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.

FATBERGS
“A nice working environment” is not how most would describe a city sewer system, but to Rob Smith, “head flusher” at Thames Water, traversing the bowels of London has its upsides. Smith and his team of 39 flushers are responsible for unclogging sewer tunnels of “fatbergs”– congealed deposits of cooking oil and flushed waste that look as disgusting as they sound. Fatbergs are typically formed of restaurant grease, used condoms, baby wipes and after a bad rain, dead rats. They collect in floating masses to stop up sewer waterways, leading to water pollution. As “Below the Waste Line,” a video by the Guardian, and a post on Edible Geography reveal, an intimate look at subterranean infrastructure reveals a waste-based map of our unsavory disposal practices (Leicester Square for example is a trouble zone for dumped oil from fast food restaurants) and the daily olfactory patterns of the urban population (morning showers are a particularly pungent time).
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Canal Street | Photo by Flickr user YoHandy

CANAL STREET MAKEOVER
To say Canal street is hectic is an understatement, and fortunately the New York Metropolitan Transportation Committee has taken note. In a report released last Thursday the NYMTC recommends widening sidewalks to make the famously bustling street more pedestrian friendly. The report also calls for curb extensions, a redesigned intersection at Canal and Bowery, and crackdown on parking placards to reduce car congestion. The DOT says they will use recommendations from the study in their own plans for the street, funded with World Trade Center relief aid dollars. For more analysis on the report check out Streetsblog’s take.
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ASTOR PLACE MAKEOVER
East Village hubs Astor Place and Cooper Square are also slated for a makeover, as plans for a pedestrian plaza project that were previously sidelined by the economic downturn are now underway. WXY Architecture and landscape architects Quennell Rothschild and Partners, along with the Department of Design and Construction, envision reconfigured streets that make room for new parks, benches, trees and plantings, and added traffic islands, bringing more greenery and usable public space to the highly trafficked triangle.
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Chuck Close taxi top | via ShowMedia

ART CAB
Happy Holidays from John Amato. The president of Show Media, a company that sells ads on NYC taxis, is devoting 500 ad spots to feature art by Chuck Close and Kehinde Wiley. This is the second year self-proclaimed art lover Amato has done this. Last year, work by Yoko Ono and Alex Katz traveled the city streets. Now if only someone would donate video installations to replace TaxiTV inside the cabs…
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OBAMA’S URBAN POLICY
Jarett Murphy at City Limits checks in on the progress of the Obama administration’s urban policies, hoping that the White House Office of Urban Affairs will pick up the pace on policy implementation as the President enters the second half of his term. Murphy cites the collaboration between federal agencies, like the Sustainable Cities Initiative led by HUD, the DOT and the EPA, as evidence that urban policy is slowly aligning with the demands of today’s metro growth and getting out of bureaucratic mire, but says the administration needs to follow up on planning with tangible projects to win favor and funding.
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NEW YEAR, NEW TRANSIT
The TransportPolitic reports on widespread commitment to public transportation in US and Canadian cities for 2011, saying that five new light rail lines slated to open over the next year, along with over a dozen other transportation projects that will break ground, “represent a continent-wide public sector commitment to the extension of transit offerings.” In New York, construction will continue on both commuter and metro rails, with LIRR access at Grand Central planned for 2016 and the much discussed 2nd Ave subway line to open in 2017.
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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.

Trash Patch Catch, trailer

Manuel Mansylla, Design Director of La Fantástica, began by confronting plastic pollution in oceans. He first presented Trash Patch, his effort to bring more awareness to the issue through art, design and research. He also screened two videos – one from 1947, which documented the plastic breakthrough, followed by excerpts from Trash Patch Catch, Mansylla’s documentary film project that tracks the plastic debris patches in oceans and considers our transition into a “throwaway society.” All of this led to the question: “How much can we change in a lifetime?” Our grandparents, Mansylla noted, were not so quick to discard things. Today, we default to a disposable mindset, without considering that our trash ultimately ends up in the center of our oceans. Moving on to the history of plastics from a design perspective, he contemplated the dominance of plastic in our lifestyle, a practice we now need to re-think. The challenge is not strictly one for the consumer — Mansylla called artists and designers to action: “I invite the creative community to re-envision the potential of plastic waste and to instigate a paradigm shift — thinking of it as a resource and as a product that people want to keep.”

From trash patches in oceans, Dennis Maher took us to his “assembled city fragments” in Buffalo. With approximately 10,000 structures languishing on the official demolition list, Buffalo is an urban landscape struggling with the fallout of industrial decline, like many others along the Rust Belt. Maher’s work explores demolition, renovation and restoration through the piecing together of remains of obliterated spaces. (Check out more of his work on his website.)

Dennis Maher | battle, 2004 | demolition debris from one-car garage, drywall screws, house paint

Maher’s interest in the demolition and reassembly of urban places arose as a result of working on demolition sites, a job taken to supplement his income when he first arrived in Buffalo to work as an assistant professor in 2002. Fascinated by the politics of demolition and shocked by the quantity of waste that resulted from deconstruction, Maher began harvesting scraps from decaying homes and fusing debris into large scale sculptures. Maher, still teaching at the University of Buffalo, hopes his work inspires people to think about how demolition affects the urban landscape and raises questions about the way a city erases visible manifestations of poverty. Urban transformations are cyclical, and the chance to regenerate is an opportunity that shrinking environments present.

Moderator Angela Soong questioned the macro/micro scale of the artists’ work. With his work focusing on the macro, Mansylla began answering the question by addressing the wine cup that was being used by the evening’s attendees. “These wine cups are nothing but pieces of plastic that get used for a few seconds,” Mansylla said. “Product designers and industrial designers need to design materials that everyone wants to keep.” Though the problem of plastic pollution presents itself on a macro level, the minutest details are what need to be addressed to bring a change. Maher offered a way to approach his work from both scales: “The City of Buffalo clearly is a part of my work in a very direct way. At the same time, what I’ve created is relevant to many cities. I’m formulating a practice that combines art, architecture and civic activism. Demolition is a form of cultural erasure. I’m interested in what that does to the urban fabric and communities.” When there is so much vacant land, he asked, do we still need to build new? Or do we need to re-think the role of architecture and design?

The works of Mansylla and Maher comment on loss, waste and ruin, and their creations speak of the potential in them. Such environmentally enlightening work of artists dramatically shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it – without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions. With their modest materials and means, Mansylla and Maher summon a collective spirit to re-think, re-use and re-cycle.

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Purva Jain is an architect and urban designer and currently works part-time as a project associate at Urban Omnibus. She is from India and now lives in New York City.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Images from left to right: Hudson River Park, image courtesy of Mathews Nielsen; West Harlem Piers Park, image courtesy of Alison Cartwright | via archleague.org

PARK TOUR AND BIKE RIDE
This Saturday, Architectural League group Design in 5 is hosting a park tour and bike ride of Hudson River Park and the West Harlem Piers, two of the many waterfront revitalization efforts springing up all over New York City. Design in 5 events are typically open to designers roughly five years or fewer out of school, but the group invites all young Omnibus readers as well. Participants will travel by bike to two different Hudson River parks and meet Len Greco from the New York City Economic Development Corporation and designers Barbara Wilks, of W Architecture, and Signe Nielsen, of Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. Join them to talk about waterfront development, design processes, and coordination efforts involved in projects of this scale, all while enjoying a beautiful day out in the sun. Email designin5@archleague.org to sign up.
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A HUNDRED MILLION CALLS TO 311

311 Calls for New York | Pitch Interactive via wired.com

WIRED reports on What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York, including how 311 calls “represent a huge pool of data to be collected, parsed, and transformed into usable intelligence,” evident in crowdsourced detective work like the Maple Syrup Mystery. Eye-grabbing infographics provide a quick glance at New York’s most vocal zip codes and common gripes, but also reveal more nuanced geographic and temporal complaint patterns. The article points to various efforts, by the City and private companies, to improve the efficiency of problem solving, but suggests that these programs can only go so far in improving the urban fabric. As a resource though, the uses of 311 call data continue to unfold. The call center is a voice of accountability that may encourage more New Yorkers to speak up, and 311 data is a tool to analyze the City’s problems, spurring timely and targeted response.
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DESIGN MATTERS
A recent survey following Election Day, which tested polling issues ranging from voter privacy to equipment functionality, found that over a third of the survey participants thought that the newly-designed ballot was difficult to read and used font that is too small. Design matters! Maybe its time for New York’s Board of Elections to go back to the drawing board with AIGA’s Design for Democracy, which “applies design tools and thinking to increase civic participation by making interactions between the US government and its citizens more understandable, efficient and trustworthy.”
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TRACING TRASH
Trash can over flowing? Not to worry, take your waste to Union Square tomorrow from 11am- 1pm for Culture Push’s Tracing Trash symposium. The “curated trash experiment” gathers information about waste disposal practices in the city. Orange-jumpsuited liaisons will answer questions about where garbage comes from and where it goes, and offer ideas for alternative disposal. Just remember to RSVP, to cp@culturepush.org, for your date with the dumpster.
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SWIMMING CITIES
Last weekend, the newest addition to Swimming Cities, which we discussed with artist Swoon earlier this fall, was launched in the Gowanus — or at least the radial foundation for it was. The Ocean of Blood, as the fleet of small boats is called, and its crew of artists will begin a journey up the Ganges River in India in March. The small rivercrafts can be connected for common space or separated in order to navigate narrow waterways. On-board motorcycles serve dual purposes, as propellers for the individual boats and vehicles for the crew when they need to get supplies on land. The final destination for The Ocean of Blood is Varanasi, the oldest living city in the world, where the crew will collaborate with local artists to create visual and musical performances using their journey as inspiration.
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KRANTHOUT

KrantHout | via worldchanging.com

File this under new materials wrought from extreme recycling: Worldchanging tells us about newspaper wood, aka KrantHout, designed by Mieke Meijer and available through the Dutch design firm, Vij5. The product is made from layers of recycled newspapers, which can be milled and sanded like any other type of wood. Meijer says KrantHout is “a reversing of a traditional production process; not from wood to paper, but the other way around.” The material has been in development since 2003 and Vij5 is working on a line of products to be added to their collection.
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EYEBALLING BRIDGES AND TUNNELS
Last week’s interview with photographer Stanley Greenberg reminded BLDGBLOG of this 2004 “carto-photographic look” at New York’s bridges and tunnels, an impressive gallery of images from the Library of Congress, the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and Historic American Engingeering Record (HAER). “Eyeballing New York City’s Bridges and Tunnels” spotlights the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, George Washington, Queensboro, Verrazano-Narrows, Triborough and Hells Gate Bridges along with the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, in all their infrastructural beauty.
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TEDxBROOKLYN

This Saturday, TEDxBrooklyn — one of many local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a “TED-like experience” — is hosting a stage event at Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn Campus. The one day program will focus on “the making of a movement,” bringing together local artists, entrepreneurs, activists, innovators and other Brooklynites to talk about and demonstrate their work and ideas. Meanwhile, you can nominate a “transformational individual” you know to be considered for TEDxBrooklyn’s “ONE Brooklynite,” to be featured on the program website.
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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.

Yesterday was a beautiful day for wandering along Roosevelt Island’s waterfront. The Omnibus team and fifty of our friends spent the afternoon learning about the history of the masterplan, seeing one of the infamous pneumatic trash chutes in action, and getting a guided tour of the Fast Trash! exhibition (open for one more week!). Thanks are in order for Juliette Spertus, Judy Berdy, Jack McGrath, Adam Michaels, and Marianne Lau for taking us around.

Scheduled tour-guide Donald Richardson, one of the masterplanners of Roosevelt Island, was unable to join us at the last minute. Luckily, Judy Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society was part of the group and stepped in to fill his shoes. Berdy shared her extensive historical knowledge of the island, from its days as Blackwell’s Island, home to a penitentiary, smallpox hospital and asylum for the insane, to its transition to a hospital complex, renamed Welfare Island, and its subsequent redevelopment in the late 1960s/early ’70s into the Roosevelt Island we know today. The original three-phase masterplan, developed by architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee, anticipated housing and services for 20,000 residents and turned the island into a car-free zone, connected to Queens by the Roosevelt Island Lift Bridge and to Manhattan by tram and subway (though F train service did not come to the island until 1989). Ultimately only phase one was implemented, and car-free didn’t take hold (though the island is essentially a one-road town — Main Street, supplemented by a few service roads), but the island flourished and is now home to approximately 12,000 people. Development continues, with a newly modernized tramway opening later this year and construction underway for the FDR Four Freedoms Park at the island’s southern tip.

One element of the masterplan that did get implemented — and the topic that piqued the interest of many of our meet-up attendees — is the island’s pneumatic trash system.  Juliette Spertus, architect, curator of Fast Trash! and subject of last week’s Omnibus feature, explained more about the history and implementation of this unusual trash collection system. Together with Jack McGrath, the exhibition’s curatorial assistant, and Marianne Lau, an architect who lives on Roosevelt Island, Juliette walked us around the island, stopping to let us see the infrastructure in action. First stop: Riverwalk, courtesy of Charlie, a maintenance supervisor, who showed us one of the residential complex’s chutes. Next stop: the waste transfer station, where we saw the remarkably unassuming entry point where the island’s two central tubes converge to deposit the trash of thousands and peered in through windows at the facility.

While walking along the waterfront, we caught sight of another project of interest to Omnibus readers: the tidal hydropower turbine project implemented by Verdant Power and Keyspan to harness the energy of the tidal estuary that is the East River.

We wrapped up the afternoon at the exhibition space itself, watching a sample Lamson airtube shoot a capsule over our heads and across the room, looking at archival documentation of New York City’s now-defunct pneumatic mail delivery system, and learning about past experiments and current advances in pneumatic waste management in cities around the world. Juliette, Adam Michaels of Project Projects, who designed and co-organized the exhibition, and other members of the exhibition team discussed the research and inspiration for the show and pondered issues surrounding waste management and consumption on a broader scale. Our nation consumes at an excessive rate, producing a similarly excessive waste stream, one that is whisked away to far-off landfills, making it easy for us to ignore or deny the larger impact our habits create. The relative invisibility of our waste management system, it was argued yesterday, might detract from our perception of individual accountability. Would a centrally-located, highly-visible waste disposal system encourage better practices? How can we learn from the infrastructure investments being made in places like Stockholm, Barcelona or Macau? Both Juliette and Judy also rallied for individual and community involvement on a local level. The existing system is reaching its limits, and those who support its modernization, potential expansion to incorporate recycling, or even exploration of the technology’s plausibility beyond the island must make their voices heard. Sound advice from a Sunday afternoon walking tour.

As always, thanks to everyone who came out to join us. Don’t miss our next event. Sign up for our weekly email, become a fan of Urban Omnibus on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter to keep up with the latest.

Judy Berdy of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society

Charlie, maintenance supervisor, Riverwalk.

Architect and Roosevelt Island resident Marianne Lau.

Project Projects' Adam Michaels and Fast Trash! curator Juliette Spertus.

Photos by Varick Shute or Cassim Shepard.

The five commissioned projects include “intelligent” street furniture that behaves in unexpected ways by David Jimison and JooYoun Paek; a public interface to water quality and aquatic life of urban rivers by David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang in collaboration with Natalie Jeremijenko; a social network for collectively regulating energy consumption involving plant life as both carbon sink and circuit breaker by Haque Design + Research; smart tags for tracing the city’s digestive system and illuminating its removal chain by the SENSEable City Lab at MIT; and a festival of collaborative work sessions organized in urban public spaces by Anthony Townsend and the Breakout! team. Taken together, the projects in Toward the Sentient City aim to catalyze public discussion on the design and inhabitation of near-future urban environments.

According to the project’s director, Gregory Wessner (Exhibitions Director, the Architectural League of New York),

Over the past several years, as the Architectural League has become increasingly involved in exploring the proliferation of various types of ambient, mobile and ubiquitous computer technologies, we have often been asked, what does this have to do with architecture? … 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 can they possibly have on the insistent materiality of buildings and cities?

The exhibition offers a provocative series of answers to these questions. In advance of the opening next week, Urban Omnibus has invited the commissioned teams to answer, in their own words, what they think their project has to do with architecture and what it has to do with the future of the city.

Too Smart City

Three pieces of street furniture – a bench, a trash can, and a sign – offer a comedic challenge to the notion that increasingly “smarter” embedded intelligence and robotic systems are an aspirational goal in the design of objects, environments and services in public space.

Amphibious Architecture

Two networks of interactive, luminescent tubes floating in the East River and the Bronx River monitor and report water quality, presence of fish and human interest in the river. Through a simple text message interface, the project links the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems of the city, urging citizens to look beneath the surface and suggesting a new mode of engagement with natural systems and public information.

Natural Fuse

A city-wide network of biotic devices act as both electricity outlets and as a shared resource that offsets C02. The exhibition space will act as a store where visitors trade in an economy of plants networked in their ability to produce electricity and to act as a carbon-sink. Cooperation among user produces more energy to share; inefficiencies or greed diminish the network’s capacity.

recorded via Skype

Trash Track

Hundreds of small, smart, location-aware tags – deployed in Seattle and New York – track different types of trash through the city’s waste management system, revealing the often surprising journeys of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

recorded via Skype

Breakout!

This festival liberates workers from the traditional offices spaces and invites them to relocate their work in urban public settings, relying on three sets of tools: lightweight infrastructure, social software and facilitators’ guides that will jumpstart collaborations to inspire creative workers, activate street-life and intensify the use of under-performing public spaces.

The Sentient City Hub Exhibition will be on view at The Urban Center
from September 18th to November 7th.
457 Madison Avenue
New York City

Gallery hours:
Monday – Saturday (closed Thursday)

11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Free admission