Experiments In Motion by INABA

E x p er i m en ts IN M o t io n 1

Audi of America in partnership with...

E x p er i m en ts IN M o t io n Resource document for internal use by 2 Experiments in Motion participants

Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP)

Experiments in Motion

Our central hypothesis is that, for the last 100 years, cities have had to react to cars, for good and bad— mainly bad. But, for the next 100 years, cars are going to have to respond to cities. The city of the future is going to ask the car different questions and demand different answers. Cities might ask the car to be something else than a car. That’s very interesting to car manufacturers, in terms of the future of their business. At the same time, it’s very interesting to an architecture school, because we’re interested in the future of the city.

Introduction Mark Wigley

Of course, we don’t know very much about the city of the future; it’s entirely possible that we know more about life on Mars. The future of cities is really unclear, and the future of vehicles is really unclear, and so we have this interesting intersection between the research arm of a highly experimental business that makes vehicles, and a highly experimental school that is engaged in imagining the future of the city. Our starting position is to combine the research capacities of Audi’s insight teams and of GSAPP and to try to imagine possible ways to frame—if not answer— this question together. Even if we don’t know what our shared future is, our past is a shared dream of motion. Deep down in every architect, there’s some sort of fantasy about motion. And, if you talk to people who make cars, drive cars, advertise cars, or make films about cars, they’re always dreaming about space. One of the paradoxes is that the people who are experts in motion—the automobile makers—actually don’t think about motion, because it’s their core knowledge. It’s possible that architects don’t just dream about motion —we might know more about motion than people who make cars. What’s more, it’s equally possible that the reverse might be true. Architects don’t necessarily think about space in a 4

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conscious sense—it’s our core business, so we just assume we’re delivering it. Those fantasies about space that vehicle experts have might—perhaps—be even more interesting and more perceptive about space than our own ideas. This overlap—this strange relationship between motion and space—is not just found in our shared dreams and future, it’s as old as the very oldest images. In the oldest artwork in the world, the Chauvet cave paintings (fig. 1), movement is already being represented in the way that we think is later typical of the arrival of cinema.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 1. Chauvet Cave Art, Prehistoric The image itself hasn’t moved for 32,000 years, but it’s an image of movement—a motionless image that carries motion, in a way that is curiously reminiscent of the time motion studies of Marey from the 1890s (fig. 2–4). 5

Fig. 2. Etienne-Jules Marey, motion study, ca. 1890

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Fig. 3. Etienne-Jules Marey, motion study, ca. 1890

Fig. 4. Etienne-Jules Marey, motion study, ca. 1890 These images have always been very influential on architects. If architecture is an object that doesn’t move, the thought that something that doesn’t move could communicate motion, like this cave painting or 6

like Marey’s images, has given us a lot of insights. And, as they become more precise and more refined over the course of the last century, it’s clear that not only are these images of motion but they are also images of space. At a certain point, the body that is moving has gone. What’s left is just the shadow of movement, and, from that, we can imagine how complicated it is for someone to walk. In other words, from this image of movement, we can try to understand the object, in the same way that when you look at leaves that move in the wind, you can see the wind and you can imagine its shape.

Introduction

This photograph shows the most influential architect of the twentieth century, Le Corbusier, and his wife, by his beloved Voisin car (fig. 5). In part, this is a classic example of the car as fetish object—it’s boys and their toys. She sits. She’s an object like a car. She’s touching the car—she’s part of the car—and he stands as the owner of both.

Fig. 5. Le Corbusier and wife with Voisin car 7

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Fig. 6.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Le Corbusier, Villa Stein, 1927

But it’s more than that. For architects, the car has always been the very paradigm of modernity. Modern architecture is unthinkable outside a certain fantasy about the car—as movement, not just as an object— the way it is produced, its speed, its styling, its evolution... Le Corbusier was always attached to his car. The car is always attached to his architecture. In these iconic images of Villa Stein (fig. 6, 7), we see the same car, moved into perfect alignment as if it is part of the composition. Le Corbusier is thinking of the car as a kind of architecture. The car has the quality of a room—a room that moves. It’s already architecture, with seats, a view, and windows—horizontal windows, no less.

Introduction

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Fig. 7. Le Corbusier, Villa Stein, 1927 Meanwhile, Le Corbusier is dreaming about an architecture that moves—an object that dreams, perhaps, of being a car. The car looks at the house and says, “I’m like you but with wheels.” And the house looks at the car and says, “I’m like you but with more capacity.” Le Corbusier remains obsessed with these cars. He designs his city as the Plan Voisin (fig. 8); he shows photographs of automobile factories; he traces the history of the automobile as an architectural history, culminating in the most famous page of his most famous book, Toward An Architecture (fig. 9).

Introduction Fig. 8.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Le Corbusier, Voisin sketch, ca. 1925

Fig. 9.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture, trans. 1927 The point of this page is not simply to argue that the automobile has the classical beauty that one would associate with the Parthenon. Le Corbusier is simply saying the Parthenon is just a technical object that 10

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over time has been perfected. The history of Greek temples is the history of a technical evolution that culminates in the Parthenon, which is art. And art transcends time. Likewise, after years of work, suddenly an automobile transcends its speed to become art. In Toward an Architecture, Le Corbusier shows this evolution of the car, which culminates, for him, in the Fiat building, with a racetrack atop the building (fig.10).

Introduction

Experiments in Motion Fig. 10. Giacomo Mattè-Trucco, Fiat building, 1923 Of course, Le Corbusier also designed his own car. Almost every architect you can think of designed a car: Adolf Loos, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Jean Prouvé, Carlo Mollino, Buckminster Fuller, and so on. Almost all of these cars are terrible as cars, but they represent the architect’s dream to shape the space of speed. In Le Corbusier’s own history of speed—La Vitesse— you can see, from 1850, which marks the beginnings of modern engineering, an exponential acceleration from the train to the telegraph to the airplane and so on (fig. 11). The graph shows that the world of the modern architect is the world of speed, of which the paradigm is the automobile. Famously, of course. Le Corbusier designs these amazing projects for Rio de Janeiro in 1929 and Algiers in 1930, in which, like the Fiat building, the housing is an extension of the highway (fig. 12).

Fig. 11. Le Corbusier, La Vitesse sketch

Introduction

Fig. 12. Le Corbusier, sketch for Rio de Janeiro

Le Corbusier tells us that a city made for speed is made for success, and then he calls speed a brutal necessity. He’s thrilled when, finally, in 1934, he’s allowed to drive a car on the roof of the Fiat building (fig. 13). What’s going on here is much more than the architect falling in love with the speed or the technology. It’s about the perception. Le Corbusier shows us that the landscape seen from the highway is a different landscape.

Fig. 13. Le Corbusier, driving on Fiat building rooftop, 1934 Of course, when Le Corbusier says that a city built for speed is a beautiful city, he’s echoing Marinetti. Marinetti, shown here in his automobile (fig. 14), was 12

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another proud driver. The Futurists—and Marinetti, in particular—are famous for writing about the beauty of speed. The very first Futurist Manifesto is about Marinetti’s automobile accident, after which he feels himself to be more alive than before.

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Fig. 14. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in car, 1912

Fig. 15. Anton Bragaglia, motion study, 1911 But this is not just the kind of beauty found in automobiles or even automobile crashes—it’s also in a very particular kind of photography, which they call 13

photodynamism. It’s not like Étienne-Jules Marey; it’s not a series of fragmented or dissected motions. It’s motion itself in its continuity. These images are all understood to be a critique of Marey (fig. 15). What Bragaglia, whose photograph this is, says, is that “we seek the interior essence of things: pure movement; and we prefer to see everything in motion.” This is not simply the world in motion, or an object in motion; this is motion itself as a kind of object, as a way of being in the world.

Introduction

In these stunning images, a blur is the main event. What you see as the object—what you imagine to be a person—is just, in a way, the mechanism for allowing this movement to take place. There is also a psychological dimension. It’s as if you’re seeing the many faces of one person. This way of fragmenting the identity of a person should be seen in relationship to the Cubist paintings that broke up the face, and which, of course, are the subject of Le Corbusier’s first book, Après le Cubisme.

Fig. 16. Anton Bragaglia, ‘Typewriter,’ 1911 In images like this, what you see is not simply a head, moving; instead, there is a movement with a head inside it, with a head being produced by it. This is, in some ways, more like what one sees with the 14

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computer architecture of a younger generation in which the movement path is actually making form, as distinct from a form being put into motion. It would be too simple to say that someone is typing in this image (fig. 16). This is more an image of typing as movement, to which you could then imagine a typist. The typist is simply the prosthetic apparatus for making typing possible. A typist does not type; rather, typing requires someone we will call a typist. In the same way, the driver of the automobile is not simply the driver moving an object in space. Movement itself calls for an assistant, and the assistant is the driver.

Introduction

And then you see these famous images made by Giacomo Balla in 1912-1913, which are based on the speed of the automobile and which, again, reference the Marey images (fig. 17).

Fig. 17. Giacomo Balla, ‘Velocità d’automobile,’ 1913 Balla concentrates on a loss of fixed boundaries. No matter how much you look at this image, you can’t privilege one space over another. If you look more closely, you’ll see that there’s a lot of architecture (in the classic sense) defined here. Really, this is an image of streetscape and the movement of a car and the optical disturbance that that produces, so that the city is now no longer a space where the object moves but is a 15

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space defined by movement. Balla elaborates literally hundreds of these works, and they are all about time, although not time in a strictly linear way, nor in the sense of acceleration.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 18. Giacomo Balla, ‘Velocità astratta,’ 1913 This image of Balla’s will make its way into Sigfried Giedion’s Histories of Modern Architecture (fig. 18). The most influential historian of architecture was very inspired by these Futurist images of motion.

Fig. 19. Sigfried Giedion

Fig. 20. Sigfried Giedion, Eiffel Tower, 1928 16

This image of Giedion as a young man is set alongside his own photograph, looking up at the Eiffel Tower (fig. 19, 20). His first book on architecture,Bauen in Frankreich: Eisen und Eisenbeton [Building in France] of 1928, features the Eiffel Tower, which dates back to 1889. Avery Hall is from 1881, so this school here was born in the same moment as the Eiffel Tower, which is, of course, a temporary building, understood as a display building for creating a new perception of Paris, and a new form of movement. And what Giedion argues in his book is that at that moment, towards the end of the nineteenth century, perception had changed radically.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 21. Sigfried Giedion, Eiffel Tower, 1928 These are images of Giedion looking up into the vertiginous structure of the Eiffel Tower (fig. 21). What he’s saying here is that there’s no up, down, or sideways, and, instead, there’s a kind of blurring or reduction of boundaries. When we speak about modern architecture, we always speak of the loss of the boundary between inside and outside.This is that loss—which is to say, in this vertiginous world, it is no longer clear what is in or out, and all spaces interpenetrate (this was his favorite word).

The result is a blur. You look at these images, and, although every detail is very precise and every detail is a piece of metal, the overall effect is one of confusion. Even Bauen in Frankreich was designed for speed—the book designed by Moholy-Nagy with a very particular layout that was meant to be read in a hurry. Giedion imagined the reader as a hurried reader and he’s talking about experimental buildings like the Eiffel Tower that are built quickly and are meant to be taken away. He’s talking about a fast-moving reader of a fast-moving book about a fast-moving architecture that’s basing itself on speed.

Introduction

If Giedion loves the Eiffel Tower, which he photographs so well, he also has another set of photographs of this bridge in Marseille from 1905, and that is where he feels all of this argument has been perfected (fig. 22, 23). Writing of this bridge, Giedion makes the case that, in this world that is full of new possibilities, everything is based on movement. “The street has been transformed into a stream of movement,” he says, and almost everything streams through the open net of the building.

Fig. 22, 23. Sigfried Giedion, bridge in Marseille, 1905 What’s so beautiful for him about this structure is that it allows everything to stream through it, because there’s no inside or outside. In fact, it’s just a piece of the street that can be lifted up and floated across the river. Basically, it’s just a prosthetic device 18

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that allows the street to keep on going even when there’s a river in the way, by allowing a piece of the street to be suspended and carried across. The street is reduced to a fragmentary unit on which the car can rest and be moved, and the bridge is a device for keeping the movement path going even when there’s water underneath.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 24. Sigfried Giedion, bridge in Marseille, 1905 The bridge keeps your movement going, by becoming a virtual road—a temporary road that can come and go. And this bridge, photographed very beautifully by Giedion (fig. 24, 25), was then used by Moholy-Nagy as the cover of Bauen in Frankreich (fig. 26). Giedion’s image of the future of architecture, at that point, is this bridge from 1905.

Fig. 25. Sigfried Giedion, bridge in Marseille, 1905

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Fig. 26. Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich,1928 But if we look at Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture of 1941, the bridge has been replaced by the Randall’s Island cloverleaf here in New York (fig. 27). A highway intersection is now his image of what he calls the “space-time conception,” both in the structuring and the handling of movement. The most influential historian of modern architecture used automobile traffic systems as his paradigms of what architecture should emulate. 20

Introduction

Experiments in Motion Fig. 27. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture,1941 A section of the book is called “Research into Movement”, and it starts with a Balla image called, Abstract Speed - The Car Has Passed—an image of a shadow in time of movement (fig. 28). Then Giedion also uses Harold Edgerton’s speed photographs of a tennis player (fig. 29).

Fig. 28. Giacomo Balla, ‘Abstract Speed - The Car has Passed,’ 1913

Fig. 29. Harold Edgerton, ‘Tennis Player in Motion,’ 1939

Introduction

The section culminates in one of Edgerton’s images of a golf swing placed alongside Giedion’s own photocollage of Rockefeller Center (fig. 30, 31). Giedion is showing that, in this breaking up of time, and in this world where there’s no longer a clear inside and outside—a world of pure movement, a world of streaming—the real way one sees the Rockefeller Center is from all these different angles in this interpenetrating collage. This relates to the Cubist sensibility, of course, but it’s not exactly Cubist in its nature.

Fig. 30. Harold Edgerton, ‘Golf Swing,’ 1938

Fig. 31. Sigfried Giedion, Rockefeller Center, 1941 22

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Introduction Fig. 32. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948 A few years later, in 1948, Giedion writes Mechanization Takes Command, in which, again, time-motion studies are absolutely central (fig. 32). In the book, he writes a sort of pre-history of motion studies, starting with Muybridge in 1878 (fig. 33), then moving on to Marey’s work between 1882 and 1900 (fig. 34, 35), and then arriving at Taylor, in the 1890s, and the subsequent Taylorization and Gilbreth images of movement.

Fig. 33. Eadweard Muybridge, man descending steps,1878

Experiments in Motion

Introduction Fig. 34, 35. Etienne-Jules Marey, ca. 1882-1900 Giedion makes a comparison between these kinds of movement—the Gilbreth image of the motion of someone’s hand, on the right, and a Miró on the left, to argue that artists were also sensitive to this new way of understanding movement (fig. 36).

Fig. 36. Joan Miró, ‘Composition,’ 1935 and Frank B. Gilbreth, ‘Chronocyclograph of a Motion,’ ca. 1917 24

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But the special gift of this book is to say that, if you really want to know the way the world is going, you have to look at industrial furniture in the United States—to look at designs for chairs that moved and adjusted themselves to the movement of your body. In other words, even when I’m sedentary, when I’ve finally stopped moving at the end of the day, my chair needs to move in order that I can not move. In order to rest, my chair needs to move.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion Fig. 37. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948 What that means is that each of these images shows a design that awaits the body that will complete it. All of this culminates in the surgical chair that you see in the bottom left. The surgical chair is perfectly designed so that your body will move in space—so that you can remain asleep and entirely comfortable while the surgeon takes things out and put things into your body (fig. 37). As Giedion notes, this surgical chair—this moving piece of architecture—is from the same year as the Eiffel Tower. Then, in the same book, he has images of prosthetic legs, as if to say that the motion machine, the surgical chair, is a part of your body—it extends your body, it’s an artificial body. This, in some ways, is the essence of twentiethcentury thought: that modern architecture is the architecture of motion, which is not the architecture of objects that move, but rather an act of defining the space of movement itself as a space, in which humans move through prosthetic extensions, and so these 25

prosthetic extensions are really the things that occupy movement (fig. 38).

Introduction

Fig. 38. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948 Le Corbusier and others repeatedly said that your building is like your car, and your typewriter is a prosthetic extension of your body, and so on. This obsession with motion and with cars is really an obsession with a new kind of prosthetics.

Fig. 39. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948 Fig. 40. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 1948 26

Experiments in Motion

It is not by accident that, in Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion sets alongside each other the mass production of the automobile (fig. 39) and the slaughterhouse (fig. 40), which he calls the dis-assembly plant. The production of the body of the car, which promises to be a new body that will allow one to move differently through the world, coincides with an incredible expansion of our abilities to destroy the existing body, and to reduce it to its constituent parts. This question of prosthetics is not just a philosophical point, it’s quite a literal point.

Introduction

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Fig. 41. Frank B. Gilbreth, motion study of a surgeon, ca. 1915 To return to Gilbreth, this is a time motion study of the movement of a surgeon’s hand—the most expert hand (fig. 41). In fact, Gilbreth did a lot of work with the crippled during the First World War. He disagreed with his French comrades who argued that we should just produce the most beautiful prosthetics, and that a wounded soldier with no arm or leg should just wait for the best prosthetic arm or leg possible. Gilbreth argued, instead, that we should see how their crippled body moves differently and find a way they can use their body to do their task. On the one hand, we have a surgeon repairing damage to the body (fig. 42), and then, in an image made by 27

Introduction Fig. 42. Frank B. Gilbreth, motion study of a surgeon, ca. 1915

Fig. 43.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Frank B. Gilbreth, motion study of a sword, ca. 1915

Experiments in Motion

Gilbreth in the same year, the movement of a sword— an instrument that is designed to damage the body (fig. 43). The sword will cut you up and then the surgeon will sew you up, and both the damaging of your body and the repair of your body will be the same kind of movement in space. In these images, you can sense that there is an architecture and that even there are people there, but they have become secondary to the movement. The movement itself is the form.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 44. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, motion study, 1913 Ultimately, what these images are doing is defining a space of movement as an extension of the body. In these typical time-motion studies, there is a space of movement and the person’s body is suspended in relationship to this space (fig. 44). The person becomes a kind of slow-moving object relative to a fastmoving space of movement, and the real prosthetic of the body is not an object but this space. The worker inhabits an extension of his or her own body. In fact, this extended field of movement is a new body—it is a new ability, a new kind of choreography, and we suddenly realize that the worker is a dancer. This is a dancer who is not simply moving around in an established space, but rather a dancer whose movement creates space, creates a kind of architecture.

We find similar arguments in László Moholy-Nagy, who publishes Vision in Motion in the same year as Mechanization Takes Command comes out (fig. 45). He takes very, very similar photographs to Giedion, of, for example, the Eiffel Tower and the bridge in Marseille. This is because Moholy-Nagy was on vacation in Paris with Giedion in 1925, when they took these photographs. It’s really Moholy-Nagy’s ideas about space, time-space, and time-space-motion that became the basis of Giedion’s famous Space, Time and Architecture in 1941.

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 45. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 1947 Moholy-Nagy was already looking at this kind of movement during the war, with the movement of searchlights. Light is moving through a space in the sky, and if an airplane is seen in this space, it will be shot. This is a space you don’t want to be seen in, this is an architecture you don’t want to enter—but it is architecture. It is architecture defined in the sky above a city. Eventually these kinds of images will be photographed by György Kepes, who had been working with Moholy-Nagy since 1930 in Berlin, and then 30

came to be with him in Chicago, and then began producing these kinds of amazing images of movement in automobiles, in which the image itself has movement because the person is walking towards the automobile (fig.46).

Introduction

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Fig. 46.â&#x20AC;&#x201A; GyĂśrgy Kepes, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences, 1956 These remarkable images become not even lines of movement, but a kind of blurry vibration. In 1956, Kepes published more of these images. In this one, a man is walking toward a hotel and the movement of his body is affecting the camera, which is moving in relationship to automobiles that have their own movement, and so architecture, automobile, and human are now suspended in this sort of vertiginous, overlapping space (fig. 47, 48). These are quite remarkable images, that would have been seen as images of modernity itselfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;as images of the world in which we live and for which we would design.

Introduction Fig. 47. György Kepes, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences, 1956

Fig. 48. György Kepes, motion study, 1953

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Fig. 49. György Kepes, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences, 1956

Introduction

You can find these images of the virtual volume created by lights going all the way back to MoholyNagy’s first book in 1928, On Architecture, one of the first of the Bauhaus books. These are MoholyNagy’s own photographs of movement in space, seen through the neons of hotels (fig. 49). Kepes is picking up on Moholy-Nagy’s argument, and Moholy-Nagy is publishing Kepes’ images, such as this one.

Fig. 50. György Kepes, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences, 1956 33

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Kepes did his own book in 1956, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences (fig. 50), in which he captures the new motion of atomic particles captured in a cloud chamber (fig. 51, 52). You notice in all these pictures that it’s no longer about lines and about the movement of an object in space; it’s about ripples, about quakes, about vibrations, about networks, about swarms. These are amazing images, culminating in this image of automobiles seen by someone walking down the road in Chicago.

Introduction

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Fig. 51. György Kepes, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences, 1956

Fig. 52. György Kepes, The New Landscape in Arts and Sciences, 1956 34

For Kepes, these images, which are mainly scientific but also artistic, capture the flux of modernity, the flux of motion. Traffic is the limit condition, and the automobile is hanging around this argument like a ghost.

Introduction

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Fig. 53. Richard Hamilton, Man, Machine, and Motion, 1965 Then, in 1965, Richard Hamilton curates an exhibition called Man, Machine and Motion in London (fig. 53). On the cover of the catalogue is an image that makes you feel the movement of this automobile. The exhibition is basically a display of 200 photographs documenting the new forms of motion, inspired by Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command and Hamilton’s own artwork, which in turn was very influenced by Muybridge’s famous studies of the human figure in motion. Hamilton’s exhibition was originally called Human Motion in Relation to Adaptive Appliances, which is to say prosthetic extension of the body. The central question, for Hamilton, is how is the human becoming a new kind of body with a new kind of movement? 35

Hamilton thinks that the relation between man and machine is a kind of union, the two act together like a single creature, and this also is what Giedion says about your relationship with the moving chair. You’re becoming one organism with your chair, you are your chair, or even that you in your chair is more like you than you, because you complete the chair, and in sitting in the chair you complete yourself. This is exactly the prosthetic logic of this machine (fig. 54).

Introduction

Experiments in Motion Fig. 54. Richard Hamilton, Man, Machine, and Motion, 1965 Reyner Banham, the British architectural critic, also wrote an essay for this catalogue—a sort of opening speech called “Metal in Motion: The Iconography of the Automobile.” You have all these architects, these artists connected to architecture, and these teachers of design thinking about motion, photographing motion, studying the documentation of motion, and positioning their work in that context, in that year. In the same year, Banham wrote his famous Vehicles of Desire, about the shaping of the American automobile. Actually, Banham never wrote an essay that didn’t refer to cars. And he didn’t know how to drive, but he’s really obsessed with this thing that he didn’t know how to do. He knew how to ride bicycles and all the images we have of him are of him riding a bicycle. In 1965—still the same year—Banham also writes one of his most famous essays, “A House is not a Home,” in collaboration with Francois Dallegret, an architect trained at L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In this 36

photo, you can see that Dallegret’s relationship to his car is like Le Corbusier’s relationship to his Voisin (fig. 55).

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 55. Francois Dallegret with car The car-obsessed non-driver Reyner Banham partnered with Dallegret, an equally car-obsessed dreamer of imaginary vehicles, and together they produced the famous Bubble house (fig. 56), in which you see a naked Banham with a naked Dallegret celebrating the fact that a house is no longer filled with anything but communication systems because your cars (and you see the car on the right) have everything else inside them. Architecture is entirely usurped by the car. Everything you normally associate with architecture is in the car. It’s a radical argument of the car as architecture, so that all you’re left with is this technical bubble. This is the argument that’s affecting the angelic Mike Webb of Archigram, who, in the same year, is doing his automobile-house and his driving housing 37

projects. He’s still working on these projects today, and you see some of the versions here (fig. 57–59).

Introduction

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Fig. 56. Reyner Banham and Francois Dallegret, ‘The Environment-Bubble,’ 1965 In Webb’s drawings, the automobiles drive into the house and become part of the house, and the house itself is like a technical extension of the system of houses. You can see that this early version leads to this next image, in which the automobile arrives, hits the corner of what you think is a house, and the corner itself turns like an airlock. As it turns, the car opens up and all the pieces of the inside of the car, the seats, music, air-conditioning, and so on—which are like architecture—then transform the parked car into architecture. You see it here opening up, and the seats coming out. Webb is making the argument, following everyone else, that a fast car is a fast house and that all the mechanisms for domestic comfort are already inside it (fig. 60, 61).

Introduction

Experiments in Motion Fig. 57. Michael Webb, ‘Automobile House,’ ca. 1965)

Fig. 58, 59. Michael Webb, ‘Drive-in House,’ 1987 These are extremely beautiful drawings in which Webb assumes that as you are sitting in the car, but, as the car turns, that’s not the way you will experience it. Instead, you will have the experience that the house itself is turning relative to you. In each of these 39

drawings, the position of the seats stays the same: I drive in, the house starts to turn, then my seat turns away from the car. It is an incredibly rigorous project. As the car is turning, it starts to expand. It’s not that the car is simply arriving into a space: there is only the space as the car unfolds and, as it unfolds, it creates the space (fig. 62).

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 60. Michael Webb, ‘Drive-in House,’ 1987 In this drawing, we see a heat map that shows that as the car opens, the heat—my body heat and the heat of the car—creates the warm interior that is the house (fig. 63). In this earlier, more detailed version, we again see Webb getting the car to unfold into a house (fig. 64). Interestingly enough, he attaches a little clipping to this drawing which says, “In 1910, the Futurist Manifesto declared that ‘the motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes and in turn the houses throws themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it.’” This is from the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting of 1910, and, again, we encounter this idea that the vehicle and the house (in this case, the bus and the house) will overlap and interlock and blend together. 40

Fig. 61. Michael Webb, ‘Drive-in House,’ 1987

Introduction

Experiments in Motion

Fig. 62. Michael Webb, ‘Drive-in House,’ 1991

Fig. 63. Michael Webb, ‘Heat Drawing,’ 2003

Fig. 64. Michael Webb, ‘Drive-in House,’ 1987

In some ways, we’ve come full circle. We started towards the beginning of the twentieth century with an early reflection by Giedion and Le Corbusier and others on the fact that in the nineteenth century, motion itself had become space, and that if one is interested in space, in humanity, in the future, one could only be interested in motion. All of this argument was deeply influenced by the Futurists, of course.

Introduction

That argument works itself so deeply into architecture that we forget about it, such that, when it returns again in the 60s and 70s, we have to be reminded of the Futurist link by Mike Webb and Archigram. Then, just 20 years later, a young generation of architects working with the computer will believe themselves to be finally capturing motion as such, and will become fascinated with the Marey images of the 19th century, forgetting about the fact that those images have already organized the thinking of the solid world that they want to surpass. And we could and should follow this history of thinking about motion into space travel, psychedelic drugs, the unconscious, skateboarding, animation, computation, and so on. But always—always—there will be this paradigm, which we might call the prosthetic paradigm. In other words, throughout this hundred-year history of the love affair between architecture and motion, motion has always been thought about as an extension of an object—motion as an extension of your body and of your mind. The Experiments in Motion project simply says, what if, over the next one hundred years, we work with some different paradigms, where motion is no longer conceived as an object in space, an idea moving through space, or even as the space itself, but something else more radical yet. The basic structure of Experiments in Motion begins with a kind of think tank, where we come up with a whole series of new paradigms, and then we do some experiments together, and then we create an 42

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interface to share our findings and our new ideas.

Introduction

The program is built around the assets we have: Columbia University, New York City, and the city’s strong design culture. First of all, we’re going around the university to ask people who never talk about cars and never talk about buildings to tell us about motion. We’re asking the most radical thinkers in the world of engineering, medicine, biochemistry, media, finance, anthropology, climate science, public health, epidemiology, policy, philosophy, history, and more, what motion means to them, in their field. And, in this way, we’re learning about the movement of particles, people, fluids, concepts, perceptions, resources, signals, images, data, money, food, words, viruses, tectonics plate, debt, clouds, sounds, tweets, and everything else besides. Then we’re going out to New York City, to find people who have developed an underground intelligence with motion—people who have become masters and mistresses of motion in order to achieve radical new business or artistic goals. And so we’re arriving at two kinds of new paradigms of motion: the new thoughts of motion going on inside the university and the new forms of motion that are going on in the streets. The next step is to talk to designers and ask them whether they can think of ways in which the relationship between design and motion can become more radical than it is. At the same time, we’ll put a bunch of students and a bunch of teachers into a very dynamic relationship with these questions. They will be thinking about New York, but to think about New York means also thinking about global forces, so these student-teacher teams studying the new forms of motion in New York will also be traveling to Rio and Mumbai and to Beijing to listen to those cities and learn about new forms of motion that might exist there, and bring that back to inform their projects. And, to come full circle myself, at the core of this fast story of motion and architecture is this central 43

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provocation: what if architects have actually forgotten about space, and think we just need to embroider it? What if the people who make cars have really forgotten about motion, and assume they understand it completely and just have to perfect it. What if we could shake each othersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; assumptions up, by going back to motion and do some experiments, in an attempt to develop a new paradigm, with which we can start to think the future of the city differently, from which different ideas about transportation and communication and so on will inevitably flow.

Introduction

My challenge to you is to say: look how amazing our thinking about motion was in the twentieth centuryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; but your job is to go way beyond all this and make that century look boring.

Experiments in Motion

Concepts in Motion I Car Names 67 Transit Names 68 Technologies 69

Personal Mobility Architects and Their Cars 82 Architects and Their Not-Cars 92

Table of Contents

Icon Mobility 97 Buildings and Their Cars 105

Eitan Grinspun 127 Andrew Blum 133 Michael Sheetz 135 Abe Burmeister 137

What Moves Movers 144 Representation 147 Point-Of-View 151 Apparent Stillness 154

Experiments in Motion

Convergence on the City Convergence Timeline 161 The Chosen Scale 176 City-States 181 Smart Systems 185 From Complex To Campus 192 Public Planning 197 Trojan Horse Planning 202

Table of Contents

Mothers Of Invention 207 Altered Realities 212

Natalie Jeremijenko 217 Austin Long 219 Greg Lindsay 223 George Hripcsak 225

City Primer Introduction 230 Maps 245

Juliette Spertus 279 Sean Basinski 282 Adam Mckeown 284 46

Experiments in Motion

Paul Scolieri 286

Sites Adventure Maps 290

Concepts in Motion II Concepts in Motion II 313

GSAPP/Audi Table of Contents

GSAPP/AUDI 321

Studios Architecture After the Street, Jeffrey Inaba 335 Under Over Out, Juergen Mayer and Marc Kushner 338 The City of Mobile Services, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley 340

Experiments in Motion

Concepts in Motion I

The history of the United States of America is a history of mobility.

Concepts in Motion I

“We see in order to move; we move in order to see.” William Gibson “Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed.” Milan Kundera

Concepts in Motion I

“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.” Aldous Huxley “If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” Mario Andretti The history of the United States of America is a history of mobility. Its greatest projects have built an enormous infrastructure to move people and goods around inside of its borders. It currently has 3.9 million miles of roads and highways, 5,400 public airports, 200,000 miles of freight and passenger railroad track, 5,800 miles of urban mass transit track with more than 2,300 stations, and 3,600 waterport terminals. This transportation infrastructure has a value of $1.75 trillion, the equivalent of 12 percent of the value of the nation’s total productive assets, or eight times the value of the entire telephone and telecommunications infrastructure. “If houses were built industrially, mass-produced like chassis, an aesthetic would be formed with surprising precision.” Le Corbusier

Concepts in Motion I

“The ultimate concept car will move so fast, even at rest, as to be invisible.” J.G. Ballard “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object.” Roland Barthes “Money may not buy happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.” Francoise Hagan

Concepts in Motion I

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.” Thomas Wolfe “The secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake... but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.” Joan Didion “Until we design a bus experience that is more attractive, more effective, and more elegant than the car, we will be selling a losing proposition. The same applies to the car itself. We must imagine and redesign the car as a product with positive impact, and not make our design objective a car that is less negative. We must design an ecology of movement options that are thrilling in every way, and that also fit together as an ecological, sustainable—but most importantly, sexy—system.” Bruce Mau “Certain cities accommodate cars quite well. If cars become more sustainable, that will remain a quite persistent model because it gives flexibility that’s almost unimaginable through any other device. But in 50

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existing cities, it’s much more problematic. In many European cities, you have a weakened public transport, weakened infrastructure of trains, and almost pervasive car use. They could have avoided a lot of this if the public sector had been enhanced. The result is a nightmare of the lack of public initiative.” Rem Koolhaas

Concepts in Motion I

The “Commuter Cookout” is a cookbook and stainless steel cooking set created by artists Marisa Jahn and Steve Shada. The cooking set wraps onto the engine block or muffler with a one-way valve that harnesses the heat to prepare a stew, spicy hot pot, or slowbaked casserole in a metal pouch. The accompanying cookbook suggests recipes tailored to the length of your commute. Jahn and Shada’s interest lies in exploring the American speeding up of food rituals as well as the fact that, for many families on busy weekdays, the car pool is the only “quality” time they share together. “Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn’t block traffic.” Dan Rather “Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.” Saul Alinsky “Hell on Wheels” was the name given to the mobile city that followed the Transcontinental Railroad as it forged its way west across America in the 1860s. For example, as work ground to a halt in winter 1866, the temporary town of North Platte, Nebraska, sprang up to house and entertain the Union Pacific railroad builders. As temperatures rose, the railroaders began building westward, and the shacks and canvas lean-to sheds housing gambling dens, dance halls, saloons, and brothels picked up and followed them. North Platte emptied out, to be replaced by Julesburg, Colorado, which, by 1867, was itself described by 51

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journalist Henry Morgan Stanley as “a played out place … now about to be abandoned by the transient sojourners, and many of them are shifting their portable shanties to some prospective city west...” * * * In August 2010, a traffic jam on the road between Inner Mongolia and the northwestern edge of Beijing began to form, eventually stretching more than 62 miles, eventually trapping vehicles in place for nine days.

Concepts in Motion I

As drivers began to turn off their cars altogether and sleep for 8 hours at a time, a temporary micro-culture of the motorway emerged. Mobile businesses broke out along the roadway. “Villagers along Highway 110 took advantage of the jam,” the Wall Street Journal reported at the time, “selling drivers packets of instant noodles from roadside stands and, when traffic was at a standstill, moving between trucks and cars to hawk their wares. Truck drivers, when they weren’t complaining about the vendors overcharging for the food, kept busy playing card games.” A spatial infrastructure of the traffic jam soon also emerged, including temporary awnings, tent walls, and small outdoor rooms, built with found materials such as food crates and truck tarps. As David Greene of Archigram once wrote, “a traffic jam is a collection of rooms,” but “so is a car park—they are really instantly formed and constantly changing communities. A drive-in restaurant ceases to exist when the cars are gone (except for cooking hardware). A motorized environment is a collection of service points.” * * * “The counter-intuitive finding is that streets without traffic signals mean that cars drive more slowly and carefully because the rules of the road are ambiguous—there’s no red, green or yellow to tell drivers precisely what to do.” A Wired article from 2004 52

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quotes Hans Monderman, the late architect of Holland’s minimalist roads, explaining his approach to influencing driver behavior: “A wide road with a lot of signs is telling a story,” Monderman says. “It’s saying, go ahead, don’t worry, go as fast as you want, there’s no need to pay attention to your surroundings. And that’s a very dangerous message.” * * *

Concepts in Motion I

Each December, up to 200 kilometers of Manila’s streets are turned into Christmas Lanes—temporary highways, stripped of their street parking, stop signs, and traffic signals. The scheme relieves congestion as shoppers flock to the city’s malls, increasing average traffic speeds on major routes speeds by about 14 percent. Traffic controllers have also been known to dress as Santa Claus, to add to the festive spirit. * * * Imagine a city in the jungle—a speculative city that literally moves. It never rests. “When its inhabitants build new districts,” McKenzie Wark writes in his recent book The Beach Beneath The Street, “it is always to the west. Each time they cut the ribbon opening a new quarter, an old one to the east is abandoned, gradually to disappear beneath the overgrowth of tropical vegetation.” The city thus advances and disappears, advances and disappears, fully and relentlessly mobile, moving further into a state of wilderness it then welcomes back into the districts that it’s left behind. * * * Over 42 million Americans moved in the 1-year period between March 1992 and March 1993. This amounted to 16.8 percent of the population 1 year old and over. Most of these persons made local moves—26 million moved from one residence to another within the same county. Nearly 8 million persons moved between counties within the same State and another 53

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nearly 7 million changed States. During that 1-year period, 1.3 million persons moved into the United States from abroad. The estimated number of international migrants worldwide is 214 million, a number that has increased by an estimated 64 million over the past decade. This means that one of out of every 33 persons in the world today is a migrant, a population that would qualify as the fifth largest nation in the world. * * *

Concepts in Motion I

A recent GAO report found the benefit-to-cost ratio of deploying a nationwide real-time traffic information system across the United States would be 25 to 1, with the $1.2 billion projected costs outweighed by $30.2 billion in safety, mobility and environmental benefits. Overall, the benefit-to-cost ratio of ITSenabled operational improvements is estimated to be 9 to 1, a significant return on investment over the more conventional solution of adding new highway capacity, which has a benefit-to-cost ratio estimated at 2.7 to 1. * * * In his 1994 bestseller The Hot Zone, Richard Preston recounts the paving of the Kinshasa Highway—now also known as the “AIDS Highway,” for its tragic side-effect of helping to bring AIDS from the African continental interior out along regional trucking routes and, eventually, to every country in the world. The Kinshasa Highway, Preston writes, is “the road that cuts Africa in half, along which the AIDS virus traveled during its breakout from somewhere in the African rain forest to every place on earth.” “The paving of the Kinshasa Highway,” Preston suggests, “affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the 54

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deaths in the Second World War.” * * * The human lags in the speed competition, with the 27 mph speed of track star and fastest man on earth Michael Johnson paling in comparison to machines like Space Shuttle (20 Mach), the X-43A jet (9.8 mach), the CRH380A train in China (302.8 mph), and the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport automobile (267 mph). Johnson even lags behind fellow animals like the Peregrine falcon (202mph), cheetah (70mph), sailfish (68mph), and dragonfly (60mph). Of course, his record blows away some of nature’s most tardy, like an iceberg (.20mph) or garden snail (.02mph).

Concepts in Motion I

* * * Until recently, neuroscientists believed that human perception of motion was produced in the MT region, a single cortical area in the brain. However, a new study published in December 2011, based on research conducted at NYU, Stanford University, and the University of Washington, has found that the visual system processes local motion—tracking signals that fall within a small retinal area—and global motion— synthesizing several movements over larger areas— quite differently. By measuring brain activity in the MT region as humans watched carefully designed patterns in which local and global motion were in disagreement with each other, the scientists found that not only was another brain region, whose nature is currently unknown, involved in perceiving global motion, but that the perception of global motion takes precedence over that of local motion in humans. * * * Stanford University bioengineer Scott Delp has created an open-source application that accurately models human motion. By programming each of the more than 600 muscles in the human anatomy into OpenSim, Delp hopes to help medical professionals, 55

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prosthetic device designers, and bioengineers study, diagnose and correct abnormalities in how people move: “It can help determine whether a simple surgery to lengthen a specific muscle might help victims of cerebral palsy. It can predict how simple changes in gait might reduce the incidence or severity of osteoarthritis. In addition to helping millions delay or avoid costly hip and knee replacements, OpenSim could help in the development of new, more sensitive prosthetics, able to read and interpret electrical impulses to control the devices.” * * *

Concepts in Motion I

On June 27, 1894, 24-year-old mother of three, Annie Kopchovsky departed Boston on a bike, inspired to circumnavigate the world on two wheels in response to a bet that a modern woman could do just about anything a man could (Thomas Stevens had previously biked around the world in 1887). Upon her return, 15 months later, she became an instant celebrity, enchanting readers under the byline “The New Woman” with stories of hunting tigers with German royalty in India and a spell in a Japanese prison with a bullet wound in her shoulder. Many of these anecdotes were of dubious veracity, and she was accused of spending most of journey traveling with a bike, rather than on one. Nonetheless, her story vividly illustrates Susan B. Anthony’s statement, in 1896, that bicycling had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” * * * A typical North American food serving involves, it has been estimated, at least 11 separate journeys, from the truck that delivers artificial fertilizer to the farm all the way to the truck that takes 40 percent of the food we buy to the landfill, uneaten. In fact, only a fraction of so-called “food miles” are 56

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used up to bring exotic or out-of-season foods to our tables. It is the industrial food system as a whole and the distortions created by cheap carbon-based fuel, rather than any specific food/s, that creates these extended movable feasts. Today, fish that is caught locally is likely to be frozen and sent on a ship to China to be filleted, before being sent back to the US for retail, due to the relative costs of labor and refrigerated ocean-borne transport. * * *

Concepts in Motion I

For the past ten years, Operation Migration, a USCanadian partnership of government and nonprofits, has been trying to re-establish the 1,285 mile Eastern flyway, which disappeared in the late 1800s when the last flocks of whooping cranes migrating along that route were driven to extinction. From a low of 15 birds in 1941, the group has managed to establish a viable flock of more than 100 birds, and is training more each year. The first thing the baby cranes hear after they are hatched in spring at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Maryland is the recording of a crane’s brood call mixed in with the sound of the small plane’s engine. By fall, they are ready to follow the plane south to Florida on their first migration. * * * The Arctic tern migrates the longest distances of any animal. It flies over 21,750 miles (35,000 km) each year—roughly the circumference of the Earth. The longest-migrating mammal is the Gray Whale, which covers roughly 12,500 miles (20,110 km) each year. The insect with the longest migration is the desert locust, which travels about 2,800 miles (4500 km) each year—just slightly further than the Monarch butterfly’s 2,000 mile journey from Canada to central Mexico each fall. The caribou is the land animal with the longest commute, at about 700 miles (1100 km). * * *

Concepts in Motion I

More than 60 different species of animals use storm drains or culverts to cross Maryland’s highways, according to a recent study carried out by the University of Maryland’s Environmental Science Center. Using motion-detecting infrared cameras, the study’s findings demonstrate the importance of these drainage tunnels as wildlife corridors, connecting habitat that has been fragmented by asphalt and cars. The design of the state’s culverts varies considerably: the underground drainage structures range from 2 feet to 15 feet in diameter; can be made of concrete, metal, or even earth; and can be arch-, cylinder-, or box-shaped. Ed Gates, the study’s author, found that although raccoons are not particular about the shape of the culvert they use, and all animals prefer culverts that offer an unobstructed view, some distinct formal preferences can be traced across species: “Deer wouldn’t go near tunnels with cobbled floors. Eastern gray squirrels were not found in any arch-shaped culverts. Domestic cats seemed to take a liking to the cylinder-shaped tunnel. And great blue herons used the box shape more often than thought, most often when the bottom was sandy.” * * * Researchers studying the effect of roads on rattlesnake mating journeys in New York state found that even minor roads create isolation between different snake populations, causing a significant increase in inbreeding and reduction in genetic diversity. As Rulon Clark, the study’s leader and a professor at San Diego State University explained, not only do rattlesnakes try to avoid roads, but when “they’re disturbed by noise or vibration, their natural response is to freeze and rely on their natural camouflage to hope they won’t be detected. With cars, that’s exactly the wrong response.” * * * Washington Post music critic Chris Richards has analyzed the music of the metro system’s run-down 58

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escalators as a form of experimental jazz: “Listen to the west entrance at Petworth. It’s all honk and grind - the clatter of a hundred bop quartets cooking from 5 a.m. to midnight. The escalators at Benning Road drone like an Indian tambura while arbitrary notes squeak and blurt, as if leaked from Pharoah Sanders’ saxophone.”

Concepts in Motion I

According to Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel, this secret music “is the result of a small plastic device that is installed on the escalators to protect the metal panels that line each side of the escalator’s steps from being damaged.” Water, salt, grit, and varying temperatures all alter the level of friction, and thus the particular notes that each escalator makes. “When those little plastic pieces start chafing against the escalator steps,” Richards writes, “the band is warming up. Squeaks turn into creaks. Tiny squalls become tenor wails. Saxophonish sneezes give way to the ghost of Johnny Griffin trying to cram every note he ever blew between Bling-blong “Doors opening” and the surface of the Earth.” * * * The rise of the “suspicious package” as a security phenomenon—for instance, a suitcase abandoned on the train or a backpack left anonymously on the subway platform—has given rise to a different criteria for surveillance: stillness or immobility. Cameras and camera operators now scan not simply for odd movements or suspicious behaviors, but for things that have stayed in one place for too long. That which exhibits no motion, we might say, becomes a threat. Packages left in place; humans loitering in one location; abandoned vehicles in parking lots or city streets: these spatial and temporal anomalies catch the eye of a new security paradigm in which immobility is reason enough to distrust something. * * * In 2011, five of the top ten Google searches in the 59

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New York Metro area were mobility-themed: “mta” was the clear winner, followed by “nj Transit,” “hopstop,” dmv Ny,” and “ezpass.” * * *

Concepts in Motion I

Manhattan has some of the highest population densities in the United States: nearly 67,000 people per square mile according to the 2000 census, compared with an average of 2,000 to 3,000 per square mile in most other developed areas. Combine one-quarter the auto-ownership rate with twenty times the population density and Manhattan turns out to have a much higher density of locally owned autos than all but a handful of communities, most of them bedroom suburbs. Specifically, as of the 2000 census, Manhattan residents owned (or leased) more than 8,350 cars per square mile. That’s considerably more than Brooklyn or Queens (both around 6,500 cars per square mile), and more than twice car-crazy Los Angeles (about 3,900 cars per square mile for the city) and more than four times auto-friendly Houston (about 1,800 per square mile, again for the city). Few Americans realize that trucks deliver 70 percent of all freight tonnage or that 80 percent of U.S. communities receive their goods exclusively by truck. Motor carrier revenues represent nearly 84 percent of the nation’s freight bill. “It should be noted that even New York, the most transit-using city in the USA, clocks in at 2,700 BTUs/p-m for its subway and 3,300 for the average of all its transit systems combined—only slightly better than cars.” Brad Templeton * * * It is estimated that, for every person living in NYC, 6.6 lbs (3 kg) of food, 13.2 lbs (6 kg) of construction 60

Concepts in Motion I

materials, 26.4 lbs (12 kg) of consumer goods, and 46 lbs (21 kg) of petroleum products are transported into the city on the average day (including container weight). * * *

Concepts in Motion I

Shifting some of Manhattan’s more than 110,000 daily curbside deliveries to off-peak hours creates major savings in both time and fuel. In a 2009 pilot program that shifted delivery times for 30 truckers to between 7pm and 6am, trucks reached their first stop 75 percent more quickly than during peak hours, and the following stops 50 percent more quickly, while they cut unloading and loading time by two thirds, from 90 minutes down to 30. In an article in The Journal of Commerce that describes the report’s findings, New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan trumpeted the benefits of off-peak deliveries: “Drivers found they could make deliveries on-time and be much more fuel-efficient, while receivers didn’t spend hours waiting for deliveries each day.” What’s more, truckers saved an extra $1,000 per truck per month by avoiding daytime parking tickets. Truck driver Chubb Chang agreed, explaining that “You may have to circle a block for half an hour to find a place to park during the day. With off-peak delivery, you can do twice as many turns.” * * * From 2008-2009, bicycle ridership decreased in New York City. * * * The total mileage of New York City’s road network is 19,324, which is nearly seven times the distance between the city and Los Angeles. * * * Even in San Francisco, often thought of as an ideal 61

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urban environment, the car and its support system rules. Experts estimate that 70 percent of San Francisco’s downtown outdoor space is devoted to the car. The total number of spaces, as Mayor Gavin Newsom recently announced on his Youtube site, is 441,541. “Manhattan represents the apotheosis of the ideal of density per se, both of population and of infrastructures; its architecture promotes a state of congestion on all possible levels, and exploits this congestion to inspire and support particular forms of social intercourse that together form a unique culture of congestion.” Rem Koolhaas

Concepts in Motion I

Every year, New York City hosts one of the “most complicated security event[s]” in the world, in the words of The Atlantic: the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly. The organization tasked with making sure it all goes smoothly is the U.S. Secret Service. In addition to an extraordinary range of converted hotel rooms, sniper posts, mobile command centers, makeshift radiocommunications links, and more, there is a detailed plan in place for evacuating world leaders from Manhattan in the event of a large-scale terrorist attack. As investigative journalist Marc Ambinder writes in The Atlantic, the Secret Service has set up “a tactical command post, code-named ‘North Star,’ at a secret location in the city.” Run by the service’s Special Operations Division, North Star was responsible for arguably the most sensitive part of the assembly preparations. ‘One of the things we know,’ [Brian] Parr, [special agent in charge of the field office,] told me, ‘is that when things go wrong, we’ve got to get 150 world leaders and their spouses off the island’—that is, Manhattan—‘in a hurry.’ For weeks, the Special Operations Division scouted evacuation routes, hardened safe houses throughout the city, and secured Coast Guard assets. If a situation arose in which protectees needed to be moved to safety, 62

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counter-assault (or CAT) teams would ‘crash’ the event and secure an evacuation pathway.” Ambinder continues: “As a last resort in the event a leader is shot or otherwise injured, the service has what Parr calls its ‘secret weapon’ on 24/7 standby. Dr. Maurizio Miglietta, a former chief of trauma at Bellevue who has been working these summits for years, provides the agency with a team of doctors and nurses, and sets up a mobile trauma unit at major venues. He can perform surgery on the spot, if necessary.” * * *

Concepts in Motion I

Much of New York City exists in a near-permanent state of quarantine. Due to the threat of the Asian Longhorned Beetle, wood debris—such as tree branches downed by heavy snow or thunderstorms— cannot be moved between the city’s boroughs. What the city classifies as “private wood debris” must thus remain in place, as “the only effective means to control the beetle is to remove infested trees and destroy them by chipping or burning the wood.” Unfortunately, so far “the beetle has been discovered in parts of Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island. As a result, quarantine has been established regulating the movement of any tree wood in these boroughs.” It is thus against city regulations to smuggle branches across borough lines. * * * In Rubble, a history of architectural demolition, author Jeff Byles tells the story of a man in New York City who refused to move, choosing instead to remain in his house while the city block around him was torn down in preparation for a private “urban renewal scheme.” “Much to his unpleasant surprise,” Byles write with considerable understatement, the man soon realized that the neighborhood’s rat population had no more buildings left to occupy—so they made straight for 63

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his lone-standing house. The home was soon “commandeered by the entire block’s cohort of rats—two tons of them in all, done in by exterminators and shoveled from the basement. One witness, describing the teeming scene just before the rats were gassed, wrote that she ‘will never forget the extraordinary hum of the vermin that came from the house even though all the windows and doors were sealed.’” Sites that refuse to change as the city around them shifts—sites that resist historical or architectural mobility—can find that transformation is, often unfortunately, forced upon them. * * *

Concepts in Motion I

The elevator, along with the steel frame, makes tall buildings—and thus urban density—possible. New York City is home to roughly fifty-eight thousand elevators, with an estimated eleven billion elevator trips per year—thirty million every day. They are a surprisingly safe (ten times as safe as escalators, according to elevator professionals) as well as energy-efficient (the counterweight does a lot of the work, and most new systems actually regenerate electricity) form of urban transportation. However, as Nick Paumgarten reports in a fascinating New Yorker article on the subject, “the amount of core space that one must devote to elevators, in order to convey so many people so high, can make a building architecturally or economically infeasible. This limitation served to stunt the height of skyscrapers until, in 1973, the designers of the World Trade Center introduced the idea of sky lobbies.” “An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs.” Mitch Hedberg On Second Avenue between 61st and 62nd stands a largely windowless neo-Gothic tower behind whose walls “lies an ingenious system of steel vaults travel64

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ing on rails.” The Day & Meyer, Murray & Young warehouse, which was built in 1928, was the subject of an October 2011 New York Times profile by architectural critic Mark Lamster, who described its mobile armored containers thus: “The Portovault units look a lot like modern shipping containers, which they predate by more than two decades. Each Portovault is essentially a steel safe, 11 feet long and tall enough to stand in, that can hold the contents of a typical one-bedroom apartment. It weighs almost a ton when empty but has four small steel wheels that allow it to be pushed along runners by a lone workman.”

Concepts in Motion I

“The innovation was that it could be delivered to the door of a client on the firm’s armored Diamond T truck, loaded, locked and then returned to the warehouse.” “There, the architects had installed a rail system, so that each unit could be routed from the loading dock into a large freight elevator, and then onto its designated floor and into its assigned space. The building, which can hold more than 500 of the units, is in a sense a giant storage rack.” The contents of the mobile containers is, of course, a closely guarded secret, although the firm’s spokesperson admits it ranges from moose heads to kayaks, in a “sort of a potpourri of madness.” * * * There is a “secret subway stop” beneath the WaldorfAstoria Hotel. As New York Magazine explained in 2008, this “now-abandoned subway track… was used as a special VIP entrance for fancy-pants rich people with their own private subway cars.” However, it was “also used by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, so he could enter and leave the hotel without the public realizing he couldn’t walk unassisted because of his polio.” There was even “a private train” for the 65

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president, parked beneath the hotel for special occasions (including emergency evacuation). *â&#x20AC;&#x201A; *â&#x20AC;&#x201A; *

Concepts in Motion I

In 2007, architect Annabelle Selldorf released her design for 200 Eleventh Avenue, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan. The 19-story, 16-unit, steel-clad condominium tower is most notable for the first of its kind, En Suite Sky Garage, an 8,000-pound car elevator that takes residents from the street to a personal garage steps away from their apartment. The garage is able to automatically identify a car and which apartment it belongs to. After driving into the elevator, the freight elevator transports the car to the correct floor and allows a resident to pull out of the elevator and into their very own garage. All units have been sold, with two penthouses selling for a combined $29 million.

Concepts in Motion I

Car Names

A4 Avant Armada Beetle California C-Class Challenger Eclipse Enclave Escape Fiesta 5 Series Focus Galant Genesis Ghost Golf Jazz Jetta Liberty M-Class Optima Outback Pathfinder Phantom Prius Q7 Quest R8 Spyder Regal Rogue S8 Saloon S-Class 7 Series Sienna Silverado Sonata Sonic Superb Terrain Titan Town & Country Tribeca TT Roadster Yukon 67

Concepts in Motion I

Transit Names

ABQ Ride BadgerBus BART CAT CATS Charm City Circulator! (CCC) Coaster COTA DART FAX FREX IndyGo Lolly the Trolley LYNX MARTA MATA MAX MAX MBTA MCTS Metro Metromover Metrorail Molly the Trolley Mountain Metro MTA Music City Star PeopleMover RapidRide RTA Rapit RTC Sac RT SEPTA SMART Sprinter Sun Metro Sun Tran TARC Triangle Transit Tulsa Transit U-Bahn Valley Metro/METRO Via + Via Primo WES 68

Concepts in Motion I

Disney’s Magic Highway USA, 1958

Technologies

App Lets You Auction Off Parking Spot Parking Auction, a new iPhone app, pairs drivers searching for a parking space with those ready to vacate theirs—for a fee. Crucially, it’s not the space itself that’s for sale—but the information of when a space might become available. Users determine how much that information is worth to them. Currently beta testing on the Upper West Side, founder Brian Rosetti hopes to soon expand Parking Auction’s coverage.

Ydreams, Santander robots, 2010 Bank Introduces Robot Escorts Santander, a banking group based in Spain, has solved its wayfinding problems creatively: autonomous friendly-looking red robots. The Santander 69

Concepts in Motion I

Interactive Guest Assistants (SIGAs) glide up once you’ve entered the Madrid Headquarters, and after you’ve entered your destination on a console, they escort you there. Ydreams, the Portuguese designers of the robots, notes that this is one of the first commercial applications of swarm robotics.

Technologies

Concepts in Motion I

Streetline, Parker application, 2010 San Francisco Parking Gets More Efficient with Streetline App Streetline, a new high-tech start-up in San Francisco, uses sensors on parking meters to offer real-time info on where available parking spaces are and how much to charge. The inexpensive sensors, which can be attached to existing meters, relay information to a citywide network, which points drivers to parking spaces and shows expired spaces to meter maids. Currently being beta tested in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sausalito, and coming soon to Washington, DC, and Roosevelt Island, Streetline can also offer cities the opportunity to dynamically price parking spaces based on demand. “The hope here is that guided parking becomes part and parcel of a next generation of services for citizens,” [Streetline CEO Zia] Yusuf 70

said. “That in seven to ten years, people will look at you funny when you say you used to have to drive around looking for a space.”

Audi, Audi TTS, 2010

Technologies

Audi’s Robotic Car Audi’s driverless car, the TTS, conquered Pikes Peak, a Colorado automotive hillclimb. By making it to the top, Audi says it is showing that new autonomous technology can handle the most challenging circumstances. “We are not trying to replace the driver,” Stanford professor Chris Gerdes said. “Instead we want to learn how the best drivers control the car so we can develop systems that assist our robotic driver and, eventually, you and me.”

Yusuke Sugahara and team, levitating plane-train, 2011 Levitating Plane-Trains as the Future of Mass Transit? Japanese researchers have debuted a a robotic planetrain that hovers above the ground. Riding within a concrete channel, the plane-train uses the increased 71

Concepts in Motion I

lift that its low flying altitude provides for propulsion. The researchers hope to eventually develop the plane-train into a functioning commuter train.

Technologies

Steven Spielberg, ‘Minority Report,’ 2002 Minority Report Maglev Transportation System Minority Report’s futuristic transportation system may seem a conceptual moment of fancy. Self-driving cars whizz along both horizontal and vertical magnetic roadways at top speeds. But the the movie’s rendering of 2054 may not be so far off. Computercontrolled cars have already been rolled out by a number of automotive companies such as Audi with the A2. Meanwhile, the maglev technology that the designers based Minority Report’s transportation system on already exists and is in use in bullet trains running in Japan, China, and South Korea. One of the designers, articulates the approach in thinking about the fictional future, “We discussed how a future goal will be individual transportation within a mass transport system,” says Harald Belker. The result is “something between a capsule and a car.” App Bumps Knowledge of Potholes A new Android app, Street Bump, has been introduced in Boston to track and report potholes while you drive. Using the phone’s sensors, the app senses bumps. The next step, to be rewarded with a $25,000 prize, is to figure out how to use the data to deter72

Concepts in Motion I

mine a pothole’s seriousness. “It’s a new kind of volunteerism,” Nigel Jacob, Co-Chair of New Urban Mechanics, the govermental office behind the app, told The Boston Globe. “It’s not volunteering your sweat equity. It’s volunteering the devices that are in your pocket to help the city.”

Technologies

EU SARTRE, road train, 2011 European Road Trains in Testing Road trains are in testing in the EU. A road train is a platoon of 6-8 cars which travel together, communicating wirelessly. Following a professionally-driven vehicle (for example, a bus), the linked cars become semi-autonomous en route to the shared destination, but drivers regain control when it’s time to turn off to their specific direction. The initiative behind the research, European Union’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment (EU Sartre), hopes that road trains increase aerodynamic efficiency and reduce congestion while allowing people use of an individual vehicle. Feds Testing Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has begun tests of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology where cars communicate with one another, thus increasing safety. Using onboard sensors, cars talk in real-time, transmitting their speed and location to other cars. A car’s computer takes this data into account to prevent accidents, either warning the driver or actively deploying brakes. For V2V to take off, however, all cars must be able to communicate, making it crucial that the NHTSA set universal standards sooner rather than later. 73

Concepts in Motion I

L-Dopa, ShotSpotter, 2007

Technologies

ShotSpotter Oakland has renewed its contract with ShotSpotter, a sensor system designed to detect and locate the sound of gunfire. Originally installed in Oakland in 2006, Shotspotter neighborhood sensors pinpoint the sound of gunfire and then instantly relay the information to the police. This high-tech solution avoids the problem of citizens too scared or distrustful of the police to report gunshots as well as the hurdle actually figuring out where reported gunfire is actually coming from. Besides Oakland, ShotSpotter is being adopted by a number of cities prone to gun crime, such as LA and Washington, D.C. Piezoelectric Technology Powers up Through Vibrations Researchers at Cornell’s NanoScale Facility are developing sensors which can use vibrational energy to power devices. Piezoelectric technology has been in use for a while in microphones and phonographs, but pairing the piezoelectric material with razor-thin batteries allows for banking the created energy. A car going through potholes, for example, could be simultaneously providing energy to its devices. “Avoid-Ghetto” Mapping Microsoft has come out with an “avoid ghetto” feature on their Microsoft smartphone. Using crime statistics, the feature can map routes to avoid more dangerous areas. 74

Concepts in Motion I

Shoulder-Worn Acoustic Targeting System Soon to be used by US troops, the Indvidual Gunshot Detector (IGD) by Qinetiq, a two-pound unit worn at the shoulder, uses supersonic gunshot waves to calculate where enemy fire is coming from. The information is then transmitted into an earpiece worn by the solider. As Brig. Gen. Peter Fuller, Program Executive Officer Soldier, notes, it allows for a completely different mapping of sniper fire: “If you get shot at, not only do I know where that came from, but others know where it came from because I can network that capability.”

Technologies

Intelligent Transportation System Countries around the world are funding research into ITS, which aims to network all transport information, thus allowing for real-time data on congestion, public transportation, or even the location of an individual vehicle. Future in-car navigation systems will connect to the ITS network, allowing cars to communicate and prevent accidents. ITS can make parking less of a hassle, transform public transportation and reduce traffic. For now, the US Department of Transportation is focused on intercar networking: most of its 2010-2014 funding has been allocated for vehicleto-vehicle communication. The United States’ $100 million a year funding on ITS, however, pales in comparison to countries like Singapore, Japan and China, which spent more than $2.8 billion on ITS last year.

Department of Defense, Nett Warrior, 2011

Concepts in Motion I

GhostRider Vs Nett Warrior: Military Smartphones Though the army has been working on a way to network soldiers together for over 20 years, coming out recently with the Nett Warrior, defense company ITT might be outdoing it with the GhostRider. It’s a war of the smartphones. The Nett Warrior is a smartphone-like device, while the GhostRider is a small encryption add-on to a commercial smartphone like the Android. Both become secure devices that can allow soldiers to communicate and track others’ position. It’s unclear whether the Nett Warrior or the GhostRider will prevail—network testing results and costs will determine that, but more efficient networking will soon be coming to the military.

Technologies

Mini-Robots Map Out Building Interiors Mini-robots are being developed that can independently explore and map an unknown location or building. Using a technology called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), researchers with Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and the California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have created robots that can map out their environment and locate themselves, of use to soldiers or firefighters. SLAM is of particular benefit when GPS is unavailable. Eventually, the researchers hope to couple the robots with another platform which would function from above, locating a specific building and its entrances and then calling in the droids to explore. Large Area Coverage Search-While-Track and Engage (LACOSTE) QinetiQ is developing a new sensor system, Large Area Coverage Search-while-Track and Engage (LACOSTE), which can work at high altitudes of around 20km. Using optical and infrared sensors and a very wide field-of-regard, LACOSTE will be able to detect and track moving vehicles in dense urban areas, tracking up to 10,000 targets simultaneously. Wireless Charging for Electric Cars Electric cars may soon be able to charge wirelessly. 76

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WiTricity, a company focused on wireless chargers, is developing a a wireless network to charge electric vehicles that uses the principle of magnetic resonance coupling. Meanwhile, a team at the University of Michigan–Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute in China is pushing to develop dynamic charging, in which chargers are installed in the road, so that electric cars can charge while driving. Both systems, however, are impeded by the close distance needed to wirelessly recharge: 12 to 18 centimeters.

Technologies

The Car of the Future is a Node on a Network By 2020, according to Kaveh Hushyar “everyone will be a passenger.” In an Ars Technica interview, the CEO of Telemtria described the future of driving. Self-driving cars will require a suite of applications: both to run the car and to transform it into a mobile office. Safety applications like sleepy eye detection and vehicle-to-vehicle networking will be required for semi-autonomous driving, with voice enablement technology also on the rise, letting the driver multitask. These are just a few examples of the applications currently propagating; as Hushyar points out, “Every one of these could be running concurrently in the car, and the processor has to have the capability to handle it.” Hushyar also mentions that a soft infrastructure will need to be in place to collect, analyze and, if necessary, transmit, information about vehicular conditions, requiring cloud computing.

UniModal, rendering of SkyTran, 1999 77

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Flying Pods a Solution for Personal Transportation? Patented in 1990 by aero-mechanical engineer Douglas Malewicki, SkyTran is a Personal Rapid Transit system where light passenger pods hang from elevated maglev tracks. Passive maglev technology means that the cars can move without any external power while the lightness of the cars allows the infrastructure itself to be fairly inexpensive, thus making SkyTran a cheap and sustainable form of transportation. NASA is currently helping develop SkyTran and there are talks of building the SkyTran in Detroit instead of the proposed light-rail.

Technologies

Concepts in Motion I

The Great Wharf, Chicago, 1893 Moving Sidewalks In 1871, Alfred Speer patented a system of moving sidewalks that could transport pedestrians on three separate belts, each running at different speed intervals, intended for use in New York City. In 1893, Eugene Henard implemented the first moving sidewalk at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The 1900 Paris Exposition also featured a moving sidewalk, which Thomas Edison sent a team to record. Like its 1871 predecessor, the sidewalks moved at different speed intervals, however they had a separate track for an electric car. Throughout the first part of the 20th century, the moving sidewalk continued to be associated with ‘the city of the future.’’ The 1962 cartoon The Jetsons prominently featuring them as 78

part of the outer space landscape. Goodyear took a particular interest in the technology, wanting to pair the sidewalks with New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subway systems. They later worked with Disney to implement the moving sidewalks in their theme parks. The first moving walkway to be permanently installed was the Travolator, which connected a bridge to a new motel. This design was used at airports in London, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.

Technologies

Concepts in Motion I

Personal Mobility

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PERSONAL MOBILITY FOR AND BY DESIGN.

Personal Mobility

Any serious study of motion requires that attention be given not only to the systems and metrics behind the movement of goods, people, microscopic organisms, particles, etc. but also to the desires that underwrite a culture obsessed by individual mobility and freedom. Whether or not the automobile will persist as an instrument in this narrative remains to be seen, but the psychological impetus behind its rise to prominence will need to be reflected in whatever forms of mobility that emerge going forward. While the freedom to move suggests both creativity and sex appeal, it also embodies fugitive impulses, insular lives, and the symbolic weight of Manifest Destiny. From a collage of a Rolls Royce grill superimposed against the Manhattan skyline to image-conscious politicians cruising the streets on two wheels, the following presents a glimpse at our received history of personal mobility in all its ambivalence, through the lens of the architects, icons, and built objects of the twentieth century.

Personal Mobility

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Frank Lloyd Wright in Packard car, 1929

Frank Lloyd Wrightâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s car crash, 1933

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion Car, 1933

Walter Gropius, Adler car, 1931

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, Voiture Minimum, 1936

Mies van der Rohe, Neue Nationalgalerie, 1968

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Carlo Mollino, Nardi-â&#x20AC;&#x2039;Giannini 750 Bisiluro, 1955

Richard Neutra, sketch of a nursing mother in a car at Garden Grove Community Church, ca. 1960

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Ed Ruscha, Mike Salisbury, and Reyner Banham in â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 1972

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Las Vegas studio, 1968

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Adolf Loos, car sketch, 1923

Craig Ellwood-sponsored car, Long Beach Grand Prix, 1975

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Craig Ellwoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Ferrari Dino at Art Center College of Design, 1976

Gio Ponti, Touring Superleggera, ca. 1920

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Terreform ONE, Soft Car: LAMB, 2010

Architects and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Zaha Hadid, Z-Car, 2006

Architects and Their Not-Cars

Personal Mobility

Antoine Predock, ca. 1990

Jane Jacobs, 1963 92

Charles and Ray Eames, 1948

Architects and Their Not-Cars

Reyner Banham, Scenes in America Deserta, 1989

Reyner Banham, ca. 1960s 94

Personal Mobility

Architects and Their Not-Cars

Personal Mobility Norman Foster, ‘How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?,’ 2010

Alvar Aalto, Nemo Propheta in Patria, 1955

Architects and Their Not-Cars

Personal Mobility

Renzo Piano, Kirribilli, 2001

Icon Mobility

Michael Bloomberg, NYC Mayor, 2011. Mayor Bloombergâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s subway trips to City Hall often began by private SUV transport from his home to the 59th Street and Lexington Avenue express stop 22 blocks away.

John Lindsay, former NYC Mayor commutes to work by subway on his last day in office, 1973 97

Personal Mobility

Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility A noted bicycle enthusiast, Mayor Lindsay banned cars from Central Park on weekends as part of his â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Fun Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; initiative for New York.

John Lindsay, Former NYC Mayor, 1968

Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility

Janette Sadik-Khan, NYCDOT Commissioner, 2007

Robert Moses, Walt Disney and Henry Ford II, publicity trip for the Magic Skyway, 1964 99

John F. Kennedy, Jr., ca. 1990

Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility

New York chef Mario Batali shuttles between his Chelsea and West Village restaurants on his Vespa, 2009

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Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility Boris Johnson, London Mayor, 2010

Boris Johnson, London Mayor and Arnold Schwarzenegger, former California Governor, 2011 101

Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility

President Franklin Rooseveltâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cars were modified to include hand controls for the breaks and accelerator to allow him greater mobility despite lower body paralysis, ca. 1941

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Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility

Marlon Brando, ‘The Wild One,’ 1953

Steve McQueen and his Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso, 1964

John Hughes, ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,’ 1986 103

Icon Mobility

Personal Mobility

OJ Simpson and LAPD, 1994

Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister, and George W. Bush, former US President, 2007

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Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Volkswagen Autostadt glass silos, 2000

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Volkswagen Autostadt glass silos, 2000

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Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility Le Corbusier, Palace of Justice, 1963

Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1931

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Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Michigan Theater Car Park

Coop Himmelblau, BMW Welt, 2007

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Buildings and Their Cars

Russell G. Cory, Walter M. Cory, and Yasuo Matsui,Â Starrett-Lehigh Building, 1931

Russell G. Cory, Walter M. Cory, and Yasuo Matsui, Starrett-Lehigh Building, section with truck elevator, 1931

Annabelle Selldorf, car elevator, 200 Eleventh Avenue, 2010

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Personal Mobility

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Bertrand Goldberg, Marina City, 1964

Ronnie Self, Saint Emanuel House, 2009 110

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Ludwig Hilberseimer, Vertical City, 1924

Michael Targe, Jean-Michel Wilmotte and Daniel Buren, Parc des Celestins, 1994

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Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Office dA, Helios House, 2007

Kanner Architects, United Oil Gas Station, 2009

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Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility Phillip Johnson, Crystal Cathedral, 1981

Richard Neutra, Garden Grove Community Church, ca. 1961 113

Buildings and Their Cars

First McDonaldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s franchise restaurant, 1955

MOS, Drive-In and Park rendering, 2009

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Personal Mobility

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

UN Studio, Mercedes Benz Museum, 2006

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Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building, 1958

Delugan Meissl, Porsche Museum, 2009

116

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Futurama Exhibit, GM Pavilion, 1939 117

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility Jean Nouvel, Ferrari Factory, 2008

Herzog & de Meuron, 1111 Lincoln Road, 2010

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George Applegarth, Bon Marche Parking Garage, 1960

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Victor Gruen, Millironâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department Store, 1948

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Buildings and Their Cars

Paul Rudolph, Temple Street Parking Garage, 1962

Owen Luder and Rodney Gordon, Tricorn Centre, 1966

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Personal Mobility

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Caption goes here

OMA, Seattle Public Library, 2004

Santiago Calatrava, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2001

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Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, 1925

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

David Chipperfield, Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cup Building, 2006

Richard Meier, Italcementi i.lab, 2011 122

Pierre Koenig, Case Study House no. 21, 1958 123

Buildings and Their Cars

Frank Lloyd Wright, Guggenheim Museum, 1958

Hans Hollein, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Rolls Royce Grill on Wall Street,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 1966

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Personal Mobility

Buildings and Their Cars

Chris Burden, ‘Trans-fixed,’ 1974

Dorothea Lange, ‘There’s no way like the American Way,’ 1937

125

Personal Mobility

Buildings and Their Cars

Personal Mobility

Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, 1997

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Eitan Grinspun Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Eitan Grinspun How objects move, how materials change shape over time, and the physics of how all of this happens can be most naturally described in terms of geometry. That’s the natural language we’re talking about in the motion of objects. When you shake your head and your hair goes all over the place, or when you pour water from a cup into another cup, all of that motion can be written down in terms of a language called differential geometry. If I had to distill what it is I look for when I try to understand the laws of motion, it’s a couple of things. One, I think it’s really interesting to look at geometry that can be explained in an integral, holistic sense rather than a differential or specialized sense. For example, if you built up a tensegrity structure, you don’t know if it will be a stable structure by looking at any one connection. Looking in that way just tells you about that specific connection. But the only reason the overall structure can stay up and be stable is because everything is collaborating together. If you go back to Kepler’s Second Law of Planetary Motion which describes the planetary orbit around the sun, it’s not looking at the instantaneous velocity of the 127

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planet and the forces, it’s looking at what happens over finite pieces of time and furthermore, how it applies to any finite piece of time anywhere. And so, in that sense, it’s also a sort of global description of what’s going on. * * *

Eitan Grinspun Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

Some of the earliest work I’ve done in graphic animation was about refining and adding more detail to a simulation where it’s needed, in other words, converting computer power to the most important aspect. I have a philosophical struggle with some of that work because it can serve as a band-aid for getting the geometry wrong. If you don’t get the geometry right in the design of a physical simulation things will basically look ok and the more and more computer power you throw at it, it’ll look better and better, so you can just decide where things don’t look ok, throw more computing power at it and cover up the fact that you didn’t get the geometry right to begin with. So after doing some of that early work and thinking about the geometry, I started thinking how much can you do without adapting and without diverting computer power, because that exposes you to how much of the geometry you got right or wrong. And now we’re coming back full circle, and I’ve been very interested in the deformation of surfaces. A piece of paper bends, but doesn’t stretch or compress. And if I take the paper and I confine it to be in a small space it starts to take on very characteristic shapes. Not that we’ve seen this particular shape before, but if I showed you a photograph of it and asked if it was paper, you’d say, yes it’s paper. Your eye can tell that this shape has come from something that was flat and has developed into something not flat without stretching or compressing anywhere. That’s what I mean by a developable surface—something that deforms without compressing or stretching anywhere and starts flat. It also has the characteristics at any given point that there’s a straight line that’s not bending. So if you pick any given point, you can 128

Modelling the Geometries of Motion

always draw a straight line. It could be curved everywhere, but it always has a straight direction everywhere. It could have some singularities—some special points—where the curve seems to go into infinity. So, a piece of paper is something that would traditionally have been an ideal candidate for adaptive computation, because it is really hard to model, especially the singularities.

Eitan Grinspun Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

With adaptive computation we would refine our meshes to tackle the more complex bends and use big meshes to model the flatter areas. But another way to approach this would be to realize that the paper has a bunch of straight directions everywhere and that maybe you can come up with a discrete representation of this phenomenon that’s adapted not by amping up the computer power or refining certain regions, but it’s adaptive just in the sense of being smart about how it forms the mesh. You could imagine if I told you to take some plywood—certainly something that doesn’t bend—and approximate a shape of bent paper, then as architects you could do it. But if I told you that the winner is going to be the person who approximates this shape with the fewest cuts to the plywood, then someone would get clever about it and get just a few pieces of plywood to make this shape. So, now it’s not about more computing power, it’s about intelligence reallocating the computing power by choosing the mesh that actively tracks the geometry of the surface. And that’s challenging because as the surface changes, where you want to place the edges on the mesh is going to change. So then it doesn’t become about refining the mesh, but about sliding the edges and singularities—and the singularities can move too from one place to another. So then it becomes about how can you update the mesh as singularities and the edges of the mesh slide around. But it all boils down to the same thing, how can you help the computer to best allocate its resources, but also respect the geometry of the model. * * * 129

Modelling the Geometries of Motion

Eitan Grinspun Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

A lot of the projects we’re doing now are in collaboration with experimental physicists. They’ll say, here’s the data we’re getting and we’ll say, here’s the data we’re getting, does it match up? If it does, great. If not what are the differences? What are they overlooking? What are we overlooking? We’re doing a beautiful project right now with Pedro Reis at MIT on coiling spaghetti. When you cook spaghetti and you take it and drop it on the table it’s going to start coiling. But it doesn’t only coil in one direction; after a while it switches and starts coiling in the other direction. And it seems to switch in periodic patterns. Why can’t it just pick a side and stick to it? It turns out that as it’s falling and turning one way, it’s accumulating twist at the top end like a capacitor. And once it accumulates enough twist at the top, it overcomes the initial direction of movement and it starts going the other way to undo that twist like a torsional pendulum. The interesting thing is our simulations were not able to repeat this. So we were trying to match up with MIT’s experiments and when we ran the simulations the spaghetti always coiled in one direction and stayed in that direction. This made us ask: is the thickness right? Is the height we’re dropping it from right? Are we using the right type of material for spaghetti? Is the friction correct? Everything seemed to match up. The problem was that we were assuming at the beginning of the simulation that the spaghetti is perfectly straight, but usually when you’ve had a cable for a while and you store it, it’s never perfectly straight. It always has some amount of curvature. One of our graduate students decided to try and give some natural curvature to the spaghetti, as if it was a cable that had been stored on a spool for a while. And sure enough, as soon as he put the natural curvature on it, we started to see these inversions happening. So he just took the natural curvature and adjusted it until it was matching the rate of inversion in the video from MIT. He was in New Zealand visiting a studio, so he was across the world. And he emailed MIT and asked, 130

Modelling the Geometries of Motion

by any chance are you storing the cables on a spool of such-and-such diameter? And they went back and measured and responded that he had predicted the spool they was storing the cable on to less than 2 percent.

Eitan Grinspun Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

And that would not be easy to discover in the lab because you never have the option of comparing to a perfectly straight cable. Whereas on the computer you can represent perfect things, you may not want to all the time, but for purpose of understanding, if you want to factor out something like the effect of natural curvature, you can represent the perfectly straight thing. On the other hand in the lab setting you have both the aches and pains, but also the beauty of not being able to neglect any of the physics. You can’t turn off friction, which means any effects you’re seeing are real effects. Whereas on the computer, if you forget to turn on friction, you might get an effect that is unrealistic. Or if it doesn’t occur to you that the air might play a role, then you might get the wrong physics. So the lab and the computer play hand-in-hand because the lab experiments work by starting with all of the physics and trying to control as much of it as possible. And the numerics or computers start with a blank canvas, with no physics, and add more and more physics until it matches the experiments; and they need to meet. That’s where the understanding starts to happen. The only reason we have Internet access between here and Europe is because somebody put a cable on the ocean floor. And the cables on the ocean floor are miles and miles away from the ship moving along and dropping the cable. This is the problem of coiling spaghetti. If it hits the floor and it’s all stretched out, then, when an earthquake hits, it snaps. So, it needs to hit the floor with some give, but how much give? If the ship moves too slowly and drops too much cable, then it’s a giant waste of cable and there’s lots of coiling in place and it can get knotted and that’s bad for reasons of cost and communication speed. So, the ideal is dropping the cable with a nice, meandering 131

Modelling the Geometries of Motion

pattern that has some give but not too much give. So, you need models on how fast the ship moves. But now we’re realizing that it’s not just how fast the ship moves, but it also depends on how they store the cable on the spool on the ship and how much the cable has been altered in the storage process. That’s a new discovery based on this observation in this very simple spaghetti experiment. And now we can predict how much a cable has been altered by being on a particular spool.

Eitan Grinspun Associate Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University

To another extreme, if you want to make stretchable materials with electronics embedded in them, then you want the wiring to have give just like the telecommunications cable. So now when you drop the molten wiring onto a substrate and it falls into a line and you strengthen the material later the wire will snap. If it has loops, that’s bad because then it short circuits. So again, what you want is this meandering pattern with some give that doesn’t short circuit. You could do this with a tiny little print head that moves back and forth in a meandering way, or you could have a model that says if I drop the wire from a certain height at a certain rate while moving laterally, the necessary pattern will form. That’s a little extra work up front for a much less expensive engineering later. And if you want to keep working at these smaller and smaller scales, you can’t design print heads that move at those small scales. So you have to rely on this passive formation of this weaving pattern. So, any of these very basic experiments we’re doing with motion will have applications to stretchable electronics or telecommunications or packing of shampoo bottles or transportation or visual effects or medical surgical simulation or hair products—it doesn’t matter because they’re such very basic questions.

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Modelling the Geometries of Motion

Andrew Blum

Andrew Blum Author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

A lot of things get in the way of the flow of data. For example, I went to visit the lab at one of the major manufacturers of routers, and one of their biggest bugaboos is how slow the switching is compared to their two benchmarks, which are the speed of light and the speed of light through a fiber, which is the speed of light. Theoretically, data should be able to cross the US in 40 milliseconds or so, and then that last meter through the router is the equivalent of walking 15 minutes to get to the Post Office and then waiting for five days. The bottleneck basically consists of the back and forth necessary to read the packet, look up its address, and then figure out which exit to go through to end up at the next destination. Every router has a finite number of ways out the door, but directing the data out the right way requires the full routing table. Although we associate the internet with almost infinite mobility—the end of geography, in a sense— in fact, its infrastructure is relatively fixed. There is always going to be a transport cost, which means that location is going to matter. In the same way that it’s cheaper to fly to LA than it is to fly to Louisville, because of all of the reasons that we all already know—supply and demand, and capacity on that route—the same is true with the transport of data 133

How data moves, and what slows it down…

across the internet. We’re mostly insulated from it as urban internet users, but the exceptions to that are really powerful. One exception is Australia, where, for regulatory and monopoly reasons as well as geographic and infrastructural ones, you as an internet user are severely constrained in the way that you use the internet. The other is rural broadband. The conventional wisdom there is that the last mile—wiring people’s homes in sparsely populated areas—is too expensive. Actually, often it’s the middle mile that is too expensive—it is just so much more expensive for a local ISP in a place like Cheyenne, Wyoming, to get sufficient capacity to connect back and forth to the rest of the internet, which, geographically, probably means Denver.

Andrew Blum Author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

But once you have a strand of glass between two places, you can shine any amount of light through that glass. In other words, we need to build the tubes, but once the physical glass connections are in place, the capacity of data through that network is limitless—depending on what sort of equipment you put at the ends of it. It’s completely different from a road, where you might build a six-lane highway and then figure out ten years later that you really should have gone for twelve. Once you put the glass in, it’s the right size. The technology of cramming multiple wavelengths of light through a single fiber, and the increasing ability to cram higher and higher data rates through a single wave of light, allows, at the moment, with some cost, practically infinite capacity for every single fiber.

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How data moves, and what slows it down…

Michael Sheetz William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University

Michael Sheetz Adults have relatively few cells that migrate and those are located mostly in the immune system to fight infections or to kill cells that are unwanted because of the signals that those cells give off. So therefore, the cells are, by necessity, chemo-tactic, which means that they respond to a cue from the environment. In those types of cases, the cell is often in a passive situation. One of the best examples is that of immune cells, which are rolling macrophages that move down the bloodstream and make periodic contact with the endothelial cells that line the blood vessel. And by that periodic contact, they in essence sample that surface. Because thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flow, they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t rely on chemo-tactic cues; they have to rely on tactile cues, and those tactile cues have to be elicited and responded to in a very short period of time. In an area where thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inflammation or bacterial infection, the blood vessels in that region (because of the death of some of the neighboring cells) become activated and once activated, they will bind or cause the macrophages to bind. The macrophages will then extravasate, i.e., go between the endothelial cells and move into the tissue and then migrate to the site of 135

Cellular Motility

infection and then start killing bacteria in that situation.

Michael Sheetz William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biological Sciences, Columbia University

With the actomyosin contraction the cell squeezes much like a muscle in three dimensions and that pushes that membrane out front. The membrane is not like that of a balloon in the sense that it canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expand, but instead it has to move from other portions of the cell out there. So thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s this process of continual disassembly at the back and reassembly at the front and that enables the cell to worm its way between the cells in the tissue to ultimately reach its goal of finding those bacteria and eating them. It would be like moving a house by taking the back of the house down and moving those components to the front and reassembling them. Because the machinery of the cell (the cytoskeleton) is made up of filaments and cross-linking proteins and motors that generate the force, they are continually dynamic on the time scale of minutes.

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Cellular Motility

Abe Burmeister Founder of Outlier Tailored Performance clothing

Abe Burmeister For Outlier—probably 98% of the time—our work is about designing to maximize mobility. Over the past 40 years or so, there’s been a real shift in clothing design, with it becoming an almost purely visual design process. You have somebody who’s a designer just drawing out a sketch and then sending it off to someone who will turn it into a technical drawing. There are always samples made, and sometimes they fit on real people—though sometimes they just fit on a form. But a lot of garments are designed not to look good when you wear them, but to look good when they’re hanging in the store. We try to put the motion back into the clothes. We put it on a model, and instead of just asking, “How does it look standing?” or “How does it look on a mannequin?” We say, “Move your legs. Squat. Run.” We have bicycle rollers in one of our factories, where we do fittings, and we’ll put somebody on the bike to see what happens when you pedal. We use a lot of woven, four-way stretch fabric, and we work with a mill in Switzerland that is without any doubt the best mill doing this. My guess is there are under ten mills in the world that have the capability 137

Designing Better Clothes for Urban Environments

of producing true, four-way stretch, woven fabric. Wearing a four-way stretch fabric is pretty remarkable, because you’re not used to wearing fabrics that respond to your body in that way. The fabric has the ability to stretch in every direction.

Abe Burmeister Founder of Outlier Tailored Performance clothing

We looked through a lot of historical references—basically at extremes of tailoring, like motorcycle jackets and military garments. The Burberry trench coat is actually a fascinating piece, because it was an army garment from WWI. It was a coat to be worn in the trenches. When you look back through those things, you see it was an era of pattern-making where motion and mobility was much more important for the design. And there are contemporary examples, of course; you have to move your arms a lot when you’re climbing, for instance, so we look at how a climbing jacket is patterned. What we do is look at how a button-down shirt is made and we stick it next to a climbing garment and we ask what’s going on here and how can we open up the movement, and where does the movement fail? So we’re taking those fabrics—fabrics that were only found in extreme outdoor enthusiasts’ garments—and making classically cut clothes. In terms of a particular garment, the holy grail is to do a proper sport coat and to really liberate it. That’s because the sport coat was actually a military garment; it is literally a descendant from armor. The history goes back to knights in armor, but it evolved to make officers look professional—which meant rigid and stiff. There are a lot of archaic pieces and a lot of structure inside a sport coat that purposefully make it very restrictive. It prevents your arms from moving around and it prevents you from bending in certain positions. It restricts you in ways that you may not think about, but that you’re definitely aware of when you’re wearing it. If you ever have on a sport coat and you try to ride a bicycle, for instance, especially in an aggressive riding stance, you’ll realize that something’s got to give—and it’s probably going to be your jacket. 138

Designing Better Clothes for Urban Environments

One of the things we learned early on—sort of accidentally—is that menswear pattern makers are really resistant to change. You can go to a traditional pattern maker who’s really talented and who can make an excellent garment for you, but they’re not going to want to experiment with new arm holes and new motions. They’ve been trained how to do a job—and when they’re good, they’re really good. But womenswear pattern makers, because of the nature of how quickly women’s fashion changes, are much more open. If you want to change the arm, then it’s no problem: it’s the nature of what they’re doing. So we always work with womenswear pattern makers first.

Abe Burmeister Founder of Outlier Tailored Performance clothing

We’re always trying to cross those barriers and find different technologies for the clothes. Sometimes, when we’re trying to solve a real design challenge, we’ll work with a womenswear pattern maker until there’s a certain point where it goes back to the social challenge of the clothing, and that’s where the menswear pattern maker will come back in. In other words, we’ll go to womenswear to innovate and then back to menswear to do cuffs, collars, or buttons, to communicate the subtle language of menswear. As far as the company goes, our original garment was just one pair of pants. They were very cycling-driven. It was just me wanting a pair of pants that I could wear everyday, and ride my bike around in, and not worry if I got caught in the rain. It was about being able to do whatever I wanted. When you look at cities today, bicycling is an amazing tool for a city; it’s a better means of transportation in a lot of circumstances. But most clothes don’t work for cycling—whereas nobody makes clothes that don’t work on the subway or in the car! Actually, the car is interesting. When you look back at photos of a city in the 1930s or 40s, everyone’s wearing hats—until there’s a point, all of a sudden, within 10 to 15 years, where all the hats are gone. Where did the hats go? It happened to be this period where the automobile took over and the hat just didn’t work anymore. You 139

Designing Better Clothes for Urban Environments

had to take it off, or it would get knocked off your head when you got into a car, and so, in just a few year, people got rid of their hats. But there’s still hat infrastructure built around us, if you look at older places—like hat rooms in restaurants or hooks to hang your hats in bars. Even on the train, if you look at the Metro North, the luggage compartments are designed for the size of a hat. You get on the train and take off your hat and you put it up above. So if everyone’s going to be riding bikes, then the clothes we make have to work well on bikes. It opens up that possibility for more people. On the other hand, we don’t think of ourselves as a cycling company! We make clothes you can wear in the city.

Abe Burmeister

Designing Better Clothes for Urban Environments

Founder of Outlier Tailored Performance clothing

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What Moves

MOTION IS ON THE MOVE AGAIN. A QUICK SCAN OF WHERE IT’S BEEN...

What Moves

Experiments in Motion ‘Flipbook,’ 2011

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What Moves

Goodweather, Vancouver Roundabout, 2011

Goodweather, Vancouver Roundabout, ca. 1970s

Canadian design studio Goodweather use photomontage and urban mapping to propose an alternative present inspired by a question left unasked in the past: â&#x20AC;&#x153;What would a metropolis in the Pacific Northwest look like if urban planners at the turn of the twentieth century had recognized and exploited the spatial potential of old-growth trees rather than their resource potential?â&#x20AC;? Their retroprojective roundabouts abandon tidy woodchip and ornamental shrubs to imagine a distributed forest of massive redwoods that dwarf the cars circling their trunks.

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Movers

What Moves

Thomas Kienzle, ‘Usain Bolt,’ 2011

Robbie Maddison, ‘X-Fighters Dubai,’ 2011

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Loie Fuller, ‘Futurist Dance,’ 1902

Movers

What Moves

Michael Jackson, ‘Moonwalk,’ 1983

Ivan Unger and Gladys Roy, ‘Daredevils Playing Tennis on a Biplane,’ 1925 145

What Moves

David O. Russell, ‘Three Kings,’ 1999

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Representation

What Moves Daniel Libeskind, ‘Micromegas,’ 1979

Steven Lisberger, ‘Tron,’ 1982

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Jacques-Henri Lartigue, ‘Grand Prix de l’A.C.F.,’ 1912

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Quentin Tarantino, ‘Kill Bill Vol. 2,’ 2004

Representation

What Moves

Andy Warhol, ‘Dance Diagram Series,’ 1962

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What Moves

Michelangelo Antonioni, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Zabriskie Point,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 1970

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Point of View

What Moves Alison and Peter Smithson, AS in DS, 1983

Getty Images, ‘John Paul Stapp Stops In Sled,’ 1954 151

Point of View

What Moves Stanley Kubrick, ‘The Shining,’ 1980

Stephen Tillman, ‘Luminant Point Arrays,’ 2009

Andy and Lana Wachowski, ‘The Matrix,’ 1999 152

What Moves

David Fincher, ‘Fight Club,’ 1999

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Apparent Stillness

What Moves

Harold Edgerton, ‘Hummingbird,’ 1947

Philippe Petit, ‘Man On Wire,’ 1974 154

Apparent Stillness

What Moves Louis Daguerre, ‘Boulevard du Temple,’ 1838

Andy Warhol, ‘Screen Test: Lou Reed,’ 1966 155

What Moves

Irvin Kershner, ‘Eyes of Laura Mars,’ 1978

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Convergence on the City

Everyone is converging on the city. It is the object of choice to influence the

Convergence on the City

Lagos, Nigeria, from Harvard Project on the City, Mutations, 2001

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Everyone is converging on the city. It is the object of choice to influence the state of things. Technology giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Google have turned to the city recognizing the opportunity to create large operation systems, ones large enough to serve cities, providing real-time resource management, data collection, and infrastructure coordination. Similarly, Siemens and Phillips are among the manufacturers who are trying to transform sustainability products so they are capable of working at a metropolitan scale.

Convergence on the City

International agencies have shifted their attention to the city regarding it as a critical platform for achieving their social goals. WHO has determined that the most beneficial public health measure to address aging populations is to improve the livability of cities (over providing the elderly traditional medical care or social services). The UN’s first ever ‘Resolution on Public Space,’ the UN Global Compact’s “Cities Programme,” UNESCO/UN Habitat’s “Right to the City” charter, and UN Habitat’s ‘100 Cities Initiative’ are major efforts to aid human development through urban development. Through their charitable foundations, banks and management services firms are reinforcing their stake in urban real estate. In addition to other ‘place-based’ causes they independently support, Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Prudential Financial for example all give considerably to Living Cities, a US philanthropy in the field of community development. People also are heading to the city. We all know the well-worn recitation of the rising percentage of the world population living in metropolitan areas. But the patterns of migration are as revealing as net population change. While millions are moving to cities in general, many others are relocating from one city to another. The movement and demographics among urban areas are just as important signs of the global geography of urban settlement.

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Convergence on the City

Much of this concentration on cities may be because municipalities can actually enact decisions. In as much as local governments can circumvent slowpaced federal decision-making processes to put in place new policies, cities are effective hosts for social transformations. And faced with desperately limited budgets, local leaders are exercising all means at their disposal including alternative policies and incentives to attract all the above parties to compete with other cities to grow. In this regard, the city is a crucial subject of study because it is a locus of experimentation in the dynamics of technology, human development, land use, and governance. Yet, if we look at our own city, can we see evidence of, let alone understand, how this is taking place?

Convergence on the City

An urgent task for the architecture profession is to give form to the form of cities. Despite the intensive activity gravitating around it, there is little knowledge of how the form of the city is changing. Does the investment in a city correspond to the same amount of new construction as it did even ten years ago? There are cities whose levels of financial and social capital rival those that are currently overseeing a building boom, yet they appear much as they did a decade ago. In todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s city, where do these escalating resources go? How do they materialize in the urban realm? We as architects can give form to the logic of this convergence: we can explain through urban models the principles guiding development and risk. And we can show how this logic is shaping the form of the districts we live in.

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Convergence on the City

1949

The US Government creates ‘The Housing Act of 1949’, as part of President Truman’s ‘Fair Deal’. This provides federal financing for slum removal programs. The Federal Housing Administration receives funding for over 800,000 housing units through this act.

1950s Convergence Timeline

Following the trauma of the Second World War, urban regeneration begins in Northern Italy. This initiates the renewal of historic city centers, privatizes state-owned enterprises, and begins housing rehabilitation projects.

1951

Lewis Mumford popularizes the term ‘urban design’ in his introduction to Clarence Stein’s book, Towards New Towns for America.

1951

The Nature Conservancy is founded as a non-profit environmental organization; through its advocacy of sustainability, the organization has protected over 473,000 sq kilometers and has over 1 million members. 161

Convergence on the City

1954

The ‘US Housing Act of 1954’ rebrands and re-markets ‘slum clearance’ as ‘urban renewal’.

1955

Convergence Timeline

Ian Nairn gains notoriety with ‘Outrage’, a special issue of Architectural Review. Here, he discusses ‘subtopias’, which are identified as the weak areas surrounding the city.

1955

In an effort for urban regeneration, the Japan Housing Corporation is established as a public-private partnership; it eventually evolves into the Urban Renaissance Agency.

1957

The ‘Housing Act’ begins in the UK and commences slum clearance.

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Convergence on the City

1958

Hannah Arendt writes The Human Condition, an early text on the citizen and new ideas of ‘public space’.

1959

Convergence Timeline

‘New Urbanism’ is coined by Grady Clay in ‘Metropolis Regained’, which is published in Horizon Magazine.

1961

The World Wide Fund for Nature is founded in Morges, Switzerland, in response to articles featured in The Observer. The organization, originally called the World Wildlife Fund, has over 5 million supporters today.

1962

Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, a book that ignites the sustainability movement.

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Convergence on the City

1965

The US Congress establishes the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as a cabinetlevel position.

1969

Convergence Timeline

The League of Conservation Voters is founded by David Brower of the Sierra Club. Since 1996, they have defeated 49 of 79 ‘anti-environment’ candidates. They are actively involved in educating the public on key environmental issues.

1970

Henri Lefebvre writes The Urban Revolution, which launches the field of ‘political geography’. He states that the urban terrain is composed of a series of power struggles.

1972

Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen use the term ‘sustainability’ in the text ‘A Blueprint for Survival’.

164

Convergence on the City

1975

The Project for Public Spaces is founded. The organization builds upon the ideas of William H. Whyte and helps to advance policy in over 2500 communities.

1978

Convergence Timeline

Once regulated at a national level, urban policy responsibilities in Spain shift to municipal regulation. The ‘Planes Generales’ gives power to the ‘Autonomous Communities’ and enacts urban policy at a local level. Bilbao’s regeneration and Barcelona’s 1994 Summer Olympic proposal are products of this policy change.

1980

The National Trust for Historic Preservation creates the Main Street Center; the Trust helps revitalize downtowns and aids in commercial redevelopment.

1980

William H. Whyte publishes The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which seeks to revolutionize the study and planning of public spaces. 165

Convergence on the City

1981

Donald Appleyard writes Livable Streets, a book that disputes the idea that streets are primarily for vehicular traffic.

1985

Convergence Timeline

‘Universal Design’ is introduced by Ronald Mace in Universal Design: Barrier Free Environments for Everyone.

1987

The UN uses ‘Sustainable Development’ in the report, ‘Our Common Future’.

1988

‘The National Movement of Urban Reforms’ passes through the Constituent Assembly in Brazil in an attempt to address worsening housing and poverty issues. The reforms are finally realized in 2001 as the ‘City Statute’.

166

Convergence on the City

1989

Open competitions are initiated by ‘Europan 1’ for young architects and designers. This allows them to build successful projects at an early age.

1989

Convergence Timeline

Edward Soja writes Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory, which discusses the influence of geography on the social and political.

1989

Ray Oldenburg introduces the term ‘third place’ to denote a place that is neither home nor work but a place central to the city’s local democracy and community vitality.

1990s

Peter Calthorpe, a California urban designer, encourages community renewal through alignment with a train-based transit system.

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Convergence on the City

1991

Bruno Latour writes We Have Never Been Modern. The book directly suggests that the distinction between the natural and unnatural within Modernist thinking can be attributed to a young, underdeveloped understanding of man’s relation to his environment.

1992 Convergence Timeline

Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss industrialist, founds the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Its 200 member roll includes BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Toyota Motor Corporation.

1995

Andrea Woodner founds the Design Trust for Public Space, an organziation that serves as a middleman, connecting architects to social causes.

1999

‘New Pedestrianism’ is coined by Michael E. Arth, an urban designer who would run for Governor of Florida in 2010. 168

Convergence on the City

1999

‘City Alliance’ begins through the coordination of donor governments, the World Bank, and UN-Habitat. The organization works to reduce poverty and increase sustainability.

2000 Convergence Timeline

Robert Putnam writes Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The book details the failing of civil society. Unbeknownst to the general public, the fabric of US social life was in danger.

2000

Former Denver mayor Wellington E. Webb, declares that the 21st century ‘will be the century of cities’.

2000

Setha Low, the director of Public Space Research Group, publishes On The Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.

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Convergence on the City

2000

Jerold Kayden writes Privately Owned Public Space: The New York Experience, a study of a new type of urban space that has emerged in the past few decades in New York City.

2001 Convergence Timeline

World Foundation for Smart Communities defines ‘Intelligent City’; the initiative encourages growth through communication and new information technologies.

2002

Richard Florida writes The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life; the book credits a city’s success to the development of technology, talent, and tolerance amongst the general community.

2004

United Cities and Local Governments is established, connecting more than 1000 member cities and 112 member local governments. 170

Convergence on the City

2004

Japan Housing Corporation forms a partnership with the Regional City Development Division to create the Urban Renaissance Agency, which develops projects in over 300 districts. The Urban Renaissance Agency is currently responsible for 770,000 rental units.

2005 Convergence Timeline

India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission is set up to address the estimated 250 million additional inhabitants in Indian cities and to solve problems of under-urbanization.

2006

‘google.org’ is founded. The initiative was originally set up for grant funding, however they now engage in engineering projects.

2007

The WHO Age-friendly Cities Guide is released.

171

Convergence on the City

2007

Leipzig Charter sets out a framework for the new economic period of EU foreign policy.

2007

Convergence Timeline

Toni Griffin works on the planning and community development of Newark, New Jersey, which is historically the first town in America to hire an urban planner. Griffinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work in Newark led to her being brought on to advise the city of Detroit.

2008

Ricky Burdett and Deyan Sudjic write The Endless City, where they document six international cities that have experienced rapid and enormous growth.

2010

IBMâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Smarter Cities Challenge helps 100 cities worldwide to address urban problems with $50 million USD in IBM technology and expertise.

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Convergence on the City

2010

UN-Habitat World Urban Campaign starts.

2011

Convergence Timeline

UN-Habitat hosts the first ‘100 Cities Summit’. It adopts resolutions on public space and proclaims that ‘all persons have the right to find in the city the necessary conditions for their political, economic, cultural, social and ecological realization...’

2011

Edward Glaeser writes the book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Inventions Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier. He advocates for economically diverse cities.

2012

Siemens Urban Sustainability Centre is set to be completed in London.

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Convergence on the City

New Cities Foundation GE, Cisco, Ericsson Child Friendly Cities United Nations Childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fund Cities Readiness Initiative Center for Disease Control Sustainability Management European Initiative on Smart Cities European Commission Cities of Service AARP, Home Depot, ServiceNation, United Way

Initiatives on the City

Eco 2 Cities The World Bank Philips Livable Cities Award Philips Age-Friendly Cities European Healthy Cities Network Habitat Resolution on Public Spaces, Habitat World Urban Campaign United Nations Sustainable Cities Collective Siemens Google.org Google Sustainability Report 2011 Toyota Motor Corporation Living Cities Bank of America, Deutcsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Prudential Smarter Cities IBM

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Convergence on the City

The Avant Garde Diaries Mercedes Ideas for Good Toyota Audi Urban Future Initiative Audi BMWi BMW L Studio Lexus

Automaker Initiatives

BMW Guggenheim Lab BMW, Guggenheim Cross Country Travels Volvo Ford Research Lab BMW Group California Innovation Triangle Renault-Nissan Audi Volkswagen Research Lab General Motors and Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation

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Convergence on the City

While activist mayors and entrepreneurial officials seek to strengthen their cities from the inside-out, cities have also become the target of interested outsiders who view the city as the appropriate scale at which to invest and experiment. Corporations, government bodies, and global NGOs are all getting into the game. Here, the city becomes a microcosm, or rather a local incubator of projects and systems to be exported upon demonstration of success. In fact, the relative geographic specificity of the city lends itself to being an ideal sample size or proving ground for new projects. “Changes in communications, education and knowledge-sharing, transportation and urban migration are transforming world dynamics...Cities that want to thrive, need to adapt to these changes. Size is no longer a leading predictor of influence. The success of cities such as Toronto, San Francisco, Stockholm and Sydney sends a clear signal that holistic balance makes a real difference.” Bob Moritz, US Chairman and Senior Partner of PwC

The Chosen Scale Locus / laboratory of investment and investigation “The big picture is that we are able to take any piece of information that is Internet-accessible, any feed, and integrate it into the logic of how we operate these components of our city.” Marcus Quigley, principal water engineer at the infrastructure engineering firm Geosyntec

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Convergence on the City

The Chosen Scale

Convergence on the City

Traffic in Mexico City EMBARQ. A not-for-profit initiative for the World Resources Institute, EMBARQ works in developing cities to provide sustainable solutions to transit problems. They currently have five Centers for Sustainable Transport, located in Mexico, Brazil, India, Turkey, and the Andean region. This NGO works with the local transport authority in the implementation of mobility systems, as they aim to reduce pollution, improve public health and safety, and beautify urban public spaces. The group approaches the urban mobility problem by employing experts in a range of fields, including architecture, geography, journalism, sociology, civil and transport engineering and air quality management.

177

The Chosen Scale

Convergence on the City

New York Cities of Opportunity. The annual â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Cities of Opportunity Reportâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, published by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, is a comprehensive study that surveys 26 global cities using 66 different variables, including intellectual capital, innovation, health, security and safety. The project began when post-9/11 reports identified Kansas City as the go-to city for business. The PwC report looks beyond cost benefit analysis to determine what makes a city attractive and often cites the ability of a city to grow and retain talent as one of the most important factors in a successful city. The 2011 report found that balanced cities rather than traditional business centers tended to perform the best in the rankings. New York took the top ranking, with Toronto, San Francisco, Sydney and Stockholm following. 178

The Chosen Scale

Convergence on the City

St. Petersburg Healthy Cities Initiative. The WHO Healthy Cities project is a global movement that engages local governments in health development through a process of political commitment, institutional change, capacity-building, partnership-based planning and innovative projects. Within Europe, the Healthy Cities Initiative partners with cities to collaborate in the implementation of intersectoral city health plans. The WHO provides technical expertise and a range of resource materials, while the cities take responsibility in supporting the development of future networks. The WHO European Healthy Cities Network has around 90 member cities and 30 Healthy City Networks in total, reaching out to more than 1400 cities.

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The Chosen Scale

Convergence on the City

Santander SmartSantander. SmartSantander is a proposal for a European experimental test facility for research and experimentation in architecture, technology, services, and the application of the Internet of Things. SmartSantander targets researchers, end users and service providers. It aims to close the gap between lab technology and real life applicability. The project is scheduled to last 36 months and is composed of a consortium of 15 organizations and 9 countries. The data for the study is collected through sensor technology placed in the architecture. The data is then processed and transmitted back to the SmartSantander â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;backbone.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; The project envisions the deployment of 20,000 sensors in Belgrade, Guildford, LĂźbeck, and Santander.

180

On October 30, 1975, the front page of the New York Daily News ran the headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” referring to then-President Gerald Ford’s unwillingness to use federal funds to rescue New York City from its impending bankruptcy. Today, it is the cities who might be said to have the upper hand on everything from climate change and public health to global influence and financial solvency. Faced with deadlocked legislatures and mounting state and federal debt, opportunistic mayors are paving their own way, going it alone yet also forging new city-to-city networks with like-minded mayors from across the country and the globe. “Cities are not the problem, they are the solution.” Jamie Lerner, urban planner and former mayor of Curitiba.

City-States Local innovations and transnational alliances

“For the first time, the 2012 TED prize has been given not to an individual but to an idea: The City 2.0. With half of Earth’s population already living in urban centers, and that number expected to grow, fewer issues could be more important in the years ahead. ‘Cities are the great hope for our future,’ said Chris Anderson, curator of TED. While thinking of who to award this year’s prize to, the answer slowly became clear: ‘This theme of the importance of cities for the future of planet earth kept coming up.’ The purpose of the TED prize is to ‘ignite a massive collaboration project’ which, in the case of cities, will not mean designing yet another utopian vision of the future. Instead, a panel of experts in the areas of architecture, the economy, urban planning and social science will be consulted about how to make current cities better.” Big Think Editors on this year’s TED prize winner

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Boris Johnson and Michael Bloomberg Innovation Exchange Programme. In May of 2008, the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, met and announced a partnership between the two cities. The agreement created the Innovation Exchange Programme, which is designed to share government procedural advancements. The program focuses on effective policy design, successful implementation, and the creation of a more accessible and transparent government. The program involves not only the formal exchange of ideas but also the transfer of personnel between the cities.

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US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement map US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Adopted in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement amongst 191 countries to address climate disruption that the US Federal government failed to ratify. In response, the mayor of Seattle, Greg Nickels, launched an initiative to advance the goals of the Kyoto Protocol through the leadership of the cities in the United States. He sought pledges from mayors in all 50 states in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7% by the year 2012. By October 2009, 1,000 mayors signed the agreement, representing over 86 million United States residents.

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Blueseed, Floating Silicon Valley rendering Floating Silicon Valley. The Floating Silicon Valley is a proposed research facility created in response to post-9/11 policy changes that increased border security. This shift in policy increased border security, making it difficult for foreign born talent to enter the United States. In the past decade, more than half of the start-ups in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants. Blueseed, a Silicon Valley start-up, is working to fund a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;floating start-up incubator,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; which circumvents the immigration laws by holding business meetings, conferences, and seminars aboard a ship on the coast of California.

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Amsterdam Centraal railway station Deltametropool. Deltametropool is a concept developed by Dutch planners that re-imagines the four major cities of the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht) as one regional metropolis. With a population of 7,100,000, it is one of the largest conurbations in Europe. Deltametropool consists of the Noordvleugel and Utrecht, two large metropolitan areas. The development of the regional metropolis began with the construction of a new fast light-rail connection between Rotterdam and The Hague. An extension of the A4 motorway to connect Delft to Rotterdam is also on the governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s agenda.

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Smart Systems Risk Management

If the Fordist era heralded a period of immense industrial productivity, it manufactured risk in equal measure, with the nation-state serving as the mediator of that risk. In the post-Fordist era, risk continues to be produced, but its materializations are as much in the information realm as in the industrial. The globalization of capital, however, has effectively re-scaled the mediator, de-throning the state and dispersing the locus of control. Within these developments, the city achieves a new form of prominence, yet also becomes saddled with a vast amount of inputs from geographically external sources. No longer able to conceive of themselves as islands, cities are the potential incubators of trans-scalar innovation. As the risks and rewards become increasingly complex, many cities have begun to partner with private organizations and comprehensive technology providers in an attempt to manage the exploding number of inputs. They are having to become “smart”, “intelligent”, and “liveable” in an age where such broad phenomena can conceivably be quantified. “Speed, safety, and comfort will be the keynotes of tomorrow’s highways. A multi-colored highway system may enable the motorist to reach his destination by following the correct color strip.” Disney’s Magic Highway U.S.A. 1958 “What people care about is predictability getting to their destinations. Predictability is more important than absolutely minimizing the time it takes to get to a destination.” William Mitchell in ‘A New Spin on Urban Mobility,’ 2009 “Singapore has increased its public transport mode share from about a third to about two thirds and reduced the amount of car traffic in its central city area by more than half. It’s done that at the same time incomes have increased more than tenfold and car ownership has risen more than 300 percent. The price of the congestion charge is not in the hands of politicians but of the technocrats who administer 186

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the system to deliver performance for the customer. And so motorists who have to pay more to drive than we do in America don’t spend a lot of time stuck in traffic; they get where they want to go quickly. And people in Singapore have a world-class public transport system in which the majority of trips are made on buses that operate on surface streets and don’t get stuck in traffic because traffic is managed.” Michael Replogle, Founder of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Bloomberg Businessweek, (1 Dec 2011)

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Curitiba transit oriented development Curitiba. In 1971, architect and urban planner Jamie Lerner began his first term as mayor of the city of Curitiba, Brazil. Working with a small budget, he implemented a rapid bus transit system in partnership with the city and private companies. The transit system was coordinated with land development policy by creating incentives and zoning controls that allowed for the necessary density of development along the transit corridors to ensure a self-sustaining system. Towards those same ends, Lerner contracted with Volvo for the design of larger passenger buses that improved the driver to passenger ratio, saving the city money. Curitiba was designed for 350,000 people, however, the population has risen to 3.2 million and currently the licensing of cars in Curitiba is 2.5 times higher than babies being born. 188

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Mexico City Street Mexico City. In 2002, Mexico City partnered with EMBARQ and CTS-Mexico to develop a rapid bus transit system for the city. In 2005, the first line opened to the public, with a second line following in 2009 to cover over 40 miles. The system services 315,000 people each day and has led to an annual decrease of over 35,400 tons of carbon dioxide. Rapid bus transit systems consist of a bus-only operating system with separate lanes of traffic; boarding is level with the station and fare collection is off-bus. The buses are typically branded, along with the stations, to make the bus more attractive to the rider.

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St. Louis St. Louis. St Louis was one of the 100 cities selected from around the world to be a part of the IBM Smarter Cities challenge. The competitive grant program offers a chance to under-performing cities to compete for awards totaling $50 million worth of IBM expertise. Within the first six months, St. Louis experienced its first dramatic drop in violent crimes since the 1960s. The city became safer and more efficient through the networking of crime agencies and the sharing and communication of data. Other cities within the initiative have looked at health, public safety, transportation, social services, recreation, education, energy, and sustainability.

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Singapore Singapore and New York City. In 1975, Singapore implemented the Singapore Area Licensing Scheme, which charged drivers to enter the downtown during daily periods of peak congestion. The system was digitized and now operates throughout the majority of the day. In 2006, Singapore partnered with IBM to run a traffic estimation tool. Despite Singaporeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s measures to make driving costly, car population continues to rise. In New York City, Charles Komanoff conducted a 3 year study on the traffic patterns, resulting in extensive data collection. From this survey, he concluded that while driving was still necessary, drivers needed to be encouraged to travel at different times in the day. In 2008, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to enact a congestion pricing zone, though this measure would eventually fail in the face of popular protest. 191

The campus is fast becoming the company town of the post-industrial era, yet one that takes advantage of the positive human capital externalities enabled by urban density and proximity to a strong talent base. Composed either as self-sufficient prototypical enclaves or as mixed-use insertions within pre-existing urban fabrics, the campus combines the soft power of image with digital technology in an evolution of the suburban office complex that signals a turn toward the corporate and institutional stewardship of the city. No longer a purely productive entity, these cities within the city establish a platform for research, recreation, and idea exchange in the service of innovation. “The literature on knowledge spillovers suggests that ideas move quickly from person to person within urban areas. These spillovers seem to be the source of intellectual change, as urban innovators riff off each others’ ideas. Urban intellectual connections create agglomeration economies and help us to understand why skilled cities are so successful, but they also remind us that many intellectual revolutions involve small numbers of connected inventors.” Edward L. Glaeser and Joshua D. Gottlieb, ‘The Wealth of Cities: Agglomeration Economies and Spatial Equilibrium in the United States,’ (Feb 2009)

From Complex to Campus Centers of research and recreation

“New York City is a powerhouse of medical research, for example, but much of the spinoff wealth is created in drug labs and medical-device makers that dot New Jersey’s suburbs. And yet the intensely urban and collaborative engineering scene in New York City suggests that tech must increasingly leave isolating suburban office parks behind. ‘Software and applications need the kind of dense expertise that cities are full of,’ said Seth W. Pinsky, president of the sponsoring New York City Economic Development Corporation in a telephone interview.” James Moore, Bloomberg News (20 Dec 2011)

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From Complex to Campus

Convergence on the City

Living PlanIT, PlanIT Valley rendering PlanIT Valley. PlanIT Valley is a proposed urban operating system with the prototype model being built outside of Portugal, scheduled to be completed in 2015. Designed as a smart city, PlanIT Valley will cost $19 billion to construct and will house a population of 225,000 occupants. The developers made a conscience decision to design the prototype as a city as opposed to a campus, looking to the mass manufacturing and mass customization systems of Toyota and Ford to keep the quality consistent. Collaborating with multiple partners to develop software and systems, they hope to eventually have 14,000 partners working to code the city.

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Novartis Campus Basel. In 2003, Novartis transformed its global headquarters from a chemical production site to a state-of-the-art center for research, development and management. Architect Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani created a master plan that adopts the campus model to foster a sense of collaboration. Designed as a mini-city on the edge of Basel, the existing buildings were gradually demolished and replaced with works by architects and artists of international stature, such as Frank Gehry, Rafael Moneo, and SANAA.

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Cornell University and Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Roosevelt Island Campus rendering New York City. Cornell University and Technion Israel Institute of Technology partnered together in the summer of 2011 as part of a yearlong competition for the design and planning of a campus on Roosevelt Island. The proposal included a $350 million gift to underwrite the construction costs and a $150 million venture fund for start up companies. The partnership and monetary donations were strategically kept secret until the time of presentation. The universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s programs will focus on technology in regards to the fields of medicine, urban planing, finance, and advertising.

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Re:Vision Architecture, Navy Yard Clean Energy rendering Philadelphia. The Navy Yard Clean Energy campus is a 1200-acre waterfront development that will receive up to $122 million from the Department of Energy to establish an energy innovation hub in partnership with Pennsylvania State University. This hub will combine university researchers with the private sector to develop technologies to make buildings more energy efficient. The campus will operate as an independent electric microgrid and as a testing ground for the technology developed on-site. In addition to the research facilities, the Navy Yard also includes commercial amenities, residential developments and expanded mass transit. When fully built, the Navy Yard will employ more than 20,000 workers and support $2 billion in private investment.

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Public Planning Think positively

Historically, the provision of public space has often oscillated between being a preordained zone in a master plan or an interstitial byproduct of real estate development schemes. In the built-out cores of the contemporary city, public space cannot be taken for granted and its provision is as much a matter of political will as of design. In New York City, City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden is attempting to reverse the developer-friendly logic of the 1961 zoning resolution—where the inclusion of public plazas and atria would permit added building height—by suggesting that public space be conceived as the primary driver of urban form. This development is more an evolution of the public-private model rather than a complete break in favor of the public sphere, as public space takes on the role of a beneficent fetish ripe for consumption. At the same time, as per the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v. City of New London, the definition of “public use” has also evolved to include the general economic benefits afforded to a community through the public transfer of private land to another private entity under eminent domain. “What happens when you think of mobility not as a vehicle or transportation problem, but in urban design terms? You take as a starting point the kind of city you want to live in and then frame the problem as wanting to make a mobility system to enable that kind of city.” William Mitchell, ‘A New Spin on Urban Mobility,’ 2009 “By the 1960s, American values had begun to catch on [in Copenhagen]—separate isolated homes and everyone driving. The city was suffering so how could we reverse these patterns? We decided to make the public realm so attractive it would drag people back into the streets, whilst making it simultaneously difficult to go there by car. ...The city became like a good party.” Jan Gehl, ‘The challenge of making a human quality in the city,’ 1992

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Public Planning

Convergence on the City

East River development New York City. In March of 2011, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a new strategic outline for New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s waterfront with Vision 2020: New York City Comprehensive Waterfront Plan. The project re-imagines the East River and creates a greenway to rival the developments on the Hudson River of the preceding decade. This overall vision has helped guide the city and its planning department in development decisions, including the recent land deal with the United Nations that brought in $73 million and a replacement park. Other popular projects include the Queens ferry and the development of Pier 15. These projects have created an interest amongst private investors, who are being engaged to radically reshape the city for years to come.

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Los Angeles Los Angeles. In 2008, the city of Los Angeles passed a one-half cent sales tax increase to help fund the expansion of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s transit network under the 30/10 Initiative. This plan will leverage the increased tax revenues to build 12 key transit projects in the next ten years. While the funds will be collected over the course of the next thirty years, the federal government will provide the money up front so that the projects will be delivered sooner. This will take advantage of the current low construction costs, create 160,000 construction jobs, reduce greenhouse emissions, and ease traffic congestion throughout the city.

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Willamette River Portland, Oregon. In an attempt to begin a discussion about the Willamette River, Mayor Vera Katz launched a series of events in September 2000 leading to the creation of the River Renaissance Strategy in March of 2001. This strategy works to ensure a healthy river system by maintaining a working harbor, creating active waterfront districts, and promoting partnerships, leadership, and education among all involved parties. By challenging the way the river is typically thought about in terms of its integration into the city, new policy is implemented that involves the public and bureaucratic officials. This helps to inspire creative solutions to complex problems and sets in motion a tradition of collaboration among city, community, and investment interests to improve the economic, ecological, recreational, and cultural functions Portlandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rivers and streams. 200

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Barcelona Olympic Village Barcelona. Located along the city’s coastal edge, the Barcelona Olympic Village was developed to accommodate the 1992 Olympic Games. The games prompted billions of public and private funds to be invested in the regeneration of this area. The city used this opportunity to redevelop old neighborhoods and discarded ports, along with its aging transportation infrastructure. Over two thousand apartments were developed by the time of the event, almost 60 percent of which were sold prior to the games’ commencement. Barcelona leveraged the success of its Olympics to emerge as a major tourist destination, creating the ‘Turimse de Barcelona’ following the games. In 2004, the Universal Forum of Cultures was designed to facilitate large scale cultural events and the area is now a high-end residential district with commercial and leisure developments. 201

Through the guise of temporary plazas and painted bike lanes, NYCDOT Commissioner Janette SadikKhan managed to orchestrate one of the cheapest and most extensive land grabs in the history of the city, all the while improving automobile traffic flow and providing New Yorkers with dozens of new leisure spaces in some of the most congested areas of the city. As these spaces become formalized with constructed medians and permanent seating, the not-so-hostile takeover sets its sights on new opportunities to exploit. Call them loopholes in the system or effective stunts, a new breed of street smart planning initiatives are starting to take hold in cities across the globe. “The city was without organs... meaning that it was a dump, and that nothing in it functioned... I thought, my colors will have to replace those organs. It was an intervention.” Edi Rama, former Mayor of Tirana

Trojan Horse Planning Activism by design

“More downright rebelliously, she sometimes circumvents the community by experimenting with test swatches called pilots, like little harbingers of the future. With a pilot change, you don’t necessarily need community permission, since the idea is that you may end up just taking it down. For example, with the DUMBO parklet, a past commissioner might have educated the residents first, tried to get them to buy into the plan. But it takes months to convince a neighborhood to agree to a change. Instead, she just painted. Part of this is psychological warfare. Moses once said, ‘Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.’ Sadik-Khan has co-opted those words. Under her rule, bike lanes materialize overnight. Sidewalks become pop-up cafés and flowers bloom inside repurposed pots in quick and cowering deference. New Yorkers aren’t used to this kind of change. So there they sit at their new café and they sip their Darjeeling, looking rather stunned or drugged and if not pleased, then at the very least seated.” Lisa Taddeo, ‘Janette Sadik-Khan: Urban Reengineer’ Esquire, 2010 202

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Trojan Horse Planning

Convergence on the City

Curitiba Botanical Garden Curitiba. Within the first 72 hours of becoming mayor of Curitiba, Jamie Lerner made the downtown area into a pedestrian mall. Over the course of a weekend, he ordered workers to jackhammer the pavement, put down cobblestones, erect streetlights and kiosks, and put in tens of thousands of flowers. By Monday morning, the pedestrian mall was complete; by Monday afternoon, local business owners were petitioning the city to extend the mall to additional blocks. Lerner would further broaden his range of tactics for creating pedestrian zones to include enlisting the help of children to play in the streets to deter drivers from particular avenues.

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New York City bike lanes New York City. Beginning in 2007 with the building of a protected bike lane on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, Janette Sadik-Khanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Department of Transportation has slowly reclaimed spaces for bikes in New York City. In the ensuing four years, the number of cyclists doubled, totaling more than 36,000 at the end of 2011. With the introduction of a bike-sharing program in 2012, that number is expected to jump even more. From that initial, covert experiment, SadikKhan is well on her way to fulfilling the 900-mile bike path network goal set forth in the NYC Bicycle Master Plan.

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Park(ing) Day San Francisco. San Francisco began the program Pavement to Parks to take advantage of the unused spaces in the city, which comprised 25 percent of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land area. Starting in 2009, the Mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s office, the Department of Public Works, the Planning Department, and the Municipal Transportation Agency began collaborating to seek out and approve projects that temporarily reclaim the unused spaces and transform them into public plazas and parks. At the beginning of 2011, there were four of these parklets; now there are 22, with six more approved and 44 in various stages of review. Park(ing) Day also began in San Francisco. This annual world-wide event temporarily reclaims parking spaces as public parks. Last year, there were over 900 interventions on 6 continents. 205

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Tirana Tirana. Former painter Edi Rama was elected the mayor of Tirana, Albania soon after the end of the communist regime. In an attempt to make the city more lively and attractive to international investment, he began treating the facades of his city’s buildings as a canvas, covering them in bold patterns with brightly-colored paint. He raised money for the city’s transformation through the World Bank, the European Union, the United Nations Development Programme and other non-governmental organizations. In order to build anything in the capital, Rama insisted that a contractor must “contribute” to the public environment of the city. He later opened up the city planning process to the public by asking architects to submit proposals for more substantive improvements.

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Congestion within dense urban cores drives much of the discussion on how best to re-allocate finite financial and spatial resources. At the same time, however, many cities with less dense compositions are also the scene of innovation in rapid transit systems that attempt to correct the negative externalities of unchecked sprawl. “Houston suburbia shifts directly to the house in the garden leaving all other accoutrement's behind. An escape from confinements more abstract than those of the traditional city–cultural history, family, inherited destinies—may have encouraged the process. Houston is never a destination but always a point of departure, the exhilarating beginning for a steady flow of newcomers. It seems perfectly reasonable to find the space program located here—a launch pad for the last frontier.” Lars Lerup

Mothers of Invention Necessity breeds creativity

“No single master plan can anticipate the evolving and varied needs of an increasingly diverse population or achieve the resiliency, responsiveness and flexibility that shorter-term, experimental endeavors can.” Alison Arieff, ‘It’s Time to Rethink Temporary’ New York Times Opinionator (19 Dec 2011) “The last two years have been about re-imagining places for our emerging economy and what kind of environment helps facilitate that.” Alexa Arena, Vice President of Forest City

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Mothers of Invention

Convergence on the City

New York City street New York City. Smart Growth@NYC is a program comprised of four initiatives: the Street Design Manual (SDM), the Active Design Guidelines (ADG), the Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH) program, and the Bicycle Parking Amendment. These created a comprehensive, city-wide resource for implementing world-class street design; they support multi-modal transportation and help achieve environmental and other community goals. Park Smart is another program within the city that is designed to encourage turnover of parking spaces by charging higher rates during the hours of peak demand and hopes to encourage drivers to park for a shorter amount of time. It operates in three neighborhoodsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, and Park Slope. 208

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Downtown Atlanta Atlanta. The Livable Cities Initiative was launched in 1999 with a ďŹ ve-year, $350 million commitment from federal funds. With this money, Atlanta is developing walkable live-work-shop-learn communities with high population densities to support alternative modes of travel. The federal funds support both community planning and the supporting transportation. Now, planning proposals are solicited each year for creating a more diverse city; part of the process highlights public transportation strategies for higher-density, mixed-use development patterns. They must also work within the land use regulation policies and find matching funds for each grant. Upon successful completion of the granted project, the applicants can apply for funds to implement the transportation components of their plans. 209

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Porto Alegre Porto Alegre. In attempts to contain the sprawl of the 31 municipalities of Porto Alegre, the city began the New Gates Project. The project aims to condense the city and densify the urban core by expanding inwards. The project proposes urban re-development in abandoned industrial land. They have also enacted densification policies that call for additional private investments and the provision of new social housing. The city plans to implement a cooperative, purchase two waste-sorting units, and create 170 new retail and service outlets to stimulate the local economy and generate new job opportunities. Nearby, seven residential nuclei are being developed. The existing road infrastructure will be connected into these new area to create an integrated system of transport.

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Floating school Gujarat, India. Due to the annual flooding and the migratory patterns of work, the education of Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s youth is often not prioritized. To counter this trend, local organizations have created mobile schools in the form of buses and boats. This anchors a school within a community, as it moves from place to place. The Floating Desert Project was developed in response to a 2001 earthquake by a coalition of school children, anthropologists, and MIT Media Lab researchers. They believe that digital technology can transform the learning process through the availability of materials and student record tracking.

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For established cities in the midst of financial turmoil it can be difficult to step back and take a long view of the measures needed to insure continued progress. In many cases, a dose of counter-intuitive or even utopian thinking is necessary to open up a larger discussion on the future of the city. Such speculative proposals may touch on issues ranging from policy and financing to adaptive reuse and the definition of new spaces of intervention within largely built-out urban fabrics. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.â&#x20AC;? Daniel Burnham, 1921

Altered Realities Revisionist futures

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891)

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Altered Realities

Convergence on the City

The High Line New York City. This mile-long park built upon a former elevated rail track was founded in 1999 by Friends of the High Line, a local community group interested in the preservation of the track. After outgoing Mayor Giuliani approved its destruction, the Friends commissioned photographer Joel Sternfeld to document the route and its diverse ecology, creating a public outcry to save the High Line. In 2004, the group partnered with New York City to identify a design team for the park. Since its completion, the surrounding area has flourished with high-end real estate developments enabled by an air rights transfer agreement integral to appeasing neighbors in the run-up to the parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s construction. In 2009, there were more than 30 projects planned or under construction in the nearby area. Other cities such as Chicago have expressed interest in replicating the park. 213

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Carmageddon Los Angeles. Over the course of a weekend in the summer of 2011, Los Angeles shut down the 405 freeway for the partial demolition of a bridge. The city anticipated chaos with the temporary freeway ban and for weeks prior they warned residents to stay off the road. However, on the weekend of the repairs, motorists largely heeded the city’s advice to stay off the roads, reducing traffic across the city. One LA resident posted online, “If we would close the freeways every weekend we would have a great society.” For years, many prominent urbanists have proposed the removal of the massive freeways and interstates that were built in the 1950s. Writers such as Christopher Hawthorne and Diana Lind are beginning to imagine ways to re-connect and re-stitch the urban fabric that was destroyed during urban renewal. 214

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Millennium Reserve plan Chicago. Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Millennium Reserve Plan is a new proposal by the city of Chicago backed by $17 million dollars from the state and other private investments. The park would turn 140,000 acres of under-used and post-industrial land into a public recreation hub. Central Park by comparison is only 843 acres. The plan is a large-scale attempt to protect Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land reserves and natural resources and to stimulate the local economy. The first phase of the project is scheduled to be completed in a few years. The park would be the largest of its kind in continental America.

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HafenCity Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg has undertaken the sustainable development of the underutilized toxic industrial areas of their city near the Elbe river. Hafen City, the largest city development project in Europe, is located on 388 acres of brownfields between the river and Hamburgâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s downtown. When completed, it will add an additional 5,500 homes to the area along with shops, parks, entertainment, schools, daycare facilities, offices, and a university, all connected by a transit system. Another project, Willenburg, is an island development across the Elbe River. With these initiatives, Hamburg is funding an environmentally and socially conscious building project to add life to the community through sustainability initiatives and additional infrastructure. These projects were instrumental in earning the city the European Unionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Greenest City Award in 2011. 216

Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko Associate Professor of Visual Art, New York University, Director, xDesign Environmental Health Clinic

We’re seeing the biggest change in aviation regulation in 60 years, which is the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) introduction of a new sport pilot license. I see this as a legislative opportunity that changes both geography and mobility in really interesting ways. There are 35 new light aircraft costing $100,000— which is less than many high-end cars—on the market, the FAA seems to be deliberately trying to encourage personal flight in a real way, and this new sport pilot license means that you can get a license in 20 hours of flight time. And when it takes 20 minutes to fly into Manhattan from Pennsylvania, these kinds of rural communities become like Westchester in their geographic relationship to the metropolis. What I did, in collaboration with the landscape architect David Fletcher, is create a wetland, the xAirport wetlanding. It’s an optional accessory for one of these new light sport aircraft, the Icon A5, which is amphibious and can land on water. It’s a 500-foot long private landing strip, and having one of them obviously makes your Icon A5 much more useful. Most of us understand that the single most environmentally damaging thing we do as individuals is to fly. In fact, in the past 50 years, planes have improved their engine efficiency incrementally, so they’re a 217

Redesigning the Airport for an Era of Sport Pilots and Wetland Appreciation

full 50 percent more efficient now than they were. If the automobile industry had done the same, we’d be in a very different position. What that means is that there’s actually not much more to be gained in the thrust technologies. By far the biggest environmental impact that our flight systems have now is in their landing infrastructure. Almost without exception, we’ve built our airports on what we used to think of as cheap flat swamps near urban centers. Now we call them wetlands: the most critical ecosystem for sequestering CO2, biodiversity hotspots, an extraordinarily invaluable technology for digesting industrial contaminants, and the basis of the whole marine ecosystem.

Natalie Jeremijenko Associate Professor of Visual Art, New York University, Director, xDesign Environmental Health Clinic

Actually, it’s much cheaper to construct a wetlanding compared to a terrestrial landing. It costs about $5,000 to do one of these wetlandings I’ve developed with David Fletcher, which also happens to be a biodiversity hotspot, versus about $150,000 to have a small terrestrial landing strip. Reintegrating small ephemeral wetlands back into the urban infrastructure in this way is extremely valuable. I’m working on one in Long Island City, in the Costco parking lot. You can park your plane right there at Costco, and the wetlanding will capture all the runoff from the rest of this vast impervious surface, as well as provide a whole host of environmental services. What I’m trying to do is seize this opportunity that the FAA has provided as a chance to explore what social and environmental change we can promulgate, and what useful prosthetics for the imagination we can create.

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Austin Long

Austin Long Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

Mobility is critical to warfare at all ends of the spectrum, whether you’re talking about the mobility of an intercontinental ballistic missile that can travel across the world in 30 minutes and deliver enormous firepower to the steps that have to be taken to enable folks to maneuver at the lowest level. Everything ties into mobility. So, why do you have machine guns? You have machine guns primarily to create suppressive fire so that people can then maneuver. Why do you have body armor? It’s so people can, without risking themselves too much, get out and maneuver. Yet, machine guns and body armor are heavy, so there’s a trade-off. You bring these assets to improve your mobility, but they also cut into your mobility. The story of warfare is basically the story of fire and mobility. Ground mobility is especially important in counterinsurgency because you can bypass people on the ground in a conventional war, and in some ways that’s better—you want to get around and behind them and cut off their lines of supply and communication and get to their headquarters. But if you do that in counterinsurgency, you just leave a pocket that you’re going to have to deal with eventually if you’re trying to establish political stability. * * *

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Austin Long Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

The combat unit is the connecting tissue between the strategy and the individuals. The US military has tried to move to more modular, and therefore, mobile units of action. For a long time, the Army thought in terms of divisions. Now it thinks much more in terms of brigades and these modular abilities to put together task forces on the fly. The ability to more readily customize particular sets of forces and deploy them has been a major change in military organization. Rather than having to pick up this massive chunk of combat power of 10,000+ guys, you can now take a few thousand here, plug this guy in here, and so forth. The same thing is true with special operations forces and conventional forces. For a long time, those operated around each other but not with each other and there have been big changes every ten years in how those two forces have really started to work hand-inglove to the point where you have conventional units assigned to special operations task forces to provide additional manpower. This has been another unit shift that’s enabled flexibility—if not mobility—in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before. * * * In the Second World War, the great thing about the Soviet T-34 was its cross country mobility. You would create a breakthrough in the enemy line, and then you’d race to exploit it and what you wanted was something that was fast and reliable. The T-34 had an advantage in that it also combined pretty robust armor and firepower. The US Sherman, in contrast, was a pretty good mobility tank. It was designed by people who had this “through mobility we conquer,” mindset, but was maybe a little under-gunned, at least initially. The sweet spot for tank design is agile but also packs a punch. You don’t want a tank that is indestructible, but can only move on certain roads at 5 mph, of which the Germans built a few. The current US tank, the M1, uses a turbine engine—basically a jet engine for a tank. It combines that agility and mobility with really robust firepower. Now, one problem with that is that it’s still a tract vehicle that weighs 70 220

The Sweet-Spot in Combat Mobility

tons. There are limits on what you can do with that— you have to have a very big airplane to put it on, for example.

Austin Long Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

If you look at the 1990s with the experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, the US Army realized it had a strategic mobility problem in terms of getting mobile forces across long distances. They had tanks that were great with all of these capacities but were hard to move from, say, Germany to Kosovo. Then you had light forces, like paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne or the 101st Airborne in helicopters, that you can get places easily, but they lack some of the necessary firepower. So, the US Army started to try and think of a medium sized vehicle that might lack the punch and the armor of a tank, but would be much more capable than the light force package. So, what we ended up with is a vehicle called the Stryker. And the Stryker is a wheeled vehicle that is quite fast compared to a tank. It has a reasonable amount of armor, but not nearly as much as a tank and a lot of sophisticated electronic systems to give it situational awareness. So, we have several brigades of those now, and they’re an attempt to find that sweet spot, not just between tactical level trade-offs of firepower and armor on the one hand and mobility, but also the ability to have strategic mobility. So, you can take the Stryker and put it on a fairly small plane, at least in theory, and take it somewhere and land it pretty quickly. That ability to get a capable force somewhere very quickly is not just tactical mobility, but it’s strategic mobility. * * * I don’t think the issue of excess is endemic to military operations. In almost all cases where your life is on the line, you want as much spare capacity as possible. I may not need 30,000 rounds of ammunition but by God, I might. And if I can get my hands on that, I’d like to. So, I think there’s a certain natural tendency toward over-engineering, as it were. The US military has tried to get a little more lean on that in terms of trying not to bring an iron mountain of 221

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supplies everywhere it goes. Relatively speaking, war is a rare phenomenon in the world, so the military, in general, is an insurance policy for outlier events, and I think the capacities that they build are built for events that, in an ideal sense, will never happen. So, if you look at strategic air command back in the 50s and 60s, the carriers of the US nuclear arsenal that was set to potentially destroy most of the world east of the Ural Mountains, their slogan was â&#x20AC;&#x153;Peace is our profession,â&#x20AC;? because they had built a capacity that was intentionally designed to be so excessive to insure that it would never be used. The bottom line of nuclear deterrence, of course, is to build a capacity that is so excessive that neither side would think about using it.

The Sweet-Spot in Combat Mobility

Austin Long Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University

222

Greg Lindsay

Greg Lindsay Author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next

Logistics represents the original total colonization of 24/7 mobility. The vast bulk of logistics, as we know it, it is what happens in the nighttime—the dead hours of the clock. The freeways are filled with truck drivers at night, and that’s when everything is processed at the FedEx hub in Memphis. Really, logistics is the conquest of lost time, in a quest to maximize mobility. Of course, geography is also important. From talking to FedEx and UPS, when you are doing air and trucking, it really just boils down to geography and time zones. The original air hubs were chosen based on this idea of the “cargo alley,” which is a swathe of cities that are in the central time zone so that you can make it to both coasts and back, and that are below the frost line, so you don’t have a significant weather disruption. Memphis gets snow once every half a century or something like that. The furthest north you can go is Champaign, Illinois. You don’t want to go further east than Columbus and Eastern Kentucky, you can go as far south as Memphis, and as far west as Little Rock or the Mississippi. That is basically where you put an air hub. An interesting example of this geography changing, and yet having to remain the same, is in the Far East. FedEx had their hub in the Philippines for years 223

The Colonization of Time and Space by Fedex...

because it was perfect for serving the Pan-Asia region, and then they moved it to China for geopolitical reasons —but it’s still on the same latitude. It had to be, in order to cover the region.

Greg Lindsay Author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next

I think the trucking hubs are all based on overlapping concentric regions. Amazon is an interesting case study in that case, in that they really expanded from the centralized model and they have increasingly decentralized over time. I don’t know exactly how—they were very unforthcoming when I tried to talk to them. For these companies, how they move things around is proprietary information. They won’t discuss it in the same way that Google will not even acknowledge how many data centers it actually has. The stuff they are most secretive about is their software. FedEx has an IT budget of one billion dollars a year. What most people don’t know is that those companies are some of the largest technology companies in the world, too.

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The Colonization of Time and Space by Fedex...

George Hripcsak

George Hripcsak Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

Biomedical informatics is the study and use of information in health care. It draws methods from a number of methodological fields—computer science, applied mathematics, philosophy, physics, statistics, epidemiology, cognitive science, psychology, and a little bit of economics. Then, with the domain areas we can divide up the field in different ways in terms of scale: computational biology is at the cellular scale; imaging at the human, or organ, scale; medicine, or clinical, informatics at the personal level; public health informatics at the population scale; and translational informatics where we cross among those various scales. The field ranges from people who do a lot of theory and develop new algorithms to people who do very practical things such as building clinical information systems that doctors use to deliver health care in the hospital. * * * Then there’s natural language processing. Carol Friedman and Noemie Elhadad are the two natural language processing experts in our department. Carol started working in the field in the 1970s as a lab technician and then got her PhD in the 1980s from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at NYU working with Naomi Sager, one of the pioneers in natural language processing in health care. Carol 225

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George Hripcsak Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

developed the next generation of natural language processing systems. The difference was that her system actually worked. Now, there are a lot of systems that are used for research and to test whether a hypothesis for a language would actually work, but with this one you could actually put text in one end and the structured information would come out the other end. We began doing studies with this new tool. In the 1990s, tuberculosis was more prevalent in New York City, so one of our problems was the fact that our patients would come in with something, but we didn’t know what and they’d be put in a hospital room with someone that might have active tuberculosis and suddenly now the patient would be at risk for tuberculosis as well. We needed to identify how to catch those patients with active TB ahead of time and make the doctor aware of it so the disease wouldn’t spread. We wrote a rule in the electronic health record that said, “If the patient is at risk for tuberculosis and they’re in a shared room, then tell the hospital epidemiologist, who then checks it out and moves the patient.” The problem was, the way we detected the tuberculosis was through a tuberculosis culture, or a tuberculosis smear, or a tuberculosis medication. But those are all examples of when the doctor knew that a person had tuberculosis, so the doctor wouldn’t put them in a shared room anyhow. Then we parsed the chest x-rays. The radiologist would read these images within a day and that became a report that is natural language. Carol’s system would then parse that report and look for particular findings like a cavitary lesion or an upper lobe infiltrate. If the patient had either of those, there would be a pretty good chance of active tuberculosis. The results from Carol’s system would go to the hospital epidemiologist, and we found that by using that system, it reduced the number of patients with active TB that were put into shared rooms in half. We’ve used natural language processing for a number of studies. We did a study where we parsed all of the x-rays in our neighborhood for ten years and we then verified the crime rate. We found that bullet and stab 226

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wounds in the emergency room, as evidenced by their wounds on the chest x-ray, dropped 46 percent just like the rate of violent crime in our neighborhood. So, we used external indicators to see if what we were getting from natural language processing on this database actually matched verifiable statistics that we knew to be true.

George Hripcsak Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

In medical language processing, we’ve swung very far in one direction with everyone trying to produce natural language processing statistically; that is, taking a corpus, annotating it, and then doing machine learning on that corpus to build a system to recognize what is being said. As an expert in linguistics, Naomi Sager’s method was based on syntax. Carol’s system was based on a semantic grammar. So she said, I can’t sit there and figure out every “the” and “a” because then I’ll be here forever and go down a path that I didn’t need to go down. Instead, using sub-language analysis, we can figure out what’s important in the sub-language, which is the language of the radiologist, or internist, or pathologist, etc and convert it into a semantic grammar which is something like, “The disease is in the body part.” So, these classes are not noun, verb, and adverb, they’re things like “body part” or “sidedness” or “disease” or “finding” or “degree.” This is the concept behind a semantic grammar. She hand-coded this grammar over a year or two and has been improving it over the last twenty years since then such that we’re now able to parse things very accurately. We did a study, published in the Annals Of Internal Medicine, comparing different methods of parsing a particular set of medical reports. We had radiologists read the reports, internists read the reports, laypersons read the reports, and Carol’s system read the reports, and then we did a sort of Google-like search, and Carol’s system was almost indistinguishable from the doctors’, radiologists’, and internists’ in interpreting what was in there and getting it coded right. And it was far above the laypersons and far above the Googlelike search.

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George Hripcsak Chair, Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University

But now in the last ten years, there’s been a hope that with more data, we can do these things with statistics. In the early days of speech processing and speech recognition, there was some statistical work and some knowledge and symbolic work, but statistics won out. Now people are trying to do the same thing by applying statistics to natural language processing, but it hasn’t been working that well. For example, you can do specific tests to find out, “Does this report tell me if the patient smokes or not?” You can train on a training set and come up with a pretty good algorithm that tells you yes or no. But if you’re trying to read the report and you have no idea if they’re going to be telling you, “I went on a vacation in the Himalayas and I came back with a rash on my left knee,” it’s pretty hard to train for that. And in cases like that, the semantic grammar approach is still out-performing the statistical approaches. Ultimately, I think what’s going to work is a combination of the statistical approach and some kind of symbolic approach like a semantic grammar that requires expertise and knowledge in order to create the system. * * * Another member of our department, Noemie Elhadad is looking at nuances in patient utterances so as to develop a program that can read between the lines in medical reports. For example, a note from the emergency department could read, “31 year old woman here with pain,” or “25 year old female back again for pain meds.” If you parse it there’s both some woman and some age for pain, but one statement tells you that someone has probably hurt herself and is visiting a doctor to fix it, versus the other where there’s a person possibly running from emergency room to emergency room looking for pain medications. But the actual word difference is small, and if you use a modern system that uses synonyms, you’d completely lose those nuances. The choice of “woman” versus “female” is also telling. If you say “female” you are distancing yourself and implying that something is different about this person. 228

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City Primer

Every day, 4,395,063 riders on average use the New York City subway system.

City Primer

Every day, 4,395,063 riders on average use the New York City subway system. On June 24, 2007, 4 billion shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange on 11 Wall Street. The top two most visited tourist attractions in the world are located between 42nd Street and 110th Street in Manhattan—Times Square (39,200,000) and Central Park (38,000,000). New York is a global metropolis rushing into a new millennium, attracting and moving millions of people and billions of dollars every single day.

Introduction

The decisions that have physically shaped this city, however, were often the product of the 19th Century, when iPhones, smart cities, and robot cars were not even contemplated in fantasy. The Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, for example, laid out the Manhattan gridiron that set the parameters for all future real estate development. The city’s most famous thoroughfare, Broadway, took root even earlier. The Indians of the region carved trails through the wilderness of Manhattan Island centuries earlier, with the main one called the Wickquasgeck Trail. It traversed the island from north to south, undulating as it went to avoid swamps and rocky outcrops. The Dutch took this as their main way of getting from New Amsterdam at the southern tip to other points on the island, calling it de Heere Straat—the Gentlemen’s Street. In English, it would come to be called Broadway, famous for cutting through the grid at an eccentric diagonal, producing a series of spaces that would become popular public squares and parks. Those decisions and works from across the last two centuries still haunt the city today in the form of a landscape of ghost infrastructures that both give character to the contemporary city and create peculiar inefficiencies in its networks of mobility. The following primer on New York City looks at the city’s past and present to give a sense of potential futures. The maps, charts, facts, and photos offer a brief snapshot of how the city has been shaped by its earlier planning decisions and how in 2012 people are trying to create a more mobile and efficient city out of these limits. 230

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NYC street scenes

2nd Ave and 79th St Pump Room Excavation 231

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Beach Pneumatic Transit, 1870

Beach Pneumatic Transit, 1870 232

Beach Pneumatic Transit, 1870

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5th Ave and 57th Street rotary system proposal 233

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Rotary and block system Comparison

Park Avenue, 1922

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Park Avenue, ‘The American City,’ 1939

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Park Avenue, ‘The American City,’ 1939

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Raymond Hood, ‘Skyscraper Bridges,’ 1929

World’s Fair Line, 1939

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Paul Rudolph, ‘Lower Manhattan Expressway,’ 1967 237

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Westway Highway Model, 1974 The West Side Highway was New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first elevated highway that ran along that ran along Canal Street and 72nd Street. In 1973, a 60 foot section of the highway collapsed, which was estimated to cost 88 million dollars in repair. City engineers eventually decided upon total demolition of the structure. The Westway Highway was a six-lane highway proposal to replace this structure. The majority of the highway was to be built beneath a new landfill in the Hudson River. The project also included 98 acres of parkland and 100 acres of new development to built on top. However, the incorporation of the new landfill was ultimately what stopped the project. In 1985, a federal judge ruled that the landfill would have an adverse effect on the striped bass fish of the Hudson River.

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City Primer Collapsed West Side Highway near Gansevoort Street, 1973

West Side Highway

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Marc Singer, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Dark Days,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 2000 In a 2000 documentary entitled Dark Days, British filmmaker Marc Singer followed the lives of 75 people living in an abandoned New York City subway tunnel, stretching north from Penn Station up past Harlem, called the Freedom Tunnel. Built by Robert Moses in the 1930s as a way to expand park space in the Upper West Side, the Freedom Tunnel was quickly abandoned with the proliferation of automobile and truck usage in the city and became a home for hundreds of homeless people. In Dark Days, a number of the people exhibited their improvised homes made of scrap metal, sheet plastic and plywoodâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;some even with carpet and discarded furniture. Many of the tunnel residents made a living above ground by collecting bottles and cans for recycling, while others peddled found garbage; their meals were found in restaurant trash. As Mr. Singer wrapped up the filming, Amtrak sent armed police into the tunnel to evict the residents, forcing Mr. Singer to contact the Coalition for the Homeless to intervene. Today, the tunnel is mostly vacant of homeless dwellers, but Mr. Singer was able to strike a deal with the federal government to provide housing vouchers for those in the evicted communities.

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New York City Olympic Village Rendering

Ghost Infrastructures

City Primer

2012 Olympic Proposal. In its first bid for the Olympic Games, New York City made a play for 2012. With plans for major development in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx, the Olympic Games would bring new energy and improved infrastructure to neglected neighborhoods. Despite losing the Olympic bid to London, New York City continued the development of a number of the Olympic proposals set forth in the bid. With a push from the Bloomberg administration, five residential towers and a number of hotels were built in Hudson Yards, a new residential and commercial development on the site of the proposed Olympic Stadium. This once-barren landscape has been revitalized through a plan of more than twelve residential and commercial towers and a park and a cultural center. This new district will have more office space than Baltimore, Maryland and more residential space than Stamford, Connecticut. In addition, the No. 7 subway line extension is set to open in December 2013, offering greater transportation access to the new developments. 241

Convention and Exhibition Center rendering

Distance from Lagurdia to Midtown (>120 minutes), triptop NYC

City Primer

Airport Development. New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo recently proposed a 3.8 million square foot New York International Convention and Exhibition Center, the largest convention center in the United States. Close to the John F. Kennedy International Airport, the center would be part of the Aqueduct Racetrack, which also holds a casino. In this proposal, the state would partner with the Genting Group to finance the $4 billion project and the state would provide the land. Even with its considerable distance to Manhattan, Cuomo boasts that the center would potentially attract the “mass, blue-collar clientele that probably won’t be going to the Broadway shows anyway.” However, there is still the problem of getting people from the city. This is not the first time that transportation between Manhattan and the airports has been an issue. In 2009, there was a fake proposal for an airport to be developed in Central Park. Within the mission statement, the necessity of the automobile is put to question when an airport is so close in proximity. 242

Automobile

430

Bicycle

1,180

Subway

11,818

LIRR

379

PATH

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18,775

Staten Island Ferry

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12,500

George Washington Bridge Varrazano-Narrows Bridge

552,533

Brooklyn Bridge

143,894

Holland Tunnel

303,500

74,996

Times Square

66,163

JFK Airport

15,171

LaGuardia Airport

24,336

Newark Liberty Airport

17,114

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200

250

300

350

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500

550

600

Cars

90.1% 1,767,091

Commercial Vehicles 3.5% 70,252

Medallion Taxi Cabs 2.1% 41,196

Motorcycles 2.0% 38,078

Rental Vehicles

1.2%

22,660

Trailer Trucks 0.5% 10,968

Buses

0.4% 8,057

Scooters

0.1% 2,258

Ambulances 0.1% 1,650

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Personal Vehicles

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Maps

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George Schlegel Lithographers, 'Manhattan and New York City in 1873'

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TeleGeography, ‘Global Traffic Map,’ 2009

Maps

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Jennifer Cox, ‘Historic Tidelands of the New York New Jersey Estuary’

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Aaron Koblin, Flightview and Wired Magazine, New York City flights, 2008 247

Maps

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Issachar Cozzens, ‘A Geological Map of New York of Manhattan Island,’ 1843

New York State Geologic Map and Cross Sections 248

Maps

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Low Water Tidal Current Chart

High Water Low Water Tidal Current Chart Tidal Current Chart

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Atlantic Flyaway

250

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City Primer Real estate prices in New York City, 2009

New York City Safety Map

251

MIT Sensable City Lab, ‘New York Talk Exchange,’ 2008 252

Maps

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Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz, ‘New Yorkistan,’ 2010

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John Keefe and WNYC, New York City Evacuation Map, 2011

Noel Billig, Play Around NYC, playground density, 2010

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Nicholas de Monchaux, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Meatropolis,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 2007

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BERG, ‘Here & There— A horizonless projection in Manhattan,’ 2009 256

Maps

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Eric Fischer, Data from the Twitter streaming API in New York City, 2012

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Eric Fischer, Flickr photos by locals and tourists #2 (GTWA #1): New York, 2010

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City Primer ‘One Week of Foursquare Check-Ins’ from Here Now, a project of Columbia University GSAPP Spatial Information Design Lab, Sarah Williams, with research associates Georgia Bullen, Francis Tan, Juan Francisco Saldarriaga (Project Manager), and Noa Younse. Images by Sarah Williams and Juan Francisco Saldarriaga. For Here Now, Sarah Williams, co-director of Columbia University GSAPP’s Spatial Information Design Lab, and her team analyzed the densities of Foursquare and Facebook check-ins over one week in July 2011, in New York City. Through geographic and statistical analysis, these maps show the breadcrumb trail of social data we leave behind as we move around the city; animated, they reveal the ebb and flow of particular neighborhoods and destinations across the city over time.

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Maps

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‘Foursquare Check-in Density,’ ‘Facebook Check-in Density,’ and ‘Foursquare’s Domain: New York City Check-Ins by Category,’ from Here Now, a project of Columbia University GSAPP Spatial Information Design Lab, Sarah Williams, with research associates Georgia Bullen, Francis Tan, Juan Francisco Saldarriaga (Project Manager), and Noa Younse. Images by Sarah Williams and Juan Francisco Saldarriaga. 260

Public Transit with Commuter Van Service

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Bus Route PATH Ferry Route Subway Long Island Railroad 261

Local Stop Express Stop PATH Stop NYC Ferry Station NJ Ferry Station Licensed Commuter â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Van Zones

Due to decreases in tax revenues between 2009 and 2011, the MTA was forced to shut down and reroute subway and bus lines in areas of Brooklyn and Queens. This made daily commutes much more difficult via public transit without using one of the illegal â&#x20AC;&#x153;dollar vansâ&#x20AC;? in the neighborhood. In zones affected by subway and bus shortages, residents are left with up to 20 blocks between transportation lines, making commuter vans a necessary source of public transport for 120,000 commuters every day.

Public Transit with Commuter Van Service

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Bike Network

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Bike Path Bike Lane Bike Route Special Hours Bike Path 263

Outdoor Bike Racks Bike Shelters Bike Racks by David Byrne

Over the past five years, the city has made a concerted effort to increase the number of cyclists commuting and traveling in the boroughs. To bring this to fruition, they have added 200 new miles of bike paths, most protected from vehicular traffic for added safety. While a mere pittance compared to the road network, the number of bike lanes are expected to double in the next decade as the city hopes to fill the gaps and inconsistencies in the network that currently plague cyclists.

Bike Network

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Truck Routes and Green Cart Zones

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Food Truck Depot Green Cart Restricted Zone Green Cart Permitted Zone 265

Through Truck Route on Expressway Commercial Vehicles Prohibited Through Truck Route Local Truck Route Limited Truck Route Restricted Truck Zones

Trucks are the essential link between warehouses and consumers, bringing everything from food and gadgets to our malls, shops, and doorsteps. These maps make visible the routes that trucks utilize daily, exposing the pivotal corridors for a functioning economy. Major routes run through Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, and New Jersey and then converge in a dense web in central Manhattan. Produce, for example, makes its way through these corridors into central Manhattan only to be redistributed by special Green Carts to those areas Uptown and in the outer boroughs where obesity and diabetes rates are highest.

Truck Routes and Green Cart Zones

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AM Congestion

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Heavy Traffic Medium Traffic Light Traffic 267

Major Stoplight Taxi Density â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Monday 7am Cab Fleet Agency Cab Relief Parking

Over three million people commute to work in New York City every day. Although itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s known that traffic in Manhattan is congested, the other four boroughs pay serious air quality costs for this influx of people onto the island. Those commuting elsewhere in Manhattan itself must take public forms of transportation or fight the crowds for a medallion taxi, which are most dense on the Upper East Side moving south. Taxis only add to this Manhattan-bound congestion, as most taxi fleet depots are found outside of the city in Queens.

AM Congestion

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PM Congestion

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Stopped Traffic Heavy Traffic Medium Traffic Light Traffic 269

Major Stoplight Taxi Density â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Monday 7pm Cab Fleet Agency Cab Relief Parking

In the evening, over three million people commute back from work and lock up Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s streets. Competing with the heavy taxi traffic in Midtown, most drivers exit through tunnels and bridges causing gridlock on some of Manhattanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most important thoroughfares. Taxi densities shift to Downtown and Midtown as financial workers are transported from work to residential areas Uptown.

PM Congestion

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Parking

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PATH Subway Long Island Rail Road 271

Express Stop Municipal Lot Garage & Lot Parking Lot Parking Garage

A combination of surface parking, garage parking, and municipal parking, this mobility infrastructure becomes most dense near express stops of the subway in all five boroughs. This configuration allows commuters the ability to drive to the most convenient train station, park their car, and bypass vehicle congestion in tunnels, bridges and highways. The highest concentrations of parking happen near train stations with multiple lines such as Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and Grand Central in Midtown. Other concentrations of parking occur in Manhattan on the edges of the island. This says that commuters are able to drive into the city, park their car, and continue their commute via train or bus.

Parking

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Special Districts

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New Developments Historical Districts Special Zoning Districts Business Improvement â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Districts 273

Increasingly, there is a city emerging within the city, one of special and historical districts, zoning overlays and Business Improvement Districts. These spaces have their own special rules and regulations, leading to the occasional conflict with the greater city and its needs. For example, Business Improvement Districts (BID), defined areas within which businesses pay an additional tax or fee to fund improvements within the districtâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boundaries, have spread greatly over the past two decades. Beginning with the Union Square/14th Street BID in 1984, they can now be found in all of the boroughs except Staten Island. These zones with their own sanitation crews and security pose both challenges and opportunities for thinking about a seamless and mobile city.

Special Districts

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Parks and Alternative Spaces

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Technology Start-up â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Landmarks Parklets Privately Owned Public â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Spaces Public Street Closures 275

Parks and Alternative Spaces

A map of parks and alternative spaces presents an alternative to the asphalt and congestion that many associate with New York City The city has more than 28,000 acres of parkland within the city boundaries, along with tens of thousands of acres of state and federally managed green space. One notes the greater presence of green spaces the further one gets from the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. This map also presents a look at the emergence of two types of space, some open and mobile, others private and regulated. In comparison to the massive green public space at the heart of Manhattan, there has been a growing number of privately-held public spaces, subject to the rules of landlords, and street closures, which predominately occur in the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wealthier enclaves with strong community groups that have the organizational capacity to host events.

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Helicopter Flight Paths

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Helicopter Flight Path Helicopter Tour Path Extended Helicopter â&#x20AC;&#x201A; Tour Path Public Helipad 277

Helicopters serve emergency functions and as vehicles for tourists and media. After a series of incidents, including the death of New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle in a plane crash, the city was forced to look at the flight paths being used by helicopters and private planes, rerouting all tour helicopters to a limited path above the Hudson Riverâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with hovering above Yankee Stadium as the sole exception.

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Juliette Spertus

Juliette Spertus Curator of Fast Trash: Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Tubes and the Future of Cities

Urban pneumatics have been around since the early 19th century. The first systems were installed in London in the 1860s, and the beginning of the pneumatic transport systems were actually for mail—like telegrams. In New York, the pneumatic mail system was first installed in the 1890s and it ran until 1953. It had 27 miles of two-way, 3-inch tubes for first class mail, which was mail being sent from post office to post office. But not between all post offices—it was a specific network of post offices linked by pneumatic tubes. Stepping back briefly, one of the things that has always interested me about this is the relationship to the surface. In other words, pneumatics have always been an alternative to surface transport. That’s always the way they’ve been chosen and implemented, but also why they’ve been discontinued. For instance, when the pneumatic system was discontinued in New York, it was because, like rail, pneumatics had become more expensive to maintain and operate than the roads and the delivery trucks. Even though it was better! Pneumatics were two, two and a half times faster than trucks, but it was discontinued because it was more expensive. In fact, somebody pointed out, when we presented this at the Bar Association, that those right-of-ways might actually still exist. Even if the tubes are not all connected, and if there are sections missing—and, 279

The Invisible Infrastructure of Pneumatic Tubes in New York City, Waiting to be Reactivated

obviously, the pump stations that keep the mail moving from point to point, if those aren’t connected—you still had those rights-of-way. So you could technically come in with something else there and reactivate the pneumatic system.

Juliette Spertus Curator of Fast Trash: Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Tubes and the Future of Cities

So pneumatics have been used for mail, for waste, for dirty linen, and for all kinds of industry, like moving raw materials around a factory. It’s still around, moving blood samples and medications around hospitals and pharmaceutical labs, and, of course, also for moving cash around banks and some department stores. And pneumatics are still used at the New York Public Library business branch, on Madison Ave. Not the Central Branch, where they discontinued the pneumatic system a couple of years ago. Anyway, the systems that transport goods around are two-way systems, whereas garbage—which we focused on in the Fast Trash exhibition—is a one-way system. It’s always waste going in one direction, so it’s also much simpler. Another thing we found with garbage is that it’s very modular; you don’t want to make a massive, central terminal. Instead, there’s an ideal size of the system that has to do with the number of inroads coming in and the amount of time spent running the system. Because it’s not just a question of how big the tubes are; it’s not just a question of how much waste you can take from one point to another. It’s about how much time those fans are running. Pneumatics don’t need to be running all the time—in fact, they can’t run all the time. And they need to be open for different kinds of stuff. For instance, if you have lots of different types of waste that you want to keep separate—for example, if you have recycling, waste, compost, and corrugated cardboard—then each one of those is going to have to go into a different valve. That means a lot more time spent opening the valve and more time running that particular tube. So the maximum amount of waste that a pneumatic system can handle has to do with the complexity and 280

The Invisible Infrastructure of Pneumatic Tubes in New York City, Waiting to be Reactivated

the number of inlet points—and, what’s also interesting, is that it’s a loop. It’s like an organism. It requires time and distance. The further things are from the vacuum, the more energy it takes. So there’s an ideal radius—a mile, a mile and a half. That’s the maximum distance from the terminal point so that the system can still operate.

The Invisible Infrastructure of Pneumatic Tubes in New York City, Waiting to be Reactivated

Juliette Spertus Curator of Fast Trash: Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Tubes and the Future of Cities

281

Sean Basinski

Sean Basinski Founder and Director of the Street Vendor Project

All street vendors are mobile to a certain extent, but there are different gradations of mobility. In fact, there used to be a rule in New York City that street vendors had to keep moving, and could only stop to make a sale. Street vending was more like delivery—it still is in a lot of countries—where vendors walk down the street calling out their wares, and people run down and buy from them. It makes a lot of sense: If you want to pass by as many people as possible, and you’re not in a congested place like Midtown where people are walking by you, then you need to keep on moving. One of the most heroic and historic moments in the history of vendors in New York City was in 1886, when four vendors on Hester Street refused to move when they were told to do so. They established the first stationary mobile street vendors, as we know them. When you can stay in one place, you can put more stuff on the cart and, as long as the neighborhood is crowded enough and people are coming to you, then you don’t have to go to them and it’s better for business. But it still allows for some flexibility— you don’t have to be out there everyday if you don’t want to, you don’t have to be out there in the rain, and if there’s a festival going on a few blocks away, you can move your push cart to take advantage of 282

The Spectrum of Mobility in Street Vending...

better business opportunities. You’re not locked into a five-year lease or whatever they offer nowadays. That’s how things have pretty much stayed in New York, with the exception of ice cream trucks, which have always been more mobile. In the 20s, Good Humor came out with ice cream trucks, and they drive around playing their music, and children—and some adults!—know that’s the signal to run out and buy a popsicle. Ice cream trucks are usually franchises of big companies that would assign them different routes to make sure their areas didn’t overlap, which is one of the issues you run into with mobile vendors.

Sean Basinski Founder and Director of the Street Vendor Project

The current food truck trend started in LA. With Twitter, you have a new model for them to communicate where they are, which theoretically enables a food truck to be more mobile. They’re still not really mobile in the same way as ice cream trucks or the original street vendors, which are in continuous motion—they’re just setting up in different spots in different days. And if they get told to move on, then they just drive around and find the next corner.

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Adam Mckeown

Adam Mckeown Associate Professor of History, Columbia University

We always have these obsessions; globalization is always new, it is happening now, it is happening here first and what that does is that it erases the fact that the whole world over the past 200 years has been connected. By the 1890s, as you start to converge, migration around the world is responding to global economic processes. The smaller you go in scale, to national flows of a few million down to scales of particular individuals, the less the patterns correlate. You are getting impacted first, by national laws, local occupational structures, kinships and relatives, and ultimately down to personality issues. ‘I migrated and my brother didn’t migrate.’ How do you explain that? I would not distinguish Asian migration from European migration as somehow being different in character, but every single flow has its own context, down to really successful migrants who called for more migrants, the commercialization or the opportunities to spend money, family structure, opportunities abroad, legal controls, transportation opportunities; each narrative has its own unique mix of possible factors. * * * The late 19th century is just an era of people getting disturbed at the high mobility, social transformation, 284

Rituals of Global Migration

Adam Mckeown Associate Professor of History, Columbia University

the rise of new working classes, and new clinical movements in thinking that somehow seem to require more control, more order, more stability to solve things, including migration. Passports are so fascinating because we think of them as controlling movement, yet they facilitate movement. They standardize identities and documents around the world. Everybody recognizes it easily. They are all about movement, yet they anchor us to nation states; they anchor us to territories. They are key to making international borders the main stopping point of movement, which was not true at all 150 years ago. In terms of all migration controls, there’s a constant interplay between policy, the enforceability of it, lawyers and migrants who resist it, international negotiations about movement, interests of transportation companies, employers; all of these factors come together to shape the specifics of who can move, how you move, and when you move. * * * The immigration process is a performance, almost a bodily performance to some extent—the theater of an investigator in uniform sitting behind a desk enacting a role within a very formal situation. These kinds of scripted interactions establish power relations and identity and factor into the narratives about what it means to be a citizen. You are not allowed to enter because your friend or this elite banker recommended you and not because of your social relationships, but because you have presented yourself as somebody with so much money and with this individual name and these family members and with this kind of occupation. This is the way you present yourself and the ritual allows you to learn how to perform this new identity that you are being called upon to perform. Many discussions of ritual say that it is not the content that matters, but rather that the performance is done properly and scripted properly and that the whole thing unfolds as it is supposed to unfold, whatever it means. The relationships are in place with each other. 285

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Paul Scolieri

Paul Scolieri Assistant Professor of Dance, Barnard College

Dance has no aspiration for commercialization or the monument because it is constantly ephemeral, it is constantly disappearing. That is in part where it gets its power. It also has a biological imperative. It is embodied in the nerves, in the language of it being corporeal. It is linked to some sort of biological determinism as a part of our evolutionary process. Every culture has some way of explaining that dance originates in the body even though thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not necessarily the case. But that need to narrate the body is a product of history. The idea that dance is linked to narrative is in some ways relatively new. The earliest dances were part of sacred, magical processes. You dance the world that you want into existence. If you want rain, you dance the rain dance. If you want to win the war, you practice that conquest. But then you have relatively more recent cultures where the idea is that you dance your myth; you dance the narratives. That is the way that you tell the story of where you came from. This is where dance links to migration. Some of the dances that we continue to see at the base of most classical traditions are stories that tell you where you come from. The choreography has been a way to recreate the processions of migration. What modernity meant was being civilized in public 286

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space as opposed to being primitive. This idea of Modern dance becomes a delayed response to Darwin and the early rise of eugenic thinking. Somehow dance will teach us social cultivation and will allow us to evolve and become better selves. It is linked to education, physical hygiene, and class. In that sense, there is an evolutionary explanation of origins embedded in the constellation of the dance. * * *

Paul Scolieri Assistant Professor of Dance, Barnard College

With regard to physicality in dance, the definitions vary depending on the dance. In ballet, for example, physicality is all tied up in the shapes and the clarity of the line that you can achieve. It is physics. Cuban social dance is also extremely physical, but it does not take up the same amount of space. The intricacy is not in the shape, but in the commitment to endurance and to the complexity of rhythms. It is physical, yes, but it is a very different sense of physicality. You could have a dancer come on in a ballet, they do their 64 bars of dance and then they are done. Can they go for longer? Of course they can, but that is the art. In Japanese or classical Indian dance, you might only move two feet in an hour, but the intensity and the physicality necessary to have that kind of control is its own form of art. * * * Even though improvisation is improvisatory, it already embodies social structures of meaning. You can look at how people improvise and it is already shaped by the way that we think about language or how we think what visual structures should be or about how we know bodies work and the shape of the body—the idea of literal movement. Dancing is seen as site of liberation practice and utopian world-making, but it is also the site of some of the most cruel and barbaric conservative thought. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s, and later throughout Latin America with the nationalization of dances, having people adhere to specific scripts of gender and identity demonstrates an obsession with conformity. And we can also see this 287

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with the Rockettes in New York. Largely speaking, although not always, we think of the most abstract movement being the most porous, where interpretation is allowed to happen, where it is about semiotics and experience, as opposed to the pantomimic or the very gestural take of a particular narrative. Those are the polarities that we see in political performance.

Paul Scolieri Assistant Professor of Dance, Barnard College

This is what Plato was talking about with regard to what is abstract and what is concrete about representation. In terms of space, one could look at Plato’s last dialogue, “The Laws,” in which he comes up with a fictional city that was going to be the ideal city next to Athens. In it is his longest writing about dance. One of the arguments that he makes is that the city must be round and it must be a circular city because you must keep all of the citizens’ bodies moving in a circular manner so that it could reflect the movement of the cosmos; so that people were in constant harmony with the cosmological order. He writes very seriously that this was going to create balance, harmony, and moderation and what is interesting is that it was going to be created on Magnesium, which is a deserted island. So it is already a colony, it is already about a migration. Plato establishes movement as a formative experience in the production of social difference. His idea of subjectivity was one that not only moves in the world, but also understands its place within it and that idea is so much of what dance does. If you go to the Court Ballet of King Louis XIV, to classical Indian dance, or look at Confucius’ drawings about what court dances were supposed to be, they are beautiful but they also convey the need for subjects to learn their place in a social order and about how to exist there.

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Sites

SCENES FROM THE FIVE BOROUGHS. CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE.

Sites

6. West 215th Street between Broadway and Park Terrace East

1. The George Washington Bridge Apartments

Manhattan

4. Second Avenue Subway

2. Food Truck Parking Ban, Midtown 3. Times Square Plaza

8. Holland Tunnel 5. Low-Line, Lower East Side

7. Wiliamsburg Bridge Entrance/Exit Redesign

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Manhattan

1. The George Washington Bridge Apartments There is no example of the intersection of transportation and housing quite like the Bridge Apartments in upper Manhattan. Built in the 1960s, decades before transit-oriented development became a catchword, the project was an attempt by the city to build more affordable housing for the middle class. In 1960, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey transferred to the city the air rights of a three-acre area near the bridge. The city auctioned off those rights to the Kratter Corporation for a little over $1 million. Construction began in 1961 on what was one of the world’s first aluminum-sheathed high-rises, with four concrete platforms providing the foundation. (From east to west, the buildings are sandwiched between 178th and 179th Streets at 260 Audubon Avenue, 1370 St. Nicholas Avenue, 1365 St. Nicholas Avenue and 111 Wadsworth Avenue.) Three years later, the Bridge Apartments welcomed their first tenants under the state’s Mitchell-Lama program for middleincome residents. “It’s very easy to find, that’s one of the positive things for sure,” said Rafael A. Alvarez, who owns the tax center. “I just tell them, I’m in the first building above I-95.” 2. Food Truck Parking Ban, Midtown Recently, food trucks seem to be as ubiquitous as Starbucks. What began as a means of serving construction sites and army bases has suddenly become the place to check out some of the best food and chefs the city has to offer. However, these mobile trucks suddenly find themselves in the eye of the police, who are following a 1965 city law which prohibits vending from metered parking spots. This enforcement makes the business nearly impossible, as without the ability to set up shop in heavily-trafficked areas—particularly in densely populated Midtown Manhattan—they cannot compete. According to Lisa Fickenscher of Crain’s New York Business, revenue is down 70% among members belonging to New York City’s Food Truck Association after police began enforcing the parking rule.

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3. Times Square Plaza It is hard to imagine, but Times Square has not always been a paradise for pedestrians. It took the city’s Green Light for Midtown project to re-imagine the area between 42nd and 47th Streets as a car-free public space. After years of study about traffic flows, planners realized that, unexpectedly, banning vehicles from the Times Square area actually improved traffic flows for 6th and 7th Avenues. According to the travel magazine ‘Travel + Leisure’ in its October 2011 survey, Times Square is “the world’s most visited tourist attraction”, bringing in approximately 39,200,000 visitors annually.

Manhattan

4. Second Avenue Subway The Second Avenue Subway was originally proposed in 1929, and was finally begun in April 2007. It is New York City’s first major expansion of the subway system in over 50 years. When fully completed, the brandnew T line will stretch 8.5 miles along the length of Manhattan’s East Side, from 125th Street in Harlem to Hanover Square in Lower Manhattan, and will include 16 new stations. Construction is being carried out in four phases, with work on the first phase between 105th and 72nd Street currently underway. Phase 1 is expected to cost more than $17 billion and be completed by 2016. Both Phase 1 and Phase 2 will use previously abandoned, subway tunnels built during an aborted attempt to construct a Second Avenue line in the 1970s. In 2009, Arup director of construction David Caiden told New Civil Engineer magazine that “It’s a spaghetti of tunnels, utilities, pipes and cables down there—I’ve never seen anything like it.” 5. Low-Line, Lower East Side New York City has always looked upwards for development, from the Empire State Building to the High Line. However, some of the most interesting abandoned spaces lie underground. Built in 1903 and abandoned in 1948, the Williamsburg Trolley Terminal was the destination for streetcars that carried passengers from Brooklyn to Manhattan over the Williamsburg bridge. It is 1.5 acres in size—nearly 60,000 square 292

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feetâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;roughly 2/3 the size of Gramercy Park. Above ground, Delancey Street has always been a bustling immigrant thoroughfare and key artery for generations of merchants. In the 1930s Delancey Street was a vibrant space, before auto traffic dominated the neighborhood. 6. West 215th Street between Broadway and Park Terrace East Because this hill was too steep for car traffic, the city built a double flight of stairs for pedestrians. One block of 187th Street in Washington Heights is also a staircase.

Manhattan

7. Wiliamsburg Bridge Entrance/Exit Redesign While the conflicts between cars tend to dominate the headlines, all is not perfect between alternative forms of transportation. The recent redesign of the on/off ramp of the WIlliamsburg Bridge provides a perfect example of how bikes and pedestrians cannot always exist in peace. Three foot high concrete barriers at the base of the bridge force Manhattan-bound cyclists to come to a full stop, with a curved fence steering northbound bikers toward Clinton Street. The goal of slowing cyclists down for the safety of pedestrians has proved quite unpopular with those commuting over the bridge, ironic considering the many cyclists demanding similar remedies to slow cars down. 8. Holland Tunnel Built in the 1920s, the Holland Tunnel was the first automobile tunnel to be constructed under the Hudson River. The tunnel consists of two tubes, each 20 ft wide with two lanes of traffic. Post-9/11, there was an increase in traffic restrictions on the tunnel, including a ban on commercial vehicles. Despite the restrictions, congestion pricing, and a recent overall increase in tolls, the tunnelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s usage remains consistent. Adjacent to the Holland Tunnel on the Manhattan side is Duarte Square, a triangular plot of land with minimal development. The land is owned by Trinity Wall Street, the same parish that owns Zuccotti Park. When the protesters were evicted from Zuccotti Park, they 293

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attempted to move to Duarte Square. The church declined, citing that creating a tent city in Duarte Square did not further their mission.

Manhattan

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4. Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue, East Williamsburg

6. East River Ferry

5. Smith and Sackett Streets, Carroll Gardens

Brooklyn

1. Smith-9th Street Subway Station

2. Atlantic Yards 3. Prospect Park West Bike Lane

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Brooklyn

1. Smith-9th Street Subway Station This is the highest elevated subway station in the world, at 87.5 feet. The stationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unique height is due to now-antiquated navigation rules that insist on the ability of tall-masted ships to pass up the Gowanus Canal under the station. (These rules are also the reason for the retractable bridge at Carroll St, a few blocks north, which is the oldest in the US, and one of only four left. The Gowanus Canal itself was originally a tidal inlet, dredged by the US Army Corps of Engineers between 1867 and 1869, to serve as a major cargo transportation route before being allowed to silt up in the 1960s, as containerization took over. It is now designated as an EPA Superfund site, with the highest level of pathogens recorded in NY Harbor water.) 2. Atlantic Yards The Atlantic Yards is a mixed-use commercial and residential development project of 16 high-rise buildings, under construction in Prospect Heights, adjacent to Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene in Brooklyn. A portion of the project is part of the Atlantic Terminal Urban Renewal Area (ATURA), and the rest is located in a low-rise and mid-rise brownstone neighborhood. According to the developers, the centerpiece of the development is the Barclays Center, which will serve as the future home of the New Jersey Nets. Of the 22-acre (89,000 sq meters) project, 8.4 acres (34,000 sq meters) will be built over a train yard that is utilized by the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR). Formerly called Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic Terminal is the westernmost stop on the LIRRâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Atlantic Branch. It is the primary terminal for the Far Rockaway, Hempstead, and, on weekdays, West Hempstead Branches. By transferring at Jamaica, access is available to all other LIRR branches except the Port Washington Branch. The location is also served by a number of bus lines.The development sits near the intersection of Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue. It is one of the biggest, and the most congested, intersections in Brooklyn. The increase of car traffic to the area caused by extra housing and the 296

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construction of an arena has been frequently cited by critics as a major reason for their opposition to the project. According to the Environmental Impact Statement, the addition of more than 15,000 new residents will not significantly impact vehicular traffic, a claim contested by the Council of Brooklyn Neighborhoods. The Atlantic Yards project, at its western end, will be adjacent to the Atlantic Avenue–Pacific Street subway station, the largest train station in Brooklyn and the third largest transit hub in New York City. The project will feature a new $50 million subway entrance, slated to open near the front of the arena in 2012.

Brooklyn

3. Prospect Park West Bike Lane No other bike lane in New York City has caused more controversy than the one put down on the west side of Prospect Park. From the time it was first proposed in 2007 until the end of 2011, it has been a lightning rod for supporters and detractors of bike lanes, DOT head Jeanette Sadik-Khan and the city’s planning department. The saga began in 2007, when Community Board 6 raised the problem of speeding traffic along Prospect Park West. In response, the Department of Transportation designed a 16-mile protected on-street bike path. The project removed one of three travel lanes and added a two-way protected bike path along the park, shielded from car traffic by parked vehicles. It was built in 2010 and, according to the DOT, has both lessened speeding and accidents, while increasing the number of bike riders in the area. However, many local residents have argued that it only makes their lives more difficult. Car drivers dislike the calming measures, pedestrians complain about dealing with cyclists; a few nearby residents sued the city in January 2011, demanding the bike lane be removed. The court ruled in the city’s favor, but as of the beginning of 2012, the litigants are still considering an appeal. 4. Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue. East Williamsburg On the night of October 17, 2011, artist Mathieu 297

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Brooklyn

Lefevre was riding his bike home from 3rd Ward when he was run over by a flat bed truck from behind while both were taking a right turn at the intersection of Meserole Street and Morgan Avenue. He died immediately. The truck did not stop and was found parked a few blocks beyond the crash. After the driver was found, it was reported that he claimed he didn’t know he hit anyone. A week later, the NYPD announced they would not file any charges against the driver. It took 2 weeks for the family to receive an accident report; additional evidence has been withheld, including a video, prompting a lawsuit from the Lefevre family. This tragedy has sparked an intense look at the relationship between the city’s police, cycling and automobiles. As the New York Times reports, “More people are killed in traffic accidents than by guns in New York City; death by motor vehicle is rarely treated as a crime. Someone died in city traffic every 29 hours, on average, from 2005 to 2009, according to a study by the city’s health and transportation departments. While New York has a stellar record compared with other big cities in the United States and has drastically improved in the last decade, the rate of traffic fatalities is far worse than in many major cities in Europe, according to another study, by the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.” 5. Smith and Sackett Streets, Carroll Garden As detailed by Street Films, there was a problem at this corner in the Carroll Garden section of Brooklyn. Drivers approaching the intersection from Sackett couldn’t get a clear view of Smith because of the parked cars blocking their line of sight. Crashes kept happening and local residents started pushing for safety improvements. The Department of Transportation, in collaboration with local residents, came up with a unique solution - the first dedicated bike parking section. Eight bike racks created a less-obtrusive space, increasing visibility, while simultaneously adding to bike infrastructure and leaving the sidewalk free. A rare example where bikes, pedestrians and cars came together and found a solution that works for everyone. 298

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Brooklyn

6. East River Ferry While transportation and mobility tend to only be thought in terms of land, the city of New York has looked to the water to give New Yorkers a new option for getting around. The seven-stop ferry network runs in a loop from Hunters Point in Queens, making four stops in Brooklyn and two in Manhattan—at East 34th Street and Pier 11 near Wall Street. What began as 6-month trial run in the summer has proven to be far more popular than expected, despite the introduction of a $4 ticket after the initial free opening. The New York Times reported in October that “nearly 350,000 people have paid to ride the ferries since late June, far more than the 134,000 they had projected. On weekdays, the number of riders has averaged 2,862, almost double the forecast of 1,488.” The service has helped ease some of the subway congestion problems, while also providing a magnet for development on the watertfront areas of Brooklyn.

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2. LaGuardia Airport 3. 82nd Street and 32nd Avenue

5. Clearview Senior Center 208-11 26th Avenue

1. The Queensway Park 4. Merrick Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue

Queens

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Queens

1. The Queensway Park The success of the High Line development in the Chelsea section of Manhattan has radically altered the way cities look at their abandoned infrastructure and development. It has brought about similar proposals around the country that seek to reclaim unused rail lines and highways as parks and development generators. One such proposal has emerged for southern Queens, as local residents seek to turn the abandoned LIRR Rockaway Beach Branch into a 3.5 mile public park with pedestrian and bike paths. The multi-use recreational and commercial corridor, dubbed the Queensway by supporters, would extend south from Rego Park to Ozone Park, connecting those communities to each other, along with nearby parks, bike lanes and recreational spaces. Others argue that it would be foolish to not utilize this rail to improve the borough’s public transit. Phillip Goldfeder, NYC Assemblyman remarked, “I believe southern Queens and Rockaway would be better served if this forgotten track once again fulfilled its original purpose as a railroad. Those same communities that are pushing this proposal are privileged with commutes of 30 minutes or less to midtown Manhattan.” 2. LaGuardia Airport There might be only one thing that New Yorkers agree on—that getting to LaGuardia is awful and once you’re there, it doesn’t get much better. Native New Yorker Donald Trump even went so far as to say on CNN, “You land your plane at LaGuardia Airport, you go to LaGuardia Airport, it’s like a Third World airport.” It is too small, too hard to get to, the service is bad, the delays are long and too numerous. The head of the Port Authority agrees with everyone else, as Director Chris Ward told city business leaders, “La Guardia should not be the gateway for domestic flights into New York City. It should fundamentally be torn down and rebuilt again.” He has commissioned a study to come up with a plan and vision for what a future, rebuilt LaGuardia would look like. However, like any major infrastructure project in this country, this plan has come up against two major obstacles—lack of 301

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funding and neighborhood opposition. Ward himself acknowledged that the Port Authority only has enough funding for minor upgrades, not a complete overhaul. Astoria civic leader Rose Marie Poveromo immediately made clear that the community is not behind Ward’s plan. As the Queens Gazette reports, she balked at plans to tear down and rebuild the airport, calling on Port Authority officials to address years of environmental concerns voiced by the community surrounding LaGuardia Airport. “If the rebuilding happens in this day of the Port Authority being economically down the toilet and unable to address our environmental concerns, the community will be there to monitor each and every step in the process. We will provide the reality check for Chris Ward.”’

Queens

3. 82nd Street and 32nd Avenue The tension between drivers and pedestrians continues to be played out on a daily basis; never is it more stark then at busy school intersections. As Streetsblog reported, two Jackson Heights crossing guards created their own traffic calming fixes for a particularly dangerous corner on their watch. They installed orange traffic cones in areas they noticed skid marks, creating a visible obstacle that forces cars “to take turns slower, functioning much like a neckdown or bulb-out at the street corner.” This comes in the aftermath of a battle between the Department of Transportation and local Queens leaders over traffic calming changes DOT implemented near another school crossing at 164th and Jewel Streets. 4. Merrick Boulevard and Jamaica Avenue Bus rapid transit has become an increasingly popular solution to city’s transportation woes. It attempts to combine the advantages of a rail system with its dedicated right-of-way and the advantages of a bus system, particularly the low cost of construction, vehicles and maintenance. It is ideal for cash-strapped cities that cannot build new subway lines. However, this system comes into direct conflict with the cars, which have dominated city streets for decades. It requires one dedicated lane on city streets, and many 302

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Queens

planners and politicians are learning that cars are not willing to give up their space so easily. In 2007, the Department of Transportation proposed a pilot BRT route for Merrick Boulevard in Queens. The route was intended to make commutes faster, connect residents to the subway system better and even provide access to the Green Acre Mall in Nassau County. To accomplish this, a dedicated lane would be needed during peak hours, eliminating curbside parking. This aspect killed the plan. “We already don’t have enough parking,” said Bess DeBetham, a member of Community Board 13 and a local business advocate. “Elderly people going to see the doctor can’t even double park to see the doctor right now. Now having a bus stop in front, that’s going to have an impact on business.” No other BRT routes have been planned for the borough since. 5. Clearview Senior Center 208-11 26th Avenue Too often, mobility issues are thought of from the vantage point of the physically healthy. But for many New Yorkers, a disability prevents them from achieving the mobility they desire. The MTA oversees a program to alleviate this problem. Access-a-Ride provides transportation for people with disabilities who are unable to use public bus or subway service for some or all of their trips. It offers shared ride, doorto-door para-transit service, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Since 1998, Access-A-Ride registration is up 170 percent, trips requested are up 233 percent, trips scheduled are up 306 percent, and vehicles in operation are up 428 percent. By 2010, the agency expects annual rides to go from 3.9 million last year to 7.5 million—an increase of more than 90 percent. Unfortunately, the program is incredibly expensive, with the New York Times reporting that the average cost of a trip is $66. With ongoing budget woes, there is the need to find ways to cut costs without compromising services for Access-a-Ride users, like many of the people living at the Clearview Sernior Center, who depend on it for doctor’s appointment and maintaining a life beyond the center’s walls.

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The Bronx

Sites 4. Fordham Plaza

2. The new Yankee Stadium

3. Sheridan Expressway

5. Toxic Triangle

1. Hunts Point Food Distribution Center

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1. Hunts Point Food Distribution Center Hunts Point Peninsula is a 690-acre neighborhood, nearly half of which is covered by the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. It is one of the largest food distribution centers in the world, comprising over 155 public and private wholesalers, including the Hunts Point Terminal Produce Market, the Cooperative Meat Market, and the New Fulton Fish Market, which generate more than $3 billion in sales annually. At this modest site, much of the city and region’s food is stored and moved out to the area’s restaurants and stores, supplying food for more than 30 million people in and around the New York area. The neighborhood has become the focus of redevelopment in the past few years, as the city attempts to keep this essential node of the economy running smoothly. Most of the work in the Hunts Point Vision plan has focused on making connections better for the trucks that drop off and pick up goods, a reminder of how important vehicles and automobile infrastructure remains for the nation’s economy. 2. The new Yankee Stadium Since the surprising success of Baltimore’s Camden Yards, sports stadiums have become essential mega-projects for cities in the past two decades. Not surprisingly, the attempt to build a new Yankee Stadium in the Bronx has proven to be one of the most expensive and controversial developments. It has highlighted the difficulty that the automobile and parking cause for major developments in urban centers in terms of cost and space. Construction on the new stadium began in 2006 across the street from the original Yankee Stadium and was completed in 2009 on 24-acres of previously open space. Much of the land was used for parking. In addition to already existing garages, the New York City Industrial Development Agency approved $225 million in tax-exempt bonds to finance construction of three new parking garages with 3,600 new parking spaces, and renovation of the existing 5,569 parking spaces nearby. As Crain’s reported in early 2011, “It’s clear that not all the garages are needed. In August, Bronx Parking 305

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admitted that the facilities, which contain 9,000 parking spaces, were never more than 60% full on game days. As a result, it said, revenues were insufficient to service the more than $237 million in tax-exempt bonds issued to fund its project, which involved building three new garages and refurbishing several existing ones.” Many fans were parking at nearby empty parking lots, avoiding fees for longer walks. As of 2012, the parkland has not been replaced by the Yankees.

The Bronx

3. Sheridan Expressway The future of Interstate 895, better known as the Sheridan Expressway, is uncertain. Proposed by Robert Moses, New York City’s master builder, the 1.25 stretch of highway connects the Cross Bronx and Bruckner Expressways, but it carries fewer than 50,000 vehicles a day, and South Bronx residents have long complained that it cuts the neighborhood off from the Bronx river. Community groups note that demolishing the expressway would create 28 miles of open space that could be used for much needed housing and green space, but a 2010 report by the State Transportation Department found that its removal would increase congestion on local roads. Truckers argue that it is an issue of traffic and removing the expressway would drastically hurt the economy. It is shaping up as New York City’s major battleground in the fight over automobile infrastructure. A final decision on the Sheridan’s fate is expected in early 2012. 4. Fordham Plaza Fordham Plaza is a 1.75-acre open-air multi-modal transit nexus in the heart of the Bronx. The terminal is the destination for three local bus routes, it connects the surface transit routes to the Fordham Metro-North regional rail station, and the terminal hosts key stops for four additional local bus routes, three regional bus lines, and New York City’s first bus rapid transit line. It also anchors the Fordham Road retail corridor, one of New York’s busiest. The plaza redesign introduces retail, a café and multiple food kiosks, along with a variety of seats and gathering 306

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spaces. The other major focus was on transit; changes were made to reconfigure the circulation of buses to maximize transit efficiency, and make modifications to surrounding streets to alleviate traffic congestion. The redesign was a collaboration between the NYC Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), who did the master plan, and the Department of Transportation, which developed a capital project based on the plan. It showcases the growing realization that transportation and economics are intimately linked.

The Bronx

5. Toxic Triangle The South Bronx is home to miles of expressways, which are essential to the functioning of the city and its economy. It is also home to some of the highest asthma hospitalization rates for children in the city. The connection between the two things has become increasingly clear, as a 2010 N.Y.U. study found that the students were exposed to high levels of air pollutants in their neighborhoods. The South Bronx children were twice as likely to attend a school near a highway as were children in other parts of the city. Dr. A. Hal Strelnick, a professor of family and social medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, stated in the New York Times that his own asthma research and the N.Y.U. study showed that kids in the Bronx are living in a different environment than kids in Manhattan. “’We think it’s the same air, but it’s not really the same air,’ Dr. Strelnick said. (Boundaries of the triangle are the Cross Bronx Expressway to the north, the Bruckner Expressway to the south, and the Sheridan Expressway to the west.)

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3. 4. Staten Island Railway Staten Island Ferry

2. New York Container Terminal, Inc. Expansion

1. Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

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1. Verrazano-Narrows Bridge The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is a double-decked suspension bridge, connecting the boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn. The last great public works project overseen by Robert Moses, the construction on the bridge began August 13, 1959, with the upper deck opening on November 21, 1964 at a cost of $320 million. In 2011, the Verrazano Bridge received the dubious honor of being named the state’s busiest and most dangerous bridge by Transportation for America. With 170,000 riders crossing the bridge every day and with little maintenance over its lifetime, the bridge stands as a symbol of the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and a lost period of major public works.

Staten Island

2. New York Container Terminal, Inc. Expansion New York Container Terminal, Inc. proposed to develop Berth 4, a new 50-foot deep container ship berth, in the northwestern corner of Staten Island. The land is bounded by the Arthur Kill to the north, Bridge Creek to the west, Arlington Marsh to the east, and Richmond Terrace to the south. The proposed 39-acre berth and associated marine container terminal will be developed primarily on a portion of the former Port Ivory site, a former marine-related site and partial brownfield owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Berth 4 site also includes a portion of a city-owned lot adjacent to Bridge Creek and two small parcels located on the southeast corner of the 39-acre site. About 16 acres of tidal wetlands will require filling or dredging to construct Berth 4. The site also contains a capped landfill. An initial environmental assessment by the New York City Small Business Services determined that there will be a sizable environmental impact. Nearby residents and local environmental groups oppose the project. However, the owners of the NYCT say the $350 million expansion is crucial for the company’s survival and will create more than 300 high-paying job, clean up a toxic marsh and add tens of millions of dollars to the city’s economy every year.

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3. Staten Island Railway Most New York transportation issues tend to focus on Manhattan and getting into and off of the island. However, over the past decade, the driving force of New York has been its boroughs, both economically and demographically. A study by the Center for an Urban Future, “Behind the Curb” reports that between 1990 and 2008, the number of Staten Island residents who travel to work in their own borough increased by 32 percent while those going to Brooklyn or New Jersey increased by 22 percent. Today, just 29 percent of Staten Island commuters travel to Manhattan for work, 50 percent stay in the borough and 21 percent travel to neighboring counties. With more and more people commuting within Staten Island, the poor state of intraborough transportation has become a big issue. That same study determined that Staten Islanders who use public transportation had the longest commute in all 5 boroughs at 69 minutes. Silive. com reported that Amanda Johnson, a St. George resident, worked as an administrative assistant in Bloomfield, but eventually left because of the taxing commute. “I can get to 42nd Street from here in 45 minutes,” she told the study. “Getting to the other side of Staten Island is harder.” The abandoned North Shore rail line right-of-way and the underutilized Staten Island Railway offer potential ways to re-think that commute and the entire borough. 4. Staten Island Ferry Perhaps the first thing people think when they think of Staten Island is its ferry. For decades, it seems to have been viewed as an oddity; recently though, city officials and developers found that 19 million people use the service annually and the Ferry has begun to be seen as a driver for redevelopment of the Island. The first major development was the renovation of the two terminals, St. George and Whitehall, which created 36,000 square feet of new retail. The next major project is the re-development of two plots of land near the St. George Terminal. Totaling more than 14 acres of land, the city hopes that two large mixed-use projects can turn the borough’s waterfront 310

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into the next hot property, which will cause other developments to follow. All of these ideas and issues are laid out in Staten Island 2020, a report produced by the Center for an Urban Future, that envisions a vibrant and connected borough in the future. While it may not be the standard transit development, the ferry has a big impact.

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Concepts in Motion II

CARS SPEND JUST 5 PERCENT OF THEIR LIVES IN MOTION.

Concepts in Motion II

According to UCLA parking expert Donald Shoup, cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion. “Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.” Robert Hughes Studies show that there are approximately three parking spaces for each vehicle in the United States. This amounts to a parking lot half the size of Belgium. * * *

Concepts in Motion II

As Michael Kimmelman writes in a recent New York Times article, “There are said to be at least 105 million and maybe as many as 2 billion parking spaces in the United States...One study says we’ve built eight parking spots for every car in the country. Houston is said to have 30 of them per resident. In “Rethinking a Lot,” a new study of parking, due out in March, Eran Ben-Joseph, a professor of urban planning at M.I.T., points out that “in some U.S. cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.” * * * There were 735 million cars on the road around the world in 2000, but their numbers are growing exponentially. If the rest of the world had U.S. levels of car ownership (and other countries, particularly in the developing world, are trying hard to catch up), there would be 4.7 billion cars in the world, requiring a parking lot the size of France or Spain. Sound crazy? Since 1950, the vehicle population has grown more than twice as fast outside the U.S. as in it. “There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have 313

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a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated. … To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.” Edward Abbey The New York Times Green blog reports that “A 2006 survey conducted for CommunAuto, a Quebec carsharing organization, found that each shared vehicle replaces eight individually owned ones, leads to an 1,800-mile reduction in distance driven per year per member, and results in up to a 44 percent reduction in fuel consumption.”

Concepts in Motion II

“The degree of slowness is directionally proportional to the intensity of memory. The degree of speed is directionally proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” Milan Kundera “The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is the right to destroy the city.” Lewis Mumford For their 13th annual Global Automotive Executive Survey, consulting firm KPMG interviewed 200 C-class global automotive executives, representing both vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, from October through November 2011. Among their findings was the fact that 37 percent of car executives believe “infotainment” in cars is nearly as important as car safety. According to John Leech, Head of Automotive at KPMG, “Intel claims that the connected car is the third-fastest growing technological device, following smartphones and tablets.” “The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically oldfashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and 314

human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society.” J. G. Ballard “In a sense the car has become a prosthetic, and though prosthetics are usually for injured or missing limbs, the auto-prosthetic is for a conceptually impaired body or a body impaired by the creation of a world that is no longer human in scale.” Rebecca Solnit

Concepts in Motion II

“Human attention, in the best of circumstances, is a fluid but fragile entity. Beyond a certain threshold, the more that is asked of it, the less well it performs. When this happens in a psychological experiment, it is interesting. When it happens in traffic, it can be fatal.” Tom Vanderbilt

Concepts in Motion II “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Sir Isaac Newton

According to an I.B.I. Group car share study published in March 2011 for Toronto, a 250-unit building with 16 car-share vehicles in Seattle may eliminate up to 47 parking spaces. In Vancouver, the same building could have four car-share vehicles, and 12 fewer spots. San Francisco, for its part, mandates car-share vehicles in larger residential and commercial buildings, but doesn’t allow developers to reduce on-site parking. Environmental writer Jim Motavalli looked at a Canadian study, which found that 86 percent of the American workforce commutes to work by car and 90 percent of them park for free. He does the math and totals $85 billion in annual subsidies to these commuters, noting the average national value of a parking space is about $1000. Ending these free subsidies has the potential to improve the financial health of governments.

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* * * According to the National Association of Australian State Road Authorities, “Reducing the number of cars by 10% during peak hour will increase average speed by approximately 10km/hr, which will reduce travel times by approximately 25%.” “As late as 1926, there was nothing in law preventing pedestrians in Chicago from using any part of the street to do anything they wished, such as hold a conversation; the most restrictive interpretation of pedestrians’ right was that cars had an equal right to the street.” Will Wiles

Concepts in Motion II

Discussing the human experience of night before the invention of electricity, historian A. Roger Ekirch reminds us that almost all internal architectural environments took on a murky, otherworldly lack of detail after the sun had gone down. In his book At Day’s Close, Ekirch explains that it was not uncommon to find oneself in a place both spatially unfamiliar and even possibly dangerous; to avoid damage to physical property—as well as injury to oneself—several easy techniques of architectural navigation would be required. One of these was echolocation. Citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book Émile, Ekirch suggests that moving safely through an unlit architectural environment could be as simple as clapping. “You will perceive by the resonance of the place,” Rousseau writes, “whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the middle or in a corner.” This, and other vernacular techniques for finding one’s way through the darkness of a pre-electrified world, were “no doubt passed from one generation to another,” Ekirch writes. Some of these techniques were material. They included systems of small signs and markers—for instance, a “handmade notch in the wood railing leading to the second floor,” which 316

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would allow you to calculate how many more steps lay ahead—but also the strategy of backing all furniture up against the walls in the same location each night to open easily memorized paths of movement through an unlit house. * * * The installation of a new piece by earthworks artist Michael Heizer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) requires a particularly complex urban choreography. Heizer’s sculpture is, in fact, a 340-ton boulder specially blasted from the mountains northeast of the city, and its transportation to the museum site presents a unique logistical challenge.

Concepts in Motion II

As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported in October 2011, successfully delivering the rock means taking a journey “through the heart of one of the most congested urban centers in the country: nine nights at six miles an hour, through 120 miles of roads, highways, bridges, overpasses, overhead wires, alarmingly low-hanging traffic lights and sharp turns.” This feels, the New York Times only half-jokingly suggests, like “nothing short of a military movement: an incursion through a bewildering thicket of state, city and county regulations, and a region with a notoriously difficult street grid.” In fact, the rock’s specific route never relied on one path through that “bewildering thicket,” but has been constantly updated and changed; it involves “teams of workers… deployed to lift telephone and power lines, swing traffic lights to the side and lay down steel plates on suspect patches of roads or bridges.” More complicated yet, so as not to interfere with local traffic, the rock can only be moved at night. * * * As artist Natalie Jeremijenko explains, urban zip-lines offer an opportunity to “reclaim airspace as public space, rediscover the ‘sport’ in ‘transport,’ and 317

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experience, through flight, a city that is fluid and three-dimensional.” They are also emissions-free, and are increasingly being recognized as a valuable place-making tool, a lucrative tourist attraction, and an ideal way to navigate vertical (whether mountainous or man-made) terrain. For both temporary and permanent examples, see the “Flight of the Angels” zip-line connecting the Italian hill towns of Castelmezzano and Pietrapertosa, Natalie Jerimijenko and Usman Haque’s 2011 FlightPath Toronto installation, and the 800-ft Indianapolis zip-line that is billed as the star attraction of Super Bowl 2012. * * *

Concepts in Motion II

Since 1993, when it was launched in Berlin, the Cycle Messenger World Championships (CMWC) have become, in their own words, “the ultimate urban cycling competition.” Hosted by a different city each year, the competition brings the “strongest, smartest and fastest bike messengers from across the planet… to determine who is the best in a variety of events that test riders’ physical and mental limits.” A related event, the annual North American Cycle Courier Championship, also hosts competitive urban cycling and package-delivery events on closed courses. * * * Artist Adam Norton has developed a Martian gravity simulator, based on the design of the lunar gravity simulators used by NASA before the Apollo landings to research how astronauts should move around safely on the moon. The gravity on Mars is more than double that of the moon, so while Neil Armstrong and his colleagues found it best to bounce, Norton thinks that “a long bounding stride will become the norm on Mars.” “There is substantial evidence that demonstrates that building new roads often increases congestion. A well-established body of research shows that new lanes tend to get filled up with new traffic within a 318

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few years, particularly if surrounding routes are also congested. This phenomenon—often called “induced traffic”—occurs when road capacity is expanded near congested routes and drivers flock to the new facility hoping to save time, even if they have to travel a great deal farther to achieve it. Also, the new roadways tend to draw people who would otherwise avoid congested conditions or take alternative modes to their destinations. The result is an overall increase in the total amount of driving and the total number of automobile trips in the region—not just the redistribution of traffic from surrounding areas.” Texas Transportation Institute * * *

Concepts in Motion II

“A recent study on the ‘psychological effects of realtime information displays’ for a tramline in the Hague suggested that tram arrival displays reduced riders’ perceived wait times by as much as 20 percent—a 1.3 minute improvement. The authors went on to predict that the improved wait-time perception could increase tram ridership by as much as 2.3 percent.” Katrin Dziekan and Arjan Vermeulen * * * In Robert MacFarlane’s 2007 book The Wild Places, exploring the last vestiges of truly wild nature in Britain, MacFarlane describes a landscape feature known as the holloway. “Cliffs, riverbanks, holloways: these aspects of the country go unnoticed in most cartographies, for the axis upon which they exist is all but invisible to the conventional mapping eye. Unseen by maps, untenanted by the human, undeveloped because of their steepness, these vertical worlds add thousands of square miles to the area of Britain and Ireland—and many of them are its wildest miles.” The word holloway comes from the Anglo-Saxon root hola weg, he explains, “meaning a ‘harrowed path,’ a ‘sunken road.’ A route that centuries of use has eroded down into the bedrock, so that it is recessed 319

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beneath the level of the surrounding landscape.’” A holloway, in other words, is a very old road, carved down into the earth along old footpaths and wagon wheels, so deep it is below the horizon line and, as such, usually unseen.

Concepts in Motion II

MacFarlane continues: “The oldest holloways date back to the early Iron Age. None is younger than 300 years old. Over the course of centuries, the passage of cartwheels, hooves and feet wore away at the floor of these roads, grooving ruts into the exposed stone. As the roads disappeared, they became natural waterways. Rain drained into and down them, storms turned them into temporary rivers, sluicing away the loose rock debris and cutting the roads still further below the meadows and the fields.” The old holloways of Britain “are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are the records of journeys”—and, MarFarlane points out, they are hosts to very complex, very small, and very unexpected forms of wilderness, tiny ecosystems that have grown up and matured in these abandoned ruins of roads. Each holloway is “an unexpectedly wild world,” he writes, “buried amid the familiar and close-at-hand.” Incredibly, some of these lost roads have even “gone unexplored for decades.” * * * Since late 2000, more than 2,500 retired New York City subway cars have been stripped of components that float (oil, plastic seating, etc.), steam-cleaned, loaded on barges, and thrown overboard in the Atlantic Ocean, off Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland, in order to form artificial reefs. The stainless steel cars form hard surfaces for marine organisms such as sponges and corals to grow on, which in turn attract crustaceans and fish, creating a vibrant marine ecosystem.

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Experiments in Motion Experiments in Motion, a new research program conducted by Audi of America in partnership with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) to develop and test new paradigms in the relationship between mobility, design, and the future of cities. As part of the Audi Urban Future Research, Experiments in Motion represents the U.S. pilot of a series of locally driven, interdisciplinary research and student programs with the world’s leading institutions and schools, tapping into the vast potential of academic intelligence and emerging talent. “As urban environments continue to evolve, transportation needs to evolve in parallel. Audi aims to not only engage the discussion, but to actively contribute to the knowledge and insights of our global experts,” says Johan de Nysschen, president of Audi of America. “We look forward to working very closely with Columbia University, one of the most prestigious and visionary institutions in the country, on this important project and topic.” “The history of cities is unthinkable without considering the emergence and development of new forms of mobility,”

Audi Urban Future Research

“This program empowers young, bright minds that will both live and shape the future to develop design responses to the most extreme implications of the collective thoughts of some of the world’s most brilliant thinkers.” Mark Wigley, Dean of GSAPP.

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Audi Urban Future Research

Urbanizing Technology Ours is a time when cities have become a key space for large-scale adoption of new technologies. Most of these technologies are not necessarily developed with the urban environment in mind. My aim in writing this text is to experiment with the notion that under these conditions, it becomes critical to urbanize at least some of these technologies. What might it mean to urbanize technology? Indeed, what might it mean to urbanize the car, a technology that is not urban in itself, yet interacts intensively with urban space? The car is, after all, a technology that is designed to close long distances – such as those between suburbs, neighborhoods, and more distant destinations – not for moving at a crawl through crowded city centers. One core assumption in my work on urbanizing technology is that the specific technical capabilities of interactive technologies realize their utility value through ecologies that include more than just the technical: They also include the logics of users, which can diverge significantly from the engineer’s logic. This divergence can become particularly intense – and especially variable – in the case of cities, given the multiple socioeconomic and cultural worlds and subjectivities they encompass. The city, a complex mix of physical and social components, can transform technologies, make them its own – making it arguably the ultimate “hacker” of complex technological systems, if we understand hacking here in its original sense, as entering or altering a closed technical system. One discussion of this mix of conditions can be found in a short piece with a self-explanatory title: “Talking back to your intelligent city.” Excessively closed technical systems, such as those that can develop in the case of the technologies being used in intelligent cities, are at high risk of obsolescence precisely because they generally lack the flexibility to register the way users might keep diverging from the engineers’ intentions – there is not much of a feedback 325

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Audi Urban Future Research

loop beyond pre-programmed options. The greater the number of this type of intelligent systems are installed in a city, the more the city itself is at risk of becoming obsolete.Historically, I find that it is the combination of incompleteness and complexity of major cities that has enabled them to outlive enterprises, kingdoms, and nation-states. And it is the rather closed formal systems at the heart of the latter that have made them rigid and more susceptible to disintegration. One implication of this development is that the new trend toward installing a growing range of closed, controlled intelligent systems in cities puts those cities at risk of becoming obsolete themselves when the technologies become obsolete. The DNA of the city is more akin to open source technology. An approach that takes this factor into account would enable interactions between the technology and the user beyond those already preprogrammed within these systems. In my work I find the city is one window into understanding successful technological innovations for urban systems and urban life. When it comes to what it might mean to urbanize the car, we have more questions than answers at this stage. One way to urbanize the car is the development of advanced mobility spaces. A whole host of new technologies are already fostering the creation of mobility spaces that can alter the role of the car. In an advanced mobility complex, the car might become a mere people-carrier, with much of the work toward advanced technical and engineering innovations going into the larger mobility complex. It could work along the same lines as the now-famous system of bicycles in Paris: full availability in the city center, no proprietary claims by users. It would mean much of the capacity that is currently embedded in the car would shift to the mobility space. This in itself represents a complex engineering and regulatory challenge. There are challenges in getting to the heart of the tension between cities as complex but incomplete systems and the proliferation of intelligent systems 326

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being installed in the city. It requires not only understanding the features of cities, but also “seeing” the issue as if one were a city. Seeing like a city means juggling the diversity of elements that constitute urban space, which inevitably means a multi-perspective approach. The city is a generous partner in this work: it offers a lens into larger realities, many non-urban, that may now have an urban moment in their trajectories. This type of analysis keeps us from simply being technologists. It helps us factor in the friction and obstacles facing even the most advanced technologies when it comes to implementing technologies in urban environments.

Audi Urban Future Research

One critical factor in this type of analysis is that the car, the airplane, the computer, the program, and more, each delivers its utility through a larger assemblage of diverse elements. The latter involves multiple features not only of, for instance, the car itself (various technologies, engineering advances, the physics of materials), but also of the larger setting (habits, systems of ownership, changes in work and family life, etc.). Let me venture a hypothesis: it is this that has given the car its longevity and its flexibility to keep incorporating change of all sorts, from technological and engineering advances to broader social changes. Each and every technology faces eventual obsolescence—except perhaps for the most elementary technologies, whose longevity resides in their being basic tools: the hammer, the shovel. Across time, cities have complicated the straight forward implementation of technologies. The mix of urban materialities and people’s cultures in the city is not quite predictable, and hence can unsettle or disrupt the best designs—whether they deal with a vast structural transportation system or a pothole detection wiki. As a lens, then, the city allows us to grasp the diverse interactions between users (whether systems, organizations, or people) and the design and implementation of the technologies used in cities.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;The courage to change ways of thinking and to question what exists is a decisive prerequisite for permanent progress and is the core of the AUDI corporate culture. This is why we have set up the Audi Urban Future Initiative, in order to draw attention to and press ahead along routes to a sustainable and responsible future.â&#x20AC;? Rupert Stadler, chairman of the board of AUDI AG

Audi Urban Future Initiative

Where, how and from what does the urban future emerge? With respect to future mobility, what might the contribution of a company like Audi be? What might that of an advanced architecture be? The Audi Urban Future Initiative raises questions like this in order to develop new perspectives for the sustainable city of the future. The results from it are intended to flow into the work of the Audi company. The interaction of mobility, architecture and urban planning is at the heart of this interdisciplinary exchange. The Initiative is curated by Stylepark AG.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;As oil costs soar, the city of the future will increasingly need to adapt to modes of transportation that are not petrol-dependent... But this is not only an environmental issue. It is also an aesthetic and social one.â&#x20AC;? Richard Burdett, architect and urban planner, in an interview during the 11th Architecture Biennale in Venice The Audi Urban Future Award aims to establish a dialogue on the synergy of mobility, architecture and urban development by means of a tangible view into the future, without losing sight of the perspective of the Audi brand as an automobile manufacturer.

Audi Urban Future Award

The Situation The global population will continue to grow in the coming decades, despite social tensions, climate change and increasing scarcity of resources. Even today, more and more people live in megacities and urban areas with high population density. Mexico City or Mumbai are bursting at the seams. Disturbances within the social systems due to economic, demographic and migration-influenced factors, a global economy prone to crises and the necessity for an energy revolution and a sustainable food supply will intensify the pressure for change on industrial and emerging nations in the years to come. At the same time, in parts of the world there exists a sphere of previously unknown affluence, within which consumption-fed individualism is thriving. The Concept In order to be able to actively shape the future, the intellectual, social and technical principles of the present must be reconsidered. Only once we know what kind of future we want can we undertake concrete steps to make it a reality. Because all areas of life today are interconnected and mutually dependent, it is every bit as important to think about innovative concepts for mobility as about energy supply systems based on renewable, non-fossil sources. In this context, the complex and sometimes chaotic urban structures of the metropolis constitute 329

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a laboratory for the advancement of a critical examination of architecture, transport policies, mobility concepts and urban development. Architects and urban planners are called upon to give objective consideration to various modes of mobility in a society that is characterized by increasingly nomadic traits. In the future, will mobility mean something other than quickly, safely and comfortably getting from one place to another? In the midst of an accelerated life, can the act of staying in one place be redefined? Which role will the electronic networking of information play, which roles will public transportation, individual transportation, large companies or active urban planning play?

Audi Urban Future Award

The Audi Urban Future Award aims to analyze the future of our cities in the context of questions of mobility, and to offer concrete suggestions for their reconfiguration. Because transformation cannot be achieved without the competence and participation of large corporations, the Audi brand is leading the way. As a premium manufacturer in the automotive industry, Audi is confident that there will be cars in the city of the future. Nonetheless, Audi has recognized the importance of conducting an open discussion over the direction in which mobility will develop. With this project, Audi emphasizes that the company is prepared to rise to the complex challenges posed by the future, whether technical, social, political or aesthetic, and to acknowledge its responsibility. The Competition At the heart of the Audi Urban Future Award is a competition between six internationally renowned architectural firms. Stylepark has selected these architects because they demonstrate original perspectives and a consistent interdisciplinary approach in projects that have been realized throughout the world, thereby achieving results that transcend traditional architectural practices.

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The participating architects will be confronted with the task of developing concrete scenarios, models, visions and images that make a changed reality socially, technically, economically, ecologically and aesthetically tangible, without losing sight of the contribution a company like Audi can and must make. In keeping with the theme of mobility, concepts should illustrate what future solutions could look like and where they could be implemented; in other words, they should offer concrete examples of where the future can take root. That means to develop alternatives to current models on both a large and a small scale, to investigate realms of possibility and to trust in the power of visions without losing sight of substantive interests.

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Audi Urban Future Award

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The Audi Urban Future Summit is an interdisciplinary and interactive symposium on the subject of urban mobility and urban development, with experts from all over the world as participants. The Summit will focus on one central question: “Which energies and forces will change the city of the future in 2020 – and what relationships will exist between these forces?” Visionary ideas will come face to face with research by experts and discussions about the manifold challenges that emerge from the development of new forms of urban mobility.

Audi Urban Future Summit

Alongside the Audi Urban Future Award, the Summit is the second component of the long-term Audi Urban Future Initiative. By founding the Initiative, Audi has made a commitment to the subject of urban mobility as a whole.One of the defining characteristics of the Initiative is that through the Audi Urban Future Insight Team – an inter-departmental think-tank established for the Initiative within Audi – this discussion can actively be carried into the company. In addition to the sociologist and economist Prof. Saskia Sassen, who chaired the jury of the Audi Urban Future Award in 2010, four further keynote speakers with various specialist fields of work are expected for speeches on the morning of the Summit. In the afternoon the Summit continues with three themed workshops taking place parallel to each other with participation by the architects Jürgen Mayer H., Andreas Klok Pedersen and Alison Brooks, with members of the Audi Urban Future Insight Team, with further experts from different departments of the Audi company and with and with external researchers Steffen P. Walz, Ulrich Hatzfeld, and Jose Castillo. The Summit will be attended by a total of more than 300 engineers, architects, urban planners, politicians, students, designers, strategists, researchers into culture, nature and economics, journalists and representatives of the automobile industry.

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GSAPP and Audi History

As part of the Audi Urban Future Insight Team, employees from various departments at AUDI AG are focusing on urban mobility and urban development. Normally, they work in design, communications, technical development or brand and corporate strategy. These six have joined forces in order to promote the themes of the Audi Urban Future Initiative and act as a conduit into the company for current scientific discussions. They each have a different area of specialization and contribute their own specific knowledge and experience. They are now participating in a creative dialogue across departmental borders to develop ideas for the future.

Audi Urban Future Insight Team

Working with the Insight Team serves to expand the range of vision on various topics and allows completely new perspectives to emerge. This happens through collegial collaboration and networking among team members. They meet twice a month, alternately in Ingolstadt and in Munich, “in order to bring some fresh air into the discussion”, says Larissa Braun, Audi Urban Future Initiative project manager. The Audi Urban Future Insight Team has made it its goal to pick up on and evaluate impulses from external specialists on the topic of “Mobility and the City of the Future”, and to actively introduce the results of this process into the company. The work of the team is about identifying and sorting topics, establishing dialogue and cultivating sensitivity within the company for new issues. They have already been able to gain new insights in several areas through the dialogue with the architects of the Audi Urban Future Award. Yet this is just the beginning of a bold and inquisitive discussion, one in which the members of the Insight Team will also be taking part today at the Audi Urban Future Summit.

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GSAPP and Audi History

Studios

ARCHITECTURE AFTER THE STREET. OVER UNDER OUT. THE CITY OF MOBILE SERVICES.

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Architecture After the Street

By far New York has the highest ridership of public transportation among US cities. A significant percentage of people take the subway, bus, or commuter rail daily. Combined with the options of traveling by foot, bike, or taxi, New York stands as the country’s premier model of urban multi-modal transit. Given the great number of people who travel by these means it would seem that the private automobile is not entirely needed. The city’s high population density, ever-present congestion, and lack of parking make it less than an ideal way to get around. Indeed, compared to other urban areas, a low percentage of Manhattan residents own a car, and a minority of New Yorkers overall contemplate buying one, let alone drive on a regular basis. But be that as it may, the automobile is the main means of transportation. Though we often don’t consider it to be the case, the car is king in NYC. More than seventy-five percent of daily commuters travel by privately owned vehicle– a truth about New York that suggests the automobile will be cruising around the city for some time to come.

Jeffrey Inaba

Irvin Kershner, ‘Eyes of Laura Mars,’ 1978 Accepting our four-wheel friend as a prerequisite, the studio will develop new architectural typologies by imagining a different presence for the car. If the contemporary city up until now has been designed to the car’s specifications of movement, then we will develop new concepts of urban motion that influence the design of the car. New York is considered to have not only the largest US metropolitan transportation 335

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Architecture After the Street

department, but also one of the most experimental. The DOT has explored options such as implementing lane closures, bike paths, dedicated bus lanes, alternative street programming, ‘parklets,’ and congestion pricing. With its high traffic volume and commitment to offering alternatives, it is the ideal testing ground to figure out how the car can best contribute to the city. We have taken for granted the motion of the car: how it accelerates, turns, idles, and sits inactive. We also have accepted how it is operated: its interface, means of navigation, and level of active engagement. If these and other assumptions were suspended for the sake of proposing new kinds of buildings and urban space, then the car could be a benefit to the field of architecture. Instead of imposing limits on the design of buildings, it could be a conceptual device to reinvent architectural types–a tool to hypothesize options for urban forms that have been thus far dictated by the existing mechanics of the automobile. In turn, these types can inform the motion and technology of future vehicles. The fixed nature of the urban grid is one such imposition of the automobile. The street has persisted because without it there would be no means to facilitate the car’s movement. Without the street the car would have to continuously respond to objects in its path. Without it, everything in the city would be an obstacle, detour, or road kill. The street entitles the car. It exists for the benefit of giving the car freedom to move without a building being in the way. What if New York City did away with the street? What kinds of buildings could be designed in its absence? How would it modify the figuration of buildings and urban plazas? What new options are possible for the language of the urban façade, building setback, plinth, and ground plane (sidewalk and ‘street front’)? The studio site will be an area that is heavily dependent on the current number and layout of streets to enable traffic in and out of Manhattan. The street geometry was designed to feed the highest volume of cars out of the grid and off the island. It encom336

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passes the complex of streets surrounding the Holland Tunnel entrance near the intersection of Canal and Varick. The focal point of the design exercise will be the open area bounded by Varick, Canal, Grand, and Sixth Avenue – a vacant urban island surrounded by a flood of cars during rush hour. For the purposes of the studio, the street layout leading into this area will be open to reinterpretation, including its width, geometry, boundary, elevation and figure.

Architecture After the Street

Studios

Matt Logue, ‘Empty LA,’ 2011 Students will work in pairs to develop an urban plan and design a building of 75,000-90,000 SF that assumes an independence from the street as we know it, and which reconsiders the architectural logic of frontality, figuration, setback, plinth and/or plaza. The week before Spring Break the studio will travel to Beijing in order to study one of the most curious urban traffic systems, a fabric conceived well before the car which was extended and enlarged to impossibly accommodate millions of automobiles. The visit will include a road trip (by car) from Beijing to another major city.

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The American city is resurgent after decades of wallowing in the shadow of its suburban neighbors. Increased density means forgotten corners of the city are ripe for architectural speculation. These spaces need more than a renovation - they need to be restitched into the city’s network of transportation, communication and culture. As part of the “Experiments in Motion” series of studios, “Under Over Out” is interested in the intersection of architecture and mobility where mobility is more than mere physical conveyance. Technology has shifted the nature of ‘being somewhere’—like digitally checking into a place—and we will explore how architecture can exploit this new spatial connectivity.

Under Over Out Juergen Mayer and Marc Kushner

The studio will focus on a site known as the Delancey Underground. The Delancey Underground is an unused trolley terminal beneath Delancey Street at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge; this site is speculated to become a subterranean public park, nicknamed the “LowLine.” The current proposal includes the use of innovative fiber optics to reflect light underground as a means of activating the space and generating the capacity for plants, trees, and grasses to thrive indoors. The “LowLine” has the potential to be the next phase in urban design, in which the increased scarcity of resources forces us to imagine smarter, more creative uses of public spaces.

Above Delancey Underground 338

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The students will undertake a two-part project. They will design their own strategies for reanimating the The Delancey Underground as an inter-modal transportation/mobility/transfer/communication hub, while also developing a communication strategy to be used both as a means of presenting their work to the class, and as a tool for communicating their architectural concepts to the world. Both parts of the project will incorporate studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; research into physical and virtual mobility.

Under Over Out

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Below Delancey Underground

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Our studio will invert the question of urban mobility, asking not how individuals can most efficiently navigate the static map of the built metropolis, but how the city’s various systems and services, from policing to entertainment, can instead come to them.

The City of Mobile Services

Through a series of case studies, site visits, and design challenges, we will explore the city of mobile services, from the familiar—ice cream trucks, food carts, bike messengers, and tow trucks—to the often radically unexpected, such as California’s RV pot dispensaries or mobile lethal-injection facilities in China. We will examine bookmobiles, cinemas-on-wheels, roving police command centers, field hospitals, forensic crime-scene investigation labs, pop-up cultural festivals, farmers’ markets, at-your-door document shredding services, and more, in terms of typology, form, and spatial footprint.

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley

Bookmobiles Further, through a focused set of readings and guest speakers, we will ask what these services tell us about everyday urbanism, how they alter the politics of public and private space, and where they intersect with government regulation and the informal economy. Last but not least, in March 2012, we will visit Mumbai, India, to study that city’s own dynamic urban services, including its legendary dabbawallas. Their daily 340

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deliveries of more than 170,000 home-made lunches across the city has been the subject of case studies by GE, the Harvard Business School, Forbes magazine, and Richard Branson. Our ultimate goal is to add to the already-rich landscape of urban mobile services through proposals of our own. What has yet to be mobilized, what would it look like if it was, and how might it reformulate the city? Rather than taking a single site, each student will be responsible for selecting his or her own territory and route within New York City, then designing a mobile service network to operate within it. Within this framework, students may choose to develop the peripheral infrastructure that makes their mobile service possibleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;such as the inspection stations and wash and repair facilities that enable New Yorkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s food cart economy to function. Or they might focus instead on the hardware of the service itselfâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;its materials, form, and motive force. In either case, student proposals must clearly demonstrate the ways in which their mobile service engages the urban landscape, disrupting and reformulating its fixed geography, socio-economic hierarchy, or shared political sphere.

The City of Mobile Services

Bookmobile

Mobile Cinema

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Delancey and Clinton Street traffic jam, 1923 342

Mark Wigley Dean, Columbia GSAPP EiM Think Tank

Studio-X Geoff Manaugh Nicola Twilley C-Lab Jeffrey Inaba Justin Fowler

Credits

EiM Curators

Th-ey Christopher Barley Troy Conrad Therrien

Editorial and Production

Jeffrey Inaba Justin Fowler Geoff Manaugh Nicola Twilley Juergen Mayer Marc Kushner Benjamin Porto Greg Evans Allyn Hughes Xinyu Li Betsy Medvedovsky Jack Schonewolf

EiM Visual Identiy

Project Projects

Design

MTWTF

Special thanks to: Audi of America, Audi Urban Future Initiative, and to Sean Basinski, Andrew Blum, Abe Burmeister, Eitan Grinspun, George Hripcsak, Natalie Jeremijenko, Greg Lindsay, Austin Long, Adam McKeown, Paul Scolieri, Michael Sheetz, Juliette Spertus

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