I feel compelled to respond to a recent article and photo essay (PDF) published by a group of communications scholars led by Keith Hampton. Hampton is best known for his doctoral research under Barry Wellman, in which he studied the impacts of broadband on a wired suburb of Toronto. His conclusion was that while broadband didn’t increase strong social ties, the use of email amongst neighbors did expand the circle of weak social ties for residents. Overall, the impacts of broadband on social cohesion were deemed modest but positive. In the decade since that study, we’ve seen a similar dynamic play out on online social networks like Facebook, which have greatly expanded our weak social ties.

So it was with great interest that I approached Hampton’s newest study of social behavior of users of wireless public spaces. In fact, I played a major role in lighting up two of the spaces examined in the study, Bryant Park and Union Square in New York City, and have been studying them myself for nearly a decade. The researchers collected an enormous amount of data, observing some 1,400 people using mobile wireless devices in these parks as well as three others in Philadelphia and Toronto. Their mixed conclusion: “We explored how wireless Internet access brings new uses and new life to public spaces‚ and how it pushes out existing public life. Some wireless users are cut off from their surroundings, but for most, interactions between on- and off-line experiences increase exposure to social diversity.” Not exactly an indictment, but not a ringing endorsement either. Given the attention that this study is likely to get, and the potential it may have to dampen interest in public wireless by civic leaders and park advocates, I wanted to point out a couple areas where this study failed to capture “the complex relationships between Internet use in urban public spaces” it sought to understand.

The first point to make is that Hampton isn’t the first to discover the risks of social isolation for and around wireless users in public space. Literally from the very first day in June 2002, when my colleagues at NYCwireless first fired up the free public wireless network in Bryant Park, we were on the lookout for negative impacts on the park’s public life. This is because we were working closely with the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation, a sort of neighborhood level quasi-governmental body that was the brainchild of William “Holly” Whyte and the organizational mechanism for the park’s revitalization in the 1990s. During the project planning, we had discussed many times that the wireless network was a pilot project, and it was made clear in no uncertain terms that if nerds with laptops took over the park, they’d pull the plug. Of course, that didn’t happen — wireless use became a small niche within the rich ecosystem of uses of the park. Furthermore, NYCwireless actively sought to create mechanisms to “undo” social isolation and reconnect Internet users back to the park — a portal with park information had to be passed before gaining access to the Internet, and we created games and chatrooms that could only be accessed on the local area network. That is to say, we created web-based services that were only accessible if you came to the park.

The troubling part of the study is where it implies that by attracting non-sociable users to public space — in particular, workers seeking an “escape” from their office — wireless connectivity is reducing the vitality of those spaces. To me, having spent a decade working in wireless public spaces around the world, this is an incredibly archaic view of what public space is for, and it is one that conflicts with the long legacy of working in public space throughout urban history. Granted, as the study documents, today, many of those working in wireless public spaces are solitary. They found that  ”Internet users rarely travel in packs: most come alone and stay alone (79 percent).” They describe the way in which Bryant Park, at certain times of the day, “functions primarily as a workers’ park” for wireless Internet users, who “typically seek empty tables and desks.”

Yet, why would we not expect Bryant Park to be primarily used for work? It is, after all, situated smack dab in the largest cluster of office buildings in the world. To think of it as some kind of bucolic retreat from the real Manhattan world of commerce is deluded at best, and destructive of the social fabric of the city, much of which is structured around work. More importantly, by making public space available for private work, we also create the opportunity for collaborative work. Laura Forlano has extensively documented the way that new forms of collaborative work are emerging in wireless public spaces such as cafes. My favorite anecdote tells of the graphic designer who leaves samples of work in progress out on display, in the hopes of soliciting casual comments from passersby. While intensely focused on his computer-based design software, he’s left a trigger for others to approach him. Other freelancers use stickers and buttons displayed on their computers to provide hooks for conversations. (Mine just says “I am making the future.”)

Thus, while Hampton’s study either misses or doesn’t address this phenomenon, it’s becoming clear that public wireless is allowing groups to work in public space in novel ways. And so, two years ago, working on one of five projects commissioned by the Architectural League of New York for its Toward the Sentient City exhibition, Forlano and I organized a series of experimental collaborative work sessions in wireless public spaces. Using a dedicated social app developed by NYCwireless’ Dana Speigel, and a backpack full of office supplies and work-facilitating doodads like a tabletop whiteboard assembled by Antonina Simeti of workplace design consultancy DEGW, we appropriated the parks and plazas of Manhattan for our work. Dubbed “Breakout: Escape from the Office,” this weeklong effort demonstrated that public space provides an ideal platform for the kind of creative, collaborative, cross-organizational work that so many companies now do. And it showed that the door is opening for us to bring work back to the streets for the first time in a century, since the office building, as architectural solution to bureaucracy — managing lots of people and paper in close proximity — sucked them away.

Finally, the study fails to address two rapidly emerging trends in mobile devices and information services that are changing the way wireless users interact with public space, and are likely to render many of the conclusions irrelevant in the near future. First, the most critical element of how online and face-to-face worlds now interact, is the widespread and diversifying use of social media and electronic communications to coordinate face-to-face meetings. “The more devices present, the less in-person interaction: the majority of public Internet users are online communicating with people they know, but who aren’t physically present.” That’s fine, but what are the consequences of those communications? Invariably, they are about planning activities that will take place in or around the park in the near future. Bryant Park receives hundreds of check-ins daily on the mobile social network Foursquare. Surely these people are creating opportunities for sociability even as they are momentarily distracted from their surroundings while leaving a digital breadcrumb. Second, the study places far too much emphasis on personal devices, especially the laptop. But laptops are already on their way out, as we enter what urban informatician Adam Greenfield first called the “post-PC era.” As tablets, game consoles and gestural and spoken interfaces to computers become more widespread, we’ll see wireless public spaces become laboratories for a kind of civic computing that lets groups large and small experience new kinds of collective computed activities.

In conclusion, while Hampton’s study of wireless public space takes great effort to be neutral and objective, its conclusions are already outdated. And I fear the nuances of its mixed conclusions will be lost on the practitioners who manage our public spaces, or, even worse, interpreted as a warning. But this great experiment with mobile connectivity in civic spaces is just getting started. We shouldn’t be so hasty to draw conclusions about its larger social impact. From an urban design standpoint, the opportunity to bring work back out of office buildings far exceeds the risks. That’s exactly why Bryant Park put the lectern desks in the park: to encourage that new and highly desirable use for a park in a business district.

And yes, I wrote this in Bryant Park, while still managing to chitchat here and there, and flirt with a girl or two. I like to think that wherever he is, Holly Whyte is looking down and smiling.

All photos of Bryant Park visitors enjoying wireless by Ed Yourdon.

Anthony Townsend is the Director of Technology and Development of the Institute for the Future, and focuses his research on the impact of new technology on cities and public institutions. His interests span several inter-related topics: mobility and urbanization, innovation systems and innovation strategy, science and technology parks and economic development, and sustainability and telework.

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.

Factories have taken advantage of the efficiencies of verticality for decades. Through her research, Rappaport analyzes the evolution of factory design and the impact of shifting economies and markets on how and where manufacturing spaces are built, and uses that history as a basis for exploration of contemporary trends and next steps, including how recent technological developments in cleaner manufacturing processes might allow for greater integration of all aspects of urban living. By engaging designers and planners in that conversation, she hopes that this will be a first step towards redefining and reinvigorating urban industry. -V.S.

Toni-Molkerei Factory, diagram of system processes, Zurich, 1974-76 | © A.E. Bosshard and H. Widmer

In the future, cleaner and greener production methods could make vertical urban factories the new engines of urban revitalization, encouraging both economic growth and urban vitality as well as offering more sustainable solutions with production systems such as just-in-time manufacturing or increases in recycling. A missing part of the sustainable picture is where and how urban industry can contribute to new self-sufficient urban paradigms. With my ongoing project Vertical Urban Factory, the first phase of which is currently on view at the Skyscraper Museum, I want to provoke conversation about the demise of urban manufacturing and call on planners and architects to redefine and reimagine urban industry and its integration with city life. 

Throughout architectural history, the factory has been a place of design innovation for engineers and architects, a typology that provided freedom to explore new material and spatial organization. Nineteenth century vertical urban factories capitalized on power resources of water and then steam, harnessing energy through mechanized systems and gravity conveyances. The proximity of labor, transportation hubs and entrepreneurial energy in dense urban clusters meant that raw materials could flow directly onto factory floors and assembled products could be distributed to local markets in an integrated, industrial, urban cycle.

Fiat Lingotto, roof test track, Turino, 1913-26 | Courtesy of Archivio e Centro Storico Fiat

As the 19th Century gave way to the 20th, two main types of vertical factories dominated the urban landscape: the integrated and the layered. In the integrated factory, workers run the production flows from top to bottom, or vice versa, as components or raw goods are mixed, sorted or assembled, then carried by automated or gravity-feed conveyors or chutes. Examples include Albert Kahn’s design for Henry Ford’s 1909 Highland Park factory in Detroit and Giacomo Matte-Trucco’s Fiat Lingotto factory, in Turin, Italy.

The layered factory has separate stacked floors, occupied by one or more companies that share common areas and services such as lobbies, elevators and power. While the building is multi-storied, the processing may be on all floors, a single floor or gradually expand to other floors, as in the New York’s Garment District or the Starrett Lehigh Building loft spaces. Usually built as speculative properties, they are a resource for those who have smaller scale operations or less capital.

Ford Factory, Highland Park, Detroit, 1910 | © Albert Kahn Associates

During WWII, demand for larger scale, horizontally-oriented operations increased, and these vertical types began to disappear. Factories were suddenly windowless, hermetically sealed spaces with air conditioning and blackout panels. Eventually, a global system of expansive highway networks, container shipping and standardized digital supply chains turned manufacturing into a widespread series of vast groundscrapers. Companies became sequestered in industrial districts, leaving vacant urban sites behind and taking jobs with them. The idea of the urban factory as a place that participated in the city became marginalized and segregated from popular notions of urban vibrancy. Industries continued to move further from their prime markets, shifting economies and production methods. Today, digital connections between consumers in retail spaces and the factory floor have resulted in mass-customization, transforming the traditional demand-supply circuit.

Large-scale industry, for the most part, has left cities. But, in spite of this spatial and economic shift, significant vertical urban factories have developed in the past ten years, all of which are seeds of ideas that can inspire us for the future. Three types of contemporary manufacturing spaces have emerged: the Spectacle, the Flexible and the Sustainable. The “spectacle” factory is iconic in design, often with the intent to represent a company brand. The VW Gläserne Manufaktur (The Transparent Factory) by Henn Architekten in Dresden (2001), for example, advertises its clean manufacturing processes through the transparency of its walls.

VW Gläserne Manufaktur (The Transparent Factory), Dresden | Courtesy of Henn Architekten

The “flexible” vertical urban factory, often located in existing loft spaces, is easily changeable to fit new machinery and adapt to economic flux. In Los Angeles, for example, American Apparel has reused former eight-story factories for their integrated vertical production line.

The “sustainable” vertical urban factory can perform multiple functions and integrates ecological building with a variety of manufacturing systems. The current redevelopment of hundreds of acres of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is a prime example of this type of urban industrial redevelopment project.

American Apparel factory | Courtesy of Jessica Varner. Photo by Yan Wang

Cities offer valuable advantages for industrial sustainability. Density allows for shared resources that can support industrial symbiosis — one factory’s heat waste fuels another. Nano and biotech companies, such as those in the Bizkaia eco-industrial park in Bilbao and the new CleanTech corridor along the Los Angeles River, have formed clusters in industrial zones to use proximity to their benefit. Imagine the New York waterfront returning to its manufacturing strength as clusters of vertical factories, linked by water, high-speed elevated rail systems or overhead conveyances, become hubs of production and distribution.

But the benefits of urban factories exist across scale. Today’s urban industry requires a redefinition: to embrace smaller scale shops with highly-skilled labor, the production of niche goods, such as furniture, food, garments or high-tech products, and a collaborative environment where designers (who are often city dwellers) and fabricators work together on high-design items.

With rising costs of oil, manufacturers will need to produce locally to save money, a shift that will also help to limit CO2 emissions. Methods in industrial management, such as lean manufacturing, just-in-time production and cradle-to-cradle recycling, are beginning to reduce production waste. Goods made on demand, without stockpiled materials, allow for smaller, cleaner assembly plants, wherein workers can produce for a more dispersed network. With the advent of open-source manufacturing software, computer numerically-controlled-machines (CNC) and 3D printers, designers can quickly make prototypes and develop a product in small batches.

The vertical urban factory could be reinvented so that supply meets demand for space and is kept flexible for new and future economiesThe viability of vertical urban manufacturing in our postindustrial urban centers is challenged by rising land prices and must be encouraged through financial incentives and zoning adjustments. Neo-cottage industries could be located in new incubator buildings with government support. Local entrepreneurs with shared resources can operate out of existing loft spaces and former factories as a new production market. Industrial zoning should allow for taller, denser, diversified and performative, rather than prescriptive, development. The vertical urban factory could be reinvented so that supply meets demand for space and is kept flexible for new and future economies.

Besides its economic value, a factory has social value and the potential to be a welcome part of a community. It can engage and educate the public about manufacturing. It might circulate information about processes, elevating workers’ social and cultural significance and further influencing interest in local industry and branding, as has been done with various Brooklyn artisanal food companies. In an area such as the Garment District, windows could allow people to see factory production, like in the VW Dresden factory, and entice people to engage with the products being made, thus participating in the inner workings of the city.

Advancements in ecologically-responsible technology mean that clean manufacturing can exist adjacent to residential spaces, and that work and living can be hybridized in new ways. The architectural and urban issues addressing manufacturing in cities present not only an exciting design challenge of integrated systems, new fabrication technologies and emergent materials, but create a demand for new solutions. Vertical urban factories could produce energy rather than just consume it, and workers could recycle goods, rather than spew them out. This in turn would close the loop of making, consuming and recycling as part of a new urban spatial and economic paradigm.

Vertical Urban Factory, developed by Nina Rappaport and exhibited in its first phase in an installation designed by Mike Tower and Mark Kolodziejczak of Studio Tractor and Sarah Gephart of MGMT Design, is on display at the Skyscraper Museum through July 1. Images courtesy of the Skyscraper Museum and Nina Rappaport.

Buckminster Fuller, unbuilt automatic cotton mill, 1952 | Courtesy of North Carolina State University, College of Design. Photo by Ralph Mills.

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Nina Rappaport is an architectural critic, curator, historian and educator. She is the publications director for the Yale School of Architecture, where she edits exhibition catalogs, books and the bi-annual magazine Constructs. She directs and curates the project Vertical Urban Factory, which includes an exhibition series, dialogues and a book with Actar Press. She teaches an urbanism seminar, Alternative Urbanism, in the Syracuse in New York City program and has previously taught at Parsons and Yale. She is author of the book Support and Resist: Structural Engineers and Design Innovation (Monacelli Press, 2007), and has written numerous essays on structural design and architecture, and on industrial architecture and the global industrial landscape for journals such as Acadia, Praxis, Perspecta, Scapes, 306090, Architectural Record, Architecture, Tec21, Metropolis, The Architect’s Newspaper and Deutsche Bauzeitung.

She has curated shows on architecture and photography, including an ongoing exhibition of the work of Ezra Stoller’s architectural and industrial photography at the 1050 K Street Galleries in Washington, D.C; “The Swiss Section,” a 2004 exhibition at the Van Alen Institute focusing on infrastructure; and she co-curated “Saving Corporate Modernism” at the Yale School of Architecture in 2001.

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.

We rejoice in public, outdoor space – dragging chairs around Bryant Park, riding over inter-borough bridges, sitting on stoops, taking the stairs, paying six bucks for a latte to work from a café – because it allows us bust out of the boxes, untethered, mostly unsupervised, and in these places, reclaim our down time and personal space.

With this in mind, and feeling the need to get up from my desk one day last week, I went along to WorkTech 10, a one-day conference on the future of the workplace, at a swank Manhattan venue. [For more Omnibus coverage of the future of the workplace, click here. -Ed.] (Note the discipline of getting up from my desk and the fanciness of the corporate destination, please, because it’s between these two extremes that the day’s discussion ran.)

Images, L-R: Bill Moggridge; Florence Hudson; M Moser Associates.

The purpose of the day was unabashedly commercial: to bring corporate facilities managers and workplace consultants together. So what drew me? The day’s presenters exposed the audience to the broader questions transforming commercial concerns: How does work shape a city? How do cities become workscapes beyond the traditional office block? If we’re not to be victimized by the future, do we merely need to just manage it better?

The answers are demographic, economic, social and, of course, technological. A new generation of digital natives will redefine what work is and where it will get done; cautious optimism after a crushing downturn is also leading us to see Manhattan as what author David Owen calls ‘our nearest close example’ of sustainability through urban density.

Keynote speakers included Bill Moggridge, the newly appointed Director of the Cooper Hewitt Museum; David Owen, New Yorker journalist and author of Green Metropolis; Andrew Laing of workplace consultancy DEGW; and Florence Hudson of IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative.

A series of case studies followed: a comprehensive green retrofit of the Empire State Building, demonstrating not only a 40% saving in that landmark’s energy costs but also implying large commercial real estate’s significant contribution to increasingly sustainable cities; M Moser Associates’ comprehensive corporate facility for Nokia in China, showcasing a corporate ‘city’ within a city on the outskirts of Beijing; and Kursty Groves’ lighthearted look inside the most creative spaces in business, I Wish I Worked There, about enterprises with space to be inspired, think, share, explore – and a sense of humor.

Peter Miscovich of Jones Lang LaSalle, and conference organizer Philip Ross of the UK’s Cordless Group were most excited by and articulate about new communications technologies and their transformative potential for how we work: Skype and video conferences instead of a congested commute; data stored and secured in the cloud rather than on-site in a frigid, cable-filled basement server room; autonomic systems will light, heat and cool buildings adaptively, by occupancy.

From detailed investigations of productivity, Herman Miller’s Jennifer Magnolfi and Microsoft’s Ian Sands suggested that work environments, like software, must be designed programmatically, to be customizable, secure, safe and seamless. In other words, inhabitable. For that, user engagement is critical, to reveal expectations, habits and tools, all clues to responding to the creative demands of that space.

Of course, how technology supports collaboration is a familiar refrain, and we’ve speculated on its impact on the workplace for years, since mainframes were made obsolete by PCs, in turn overtaken by laptops, only to be outdone by smartphones and tablets. What’s new, as we get to work anywhere, is that we will work in ‘post-sedentary’ workspace, said Andrew Laing.

We are already working, as Philip Ross put it, ‘on the pause’ and in third spaces (neither at home, nor a designated office, but in flexible environments, like libraries or for-fee spaces like Soho House) – the places between A and B, snatching time between scheduled meetings.

We won’t go to the office to access hardware and work files, but for the empty space, social contact and pause it provides: For a desk to put down our bags and to charge up devices so we can go greet clients, or, get this, to think, write or sketch quietly or concentrate on our own, if only to emerge, confer and present later.

In the day’s discussion, consideration of where we go to work alone took second place to collaborative work. In the end, what’s enjoyable about work is both social and individual experience, in both environmental and managerial contexts, as Peter Drucker spells out in “Managing Oneself.” If you’re having a lousy day at the office, does it matter how bright the walls are? If you’re working in a windowless cubicle farm with no AC this summer, answer yes, and call your facilities manager.


Rachel Abrams is Creative Director of collaborative design practice, Turnstone Consulting LLC, in New York. She is on the Faculty of the SVA Interaction Design MFA Program, and has also taught Service Design for Public Space to a class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. As a Fellow of the Design Trust for Public Space, she co-edited Taxi 07: Roads Forward, and has recently contributed to New York City’s Taxi of Tomorrow program.

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

A conversation with Adam Friedman

Click audio player to hear Salazar’s interview with Adam Friedman. Running time: 9:36.
Right click here to download the mp3.

The collapse of the financial markets and their subsequent rescue has brought the need for a “real” economy into sharp relief.  While the financial sector was shedding jobs earlier this year, I sat down with Adam Friedman, then executive director of the New York Industrial Retention Network (NYIRN), to talk about the manufacturing industry in New York City and why it’s important.

“Manufacturing today is overwhelmingly very high end and provides very well-paying jobs.” -Adam FriedmanThroughout the five boroughs New Yorkers are producing high end garment and paper products, building green construction materials, furniture, the kitchen sink, and so on. While much needed infrastructure investments and talk of a Green Economy are getting long overdue attention from Washington, many New York businesses are doing the kind of work the national economy seems to be dreaming about. Steady growth in this corner of the economy goes to show the viability of potential investments nationwide.

These jobs also contribute to the vitality of the city and our neighborhoods. High wages, unionized workplaces, benefits, the high walk-to-work ratio of blue-collar communities – for many people, industry jobs are the only jobs in the city that offer a living wage and decent work. Even so, there are tremendous pressures on manufacturers in the city to leave. High rents and inadequate and outdated zoning laws are squeezing manufacturers out of the city.

Political and private interests are also at work, as always. A recent proposal supported by the Bloomberg administration to eliminate zoning protections in the garment district in Midtown means 4,600 workers are battling for survival. Once upon a time (in the 1950s and 60s), 95% of apparel sold in the United States was made here. Today, that number is down to 5%.  With the Garment district under threat of extinction, we should expect to see that number plummet further. If the proposal goes through, designers will not be able to afford the rents for production in the Fashion Capital.

The work by The New York Industrial Retention Network and Adam Friedman, who has since been appointed Director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, are critical voices on how we can make our communities stronger, more innovative, and more resilient. Now more than ever we should bring their work to the forefront.


Nicole Salazar is a Multimedia Producer at the independent TV / Radio news program Democracy Now!. Previously she studied Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Gowanus, Brooklyn.


Image: 3rd Street, Gowanus, Brooklyn. Photo by Nicole Salazar

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.

Frank Duffy is a British architect, noted for his research and design work on the changing nature of the modern office. He is the author of Work and the City, one of five books in Black Dog’s Edge Futures series that explores the impact of global climate change on various aspects of social life, including education, transportation, community and Duffy’s own realm of expertise: the nature – and spaces – of work. Duffy’s command of this topic is rare, honed in the thirty-six years since he co-founded DEGW, an architectural firm whose emphasis on social-scientifically informed space-planning practices, organizational consultancy and post-occupancy evaluation makes it singular in the field.

In the book, Duffy argues against contemporary cities’ irrationally low use of their existing office space. In so doing, he echoes in unexpected ways Robin Chase’s call to maximize our use of excess capacity in transportation. And he foreshadows Laura Forlano’s future-facing analysis of new intentional communities springing up in self-organized work environments.

On a recent visit to New York, Duffy took Rosalie Genevro, executive director of the Architectural League, on a walk around Lower Manhattan, to reflect on our office stock and what it means in the context of our changing city.

Read an excerpt of their conversation below, followed by an audio-slideshow of their walk. -C.S.

Rosalie Genevro: Do you see any glimmer of hope in our recent and current financial meltdown?

Frank Duffy: I think the crisis might stimulate a beneficial thought process, in two principal ways. The first is related to the question of sustainability, which I think is going to work its way through the whole system. And the second of course is information technology, which is changing the nature of organizations. The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore, because organizations are always bigger or smaller and constantly changing. At least half of them operate in a virtual world, in a placeless world. The crisis is going to demonstrate that there’s too much space. And a lot of people are going to be frightened by that. Hopefully that fright will lead to some beneficial realizations.

RG: It may be a very painful transition – it seems to me that we already have a lot of empty space that won’t be absorbed because it won’t be needed.

You also make the argument in Work and the City that even in terms of existing space that is occupied, we use it at an irrationally low level – it is just not inhabited much of the time.  Even for people whose interest is in making money from the built environment, that argument doesn’t seem to have penetrated.

Buildings aren’t made out of glass, concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.FD: Actually, I think it will penetrate eventually.  I thought, twenty years ago when I spend a lot of time encouraging development, that facilities managers would bring some intelligence into the system; but instead of thinking about the supply chain, they were much more interested in their own deliverables rather than longer-term use value. The vertical silos that exist within these very large corporations pose another very important problem. We need to weave together, keeping the end-user’s point of view in mind, the organizational silos within which, say, human resources departments look after human resources departments and information technology staff interact only with information technology staff. In that context, it is very difficult to create organizations that are agile.

That being said, there are many things about the American office that are extremely intelligent that Europeans didn’t necessarily pick up on until much later. Americans were less interested in the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk and supported the skills of people like interior designers, space planners, decorators and others whose scope – within the building – was to meet the short-term needs of five- or ten-year tenants. That system was invented here. It’s a wonderful system. And it’s a perfect example of not getting everything “right in a night” but leaving scope for change and adaptation. That’s the principle that I’m trying to articulate in this conversation. Not all design decisions have the same longevity. Buildings aren’t made out of glass and concrete and stone: they’re made out of time, layers of time.

One of the things I like about New York is the juxtaposition of the old and new in the way that the blocks have been developed. That is a component of the recipe for success of long-term urban fabric: it is capable of being modified internally and externally as social and technological change develops. Older stock has been moved out of exclusive office use into other purposes, older buildings turned into apartments for example.

RG: If we are to build fewer new buildings, how do we decide what’s worth building?

FD: Well, I think you can test that. You can think through the process of working on a floor plate or building section, thinking about what its use-potential is.  If I were a building owner these days, that’s something I’d be interested in: the future potential of existing structures, whether they’ll have to be extensively modified to cope with change or not.

I am very much involved with the Olympics at the moment in London.  The so-called “legacy” and “transitional” phases of the Olympic sites are very important.  We’re trying to do a think-over of a way of designing things that can mutate and develop into other things over time.  One of the curses of architecture is its instantaneity.  The definite statements of each individual building do not necessarily cumulatively add up to something that has got the idea of change built into it.  But urbanism should include that idea, and older cities have had that capacity to accommodate change. The mono-functionality that you see from here very clearly is vulnerable.

Another theme is that the design and use of interstitial spaces – made in the context of the knowledge economy – is becoming more important than the buildings themselves or what happens inside them. So, designing for the full spectrum of uses over a large area, having a mix of uses and then having the principle of change built into that so it can develop and mutate and move from one kind of use to another. These are the fundamental secrets of urbanism.

The building isn’t a useful unit of analysis anymore.RG: How can you design for that? That has always seemed to be the accreted nature of cities. The most interesting places tend not to be the work of one hand, of one designer.

FD: Or one financier. It’s always been difficult, but I think we’ve made it worse by the way in which buildings are financed, procured and developed. Cumulatively, over the course of the twentieth century, this has made each building more and more specific and separate in itself rather than something that adds to a more complex urban fabric.

Certainly, from an architectural and user point of view, I’d think about what different building forms can accommodate, and how ambiguity, choice and potential can be built into design over a long period. Thinking about the buildings themselves in a much more sophisticated way. But also thinking about the nature of the interstitial spaces – who owns them, who manages them, who loves them, who takes advantage of them. That’s something that we have not given enough thought to.

RG: Thinking about the interstitial spaces as providing for serendipity or accommodating the unexpected is very hard to do as a designer.

FD: Well I don’t see why it needs to be so. It’s all about scenarios, thinking through what could happen, and what is fixed.

RG: What’s the appropriate role of the public and public decision-making bodies in all of this?

FD: The city and citizens are two levels.  The city should always fight for the long-term.  The individuals always try to find ways of penetrating the system to make sure that it meets their changing needs.  There are feedback channels that should be built into much more of the urban fabric.

The fascinating paradox of the power of technology and its ability to allow people to choose when and where to work, is that it actually makes more poignant and more important the city-like things that are good at bringing people together. The more we disperse, the more we need to congregate. I think the true nature of a city is discourse, especially in a knowledge economy. It’s about places – serendipitous encounters. That’s another design principle to be brought into urbanism. Places that are valuable because they are unprogrammed and open-ended and allow accidents to happen.

For a long time there was a correlation between the patterns of work and the shape of the building. What’s happening now is that patterns of work are changing faster than the shape of the buildings. And we have models of buildings that are inherently vulnerable because they are not good at accommodating groups, they are not permeable, they make assumptions about levels of occupancy that are untenable and easily refuted. They can’t be changed into anything else.

They’re brittle – they snap, they can only do one trick.

I became aware of this in the 60s and 70s in the regeneration of the decayed industrial cities of the UK – Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham. In order to bring great stretches of the Liverpool docks back into beneficial use, we had to realize that the older buildings – because they were robust and adaptable – could be used for a wide range of purposes apart from what was originally designed. They could be used as art galleries, workshops or hotels, for example.

What’s the lesson there? The lesson is about making a building tough enough to accommodate change, to have enough volume, to have columns in the right places, attractive ceiling heights, a relationship to the sky and the outside that is tolerable. These were considered to be obsolete and useless, but they were brought back to life. So I think the difference is that these newer office buildings are so flimsy – so value-engineered – that they have only a very limited range of utility.

The reinvention of place, the pleasure of place, the use of place for talk, commerce, etc. That’s terrific. To be freed from the “8-hour day.”  These are, in human terms, recent inventions, no older than 200 years. People thought of and used time in a very different way before that.  And we’ll invent something new ourselves. This discussion about the nature of buildings is only a subset of a much broader discourse about the nature of life in what I hope will be a much better world. I don’t think the twentieth century’s my favorite century actually. I think there were one or two things wrong with it.

Click ‘Play’ button below to start slideshow

Interview conducted by Rosalie Genevro. Edited and condensed.
Photos by Cassim Shepard.

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.

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that uses art and visual culture to increase the quality of public participation in urban planning and community design. CUP specializes in creating interdisciplinary collaborations that bring together designers, educators, advocates, and community residents to improve urban life in New York City and beyond.

Making Policy Public (MPP) is one of CUP’s programs: a series of fold-out posters that use graphic design to explore and explain public policy. Each poster is the product of a commissioned collaboration between a designer and an advocate. This series aims to make information on public policy truly public: accessible, meaningful, and shared.

This winter, the MPP jury paired designer Candy Chang with Sean Basinski of the Street Vendor Project to work with CUP staff to demystify the rules and regulations of street vending in New York City. Here, she shares the process and product of this endeavor. In doing so, she makes a strong case for further extending the kinds of collaboration that Making Policy Public embodies, and for establishing more peer-to-peer platforms – identified by advocates and communicated through good design – for information exchange between citizens.

Stay tuned to the Omnibus for a process narrative of another Making Policy Public poster, Predatory Equity, coming up in a couple weeks.

Six pairs of sunglasses, five hand bags, two scarves, seven books, one DVD, six magazines, two hats, two umbrellas, one necklace, three photographs, one wallet, four t-shirts, one notebook, three pairs of ear muffs, eight pairs of slippers, one watch (that I still wear after five years), and countless hot dogs, pretzels, noodles, biryani, crepes, falafel, halal, dosas, rice wraps, roasted nuts, bagels, and coffee: these are some of the things I’ve consumed thanks to New York City’s 10,000+ street vendors. It wasn’t until recently, however, that I realized how much drama they have to endure to make an honest living.

I’m a big fan of CUP and when they posted an open call to designers and advocacy groups to work together through their Making Policy Public Program, I happily applied. Sean Basinski (The Street Vendor Project), Rosten Woo (CUP), John Mangin (CUP), and I collaborated for five months to translate NYC’s complex vending regulations into an accessible fold-out poster. CUP served as project manager and provided working stipends, research assistance, and direction throughout the process. Our goal was to make an educational resource for vendors that clarifies the rules and their rights when confronted by police officers. We also wanted the poster to serve as an advocacy tool that highlights the history of vending, personal vendor stories, and policy reforms to help develop a more just system. At the end CUP would publish several thousand copies of the poster, provide distribution support, and give 1000 copies to The Street Vendor Project for use in their advocacy and education work.

A lawyer and former vendor himself, Sean founded The Street Vendor Project in 2001 as a legal advocacy group for NYC street vendors. The organization has 700+ vendor members who collectively work together to make their voices heard. They publish reports to raise public awareness about vendor issues, file lawsuits to support vendor rights, and help vendors grow their businesses by linking them with small business training and loans. While meeting at Sean’s office to learn more about vending issues and challenges, he pulled out a box containing heaps of pink tickets they’ve accumulated from local vendors:

The violations are mostly for the physical position of vendors’ carts and tables, which must be certain distances from curbs, crosswalks, and building doors. Vendors are also frequently ticketed for not “conspicuously” wearing their vending license and for setting up shop on restricted streets. It’s an uphill battle for vendors, whose interests have often been quashed by the City’s “quality of life” crackdowns. It’s virtually impossible to get a general vending license and the estimated wait is several decades! There are tons of street restrictions, partly due to the leverage of powerful business groups. And the fines are shockingly steep at $1000 – as a comparison, a parking ticket is $65. To top it off, all these regulations are buried in documents full of intimidating jargon and heinous text formatting that would make even the most patient person cry. Here’s an example page from the City’s vending regulations book:

Snap! Can the City be ticketed for bad formatting? These resources not only make it confusing for vendors but for the government too. Sean pointed out several tickets where even the police officers got the rules wrong. And worse yet, what if English is your second language? Ever since the first Jewish, Italian and Irish pushcart markets formed in lower Manhattan in the 1880s, immigrants have made up a large part of the vending workforce. Its low startup costs, independence, and flexibility make it a traditional first stop for small business entrepreneurs. Today over 80% of NYC vendors in lower Manhattan are born outside the U.S., particularly Bangladesh, China, Senegal and Afghanistan. Seeing a document like this makes me wonder how anyone has the moxie to vend at all!

We learned more at The Street Vendor Project’s monthly meeting where vendors join forces to inform each other about current issues and take an active role in making changes. City officials are proposing that vendors can never leave their cart (who needs bathroom breaks?) and that all vendors must display an unobstructed 36″ x 18″ sign that displays all their appropriate licenses. This would take up serious space on their size-restricted tables. Vendor and board member Larry McDonald said, “Forget about your goods. You’re going to be selling the sign!”

I also spoke with individual street vendors like Munnu, who sells hot dogs and pretzels at the corner of Lafayette and Reade. He moved to NYC from Bangladesh and has been a street vendor for 17 years, but it hasn’t been easy. “One time I got a ticket because my jacket covered my license, and then I have to pay $1000 fine,” he said, “Do you have $1000 in your pocket? You don’t have it! I don’t have it! This hand makes money and the other hand finishes it very fast. How do they think I can give so much?”

While learning about the challenges vendors face – and enjoying the best burritos, biryani, arepas and more at the annual Vendy Awards – we started thinking about the content of the poster. How much would be directed towards street vendors as a much-needed resource, and how much would be an educational/advocacy tool about street vendors and regulation reform? How much would be about clarifying the convoluted regulations into clear graphics and how much would be about showing just how convoluted it currently is?

After we established a general scope of content, I made “wire frame” mockups and marked each page of the fold-out poster with titles and image placeholders. This gave us a foundation to discuss the order, prominence, and general layout of the content. We placed vendor-targeted information in the first folds so vendors can easily access it on a day-to-day basis and within the small confines of some carts. We also started thinking about how to make the rules as pictorial as possible and include text translations in Bengali, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish.

The fully-opened poster was devoted to a few elements, including personal stories from local vendors, historical background (NYC vending started when four Jewish peddlers set up pushcarts along Hester Street), fun facts (Jerry Seinfeld was once a vendor, and Bloomingdale’s, D’Agostino and Macy’s all started as pushcarts), and recommended regulation reforms (lift the license caps, increase street access, reduce the fines, and reform administration and enforcement). While this spread was geared towards educating non-vendors, Sean noted its equal value to vendors so they could feel less informal and take pride in a profession that has been so integral to New York’s history.

I tried different visual styles, from old world LES charm to photographs of actual objects on the sidewalks. The guys were open to anything that best facilitated the content, and Rosten championed as much diagrammatic information as possible. Sean made a good point that, whatever the style, the poster should have a sense of “authority” so vendors could use it as a trustworthy-looking resource when dealing with police officers.

I eventually landed on a friendly Chris Ware-inspired style and had good times illustrating everything from hot dog stands to former Mayor Ed Koch. I printed a lot of homemade versions so we had hard copies to peruse and mark up during meetings. Here’s a look at the poster-in-progress at three stages:

Over the course of our bi-weekly discussions, many elements evolved. Things that were initially little (sidebar of fun facts) became a centerpiece. Things that got tossed to the wayside (John’s extensive timeline research) became useful fodder integrated into the policy reforms. And things that were once separate (vendor types, personal stories, policy reforms) became one coherent cityscape.

We got feedback from vendors about clarity, content, symbols, language and text translations. We tried to challenge all our assumptions – is “>” a universal symbol for “greater than”? Is a green check symbol the opposite of a red x’d circle? Are the abbreviations for feet, inches, and meters clear? Here’s the final version:

Vendor Power! Hopefully this fold-out poster not only saves vendors some headaches but allows the city to direct its energy (and our tax money) towards more pressing issues. In order to put this information directly in the hands of people who need it the most, CUP organized a citywide distribution event where volunteers handed out free copies to vendors across the city. Unfortunately I was way up in Helsinki, but here’s some photos of the big day from CUP:

And here are some first-hand thoughts from John:

“The poster went public with a citywide distribution extravaganza on a Saturday in late March. We got about 20 volunteers to take the posters to vendors on the job. Cheikh Fall, a vendor himself, helped us map the city’s vendor-dense areas and estimate numbers. The weather was iffy, but that wouldn’t matter, he said – April rent was due soon and the vendors would be out in force.

The volunteers met us downtown to pick up Google maps and a big stack of posters. From there they fanned out to Jackson Heights, Fulton Mall, Grand Concourse, Harlem – about 20 neighborhoods in all. (We talked about a Staten Island toe-touch, but it didn’t quite happen.) We put the poster in the hands of about 1,000 vendors. Reactions ranged from enthusiastic to what-took-you-so-long? — more than a few related stories of run-ins with cops or storeowners when the poster could’ve come in handy.”

We heard how technology enables workers to create environments for themselves in the relative absence of employers. As corporations pull back on staffing, we’ll see more liberated workers trying to get things done in a more volatile environment. It’s a case of “who moved my cheese” but also “wow, look what I can do with these constraints removed.”  Those reviewing the state of work need to be diligent about highlighting new work products and work-patterns as they emerge.

Duffy’s presentation framed most of the discussion, drawing on material from his recent book “Work and the City.” He stepped through a brief history of how Frederic Taylor’s Scientific Management principles separated work into discrete explicit tasks, broke down the secret knowledge of the workers, and kept control of the factory floor. He contrasted it with the “social democratic” concerns of Post-War Europe, which created large campuses of office pods that nurtured and insulated the individual at the expense of collaboration and efficiency. Finally, Duffy asked what can be achieved in a 21st Century environment of “ubiquitous access to networked resources.” Do the old requirements of worker co-location and synchrony apply?

In response, Duffy argued that the current complex of real estate interests, architectural firms, and construction companies now creates its Class-A real estate according to accumulated conventions but without much thought of workers’ real present needs. Duffy challenged all parties to rethink the status quo: for successful workspaces to take shape, workers needs will have to regain priority in the building process.

The other speakers both corroborated and challenged Duffy’s analysis. Nicole Russo of the Downtown Alliance spoke of the real-world success transforming an office building in the Financial District into residential housing. Even these difficult spaces can be reclaimed and repurposed. If zoning is prescribing, rezoning is ‘re-scribing’ what these buildings should do. Laura Forlano pointed to an increasingly mobile workforce’s practical successes transforming public places into usable workspaces.

Audience members weighed in from the conservative side (it’s very hard to translate new ideas for a clients “looking for a certain amount of square footage on a certain piece of dirt”) to the progressive (new workspaces and work-patterns, such as coworking, are out there looking for more academic and media attention).

Looking forward, these concepts and problems get some real-world testing this summer during the Breakout Festival starting September 12 through the work of the Architectural League, DEGW, the Downtown Alliance, and NYCwireless (including yours truly).

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

Rob Kelley manages technology projects that connect mobile, social and local space. His past experience includes JetBlue Airways and WeightWatchers.com. He serves on the Board of NYCwireless, helping to make New York City a better place.