Environmental Art Activismtag:www.nyu.edu,2010:/projects/xdesign/artact//62007-05-04T16:42:50ZMovable Type 3.33Marissa Jahn lecture in clips!tag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.2192007-05-04T16:30:31Z2007-05-04T16:42:50Z Marissa Jahn, artist and curator, speaks about social space of seeds, anti-advertising, and the I-5 project. POND http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/01 Pond 1.mp3...admin
Marissa Jahn, artist and curator, speaks about social space of seeds, anti-advertising, and the I-5 project.
POND
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/01 Pond 1.mp3
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http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/02 Egyptian Representation 1.mp3
Plant properties
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/03 Clover properties.mp3
Throw n' Sow
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/04Throw n sow.mp3
One Tree
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/06one tree.mp3
Victory Gardens
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/07Victory Gardens.mp3
Exhibition: "Shop Dropping"
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/08Shop Dropping.mp3
Invisible-5
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/09Invisible 5.mp3
Q&A: expertise and artist's role
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/091q n a_ expertise and artists.mp3
Q&A: public engagement and money
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Marissa Jahn/092q n a_ public engagement.mp3
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Readings for April 9 Thackara: design in the bubbletag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.2122007-04-11T00:22:04Z2007-04-11T04:28:01ZThe thesis of Thackara's book is that design got us into this mess, design can/must get us out. As you write up your analysis it is important to keep in mind that you are doing so in order to provide...admin
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/05bubble_space.pdf
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/08bubble_literacy.pdfhttp://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/10bubble_flow.pdf]]>
Corrado Poli "Traffic Revolution" April 18tag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.2112007-04-11T00:16:13Z2007-04-11T00:18:52ZCorrado Poli TRAFFIC REVOLUTION: LESS MOBILITY, MORE COMMUNICATION Presentation on April 18 @9:30 am by Corrado Poli on "TRAFFIC REVOLUTION. Less mobility more communication. The political problem of traffic plans from transportation engineering to communication strategies. Techniques, problems and environmental...admin
TRAFFIC REVOLUTION: LESS MOBILITY, MORE COMMUNICATION
Presentation on April 18 @9:30 am by Corrado Poli on "TRAFFIC REVOLUTION. Less mobility more communication. The political problem of traffic plans from transportation engineering to communication strategies. Techniques, problems and environmental solutions".
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SYNTHESIS
Corrado Poli’s “Traffic Revolution” aims at undermining some entrenched biases regarding professional and economic monopolies in urban mobility planning.
The first part of the essay critically analyzes decision-making and planning related to urban traffic policies. In the second part, some methods and tools are presented. They intend to remove biases and then lead to problem-creating “solutions”.
“Traffic Revolution” challenges the old-established idea that links transport with communication. Traffic planning in urban areas should begin with the analysis of citizens’ behavior and preferences instead of just focusing on road or rail construction. A series of new projects are presented which include mobility demand reduction and focus on social planning.
REVIEW
“If one’s only tool is a hammer, then all problems look like nails”. This aphorism by Mark Twain synthesizes the content of Corrado Poli’s new essay. All over the world, urban traffic policies and the building of traffic-related infrastructures, have failed either to satisfy the mobility demand or to cope with high environmental impacts. Nonetheless, decision-makers have never really questioned the traditional approach. Moreover, in order to find a solution, they keep asking the same professionals who have been failing for at least forty years and are thus responsible for the current unsustainable situation.
“TRAFFIC REVOLUTION. Less Mobility, More Communication” also includes a long subtitle that better explains its content. It goes: “The political problem of traffic plans from transport engineering to communication development. Techniques, problems and environmentalist solutions”. Poli’s approach is far-reaching. The author proposes a drastic change in the usual method of how urban mobility problems are coped with. He applies humanities approach and social sciences tools to understand and solve it. The first assumption is that the usual transport engineering techniques are the very cause of the problems we want to disentangle.
The essay is skillfully written and is easy to read. Poli is actually a journalist and a writer besides being Professor of Economics and Environmental Ethics at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and a consultant to many local and central governments on urban and traffic planning. The arguments are always consistent, giving detailed information and are based on sound research combined with a long lasting direct experience. Nonetheless, the tone often swings to irony and complicity with the reader. Corrado Poli makes it easy reading by including examples, anecdotes and quotations at the beginning of each chapter. Among these quotations, the first one – by Marguerite Yourcenar –presents the real sense of the essay: “As usual there were plenty of practical reasons to justify the absurd and drive to the impossible”. It can translate into the question: “How many useless infrastructures – highways, tunnels, bridges, underground rails, etc. – have been built claiming inexistent ‘practical’ reasons?”
“Traffic Revolution” implies infringing some professional and economic monopolies. In public administration, civil engineers, who associate with construction companies, have dominated the traffic policy debate and management. The essay challenges the old-established idea that equals communication and transport. On the contrary, the starting point of mobility plans should be the analysis of citizens’ behaviors and preferences. One of the priorities should be the containment of the constructions’ role in coping with mobility demand problems. Corrado Poli claims that also the mass/public transportation infrastructures should be included in the containment process. On this ground a series of projects for reducing mobility demand are proposed which are based on democratic social planning methods. Although the book is not a handbook, in the second part of it the author proposes explicit planning methods and applicable tools. Both the first and the second part of Corrado Poli’s “Traffic Revolution” are convincing. However, the first more theoretical part is definitely more original and insightful than the second, at least for the American public.
The book is to be read together with the companion essay (forthcoming) on European middle-size cities. These cities – which prove to have the highest quality of living standard in the world – are the model to imitate for a new urban organization. However, they undergo the organizational and cultural power of the big cities. Metropolises colonize middle size cities by imposing a technology unsuitable to a smaller scale as it was devised for (not) solving large urban areas problems.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Corrado Poli is Professor of Economics and Environmental Ethics at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He also heads the Environmental Communication Laboratory at the same University. Beginning January 2007 he will be Senior International Urban Fellow at The Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies, Baltimore. Dr. Poli has chaired and managed public Bodies and serves on journals boards. He has taught at several Italian and foreign universities such as The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimora (USA) and Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (Australia). Dr. Poli consults on urban policy and environmental issues and is an editorialist for newspapers and TV networks.
Syllabus/Projectstag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.2102007-04-11T00:07:49Z2007-04-11T00:14:55ZHere is the final syllabus with grade breakdown and project descriptions http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/ArtActGradeScheme.pdf...admin
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/ArtActGradeScheme.pdf]]>
Reading for April 2: Global Warming Survival Guidetag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1982007-04-02T16:47:08Z2007-04-02T16:52:35Z Attached is the special double issue published in TIME magazine, April 9, 2007 "The Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference" http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/TIME001.pdf Please post your comments based on a critical assessment of this...admin
Attached is the special double issue published in TIME magazine, April 9, 2007
"The Global Warming Survival Guide: 51 Things You Can Do to Make a Difference"
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/TIME001.pdf
Please post your comments based on a critical assessment of this journalistic piece.]]>
Collen Jerolmack: the "birdman"tag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1962007-03-23T15:34:00Z2007-03-23T15:42:04Z Here are clips from Collen's lecture on March 21st http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/podcast/collen clips.mp3 Compare his sociological comparative notes with our class perception of pigeons from the beginning of the semester: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/podcast/Jeremin_Jan22_Pigeons.mp3...admin
Here are clips from Collen's lecture on March 21st
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/podcast/collen clips.mp3
Compare his sociological comparative notes with our class perception of pigeons from the beginning of the semester:
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/podcast/Jeremin_Jan22_Pigeons.mp3]]>
Reading for March 1: The Hidden Life of Garbagetag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1942007-03-06T23:55:23Z2007-03-06T23:57:56ZIntroduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 9 "Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage", by Heather Rogers http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Garbage002.pdf...admin
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Garbage002.pdf]]>
Exhibition: Francis Alys at David Zwirnertag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1912007-03-04T02:39:15Z2007-03-23T15:15:51Z http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/127/index.htm February 15 - March 17 2007 David Zwirner 525 West 19 Street New York, NY 10011 A compulsive wanderer, Francis Alÿs is known for his in-depth projects in a wide range of media including documentary film, painting, photography,...adminhttp://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/127/index.htm
February 15 - March 17 2007
David Zwirner
525 West 19 Street
New York, NY 10011
A compulsive wanderer, Francis Alÿs is known for his in-depth projects in a wide range of media including documentary film, painting, photography, performance and video. Many of his works involve intense observation and recording of the
social, cultural and economic conditions of particular places, usually conceived during walks through urban areas.... ]]>
For example, The Modern Procession (2002), chronicles the movement of artworks from MoMA to Queens before the remodeling and expansion of their Manhattan galleries. In Cuentos Patrióticos (1997), a flock of sheep circle the main
flag pole on the Plaza del Zócalo in Mexico City as a political metaphor. Filmed in the same plaza, Zócalo (1999) records the same flag pole as it becomes an accidental sun clock over the course of a day. Some projects focus more intently on
the people who live in Alÿs’s subject cities. Beggars (2002-2004), comprises an 80-slide carousel with images of street
people asking for money at the entrance to the subway in Mexico City, and When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) documents a large group of people outside the Peruvian capital as they slowly and deliberately “move” a large sand dune a short distance using shovels. In these and his many other projects, which are typically displayed along with working notes, drawings, paintings, photographs and ephemeral material employed in their processes, Alÿs creates powerfully original metaphors for human will.
SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POETIC CAN BECOME POLITICAL AND SOMETIMES DOING SOMETHING POLITICAL CAN BECOME POETIC, which includes a film in collaboration with Julien Devaux as well as a map of Alÿs’s journey, photocollages, paintings, drawings, and a group of sculptures, was exhibited in part at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2005. The film, which revisits the artist’s 1995 work entitled The Leak, shows Alÿs carrying a dripping can of green paint along the armistice boundary that Moshe Dayan marked on a map with green pencil after Israel’s War
of Independence ended in 1948. The piece questions the physicality and cultural relevance of the Green Line, its function as a social and spiritual division in the city of Jerusalem, and its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict. With this work, Alÿs asks: Can an artistic intervention truly bring about an unforeseen way of thinking, or it is more a
matter of creating a sensation of "meaninglessness" that shows the absurdity of the situation? Can an artistic intervention translate social tensions into narratives that in turn intervene in the imaginary landscape of a place? Can an absurd act provoke a transgression that makes you abandon the standard assumptions on the sources of conflict? Can those kinds of artistic acts bring about the possibility of change? In any case, how can art remain politically significant without assuming a doctrinal standpoint or aspiring to become social activism? For the moment, I am exploring the following
axiom: Sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic.
Green Manhattantag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1902007-03-04T02:22:53Z2007-03-23T13:52:55ZGREEN MANHATTAN; OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS DAVID OWEN. The New Yorker New York:Oct 18, 2004. Vol. 80, Iss. 31, p 111-123 Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare. However, Owen says that by...admin
GREEN MANHATTAN; OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
DAVID OWEN. The New Yorker New York:Oct 18, 2004. Vol. 80, Iss. 31, p 111-123
Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as
an ecological nightmare. However, Owen says that by most significant
measures, New York is the greenest community in the US.
Full Text (5739 words)
(Originally published in The New Yorker. Compilation copyright (c) 2004
The Conde Nast Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young
and naive and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first
home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For
seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would
strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space
measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a
dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery
shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used
public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom
acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked
out to about a dollar a day.
The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth
Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New
Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland
of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in
comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental
responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the
greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities
in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the
environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a
category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average
Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole
hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely
owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per
cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by
bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in
general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County.
New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were
granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.
"Anyplace that has such tall buildings and heavy traffic is obviously
an environmental disaster--except that it isn't," John Holtzclaw, a
transportation consultant for the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources
Defense Council, told me. "If New Yorkers lived at the typical American
sprawl density of three households per residential acre, they would
require many times as much land. They'd be driving cars, and they'd
have huge lawns and be using pesticides and fertilizers on them, and
then they'd be overwatering their lawns, so that runoff would go into
streams." The key to New York's relative environmental benignity is its
extreme compactness. Manhattan's population density is more than eight
hundred times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half
million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces
their opportunities to be wasteful, and forces the majority to live in
some of the most inherently energy-efficient residential structures in
the world: apartment buildings. It also frees huge tracts of land for
the rest of America to sprawl into.
My wife and I had our first child in 1984. We had both grown up in
suburbs, and we decided that we didn't want to raise our tiny daughter
in a huge city. Shortly after she learned to walk, we moved to a small
town in northwestern Connecticut, about ninety miles north of midtown
Manhattan. Our house, which was built in the late seventeen-hundreds,
is across a dirt road from a nature preserve and is shaded by tall
white-pine trees. After big rains, we can hear a swollen creek rushing
by at the bottom of the hill. Deer, wild turkeys, and the occasional
black bear feed themselves in our yard. From the end of our driveway, I
can walk several miles through woods to an abandoned nineteenth-century
railway tunnel, while crossing only one paved road.
Yet our move was an ecological catastrophe. Our consumption of
electricity went from roughly four thousand kilowatt-hours a year,
toward the end of our time in New York, to almost thirty thousand
kilowatt-hours in 2003--and our house doesn't even have central air-
conditioning. We bought a car shortly before we moved, and another one
soon after we arrived, and a third one ten years later. (If you live in
the country and don't have a second car, you can't retrieve your first
car from the mechanic after it's been repaired; the third car was the
product of a mild midlife crisis, but soon evolved into a necessity.)
My wife and I both work at home, but we manage to drive thirty thousand
miles a year between us, mostly doing ordinary errands. Nearly
everything we do away from our house requires a car trip. Renting a
movie and later returning it, for example, consumes almost two gallons
of gasoline, since the nearest Blockbuster is ten miles away and each
transaction involves two round trips. When we lived in New York, heat
escaping from our apartment helped to heat the apartment above ours;
nowadays, many of the Btus produced by our brand-new, extremely
efficient oil-burning furnace leak through our two-hundred-year-old
roof and into the dazzling star-filled winter sky above.
When most Americans think about environmentalism, they picture wild,
unspoiled landscapes--the earth before it was transmogrified by human
habitation. New York City is one of the most thoroughly altered
landscapes imaginable, an almost wholly artificial environment, in
which the terrain's primeval contours have long since been obliterated
and most of the parts that resemble nature (the trees on side streets,
the rocks in Central Park) are essentially decorations. Ecology-minded
discussions of New York City often have a hopeless tone, and focus on
ways in which the city might be made to seem somewhat less oppressively
man-made: by increasing the area devoted to parks and greenery, by
incorporating vegetation into buildings themselves, by reducing traffic
congestion, by easing the intensity of development, by creating open
space around structures. But most such changes would actually undermine
the city's extraordinary energy efficiency, which arises from the
characteristics that make it surreally synthetic.
Because densely populated urban centers concentrate human activity, we
think of them as pollution crisis zones. Calculated by the square foot,
New York City generates more greenhouse gases, uses more energy, and
produces more solid waste than most other American regions of
comparable size. On a map depicting negative environmental impacts in
relation to surface area, therefore, Manhattan would look like an
intense hot spot, surrounded, at varying distances, by belts of
deepening green.
If you plotted the same negative impacts by resident or by household,
however, the color scheme would be reversed. My little town has about
four thousand residents, spread over 38.7 thickly wooded square miles,
and there are many places within our town limits from which no sign of
settlement is visible in any direction. But if you moved eight million
people like us, along with our dwellings and possessions and current
rates of energy use, into a space the size of New York City, our
profligacy would be impossible to miss, because you'd have to stack our
houses and cars and garages and lawn tractors and swimming pools and
septic tanks higher than skyscrapers. (Conversely, if you made all
eight million New Yorkers live at the density of my town, they would
require a space equivalent to the land area of the six New England
states plus Delaware and New Jersey.) Spreading people out increases
the damage they do to the environment, while making the problems harder
to see and to address.
Of course, living in densely populated urban centers has many
drawbacks. Even wealthy New Yorkers live in spaces that would seem
cramped to Americans living almost anywhere else. A well-to-do friend
of mine who grew up in a town house in Greenwich Village thought of his
upbringing as privileged until, in prep school, he visited a classmate
from the suburbs and was staggered by the house, the lawn, the cars,
and the swimming pool, and thought, with despair, You mean I could live
like this? Manhattan is loud and dirty, and the subway is depressing,
and the fumes from the cars and cabs and buses can make people sick.
Presumably for environmental reasons, New York City has one of the
highest childhood-asthma rates in the country, with an especially
alarming concentration in East Harlem.
Nevertheless, barring an almost inconceivable reduction in the earth's
population, dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible remedies
for some of the world's most discouraging environmental ills. To borrow
a term from the jargon of computer systems, dense cities are scalable,
while sprawling suburbs are not. The environmental challenge we face,
at the current stage of our assault on the world's non-renewable
resources, is not how to make our teeming cities more like the pristine
countryside. The true challenge is how to make other settled places
more like Manhattan. This notion has yet to be widely embraced, partly
because it is counterintuitive, and partly because most Americans,
including most environmentalists, tend to view cities the way Thomas
Jefferson did, as "pestilential to the morals, the health, and the
liberties of man." New York is the place that's fun to visit but you
wouldn't want to live there. What could it possibly teach anyone about
being green?
New York's example, admittedly, is difficult for others to imitate,
because the city's remarkable population density is the result not of
conscientious planning but of a succession of serendipitous historical
accidents. The most important of those accidents was geographic: New
York arose on a smallish island rather than on the mainland edge of a
river or a bay, and the surrounding water served as a physical
constraint to outward expansion. Manhattan is like a typical seaport
turned inside out--a city with a harbor around it, rather than a harbor
with a city along its edge. Insularity gave Manhattan more shoreline
per square mile than other ports, a major advantage in the days when
one of the world's main commercial activities was moving cargoes
between ships. It also drove early development inward and upward.
A second lucky accident was that Manhattan's street plan was created by
merchants who were more interested in economic efficiency than in
boulevards, parks, or empty spaces between buildings. The resulting
crush of architecture is actually humanizing, because it brings the
city's commercial, cultural, and other offerings closer together,
thereby increasing their accessibility--a point made forty-three years
ago by the brilliantly iconoclastic urban thinker Jane Jacobs, in her
landmark book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
A third accident was the fact that by the early nineteen-hundreds most
of Manhattan's lines had been filled in to the point where not even
Robert Moses could easily redraw them to accommodate the great
destroyer of American urban life, the automobile. Henry Ford thought of
cars as tools for liberating humanity from the wretchedness of cities,
which he viewed with as much distaste as Jefferson did. In 1932, John
Nolen, a prominent Harvard-educated urban planner and landscape
architect, said, "The future city will be spread out, it will be
regional, it will be the natural product of the automobile, the good
road, electricity, the telephone, and the radio, combined with the
growing desire to live a more natural, biological life under pleasanter
and more natural conditions." This is the idea behind suburbs, and it's
still seductive. But it's also a prescription for sprawl and
expressways and tremendous waste.
New York City's obvious urban antithesis, in terms of density and
automobile use, is metropolitan Los Angeles, whose metastatic outward
growth has been virtually unimpeded by the lay of the land, whose early
settlers came to the area partly out of a desire to create space
between themselves and others, and whose main development began late
enough to be shaped by the needs of cars. But a more telling
counterexample is Washington, D.C., whose basic layout was conceived at
roughly the same time as Manhattan's, around the turn of the nineteenth
century. The District of Columbia's original plan was created by an
eccentric French-born engineer and architect named Pierre-Charles
L'Enfant, who befriended General Washington during the Revolutionary
War and asked to be allowed to design the capital. Many of modern
Washington's most striking features are his: the broad, radial avenues;
the hublike traffic circles; the sweeping public lawns and ceremonial
spaces.
Washington is commonly viewed as the most intelligently beautiful--the
most European--of large American cities. Ecologically, though, it's a
mess. L'Enfant's expansive avenues were easily adapted to automobiles,
and the low, widely separated buildings (whose height is limited by
law) stretched the distance between destinations. There are many
pleasant places in Washington to go for a walk, but the city is
difficult to get around on foot: the wide avenues are hard to cross,
the traffic circles are like obstacle courses, and the grandiloquent
empty spaces thwart pedestrians, by acting as what Jane Jacobs
calls "border vacuums." (One of Jacobs's many arresting observations is
that parks and other open spaces can reduce urban vitality, by creating
dead ends that prevent people from moving freely between neighborhoods
and by decreasing activity along their edges.) Many parts of
Washington, furthermore, are relentlessly homogeneous. There are plenty
of dignified public buildings on Constitution Avenue, for example, but
good luck finding a dry cleaner, a Chinese restaurant, or a grocery
store. The city's horizontal, airy design has also pushed development
into the surrounding countryside. The fastest-growing county in the
United States is Loudoun County, Virginia, at the rapidly receding
western edge of the Washington metropolitan area.
The Sierra Club, an environmental organization that advocates the
preservation of wilderness and wildlife, has a national campaign called
Challenge to Sprawl. The aim of the program is to arrest the mindless
conversion of undeveloped countryside into subdivisions, strip malls,
and S.U.V.-clogged expressways. The Sierra Club's Web site features a
slide-show-like demonstration that illustrates how various sprawling
suburban intersections could be transformed into far more appealing and
energy-efficient developments by implementing a few modifications,
among them widening the sidewalks and narrowing the streets, mixing
residential and commercial uses, moving buildings closer together and
closer to the edges of sidewalks (to make them more accessible to
pedestrians and to increase local density), and adding public
transportation--all fundamental elements of the widely touted anti-
sprawl strategy known as Smart Growth. In a recent telephone
conversation with a Sierra Club representative involved in Challenge to
Sprawl, I said that the organization's anti-sprawl suggestions and the
modified streetscapes in the slide show shared many significant
features with Manhattan--whose most salient characteristics include
wide sidewalks, narrow streets, mixed uses, densely packed buildings,
and an extensive network of subways and buses. The representative
hesitated, then said that I was essentially correct, although he would
prefer that the program not be described in such terms, since emulating
New York City would not be considered an appealing goal by most of the
people whom the Sierra Club is trying to persuade.
An obvious way to reduce consumption of fossil fuels is to shift more
people out of cars and into public transit. In many parts of the
country, though, public transit has been stagnant or in decline for
years. New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority and
Department of Transportation account for nearly a third of all the
transit passenger miles travelled in the United States and for nearly
four times as many passenger miles as the Washington Metropolitan Area
Transit Authority and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan
Transportation Authority combined.
New York City looks so little like other parts of America that urban
planners and environmentalists tend to treat it as an exception rather
than an example, and to act as though Manhattan occupied an
idiosyncratic universe of its own. But the underlying principles apply
everywhere. "The basic point," Jeffrey Zupan, an economist with the
Regional Planning Association, told me, "is that you need density to
support public transit. In all cities, not just in New York, once you
get above a certain density two things happen. First, you get less
travel by mechanical means, which is another way of saying you get more
people walking or biking; and, second, you get a decrease in the trips
by auto and an increase in the trips by transit. That threshold tends
to be around seven dwellings per acre. Once you cross that line, a bus
company can put buses out there, because they know they're going to
have enough passengers to support a reasonable frequency of service."
Phoenix is the sixth-largest city in the United States and one of the
fastest-growing among the top ten, yet its public transit system
accounts for just one per cent of the passenger miles that New York
City's does. The reason is that Phoenix's burgeoning population has
spread so far across the desert--greater Phoenix, whose population is a
little more than twice that of Manhattan, covers more than two hundred
times as much land--that no transit system could conceivably serve it.
And no amount of browbeating, public-service advertising, or federal
spending can change that.
Cities, states, and the federal government often negate their own
efforts to nurture public transit by simultaneously spending huge sums
to make it easier for people to get around in cars. When a city's
automobile traffic becomes congested, the standard response has long
been to provide additional capacity by building new roads or widening
existing ones. This approach eventually makes the original problem
worse, by generating what transportation planners call "induced
traffic": every mile of new highway lures passengers from public
transit and other more efficient modes of travel, and makes it possible
for residential and commercial development to spread even farther from
urban centers. And adding public transit in the hope of reducing
automobile congestion is as self-defeating as building new highways,
because unclogging roads, if successful, just makes driving seem more
attractive, and the roads fill up again. A better strategy would be to
eliminate existing traffic lanes and parking spaces gradually, thereby
forcing more drivers to use less environmentally damaging alternatives--
in effect, "induced transit." One reason New Yorkers are the most
dedicated transit users in America is that congestion on the city's
streets makes driving extraordinarily disagreeable. The average speed
of crosstown traffic in Manhattan is little more than that of a brisk
walker, and in midtown at certain times of the day the cars on the side
streets move so slowly that they appear almost to be parked. Congestion
like that urges drivers into the subways, and it makes life easier for
pedestrians and bicycle riders by slowing cars to a point where they
constitute less of a physical threat.
Even in New York City, the relationship between traffic and transit is
not well understood. A number of the city's most popular recent
transportation-related projects and policy decisions may in the long
run make the city a worse place to live in by luring passengers back
into their cars and away from public transportation: the rebuilding and
widening of the West Side Highway, the implementation of EZ-Pass on the
city's toll bridges, the decision not to impose tolls on the East River
bridges, and the current renovation of the F.D.R. Drive (along with the
federally funded hundred-and-thirty-nine-million-dollar Outboard Detour
Roadway, which is intended to prevent users of the F.D.R. from being
inconvenienced while the work is under way).
Public transit itself can be bad for the environment if it facilitates
rather than discourages sprawl. The Washington Metropolitan Area
Transit Authority is considering extensions to some of the most distant
branches of its system, and those extensions, if built, will allow
people to live even farther from the city's center, creating new, non-
dense suburbs where all other travel will be by automobile, much of it
to malls and schools and gas stations that will be built to accommodate
them. Transit is best for the environment when it helps to concentrate
people in dense urban cores. Building the proposed Second Avenue subway
line would be environmentally sound, because it would increase New
Yorkers' ability to live without cars; building a bullet train between
Penn Station and the Catskills (for example) would not be sound,
because it would enable the vast, fuel-squandering apparatus of
suburbia to establish itself in a region that couldn't support it
otherwise.
On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, I was working in my office, on the
third floor of my house, when the lights blinked, my window
airconditioner sputtered, and my computer's backup battery kicked in
briefly. This was the beginning of the great blackout of 2003, which
halted electric service in parts of eight Northeastern and Midwestern
states and in southeastern Canada. The immediate cause was eventually
traced to Ohio, but public attention often focussed on New York City,
which had the largest concentration of affected power customers.
Richard B. Miller, who resigned as the senior energy adviser for the
city of New York six weeks before the blackout, reportedly over deep
disagreements with the city's energy policy, told me, "When I was with
the city, I attended a conference on global warming where somebody
said, 'We really need to raise energy and electricity prices in New
York City, so that people will consume less.' And my response at that
conference was 'You know, if you're talking about raising energy prices
in New York City only, then you're talking about something that's
really bad for the environment. If you make energy prices so expensive
in the city that a business relocates from Manhattan to New Jersey,
what you're really talking about, in the simplest terms, is a business
that's moving from a subway stop to a parking lot. And which of those
do you think is worse for the environment?' "
People who live in cities use only about half as much electricity as
people who don't, and people who live in New York City generally use
less than the urban average. A truly enlightened energy policy would
reward city dwellers and encourage others to follow their good example.
Yet New York City residents pay more per kilowatt-hour than almost any
other American electricity customers; taxes and other government
charges, most of which are not enumerated on electricity bills, can
constitute close to twenty per cent of the cost of power for
residential and commercial users in New York. Richard Miller, after
leaving his job with New York City, went to work as a lawyer in
Consolidated Edison's regulatory affairs department, spurred by his
thinking about the environment. He believes that state and local
officials have historically taken unfair advantage of the fact that
there is no political cost to attacking a big utility. Con Ed pays more
than six hundred million dollars a year in property taxes, making it by
far the city's largest property-tax payer, and those charges inflate
electric bills. Meanwhile, the cost of driving is kept artificially
low. (Fifth Avenue and the West Side Highway don't pay property taxes,
for example.) "In addition," Miller said, "the burden of improving the
city's air has fallen far more heavily on power plants, which
contribute only a small percentage of New York City's air pollution,
than it has on cars--even though motor vehicles are a much bigger
source."
Last year, the National Building Museum, in Washington, D.C., held a
show called "Big & Green: Toward Sustainable Architecture in the 21st
Century."A book of the same name was published in conjunction with the
show, and on the book's dust jacket was a photograph of 4 Times Square,
also known as the Conde Nast Building, a forty-eight-story glass-and-
steel tower between Forty-second and Forty-third Streets, a few blocks
west of Grand Central Terminal. (The New Yorker's offices occupy two
floors in the building.) When 4 Times Square was built, in 1999, it was
considered a major breakthrough in urban development. As Daniel Kaplan,
a principal of Fox & Fowle Architects, the firm that designed it, wrote
in an article in Environmental Design & Construction in 1997, "When
thinking of green architecture, one usually associates smaller scale,"
and he cited as an example the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain
Institute, a nonprofit environmental research and consulting firm based
in Snowmass, Colorado. The R.M.I. building is a four-thousand-square-
foot, superinsulated, passive-solar structure with curving sixteen-inch-
thick walls, set into a hillside about fifteen miles north of Aspen. It
was erected in the early eighties and serves partly as a showcase for
green construction technology. (It is also the home of Amory Lovins,
who is R.M.I.'s co-founder and chief executive officer.) R.M.I.
contributed to the design of 4 Times Square, which has many innovative
features, among them collection chutes for recyclable materials,
photovoltaic panels incorporated into parts of its skin, and curtain-
wall construction with exceptional shading and insulating properties.
These are all important innovations. In terms of the building's true
ecological impact, though, they are distinctly secondary. (The power
generated by the photovoltaic panels supplies less than one per cent of
the building's requirements.) The two greenest features of 4 Times
Square are ones that most people never even mention: it is big, and it
is situated in Manhattan.
Environmentalists have tended to treat big buildings as intrinsically
wasteful, because large amounts of energy are expended in their
construction, and because the buildings place intensely localized
stresses on sewers, power lines, and water systems. But density can
create the same kinds of ecological benefits in individual structures
that it does in entire communities. Tall buildings have much less
exposed exterior surface per square foot of interior space than smaller
buildings do, and that means they present relatively less of themselves
to the elements, and their small roofs absorb less heat from the sun
during cooling season and radiate less heat from inside during heating
season. (The beneficial effects are greater still in Manhattan, where
one building often directly abuts another.) A study by Michael Phillips
and Robert Gnaizda, pubished in CoEvolution Quarterly in 1980, found
that an ordinary apartment in a typical building near downtown San
Francisco used just a fifth as much heating fuel as a new tract house
in Davis, a little more than seventy miles away. Occupants of tall
buildings also do a significant part of their daily coming and going in
elevators, which, because they are counterweighted and thus require
less motor horsepower, are among the most energy-efficient passenger
vehicles in the world.
Bruce Fowle, a founder of Fox & Fowle, told me, "The Conde Nast
Building contains 1.6 million square feet of floor space, and it sits
on one acre of land. If you divided it into forty-eight one-story
suburban office buildings, each averaging thirty-three thousand square
feet, and spread those one-story buildings around the countryside, and
then added parking and some green space around each one, you'd end up
consuming at least a hundred and fifty acres of land. And then you'd
have to provide infrastructure, the highways and everything else." Like
many other buildings in Manhattan, 4 Times Square doesn't even have a
parking lot, because the vast majority of the six thousand people who
work inside it don't need one. In most other parts of the country, big
parking lots are not only necessary but are required by law. If my
town's zoning regulations applied in Manhattan, 4 Times Square would
have needed sixteen thousand parking spaces, one for every hundred
square feet of office floor space.
The Rocky Mountain Institute's showcase headquarters has double-paned
krypton-filled windows, which admit seventy-five per cent as much light
as ordinary windows while allowing just ten per cent as much heat to
escape in cold weather. That's a wonderful feature, and one of many in
the building which people ought to copy. In other ways, though, the
R.M.I. building sets a very poor environmental example. It was built in
a fragile location, on virgin land more than seven thousand feet above
sea level. With just four thousand square feet of interior space, it
can hold only six of R.M.I.'s eighteen full-time employees; the rest of
them work in a larger building a mile away. Because the two buildings
are in a thinly populated area, they force most employees to drive many
miles--including trips between the two buildings--and they necessitate
extra fuel consumption by delivery trucks, snowplows, and other
vehicles. If R.M.I.'s employees worked on a single floor of a big
building in Manhattan (or in downtown Denver) and lived in apartments
nearby, many of them would be able to give up their cars, and the
thousands of visitors who drive to Snowmass each year to learn about
environmentally responsible construction could travel by public transit
instead.
Picking on R.M.I.--which is one of the world's most farsighted
environmental organizations--may seem unfair, but R.M.I., along with
many other farsighted environmental organizations, shares
responsibility for perpetuating the powerful anti-city bias of American
environmentalism. That bias is evident in the technical term that is
widely used for sprawl: "urbanization." Thinking of freeways and strip
malls as "urban" phenomena obscures the ecologically monumental
difference between Phoenix and Manhattan, and fortifies the perception
that population density is an environmental ill. It also prevents most
people from recognizing that R.M.I.'s famous headquarters--which sits
on an isolated parcel more than a hundred and eighty miles from the
nearest significant public transit system--is sprawl.
When I told a friend recently that I thought New York City should be
considered the greenest community in America, she looked puzzled, then
asked, "Is it because they've started recycling again?" Her question
reflected a central failure of the American environmental movement:
that too many of us have been made to believe that the most important
thing we can do to save the earth and ourselves is to remember each
week to set our cans and bottles and newspapers on the curb. Recycling
is popular because it enables people to relieve their gathering
anxieties about the future without altering the way they live. But most
current recycling has, at best, a neutral effect on the environment,
and much of it is demonstrably harmful. As William McDonough and
Michael Braungart point out in "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We
Make Things," most of the materials we place on our curbs are
merely "downcycled"--converted to a lower use, providing a pause in
their inevitable journey to a landfill or an incinerator--often with a
release of toxins and a net loss of fuel, among other undesirable
effects.
By far the worst damage we Americans do to the planet arises not from
the newspapers we throw away but from the eight hundred and fifty
million or so gallons of oil we consume every day. We all know this at
some level, yet we live like alcoholics in denial. How else can we
explain that our cars have grown bigger, heavier, and less fuel-
efficient at the same time that scientists have become more certain and
more specific about the consequences of our addiction to gasoline?
On a shelf in my office is a small pile of recent books about the
environment which I plan to reread obsessively if I'm found to have a
terminal illness, because they're so unsettling that they may make me
less upset about being snatched from life in my prime. At the top of
the pile is "Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil," by David
Goodstein, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, which
was published earlier this year. "The world will soon start to run out
of conventionally produced, cheap oil," Goodstein begins. In succeeding
pages, he lucidly explains that humans have consumed almost a trillion
barrels of oil (that's forty-two trillion gallons), or about half of
the earth's total supply; that a devastating global petroleum crisis
will begin not when we have pumped the last barrel out of the ground
but when we have reached the halfway point, because at that moment, for
the first time in history, the line representing supply will fall
through the line representing demand; that we will probably pass that
point within the current decade, if we haven't passed it already; that
various well-established laws of economics are about to assert
themselves, with disastrous repercussions for almost everything; and
that "civilization as we know it will come to an end sometime in this
century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels."
Standing between us and any conceivable solution to our energy
nightmare are our cars and the asphaltlatticed country we have built to
oblige them. Those cars have defined our culture and our lives. A car
is speed and sex and power and emancipation. It makes its driver a self-
sufficient nation of one. It is everything a city is not.
Most of the car's most tantalizing charms are illusory, though. By
helping us to live at greater distances from one another, driving has
undermined the very benefits that it was meant to bestow. Ignacio San
Martin, an architecture professor and the head of the graduate urban-
design program at the University of Arizona, told me, "If you go out to
the streets of Phoenix and are able to see anybody walking--which you
likely won't--they are going to tell you that they love living in
Phoenix because they have a beautiful house and three cars. In reality,
though, once the conversation goes a little bit further, they are going
to say that they spend most of their time at home watching TV, because
there is absolutely nothing to do." One of the main attractions of
moving to the suburbs is acquiring ground of your own, yet you can
travel for miles through suburbia and see no one doing anything in a
yard other than working on the yard itself (often with the help of a
riding lawnmower, one of the few four-wheeled passenger vehicles that
get worse gas mileage than a Hummer). The modern suburban yard is
perfectly, perversely self-justifying: its purpose is to be taken care
of.
In 1801, in his first Inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that the
American wilderness would provide growing room for democracy-sustaining
agrarian patriots "to the thousandth and thousandth generation."
Jefferson didn't foresee the interstate highway system, and his
arithmetic was off, in any case, but he nevertheless anticipated (and,
in many ways, embodied) the ethos of suburbia, of anti-urbanism, of
sprawl. The standard object of the modern American dream, the single-
family home surrounded by grass, is a mini-Monticello. It was the car
that put it within our reach. But what a terrible price we have paid--
and have yet to pay--for our liberation from the city.
Everywhere should be more like New York.
Exhibition: Michael Krondl "Fall"tag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1892007-03-02T04:39:55Z2007-03-02T04:43:29Z Michael Krondl - Fall Black and White Gallery, Chelsea February 16 - March 17, 2007 Czech-born New York-based artist Michael Krondl is recognized for a practice that embraces installations which become visual experiences. Krondl places personal observations of natural...admin
Michael Krondl - Fall
Black and White Gallery, Chelsea
February 16 - March 17, 2007
Czech-born New York-based artist Michael Krondl is recognized for a practice that embraces installations which become visual experiences. Krondl places personal observations of natural phenomena into the terrain of formal aesthetics, resulting in witty and poetic work that challenges how we perceive the world around us.
In his precise articulation of nature, its beauty and danger, Krondl examines and decodes human interaction with nature, working with limited materials and situations that take on symbolic meanings.
In Krondl’s own words, “Fall” is a Frankenstein-like stepchild of the Hudson River School. Thomas Cole and his companions used to hike the Catskills with sketchbook in hand returning home to assemble landscapes of the sublime. Krondl lugged a backpack full of expensive technology and fashioned a large and threatening behemoth out of fragments of their beloved waterfalls. Sure, it bears only the faintest family resemblance to their splendent pictures. But the relationship is there.
There is another connection to the Hudson here as well, for if the virtual water falling down the gallery wall were real, it would flow out of the white box into the street and then course into the river just across the road. It would sweep any viewers right into the sea. Does it bear repeating that the natural world is lovely to look at, but also deadly? That our finely tuned neurons are encased in a carapace of mortal flesh? That our waterfront may soon be under treat from the rising waters of the Hudson estuary?
This exhibition is presented in conjunction with “Prince: Pre-Fame” by Robert Whitman. The exhibition seeks to create a dialogue between the two artists, working with different visual cues that imply sound – both natural and man-made.
Image:
Michael Krondl, Fall, digital print on vinyl, 9.5 x 66 feet
Courtesy of Black & White Gallery, Chelsea // Williamsburg
The Chelsea Terminal Warehouse // 636 West 28th Street, Ground Floor // New York, NY 10001 // t: 212 244 3007
f: 212 244 3312 // HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday, 11 AM - 6 PM and by Appointment // info@blackandwhiteartgallery.com]]>
Exhibition: Open City at Eyebeam Opens March 1sttag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1882007-02-28T19:43:15Z2007-02-28T19:43:48Z OPEN CITY: Tools For Public Action Eyebeam announces its long-anticipated 2007 exhibition season and commences its 10th Anniversary year with Open City – a glimpse into the current media and tactics of artists who take their practices into the...admin
OPEN CITY: Tools For Public Action
Eyebeam announces its long-anticipated 2007 exhibition season and commences its 10th Anniversary year with Open City – a glimpse into the current media and tactics of artists who take their practices into the street. Be it through projection, writing on walls or robotic pamphleteering, Open City presents the work of artists who communicate through the surfaces and structures of our communal spaces and offers a deeper look at the means and motivations of urban action and creativity.
Please join us for the Opening Reception March 1, 6-8pm to launch this series of screenings, presentations and workshops exploring tool building, tactics, techniques and approaches to communication by any means necessary within the urban context. ]]>
UN Millenium Ecosystem Assessmenttag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1862007-02-26T16:26:52Z2007-02-26T16:27:56Zhttp://www.maweb.org/...admin
http://www.maweb.org/]]>
Podcast: Marissa Jahntag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1852007-02-26T12:07:25Z2007-02-26T13:00:11ZHere is a podcast from our guest lecturer on February 21. Marissa Jahn, co-producer of Throw-n-Sow and co-founder of the experimental curatorial group called Pond. http://www.throw-n-sow.org/ http://www.mucketymuck.org/ The lecture may take 30 seconds to download, so please be patient. http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/podcast/Marissa...admin
http://www.throw-n-sow.org/
http://www.mucketymuck.org/
The lecture may take 30 seconds to download, so please be patient.
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/podcast/Marissa Jahn_1-2.mp3]]>
Exhibition: Lillian Ball at Queens Museumtag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1842007-02-23T22:59:14Z2007-02-23T23:01:09Z Lillian Ball: GO ECO February 4 - May 27, 2007 Opening Reception: Sunday February 4th, 2-5 PM GO ECO is an interactive installation that illuminates the different perspectives of several participants involved in a wetland preservation project. The concept...admin
Lillian Ball: GO ECO
February 4 - May 27, 2007
Opening Reception: Sunday February 4th, 2-5 PM
GO ECO is an interactive installation that illuminates the different perspectives of several participants involved in a wetland preservation project. The concept is metaphorically based on the ancient Asian game of Go, (originally, one of the Four Arts of China along with music, painting, and poetry) which uses strategies to capture territory through balancing tactics. GO ECO also functions as an informational “serious game” installation of video vignettes. Digitally manipulated images with sound are projected in quadrants on the screen to lead players through to the next move. The final outcome of the game is determined by the teamwork of players making their way toward a solution that enables all sides to win or to lose together. GO ECO allows players of many ages to be empowered and to learn about the issues through an art experience that maps paths of action.
Queens Museum of Art
New York City Building
Flushing Meadows Corona Park
Queens, NY 11368-3398
718.592.9700
http://www.queensmuseum.org
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Questions of Evidencetag:www.nyu.edu,2007:/projects/xdesign/artact//6.1832007-02-23T03:54:24Z2007-02-23T04:00:22ZThese are three essays from the book, "Questions of Evidence." Each essay has three parts according to each subject: the author's arguments, the response from an outside reader, and the author's counterargument. The essay subjects as follows refer to evidence...admin
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Evidence Self003.pdf
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Evidence Experience004.pdfhttp://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/artact/Evidence Natural Science005.pdf]]>