Nerds get down and...

...[fill in the blank].



I had the pleasure of emceeing the Ignite presentations for Transportation Camp this past Saturday. Great presentations stories from a bunch of different nerds - academics, mobility, transit, marketing, DOT, and planning; packed room, impressive for a Saturday night in New York City. Storytelling is so important when untangling complicated issues. The ability to weave a narrative is endlessly useful for problem-solving.

I also had the fun of declaring two winners - an impromptu decision before the event to raise the stakes. The winners for amazing storytelling were Chris Pangilinan from DC and Neil Freeman from NYC. Can't wait to see what will come out of Transportation Camp West.

I do have to share Neil's project: The Daily Pothole. Just try not to fall in love with this! p.s. the name comes from the longstanding daily report that the road crews send around. nothing beats the real thing.


image from The Daily Pothole

DIY Median Point

Sick of sidewalk clutter? Put those newspaper dispensers in the street to create your own median point. A 15 minute observation showed that such a median point channelized cars in a much better way, making cars more predictable for pedestrians and cyclists. But interestingly, it also did not impede vehicle throughput, speed, or turns in any way.

I stumbled onto this in the morning yesterday and was surprised to find it still hanging out in the street at the end of the day. Nice.

Enjoy some sun on a chilly day

Upcoming: TransportationCamp - Do Not Miss

Rift #26 (Heimaey Houses), Marion Belanger, print available at 20x200.

At a recent TED talk, David Brooks, the columnist, asked, “"Why are the most socially attuned people on earth completely dehumanized when they think about policy?”

That is exactly at the heart of the challenge of understanding transportation.

Everyone knows what it’s like to use transportation – whether you walk, bike, bus, train, or drive, or a combination of any of those. These collective – yet uniquely individual - experiences are the fodder of many cocktail receptions. You can walk up to any stranger at a party and have a lively conversation for a half hour just by asking them, “how did you get here?”

From the perspective of making the policy that enables walking, biking, busing, etc, transportation is traditionally a top-down, expert-driven practice and can appear divorced from social acuity. (Come to my session at Transportation Camp to peer into the dark chasm that is the current federal transportation program. If you’re curious, there are many good books on how things in transportation got this way.)

It’s an exaggeration to say that people thinking about policy have been dehumanized though. The real problem is that the federal transportation program is broken and policymakers must struggle with an outdated structure to deliver the types of projects that the public really wants or needs. The choice we’ve made to depend on cars today forces us to send - on a daily basis - nearly $1 billion overseas, often to unstable regimes. The US transportation system currently eats up 70 percent of our oil supply. This consumption comes with a high environmental price - transportation accounts for 30 percent of US carbon emissions, and of that 30 percent, nearly 80 percent comes from our surface transportation system alone. At the same time, attempts to change the system seem futile when compared with emerging economies across the globe: China spends 9 percent of its GDP on infrastructure while we spend a paltry 2 percent.

What the public fundamentally knows about how broken the transportation system though is not from scrutinizing foreign policy or emission regulation - it's through the experience of moving around. It is much harder – more expensive, more time consuming – for people to do the everyday things they need to do. And the numbers bear witness to the hardship that our current transportation system brings: although transportation funding has increased every year, dollars lost due to congestion have also risen proportionately. Sometimes, people even risk their lives trying to get around, walking down wide, fast-moving streets without sidewalks, for example. Traffic crashes are leading cause of preventable injuries and deaths - worldwide. This has got to end.

Connecting the bottom – “how did you get to this party?” – to the top – “where should we put our billions of public dollars in transportation funding” – is a big task indeed. That is why conferences like Transportation Camp should be important to anyone who cares about how the world is positioning itself for the future. Conversations between people of all backgrounds who have come together to work on focused, shared problems are how innovation happens. This is particularly important when tackling structural issues, like the US transportation system. Every incremental collaborative step is a move towards fixing it. Now, let’s get to work.

Transportation Camp is happening March 5-6 in New York City and March 19-20 in San Francisco. Visit the web site or tumblr for more information, or follow on twitter.

Parting shot

We need to get from this, while beautifully rendered, still eons away from people


to this - why should ciclovias only happen on special days?

via flickr, mcas_sf

How to maintain walkability on a busy sidewalk

Such a small thing, but it makes a world of difference. It's a little hard to see here: the glass mender (?) was fixing a crack and had his generator hooked up closer to the power source than he could be. He wound the wire around the door frame via the scaffolding. So nice - people can still easily enter and exit the store and your mending will not be interrupted.

It reminded me of this image from this Copenhagenize post.

Play the subway

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen.

NYC subway system as an interactive string instrument, here's the artist's explanation of the project.

Silver Spring - parking lot to park to ice skating!

An update on the little space in Silver Spring about which I posted a couple years ago. The folks there just keep on going with programming ideas. Here it is in full winter glory - ice skating! And is that a permanent structure to provide some shelter for the public space? What a beautiful sight.
(Thanks Patee!)

Ride the talk

It's been quiet here, but not for lack of activity elsewhere. In addition to its facelift, Planning Corps' work on Queens Blvd got a press mention, the transportation climate change project is gathering steam, and we're collaborating in some great new ways.

In between the activity, we managed to hop on the Capital Bike Share one night while we were all in DC for the Transportation Research Board's Annual Meeting. What can I say? This video is a little snippet of the fun and makes me incredibly happy. Nothing beats riding bikes with friends.

Capital Bikeshare Chic from Aurash Khawarzad on Vimeo.

Return to Home

This Metropolis article on bringing design and urbanism excellence to Syracuse is enough to make me feel that more New York transplants should return to the Rust Belt cities from where they came, and apply there all the energy and ideas that they've accumulated.

International Public Space Library

I love the idea of leaving books around a public space for others to enjoy and share (something I have always done when I've traveled - train seats, park benches, beach hammocks). So here it is, an official Ex Libris to formalize an International Public Space Library brought to you by the self-described secretive Momentech.

Not so secretly, I do wish the logo was nicer, but I'll take the concept. People, you can easily share your books without the label - but I guess formalizing it motivates people to pay it forward.

Conversation about Planning Corps

The fabulous people at MIT's Colab Radio asked us to write a short bit about the evolution of Planning Corps. Here it is. If you've never visited the site, you'll really enjoy the firsthand experience of planners trying their hand at all types of innovations to make our cities better.

Speaking of which, Planning Corps is having another working session Thursday, October 28. Join us!

A Love Letter to Syracuse

A beautiful collaboration of a project, A Love Letter to Syracuse was pulled together by the Near Westside Initiative and Colab, a design collaborative out of Syracuse University. Art by Steve Powers, aka ESPO. Go Cuse!

A tree walk around the block

A few locust trees here, plus a maple, maybe?

Last weekend I went out with Liz Barry and Planning Corps for a test run of the methodology that Liz and a group of other ecologists, mappers, and designers are developing for the 2015 street tree census. As Liz explained to me, street trees are part of our city's urban infrastructure, and the more that we know about them and their mini-habitat, the more that we can develop other systems to complement the existing system, such as bioswales, stormwater management, etc. Makes perfect sense.

Liz and I paired up and started down the block. We were quickly outpaced by the other groups, because it turns out that Liz loves talking to people* and nearly every tree was in more or less in the custody of the building which it fronted. We wouldn't even get to the next tree without a resident coming out to ask us what we were doing. We heard about the love of trees; the love of birds in the trees; the love of the genus of trees, but not of tree stewardship itself; and the ultimate story, requited love of high school sweethearts after 40 years of being apart. And I in turn learned to ID trees, something I used to be able to do but lost along the way.

It was a lovely afternoon. Something about being on the street and physically engaging with it. Something about grabbing hold about the details about the place where you live. We literally had to hug each tree to measure its circumference. Also, I thought a lot about scale and how to engage people to make this tree survey happen. The 1995 (is that the last one?) survey relied on volunteers. What will the 2015 survey entail? How will it dovetail with One Million Trees? I'm sure they're already working on it, but much more to come.

*It turns out that Liz and I might have been fated to meet each other. I realized much later that she was briefly profiled here years ago for one of her earlier projects, Talk to Me.

Planning Corps No. 6 - Queens Boulevard

Grand Boulevard, Barcelona


Champs Elysees, Paris
Both images via Huge Ass City


Queens Boulevard, Forest Hills, looking westward, circa ?


Queens Boulevard, Forest Hills, today

This Thursday, 6:30 PM, hosted by H3, we'll be tackling Queens Boulevard, drawing up potential cross-sections, discussing their viability, coming up workable themes. Bring ideas, sketches. You're encouraged to draw, no judgments on skill. (Haven't you always wanted to give it a try? This is your chance!) You can find base map and other materials here, full details here. Hope to see you there!

Hacking the City

Love this project, Hacking the City, an experimental exhibition curated by Museum Folkwang. Ends September 26, 2010, so check it out now.

Thanks Lisa!

Perceptions of change: streets, buildings, neighborhoods

The water feature in the new plaza in Columbia Heights at 14th St NW and Park St only gets busier as the night goes on.

By some amazing serendipitous twist, I had the pleasure of staying last week with a writer who has worked in the community development, historic preservation, transportation, and public space arena. We got to talking about her neighborhood, Columbia Heights, which has gone through a lot of change in the last few years. A fascinating conversation, in that it underscored just how much context and firsthand experience of living through change informs our lens when deciding the type of change we want with our spaces.

Columbia Heights was recently rezoned, and instead of bundling the parcels for one developer, the local community development corporation decided to put each parcel out so that several developers would have a hand in the corridor. Having lived with the longstanding Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, this strategy didn't sound off any alarms for me. Different developers seemed to reduce the risk of a monolithic perspective dominating the area. Lisa had a another perspective: with so many developers weighing in on the neighborhood, cohesiveness was eroded and the opportunity to contextualize the new developments with the surrounding community was lost. No judgment here, the merits of this perspective are pretty clear.

The second differing opinion had to do with the design of the Dance Institute of Washington's new building. I had walked by it a few times and liked how it allowed pedestrians to see what was going on inside, a greater emphasis of opening up the studio to the neighborhood.


The dance studios for the Dance Institute of Washington are transparent to the users of the street below.


This corner of a rehearsal studio in the redesigned building in Lincoln Center allows passersby to get a glimpse of the dance students.

My positive impression was perhaps largely informed by my habit during college of walking by the performing arts building on my way home after a long day. It was lovely to see the dancers working at the barre after spending hours studying in the stacks. As a mom, Lisa was concerned about the experience of the kids; me without kids, this perspective was simply not available to me.

In spite of our differing opinions, we had a great conversation about the neighborhood. Or perhaps, because of our differing opinions, we did. She helped me understand another way of looking. And it reminded me that we're constantly writing and re-writing the narratives for our neighborhoods.

Next Planning Corps - July 28

photograph by Nina Ahn

Yo yo yo, it's that time again. Planning Corps meets once a month (usually at the end) and is a way for planners to geek out, meet other planners, share a beer, and all in the act of advancing a non-profit's cause. Thank goodness for Planning Corps - a lifeline for me! A chance to apply planning at a local scale, always good for the brain, heart, and soul. We've been working on Queens Boulevard, public plazas, citizen engagement, and mapping neighborhoods. Unless otherwise posted between now and then, the next session will be at the Open Plans penthouse, 148 Lafayette at 6:30, Wednesday, July 28. Check the site for an agenda (should be up soon) and see you there!

New news

"the insistence of distance" by Richard T. Walker via vvork

When I told a friend that I recently joined the Carnegie Endowment, his response was, so you're leaving planning? That's an emphatic NO. (Someone else asked me how I could choose between bike lanes and world peace.)

At face value, I get what he's suggesting. No more sketching out re-designs for street intersections, fewer opportunities to examine maps, plans, surveys, reviewing EIS, and facilitating workshops.

But at another level, I think planning is about chipping away at things and arriving at land use and transportation policies - all part of the larger built environment policy family - that promote better strategies for the way we want to live and for how we can secure a positive future. The issues that concern us as planners are very connected and operate at many scales, including national and global. Does this really need to be said again? More on my project soon, with a project site to be launched this fall. In the meantime, I'll still be posting about public space (big and small) items here, and will also be continuing to work on Planning Corps which you should totally check out in person if you haven't already.

Lots being done...

Very fun going through the index of Project M:

Project M is an intensive summer program designed to inspire young graphic designers, writers, photographers and other creative people that their work can have a positive and significant impact on the world.

Ideas for shifting American Dream

"Housing Development at Different Stages, Las Vegas, NV, March 2005" by Alex Maclean at the jen bekman gallery

...that's right, suburbs! The finalists from Build a Better Burb competition are up, and the People's Choice vote is open till October 4. Love that this competition merges planning and design thinking.

I recently spent some time in suburbs myself and personally dislike (verging on hate) the experience, but am endlessly fascinated by how people LOVE living in that environment. Visiting is one thing, but living? That's all I can think of when we drive through the endless streets of detached houses located a drive away from anything else - people love living like this. It's truly a dream come true for many.

But when you piece together what they go through to live this dream, it seems to be a huge hassle and expensive too. On an individual level, I guess people like choosing the hassles they're willing to live with. On a community level though, the multitude of individual choices just don't mesh well, never mind the long-term problems with supporting developments of this type...and on and on. So these competition ideas each have great potential, each a creative spin on some au courant planning basics. There were only a few out of the 20 odd finalists that dealt more deeply with regionalism.

Postscript: I had a suspicion I've written about the American Dream before, the immigrant experience seems to frame things in a way that's unavoidable for me: how a city in another country thinks about its life dreams, how housing development companies capitalized on the american dream and then on the disillusionment with this dream. Whoa.