Art for All

As ridiculous as it might seem, I fell in love with a poster exhibit this past weekend. The posters are from one of the most ambitious campaigns to encourage people to use public transport and staged by London Transport. Original art was commissioned and the results are an amazing exploration of consumption and place, and the creation of a strong civic identity. (The title of the show was taken from a 1948 show at the Victoria and Albert Museum that exhibited the original artwork for the posters.) The Yale exhibit site has a slide show of some of the posters - I highly recommend the book. The graphic design and art are truly beautiful. Below is a favorite by Tom Purvis. Can we do a poster contest, MTA? WMATA?

Idea #2: Public Service Announcement

I have a Los Angeles bestie who I get to see about once a year. She's involved in the public space scene there - on the board of the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, works at Getty, super talented, etc etc. Every time we get together, we show each other the latest in our respective cities, then inevitably get going on all the fun projects we want to do. Above is a little snapshot of one of those sessions from 2007. I love that we got so excited about this (you be the judge of the merit of the ideas). We were going to call our bi-coastal collaboration "Public S.A." - for Public Service Announcement. I still love the name.

About this blog

Not sure where this came from...happy to credit it...

This blog started back in 2004 as a way to track public space issues that interested me. Way back then, Curbed was the reliable neighborhood development blog (rather than a hack for realtors). Jen Bekman of the eponymous gallery used to gather us design, city, urbanist, architecture bloggers together for drinks every so often. Today, it would have to be a large bar to fit just the architecture bloggers out there.

I felt OK with amateurly covering this space back then because there weren't too many others covering it. Obviously, things change, and this space changed. Tracking news stories became more about how public space gets won (markets, streets, parks, etc). It got more personal as I managed to talk my way into working at a few favorite organizations - Project for Public Spaces, Transportation Alternatives, ZGF - who were tackling the issue in their own ways. Still amateur, but different.

Fast forward today. It's amazing how much the proliferation of media and free tools has led to such great coverage of space, design, architecture, urbanism, planning, and everything in between. I stopped tracking articles about public spaces, development, and cities because so many places did it so well (and much better than me).

My interest in public spaces started broadly. I came to focus on transportation (i.e., 80% of NYC public space are its streets). From transportation, I opened up to climate change and energy (i.e., 70% of our oil is consumed for transportation purposes). And now I've come full circle back to cities (i.e., metropolitan regions take up only 2% of the earth's land mass but are responsible for 70% of global emissions).

Over the course of the next few months, I'll be developing ideas and activities around cities, energy, and climate change. After being able to work on a variety of different scales, with various communities, and in design, planning, and policy, I feel that tying this broad, long-term, global issue - climate - to a very tangible, rooted perspective - cities - is a good way to try. The point is not to duplicate the wonderful work that so many organizations are doing on urban policy. The point is to advance energy and climate policy by examining opportunities and challenges in governance, policy, innovation, systems, and participation, through the lens of cities. The second point is to amplify the work that others are doing on urban policy and in elevating the profile of cities more generally.

I'm really excited about this. I've thought a lot about whether I should shut BttN down, since it really no longer is a place to come and look at public space ideas, but I think I'll keep it up for the rare occasion that I find something worth sharing. It's a chance to continue noting a couple of things important to me: the smallest scales (that's why I love little urban interventions) when working on big policy. And signals of cultural shifts afoot - hence the inclusion of art on this site.

That's where things are in 2011. Let's see how this goes!

Idea #1: Adopt-a-Stop

I was cleaning out my files today on the train and found a bunch of short documents squirreled away all over my laptop (not the most organized filer here.) I guess I used to sit down and write out a random public space idea, then save and forget all about it. Below is the first one, exactly as I wrote it a few years ago. It's silly and ingenuous and not well-developed - but I did laugh.

Small, interstitial public spaces are the best opportunities to improve the experience of a city dweller. Though New York City has lately paid much attention to reclaiming public space such as pop-up cafes, new public plazas from underutilized street space, the bus stop – and the bus layover space, with its 15 feet of curb – is an underutilized space as well. And of all of New York City’s residents, the bus rider’s experience is one given the least attention.

This is a campaign to provide to bus riders a truly magnificent experience, one that equals the benefits they provide the city by not driving a car, polluting the air, and endangering its citizens. Historically, bus riders have been viewed as second class citizens. This is perhaps illustrated by the way Charlotte, NC, in the 1980s encouraged the development of skywalks, pristine walkways that protected privileged citizens from the weather as well as providing access to retail. Down below, on the messiness of the street, no shelter was provided for bus riders. They were forced to stand up to climate and few amenities.

The campaign will identify popular bus stops – those with plenty of riders but with very few amenities. (Though NYC has launched a new street furniture system with new bus shelters, the shelters are expensive enough and sidewalk space scarce enough that not all bus stops will have shelters.) Adopt-a-Stop would pair the bus stop with a local civic organization. On a designated day of the year, the group will design an experience for riders alighting the bus at that particular stop. This will draw attention to the highly utilized bus stop system and greatly underserved bus ridership in NYC. Why shouldn’t bus riders receive the same high quality experience as other people on the street?

Yes, why the hell not?? And to get your creative juices going, here's a set of amazing bus shelters.

Soviet Style


Beat the cold in Minneapolis



In Unst

This one is famously community-oriented.

Tons more on flickr...

Towns and stadiums suffering together

Image from NYT

Ah, the dream of stadiums as a driver of economic growth. It does happen. But it's not a quick fix.

The NYT has an interesting article today, "Company's Arenas Leave Cities with Big Problems." The article describes the pain several smaller towns in more remote locations are experiencing because of their stadium strategies. They are now left with the high costs of maintaining the building and paying back the initial debt without the expected revenue. Other city services are being cut to keep the stadium afloat. There are few available buyers for stadiums, though I do recall a moment during the real estate bubble when there were quite a few international buyers for unattractive real estate.

(Apparently the cities bought into the sales job from Global Entertainment, promised. Full list of stadiums this company helped build, pdf.)

[I've written a few times about stadiums at BttN and interestingly, this post, A stadium round-up is consistently one of the most popular pages on this site. (Probably because sports fans trying to find a nearby stadium vastly outnumber urban nerds.)]

Who is making progress on cities, climate change, and policy?

images by Vera Frankel, rehearsals for String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video, 1974 from here

I'll ask it once again, who (person or organization) do you think is making good progress on cities, climate change and policy? It can be on any scale - urban intervention, city-wide, sectoral, regional, state, national, supranational, bilateral, multinational...you choose. I want to know who your city-climate change heroes are. You can define action, who does it, how much, what success is, etc. The only caveat is that your nominee should deal with policy somehow - effectively, the rules that allow multiple actors to engage with one another while avoiding public harm (btw, this is such a low bar that I feel it needs a disclaimer - this should not be a standard for public policy!)

Projet Nid du Poule

Filling in the cracks - until the city decides that the sidewalks are worth taking care of? Cool project by juliana santacruz herrera.

Happy Earth Day

From Jason Polan's Every Person in New York

I know this is hokey, but it being earth day (and being bombarded by everyone's green newsletter) made me a bit reflective about things have progressed since I started this blog back in 2004 - both in "public spaces" and with my work too. I'm constantly reminded that everything goes back to people - being able to connect with others and thus remember why we're all working on this grand project together.

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!