resident expert on Atlantic Yards and author of the watchdog blog Atlantic Yards Report, recently reviewed Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley’s documentary on the seven-year development controversy, Battle for Brooklyn. Oder finds the film to be “most valuable in the camera’s witness to the palpable insincerity and cold-blooded indifference of the developer-government alliance” and wonders if Ratner’s deputy Bruce Bender asked the right questions. Read Oder’s full film review over on Dissent and his comment on Forest City Ratner’s response to the film.

BAD HABITS = DANGEROUS STREETS
SVA Masters student Ron Gabriel has created a compelling video campaign called “3 Way Street” drawing on the dangerous behavioral tendencies bikers, people and cars play out on NYC streets. Gabriel’s project exposes how “pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights and motorists plowing through crosswalks” make our streets unsafe. Catch the cleverly annotated video here.

WHAT’S NEXT FOR SOUTH STREET SEAPORT
Gotham Gazette covers the latest land use controversy over plans for South Street Seaport, following a 40-year string of unsuccessful development strategies. The Howard Hughes Corporation has been in preliminary discussion with SHoP Architects to redevelop the neighborhood, which, although it has some of the oldest architecture in Manhattan, has been home to many struggling businesses over past few decades. A 2008 plan sought to tear down the Pier 17 mall and construct a huge condominium, which was heavily critiqued by Community Board 1. Competing area demands like public retail needs and newer businesses like the New Amsterdam Market make for a complex design challenge. Stay tuned for updates and see the full story here.

Graphic via Architecture Magazine

IS LEED TOO POWERFUL?
On ArchitectureBoston, Michael Liu outlines the debate surrounding the legitimacy of LEED certification. Starting in 2010, Henry Gifford filed a class-action lawsuit against the non-profit US Green Building Council (USGBC) on a number of accounts, claiming USGBC’s claims to improved energy performance of LEED-certified buildings were unsubstantiated and contributed to a defrauding of the public en masse over the actual benefits of LEED-certified buildings. LEED-certification currently charges significant sums for construction and professional credits, turning LEED into what Gifford calls “a fee-generating monopoly.” Gifford provides a relevant contribution by opening up discourse around who makes what rules and unpacking the added complexity of charging money for institutionalized standards. Nevertheless, LEED certification also represents the need to formalize and codify design standards to move toward a sustainable future. Gifford points out that we need to be wary of how these standards are met; he critiques the “process of certifying buildings and the creation of a fee-generating bureaucratic structure” rather than green design standards themselves. Read Michael Liu’s full op-ed here.

HIGH-TECH TOURISM
CultureNOW, an organization formed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 specifically to illustrate the cultural and historical richness of Lower Manhattan, has mapped out the history, art and architecture of New York’s public realm to create a “museum without walls” iPhone app. CultureNOW President Abby Suckle calls the app, which won an honorable mention in the New York City’s 2011 BigApps 2.0 contest, a “treasure hunt, almost like urban archaeology.” Users can explore with maps, photos, tour routes and renderings of former buildings, all while listening to timely podcasts from experts like Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, Pratt Professor Bill Menking and architect Hugh Hardy. Download the app here.

Poe Park Visitor Center | Image via NYC PARKS/Malcolm Pinckney

EDGAR ALLEN POE AND DESIGN EXCELLENCE IN THE BRONX
The new Poe Park Visitor Center, located in the Bronx between the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road, sits on a 2.3 acre park that was home to the last residence of famed author Edgar Allen Poe. The visitor center is the first parks project to be completed from the Bloomberg Administration’s Design and Construction Excellence Initiative. Designed by architect Toshiko Mori, the new center is a 5,400-square-foot visitor center that includes a gathering space for community use and a display area showcasing the Poe farmhouse vista. A modest structure, Mori did not want to overwhelm Poe’s tiny farmhouse. See Archinect’s full coverage on the center.

EVENTS + TO DOs

BY THE CITY / FOR THE CITY CALL FOR DESIGNS
Last month, we told you about Institute for Urban Design’s call for ideas for its By the City/ For the City project, which asked New Yorkers to share their ideas for how to improve NYC. IfUD has now opened up the second phase of the program to designers who want to visualize these ideas. The ideas and designs will eventually be published in a public atlas. The Call for Designs will be open through July 14th. Submit your designs and visit the competition’s site here.

CITY AS STAGE: CONVERSATION ON ‘FORECLOSED’
On Saturday, June 11th, the Whitney will host a free, public platform lecture on Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, at 3pm at The Kitchen, 512 W 19th Street. As part of the exhibition Foreclosed: Between Crisis and Possibility, the discussion will explore urban space as a site of contestation and possibility. It will begin with a screening of Yto Barrada’s video Beau Geste (2009), followed by a conversation between Tania Bruguera (Artist), Peter Marcuse (Professor of Urban Planning, Columbia University), Damon Rich (Urban Designer, City of Newark) and Radhika Subramaniam (Curator, Parsons The New School for Design). See full details here.

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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 “infra-“ in infrastructure means below, which perhaps explains why we rarely pause to consider the sewers, water supply or electrical grids that enable the basic functions of urban living. Even when critical infrastructural systems are visible and not hidden below ground — like highways, power lines or traffic lights — their ubiquity and necessity put them just out of sight and out of mind. Until, of course, they break: a pothole is the quickest reminder of the good road maintenance we generally take for granted. How often do we stop to reflect on the full scope of what well-functioning roads and bridges and tunnels make possible? The desire to provoke that kind of reflection is what the City of Systems video series is all about.

Last year, Urban Omnibus spoke with Tom Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association (RPA), an organization that since the 1920s has advocated strongly for “creating infrastructure and building big systems to protect landscapes and water supplies, to provide more mass-transit, to plan for the region’s growth.” Looking forward, Wright explained that future planning and advocacy efforts might be “less about creating new systems and more about getting more efficiency and productivity out of the energy supply, the water supply, community development networks. The bad news is that we’re doing a poor job of managing and operating these 19th and early 20th century systems; the good news is there’s a lot more capacity in them if we start to manage the systems better.” Digital technologies offer one mechanism to get more out of our basic urban systems, facilitating use-on-demand systems or creating responsive environments. Yet, while our new digital infrastructure will do many things, it won’t, by itself, build roads over water. It might, however, enable us to maintain our physical infrastructure better: monitoring usage to identify greater efficiencies, to alert us of potential malfunctions, or to extrapolate broader patterns in regional flows of people and goods. Imagine if the data from E-ZPass toll payments on the Verrazano were made available to support, say, a more nuanced proposal for congestion pricing.

As we go about instrumenting all of our systems in an attempt to harness the excess capacity within them, we would be wise to contemplate the implications of how those systems came into being, what the assumptions were about their eventual use, and how those assumptions have played out in the lived experience of residents and communities. Visible from places in all five of New York City’s boroughs, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stands as an iconic reminder not only to appreciate a masterwork of civil engineering, but also to reflect on the systemic urban change that infrastructure can bring about.

This Urban Omnibus video is the second in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Interstate highway I-278 crosses the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

The original music in the video, “Verrazano” by Good Fruit, appears courtesy of the artist.

Earlier this year, Urban Omnibus sat down with TMC Director John Tipaldo, a systems engineer who oversees the facility, to learn firsthand about some of the priorities and technologies that influence the operation of traffic signals. Stoplights, it turns out, aren’t about limiting vehicular speed. They are about organizing who has the right to travel across a certain intersection at a particular time — cars going in this direction, cars going in that direction, pedestrians — and who has to wait until the other does so. In other words, traffic signals are about negotiating the interests of different users. What could be more urban than that? Find out more in the video below.

This Urban Omnibus video is the first in a series called City of Systems, a suite of short videos intended to offer a poetic peek behind the scenes of some of the complex systems that enable New York City to function. This video series is made possible by IBM as part of its commitment to use technology and information to help build more sustainable and intelligent cities.

Most talk of urban systems these days seems to focus on efficiency and effectiveness, with a particular emphasis on using digital technologies to increase both. At IBM Smarter Cities New York in October of 2009, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano posed questions to illustrate the significant role that technology plays in building smarter cities. With four billion cell phones, 30 billion RFID tags and two billion internet users constantly providing and collecting data, what happens when we apply analytics to guide more strategic resource allocation as our digital and physical infrastructures converge?

Urban Omnibus and the Architectural League, as part of our mission to foster excellence in the design of the built environment, want to infuse this conversation about what’s technologically possible with informed debate about what kind of urban future is desirable. The Architectural League has been looking at the implications of computing embedded in our everyday environments, or situated technologies, for several years. Through a symposium, pamphlet series, exhibition and recently-published book called Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space, the Situated Technologies project has engaged architects, artists and technologists in a provocative exploration of what design has to offer, and how design can critique, the ubiquity of sensors and automatic data generation in our urban experience. Gregory Wessner, who has overseen the project as the League’s exhibitions and digital programs director, characterizes the central issues as an urgent question: “At a moment when new digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact are they having on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?”

Meanwhile, Urban Omnibus has been reporting on what some of these trends and technologies have to offer the evolving conversation about infrastructure investment, public participation and open data. But for all the innovations and policy recommendations that emerge from these multiple and overlapping convergences (digital and physical, dematerialized and apparent, data and visceral experience), our primary objective is to encourage greater intimacy with the choices and operations that give shape to the urban environment. To that end, we want to foster appreciation of the complexity and sophistication of the urban systems that currently enable us to go about our day, those systems that we take for granted — like the expectation that a stoplight will always, eventually, turn green.

The music in the video, “Bellows” by Loscil, appears courtesy of kranky.