Go to essay: Queer Beacon

Pier 48, photo by Richard Renaldi

Excited about warming weather and loosening schedules, my partner Tamiko and I were thinking of interesting summer projects that involved getting out in the city. We were having a sushi picnic in Prospect Park, watching the kite flyers and kids on bikes on grass, and had an idea: why not visit every New York City Park this summer? Then we thought, wait, how many New York City Parks are there? It turns out there are 1700*. We realized that we had to rethink this one…

Today the second phase of the immensely popular High Line Park opens. Since its initial opening in June of 2009, the High Line (6.73 acres) has been a huge hit. New York area residents and tourists flock to it, designers and design students pore over and photograph every patch of native planting and railing detail, city politicians puff their chests, and developers move with haste to bring their new High Line-ready creations to market. Everyone has a nice thing to say about this new stretch of green hovering 30 feet above the sidewalks.

It is a special place. The High Line did what so many recent urban interventions can only dream: it transformed the concept of a space – the idea of a park – and how, why, it can exist in a dense urban environment. It’s inherent and simple device – shifting viewpoints and perceptions of the city, just a bit, taking us just enough out of the city – made us look a-new.

Highly detailed, extensively choreographed, landscape architects Field Operations and architects Diller Scofido + Renfro created a place that is as much event programming as design of space; a constantly unfolding, unfurling series of experiences tied to the landscape of the park and the vistas of the city. Embracing its urban context, the park asserts itself as a space not exactly relaxing, but active, engaging, always about where you and others are.

Even as I take in this urban wonder, I find myself asking a question: but what kind of public park do we want?

Is it a park that is intimately tied to real estate values? The High Line took what was previously a rather forlorn stretch of Manhattan west side and turned it into some of the most expensive square footage in the world. It is now flanked by architectural tours de force: condominiums commanding prices up to $2000 a square foot, exclusive galleries and high fashion headquarters. This isn’t a new phenomenon. The same thing happened around Central Park. In cities dominated by concrete and brick valleys, people actually like living next to nature. But in a city of rising inequality, who gets to live near our best places of nature?

Is it a park that is not, at some level, a city park? The High Line is a designated city park, but run by Friends of the High Line, a non-profit, private foundation initially formed to garner support for the reuse of the elevated rail line, and now tasked with maintenance, programming, and fundraising for the ongoing planning, construction, and up-keep of the park. The park hews closely to the prevailing method of public-private partnerships to bring us everything from low-income housing to recreation spaces. But shouldn’t a city take care of its residents as a matter of course, without the potential complications of private management and financing?

Is it a park that is literally elevated, separated, a public space that is discontinuous with public rights-of-way, protected by clear points of control? The High Line’s unique strength is also, to me, a point of concern. I remember the lines during opening day last fall, crowds waiting at the entry stairs to gain access. Its strict directionality too makes it particularly ill-served as a space of meandering, chance encounters, informal gatherings and spontaneous actions. What does it mean when it is easier to access a city park from your condo building next to it than from the public sidewalk below?

The other much talked about park lately is the Brooklyn Bridge Park (85 acres), a huge swath of waterfront green space with perfect views of Lower Manhattan. Designed by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh, the park is current de riguer landscape design, showing off sculptural berms, generous events spaces, and a stormwater garden feature. The park continues the city’s gradual reclamation of its waterfronts from their post-shipping decay.

Last month Tamiko and I went to the first Celebrate Brooklyn! event at Brooklyn Bridge Park with our friends Irene and Maya to watch Maceo Parker do his Funk Dance Party thing. It was still quite cold, and after a couple of sets we retreated to a nearby Dumbo bar, but not before taking in a breathtaking urban site – the multiple levels of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and Brooklyn Heights Promenade on our left, Manhattan skyline so close you felt like you could touch, Statue of Liberty in the distance.

The Brooklyn Bridge Park is unique, in that it has been planned to be “self-sustaining,” maintenance funding coming from money-making ventures in the park itself, including planned residential buildings. When those are built, this will be the first city park to include private housing development within the park itself. Not too dissimilar from the High Line, the Brooklyn Bridge Park will be a city park that’s operationally connected to the wealth of the residents living, in this case, literally in it.

The High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Parks epitomize the city’s emphasis on elite parks (term borrowed from Sharon Zukin), showcases that are described by terms like “world class,” and tied to massive amounts of money, necessarily linked to privatization, ownership and commodification. For Brooklyn Bridge Park, the city has promised an additional $50 million of the estimated $350 million it will take to complete the park. This at a time when it is again proposing to close public swimming pools because of budget shortfalls. For the projected $153 million High Line, already the most expensive park to maintain in the city, Friends of the High Line is considering further privatization in the form of a business improvement district to raise sufficient funds.

Finally, this weekend Tamiko and I joined a group of friends post-dim sum in Columbus Park (2.76 acres) in Chinatown. Not big, not particularly grassy, it could be easily missed in the hustle and noise of the surrounding streets. We each had a scoop from the nearby Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. This day, throngs of park users were crammed into every corner of it. On the diminutive playing field youth recreational teams tried to outdo each other in sack races and hula hoops as one boy sat forlornly with a red balloon. A game of Chinese chess had drawn a large crowd (all men, why?!). We stopped to watch some musicians. Columbus Park has none of the glitz and glamor of the elite parks, yet is fully and well used, multi-generational, multi-purpose, and inextricably linked to its neighborhood and community.

So what kind of park do we want? The answer is both, or all, I think. But how do we get them? What do you think?

* An interesting fact: there is approximately 1 NYC park or recreation space for each of the 1700 people allowed to be on the High Line (at the least the first phase part) at any one time.

I’ve been quite preoccupied making a big decision. This fall, I will be pursuing a PhD in urban studies and planning at MIT!

My research focus will be on architecture, politics, and urban ecologies. I want to investigate the relationship between institutional systems and social movements, and their impact on the built and natural environments of cities.

Looking forward to having this blog be part of my future academic work.

More posts to come soon on architecture and weather, disappearing cities, and local manufacturing.

Kian

Our visions begin with our desires.
- Audre Lorde

Text and images here are based on a presentation made by the author at Qpenn Pecha Kucha (short format presentations: 20 slides for 20 seconds each) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design in March 2011, and is excerpted from an article forthcoming in Progressive Planning magazine.

1.    In 2008, a group of parents and children, parks advocates, and LGBT youth rallied to protest the proposal for a large-scale retail and entertainment development at Pier 40, on Manhattan’s Hudson River Park. The LGBT youth, led by community organizing group FIERCE, had been working since 2000 to keep the park and piers safe and accessible…

FIERCE protest at Pier 40, photo by Villager; FIERCE rally poster

2.    … organizing in response to harassment and arrests of youth and insisting on the right to inhabit city streets. Carrying signs that read “Save the Village” and “LGBT Youth and Little Leaguers UNITE!,” youth and residents formed an unlikely alliance in opposition to large-scale privatized development.

3.    Memorialized in the documentary Paris Is Burning, the piers at the end of Christopher Street have long been an epicenter of queer congregation. Like the bodies that inhabit them, the piers epitomize a wary comfort on the edge. The crumbling infrastructure offered an in-between space for those looking simultaneously for escape and belonging.

Stills from Paris Is Burning, documentary by Jennie Livingston

4.    In recent years the piers and adjacent Hudson River Park have reflected the demographic and economic changes in the West Village – piers and park are now smartly landscaped with popular jogging and biking paths. Nearby residential towers are home to some of the priciest square footage in the world. Many streets in the Village barely hold on to their bohemian, counter-cultural history.

Present day Hudson River Park, photo by author

5.    But still the youth come to the piers, motivated by accounts they’ve read, watched, heard about, or something more intangible: shared history, cultural memory, of those places of possibility.

Youth at piers, photo by author

6.    Queer space, as defined by architectural historian Aaron Betsky, is: “not built, only implied, and usually invisible,” “useless, amoral, and sensual space that lives only in and for experience.” Queers, mostly gay men, “queered” spaces using actions, signs and symbols, particularly interstitial spaces of the city: discos and clubs, bathhouses, bars, sections of parks at night.

Studio 54; Pier 48, photo by Allan Tannenbaum

7.    Queers invented ephemeral spaces of display and experience, new spatial and cultural permeabilities. Early queer spaces were necessarily interior, where darkness allowed for remaking both the spaces between and the bodies themselves. Stonewall proved a decisive breakout moment – the spilling out of queerness into public streets.

Stonewall, June 1969

8.    Through the 80s and 90s queers increasingly occupied and queered public space and public imaginations. Gay pride parades grew and multiplied, going from protest to celebration. Groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation stormed streets at the height of the AIDS epidemic, making demands for acknowledgement of gay bodies in a time of crisis.

Poster by ACT UP / Gran Fury, 1988; Queer Nation, photo by Marc Geller

9.    And gays created distinctly gay neighborhoods in large cities across the country. From the West Village, to Dupont Circle and the Castro, gays proved incredibly adept at revitalizing urban spaces. Emblazoning the exteriors in ways that reflected past splendorous interiors, such gay facades time and time again indicated when neighborhoods were safe for further exploration by less brave and foolhardy groups.

Castro, San Francisco, photo by New York Times

10.    Recent mainstream gay activism has steered far from its spatial repercussions. Both the gay marriage and gays-in-the-military movements constitute desires for stamps of approval. From interiority, to parades and protests, to, now, to do just like everyone else… The mainstream gay agenda has been largely an assimilative one.

11.    Is there still the possibility of a Queer Urbanism? Do queer actions still have the ability to reformat urban space? Clearly, the demarcation of queer public space has not ceased. The increasing prominence of dyke marches across the country and the Trans Day of Action march in New York City attest to a renewed queer claim on public space.

12.    The recent queering of ethnic pride parades as well show a fascinating confluence of complex issues of identity, visibility, and representation. In Manhattan’s Chinatown, local organizers led by the group Q-Wave successfully petitioned for and organized a LGBT contingent in the annual Lunar New Year Parade.

NYC Lunar New Year Parade, 2010, photo by author

13.    Beyond parades and marches, we can also observe what could be called a conscious re-queering of spaces. FIERCE’s work on the piers is a primary example. Not content simply to ensure access to public space, FIERCE has held numerous organized events on the piers, including film nights and mini-balls, revisiting the heyday of vogueing balls.

FIERCE mini-ball at Pier 46, photo by FIERCE

14.    This kind of re-queering goes on every day, but is most evident in the hours after the annual gay pride parade, when thousands of young LGBT people of color flood the Hudson River Park. Kept from the piers by police barricades, young queers enact a parade of sorts along the promenade.

Hudson River Park, after Pride Parade, 2010, photo by author

15.    Even in the age of post-queer liberation, the work of radical LGBT activists constitute a new in-between queer space, between the increasing invisibility of mainstream gays and lesbians of television and movies, of townhouses and magazines, and the violence and discrimination that still confound LGBT people in many parts of this country.

16.    Distinct from previous struggles, groups in New York City like FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, the Audre Lorde Project, and Make the Road NY carve out new spaces, not only of visibility, but of safety and resilience, in public, urban space, oftentimes far from established gay centers. They address the most critical lapses of urban services and safety.

17.    QEJ’s Shelter Project organizers work in the city’s homeless shelters, reaching out to homeless LGBT people, offering support and community, working within the interior space of the shelter and also creating tangible connections to wider networks in the city. The work highlights homelessness, a particularly fraught queer space all too prevalent among urban LGBT youth.

QEJ Welfare Warriors, photo by QEJ

18.    The Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Neighborhoods campaign is creating a network of safe spaces in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, without police intervention. In a country where 1 in 100 people is in the criminal justice system, ALP organizers know that the increased criminalizing of young people of color helps no one. ALP will be holding their 3rd Annual Safe Neighborhood Summit on April 16, 2011.

Audre Lorde Project's "Safe Outside the System" Safe Neighborhoods campaign, photo by ALP

19.    Make the Road NY’s GLOBE project, working largely with immigrant communities in Bushwick, Brooklyn, engaged neighborhood schools as partners in creating supportive environments for LGBT youth. Sited at the intersection of immigrant and LGBT rights and safety, the initiative negotiates and pulls apart at spatial and social boundaries that are complicated and multi-level.

Make The Road NY's Safe Schools initiative at AUP, Queens, 2009

20.    Each of these initiatives insists that the safety and welfare of LGBT people in cities cannot be divorced from the social, economic, and spatial conditions of urban environments. They broaden the possibilities of movement for queers in the city and map – literally and otherwise – paths forward for urban social movements that are critically inclusive.

The author is a former member of the board of directors of the Audre Lorde Project, and contributed planning and architectural designs for FIERCE’S Pier 40 youth center campaign. She was also one of the organizers, with Q-Wave, of the first LGBT contingent in the New York City Lunar New Year Parade in 2010.

The devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan late last week further confirmed the relative frailty of humans when confronted by powerful natural phenomena or human-made processes that we don’t quite fully control.

Coming close on the heels of previous natural disasters – earthquakes in New Zealand, Chile, and Haiti, floods in Pakistan and Australia, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 – the ongoing catastrophe in Japan brings a particular point into sharp focus. The human toll of such natural events are both mitigated and exacerbated by human constructions, physical and otherwise. In the Chile and Haiti earthquakes, the dramatic difference in the human toll of the disasters was largely ascribed to the economic and institutional health of each place. In Chile, sound building codes and construction standards kept casualties to a minimum. In Haiti the clear lack of such codes and standards was immediately obvious. The social and political basis – including the racist and imperialist histories – for such economic and institutional conditions has been well documented. And I will leave those alone for now.

In New Orleans in 2005 we in the US witnessed firsthand the complicity of architecture, planning, and politics in the impact of disasters. Where one builds, what one builds, and how we plan or don’t plan for imminent weather events in an era of climate change dramatically determines the way such events play out. Hurricane Katrina was, in effect, allowed to become a historic event, one in which too many people died, too many displaced, the geography and politics of a city changed possibly forever. It’s momentousness was due to one human cause that is not much in contention: that an increasingly warm climate contributed to the strength of the hurricane as it passed through the gulf; and two that are not in contention at all: that the massive flooding occurred because of inadequate planning for predictable disaster scenarios in the levee system; and that further human catastrophe was allowed to happen because of inadequate evacuation plans and post-disaster aid.

My point is that there is a very real connection between the “disaster” quotient of natural events and the kinds of spaces we plan and build. People die because buildings fall down, because levees fail.

In Japan, news stories immediately told accounts of how the country’s stringent building and engineering codes saved perhaps thousands of lives during one of the biggest earthquakes ever recorded. Videos taken by office workers showed skyscrapers swaying very disconcertingly but still safely.

On architecture blogs some wondered how the Sendai Mediatheque, designed by architect Toyo Ito with a particularly innovative structural system of irregular trussed tubes, had fared, being so close to the epicenter of the quake. While some commentors suggested that it was crass to think of buildings at a time of human crisis, the exchange also brings to mind the fact that we now live in a time when the wellbeing and safety of human beings are necessarily and intimately tied up with the built and natural environments in which we live. This includes, prominently, the buildings in which we spend the vast majority of our time. The Mediatheque performed amazingly well.

Still, even as we give a silent, respectful cheer for institutional and engineering prowess, one aspect of the Japan disaster still looms large and unchecked. The explosions at three nuclear reactors, and ongoing struggle to retain control of their otherworldly power, remind us of further human frailties. We have been living for 66 years now in a world in which astounding technological advancement allows humans to destroy ourselves, quickly, effectively, in particularly odious fashion. It is beyond ironic, and simply tragic, that Japan now faces a new nuclear event, being the only country that has ever been subjected to nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power is probably the most vivid, the most immediate, example of how a brilliant unlocking of nature presents us with choices that have far larger consequences. Our slow(er) changing of global climate is another.

Earthquakes like the one off Japan’s coast, and other ge0logical and climate phenomena, will always occur. We should at least recognize that our actions are contributing to accelerated bad weather events. And we can take steps to live with these events better: a healthy respect for nature; appreciation for good design, smart engineering, and appropriate local regulations; attention to social and economic health of places that are threatened by natural phenomena. And, ultimately, having critical responses to current environmental issues and rethinking how we balance the threats to human life and culture against ever larger appetites for energy and resources.

The following organizations and examples illustrate just a few ways that design of both built and natural environments directly confronts imminent disasters:

Article 25, a nonprofit dedicated to post-disaster shelters

Architecture for Humanity, bringing professional design services to places they are most critically needed

Shigeru Ban, an architect who has crafted a practice of innovative responses to challenging local conditions

Floating Gardens in Bangladesh

On the Water: Palisade Bay, a research initiative to imagine “soft infrastructures,” and Rising Currents, an exhibition at MOMA, two recent projects based on sea level rise projections in New York City harbor

University of Virginia landscape architecture professor Kristina Hill researches ecological design strategies to mediate climate change and sea level rise

Japan has been one of the largest donors of international disaster aid. It’s a good time to give something back. The following are well-known organizations collecting donations for humanitarian aid and reconstruction:

Doctors Without Borders (not collecting donations specifically for Japan effort, but working from general donations)

UNICEF

MercyCorps

Architecture for Humanity

Japan Society Earthquake Relief Fund

Photo taken on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan a couple of nights ago. I’d never seen these before. These red-lit bollards are on a large turntable (about 16 ft in diameter) that silently turns to allow traffic to pass. The large turntable is actually cobblestone covered! I guess they’re trying to put a prettier, glowing, face on one of the most securitized urban blocks in the country.

Drawings on the G train platform at Hoyt-Schemerhorn in Brooklyn. Small text above: “THE TRAIN FINALLY COMES.”

Architect and Middle Eastern scholar Mohamed Elshahed’s vivid account of the social and political at Tahrir Square, on Places.

Real estate and development professor, previously Director of the Manhattan Office of the New York City Department of City Planning, Vishaan Chakrabarti discusses public squares as spaces of collective gathering in the city and “expression of a world ever in need of change,” on Urban Omnibus.

Alex Goldmark, at GOOD, posts a story written by Mosa’ab Elshamy, Egyptian pharmacy student and photographer, of an informal “pop-up” kindergarten at Tahrir Square. Elshamy’s Twitter page.

Nam Henderson, blogger and frequent contributor to Archinect, on the performative aspect of urban spaces like Tahrir Square.

Something shivered, in her field of vision. “Look. Look here.”
She turned, following his gesture, and saw a slender, dark-haired body, facedown on the sidewalk.
“Alloween night, 1993,” said Odile.
Hollis approached the body. That wasn’t there. But was. Alberto was following her with the laptop, careful of the cable. She felt as if he were holding his breath. She was holding hers.
- William Gibson, Spook Country

We’ve heard over and over again of how revolutions spreading throughout the Middle East and North Africa were incited and organized through digital social networks, particularly Twitter and Facebook. We were told excitedly about how the new revolutionary will be an executive from Google.

But of late we increasingly hear more sobering/sobered assessments of what transpired in Egypt and Tunisia – acknowledgments that digital social networks were important to initiating calls to action and dissemination of information, but reminders that social movements are made by people. New York Times columnist Frank Rich warned early of our fixation on the extent to which social networks mobilized the uprisings. He cites author Evgeny Morozov’s recent book The Net Delusion, in which the author argues against a simplistic or one-sided reading of the political consequence of the internet. Morozov contends that, contrary to the often heard premise, the networks are not always democratizing. In fact, in the hands of an authoritarian power, it could even be the opposite, tools of disinformation and control.

The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.
- Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted”

The fact that social networks are not always benevolent should be obvious enough by the fact that they are run, controlled, and actually enabled by increasingly mammoth corporations who have more than their stated social missions to be accountable to.

Google, the company that epitomizes constant access and connectedness, went through its early heady growth accompanied by its famous motto Don’t Be Evil (an obvious rebuke to Microsoft). The company has since maneuvered to less loftily progressive positions on net neutrality. Facebook has never pretended to have the wellbeing of its users at heart. The furious rise of its 500 million and counting users has always been premised on the ways massive interconnectedness is tied to opportunities to mine and use personal information and preference. It’s not particularly surprising that Facebook and Goldman Sachs are now best friends. There are clear financial opportunities to such friending.

When the power for social movements are dependent on infrastructures that are – technologically, financially – not of the people, then how are we to count on them for the people? I think the answer to that question is clear: we can’t, or shouldn’t, really. Or, rather, we temper our enthusiasm for their powerful instrumentality with caution and realization that these are borrowed tools. It is a tenuous relationship. These days, the means of production is often exactly the means of communication.

As an architect, as someone who is mostly concerned with physical space, I am curious about the spatial and environmental possibilities of such pervasive networks. When we are hyper connected, always tied virtually on multiple levels through multiple distances, what does that do to the way we move through, define, and redefine “real” time and space? The relationship between actual and virtual space has been in flux and contest since the early days of radio, when wireless networks first disengaged information from time and space. What happens now, when virtual flows attain a density that often seems quite physical?

Firstly, can we see it, this virtual space? Christian Marc Schmidt and Liangjie Xia’s Invisible Cities project visualizes social networks in urban environments, using geotagging to map and illustrate densities of network activity that then create abstract information landscapes. We follow bursts of tweets and updates across a 3-D terrain, constantly in flux, while images of actual space, actual time occasionally pop up. While strangely fascinating, Schmidt and Xia’s work as yet does not imply or produce spatial or environmental impact.

Christian Marc Schmidt & Liangjie Xia, Invisible Cities

William Gibson, in his book Spook Country, envisions how geolocative art – virtual creations that are tied to place and time – can reformat experience of urban space in particularly vivid ways. A famous scene from the book depicts a geolocative artist creating a virtual 3-dimensional River Phoenix, face down and dead on a Los Angeles sidewalk. Gibsons suggests that interconnectedness – pervasive GPS coordinates, wireless access, virtual imaging – can significantly shift and alter experiences of public space for networked users.

William Gibson reads from Spook Country to virtual Second Life audience. Image by gnwcampus on Flickr

On a global level I’m also interested in the ways that a massive dissemination of information – of tools and strategies, clearly important to social movements like the aforementioned political uprisings – can engage actively with issues of urban form and ecologies. How can new networks of digital communications reformat understanding of urban space? How can a broader understanding of local systems, materials, and energy flows – helped by communications networks – actually empower local movements and reinforce the power of people and place? What are spatial, physical, architectural, planning or non-planning parallels to pervasive social networks?

Initial efforts seem promising, if still quite passive. Three examples of global networked architectural projects were on display at the recent exhibition Small Scale, Big Change: New Architectures of Social Engagement at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. These – The 1% by Public Architecture, urbaninform by Rainer Hehl and Jörg Stollman, and the Open Architecture Network by Architecture for Humanity – envisioned ways to mobilize public engagement, foster the creation of design communities and sharing of strategies. They offered glimpses into the intersection of social and environmental activism and global communications technologies.

Within the decade, more people will access the internet through their mobile devices than on their computers. Globally, mobile phone use, wireless internet access, and handheld devices like the iPad are already changing the ways businesses and services are understood and implemented in ways that were unthinkable just a decade before. The tools are in their infancy. Even if we can’t rely on the benign nature of digital social networks, we can clearly foresee the widespread change they bring. For those of us who are working towards social and environmental sustainability, who understand and respect the power of social movements to transform our built and natural environments: how do we envision this change?

I teach sustainability and design at Parsons The New School for Design and architectural design studios at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design.

In recent semesters I’ve increasingly focused on what I call critical mapping in my classes. Also termed experimental geography or radical cartography, critical mapping acknowledges that maps are not neutral conveyors of fact; more importantly, it embraces the idea that maps have agency.

My interest in an activist critical mapping stems largely from the realization that maps have always been instruments of power, creating and reinforcing borders and control points. Since the earliest efforts to chart the known world maps have been instruments to know, in order to control and possess. From the Korean peninsula, to the Middle East, to Germany, acts of politically strategic but socially and environmentally arbitrary mapping have perpetuated decades-long conflicts and oppressions.

Critical maps, at their most effective, can not only illustrate previously hidden patterns of social injustice, but unearth vivid opportunities for activism and advocacy.

But first, to implicate some damning acts of mapping:

Land Ordinance of 1785
Critical to the establishment of the United States, the Land Ordinance of 1785 institutionalized a methodology of mapping, creating a systematic way of measuring and sectioning land as pure square grid, almost fervently ignoring particularities of topography and environment. The maps, by the newly formed General Land Office, enabled not only a measure of land, but more importantly the selling of it.

General Land Office plat showing diagram of grid system

Gridding the landscape, from James Corner, Alex Maclean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape

The spatial implications of the GLO plats are still clearly evident to anyone flying over parts of the Midwest. Particularly interesting is how nature resists pure grid mapping – the photo above shows how roads following grid maps jog to account for the curvature of the earth.

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) Maps
The holy-grail-of-sorts of politically dubious maps in this country. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a New Deal agency ostensibly tasked with targeted lending to avoid foreclosures, created maps of urban areas, defining neighborhoods according to a gradient of desirability, from “best” to “hazardous.” The HOLC maps have frequently been held up as a primary example of institutional racism, and cited as the cause of redlining, discriminatory lending policies resulting in disinvestment in largely black inner city neighborhoods. Not everyone agrees with this assessment. There is current research underway to explore further the role of the HOLC maps in actual lending practice, potentially complicating the prevailing understanding of them.

HOLC Map of Philadelphia, 1936

Highway Maps
The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized the construction of 41,000 miles of highway. Originally intended to bypass cities, planners including Robert Moses, argued for them to intersect city centers as ways to help clear blight and facilitate movement from suburb to center. Two of Moses’ proposals are particularly clear examples of the instrumentality of maps: one, of the then proposed Cross Bronx Expressway, represents the first stage in a series of actions that continue to have widespread social and economic consequences in the Bronx today; and an aerial representation of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, never constructed after strident community opposition.

Cross-Bronx Expressway Route Study

Cross-Bronx Expressway, photo by NYTimes

Lower Manhattan Expressway Plan

And now, a few favorite examples of critical mapping:

Architecture and Justice
The Architecture and Justice project by the Spatial Information Design Lab, a research unit at Columbia University led by Laura Kurgan, explores the complex geography, economics, and social repercussions of incarceration in Brooklyn, New York. Ms. Kurgan’s team uses data mapping to uncover the particular concentration of offenders sent to upstate prisons from specific Brooklyn neighborhoods, and the amount of money used to do this. They vividly illustrate how, in some cases, more than a million of dollars are spent per year per city block. This not only constitutes a massive export of both people and money, but essentially makes the criminal justice system the primary government institution in these communities. The project asks, directly: “Have prisons and jails become the mass housing of our time?” and “…How might we save state money spent on prisons, and redirect that money where it is most needed, in the poorest urban areas of our cities?”

Architecture and Justice - place of origin of prisoners in justice system, by SIDL

Architecture and Justice - movement of prisoners, by SIDL

Architecture and Justice - "Million Dollar Blocks" by SIDL

Solid Sea 03: The Road Map
Multiplicity, a multidisciplinary collective based in Milan, conducted an experiment in the West Bank near Jerusalem in 2003. The group documented two journeys, one conducted by a person with Palestinian documents, the other with Israeli passport. They showed that the Palestinian journey took five times a long – five hours compared to one – a passage dogged by borders, standstills, check points, and diversions. The project makes clear that, no matter what one’s politics, in this highly contested and controlled region there are undeniable impacts to everyday freedoms on the ground.

Solid Sea 03: The Road Map by Multiplicity

Solid Sea 03: The Road Map, by Multiplicity

Vendor Power
An incisive project in the Making Policy Public series – to explore and explain public policy through graphic design – by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). There are 10,000 street vendors in New York City, providing us with all kinds of necessities from hot dogs to I LOVE NY t-shirts. The vendors are subject to a myriad convoluted rules and regulations in the best manner of city bureaucracy (where minor violations can lead to $1000 fines) and are frequently harassed by law enforcement. Conducted in partnership with the Street Vendor Project and designer/urban planner/artist Candy Chang, the Vendor Power project serves as an accessible delineation of vendors’ rights and recourse in five languages and particularly scrumptious design, as well as a community advocacy tool.

Vendor Power, by the CUP

Vendor Power, by the CUP

Next week: Queer Urbanism, and how social networks redefine our experience of urban space (or not).