URBAN v.12 is.1 - Utopia by Columbia GSAPP

Urban Magazine Produced by the Graduate Students of Columbia Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Urban Planning Program Winter 2008 Volume 12 Issue 1

Urban\Volume 12\Issue 1\Utopia Letter from the Editors

Not So Fast

Abuja, ‘Centre of Unity’?

The Utopias of Istanbul

My Utopian Experience in Tokyo

What Goes Around, Comes Around

By Victoria Okoye By Matt Schwartz

By Inbar Kishoni

By Stefanie Garry

By Patrick Streeter

Columbiutopia\Autumn

Paved Paradise

Dear Mr. President

Reclaimed Façades: São Paulo

Post Apocalypse

Green Affordable Housing

The Dystopia of Free Trade

Virtual Utopia and the (Un)Real

Columbiutopia\Winter

First-Year Planners

Housing is a Social Matter

Second-Year Planners

Musicians’ Village

Ph.D. Candidates

Columbiutopia\Spring

Transit-Oriented Disinvestment

The World That Could Be

New York, Be True

Public Transportation

Parting Image

By Stephanie Lim By John Dulac

By Dory Kornfeld

By Youngji Bae

By Stephanie Lim By Allison Mayer

By Stefanie Garry

By Stephanie Lim By Cuz

By Itir B. Sonuparlak

By Kasey LaFlam

By Thomas Bassett

By Sadamitsu Sakoguchi By Danil Nagy

By Brendan Shera

By Andrea Marpillero-Colomina By James Cocks

Urban\Editors Kevin Leichner\Layout Stephanie Lim\Theme Andrea Marpillero-Colomina\ Submissions

Urban\Contact

URBAN Magazine The Graduate Students of the Urban Planning Program Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Columbia University Avery Hall, 1172 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 urban.magazine@gmail.com

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it. Nadine Gordimer

Letter from the Editors Planners know that there is no silver bullet to solving the world’s problems. We attack things from all angles, from transportation to labor economics; we assume many guises, from politicians to visionaries, all in the hope that what we do today can make a difference tomorrow. In the meantime, we hope. Every day we are faced with shortfalls of resources, corruption, the negative effects of capitalism, and the consequences of previous decades of planning—or lack of planning—gone awry. But we live in exciting times. The president-elect has taken long overdue interest in planning issues, and his stances on urban renewal and smart growth show great promise. Accelerating advances in technology have the potential to aid us in managing the earth’s finite resources and to help build a global community with access to an expanding knowledge commons. Now is a time for progress and change, but also a time to think about what our visions of utopia actually entail. More and more, we are daring to put our dreams of utopia into action. Utopia, by many standards, is either unachievable, or so subjective that it is not worth discussing. But can utopia be something else, something fleeting? Is it not a permanent state, but a state of mind? Can you find utopia while crushed in a subway car, while watching your favorite dive bar be displaced by a luxury condo, or by taking part in the community effort to rebuild a decimated city around the life and lore that never died? One thing is sure: utopia is not without controversy. And maybe this is the surest sign that it exists. Utopia, then, is not a state of mind, but the states of all of our minds, working together, to ensure that we can construct our environments in such a way that we can live the way we were meant to. With this inspired collection of utopian visions and conflicts, we hope to keep the conversation going about our brief brushes with utopia and our often naïve desires to make them less ephemeral. So keep talking about utopia. It’s worth it. Your humble editors,

Stephanie, Andrea and Kevin

With many thanks to Sophia Lalani, Alison Mayer and Victoria Okoye for their invaluable assistance 1

Abuja, ‘Centre of Unity’? By Victoria Okoye Abuja, Nigeria’s relatively new federal capital, designated in 1991, defies the descriptions and stereotypes traditionally associated with the country’s cities. Places like Lagos and Port Harcourt are often described as inefficient, poorly maintained, and overall, chaotic. These cities’ notorious “go slows” (a colloquial reference to the traffic jams during peak travel hours), street hawkers, ubiquitous motorcycle taxis, irregular power and water supplies, outdated power grids, disparity between high- and low-income housing, and substandard squatter settlements in part result from the underinvestment in urban utilities and infrastructure as well as city residents’ piecemeal accommodations for unplanned growth. At first sight, Abuja presents a spectacular picture of urban development in Nigeria and a stark contrast to the country’s more chaotic cities. Roads are often wide, with multiple lanes for traffic, and are regularly maintained. Electricity supply to residences, office buildings, and commercial centers is relatively regular. New buildings seem to crop up almost daily. In addition, many of the city’s buildings and expensive residences have been built to international standards. Unique structures such as the National Mosque, with its gilded dome and tall pillars, and the Nigerian Central Bank Headquarters, a building endowed with black-tinted glass and cement, can be seen from all over the city. Multistar hotels like the Abuja Sheraton, the TransCorp Hilton, and the Nicon Luxury Hotel serve as important reference points for orienting oneself in the city. The numerous green areas and parks, most notably the largest – Millennium Park – was designed by acclaimed Italian architect Manfredi Nicolleti.1 Abuja City View, © 2008, Victoria Okoye

My Utopian Experience in Tokyo, Japan By Matt Schwartz This past summer I spent a few weeks backpacking through many of Japan’s greatest cities and villages. Naturally, this called for a stop in Tokyo. Being a New Yorker, I have seen the bright lights of Times Square, have had my fair share of being in crowded subways, and fought my way around people who walk insanely slow on the sidewalk (one of my pet peeves in life). However, I never imagined I would be in a city that took New York City to the next level. The rush hour, for example, felt like Times Square but with ten times more people. The trains were so packed that the City of Tokyo has “people-pushers” whose sole job is to push people into the train cars so that the trains leave exactly on time. Can you imagine this for the 1 train at 42nd Street?

The holiest shrine in all of Tokyo is Meiji Jingu Shrine. It served as a repository for Emperor Meiji who sent young men abroad to learn about Western culture. If you want to escape large crowds and want to experience nature as well as peace and quiet, this is the place to go. In order to get to the Meiji Jingu Shrine, you have to walk along on a gravel path about the width of a four-lane road through a bird-chirping forest in Yoyogi Park (133 acres). Meiji Jingu Shrine is enclosed within the park and is surrounded by an abundance of greenery. In order to show respect for the Meiji Jingu Shrine, you have to wash your hands, rinse your mouth out of a stone basin with water, and then approach the shrine. You then bow twice, clap your hands twice, say a prayer, and then bow once again. After I paid my respects to the shrine, I walked around the stone plaza and took a seat on a bench. In the distance, I saw a building that looked eerily similar to the Empire State Building.

The entire © 2008, Matt Schwartz city is reminiscent of New York’s Times Square, with an exorbitant amount of bright lights, except that Tokyo also has an extreme infatuation with cartoons. Even the police station signs are in cartoons!

However, to be fair, Tokyo is not just bright lights and cartoons. One of the most beautiful and “utopian” aspects of Tokyo and many other Japanese cities is the plethora of shrines and temples at your disposal.

At that moment, I had a different impression of Tokyo. Although Tokyo is very modernized, it has struck a nice balance by respecting and preserving the old with the new. I felt at peace, sitting and watching the beautiful architecture of the shrine along with the skyscrapers in the background. I would like to think that Emperor Meiji would also agree with my assessment. This was definitely one of my favorite “utopian” experiences in Japan.

Dear Mr. President, My Honest Regard By John Dulac To Our Presidential Candidates, President Elect, Like generations before us, we stand today at a critical moment in the history of America. The social, political, and economic tensions that loom despairingly over our heads are colossal tasks that this nation indisputably will be forced to address if we are to transition smoothly and continue to lead the world into the 21st century. Regrettably, this hardly scratches the surface when looking at the challenges that greet us in the second millennium: from environment, energy, trade, food, hunger, disease and an internationally defective financial market, this new, changing world now supercedes the breadth of the human scale â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there are virtually no issues that do not affect the local, national and international dimensions. As the world continues to change rapidly, not only should we not respond slowly but we will not have the opportunity to act slowly in measure. Unlike generations before us who often were able to mend or in part ameliorate the issues of their day by riding on the successes of their predecessors, the 21st-century American and global forums instead ÂŠ 2008, Chris Ferguson have inherited the problems of our 20th-century forefathers and thus are radically different: metaphorically, we have inherited our parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Henry Fords and have driven them well past 100,000, 200,000 and even 1,000,000 miles. We must now build a vehicle that will carry us through the next century, and it is not in the form of a new Model T. 10

While speaking of Fords, I strongly encourage you, President Elect Obama, and Congress to pass legislation that will assist our failing auto industry at this time; and while I indeed agree with critics that a bailout of the major motor companies is another burden on tax-payers, I earnestly do believe this exception is necessary for our economy and, more importantly, is the responsibility of our nation for having consciously sold our national interest to foreign competitors. In fact, the question today is not why we allowed legislation regarding automobile efficiency and emission standards to remain lower than our major foreign competitors, nor is it why our major automotive companies fell behind and failed to meet our future transportation and energy interests – these are the unintended consequences of the free market economics we have promoted for the past 30 years: we consciously let them sell inefficient cars, at a profit, and they followed the simple rules of the free market system. The real question therefore is: do we want our automobile industry to fail and be replaced by foreign autobody makers; and I believe every American’s response is a solid NO.

That said, the automotive bailout shouldn’t be without condition. If our goal is to produce a stable, profitable, energy efficient fleet of automobiles, then we should scrap the production of the cars we know aren’t meeting the desired standards. Why should American taxpayers pay to maintain a failed system during a transition period? I rather prefer that the U.S. government create new standards and expectations – coupled with a progressive tax-credit benefit system – and meanwhile pay for the three major auto manufacturers to shut down, restructure, and start selling the same energy efficient cars many of them already produce overseas.

The issue of our auto industry is emblematic of the issues stemming from nearly all aspects of 20th-century American life. The solution to the problems faced by Americans will not be simple, nor will it be easy, and therefore, one of the first things you should do as President is to address America candidly and with sincerity. Small changes and action on local scales are feasible with partial participation. However, great changes, particularly those that will put in question and alter certain ways of life that have become established norms throughout the last century, require great leadership. They will require every American to take action and set an example. And, we are capable – the strength and drive of the American people always has been the backbone of this country, and after years of neglect, it is time to channel that power once again. 12

Your next step as President should be to address the major challenges that face our country and to analyze them from both a macro- and micro-perspective. I propose that you employ our industries’ greatest minds, including those in academia, to create working task forces and roundtable discussions with real objectives. I suggest this for two important reasons: first, if we are to accomplish great things then we must work as a unit – just as this nation did to overcome the Depression and to defeat the German and Japanese empires in 1945, and this means that a government-driven response or the expectation that the free market will regulate itself is unsatisfactory and insufficient. Second, to harness the ingenuity and the willpower of those who have the capacity and desire to create great solutions, it will be necessary to create a working group through open dialogue and, perhaps more importantly, through a clear communication by your administration that you want to work with those experts to create change and to empower their efforts. Working with this country’s leaders to create change will not come at a small cost, and for this reason alone, one of the great goals of the next US Presidency must be to work with politicians and independent experts to revalue and recreate our nation’s fiscal budget. Washington cannot ask of the American people what it is not willing to give of itself, and 20th-century status-quo budget operations will not support a 21st-century agenda.

We want our Utopia now. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

One major start will be to address the $650 billion defense budget (not including another $25 billion to develop and maintain nuclear warheads and the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). I suggest a radical evaluation of defense spending: if school departments across the country are consistently asked to tighten their belts and local, state and national governments are forced to choose which programs to fund, then why should our nation’s armed services, which constitute nearly 20 percent of our national budget, be exempt from that expectation? Moreover, because the future successes of this country depend on creating new solutions to this new century’s needs, is it not in our best interest that we reevaluate our defense budget so that 20 percent of our national finances will be used as effectively and efficiently as possible? Regarding the issue of energy, I firmly believe that the 21st century is in need of another great discovery that will fuel us in the same way, if not in a better way, as the petroleum we discovered 150 years ago did throughout the 20th century. Yet, unlike petroleum and fossil fuels, modern energy production will not be able to be purchased for $4 a gallon and it will require government involvement because nickel-and-dime solutions such as wind and solar power – although in quantity they may produce impressive results – are presently technologically 13

incapable of serving the base-load of this country (and equally the rest of the world). Government funding and cooperation are necessary to encourage the development and creation of new base-load sources, whether they are to be improved 20th-century technologies such as nuclear power or newly created technologies such as nuclear fusion, which, by the way, has an estimated $12 billion price tag – half of the 2009 budget for nuclear arms creation and maintenance. The next presidency also will have to address the urban question. For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s populations live in urbanized areas, and that is also true of the United States, where more than 80 percent of the population lives in urban centers. Yet, strikingly absent from a federal agenda are policies and priorities to manage, maintain, and promote the present and future prosperity of our urban centers. There is a lack of funding for urban programs, a failure of the federal government to promote better inner- and intra-city transportation, and a 50-year development schema that has created an unsustainable suburban expansion and a weakening urban core. These and other issues – such as public housing, preservation, disaster planning and the public-private interface – all must be addressed, particularly as they impact © 2008, Chris Ferguson

more than three-quarters of this country in some way, and especially because nearly every challenge facing 21st-century America manifests itself in the urban arena. So President Elect Obama, in addition to recharging the American frontier, you are faced with an increasing number of changing social, political, economic, and environmental issues, not to mention a changing world and a charged international arena. The issues that I have brought up here are certainly important, if not crucial, but are not all-inclusive or wholly comprehensive. Yet, they touch on the significance of the contemporary American state of affairs, and will play a vital role as the United States and the world experience the paradigm of 21st century. You therefore will play as much the role of a policy maker and leader as you should be an example of and participant in the reshaping of America. In closing, I offer you my honest regard and hope that you will take of it the spirit of the great American promise: our ability to work together, to change for the better, and to lead this world. Remember in your service that Americans are ready for change. We may not be readily willing to take on that change, but we want it. We want better schools and better education for our children. We want better transportation and more fuelefficient cars, and we want cheaper, more efficient ways to cool and heat our homes. We need better cities and better public spaces, and we deserve better application of our tax dollars. Despite the appearance of current practices and 20thcentury lifestyles, we support environmental design and want to reduce our carbon footprint, and we want better health care, better care for the elderly, better protection for consumers, and better regulation of our financial markets. Above all, what we want and need is a President who is willing to address these issues, who seek solutions and hold us to them, who understands that change is not easy but that change is important and, finally, who encourages change through both moral support and leadership, as well as the creation of government partnerships and federal legislation to reimagine and redevelop the 21st-century American frontier. Sincerely,

Post Apocalypse. By Dory Kornfeld

I had to mail my absentee ballot to Canada, and it needed to get there fast, so I made the trip across the street for my first visit to the post office in my neighborhood.

When I entered the big, old, brick building across the street from my apartment, I was met with empty racks (ones that that should have been filled with postcards, envelopes and packing tape), a long line of agitated folks, and Plexiglas barriers shielding unhappy-looking USPS employees from surly customers. The 3-person line took 25 minutes to get through, and I could barely hear the clerk through the scratched-up barrier. Mailing express to Canada is unnecessarily complicated and the questions on the required forms do not make any sense. (How would you assess the dollar value of a ballot?) When I was done, I left the building $30 poorer (small price to pay for democracy, though) and grumpier than ever, wondering why I had ever found such charm in the postal service.

I really like the mail—I send letters and postcards to my friends and love being surprised by the beautiful handwritten things I get in return. I get excited when there are new stamps for each season. I love that, in America, mail gets delivered six days a week. By extension, I love the post office. I once took a tour of Vancouver’s main branch, oohing and aahing at all the sorting machines and cubby-holes, the rubber stamps and conveyor belts, and the hundreds or thousands of uniformed postal workers facilitating the exchange of objects from one part of the world to another. Having seen the backstage of the mail system, I appreciate even more the small theatre that gets played out when you go to buy stamps and see your neighbours sending their boxes and envelopes and oddly taped-up packages off to somewhere else. And so when I moved to New York, to a new neighborhood in a new city, I was excited about my first visit to the post office. I was also pleased about being able to participate in the Canadian elections from afar, and having this expression of democracy be the reason for my first visit to my neighborhood post office felt right. I would take another step towards really settling into my new home by sending off my ballot at the Williamsburg post office. 16

The reviews on Yelp.com (the “online urban city guide” where people review things in their neighborhoods) verify that I’m not alone in my experience. Eleven reviews lambast the Williamsburg Post Office for everything from the broken stamp machine and long lines, to Christmas cards being delivered with slit envelopes and missing cheques.

The post office, in its ideal state, is the utopian idea of a community spot. Every neighborhood needs one, and everyone needs its services. The other folks in line with you are the people who live in your 17

neighborhood. We should relish amenities like these as places where we can watch other humans do their mundane and necessary business of existing, and recognize the sameness between all of us, even if that means appreciating the difference between mailing an absentee ballot and picking up a crate the size of a refrigerator that sounds like it might be filled with snakes and baby chickens. This may seem like nostalgia for a life in the country that I never had, but it doesn’t have to be. In busy cities like New York, shouldn’t we be able to enjoy our ten minutes in line at the post office to chat with someone who might live in the next building over, finding out what’s going on in the neighborhood? Instead, the post office only seems to unite the neighborhood online, through the collaborative hate-on being played out at Yelp.com. So what’s a stamp-loving girl to do? One Yelp reviewer said she rented a P.O. Box on the Lower East Side because it’s faster to take the L into Manhattan than it is to wait in line in her own neighborhood, but that’s hardly a lasting solution. I have dreams of throwing a snail-mail lovein: a tea-and cookies letter-writing party in the dreary hall of the Williamsburg Post Office. We would play music (the Postal Every daring attempt Service, maybe?) and write notes of appreciation to all the letter carriers and postal clerks. We would have a stamp-design contest to make a great where children would draw pictures of their favourite parts of change in existing the neighborhood. We would take down the Plexiglas. We would conditions, every repair the stamp machine. Hey, if The Laundromat Project (www. lofty vision of new laundromatproject.org) can succeed in turning those fluorescentpossibilities for the lit rooms’ coin-ops into community art centers by making and human race, has been displaying art, and holding classes and workshops in Laundromats, labeled Utopian. why can’t we do the same for the miserable post offices of this town?

Emma Goldman

But for now, I’m not going to be able to avoid the post office. And rather than bike up to Greenpoint or down to Park Slope where services might be better, I will go into my local branch, wait patiently, and smile nicely. I will hold in my heart the words of the now-tragic writer David Foster Wallace, who said in a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005 that “if you really learn how to pay attention, then...it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred.” Yes: sacred. Even if the wait is long and fights break out, the post office is still a sort of temple. The congregants are your neighbors and their letters are prayers. Stamps are blessings and the postmarks say “amen.” 18

The Dystopia of Free Trade By Youngji Bae Since May 2008, thousands of candles have been lighting up the nights of Seoul almost every week. What started as a vigil of a few hundred people who opposed the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the United States and Korea, the “Candlelight Festival” quickly grew into a major demonstration, amassing more than 100,000 people during some holiday weekends. The very first candlelight protest began soon after South Korean president Myung-bak Lee signed the FTA, which specified resumption of American beef imports, and lifted protections for Korean rice farmers. The news immediately elicited flamed responses among the public. Allowing the import of American beef, despite the threat of mad cow disease, was deemed a sellout of public health for the sake of diplomacy. The unsubstantiated fear of mad cow disease hit the breaking point when Korea’s national TV station, MBC, aired a documentary that questioned the safety of American beef and raised concern over the disease. While MBC later made formal apologies for making hasty connections, fear of the unknown disease did not diminish but spread through Internet communities at the speed of light; middle school and high school students, worried parents, and infuriated citizens flew out into the street with candles in their hands to demand the re-negotiation of the trade pact. Facing the growing parades of candlelight protests, President Lee attempted to persuade Koreans that people of lesser income could now afford to eat beef for a cheaper price. Image courtesy of www.oregonlive.com/ index.ssf/agriculture

The comment led to an even greater outcry at the implication that the less privileged be obliged to bear more public health risk. The series of such incompetent government responses ignited citizens who were already frustrated with his disregard for democracy, authoritative leadership, and neo-liberal policies. Little by little, the candlelight protests started to take a different turn; the protest was not about beef anymore. Even though renegotiation of FTA seemed unlikely, more and more people joined the protests to show their dissatisfaction of—and to—President Lee’s government. In the course of the protest, the assemblage of diverse civic groups expressed disagreement and urged for social change in their own unique ways. The parade maintained a sense of festivity, as citizens held humorous, satirical banners, making reference to their hobbies or occupations. For instance, a group of mothers who met through cooking websites marched with babies in strollers. The middle school girls held their boy band fanclub flags, as

they did not want to lose their favorite idols to mad cow disease. Movie afficionados dressed up as Guy Fawkes and set off fireworks as was done in “V for Vendetta,” proclaiming their disgust of authoritative government. Different religious groups protested together as well; priests, monks and ministers conducted their own rituals on different days, respecting one another. A great number of progressive political groups, including advocacy groups for the environment, informal workers, feminists, sexual minorities, joined the parade of candle lights. Online newspapers wrote on candle lights when the major newspapers ignored the event for weeks. One magazine even set up a temporary headquarters on the street, and thousands of bloggers posted minute-byminute reports. While the country they live in is far from utopia, the Korean voluntary, multi-lateral collective action was rather utopian. The candle lights were a discordant, chaotic but peaceful collage of the city. As the protests continue, the fierce debate on the nature of the candle light protests and the next course of action go on both in physical space and cyberspace. However, even when people have different reasons for participating in the protest and voice diverging concerns, citizens march together for better communication to bring about social changes based on consensus. Thus, the anti-FTA candle lights have become a much greater social phenomenon, in which disparate groups work together to express their civil disobedience. The sheer presence of people manifests the demand for better governance with more transparent and participatory decision-making processes, instead of quick, growth-oriented, top-down policies. However, the Korean government’s reaction to the protest was both incompetent and inept. While the candle light protests were loosely orchestrated through spontaneous, parallel online networks, President Lee continuously attempted to chase down non-existent leaders who were spreading propaganda, classifying them as North Korean spies. His misunderstanding of the nature of the protest became apparent when the police set up a temporary wall of containers on the way toward the presidential residence — the wide public street of Kwanghwa Gate was blocked off in front of the citizens demanding effective communication and participation. As the protest got stronger during the summer months of July and August, the Korean police started to hit, arrest and shoot water canons at non-violent citizens. As a result of the aggressive police raid, the candle light protest eventually ceased in the city center in September and has since dispersed to safer places. We all have already been disenchanted by democracy and the participatory process. However, in this postmodern world, more than 100,000 Koreans still ran out into the street, marching for ideal, democratic process. How would these utopian protests open the communication channel between various political social entities of Korea? While nothing has changed in President Lee’s leadership and every election breaks record-low voting rates — the ongoing candlelight protests in Seoul guarantee nothing but the willingness of the public to face the challenges of creating a utopia. Image courtesy of https://www.chinapost.com.tw/ asia/korea/2008/05/30/158731/South-Korea.htm

Housing Is A Social Matter By Alison Mayer Through his coke-bottle glasses, Richard Buckminster Fuller not only imagined an earth where a “sustainable standard of living for all humanity” (Fuller, 1983: Foreword) could be provided, he saw it. What he lacked in eyesight, having been born cross-eyed, with only the ability to see large shapes and outlines until the age of four, Fuller made up for in vision. He was indeed a visionary. Fuller devoted all of his multidisciplinary knowledge and skills in science, technology, architecture, and engineering to improving the way the world manages its material and human resources (Design Museum, 2006). From Dymaxion homes, bathrooms, and cars to megastructures and geodesic-dome-enclosed cities, the mantra “more for less” informed and guided his prolific work (ibid). In looking more closely at Fuller’s megastructures and habitation designs, we can understand exactly how he intended to house the world’s population in low-cost, lightweight, environmental, efficient, transportable, and generally mass-producible dwelling structures. As a visionary, many of Buckminster Fuller’s housing ideas fall outside of the norm. That they were proposed more than 60 years ago is even more extraordinary. © Buckminster Fuller Institute

In one project, entitled Cloud Nine, large geodesic, or “transegrity” spheres housing thousands per capsule, were intended to float above the earth’s physical surface using trapped solar energy, like a city-scaled hot air balloon (Baldwin, 1996: 190). In a similar fashion, Fuller also imagined sub-cities, whereby a collection of geodesic spheres could be anchored in the ocean well below the effects of wave action. Sub-cities would ostensibly be unaffected by weather or season (Baldwin, 1996: 186). What these two projects had in common was that they were fundamentally linked to the “more for less” precept. In employing the geodesic sphere on this scale, he was able to maximize the efficacy of the geodesic structure: the larger it grows the stronger it becomes. Fuller was preoccupied with the expense of inflated land prices and viewed it as a hindrance to affordable housing. His housing designs, therefore, minimized land coverage or avoided it all together. 22

Other housing projects designed by Fuller, while appropriately unconventional and quirky, may afford us the opportunity as planners to be inspired by super creative ideas. The 4D House, which became the concept upon which larger projects would be built, was a hexagonal dwelling-unit suspended by steel cables from a central column. The house was divided into four triangular rooms and all utilities, including the bathrooms, hung from the central mast, which contained the structure’s power unit. While individually it did not constitute a megastructure, it did fit into the larger housing and employment scheme Fuller called the World Livingry Service Industry. Mass-produced 4D houses could be prefabricated, shipped in pieces, assembled, and eventually stacked. Every lease for a 4D house would include waste removal, upgrades and servicing. As with cars, 4D houses could be easily replaced, transported, or upgraded, and there would even be a market for used units. Rather than rejecting Fordism and mass-production, like the Arts and Crafts Movement, Fuller integrated it whole-heartedly into his ideas for the “accommodation of all humanity” (Fuller, 1983: Foreword). What began as the 4D House (subsequently dubbed the Dymaxion House), through a simple process of vertical reiteration, evolved into the stackable-unit apartment building, known as the 4D Tower. The fourth dimension being what Fuller identified as time, or rather the consequence for © Buckminster Fuller Institute humanity over time if only personal gain is paramount. He envisaged the Tower as being lightweight, prefabricated and lowcost. Proposed in 1928, the 4D Tower was to be delivered by “airship” to any appropriate location and able to generate its own light and heat. It was among the houses Fuller designed and defined as “Lightful,” in that it was lightweight and filled with natural light (Design Museum, 2006). 24

Realizing that smaller-scale projects may not be affordable for all, however, Fuller moved into the realm of megastructures. Closely related to the sub-city concept was Fuller’s plan for Triton City. It was, in essence, a single-building floating metropolis. Triton City required no land, earthmoving, landscaping or roads. Without the burden of inflated urban land values, Triton City could price rents at just above poverty level, yet provide housing of high quality (Baldwin, 1996: 186). As Fuller stated in his book, Grunch* of Giants, “… money-making was never my goal. I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive” (1983: Foreword). While Fuller may be criticized for designing housing rather than houses, or for prioritizing mass-production over individual preference, he was motivated by a perception articulated by former student J. Baldwin: “House is architecture. Housing is a social matter.” It is not the exact form of Fuller’s designs that should matter to us, but rather the creativity involved in conceptualizing radical ways to provide shelter. It is upon us as planners to resurrect Fuller’s innovation in visioning a “sustainable standard of living for all humanity” (Baldwin, 1996: 206). © Buckminster Fuller Institute

References: Baldwin, J., Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas Today, New York: John Wiley, 1996 Design Museum, “R. Buckminster Fuller Inventor, Designer, Architect, Theorist (1895-1983),” London: Design Museum, 2006 Date Accessed 10 October 2008, http://www.designmuseum.org/design/r-buckminster-fuller Fuller, Richard Buckminster, Grunch* of Giants, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983

Way down yonder in New Orleans In the land of the dreamy scenes There’s a Garden of Eden... You know what I mean? Louis Armstrong “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans”

Musicians’ Village By Stefanie Garry In the three years since the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, much talk has focused on the need to rebuild the city in creative, progressive, and innovative ways. Amidst great physical, cultural, and economic devastation, New Orleans has been presented with a medium for reconstruction and resilience. In a critical moment of destruction the city has the opportunity for a creative rebirth. The many urban planning problems that plagued the city through its history — racial divide, spatial exclusion, uneven economic development, and political corruption — were no secret to residents or government officials alike. Safe, affordable, and stable housing had always been a problem for many in New Orleans, especially for low-income members of the creative arts community. These purveyors of jazz, funk, blues, soul, and good, oldfashioned brass bands have provided the cultural soundtrack of New Orleans for generations. Over the years they developed a unique, creative subculture, at once weird and wonderful and, as always, only in New Orleans. After the storm, many displaced musicians, performers, and artists were left without jobs, apartments, or a sense of what the future would hold. Would that mean a return to the city? Shortly following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, two of New Orleans’ native sons, Harry Connick Jr. and Branford Marsalis, envisioned the creation of a new home for music and its creators. With a homespun grounding in history and culture, and an eye toward the possibilities of what could be, these two dreamed up the Musicians’ Village as an affordable community for musicians and their families. 26

Today, the NOLA Musicians’ Village covers more than eight acres of land in the city’s now infamous 9th Ward. Home to 72 single-family homes designed in the classic Southern shotgun style, the Musicians’ Village is as close to a utopian village as one might be able to get in a city that is all too versed in the stark realities of urban struggle. Brightly colored porches and wide, friendly sidewalks provide a common space for community interaction. A partnership with the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity has given financial feasibility to the project by allowing for the creation of zero-interest financing. Low-income artists and their families have thus been provided with the opportunity to become homeowners, many of them for the first time. But the Musicians’ Village is more than a residential neighborhood; it is better classified as an artists’ community, conceived and designed from the utopian ideals of a complete and equitable neighborhood with a common social identity. The Musicians’ Village is also a cultural incubator and a site for the living preservation of the city’s unique and organic musical heritage. A central feature of the development is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, which features an interactive classroom and performance space for musical and performing arts. The Musicians’ Village stands at the vanguard of an urban rebuilding process that has not only literally repaired the foundational cracks in New Orleans’ housing infrastructure, but also given long-term residents the ability to patch some of the many cultural and social divides in the city. This project stands as a successful example of creativity in the planning and rebuilding of a post-Katrina New Orleans. At once innovative and practical, the Musicians’ Village meets the immediate needs of a critical population while advancing the city’s cultural fabric for generations yet to come.

References: New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity. http://www.habitatnola.org/projects/musicians_ village.php New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village. http://www. nolamusiciansvillage.com Fensterstock, Alison. It Takes a Musicians Village. April 25.2006 http://www.bestofneworleans. com/dispatch/2006-04-25/ news_feat.php

The World That Could Be By Cuz In a campaign ad, Barack Obama declared, “The world as it is is not what it could be.” If this is to be anything more than a tautological statement, it implies that the hope for change depends upon a conception of what the world could be. And such conceptions grow from explicit or implicit utopian ideals. So why does utopian thought have such a bad reputation? Despite the fact that much of urban planning finds its roots in utopian thought (Benevolo 1967), today the word ‘utopia’ tends to evoke images of either Jetsons and Futurama-like spaceship highways and instant gourmet meals or hopelessly naive hippies growing their own lentils and getting groovy with the Grateful Dead. But more perspicacious thinkers are also skeptical, as illustrated by emergence of the debate between the Right to the City thinkers and the Just City thinkers in the forthcoming Searching for the Just City (Routledge 2009). This skepticism, I suggest, is misplaced. Utopian thought in all its forms is a vital tool for developing beyond the status quo.

Underlying both sides’ critique of utopian thought is a concern with the implementation of utopian ideas rather than with the visions themselves. As Susan Fainstein summarizes in her chapter, utopian thought does not “offer a strategy for transition within given historical circumstances‚” a sentiment echoed by Peter Marcuse in an early draft of his contribution. David Harvey, in his piece, elaborates this position by recapitulating his argument from Spaces of Hope (2000), where he categorizes utopias into utopias of spatial form and utopias of social process and then explains their deficiencies. 28

Utopias of spatial form are probably the most familiar. These utopias, like Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden City, elaborate a community’s spatial organization to reflect an ideal set of social relations. Certain areas are designated for certain functions or groups, and the spatial relation of streets and buildings are often specified to provide for the physical and mental wellbeing of residents. For example, Le Corbusier’s influential design for “A Contemporary City” (1929) specifies densities, heights, and locations for commercial skyscraper districts and residential areas. The problem with such utopias, Harvey claims, is that their efforts to fix social relations in space is undermined by the compromises necessary to construct that space.

Utopias of social process, on the other hand, have the opposite problem. These utopias propose social processes that will produce perfect societies. The Habermasian ideal speech situation touted by communicative planners, in which the force of rational argument rather than self-interest produces the best planning outcomes, is one such example. The problem with utopias of social process is that the introduction of abstractions into existing socio-spatial organization perverts and undermines the ideals. For example, the interests of those in power made a mockery of public participation on both the planning for the WTC site and the development of the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. Similarly, the inevitability of imperfect information leads to a now too familiar distortion of the implementation of free market fundamentalism.

So what’s the solution? Harvey proposes that since utopias of spatial form are atemporal and utopias of social process are aspatial, we need to develop spatio-temporal utopias. These dialectical utopianisms are rooted in contemporary historical conditions and elucidate alternative paths forward. Fainstein’s ‘Just City’ concept might be considered an example as it takes global capitalism and popular, middle-class values as its starting point and strives to identify the characteristics of a just city by drawing on Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach and exploring extant examples of relatively more equitable urban policies, like those of Amsterdam. 30

In practice, however, dialectical utopianism tends to divorce theory from practice. It has evolved into a theoretical attempt to define broad principles and goals of a better world that can be employed to inform contemporary decision making under a variety of specific historical circumstances. In the schism that emerges in Searching for the Just City, in opposition to the ‘Just City’ concept, the ‘Right to the City’ movement, as Peter Marcuse describes it, champions a radical transformation of capitalism, which it claims systemically perpetuates injustice, by instituting a set of collective and individual rights that include the right to housing and the right to public opposition. While these two sides differ ideologically, they both rely on broad principles distinct from concrete reality. They thus repeat the very problem they ascribe to utopian thought: they do not define a strategy for transition. They only provide guidelines for deciding on incremental changes in policy, thereby reproducing the same perversions of the ideal in practice. San Francisco, California, © 2007, Kevin Leichner

But this difficulty should not be considered a deficiency in any of these cases. There is a gap between any theoretical construct of how things should be and the action of realizing that theory. This is inevitable, for theory attempts to give form to a reality that will at the last moment elude the rigorous grasp of rationality. The world has always been too rich for theory to exhaust. Theory’s In Utopia, where every man has a right very application transforms its to everything, they all know that if object and demands new theories. care is taken to keep the public stores Utopian thought cannot expect full, no private man can want anything; to unite theory and practice, as for among them there is no unequal Fainstein seeks to do. Instead, it distribution, so that no man is poor, none must zigzag back and forth between in necessity; and though no man has them, employing the one to inform and transform the other. Thus, as anything, yet they are all rich; for what Lefebvre argues in Writings on Cities can make a man so rich as to lead a serene (1996), “Utopia is to be considered and cheerful life, free from anxieties. experimentally by studying its implications and consequences on Thomas More, Utopia the ground.” 31

I thus suggest that all the varieties of utopian thought presented here function similarly in applying ideals to contemporary circumstances and that no one should have any qualms about working out the particulars of a utopian vision. I suggest that we need to go beyond generalized principles like “change” and “hope” and “justice” to work out the details of what the world could be. As described here, dialectical utopianism and utopias of social process and spatial form differ only in the amount of detail worked out prior to application. The problem is not that utopias are transformed by the effort to implement them but rather the refusal of those seeking to create those utopias to allow concrete circumstances to alter their vision. Problems arise in the refusal to accept that each new circumstance calls for the reworking of utopian principles and particulars.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality

In fact, working out the particulars of a vision has long served as a form of policy proposal and critique. One need only consider Thomas More’s scheme for determining political leadership, Ebeneezer Howard’s incorporation of greenery, Le Corbusier’s separation of uses, or the government withdrawal from social policy demanded by neoliberal economic models to see that utopian thinking frequently introduces concrete applications. And though the particular arrangements recommended by Sir Thomas More, Fourier, and other utopians may no longer have direct application today, we still turn to them for understanding of both the principles and aspirations they embody. It is not so much that we must design a universal spatio-temporal utopia but rather that we recognize the spatio-temporal setting of every utopian conception. Obama has explicitly engaged our aspirations for the world that could be. It is now our responsibility to give that world explicit form. And, our vision of that world must go beyond the stressful, insecure, self-interested everyday life of consumption embodied by the middle class with which Obama is so enamored if there is to be justice and happiness. But that is another discussion that each of us should have with those around us. References: Harvey, D. (2000), Spaces of Hope, University of California Press, Berkeley. Lefebvre, H.; Kofman, E. & Lebas, E. (1996), Writings on cities, Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass..

Marcuse, P.; Connolly, J.; Novy, J.; Olivo, I.; Potter, C. & Steil, J., ed. (2009), Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice, Routledge, New York.

Albert Camus

Public Transportation, Personal Responsibility By Itir B. Sonuparlak New York City’s subways are without a doubt one of the single most important aspects of city life. We race against time every day, and our dependence on the subway system grows more crucial with a growing population. Sometimes I find myself spending a lifetime underground trying to get to my destination. But whether you’ve spent years taking the subway or it is simply your first time riding the A train, it is impossible not to notice the accumulating litter on the tracks and the platforms. Despite the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s efforts to clean up, the garbage ends up back in our subway stations. The buildup of litter is an eyesore and a fire hazard. Its solution is one that is harder than just cleaning. It is almost every single day that I am on the subway and every single day I see a new accumulation of garbage waiting to be picked up. But the main issue I am referring to is not on the part of the MTA but rather on our end, as passengers. The City is well aware of its responsibility to take care of the subways. This is visible through the various actions it has taken, like its weekly track cleanings and its sustainability initiatives, as well as its goal of providing 7 percent of the MTA’s total energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources by 2015 (The Interim Report of the Blue Ribbon Commision on Sustainability and the MTA, 2008). But what are we doing in return to maintain the amenities that we are provided for us? 33

There are garbage cans provided all along the platforms, yet why are there empty bottles lying on the ground only a few steps further? Why are our platforms covered in gum stains that have been embedded into the concrete? The MTA should be responsible for cleaning the natural accumulation of dirt that comes with large numbers of people in a closed environment, but not the litter that is discarded so irresponsibly. The action to take is to prevent the littering altogether: to be proactive rather than reactive. The only way we can be proactive is by assuming personal responsibility over this common ground. We must recondition ourselves to respect this public space. Altering human behavior is of course more difficult than simply asking for it. The reality of individual manners sharply contrasts with the ideal that we all value our communal grounds. I guess that is what Camus meant when he said utopia contradicts reality. It would be highly unrealistic to expect every single person to take on this responsibility without an incentive or an initiative. But at least recognizing the problem can prove to be a first step in a number of processes that change the way we view our communal space.

Prospect Park, Brooklyn, ÂŠ 2008, Kevin Leichner

Reference: (2008). The Interim Report of the Blue Ribbon Commision on Sustainability and the MTA. The Blue Ribbon Commission and The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, http://www.mta.info

The Utopias of Istanbul A Photo Essay by Stefanie Garry 36

ÂŠ 2008, Stefanie Garry

What Goes Around, comes Around By Patrick Streeter Urban Americans today live in a “disposable” society. We purchase single-use cameras, bottled water, and all sorts of food containers. We then carry these items home in one of the 100 billion plastic bags that the U.S. disposes of each year. It seems ever easier to just toss it away, flush it down, or throw it in the trash and in a perfect world that would be the end of our waste woes. Alas, society must recognize the Law of Conservation of Mass, which states that despite our ability to move matter around and even rearrange its molecules, we cannot get rid of it. The reality is, as we consume more and more, we are fast running out of places for the waste to go. The flip side to our obsession with consumption is that a great number of cities are finding themselves starved for resources. Rising demand for electricity and increased competition over sources of fresh water are major issues for municipalities from coast to coast. There is an obvious solution to this debacle, however: find a way to transform waste into resources. While we are still far from the Utopian notion of 100 percent waste reallocation, significant technologies do exist and are already being implemented in communities and cities around the world. Landfills, for example, have been making headlines lately as potential suppliers of alternative energy. The natural decomposition of our trash yields large amounts of landfill gas—a combination of about 50 percent methane and 50 percent carbon dioxide; a trace amount of hydrogen sulfide is what provides the familiar, noxious odor. Rather than simply flaring off the gas or letting the valuable methane escape into the atmosphere, energy companies and local governments are tapping into the potentially millions of dollars that can be garnered from sequestered landfill gas. In South Africa, the City of Johannesburg has started the capture of landfill gas from five sites, with the power generated being added to the city grid. As an added bonus, the city stands to benefit economically by earning carbon credits for trading. In the United States, Sonoma County, California, is in the test phase of converting landfill gas into compressed natural gas. The fuel will run four of the county’s 45 public buses and could be applied to the entire fleet if proven successful. 42

One of the country’s leaders in landfill gas energy is the state of New Jersey. Methane capture projects are in operation at more than 20 New Jersey landfills and under construction at three more. According to a 2007 report filed by the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, 5.5 million tons of the 8.2 million tons of biomass the state produces each year could be used to generate up to 1,124 megawatts of power. Depending on what form the methane takes, that could supply approximately 9 percent of the state’s current electrical Think of it. We are blessed energy demand, or up to 5 percent of its current fuel energy with technology that demand.

would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-itall to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance... Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-andgo relay race right up to the final moment.

Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

Solid waste is not the only resource being recaptured. Tremendous strides have been made in recent years toward wastewater reuse. At the beginning of the new millennium, Orange County, California was facing a serious challenge. Over-pumping from the groundwater basin was pulling saltwater from the Pacific Ocean into the county’s drinking water supply. Furthermore, projected population growth in the county of 300,000-500,000 residents in the next decade meant a second outfall pipe going five miles into the ocean would need to be constructed at a cost of $170 million and more water would have to be purchased from outside the county. The solution manifested itself as the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment (GWR) System.

“while technologies like ultraviolet purification may work well in small experimental systems, the real challenge is to scale the process up so it can be cost-effective and feasible for larger blocks of the population.” While the Orange County GWR System treats approximately 70 million gallons of water each day, the NYCDEP deals with an average of 1.5 billion gallons of wastewater per day. It may still be a while before cities begin converting waste to resources in a major way. However, whether dictated by need or through changing public perception, the process has already started. As technologies evolve and natural resources dwindle, tapping into the enormous potential of our waste stream will make more and more economic and environmental sense. So for all those years we’ve scolded Fido for drinking out of the toilet, maybe he was just trying to set a good example.

In addition to the typical primary and secondary treatment performed on wastewater at most treatment plants, water in the GWR System is subjected to reverse osmosis, the same process used by manufacturers of bottled water, as well as microfiltration and ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide advanced oxidation treatment. The resulting water is significantly cleaner than the freshwater basins from which it had originally been sourced as drinking water. Although it would probably make sense to inject this hyper-clean water directly into the county drinking water system, there still exists a social stigma about going from “toilet to tap” in a closed system. Instead, treated water is injected into the watershed upstream where it will percolate through sand and gravel until eventually re-entering the drinking water system via municipal wells. Although the technology has shown up in other water systems, Orange County’s is the first to employ it on such a massive scale. This is a major step toward making groundwater replenishment a common practice. As Gerard Marzec of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (NYCDEP) noted during an interview, 44

Paved Paradise and Put Up A – Residential Complex? By kasey LaFlam What is Utopia? Is it paradise? Is it what we strive to achieve in our everyday lives? Or instead, is it where we go to forget about all that is mundane? My version: I say Utopia is a ‘to all their own’ philosophy. What is for you may not be for me. Take, for example, my favorite local alcoholic beverage establishment. Yogi’s Bar, or known affectionately as just ‘BAR’ to my friends and me, was certainly not for everyone. Nestled in the Upper West Side with its juke box selection of honkytonk country classics, $6.50 pitchers of P.B.R., and a velvet painting of Elvis on the wall, BAR provided an escape from the $15-martini establishments easily found elsewhere in the City. On Monday, October 6, 2008, however, I received some very unsettling news. My beloved BAR had closed the Saturday before. The owners were given eight days notice by their landlord to vacate the building for the now-too-common reason: the building was to be converted into a high-rise residential complex. That afternoon I ventured down to 76th and Broadway to see for myself what I had read online, hoping that perhaps the reports had been wrong, and that my evenings of singing along to Johnny Cash were not over. Alas, when I arrived the iconic six-foot-tall wooden bear that stood outside BAR for more than 20 years was gone, and in its place lay a pile of dirt and the screws that once secured it to the façade of the building. Looking into the window I saw that the neon signs inside had been taken down, the liquor bottles no longer sat on the shelf, and even more disturbing was the absence of patrons who had always been on the barstools, no matter the time of day. In the window was a sign that read “Well folks. It’s official. The walls are coming down!...We held out as long as possible, but big money wins again…” © 2008, Kasey LaFlam

chance to speak with one of the owners/managers of BAR, Charde Raymond. She told us that they had to leave the neighborhood because rents are too high. She said people are charging rents for the types of establishments they think are best suited for the Upper West Side. She assured us that BAR would return to the UWS one day, hopefully this spring. Oddly enough, she’s counting on the current credit crisis to help them negotiate lower rents. While we left with a beer on the house and the gleaming hope of more ridiculous evenings to come at a new BAR this spring, it was still an emotionally difficult evening. Walking to the M116 bus stop it finally hit us, our BAR had closed, and that we may never be able to replace it – our Utopia had been taken away. Joni was right, they really do want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, or, at least a high-rise residential complex.

“Big money.” What is that? Who is that? And how do they get to decide whether or not an establishment as wonderful and utopian as BAR stays or goes? And who determines what vision of Utopia is more appropriate in a neighborhood? Forgive my melodrama, but the idea that BAR will be replaced by an 18-story building is among one of the more depressing things I have heard since moving to this City. It was not until I had ventured to BAR in the daytime that I noticed every storefront was vacated on the block. The Avis Car Rental, the pet store, they were all gone, gated up, and awaiting the fate of a bulldozer. Again, we are confronted with this idea of who decides what belongs where: how do we come to a consensus in society of what vision of Utopia is realized? Perhaps this is too existential a discussion to have about a dive bar, but really, who hasn’t had a fantastic existential conversation late at night on a bar stool with a total stranger? Despite this talk of realizing and coming to an agreement of what Utopia is, BAR is still closed. The owners have since opened up a new bar, The Duck, at 111th and 2nd Avenue. While it is not meant to be a replacement of BAR it still stands for exactly what the old one stood for: a place where everyone is welcome, from hipsters to cowboys and everyone in between. We of course ventured to their new location on opening night and had a 48

Reclaimed Façades: São Paulo as a Utopian Model for a “Cleaner” City By Thomas Bassett New York City thrives on advertising; every inch of the city can become a platform to sell a product. The eye grows tired from the constant assault by ads. Imagine the city with no outdoor advertising: Times Square’s lights would fade. On January 1, 2007, São Paulo, Brazil instituted a law banning all outdoor advertisements in an effort to eradicate visual pollution. The megalopolis of nearly 20 million people is the economic center of South America, and a haven for consumerism. The city was plastered with advertisements, mostly illegally erected. São Paulo’s mayor, Gilberto Kassab, pushed this ban through as part of the “Clean City Law.” Combating visual pollution is the first step in cleaning the entire city, which has many heavily polluted rivers and poor air quality. The details of the entire “Clean City Law” have not been spelled out, with this first implementation garnering the most attention. © 2008, Tony de Marco While the advertising industry has projected US$133 million in lost revenues and a loss of 20,000 jobs, the public reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The city council also approved the ban 45-1, with the one dissenting vote cast by Dalton Silvano, who coincidentally is an advertising executive. Although many steel frame billboards remain empty, some façades, which had been covered by advertisements, now add to the architectural richness of the city, often perceived as an unforgiving concrete jungle. © 2008, Thomas Bassett

In addition to banning large billboards, individual shops also must change their signage to meet new standards. A store’s sign has been limited to 1.5 meters for every 10 meters of the store’s frontage. The distribution of flyers has also become illegal. Hefty fines of up to $4,500 could result for violating any of these laws. This ban is the first of its kind in a country outside of the communist world. Other cities in Brazil as well as Buenos Aires, Argentina have explored the idea of similar bans. Outdoor advertising during the city’s Carnaval celebration will be allowed in order to make the celebration financially viable. There is also speculation that an easement of the ban will occur as time passes. Another critique is that the city’s officials should solve more dire problems, such as the proliferation of informal settlements or serious environmental issues. Banning outdoor advertisements is tangible and relatively easy to implement. One must always question a politician’s motives; since Kassab’s administration has been able to implement a popular program, he has more chance of being reelected. Do citizens win with this outcome? Are they being starved of product information, as some opponents claim? In a capitalist society, restricting outdoor advertising is a large risk, but in São Paulo, the ban has proved positive. New York should look south for ideas to rethink its façades.

References:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/73/Sao_Paulo_A_City_ Without_Ads.html http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/12/news/brazil.php?page=1 http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2007/ id20070618_505580 © 2008, Tony de Marco

htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_ innovation+%2Bamp%3B+design

Green Affordable Housing By Sadamitsu Sakoguchi Affordable housing is typically not associated with “green building,” despite sharing similar goals. Affordable housing usually targets low- and moderate-income households, through a calculation method of regional income measures. Green building standards calculate some methods of reducing the built environment’s negative impacts on human health and the natural environment. These two measurements, however, aren’t on the same terms yet, as affordable housing faces many obstacles to become environmentally friendly and green. Since developers receive fewer subsidies for affordable housing than can be recovered in rental or sales income, limited resources are available for affordable housing. In addition, building an environmentally friendly structure takes innovation and research, usually requiring a lot of time and money. Since developers manage affordable housing by funding from private and public organizations, green techniques become more costly and difficult to integrate. Developers, architects, and builders avoid accepting new technologies and materials in order to avoid bankruptcy. As a result of these factors, developers, architects, and builders have been forced to overlook “the physical discomforts of the buildings’ occupants and the buildings’ impacts on the local or global environment” (Tibetts, 1996). A recent article examining Harvard University’s statistical report found that at least a quarter of the nation’s affordable housing stock was in a state of disrepair, creating health hazards. These sub-standard living conditions have been linked to greater rates of asthma, elevated lead levels, and economic burdens from a higher portion of income devoted to utilities for the leaky buildings, inefficient heating and cooling equipment, and outdated appliances. In short, building occupants living in affordable housing are forced to harm their bodies, their pocketbooks and the environment by consuming extra resources. Fortunately, times are beginning to change. Two large community development organizations are involved in the greening of affordable housing: the Local Initiatives Support Corporation and Enterprise Community Partners. They are, respectively, the nation’s largest nonprofit community development support organizations and 53

nonprofits that specialize in affordable housing and community development initiatives. Through the financing, technical assistance, and advocacy of these organizations, a new group called the Green Building Production Network (GBPN) has formed. The GBPN’s concept of green building is that it “encompasses a wide array of issues including the conservation of natural resources, the elimination of unhealthy and dangerous materials from buildings and building sites, the long-term reduction of building operating costs, and the positioning and design of buildings that contribute to improved regional land-use patterns.” One of their projects is Boston’s “Urban Edge: Jackson Square,” which includes a 430-unit community of mixed-income housing, retail space, a community center, and offices. Located at a public transit stop, the project will maximize green building criteria, such as improved energy efficiency, sustainable site selection, water efficiency, eco-friendly construction materials, and improved indoor air quality. The construction is expected to be completed in 2009. There are many similar projects starting throughout the country. I personally believe that a moral change of thinking—that occupants in affordable housing should not have poor living conditions—plays an important role in facilitating this shift. One method of evaluating the eco-friendliness of buildings is to use the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System. By being LEED-accredited, developers can demonstrate the design and construction of high-performance green homes and promote their business by pooling affordable housing tenants and regular tenants. Compared to regular buildings, LEED-certified buildings cost more to build, but the costs can be recovered with smaller operating costs. Through improved performance such as indoor air quality, the buildings can also reduce the number of sick-days of its occupants, consequently boosting the economy and worker productivity. There are many benefits in green buildings and affordable housing. Let’s make all affordable housing green and make the U.S. more prosperous!

References:

Urban Edge, http://www.urbanedge.org, accessed November 5, 2008 Walker Wells, “Benefits of Green Affordable Housing,” http://blog.islandpress.org/163/walker-wells-benefits-of-greenaffordable-housing, accessed November 5, 2008 Local Initiatives Support Corporation: <http://www.lisc.org> accessed November 5, 2008 John Tibbetts, “Green Houses,” Environmental Health Perspectives, Vol. 104, No. 10 (Oct., 1996), pp. 1036-1039 Gregory Maher and Judith Turnock, “Affordable Housing Goes Green at Last,” http://americancity.org/magazine/article/webexclusive-affordable-housing-goes-green-at-last-maher-turnock, accessed November 5, 2008

Virtual Utopia and the (Un)Real By Danil Nagy The discussion of utopia has been a dominant part of architectural discourse since the Renaissance, often characterized by radical urban visions developed to give space to new social theories. While most of these visions failed due to their reliance on massive infrastructure, the widespread dissemination of the Internet has created a new virtual space in which many of these utopian visions have become possible. Recently, the virtual world has begun to play a greater role in our physical lives, whose forms and methods have started to predict how we imagine and organize our physical urban space. This suggests a radical shift in architectural and urban theory, where utopian visions once thought impossible become a real part of our everyday experience. The use of the word Utopia originates in a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More, which describes a fictional island possessing a perfect society. The etymology of the word can be traced back to the Greek ‘ou’ meaning ‘not’ and ‘topos’ meaning ‘place’. At the same time, the homophone ‘Eutopia’, derived from the Greek ‘eu’ meaning good and ‘topos’ meaning ‘place’ signifies a double meaning that was fully intended by More in 55

showing the desirability but simultaneous impossibility of this fictional world. The hopelessness of his vision was important to More, who was above all a lawyer and a statesmen responsible for upholding the imperfect system of rule in 16th century England. Whether intended or not, the disjunction between the perfection and futility of the ‘non-place’ would permeate all utopian visions undertaken since. This can be seen in the multitude of utopian visions that dominated architectural culture in the late twentieth century. Questioning the oversimplifications of modernist minimalism, these visions rejected the high capitalist society that left many avant-garde architects unable to build. Retreating into theory, many groups such as Archigram and Superstudio envisioned new urban forms that could house new post-capitalist societies. In his project “New Babylon,” Constant envisioned a new type of worldwide city for a society of total automation, in which underground machines take care of all labor and the need to work is replaced by a nomadic life of creative play . Developed through many models and drawings, Constant’s New Babylon takes the form of an immense suspended network of interior spaces, which are free to expand in any direction until eventually covering the entire world. Constant’s utopian vision is characterized by the concepts of networks and play, which serve as a direct reaction to the culture of capitalism. While the decentralized city questions the hierarchies of contemporary city centers, the destruction of labor creates © 2001, Catherine de Zegher and Mark Wigley a single class free of social inequality. For the inhabitants of this global city, social life becomes architectural play, as they are left free to drift through the labyrinthine interiors, perpetually reconstructing every aspect of their environment. No longer a slave to the desires of capitalism, architecture becomes an ever-changing display of interacting personal desire. While impossible as a physical city, New Babylon predicted a new kind of environment without edge or center, where people are free to interact with their environment without restrictions or physical limitations. Today, Constant’s vision is realized in the virtual space of the World Wide Web, in which people are allowed to 56

configure their own spaces and can wander freely from site to site without limitations. Constant’s dual concepts of network and play are also manifest in the massive virtual online environment of Second Life, which visualizes and gives space to the social freedoms of the Internet. The urban structure of Second Life is based around a continuous rectilinear grid, which subdivides the world into equal parcels of land which can expand and grow in every direction. The virtual inhabitants of Second Life, avatars representing Internet users around the world, are given no responsibilities, and are left free to roam around and construct and modify the virtual world to their liking. While Second Life’s lack of rules and boundaries might predict radically new forms of space, a curious effect is how closely it resembles the typical patterns of urbanism found in the real world. As the environment of Second Life has grown over the last two years, much of the development has taken on surprisingly familiar forms. Several areas, such as Amsterdam and ancient Athens, replicate real environments with amazing precision, and become tourist attractions in much the same way as the real locations they are meant to replicate. Another function of Second Life has been to create virtual presences for institutions like schools and businesses, where avatars of the institution’s real members can gather, communicate, and sometimes hold virtual meetings as avatars. The system of development of the Second Life world has also paralleled our own real estate market, with virtual real estate agents © 2008, Second Life such as Anshie Chung (Second Life’s richest member), making virtual (and often real) money from selling virtual property. Furthermore, while people are given new ways to communicate with and navigate around the world (including the ability to fly), most time is spent hanging around and communicating with others in much the same ways as we do in our real lives. 57

The virtual worlds of more traditional video games, like the recently released Grand Theft Auto 4, have also spent their time remaking real environments, with the fictional Liberty City becoming a stunning facsimile for the physical environs of New York City. Likewise, in “The Sims,” the seemingly liberated world of the character is dominated by a mundane cycle of work and sleep. Whether these environments model real worlds or create new ones, however, the question still remains if they constitute the first true Eutopias (perfect worlds), or whether their fundamental lack of physicality still qualifies them as Utopian “non-places.” While these worlds remain in the digital realm, the growth of their virtual networks has been paralleled by a growth in the influence that these networks have on our physical world. Thus, while they lack real physicality, virtual environments are now an integral part of our everyday world, and have come to affect our society and our built environments. The ease with which physical environments can be replicated in the virtual world has lead to a trend in creating physical replicas of popular global locations in many parts of Asia. One example is the Windows of the World theme park in Shenzhen, China, where major world monuments such as the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, and Taj Mahal were meticulously replicated at a smaller scale, allowing tourists a complete global experience in a single visit. On a more urban © 2008, Chris Steins scale, the town of Luodian just outside of Shanghai offers a fully-fledged copy of a small Swedish town, complete with a low density suburban fabric and vernacular Scandinavian architecture. While these environments are not directly linked to the virtual world, our desire for and acceptance of them is predicated on our constant exposure to virtuality in our everyday lives. 58

A further example of the virtualization of physical experience can be seen in the opening ceremonies for the Beijing Summer Olympics. Because of fears that live filming would not achieve the desired effect, the game’s opening fireworks sequence was composed a year in advance, and then digitally inserted into the streaming live coverage. Unknown even to viewers inside the stadium, the virtual desires of the event’s coordinators became integrated into what we thought was a “real” experience. On a bigger scale, virtuality also dominated the event’s architecture, where buildings were no longer made to look like buildings, creating an ambiguity of scale that lent an air of drama and mystery to the primary icons of the Olympic Games. In the design of the National Stadium, the creation of an iconic image (through its form, materiality, and lighting), became more important than the way in which the building functioned, since it is through the image and not through physical contact that most of the world was meant to experience it. The ubiquity of the virtual and its dissemination into our physical world raises several questions concerning the possibility of modern utopias. If the virtual environment of the Internet creates a utopian model of unlimited social interaction, how will this model influence our conceptualization of physical form? Furthermore, as virtual networks increase communication while decreasing our reliance on physical infrastructure, will Constant’s urban model at last become viable? While the virtual dimension already dominates most of our everyday lives, much of the physical implications of virtuality are yet to be seen.

Reference: De Zegher, Catherine and Wigley, Mark, ed. The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond. The MIT Press, London: 2001.

First-Year Planners Jennifer Ayala is a South Bronx native with a passion for environmental justice. She’s a dual MSUP/MPH student who wants to improve the health of lowincome communities by advocating for clean air environments that promote physical activity. Jen’s a Tim Burton FANATIC and enjoys drawing, double-dutch, tomatoes, and everything BRONX! Former resident of Savannah, Georgia, Budapest, Hungary, and Paris, France, Audra Brecher has a background in historic preservation. She’s been living in New York for the last two years, where she worked as the preservation specialist in an architecture firm. She practices Iyengar yoga, makes buttermilk biscuits, and drinks whiskey. Lindsay Casper still plays with Legos. She likes to build Lego houses and take them apart. She is also a big fan of bird’s eye view. Lindsay will always call Boston home but spends most of her time at a candy store on the corner of Union and Kingston in Crown Heights. Caitlin Dourmashkin lives in Brooklyn, the third borough she has called home over the past six years. Caitlin is an animal lover to the 60

millionth degree and she is a very big fan of New York City’s industrial and manufacturing sector (which is not dead, thank you very much). Excited to be living in the city of New York, when Renata Dermengi Dragland is not studying, she is in the subway or walking around the city, always taking photographs. She is from Brazil, but lived in Orlando for some years. She is always looking forward to learning about new cultures and trying their cuisines. Louise Dreier has lived in Brazil, England and Spain. She rides her bike everywhere and tries very hard to be punctual, yet usually fails. Jesse Farb is a frequent denizen of various karaoke bars throughout the city, but, um, can’t remember which ones right now. He would like to assure everyone that despite his sophisticated Canadian sensibilities, he still thinks you’re all really, really nice people. Vikram Gill, who also goes by the clever moniker “Vik,” enjoys dance battles and moderately-lengthed walks on the imported sand beaches of his native Vancouver. He is passionate about participatory planning and taking back the ‘burbs!

A recent graduate of Brandeis University, Michal Gross is from northern New Jersey. A tennis player all her life, Michal enjoys art, architecture, cooking and water sports. Seeing rainbows after it rains makes her really happy, and she is the ultimate chocoholic. Christina Huan loves long walks, strange foods, pragmatism, and simplicity of life. Sanggyun Kang, from South Korea, has so many things to do to ready himself to take part in the reunification of his mother country, South and North Korea. A bare and once unattainable land, North Korea, suffering under the despotism, is suddenly within his reach. Peter Katz believes there’s nothing better than a cold beer after work. He is a Brooklyn native, where everything is serious – even relaxing, yo! After high school he busted out and went to Pennsylvania for college, and then Vermont, New Jersey (shout out to dirty jerz), and DC (…had to earn moolah somehow…). He’s excited to be home, and is looking forward to a spectacular year. Angela Yaeseul Kim practically lives on the plane. She loves to

travel around the world and has lived in Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and, currently, New York. She hopes that her experiences will help her become a better urban planner and feels very blessed to have found her passion in life. Dory Kornfeld is from Vancouver and/or Toronto, depending on when you ask her. She likes public space, mason jars, Pyrex bowls, country music, Canadian spelling, and subverting post-industrial capitalism through baking bread, growing vegetables, and knitting at meetings. Someday she would like to be known as the City Councillor who put a garden on the roof of city hall.

Opera and flamenco dancing. Life is too short and the world is too small, that is why she tries to enjoy every minute of it and wants to help leave a better world behind.

David Krulewitch likes going to the beach, relaxing, and barbequing. His focus at school is on transit and land use. He used to work for the Parks Department and for the Mayor’s Office for the City.

Kyuwon Lee, also known as Q1, studied urban design. Now he is studying urban planning and dreaming to be a great planner. He is a DJ, dancer, skateboarder, smoker, designer, and planner.

Sophia Lalani was born in Abu Dhabi to a Burmese mother and a Pakistani father who happened to meet in Bangladesh. The story of her transience doesn’t end there and, thus, Sophia is always scheming her next adventure. Teach for America in the South Bronx was her latest venture and she can’t wait for what lies ahead.

Shaohua Li is an easygoing person. She likes swimming, watching TV, playing video games, and chatting with friends online. She graduated from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou where her major was Urban Planning with a minor in Finance. During college she worked for student union and the school’s TV center.

Milagros Lecuona loves spending time with her family while having a good conversation with a glass of rioja. She enjoys going to the

As Alison Mayer settles into her 6th NYC apartment, drinks a little of her friend’s wine and listens to Boyz II Men, she tries to imagine

how to sum up her life. She is a bit preoccupied by the daunting amount of work looming and thinks about the Bat Mitzvah of a distant relative that she should NOT have committed to going to. Alison chews on a little plastic thing from a clothing tag she found on her desk. Danil Nagy moved from Russia to the United States in time with the deconstruction of the Soviet Union. He has a fascination with the built environment that suggests a bridge between architecture and urban planning. He explores cities through bicycles and is not shamed by his love of cable television. The hustle and bustle of over ten million inhabitants greeted my eyes. This scene may excite some, but for me, the rush and friction of people living in such close quarters perplexed me. Indeed, I found myself wondering: “Why do people continue to live in such a city?” In 61

my quest to answer this question, Hyun Myoung Oh entered urban studies. Victoria Okoye’s favorite things include peanut butter M&Ms, Sunday brunches, walking all around the city and discovering new places. Before Columbia, Kristian Ongoco worked at the San Francisco Ethics Commission for five years, educating and regulating campaign finance laws. She is a Coro Fellow, and has a Masters degree in Public Administration. She has lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Siena, Italy, and now New York City. Kristian spends her time playing volleyball, snowboarding,

and traveling around the world. Laura Poulsen spent most of 2008 traveling in Cuba and India trying to get an understanding of how people live in the world. Before then she worked with clean energy planning in Copenhagen. She is very excited about the North American trees, which reminds her of why she thinks David Lynch is a great film maker. Despite being a closet perfectionist, street dancing enthusiast, and instant coffee drinker, Alexandra Sophie Rosas is rather like the buildings she loves so much - a little rough around the edges but, when you look closely, absolutely authentic.

Alan Schwartz, having ascended from the primordial ooze of the La Brea Tar Pits, recently made his triumphant return to Gotham. He is excited to be back in the land of chestnuts roasting on a sweltering street corner in July, and eagerly awaits February’s arctic wind blasts. The most special place in his heart is reserved for express hauls on the A train. Brendan Shera is from Buffalo, New York and will go on at great lengths about this fact if you tangentially mention the subject. Since graduating from Cornell University in 2006, Brendan has worked for the County Executive’s office of Erie County; the affordable housing division of Brooklyn’s Fifth Avenue Committee; and is currently interning with the MTA. His interests within the program include transportation and community development. Sarah M. Shin was born and raised in the central valley of California before leaving the west coast for schooling in Boston. After graduating from college, she spent a month backpacking through western Europe and a year working as an architect in southeast England. In her spare time, Sarah attempts to cook foreign dishes, snowboards in warm climates, strives to become an excellent kite surfer, and experiments with the literary/visual arts.

Neuropolis, John Harvey, A Utopian City, 1897.

James Simmons is somewhat conventional. He tends to do things somewhat haphazardly. He is relatively social and enjoys the company of others. He finds it easy to express irritation with others. He is not particularly nervous, nor calm. At least this is what an online personality test tells him. Newly-engaged Jennifer So met her sweetheart at Amherst College, where she studied Music and Neuroscience (separate majors—not neurotransmitter sonata composition). The dualdegree candidate in Public Health recently researched obesity and built environment influences in her hometown, Seattle. If this progressive Evangelical catches you not recycling, she will call the mafia on you. And your mom. Yihong Song is from China where she majored in architecture as an undergraduate. Columbia’s academic atmosphere attracted her so much and she feels so lucky to work with the excellent students here! She likes music, especially classical music, and romantic movies. She enjoys concerts and exercising in her spare time. Itir Bahar Sonuparlak is an art historian at heart and loves Rococo, probably because she was French royalty in a past lifetime. She lived in Turkey for 12 years and moved to Fort Lee, NJ in 1997. Itir is a bit circumspect but is constantly working on her spontaneity. She

loves protons and magnets, and is eagerly waiting for the results of the Large Hadron Collider experiment. Go Universe! Rosalind Streeter hails from Louisville, Kentucky and is having a vastly improved 2nd year in NYC as a Preservation and Planning student. During the summer she worked at the NY Landmarks Conservancy for their Sacred Sites Program in Queens. She is primarily interested in cultural site management. Gita Subramony grew up in Jackson, Mississippi and now lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She loves all animals except for roaches, armadillos, rabid(!) possums, and swans (but only because as a small child she got attacked by one). Gita is a Star Wars enthusiast and also enjoys eating and cooking food. Josef Szende likes walking, biking, and healthy eating. He was raised in Toronto and has lived in Hong Kong, Edinburgh, Berlin, Brussels, Montpellier, Dijon, and Chicoutimi. He has found that it is easier to do the things he likes outside of North America. He wants to do something about this continent. Matt Viggiano has a tolerance for a great many things. He is a lover of great cities and admirer of the rural (the country air smells and tastes better). Loud bars are sometimes fun, but the more quiet drinking hole where conversations

are more readily shared appeal more to his sensibilities these days. His advice: Don’t be ashamed to be ambitious and honest to a fault, and everything should work out all right. Casey Wang is from Montreal. Elle peut parler francais mais pas si bien comme elle devrait. It was fate. Casey took an environmental planning class and knew that she was onto something. After a semester in Sydney, she took advantage of her eastern hemisphere positioning and visited China, Taiwan, Japan, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, New Zealand, Fiji and Australia. Along the way, she kept asking questions-turns out there is a whole field devoted to answering them. Andy Watanabe is from Sacramento, California, and he’s not mad that Jessica Farb comes into his house and breaks everything he touches. Flushing is awesome. GO QUEENS!!! Menxi Wu (it’s better that you call her Wu Meng if you can’t pronounce it right) can’t live without anime and Project Runway. She loves cooking, and welcomes you to come to China!! David Zyck is one of the few students from the Midwest. Aside from what everyone thinks, he does not have an accent. When not speaking normally, David enjoys watching sports and exploring NYC. 63

and retains, however simplified here, his dedication to outdoor pursuits and adventures.

Second-Year Planners Pixie Alexander dodges midnight compulsions and neurotic ramblings. Her old paintings are growing mold. And although policy and demographics challenge her greater engagement with sensory experience, she believes this value anchors urban planning: “There is but one great thing: To live, and to see the great day dawning.” -Inuit Youngji Bae is an urban nomad, who always tries to settle down in vain. In fact, this is the first time she has ever spent more than a year in the same city since she was eighteen. Youngji is planning to go back and work for her hometown, Seoul, Korea at one point in her life, but before that, would love

to live in Berlin, Istanbul and Ulan Bator. Catherine Barnes-Domotor grew up in Washington, DC. While the stimulating political atmosphere influenced her development, she decided she wanted to work in a more manageable and less frustrating field. She therefore decided on attempting to solve all problems of the built and social environment. She currently resides in Brooklyn Heights with her fiancé Chris and their new puppy Casey. Hailing from New England, Thomas Bassett can still find love for New York. He is somewhat nervous about the prospects of a job come

spring, but hopes to enjoy Brazilian beaches again soon. He wants to work in bringing clean drinking water to people in the developing world. Daniel Berger studied History and Film Studies at Yale, where he graduated with a BA in 2005. After graduating from college, he worked as a paralegal for a year, which made him never want to go to law school. His interests include Asian cities, comedy writing, squash, and poker. Meera Bhat is a part-time planning student and full-time computational biologist. Yeah, she doesn’t really know what that is, either. She is a MichiganderBrooklynite who doesn’t find the weather too bad here, all things considered. Meera enjoys haircuts, teen drama real and fictional, her brand-new spouse, and urban farms. Also known as “Brian the Architect” to some of his planning classmates, Brian Brush consistently works across party lines not only for his own educational benefits, but also to show that the study of planning and architecture can be complementary and advantageous. He’s happy to call the West and its grandeur of landscape his home,

Xu Chen has lived and worked in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Melbourne, inner Mongolia, Shen Zhen, Tian Jin and likes to travel. She has three years of experience with a real estate, land developer, design and planning company. She would like to share with others, meet different people, and hear different thoughts. James Cocks has a background in physical planning and construction, but is using his time in grad school to focus on social research. This includes going to happy hours, bowling, sipping coffee, and shooting the breeze for several hours a day. Born and raised in New Jersey, Gillian Connell’s experiencees watching the suburban landscape around her change and grow got her interested in issues of Urban Planning and Historic Preservation. When she’s not here at school, she is out and about enjoying the city, and wishing she were back in NJ in the lake! Born and raised in Providence, RI. Lived in Austin, TX, and Barcelona, Spain. As a lad Kyle Daniels played with Legos, read books and enjoyed camping. Still does. Friend of the bicycle, recycling and composting. Playing ping pong or the board game Go both delight him.

Particularly interested in everything, Therese Diede decided to quit her one-year experiment in rural life and move to the Big Apple to study urban planning. From the smaller-scale techno-apple of Cupertino.CA, Therese was quite used to fruity associations. Though often quiet herself, she enjoys participating in others’ raucous behavior…maybe yours? John Dulac’s state is home to few and holiday to the nation. He spent five years studying international relations and engineering at the university where the Reach toothbrush was invented, and his first name is Ivan in Russian. Maternal language that of Henry VIII, paternal tongue of Henry IV. By the way, he shares a birthday with Rosa Parks.

Tyler Fairbairn is a second year planning student from Connecticut who one day aspires to help facilitate the construction of additional Sam’s Clubs and Carl’s Jr. restaurants in Wasilla, Alaska. Chelsea Feerer is from Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Tufts University in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies. She plans to specialize in transportation planning and real estate development, looking at each from a sustainable design perspective. Also, she enjoys exploring and improving cities’ land and water recreational opportunities. Brian Gardner is worried about sea level rises and global cataclysm. He sees planning sustainable cities and green real estate development 65

as the way to prevent civilizational collapse and great way to stick it to the House of Saud. Brian also relishes speaking Italian or Spanish while enjoying vegetarian meals. After winning the national competition in her home town of New Orleans for knowing world geography on the hit television show, “Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?”, Stefanie Garry won the grand prize of G.I.S software, which sealed her fate. She then pursued her dream of becoming the next Carmen San Deigo by majoring in Geography at GWU, and visiting Panama, Turkey, Italy, Thailand, Argentina, France, Hungry, Poland, Germany, Costa Rica, Mexico, Alaska, and even Long Island, the most foreign place of all. Growing up infatuated with taking pictures of pretty flowers, Karolina Grebowiec-Hall made a dramatic shift to snapping photos of urban dwellers, structures and streetscapes. She knew there must be something in it for her! After studying development planning and working in London for three years, she is back home in NYC, ready to find her focus. Before finding herself in New York, Naomi Hersson-Ringskog had a shorter name and a greater disposition to speak in third person. Criss-crossing the Atlantic Ocean, this American-Swede spent much time abroad satisfying her penchant 66

for foreign languages, cafe cultures and urban meanderings. New glory days are here, and they hold out the promise of many things fun and visionary (like finding a Finnish style sauna on a NYC rooftop). Catherine Kim is concentrating in Economic Development. She is fascinated by the organization of a city and planning for its competitive edge. Before coming to Columbia, Catherine worked on a special NYCHA Co-op Conversion project and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in South Africa. Inbar Kishoni is a geographer who would love a world where bicycles rule the street. In her spare time she enjoys crosswords, non-fiction, and GSAPP-induced existential crises. It pleases her to know that since you are reading this in the future, you are living in a world in whichshe has finally settled on a thesis topic. Sick of the endless sprawl in his native Jersey, Michael Kolber busted out and moved to Africa. In his beloved Burkina Faso, he discovered a whole new world of urban sprawl. Mike now wants to work in refugee camps as an emergency sprawl relief officer. Despite being a proud New Hampshireite, Kasey LaFlam has still managed to find a special place in her heart for the Big Apple. She’s kind of a big deal in Baltimore – no, really! And she enjoys long

talks about Slovakia, double shots of Patron, watching her beloved Braves at Shea when they happen to be in town, and local economic development, of course. Anna Lan is a Chinese girl from Texas, yes, Texas. And the shady part too. She spoke with a Texas accent until the fourth grade when her mother made her stop, which would have been pretty hilarious otherwise. During undergrad at the University of Southern California, Anna majored in international relations and sociology before hitting the jackpot with urban planning. Another year older: a direct correlation to another year wiser. Kevin Leichner is happy to be in his middle year of a three-year odyssey, planning the business of his long-delayed freedom. He is thankful for his insights, blessed by his ignorance and happy to leave the past behind. Eileen Leung is from Toronto by way of Vancouver. She loves zoning, so much. All of Stephanie Lim’s secret plans seem to be coming together. Despite being a proud Jersey girl, Kathryn Lipiecki relocated to study and pursue a career in urban planning and to enjoy car-free living. Upon arriving in New York she discovered she had never fully appreciated the wonder that is the

cupcake and vows to make up for a lifetime of neglect. Jiuyuan Liu is currently in the 2nd year of Planning Master. Actually he’s from a manufacturingdominated community where all iPhones in the world are produced and witnesses the dramatic industrialization and urbanization undergoing there vividly. Now he devotes himself to private participation in urban development and transportation systems. An aficionado of post-its and pretty champagne flutes, Andrea Marpillero-Colomina enjoys organizational bliss and the Manhattan street-grid, which both come in handy when she has exceeded her post-it and/ or aperitif quota. She likes loud conversations, blunt expressions, and the only thing that consistently stops her dead in her tracks: the sun setting against the skyline of her city. Hee Seok Park has a Master’s Degree in Architectural Planning, granted for research on occupants’ behavioral response to spatial hierarchy. He worked for AIG as a casualty insurance underwriter and has participated in the Korean Ministry of Construction and Transportation’s research project on urban flood damage mitigation. His chief interest is people’s behavioral pattern and the physical configuration of urban space.

Magnet City, Ebenezer Howard, In the Garden Cities of Tomorrow, 1902

Soon Mahn Park has some favorites: Beethoven Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, Bach Ouverture Nr.3 BWV.1068, Bach No.1 in G Major BWV1007, Stanley Kubrick, Tim Burton, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Umberto Eco, snowboarding, espresso doppio, Remy Martin XO, Ektachrome, Claude Monet’s Sky. Since rebelling against her native Texas and insidious southern sprawl, Jennifer Pehr has become obsessed with urban space. After traveling to India, Argentina, Italy, and the Middle East, she is also obsessed with the gastronomy and libations of local cultures. Benjamin Prosky is currently Director of Special Events at GSAPP where he is also pursuing a Masters in Urban Planning. Previously, he

was Head of Public and University Programs at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal. He started his career as an Exhibitions Coordinator at the Institut français d’architecture, Paris. Francisco M. Rodriquez completed his undergraduate studies in Architecture at Havana University, Cuba. His undergraduate research focused on low income housing and public participation and his current interests include: issues of poverty, globalization and international sustainable development especially in the Latin American region Abdul Saboor is originally from Afghanistan, and is on a Fulbright scholarship to do his Master’s studies here at Columbia. Prior to traveling to the US, he worked for nearly 3 years in on urban conservation projects in his 67

hometown, Herat, Afghanistan. Besides learning about urban planning in the US, Abdul is pleased to meet new people and socialize with his American peers. Sadamitsu Sakoguchi, better known as Sako!, is from an orange farm land in rural Japan. He has lived in the U.S. for more than 6 years, but he still has difficulty pronouncing “L” and “R.” ‘Hilarious’ is the word he hates the most. He likes cooking, shopping, drinking, and watching. He likes to say, “it’s not about size, it’s about quality.” Gaining international stardom for inspiring Mel Brooks to write the movie “Spaceballs” and after dating several Hollywood celebrities such as Natalie Portman and Britney Spears, Matt Schwartz decided to shy away from public life for a bit and focused on educating himself on public policy at Indiana University - Bloomington. Matt Schwartz then spent time working for the Geico Gecko where he realized his interests in urban design and transporation, which led him to pursue a Master’s in Urban Planning. From South Korea, Irene Youngin Seo studied Public Administration at Yonsei University. She has worked for an IT company before as an IT strategy planner. She loves sports and traveling (especially the preparing part). She wants to experience all that an urban 68

planner can in the fascinating city of NY. After Qianqi Shen finished her undergraduate in real estate development in Shanghai, she decided to resort to a broader field to look at the developments in city--an exciting field involving social, economic, political, and spatial sciences. Now she’s trying to understand the dynamics in a broader international development backdrop. Preeti Sodhi was born in Wichita, Kansas and grew up in New Jersey. She studied Metropolitan Studies and Photography at NYU. Her interests include: architecture. taking pictures. watching movies. rock n roll. hip hop too. cocktails. dancing. good reads. fashion. chitchat. deep stares. roaming the globe. procrastinating. learning and new words. Hardened by the unforgiving badlands of suburban New Jersey, Patrick Streeter embarks on his selfless quest to battle uninformed development on any front. Armed only with his GIS software and trusty sidekick Sketchup, he steels himself for the long and bloody battle. He also loves kittens. Yuan Tang hates papers and readings, wishes professors would read all Chinese papers and feel the pain as well. She is red-holic, addicted to decorating her blog, Broadway musicals and, recently,

whole-wheat bagels with cream cheese. Yuan plays piano and Erhu, badly, though. She has danced a little bit of hip-hop and lately, a little bit Jazz. Christie Walkuski grew up in Queens and feels more comfortable calling herself a New Yorker than anything else. She’s not sure where she’ll land in the world of planning, but knows she comes at it from a social justice perspective. Apart from a stretch spent traveling around the US, with time spent in Atlanta, she can’t seem to move too far away from the Hudson River. If she gets any free time in the next two years she would like to finally pick up the guitar and get fluent in Spanish. Danni Wang, was born in Beijing, China. She studied architecture, double minored in math and engineering at Lehigh University. After having studied, worked and traveled to 11 countries, she found she was more interested in landscape architecture. She wished to start with ice hockey earlier that she would be a professional player by now. Lin Zhang, a girl from China, was born and grew up in a beautiful seaside city. Just having spent 5 years exploring what is architecture, though still in confusion, she is now striving with GIS and SPSS, and it is most likely that she will fall in love with them soon.

Ph.D. Candidates John Powers is in the final stages of completing his dissertation. He is writing on regional economic development and technological change in Dublin and Beijing. John is here because he got tired of carrying out the World Bank?s agenda in Washington DC where he worked prior to Columbia. He received his master?s in planning from MIT. Surviving through the past chanllenges, Lei Wang eventually reached the final stage of his dissertation project deciphering the rise of local state entrepreneurialism across urban China.

director for a financial justice nonprofit working against predatory lending. Broadly interested in the exercise of power through control over space, his research focuses on the intersection of law planning in local efforts to regulate immigration. Milena Gomez is writing her dissertation on /The Potential Impact of Remittances on the Urban Development of Colombia- A Case Study of the Housing Market/. She has also been working as Deputy Director of the Picker Center for Executive Education at SIPA. Having spent so much time with his

head in theoretical utopian climes, Cuz, née James William Potter, is working hard to get back down to the practicalities of finishing his dissertation on how international shipping liner companies have employed interlocal competition to reorganize the national logistics network in their favor. Kate Pedatella is a second-year PhD student. She is bored by things you find interesting (transit-oriented development, Jane Jacobs), and is interested in things you find boring (epistemology, Star Trek: The Next Generation). Some day, she will complete a dissertation about postconflict peacebuilding.

Padmini Biswas is researching comparative strategies of immigrant labor organizing at diverse scales. While completing her dissertation, she is also the assistant to David Harvey at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center. Justin Steil is currently engrossed across Amsterdam in the JD part of his JD/PhD and pining for the good old days in the planning studio. Before signing away his life to academia, he worked on brownfield redevelopment for an environmental justice organization and, before that, as advocacy

Shakyamuni entering Nirvana, Artist Unknown

Transit-Oriented Disinvestment By Brendan Shera So, I’ve been a graduate student here at GSAPP for, what like, a month and a half now? And I’ve already had to read this British article on disappearing traffic for two of my classes. The gist of it is that if you take traffic off of a given road in an urban setting, it doesn’t increase congestion on parallel networks like one would expect, ceteris paribus. What results is the flipside of Anthony Downs’ triple convergence – people diverge from the removed road by taking alternate routes, traveling at different times, and occasionally using different modes. The authors of the paper in question (“Disappearing Traffic: The Story So Far”) take it one step further and say that road closures may have a straw-that0broke-the-camel’s-back type effect: although no one is going to move, or change jobs, or fundamentally alter their shopping behavior on the basis of one road closure, it may edge them further towards giving up on that area and moving on to another. When we read about disappearing traffic, I can’t help but view the subject with a cynical lens. You see, I hail from Buffalo – a hotbed of municipal cynicism if there ever was one – and we’ve had some piss-poor planning practices since, say, the advent of electricity. There’s the time they relocated the main campus of the State University at Buffalo (UB) out of the city proper and into a decentralized suburban setting surrounded entirely by ribbons of highway. That’s a good one. Or the relocation of the Buffalo Bills’ stadium in an even more remote rural environ. My personal favorite, however, has to be Buffalo’s Subway system. Okay, let that sink in for a minute. Yes, Buffalo has a subway. Now come the caveats. It’s not really a subway system – it’s really just one line, and the funding opportunities for any expansions seem dismal at best. That one line happens to run along Main Street, which in terms of nomenclature has about as much truth in advertising as Greenland. Further more, from a transportation policy standpoint, it would be more accurate to call the system “light rail,” just light rail that runs underground for most of its length (and about half of its stops). Along the length of the train’s route, which runs from the HSBC Arena downtown to the old campus for UB on the city’s northern fringe, not much seems to be happening. Development picks up a bit at the university end of the line, and the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus around the Allen-Hospital station (full disclosure – my home station) has seen some improvements associated with the recent concentration of the region’s medical institutions in the surrounding area. By and large, though, if you looked at the neighborhoods that border the line, you’d be hard-pressed to guess that there was a train beneath your feet. In fact, most of what you see 70

reflects the modern nature of Buffalo’s Main Street – as a thoroughfare that divides neighborhoods and serves mainly to efficiently expedite traffic through the area. The new construction that I recall reflects an auto-centered culture – a large car wash/gas station/convenience complex near my home, a smattering of drivethru fast food chains, and some strip malls by the northern terminus. Along the at-grade portion of the rail, the story gets a bit more complicated. The underground portion of the rail was originally planned to be placed under the city’s central business district, which happens to also be the area which is usually first struck by much of the city’s celebrated lake effect snow. As the line headed north, it was to move to an above ground line. Community opposition forced © 2008, Brendan Shera planners to invert the planned line, and the city wound up with what has been termed a “transit mall” – a stretch along Main Street through the heart of downtown that is totally closed to private automobiles. The city closed one of the main thoroughfares in the city to traffic, and the result? Disappearing traffic, of course. But traffic wasn’t the only thing to disappear. The common perception in the area was that what had remained of downtown’s fragile retail core was thoroughly smote by the rail. I can remember when department stores still existed downtown, but only just barely. Their shells loom over the metro rail, hulking slabs of asbestos waiting for abatement. Conventional wisdom holds that, with consumers unable to drive along downtown’s main drag, suburban malls got that final push they needed to drive the nail into the heart of the region’s core. Personally, I have my doubts. There exist numerous parallel routes in downtown Buffalo – I see only correlation in the timing, not necessarily causation. 71

So what’s the hot transit topic in Buffalo these days? Well, the new president of UB wants to extend the rail line out to the suburban campus. So do I, but I don’t see where the money could come from. Currently everyone’s in a tizzy about a multi-million dollar plan – underway, as we speak – to scale back the transit mall, and restore traffic to Main Street. I personally loved the concept of a car-free Main Street, flawed as it may have been. I rode the train to work daily to my various summer jobs downtown; and after a point treated the track as my own private bike lane and got to work even faster. Downtown Buffalo will certainly seem a lot busier during the business day if cars and trains are sharing the road, but whether or not this has any effect at all on the renaissance of the downtown remains to be seen. To me, it’s kind of sad and a bit backwards to put cars back downtown when so many American cities are finding success with Bus Rapid Transit lanes and other pedestrian/ transit-oriented corridors. I’ve come to face it, though. Buffalo is not Portland. Buffalo is not New York. Sometimes you have to know when to say a good idea just didn’t work. I suppose I should at some point make a connection to the concept of utopia. I had originally come up with this topic as a pun on this semester’s theme. What, after all, does utopia mean? It literally means “no place” – which is exactly where Buffalo’s metro line goes. At the same time, I’ve always framed real-world utopias as these well-intentioned bad ideas – intentional communities that spiral out of control under a charismatic leader, or wind up failing in their collectivist schemes due to mankind’s reputedly irrepressible individuality. To me, these intentional communities are good intentions with bad results. It was a healthy social experiment to give transit free reign of downtown, but the time might be right for Buffalo to try a new plan, with everyone’s favorite punching bag: the automobile.

After all, it can’t really make things any worse, can it?

New York, Be True By Andrea Marpillero-Colomina Dear New York, I know this will not be your first letter.1 We have known each other in our most intimate moments, but your lovers are many; 8,250,567 to be exact.2 They have not all treated you well; your façade is impenetrable steel/ stoic brick/ cool glass, but the cheap siding on the new condominiums in your most precious neighborhoods tells a new story. Localities as we know them are disintegrating, the bold history of their social structures and physical spaces pushed aside to make way for the irreverent and irrelevant new development. How can we explain away our new legacy (perhaps yet un-built but ever present) of Yankee Stadium, Atlantic Yards, presumptuous glass towers which dwarf historical tenement neighborhoods and cast seemingly endless shadows? Organizers and residents and whole communities © 2008, The New York Times have been disregarded in blatant developer favoritism, which is operating in a mode that “seems to be part of a much bigger reversal in the public process set up to handle development proposals” (as Tom Angotti, Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and writer for Gotham Gazette, puts it).3 How can we justify the destruction of the 1963 O’Toole Building, located within a long-recognized landmark district, in the name of enabling a hospital to become a developer? Let me leave the explanation of that one to The New York Times, which in April 2008 proclaimed, You don’t need to love the building to grasp its historical value.…The O’Toole Building is part of a complex historical narrative in which competing values are always jostling for attention. This is not simply a question of losing a building; it’s about masking those complexities and reducing New York history to a caricature. Ultimately, it’s a form of collective amnesia.4 By allowing these atrocities in our urban environment, we are not only empowering destruction but denying history.5 73

This is not only a haunting story about the annihilation of our spaces, the legacy of hard-won battles to create and sustain badly needed tree-rich parks or thriving patches of brownstone neighborhoods or protected landmark districts. Our social fabric is suffering too.

here, pumping life into the veins which are your streets and your schools and your subway stations. Our spirit is stronger than the dollars which were lost. You can thank us by exchanging stadium projects for new parks, by committing yourself to the preservation of historic places, by investing in our suffering neighborhoods.

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; in 2006 the Brookings Institution released a study reporting that over the past three decades the middle-class population in New York has dwindled.6 This city has become a parody of the diversity it once represented; in April 2007, Gotham Gazette reported that the family income for a white family with a child under 5 was $285,000 while the median income of its black counterpart was almost 10 times less ($31,171).7

Never has the impetus for change been so starkly visible, and never has this city needed it so much. This is not a breakup moment, a letdown notice, a white flag of surrender; we are ready to resurrect our relationship. This is an opportunity for change. This, New York, is the beginning of now.

Despite what some may believe or hope or wish, higher incomes do not always translate to better neighborhoods. New York, your people are slipping through the cracks as middle-class neighborhoods disappear and segregation by income becomes systemic. Take, for example, Park Slope; in the 1970s it was primarily home to middle-class families. Since then and throughout the 1980s and 1990s the neighborhood has gentrified so radically that it now ranks as one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city.8 Development has manifested in such a way that new neighborhoods are not filling the shoes of gentrifying ones. Certainly gentrification is not a new phenomenon in this city, where upwardly-mobile processes of change have been socio-culturally recognized at least as far back as the “Bohemianization” of Greenwich Village during the 1960s. But as neo-liberal policy has gained footing, protective measures have not been taken by the public sector to ensure the stability of the middle class. Policymakers have stood idle as the divide has grown. The span of my lifetime is a narrative of unfulfilled promises of affordable housing and better jobs. The dictatorial power of the financial sector, which lives and breathes (or used to) on one of your own streets, has been a decisive component of the growing divide. Barely three decades have passed since community activists persuaded Congress to actively enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act and pass the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act; our communities are again suffering the impacts of racially-biased lending practices. The legacy of redlining is still fresh in Bushwick and Fordham and Jamaica, where sub-prime mortgage rates are among the highest in the city. In these neighborhoods, and others, where working-class and middle-class people have spent their lifetimes working tirelessly towards creating safer neighborhoods and achieving leadership, they have suddenly found themselves losing their homes. Foreclosures have spread like an epidemic.9 You have turned a blind eye New York, allowing the greed of Wall Street to obscure your investment and interest in the other 303 square miles of streets which make up this city.10 Now Lehman and Merrill have been left behind, the flags of the Stock Exchange lowered to half mast; the end of a romance. But the rest of us are still 74

Always yours,

Andrea Marpillero-Colomina References: 1In fact, Spalding Gray wrote a letter entitled “Dear New York City…” in the aftermath of 9/11. After his death in 2004, it was published in The New York Times on September 11, 2005. 2NYC

Department of City Planning, “The current population of New York City (2006)”. Online: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/popcur.shtml, accessed December 2008

3Angotti,

Tom, “Atlantic Yards: Through The Looking Glass”. Gotham Gazette. November 2005. Online: http://www. gothamgazette.com/article/landuse/20051115/12/1654, accessed December 2008.

4Ouroussoff,

Nicolai, “In Village, a Proposal That Erases History”. The New York Times. April 1, 2008.

5In November 2008, the Landmarks Preservation Committee voted in favor of demolishing the building, which was designed by New Orleans architect Albert Ledner, and in the early 1960s was one of the first in the city to break with the Modernist mainstream. (see footnote 4) 6Galster,

George; Cutsinger, Jackie; Booza, Jason C., “Where Did They Go? The Decline of Middle-Income Neighborhoods in Metropolitan America”. The Brookings Institution. June 2006. 7Gotham

Gazette, “Saving New York’s Middle Class”. 16 April 2007. Online: http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/issueoftheweek/20070416/200/2149, accessed December 2008.

8Berube,

Alan, “The Middle-Class is Missing (New York)”. New York Daily News. July 8, 2006.

9Fernandez,

Manny, “Door to Door, Foreclosure Knocks Here.” The New York Times. 18 October 2008.

10US

Census, “New York City Geography Quick Facts: Land Area (square miles).” Online: http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/36/3651000.html, accessed December 2008.

Historic Map of Columbia University and Morningsside Heights Courtesy of the University of Texas, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/new_york.html

Utopia in America Front Cover U, New Harmony, Indiana, 1838, F. Bate, printed from a plan by Robert Owen T, Seaside, Florida, © 2001, East St. Louis Action Research Project, www.eslarp.uiuc.edu O, New Harmony, Indiana, courtesy of http://worldconnect.rootsweb.com/~garyscottcollins P, Seaside, Florida, © 2008, Seaside Institute, www.seaside-institute.org I, New Harmony, Indiana, 1832-33, Karl Bodmer A, Seaside, Florida, house featured in The Truman Show, © 2005 Bryan & Leigh, www.keighly.net Back Cover Right, New Harmony, Indiana, © 2008 f_o_papurutzi, Flickr.com Left, Utopia on Sale at Target, Baltimore, Maryland, © 2008 Kevin Leichner