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August 8, 2013

Holding Pattern

Though a commission from MoMA PS1 might seem out of place in a panorama of mostly unsolicited interventions, Interboro Partners saw Holding Pattern—the winner of the 2011 Young Architects Program—as a framework to make more than 40 neighboring businesses and groups their actual client. The Brooklyn-based design studio shifted their project’s focus from temporary installation for the museum’s summer music series to long-term neighborhood gain. Interboro began by meeting with close to 200 neighborhood institutions including schools, senior centers, public housing projects, libraries, a post office, and various local businesses to develop a wish list of things for the neighborhood. The team then worked to design the elements of the installation at PS1 to both create a unique spatial experience at the museum and meet the local institutions’ needs. The resulting project, Holding Pattern, assembled eclectic objects like benches, trees, playground equipment, mirrors, flood lights, chessboards, and ping-pong in a shady and dynamic space for the series. And after the museum series ended, its parts were redistributed, with 79 objects and 84 trees were donated to more than 50 community organizations.

May 5, 2013

Visionary Chicago

Walking through downtown Chicago, one is surrounded by buildings that mark watersheds in architectural history. But few people know about the Chicago that could have been. From Adolf Loos’ spectacular proposal for Chicago Tribune Tower to Greg Lynn’s Stranded Sears Tower, Visionary Chicago illuminates more than 100 unrealized projects from the past century that continue to haunt and inspire the contemporary imagination. The collaborative project is an iPhone app–driven tour of fantastical schemes revealed at the sites for which they were designed. It’s an extension of the version that architects Irene Cheng and Bretty Snyder created for New York City in 2009. The Chicago edition is based on the research of local architect and writer Alexander Eisenschmidt, who describes it as “a directory of ideas, ideas of how to engage the city.”

May 5, 2013

TrafficCOM

No urbanite is spared the nightmare of traffic. We might lament how much worse traffic has gotten, but only professional planners with expensive software know for sure. To enable more information collection, Brooklyn urban planner and activist Aurash Khawarzad and product designer Ted Ullrich developed TrafficCOM, a portable, inexpensive traffic counting device that can be deployed by citizens anywhere. The data collected by the battery-operated device is uploaded and published via open-source mapping software, equipping the public with timely, accurate data that may be used to influence the planning of anything from bike lanes to street closures to parks to mass transit. TrafficCom has been counting cars New York, San Francisco, Moscow, among other cities. The designers hope to improve and democratize traffic data, emphasizing that good information is crucial to good networks.

May 5, 2013

TERRITORY

Over six weeks in Chicago’s Albany Park neighborhood, the art and design collective known as the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena (MCP) harnessed one of the city’s greatest and most overlooked sources of energy: teenagers. In a vacant storefront, MCP conducted a series of hands-on workshops addressing the design of safe spaces. Thirty teens took part, learning about the complete design process—interviewing neighbors, mapping sites, brainstorming ideas, developing concepts, presenting them to the community, and selecting an idea to pursue at full scale. Their final project was the transformation of a parking lot into a lively place, replete with benches, flower planters, a climbing wall, and skateboard ramps which the teens built themselves. By empowering teens to improve the spaces they regularly occupy, Territory created an opening for them to positively interact with each other and their communities.

May 5, 2013

Piazza Gratissima

New York artists and sculptors Rahul Alexander, Jonathan Brand, Adam Brent, Ryan Roa, and Travis LeRoy Southworth formed the collective BroLab out of their shared interest in bridging design, art, community service, and placemaking. For them, a small under-utilized space in front of the Mott Haven Public Library in the Bronx seemed ripe for improvement. They sought permission from the library and city officials to develop a design intervention, and met with locals to hear what the neighborhood needed. Armed with $5,180 raised on Kickstarter, the artists created Piazza Gratissima, a multipurpose “free plaza” that amplifies the library’s position as a public commons. Like their previous collaborations, Piazza Gratissima reinforces their desire to “connect art to the live activities of both making and engagement.”

May 5, 2013

Moving Design: Civic Intervention

Communication design skills are most commonly deployed in the service of advertising, branding, and sales, but not all graphic designers want to apply their expertise only to commercial ends. Moving Design is a nonprofit coalition of graphic designers and artists who work with community partners to lead initiatives addressing pressing social and environmental issues. Founded by Chicago communication designers Rick Valicenti and John Pobojewski, Moving Design issues “calls to action” on a range of concerns—from water stewardship to bicycle safety to air quality—urging their profession’s best and brightest to develop creative communication campaigns that educate, engage, and activate the public. They have organized seven initiatives so far, with results taking the form of public information crusades, live events, community charrettes, and more. For Moving Design’s committed network, effective communication is necessary to catalyze change.

May 5, 2013

Imaging Detroit

For the city that spawned the term “ruin porn,” sources for a positive self-image have been hard to come by. Recognizing that image-making can be used constructively in Detroit’s economic and social recovery, three professors at University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture — Anya Sirota, Mireille Roddier, Jean Louis Farges — organized Imaging Detroit, a 36-hour outdoor film festival held in Perrien Park to engage residents in debating their city’s public image. Fifty documentaries about Detroit (selected from hundreds of international submissions to an open call) were screened back-to-back inside a complex of temporary plywood structures, followed by lively panel discussions. This pop-up agora turned the park into a vibrant civic space for public dialogue, drawing passionate citizens, artists, architects, academics, writers, urbanists, and policymakers alike.

May 5, 2013

Flint Public Art Project

Flint Public Art Project (FPAP) is an ambitious attack on the actual and imagined cultural and economic distress in Flint, Michigan. FPAP founder Stephen Zacks (a Flint native and now Brooklyn-based writer) invites architects, artists, thinkers, and activists from around the world to collaborate with local talent and organizations, resulting in participatory cultural events, public art installations, and demonstration projects of urban revitalization or branding strategies. Recently realized projects include Alex Gilliam’s Tiny WPA, a chairbomb developed with local teens that easily bolts to bus signposts, and a large-scale video projection by VJ Kero on Genesse Towers, Flint’s tallest building, now entirely vacant (pictured). Recently, FPAP launched the Flat Lot Competition, a collaboration with the Flint AIA chapter, awarding $25,000 to London studio Two Islands to create a temporary pavilion for events and programs, scheduled for summer 2013.

May 5, 2013

Dream It. Grow It.

“Dream in a pragmatic way,” Aldous Huxley once advised. With Dream It. Grow It., urban designer Yael Breimer and architect Allie O’Neill developed a simple tool for communities and aspiring gardeners to do just that, a deck of playing cards, color-coded with simple icons to designate the various steps to plan, design, and implement a successful garden. Tags at the bottom of each card help prioritize elements for decision-making and budgeting. Offering a fun and interactive way to structure brainstorming and cooperative design, the cards have been used in youth workshops in Washington Park, Hyde Park, and Pilsen, where one garden is breaking ground in summer 2013. “Converting even just one lot to a garden has the power to change a block,” the designers state. “Dream It. Grow It. puts the ability to transform neighborhoods in citizens’ hands.”

May 5, 2013

The City from the Valley

Fundamental shifts are underway in the relationship between San Francisco and the Silicon Valley as legions of tech workers are opting to live in the city, thus reversing the traditional suburb-to-city commute. San Franciscobased communication design firm Stamen created The City from the Valley, a map of the alternate transportation network of private buses that threads through the city daily, picking up employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, and the like, at unmarked bus stops, and carrying them southward to their campuses. Deploying bike messengers and others to track the buses, Stamen collected route information and mapped what is a surprisingly vast, high-frequency, and unregulated system. Like previous projects such as Cabspotting and Crimespotting, The City from the Valley harnesses data to visualize the flows of urban activities, ultimately helping us to understand the changing patterns and needs of the city.

May 5, 2013

Chicago Rarities Orchard Project

The Chicago Rarities Orchard Project (CROP) is raising the bar on public green space. The new nonprofit was established to “create ‘community rare-fruit orchards’ in reclaimed urban spaces” in Chicago. Its pilot project, breaking ground in Logan Square in June 2013, will transform an empty plot into an orchard with 40 fruit-bearing trees, including rare and endangered varieties of pears, apples, and stone fruit. By planting rare-fruit orchards, CROP addresses several issues in one bundle, including crop diversity, vacancy, public space, and access to food. With partnerships with the urban land trust NeighborSpace, the City of Chicago, and landscape architecture firm Altamanu, CROP hopes to nurture a generation of custodians to ensure the orchard’s longevity.

May 5, 2013

ACTIVATE!

Challenging Daniel Burnham’s famous declaration “Make no little plans,” ACTIVATE! is showing how powerful smallscale, limited-budget interventions can be. Initiated by Katherine Darnstadt of Latent Design in 2010, ACTIVATE! is an international competition challenging teams to enliven a vacant site within a budget of $1,000. Iker Gil’s collective practice MAS Studio won the first year with Cut.Join.Play, a flexible DIY design for seating and planting (pictured). Though the ACTIVATE! began as a one-off, the results were so encouraging that Darnstadt, in partnership with Architecture for Humanity, turned it into an annual event. In 2013, ACTIVATE! is taking over four sites and the winning proposals will be constructed mid-summer. “Through small acts of acupuncture-style activation,” Darnstadt says, “we can repurpose public space to be more universally accessible, inclusive, age-friendly, and a builder of community.”

May 5, 2013

61st Street Farmers Market

Farmers markets tend to offer high-quality vegetables at prohibitively high costs, but the 61st Street Market in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, started by Connie Spreen and Dan Peterman of Experimental Station, has pioneered a radical alternative. Each week over the summer, more than 20 local farmers and vendors selling fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, poultry, eggs, cheeses, baked goods and specialty items accept food stamps (LINK/SNAP) and match purchases up to $25 per day through a Double Value Coupon Program. To support a broader culture of nutrition and healthy food, food-focused public educational programs, often conducted by vendors, have been in place since the market’s inception. The result is a sales growth of 1,000% from 2008 to 2010; the market is now championed as a model for farmers markets across the state of Illinois.

August 8, 2012

Pop-Up Art Loop

Launched at the height of the recession, Pop-Up Art Loop was conceived as a way to turn increased vacancy in downtown storefronts into an opportunity to showcase the Windy City’s arts community. Hundreds of thousands of office workers, tourists, and residents pack the Loop daily, making its storefronts ideal for exposing artists’ work to new audiences. Taking its cue from retail window displays, the Chicago Loop Alliance, a member-based business organization, provides free space for pop-up galleries. Last year, the Alliance took over 16 vacant properties and invited dozens of arts organizations to curate 49 original exhibitions, each accompanied by public programs. WIth these efforts, the Alliance hopes to build a more “curious, smart, and bold” Chicago.

August 8, 2012

Place Pulse

Place Pulse players are shown two side-by-side Google Street View images along with a question (for example, “Which place looks safer?”). Players click on the image of their choice, earning points that can be exchanged for access to additional game features. Over time, Place Pulse converts opinions shared in-game into perception scores for each place, creating a quantitative measure of urban perception. Scores are mapped and used to identify areas that are most in need of improvements. Developed by an MIT Media Lab team led by Phil Salesses, this digital tool is intended to help cities become more flexible and representative of the desires of their inhabitants

August 8, 2012

Place It!

Place It! is a series of community workshops that invites the public to reflect upon, explore, participate in, and better comprehend the look and feel of the city through interactive models. Over the past three years, Los Angeles architect and planner James Rojas has led over 200 workshops in diverse communities across the country, involving schools, museums, community groups, city agencies, and more. He starts the workshops with a basic model of the local city, crafted from Legos, buttons, other toys and raw materials, and then invites workshop participants to add, subtract, and rearrange elements to envision their ideal city. Participants in a recent workshop in Raleigh, North Carolina, came up with proposed improvements including new grocery stores and farmers markets, outdoor movies, and improved biking conditions.

August 8, 2012

Pixelator

Sightlines at the entrance of New York’s subway stations are prime visual real estate, and such real estate comes with a price tag—one paid more easily by promoting commodities than art. Artist Jason Eppink, however, devised a way to appropriate these LED billboards for a more artful purpose: Pixelator, a homemade foam core and paper screen that can be affixed to any of the monitors, transforming commercial pollution into abstract projections of light and color. The results are wholly spontaneous and dependent on the advertisements hidden behind the intervention. In keeping with this open-ended spirit, Eppink has posted on his webiste simple instructions for building your own Pixelator.

August 8, 2012

PHS Pops-Up Garden

In May 2011 the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) transformed an empty lot in downtown Philadelphia into a lush garden with fresh organic produce, open to the public. In a single growing season, it produced 600 pounds of vegetables, most of which went to PHS’ City Harvest, a program that distributes fresh vegetables to area food cupboards and draws from a network of community gardens. PHS also partnered with chefs from Center City restaurants, who used the produce in signature dishes. The pop-up garden attracted 6,000 visitors who attended tours and dozens of educational sessions and performances. The garden was dismantled in October, with materials either given to local garden groups or recycled. A new PHS Pops-Up was installed on a different vacant lot in spring this year.

August 8, 2012

Phone Booth Book Share

With smart phones near universal, one might wonder why public payphones still occupy so much sidewalk space. The Department of Urban Betterment’s (DUB) Phone Booth Book Share is part of a series of urban interventions that explore obsolete street technology. It might look like a simple repurposing of phone booths into community book shares, but DUB’s motto – nascetur ridiculus mus, “and a ridiculous mouse will be brought forth” – hints at a grander objective. Architect John Locke invokes Homer to argue, “The central office has no brain. The paternalistic top- down strategy of traditional urban planning has been a waste of heroic labors. We can match modest labors with exceptional gains by turning even a few of our neighbors into consciously critical observers.”

August 8, 2012

Periscope Project

The Periscope Project is a cooperative of artists, designers, scholars, and community advocates headquartered in four shipping containers on the small San Diego lot of founder Petar Perisic. The space functions as a public amenity and a living visualization of alternative urban land use, exploiting temporary-use zoning loopholes as an opportunity to realize a new paradigm of urban citizenry – one engaged at the level of the built environment. The cooperative curates, organizes, and hosts events, exhibitions, panel discussions, and lectures in the flexible spaces, and also emphasizes educational programming to engage local youth. The Periscope Project has become a central force in rallying community activism and has evolved into a loose practice that develops public art and architecture interventions.

August 8, 2012

People Make Parks

Many people might fantasize about turning an underused space in their neighborhood into a lush green park but most wouldn’t know where to begin. The New York design-build nonprofit Hester Street Collaborative and the Partnership for Parks, a program of New York City’s Parks & Recreation Department, created People Make Parks (PMP) to change that. PMP is a digital platform that helps communities to participate in the design of new parks in their neighborhood, clearly explaining the step-by- step process of what must happen, from advocacy and design to funding, construction, and maintenance. When citizens engage in park design, governments build better parks, and the public continues to enjoy and care for places they helped make.

August 8, 2012

Participation Park

In a gesture of resistance to the mounting privatization of public space, the artist collective Baltimore Development Cooperative took over an empty lot in East Baltimore in 2007. The result is Participation Park – a nod to Berkeley’s historic People’s Park – which they continue to squat to this day, and is group’s longest running project. The park is an experiment in democratic spatial practice, in which everyone who participates in the use of the space is invited to engage in the political process of shaping it. Working with input from neighborhood residents to design and implement new uses for the land, the Baltimore Development Cooperative has effected the park’s evolution from an urban farm to a community kitchen, free store, and adventure playground.

August 8, 2012

Parkman Triangle Park

Los Angeles – based Urban Operations’ work exploits loopholes in the rules that govern the streetscape. Parkman Triangle, a wedge-shaped space that was once a turn lane, is classified by the city as an “improvement” instead of as a park. Initiated by John Southern, the pocket park is planted with native and drought-resistant trees, succulents, and grasses. City guidelines regulate boulders differently than street furniture, so the designer chose large flat rocks for seating. Local residents pitched in to help with the construction. “It fosters a sense of civic stewardship between members of the community through its maintenance and upkeep,” Southern says. The project is part of a study focusing on the identification and reprogramming of sites that do not appear in GIS databases.

August 8, 2012

Paintings for Satellites

Artist Molly Dilworth’s paintings serve the general public, even if the general public can’t easily see her work. Her ongoing series Paintings for Satellites turns buildings’ fifth elevation into dazzling murals that mitigate urban heat island effect. Some of the most environmentally aware cities in the world encourage building owners to paint their rooftops lighter, more reflective colors to reduce heat gain and cut energy use and greenhouse emissions. New York City’s CoolRoofs program and climate change advocacy group 350.org recently invited Dilworth to paint the roof of a Brooklyn high school (pictured). For the most part, however, her work remains self-generated, relying on discarded house paint and easy (not always) access to rooftops.

August 8, 2012

OpenPlans

How can citizens help cities run more smoothly? What if cities could share software and data with other cities, learning from each other’s successes to conquer similar challenges? New York nonprofit OpenPlans, founded by transportation advocate Mark Gorton, builds tools for governments to do this, and more. Cities spend billions of dollars on closed-source technology to facilitate everything from intranets to building permits to transit operations. OpenPlans builds open software and consults city agencies on how to implement open-computing platforms to help them run more efficiently. For NYC’s Department of Transportation, for example, OpenPlans developed Shareabouts, a mapping tool that allowed citizens to suggest locations for the city’s new bikeshare system. It’s just one of many projects that advances their mantra, “Information is the currency of democracy.”

August 8, 2012

Occupy Wall Street

Set off in September 2011 with protests in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, Occupy Wall Street uses the takeover of public spaces as a means to protest economic inequality. Under the slogan “We are the 99%”, the movement quickly manifested as global “instant cities” – tent encampments complete with civic services such as first aid, canteens, and libraries that supported the needs of protesters living outdoors for weeks. Protesters developed a number of clever systems and tactics that have continued to grow. In Zuccotti Park, the Screenprinters Guild created a portable system to get messages quickly onto t-shirts and banners, while Greta Hansen, a member of the OWS Architecture Working Group, led a team that developed 123 Occupy, pop-up shelters using everyday materials such as shipping pallets and bubblewrap.

August 8, 2012

New Public Sites

Artist Graham Coreil-Allen applies psychogeography and Situationist principles to the everyday urban walking tour in his New Public Sites project. After extensive research into the definitions of and legal issues surrounding public space, Coreil- Allen developed an understanding of the latent potential in empty, ambiguous, contradictory, or invisible areas of the city. Through a series of guided walking tours that use architecture and planning terminology in a “playful yet serious” manner, Coreil-Allen activates and informs citizens about the civic and social possibilities of underutilized spaces. Participants are given free maps of the area explored, and invited to read Coreil-Allen’s growing Typology of New Public Sites (available for free download) to learn more about his “radical pedestrianism” and “radical cartography.”

August 8, 2012

Neighborland

Candy Chang, Tee Parham, and Dan Parham developed Neighborland to allow people to share their ideas and insights for their city, support their neighbors’ ideas, and connect with people who share their interests. Informed by Chang’s “I Wish This Was” (project #53), the Neighborland website was created to provide the people of New Orleans with a platform to identify achievable goals and discuss how to accomplish them. Forums for twenty-five other cities have since been added to the site. Simple tactics like stickers, spray chalk, and physical signage bring people together oine and spark conversations in public space. The team’s goal is to help make cities more complete, compact, and connected.

August 8, 2012

popuphood

Despite amenities like a farmers’ market and historic buildings, Oakland’s old business district was lacking in vibrant street life. Architect and local business owner Alfonso Dominguez and artist Sarah Filley co-founded nonprofit popuphood as a small-business incubator to revitalize the neighborhood and spark long-term economic development. Working with a landlord who agreed to provide space in vacant storefronts, Filley and Dominguez recruited five complementary businesses with the promise of six months of free rent and marketing support. The project launched before last Christmas and has so far been a success, generating buzz as a new destination unique for its hyper- local approach to retail. Three of the original retailers have signed long-term leases, and the neighborhood seems on the rise.

August 8, 2012

Power Cart

Street vendors have traditionally played a role in defining the urban environment, often reflecting the social and cultural particularities of a city. Knife-sharpening in India, gas refills in Africa, fake Gucci bags in Paris, and chair massages in New York City are some of today’s examples. Mouna Andraos brings another service to the contemporary city with Power Cart, a mobile unit that delivers a quick recharge for urban dwellers’ mobile devices. With sustainability in mind, Power Cart derives its energy from solar cells and hand-operated crank power. Power Cart was designed to be easily assembled by anyone using off-the-shelf pieces. Detailed instructions are available on her website www. livingwithourtime.com.

August 8, 2012

SeeClickFix

Ben Berkowitz was inspired to start SeeClickFix after struggling to get the city of New Haven to remove graffiti from a neighbor’s building. After repeatedly calling City Hall and getting nowhere, he realized that citizens everywhere likely had the same experience and desire to have a reliable channel to communicate with their city officials. As a website and mobile app, SeeClickFix enables citizens to report non-emergency problems (for example, potholes, fallen trees, broken traffic lights) to city officials and the media simultaneously – the company has almost 80 government partners and 700 media partners – so there is more transparency about the resolution of civic problems. SeeClickFix calls on citizens to take ownership of the problems in their communities, enabling them to be not just voters but attentive civic actors.

August 8, 2012

San Francisco Garden Registry

The San Francisco Garden Registry is an online map and social networking tool created to connect urban gardeners and to locate current or potential open spaces in the city that are suitable for growing food. By registering these “food production zones” online, a comprehensive land use portrait begins to emerge. Set up by San Francisco art and design collective Futurefarmers, the Garden Registry seeks to quantify the total farmable acreage within the city in order to better support, connect, and cultivate these spaces. To date, some 1,500 acres have been identified.

August 8, 2012

re:NEWS

To enliven San Francisco’s Mid-Market District, a neighborhood with one of the highest crime rates and lowest occupancy rates in the city, architecture firm HOK initiated a charrette, teaming up with the Central Market Community Benefit District and drawing dozens of firms including Public Architecture and WSP Flack + Kurtz, as well as local residents. From these sessions emerged a proposal for simple adaptive reuse – converting disused newspaper kiosks into community-focused hubs and sites for micro-businesses. Proposed new uses include a free bicycle repair station, a florist, a café, and a venue for performance art. The city agreed to lease the kiosks free of charge for the community uses. The bike station opened several months ago, and the florist will open next.

August 8, 2012

Queens Boulevard Intervention

In 2009, after the death of cyclist James Langergaard on Queens Boulevard, a group of urban planners committed themselves to bringing safety improvements to this auto-centric thoroughfare. They formed the Planning Corps, and through monthly working sessions with activists and residents, they realized their work could have impact beyond Queens Boulevard: By educating people about complex transportation topics, they could empower them to work with the full range of stakeholders – residents, businesses, and government agencies – to bring positive changes. This resulted in the Public Engagement Tool Kit, which breaks down everything from signal timing to congestion data, and documents precedents of broad boulevards from around the world to suggest how to more safely allocate space for cars, transit, pedestrians, and cyclists.

August 8, 2012

Serendipitor

With smart phones, smart cities, and endless tools to maximize efficiency and minimize travel time, the possibility for serendipitous encounters or discoveries is diminishing. Artist and architect Mark Shepard created Serendipitor, an iPhone app that brings out the playful explorer in all of us. Users input their selected destination, and Serendipitor provides inventive directional routes and suggested actions inspired by Fluxus, Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, among others, helping users find something surprising and new along their way. Users can increase or decrease the complexity of the route, depending on how much time they have. Serendipitor is part of Shepard’s larger project, the Sentient City Survival Kit (supported by Creative Capital), which “probes the social, cultural and political implications of ubiquitous computing for urban environments.”

August 8, 2012

Spatial ConTXTs

Architect Anda French has found a way to tap public mobile device fixation and direct it toward imaginative exploration of the built environment. In her Spatial ConTXTs projects, French uses text messaging to drive city-wide interactive installations. For Sibylline TXT, named after an oracle in Virgil’s Aeneid, French dispersed an original fictional story across 26 art and cultural sites over a span of 30 days. Participants were encouraged to rove the city of Syracuse, and on reaching each destination, would receive parts of the narrative via text message. French adapted a similar structure for SyrAsks, a project with Syracuse University and middle school students, in which the city texted responses to student questions at specific sites, fostering new forms of public dialogue.

August 8, 2012

Stairway Stories

Would you forego the elevator if climbing stairs promised a great story? That’s what industrial designers Alison Uljee and Sierra Seip hope to achieve with Stairway Stories, which is a part of their larger project, Design That Moves You, aimed at combating obesity through public design interventions. Stairway Stories entices people to take the stairs, with snippets of a story adhered to ascending risers. Uljee and Seip tested their project at the High Line park, posting a sign on an elevator suggesting visitors make the two-flight climb. Those opting for exercise were rewarded with “a romantic and educational encounter between two angler fish.” It might have been more work, but then “Her gorgeous face glowed…”

August 8, 2012

596 Acres

Vacant urban land abounds, often locked behind chainlink fences in neighborhoods sorely in need of green space and other amenities such as fresh produce. A multidisciplinary group (including a programmer, designer, and artists) formed 596 Acres to encourage communities to re-envision the possibilities for the vacant lots in their own backyards. The name refers to the quantity of vacant city-owned land in Brooklyn, which the group catalogued, mapped, and printed on a poster that reads “Find the lot in your life. Contact the owner. Work out a deal. Grow something. We can help.” They hung the posters on hundreds of lots, prompting locals to action. Their interactive online map, combined with educational workshops, “labeling walks,” and more, have made 596 a valuable community resource.

August 8, 2012

proxy

A placeholder for more permanent development, proxy is a temporary two-block project that creates an ever-changing experience in a neighborhood in transition. Leasing empty lots from the city (formerly occupied by an elevated freeway), San Francisco architect Douglas Burnham has engineered a thriving destination with pop-up food stands, art installations, a beer garden, an area for food trucks, and event and retail spaces. Smartly revamped shipping containers compose an open frame- work that embraces the potential of impermanence, encouraging the rotation of new businesses and happenings. With plans for outdoor films and a farmers’ market, proxy has become the focal point of its community and an inspiration to cities across the U.S. looking to maximize the potential of latent real estate.

August 8, 2012

Popularise: Build Your City

As a reaction to real estate development that’s often out of touch with local wants and needs, former developer Ben Miller created an online crowdsourcing platform called Popularise to give people a way to influence how their neighborhoods take shape. Launched in Washington, D.C., with other city editions in the works, the website invites the public to suggest businesses they’d like to see occupy vacant storefronts in their neighborhoods and to offer feedback on impending projects. Builders can post descriptions and photos of projects in the works, and solicit community input. With many cities confronting the same problems, such as empty storefronts or shopping strips filled with big-chain retailers, Popularise facilitates “a new way to develop authentic places” that draws from the power of the crowd.

August 8, 2012

Pop Up City

Since 2007 the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative of Kent State University has run Pop Up City, a program that brings vacant urban space to life through fleeting interventions. Cleveland lost half of its population since the 1950s, and much of its urban fabric is unused and deteriorating. Pop Up City aims to spotlight some of Cleveland’s spectacular but underutilized properties, while demonstrating that vacancy can be an opportunity and an adventure, not just a liability. Past interventions have included an ice sculpture park on the banks of the Cuyahoga River; a roller-disco on a vacant floor of an old industrial building; and an inflatable music venue on top of a parking garage, demonstrating possible alternative programming for structures that are used only during certain hours of the day.

August 8, 2012

Streetfilms

We all know how powerful a well-made viral video can be to advance a cause. Streetfilms has harnessed that power to promote smart transportation design and policy and its potential to create happy, healthy places to live. The New York nonprofit Streetfilms (sister organization of OpenPlans) has produced over 400 short films on subjects ranging from bikeway design to sustainable transport to parking reform, shot in locations all over the world. One of its most-viewed films is about Ciclovía, a weekly “open streets” event in Bogotá, Colombia, in which over 70 miles of streets are closed for leisurely cycling. The video has received over 200,000 hits and has helped advocates everywhere to convince their own city officials to implement ciclovías.

August 8, 2012

#whOWNSpace

#whOWNSpace was founded in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York when activists occupied Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public space (POPS). A grassroots collective initiated by DSGN AGNC, along with Change Administration (formerly DoTank), Not An Alternative, and others, group members teach, research, and broadcast issues surrounding the democratic use of public space. #whOWNSpace has conducted public workshops to map these sites, and when they find illegal restrictions to access, the group pressures building owners to remove them. “Understanding what privatization is doing to our cities and open spaces is ultimately about understanding the role of space in a society,” explains Riano. #whOWNSpace’s teach-ins, tweets, and design proposals encourage community activist
use of space in the city.

August 8, 2012

Yarnbombing

Adorning features of the urban landscape such as signposts, bike racks, and public benches with brightly colored knitted or crocheted covers, yarnbombing (a.k.a. graffiti knitting, yarnstorming, and grandma graffiti) is a fast-growing street art movement now seen in public spaces all over the world. The phenomenon’s beginnings are attributed to business owner Magda Sayeg and her “Knitta Please” knitting group in Houston. Her simple and inexpensive methods have inspired others to take their needles to the streets the world over, with the shared aim of “cozying up” cold and uninviting public spaces. Yarnbombers range from guerrilla groups with unique urban agendas to artistic expressions or social commentary by individuals (such as New York artist Olek whose handiwork on the Wall Street bull is pictured).

August 8, 2012

Walk Raleigh: Guerrilla Wayfinding

For Matt Tomasulo, the inclination to drive in downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, was a result more of perceived distance than actual necessity – a tendency endemic in many American cities. As an antidote to this misconception, he devised Walk Raleigh, an unsanctioned wayfinding system for pedestrians. Tomasulo hung 27 signs at three major Raleigh intersections, each with a directional arrow, a count of how many “minutes by foot” are necessary to reach a destination, and a QR code for more information. Though the signs were removed within days of being posted, overwhelming support from the local community led the Raleigh City Council to reinstate Walk Raleigh as an official pilot project, promoting a healthier and safer pedestrian environment in the city.

August 8, 2012

Syracuse Downtown

Town-and-gown relations in Syracuse were long characterized by disconnect, with the thriving institution of Syracuse University geographically and culturally removed from its economically- depressed hometown. Under Dean Mark Robbins, the University’s School of Architecture (SOA) saw the struggling city as an opportunity to put scholarship into action. SOA moved its classrooms and studios downtown, and initiated over 30 projects in the city, including Storefront:Syracuse (pictured), a student-run initiative by Nilus Klingel and Stephen Klimek that transforms vacant storefronts into creative hubs. Other projects include La Casita Cultural Center by PARA- Project and the forthcoming South Side Food Cooperative. Robbins also encouraged his faculty to realize personal projects in Syracuse (see banner #111, Anda French’s Spatial ConTXTs). SOA proves that academic institutions can both study and solve urban issues.

August 8, 2012

Ten New Historical Markers

In 2007 a group of Pittsburgh-based artists, activists, and amateur historians coalesced around their interest in the often- buried history of radicalism in the United States. Perturbed by the lack of visibility and appropriate perspective given to important moments of resistance reflected in the city’s existing historical markers, they formed the Howling Mob Society to research and design a series of new public signs. Their first effort focused on the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, with ten markers detailing significant events installed throughout the city, inspiring considerable local debate. To date, eight of the ten signs are still up, and an accompanying website invites readers to explore an interactive map and delve deeper into this lesser-known chapter of the city’s history.

August 8, 2012

The Uni

The Uni is a mobile, modular outdoor library designed to reinforce the potential for learning in the public sphere. Developed in Boston by Street Lab (now The Uni Project) in collaboration with Höweler + Yoon Architecture, the Uni introduces an unfamiliar use of the public realm, converting any square or sidewalk into a plein-air learning lounge. Uni’s lightweight modular structures are composed of open-faced stacking cubes, which can each hold 10 to 15 books, and can be adapted to almost any public space. The first was assembled in a street market in Lower Manhattan, and Unis have since been installed all over New York City, Boston, and recently, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, with book selections varying according to location and time.

August 8, 2012

TreeKIT

In some cities, dead trees are as numerous as potholes, but get a lot less attention. For this reason, landscape architect Liz Barry and urban forester Philip Silva developed TreeKIT, a system to measure, map, and manage urban forests. Volunteers use simple site-survey- ing skills to map trees in urban areas. TreeKIT’s website features a map showing tree density block by block, and users can zoom in on trees to click for information about trunk dimension, genus, or species. The map also color-codes empty treebeds, stumps, and dead trees. This data is shared with city agencies and local tree steward organizations. Studies indicate healthy trees in urban areas can filter pollutants, reduce heat island effect, reduce CO2, and prevent runoff as well as create safe inviting public spaces.

August 8, 2012

Trees, Cabs and Crime in San Francisco

On the digital data frontier, San Francisco design firm Stamen is an intrepid, advance exploratory team. Their data visualization and cartography work is imbued with a belief in the power of maps to make meaningful sense of abstract information. The firm conducts its own research alongside its client work, which has included visualization projects for the London 2012 Olympics, Esquire, and Twitter. For Trees, Cabs and Crime, partner Shawn Allen combined three distinct data sets to suss out unknown urban patterns. One layer is a map of urban tree locations; another follows taxicab GPS traces; and the last depicts crime hotspots, drawing from an earlier Stamen project, Crimespotting, a useful interactive map charting to-the-minute police reports of crimes in the Bay Area.

August 8, 2012

Version Festival 12

Bridgeport, a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, has long been an Irish-American, working-class enclave but has recently showed signs of change. The Public Media Institute (PMI) – led by artist Ed Marszewski, a longtime Bridgeport resident – took a proactive look at the neighborhood’s future evolution by making it the focus of its 12th Version Festival, an annual month-long community arts event. For the Bridgeport edition, the aim was to create a temporary autonomous zone: PMI invited cultural workers, activists, entrepreneurs, artists, designers, foodies, and dreamers to swarm the neighborhood, remixing twelve temporary spaces. For one month, these pop-ups – including a bookstore, performance space, home-brewing clubhouse, galleries, shops selling locally made goods, and community kitchen – invigorated the area and provided a glimpse of potential long-term cultural and economic change.

August 8, 2012

War Gastronomy: Recipes of Relocation

It might appear to be just another sidewalk food cart, but San Francisco artists Justin Hoover and Chris Treggiari’s set-up – a mobile kitchen/café fashioned from industrial bikes and travel trunks – is actually a cultural project about globalization and dislocation. Touched by his Chinese grandmother’s tales of escaping war, and by her traditional cooking, Hoover started to collect recipes from people who have been forced to move due to conflict in their home countries. At predetermined times in public places, the pair sets up their cart and serves dishes along with the personal stories attached to them. Passersby can contribute their own recipes to War Gastronomy’s ever-growing archive, feeding a performance/participatory work that brings the communal experience of cooking, eating, and sharing stories to public space.

August 8, 2012

Guerrilla Grafters

The streets of San Francisco are planted with thousands of fruit trees, yet they are strictly ornamental varietals. Most cities want to avoid the mess of fallen fruit, which could lead to slippery sidewalks and the infestation of unwanted pests. Guerrilla Grafters is a grassroots group that sees a missed opportunity for cities to provide a peach or a pear to anyone strolling by. Their objective is to restore sterile city trees into fruit-bearers by grafting branches from fertile trees. The project might not resolve food scarcity, but it helps foster, in their words, “a habitat that sustains us.” So far the group has grafted about 50 trees in neighborhoods where they identify locals to take stewardship of the trees
and their harvest.

August 8, 2012

Harvest Dome

Any New Yorker worth their salt will recognize the frayed remains of broken umbrellas, which crowd city trashcans and litter gutters during and after a storm. With Harvest Dome, Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi of SLO Architecture have repurposed these remains as a way to foreground the city’s accumulation of waterborne debris. Schachter and Levi worked with area teenagers and apprentice architects to gather the discarded, storm-snapped umbrellas and assemble them into a light-gauge spherical installation, which they floated in the Inwood Hill Park Inlet at Manhattan’s northernmost tip. Rising and falling with the tide, the buoyant dome called attention to the city’s waterways and watersheds and the circadian action of the water.

August 8, 2012

I Wish This Was

Vacant storefronts are an urban mainstay. But while passersby may dream of what they wish would fill the void, rarely do they get any say in the matter. Combining street art and city planning, I Wish This Was is an interactive public art project that invites residents to voice their ideas about improving the neighborhood. Trained in architecture, graphic design, and urban planning, Candy Chang posts grids of blank stickers on vacant buildings so that residents can write their thoughts on future use, provid- ing a fun, low-barrier tool to spark civic engagement and a way to showcase the city’s collective imagination. The project was launched in New Orleans, but stickers are available online and have been appearing in cities around the world.

August 8, 2012

ICE-POPS

ICE-POPS (Interested Critical Explorers of Privately-Owned Public Space) believes that spaces are not public until the public knows about them. This open collective of urban explorers, planners, writers, researchers, and artists operating from cities across the U.S. identifies and catalogues privately-owned public spaces (POPS) and other public-private developments, and conducts walking tours of these sites in hopes of making cities more open and more public. “We feel that information-sharing is itself a radical act and that research can be poetic, brash, quiet, performative,” according to the group’s website, which invites people to participate by uploading their own documentation of POPS, aggregating research on site owners, designers, amenities, and other characteristics.

August 8, 2012

Insert____Here

The Insert____Here project, launched by artist Eve Mosher in response to a perceived lack of public awareness around community-driven change, capitalizes on community awareness of place and optimism. The project invites participants to place bold yellow “Insert____Here” arrows in locations in their community where they want to “insert” an urban change or intervention. By posting their ideas on site, individuals can share their proposed solutions with the greater community. Arrows have also been projected onto the sides of buildings during events, allowing passersby to text their wishes for a site and see them broadcast live to the neighborhood.

August 8, 2012

Intersection Repair

Sometimes all you need to create a great public space is a gesture that makes people feel welcome and comfortable: Mark Lakeman realized that public gathering places could be retroactively created out of normal street intersections in his Portland neighborhood with some paint and community effort. City Repair, the organization he founded in 1996, is an almost all-volunteer organization that gathers communities to paint murals on street crossings and to add other improvements, like benches, information boards, and plantings, yielding lively new focal points for their neighborhoods. They started with Share- It Square and Sunnyside Piazza, and have since expanded to dozens of intersections across the country, where neighbors gather annually to repaint and update their community spaces.

August 8, 2012

Islands of LA

Although you may not notice them, artist Ari Kletzky sees traffic islands everywhere in his city. Surmising that these miscellaneous bits of public land add up to a sizable territory, he started an art project in which he installs official-looking signs declaring these undistinguished plots a part of the Islands of LA National Park. An ongoing project to activate underutilized public space, Islands of LA includes an online map of traffic islands that Kletzky considers suitable for public gatherings. He describes them as “highly visible places of public intimacy,” and possible places for “unrestricted peaceable gatherings,” from protests to picnics to art exhibits.

August 8, 2012

Kingshighway Skatepark

Jonathan Ware wasn’t sure whether to bring a bag of concrete along with a skateboard and pads on his first visit to Kingshighway Skatepark. “Word on the street was if you showed up and you did not contribute in some way, you would not be permitted to skate there,” says Ware, a local architect and skater. Situated below an overpass in south St. Louis, the highly popular skate park was built by an all-volunteer network of skaters in an urban dead zone. Plans to overhaul the road above now jeopardize the park’s future, but its success has galvanized larger efforts between the volunteer group now known as Kingshighway Vigilante Transitions, city officials, and the community to build sanctioned skate parks in other locations throughout the city.

August 8, 2012

LA Green Grounds

While leading urban farming courses for the LA Museum of Natural History, Vanessa Vobis noticed that her attendees were mostly white families, many of whom already have access to healthy food options. To make these skills more accessible to diverse communities, Vobis approached a neighbor in the low-income community surrounding the museum, offering to build a home garden in exchange for the homeowner recruiting friends and family to help with the physical work and to learn about urban farming together. LA Green Grounds now holds monthly “dig-ins,” like old-fashioned barn-raisings, where residents work together to convert front yards into edible gardens in one day. Trained as an artist, Vobis sees participatory engagement as central to the work of socially active artists who attempt to resist the commercialization of the arts scene.

August 8, 2012

Legal Waiting Zone

Ghana ThinkTank, a global network of think tanks that aims to resolve local problems, operates with a mobile unit that invites passersby to submit concerns for the nonprofit’s wide-ranging affiliates to explore. While parked in Queens in 2011, ThinkTank workers heard that police were ticketing immigrant workers nearby for loitering, despite the fact the anti-loitering law was deemed unconstitutional in New York 20 years ago. In response, the ThinkTank established “Legal Waiting Zones,” taped-off areas with signs in English and Spanish educating residents on the illegality of police’s actions and empowering them with the knowledge of their right to hang out on city sidewalks.

August 8, 2012

Local Code: Real Estates

When artist Gordon Matta-Clark created Fake Estates in the early 1970s, he spent three years combing through public records to identify 15 fallow, forgotten city-owned lots. Using GIS mapping, architect Nicholas de Monchaux identified over 1,500 vacant public lots in San Francisco in a matter of months. In the U.C. Berkeley professor’s eyes, when considered together, these residual, unmaintained spaces are a vast untapped resource. Using parametric design to optimize thermal and hydrological performance, he proposes a landscape design for each parcel, resulting in a network of urban greenways that enhances the city’s ecology and benefits citizens’ health. He has extended the research to other cities, creating a database of neglected sites that could be recuperated to create infrastructures that mend ecological and social circumstances.

August 8, 2012

Making Policy Public

While the effects of public policies can be widespread, the discussion and understanding of these policies are usually not. The Center for Urban Pedagogy’s (CUP) Making Policy Public series aims to make information on policy truly public – accessible, meaningful, and shared. Four times yearly, CUP pairs communication designers with advocacy organizations to translate complex policy issues into easy-to-grasp visuals that are then widely distributed within the community most affected by the policy. Previous posters include Predatory Equity: The Survival Guide, which arms tenants and landowners with the tools to avoid foreclosure; I Got Arrested! Now What?, which educates those caught in the juvenile justice system; and Vendor Power!, which helps street vendors defend themselves against needless fines.

August 8, 2012

Marcus Prize Pavilion

Dotted with brownfield sites, Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley is just one of the nation’s many damaged postindustrial corridors in need of revitalization. Through a design-build studio at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Barkow Leibinger Architects and Professor Kyle Talbott introduced a catalyst for the process of its rehabilitation. The studio created the Marcus Prize Pavilion, a permanent structure to serve as a meeting point and storage facility for volunteer gardeners working to restore the surrounding landscape. The pavilion’s design is inspired by local ecology, with a light, plywood-beamed roof mimicking the structure of leaves. It’s meant to be the first of a series of interventions to create a support network for the valley’s environmental reclamation.

August 8, 2012

Museum of the Phantom City

The Museum of the Phantom City is a public art project that uses personal digital devices to transform the city into a living museum. The downloadable mobile app reveals visionary speculative design proposals for various sites in New York City – Buckminster Fuller’s dome over Midtown, for example, or Raymond Loewy’s helicopter landing field planted over Bryant Park, or Michael Sorkin’s scheme for a homeless colony on the West Side railyards. Architects Irene Cheng and Brett Snyder’s project explores how mobile technology might go beyond traditional navigational functions to transform the way we experience the city. Inspired by the Situationists who strived to make ordinary landscapes appear unfamiliar and strange, this “museum without walls” hopes to intensify urban experiences, introducing pleasure and mystery to the metropolitan condition.

August 8, 2012

MyBlockNYC

MyBlockNYC.com is an interactive, user-generated mapping website populated with personal video accounts of the life and culture of New York City. The public is invited to upload videos and tag them to the exact time and location where they were shot. The MyBlock map conveys not just the geography of the city but the stories, culture, and style that define a location. Videos are searchable by location as well as by time of day and topic (for example, street fair, pizza, playgrounds). The goal of MyBlockNYC is to harness the creative potential of the city’s occupants and visitors, and to paint a rich, intimate, constantly evolving portrait of the city to be shared with others.

August 8, 2012

NY Street Advertising Takeover

Advertising dominates the urban realm, plastered over billboards, building walls, street furniture, and automobiles. Tired of this visual and mental pollution – and indignant that much of street advertising is illegal – Jordan Seiler, founder of PublicAdCampaign, organized the New York Street Advertising Takeover. After three months of preparation, for one day Seiler and a team of 20 set out with military precision to hundreds of locations, where they whitewashed 20,000 square feet of illegal advertising. Over one hundred artists, activists, and residents then claimed this liberated space with their own artistic or personal sentiments. As a result, the city took action against the most offensive illegal advertiser. Seiler hopes for an urban citizenry that shares in the curation of the public environment.

August 8, 2012

Tactical Urbanism Handbook

While large-scale planning schemes definitely have their role, Mike Lydon and his colleagues at the Street Plans Collaborative believe that the work of improving the livability of towns and cities starts at the scale of the street. They saw small-scale, short-term projects happening all over the country, and decided to create a resource for would-be interventionists. The Tactical Urbanism Handbook, now in its second volume, gathers examples of low-cost incremental improvements that spotlight specific problems and generate support for more substantial investments in the future. From guerrilla gardens and weed-bombing (tagging overgrown weeds with eyepopping colors) to food trucks and pop-up town halls, the Handbook documents dozens of useful and replicable tactics. Available free online, volumes one and two have each been downloaded nearly 30,000 times.

August 8, 2012

QR_Hobo_Codes

The informal code that vagabonds developed in the 19th century to offer warnings and help each other cope with the uncertainties of nomadic life inspired the QR_Hobo_Codes project by Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, a Pittsburgh-based research network devoted to enriching the public domain through the development of creative technologies and media. F.A.T. Lab created 100 QR codes (freely downloadable lasercut-ready stencils) to provide advice and warnings to modern-day digital nomads. Codes include “vegans beware,” “hidden cameras,” and “those aren’t women.” QR_Hobo_Codes is one in a suite of what F.A.T. calls its “homebrew infoviz graffiti tools for locative and situated information display.”

August 8, 2012

1415

When Theaster Gates – artist and founder of the Rebuild Foundation – led a series of classes asking students from Most Holy Trinity Catholic School and Academy to describe a healthy community, it could have ended there. Instead, an inspired parishioner donated a dilapidated multi-family building that Gates, and an army of volunteers (including students from Washington University’s CityStudioSTL), transformed into an arts center providing the cultural programming lacking in the neighborhood. Volunteers re-clad one wall of the house, known as 1415, in reclaimed hardie board, made a community theater/performance space by replacing a wall with a garage door, and established a community advisory committee to help with programming. The transformed structure now houses arts classes, workshops, and artist residencies.

August 8, 2012

Amphibious Architecture

Though New York is surrounded by rivers, residents have little to no interaction with the water and little understanding of the ecosystem below. The Environmental Health Clinic at New York University and the Living Architecture Lab at Columbia University created Amphibious Architecture to allow a data-driven dialogue between humans, fish and their shared environment. Installed in the East River and the Bronx River, two networks of interactive tubes contain underwater sensors and display lights above. Through a text-message feature, participants can correspond with fish and receive real-time data about water quality in response. Conceived by architect David Benjamin and artist Natalie Jeremijenko, Amphibious Architecture imagines a dynamic, participatory city in which static architecture is replaced by a kinetic and responsive built environment.

August 8, 2012

AirCasting

AirCasting is a platform for recording, visualizing, mapping, and sharing environmental data using smart phone technology. Aimed at enhancing the impact of community voices on building greener cities, users can use their local measurements of sound, temperature, humidity, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen dioxide, and share their data with a worldwide community via the AirCasting CrowdMap with the goal of creating a set of “actionable data.” According to its creators, HabitatMap, a New York nonprofit devoted to environmental health justice, “Much of what happens in our immediate environment passes without note, despite the positive contribution that recording and crowdsourcing these moments may have on our understanding of our health and the health of our communities.”

August 8, 2012

Bartering and Sharing Networks

Sharing cars and bikes has become commonplace, but what about sharing tools, skills, and just about everything else? In recent years there has been an explosion of sharing and bartering networks, allowing people to swap, for example, their power tools for knitting classes or surplus garden vegetables. While primitive economies have historically depended on the smallness and familiarity of one’s village or tribe, the resurgence of interest in capital-free exchange is fueled by websites that help people take advantage of urban density by facilitating their trade with others who might live on the same block (or same building!). OhSoWe, OurGoods, Trade School, and e-flux’s Time/Bank are just a few recent endeavors that help expand people’s access to resources while avoiding more consumption.

August 8, 2012

Air Quality Egg

Air Quality Egg is an open-source initiative that enables citizens to measure environmental conditions where they live. The project, a collaborative effort between designers, scientists, and citizens, grew out of workshops in New York, Amsterdam, and London. From those conversations emerged an online wiki, the Google Group Air Quality Egg, and a community-prototyped Air Quality Egg system which consists of an outdoor sensor and an egg-shaped base station that wirelessly receives air quality data and has a visual display with real-time data updates. An online database continually collects data from all the Air Quality Eggs deployed in the world, and generates alerts, maps, and other creative applications using these measurements.

August 8, 2012

Greenaid Seedbomb Vending Machine

Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, seed bombs can be tossed anonymously into derelict urban sites to green the city. Los Angeles design firm COMMONstudio created the coin- operated Greenaid dispensary to make guerrilla gardening more accessible. Marketing the machines to businesses to rent or to own, the designers have installed more than 150 since 2010, each equipped with a mix of native seeds. The seed bombs are hand-rolled by workers contracted through Chrysalis, an LA nonprofit that helps homeless and low-income residents earn a living wage and work towards self-sufficiency. The vending machines invite people to become casual activists, taking part in the incremental beautification of their environments – using only the loose coins in their pocket.

August 8, 2012

Grassroots Mapping

The Grassroots Mapping project began in the summer of 2010 when a group of activists, educators, and technologists known as the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (PLOTS) began documenting the BP oil spill on the American Gulf Coast using balloon mapping – an accessible and low-cost alternative to satellite imaging. Recognizing the power of “community satellites” to subvert the power dynamics associated with cartography, the project has since expanded to nine environmentally compromised sites across the country. Their website GrassrootsMapping.org includes how-to instructions for balloon and kite mapping as well as other low-cost DIY environmental sensing devices. Awarded a $500,000 grant last year by Knight News, PLOTS is expanding its work to support community action through locally produced environmental and civic data.

August 8, 2012

GOOD Ideas for Cities

GOOD Ideas for Cities taps creative problem-solvers to tackle urban challenges and present the solutions at live events across the country. The project connects creative teams with civic leaders who can help put the ideas into action. The high-energy live events allow for a meaningful dialogue between the creative teams and urban leaders, as well as feedback from the audience. In St. Louis, for example, designers proposed turning neighborhood dividing lines into bridges between communities. In New York, designers suggested improvements to subway wayfinding with to-the- minute GPS route updates and alerts. In 2012, GOOD Ideas for Cities is taking its program to five mid-sized cities and multiple schools across the U.S.

August 8, 2012

Fresh Moves Mobile Market

Fresh Moves Mobile Market is a single-aisle grocery store located in an unlikely venue: a retrofitted Chicago Transit Authority bus, which was purchased from the city for $1. Architecture for Humanity Chicago partnered with local nonprofit Food Desert Action to design the bus, which brings fresh produce to the 500,000 Chicago residents living in neighborhoods that are classified as food deserts. Fresh Moves’ website lists its hourly schedule, and the mobile market not only sells produce but also offers classes on cooking and nutrition. The organizers are documenting the impact of Fresh Moves to support the possibility of scaling the operation up in Chicago or replicating it in other cities.

August 8, 2012

For Squat / Reuben Kincaid Realty

Reuben Kincaid Realty invites people to “Be Your Own Agent!” Describing itself as a “certified Rehousing Consultancy,” the faux real estate website features listings of abandoned or recently foreclosed-upon properties available for squat. A project of the nonprofit Public Media Institute (PMI), the listings are often crowdsourced, with entries mimicking brokers’ enthusiasm (“stunning two-bedroom townhouse, skyline views; owner recently evicted,” or “Perfect location! Abandoned church ready for occupation or weekend parties!”). PMI installs “For Squat” signs on available properties, and encourages people to download the sign and join their campaign to fight for the basic human right to shelter. A foil to the satire is the website’s links to articles and organizations that address the homeless crisis.

August 8, 2012

Faubourg St. Roch Project

Founded by architect Drew Lang, the Faubourg St. Roch Project is dedicated to the full-scale revitalization of the city’s St. Rochelle neighborhood, which suffered extensive damage during Hurricane Katrina but had also endured decades of neglect. Since 2005 Lang has been studying, planning, acquiring permits, and working with the community to enact a plan that involves renovating damaged housing, invigorating public space, and reintroducing commercial and cultural ventures along a nine-block segment of St. Roch Avenue. Lang, who has offices in New York and New Orleans, recently completed thermal retrofits of seven homes and opened a community garden. He wants not only to create a sustainable, affordable neighborhood for residents, but to develop a model of community-based urban renewal for other neighborhoods to follow.

August 8, 2012

Field Guide to Phytoremediation

According to the New York Department of City Planning, more than 6% of the city’s land is vacant, adding up to approximately 11,700 acres of underutilized land. Many of these lots are plagued with contaminated soil as a result of previous constructions and industrial uses. To educate property owners about how they can initiate cost-effective toxic clean up, architect and planner Kaja Kühl created the Field Guide to Phytoremediation, a do- you-it-yourself (DIY) handbook that is available online and as a downloadable pamphlet. She also launched the Field Lab, an experimental garden in the South Bronx where she tests and demonstrates DIY brownfield remediation techniques to citizens.

August 8, 2012

Edible Wall

The Bronx suffers many burdens, including high rates of unemployment, poverty, obesity, and food insecurity. In response, local high school teacher Stephen Ritz came up with the idea of using gardening to engage his troubled students. As the students’ in-class farm flourished, so did their academic performance: Daily attendance jumped from 40 to 93%, while 25,000 pounds of organic fruits and vegetables have gone into school lunches or have been sold to community members. Green Living Technologies developed the mobile growing walls that enable Ritz’s team to grow vertical farms in even the smallest classrooms, or on rooftops, side lots, subway canopies, public buildings. The program has evolved into a successful job-training program, generating paid work for 2,200 students, including contracts with private homeowners.

August 8, 2012

Edible Schoolyard

For WORKac’s Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, “Urban farming became a way of talking about the sustainable city.” This long-time interest led them to chef Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse Foundation, and in 2011, the two teamed up with P.S. 216 in Brooklyn to design the first of Waters’ Edible Schoolyards on the East Coast, an organic garden that is wholly integrated into the school’s curriculum and food program. The design includes a Kitchen Classroom where students can prepare and eat meals together, a greenhouse roof that creates growing space in the winter and retracts in the summer, water reclamation, and composting. For the project’s design coup de grâce, all of the components are interlinked to form an off-grid, self-sustaining system.

August 8, 2012

Eco-Playground

One of the most well-publicized success stories of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans is the series of architect-designed houses built by Brad Pitt’s Make It Right Foundation in the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city’s hardest hit neighborhoods. Less known is the foundation’s nearly three dozen innovative community development projects that fulfill the everyday needs of the reconstructed neighborhood, including shared gardens, a comprehensive stormwater-mitigating landscape plan, a micro farm, and a playground. Eco-Playground, designed by landscape architect Tim Duggan, uses recycled materials as well as state-of- the-art playground equipment including a solar-powered digital component that encourages children to play physically active games. Make It Right’s work in the Lower Ninth Ward is a model of ecological and innovative neighborhood revitalization.

August 8, 2012

Detroit, Demolition, Disneyland

When a collective of Detroit artists calling itself Object Orange started painting some of the city’s 7,000 abandoned and dilapidated buildings bright orange, they meant to bring beauty to decay. When four of the original eleven painted houses were quickly demolished by the city, the group’s endeavor turned to raising awareness about the hazardous conditions associated with blight: low morale, depressed property values, and crime. This ongoing project, dubbed Detroit, Demolition, Disneyland (the latter referring to the paint, from Behr’s Disney Color series) has evolved into a call to action, with the group declaring, “These buildings aren’t scenery. Don’t look through them…Pick up a roller.”

August 8, 2012

Dérive App

While most smart-phone technology is designed to map locations and information more precisely, Dérive is an application for getting lost. Designed by architect Eduardo Cachucho, Dérive deals users a task card detailing an action, such as “follow a couple,” or “find a tree.” Users are dealt a new task card every three minutes, prompting an unplanned journey through the city. Inspired by the Situationist concept of the dérive (or “drift”), which was in part a political gesture against the monotony of everyday life, this interface facilitates an important aspect of the original spirit – the enduring power of subjective experience in an era of information saturation.

August 8, 2012

Depave

When Depave founder Arif Khan tore down his garage in 2005 and replaced it with a grove of fruit trees, he realized the same action could be applied on a much larger scale. Three years later, Depave’s first parking lot transformation was complete: Khan and 147 volunteers transformed an under-utilized asphalt lot into the Fargo Forest Gardens, a community garden. The nonprofit will mobilize workers to remove impervious paving for anyone who asks; past depavings have included school playgrounds, businesses’ parking lots, and residents’ driveways, amounting to 100,000 square feet of asphalt that is no longer contributing to the negative effects of polluted stormwater runoff. Depave also helps in the process of replacing these spaces with native-plant gardens.

August 8, 2012

Day Labor Station

The San Francisco nonprofit Public Architecture (PA) believes designers can play a role in identifying larger social problems as well as in solving them: The 117,000 day laborers in the U.S. gather in parking lots and on street corners in hopes of finding work, leaving them exposed to the elements and, often, the anger of those who oppose immigration. In response, PA developed the Day Labor Station to serve as a meeting place and amenity for laborers. Though it hasn’t been deployed, it launched an advocacy effort around the working conditions of laborers. The ongoing campaign has led to outreach with about a dozen worker networks across the country, and PA hopes it will inspire others to identify problems where social consciousness and design can beneficially intersect.

August 8, 2012

Crown Heights Participatory Urbanism

The remnants of an 1887 shuttle train connecting the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Crown Heights and Coney Island is still in use, but its elevated structure is surrounded by an underused and neglected corridor that divides a diverse and complex neighborhood. Manuel Ávila founded Crown Heights Participatory Urbanism, a community-based planning and design project, to invite residents to re-imagine this passage into a series of public spaces that would unify the neighborhood. Their feedback, collected at community meetings, on local blogs, and in several notebooks strategically placed in local stores, informs designs for five sites along the corridor. With input in hand, Ávila is working with elected officials to obtain the permits and funding to realize these modest but transformative ideas.

August 8, 2012

Come Out & Play Festival

Transforming cities from concrete jungles into jungle gyms, the Come Out & Play Festival reclaims space through free, public street games. Annual weekend-long events in New York and San Francisco provide forums for new types of play and unusual interaction with fellow urbanites. As game designer and festival co-founder Greg Trefry lamented the “loss of a sense that we can play in public space,” he said the festival can also open up places that might otherwise feel regulated. Games range from dodgeball and large-scale Battleship to “psychogeographic experiments,” and largely attract an under-40, media-savvy crowd. In future, Trefry hopes to host games that encourage more spontaneous drop-in participation, and as always, he wants to bring playfulness back to the public realm.

August 8, 2012

City Sensing: Signal Spaces

When residents of a luxury building on New York’s Upper East Side occupied their rooftop in protest of the installation of a cellular base station, it highlighted the concern that many have about the impact of these ubiquitous electromagnetic signals on our health and safety. The network is hidden in plain sight, with deals often struck between cell phone companies and building owners` without occupants’ knowledge. Signal Space maps Manhattan’s mobile antenna infrastructure, with data assembled by citizens and by mobile devices that capture antenna locations and signal strength being used. Creators Michael Chen and Justin Snider are using the information to explore alternative zoning scenarios wherein the signals and density of radiation exposure are evened out between buildings, thus mitigating potential health risks.

August 8, 2012

City Farm

It makes sense that the Resource Center, the venerable Chicago nonprofit that has led the way in innovative recycling, upcycling, and farming techniques for 35 years, would also be a pioneer in urban farming. Their mission to deflect the abundant waste in cities while improving the quality of life of urban dwellers extended naturally to agriculture. Turning neglected fallow land into sustainable farms, the center operates more than 20 productive plots that are financially self-sufficient, employs neighborhood residents, and sells vegetables on site and to local restaurants. The center’s flagship City Farm sits in the middle of a downtown housing project and has played a key role in strengthening its community. City Farm is a proven model that supports the local economy by growing food, jobs, beauty, and change.

August 8, 2012

chainlinkGREEN

International Design Clinic, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to realizing much-needed creative work with communities around the world, conceived of chainlinkGREEN in response to the often lacking community spaces for underfunded schools and community organizations. ChainlinkGREEN is a construction system that uses materials commonly found on abandoned lots, including chainlink fencing, steel pipes, standard 90 degree angles, reclaimed lumber, and rubble, to create a lightweight and easily constructed structure that serves as an outdoor amphitheater/gathering space for the community. It demonstrates that affordable, accessible, inviting spaces may be created within previously overlooked landscapes.

August 8, 2012

Cart Coop

One day Carey Clouse and Zachary Lamb found themselves charged with a brood of baby chickens and nowhere to house them. Architects by training and founders of design studio Crookedworks, the pair developed an inexpensive mobile chicken coop made from a shopping cart and street-scavenged materials. They then disseminated the design among students and urban farmers, hoping, they joked, to instigate a “Cartcoop Revolution.” Crookedworks also developed a downloadable Urban Farming Toolkit, a set of “recipes” on how to deal with urban gardening issues. With these and similar projects, Crookedworks envisions a participatory framework for a city in which design and planning tools can be utilized to improve food justice, economic self-sufficiency, and ecological vitality.

August 8, 2012

Campito

Campito calls attention to historic and contemporary working conditions of rural immigrant workers in the American West. Denver-based artist collective M12 studied the sheepherder’s wagon, or campito, which still resembles its pioneer predecessor, and developed a new design that incorporates solar energy, composting toilets, and portable gardens. But more than just a redesign of a trailer, Campito is a project to raise awareness about everything related to modern-day sheepherding, including contemporary food production, immigration patterns, and workers’ rights. M12 towed a typical campito through the streets of Denver, passing out posters documenting their research. “By suggesting the sheep wagon be redesigned,” explains M12 co-founder Richard Saxton, “we are admitting that the current living and working conditions of sheepherders are unacceptable.”

August 8, 2012

By the City/For the City

The Institute for Urban Design created By the City/For the City to turn the traditional design competition process on its ear by sourcing the sites and situations to be addressed directly from the people of New York City, rather than choosing a site and “parachuting in.” A digital public input site, built on Project for Public Spaces’ Ushahidi-based PlaceMap, asked people to complete the phrase “Wouldn’t it be great if… ” From this, 600 ideas were generated and analyzed, and an open call brought in 150 proposals by designers who proposed responses to the ideas that intrigued them most. The resulting publication, An Atlas of Possibility for the Future of New York, provides a snapshot of possible futures.

August 8, 2012

Bunchy Carter Park for the People

One afternoon in 2009, an official-looking declaration appeared on a construction fence at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. The sign announced the impending construction of a “park for the people” in honor of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, a 1960s activist and Black Panther Party leader. The graphic design was convincing down to its administrative logos, city contact information, and translations (into Korean and Spanish), though it was actually a provocation by a team of grassroots activists who cite the “Situationists, Yes Men, and anarchists everywhere” as their inspiration. Days later the sign was removed, but this provocation raised questions about what people really want and need in their neighborhoods.

August 8, 2012

Bench Press

In recent decades, benches started disappearing from bus stops as a way for cities to discourage homeless or loiterers. BroLab, a collaborative of artists and sculptors, created BenchPress, a modular system of temporary benches for bus stops along major bus routes between Brooklyn and Queens. While the two neighborhoods foster vibrant artistic communities, between them lies a nondescript, alienating landscape with few street amenities. BroLab’s modular benches provided the missing comfort of seating for commuters for one day in October 2011 (as part of events organized by the Congress of Collectives at Flux Factory in Queens). Between 4:00 am and 9:00 pm, they assembled, dissembled, and relocated benches that appeared at each of the route’s 80 stops.

August 8, 2012

Bat Cloud

Bats are a critical part of urban ecosystems, yet many city-dwellers see them as pests to be chased away. Joyce Hwang created Bat Cloud to combat their negative perception by giving them greater visibility, emphasizing the important role they play in controlling populations of insects such as mosquitoes. This cloudlike canopy of hanging vessels is designed to provide a habitat for bats and other urban wildlife that have been increasingly driven to cities due to habitat loss and climate change. It is currently installed at the in Tifft Nature Center, a preserve that was created on a landfill site in an industrial part of Buffalo, New York.

August 8, 2012

Building Projections

Building projections as an art form gained traction in the late 1970s with artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko and Jenny Holzer creating seminal works that brought the idea of public art to a massive urban scale. New technology has reinvigorated the potential of enlivening a public space by projecting moving images onto static buildings. For example, a drab wall is electrified by a dazzling light display triggered by passing car traffic, or passersby’s text messages replace a classical façade’s carved inscription with citizen proclamations. Architects have been experimenting with programmable façades for years, and dozens of cities worldwide host Nuit Blanches, all-night festivals featuring a range of illuminating public interventions. (Pictured: Marcos Zotes’ CCTV/Creative Control, from New York’s 2011 Nuit Blanche.)

August 8, 2012

Art in Odd Places

Drawing on sources as diverse as Dadaism, Situationism, Jane Jacobs’ urban activism and Abbie Hoffman’s pranksterism, Ed Woodham’s Art in Odd Places (AiOP) is a self-sustaining, collaborative project that aims to expand the conventions of communication in the public realm. Active in New York City since 2005, AiOP is Woodham’s response to a sense of diminishing public space and contracting civil liberties within those spaces. AiOP works to locate the cracks in public space policies, and then co-opts that space for a month of visual and performing arts interventions each year. For AiOP, public space is social space, and artworks can be actively integrated into the exchanges that take place in this realm to inspire the popular imagination.

August 8, 2012

Brooklyn Night Bazaar

Motivated by the desire to create a dignified platform that elevates the flea market to the quality of its artisans, the Brooklyn Night Bazaar provides a curated environment for the best local art, design, music and food. This mobile mega- pop-up merges crafts and concerts, art and social causes, design and handmade delights while providing homegrown talent and budding entrepreneurs an inexpensive place to test their creations. Inspired by the night markets of Asia, the roving weekend-night event has taken place on a stalled development site, an industrial waterfront lot, and an empty 40,000-square-foot warehouse – the latter featuring temporary furniture designed by architect Julient De Smedt. Funds raised on Kickstarter helped finance some of the basic set-up costs.

August 8, 2012

BK Farmyards

BK Farmyards is a large decentralized urban farming network based in Brooklyn. Since its founding, the coalition of experienced urban farmers – working under the tag line, “You have the land. We grow the produce” has been flooded with requests from people with spare land, ranging from private small-lot owners to a public school principal with a full free acre to an old municipal airport. Today, BK manages several acres of land and brings healthy food directly to residents of Central Brooklyn, where many lack affordable, fresh food options and suffer from health issues related to high poverty rates. BK offers a subscription service for eggs, flowers, and vegetables, as well as adult farm training and a youth program, creating employment opportunities for locals.

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