WATER AND SEWER

Relman, Dane, & Colfax is a pretty righteous law practice. Their cases are pretty good fodder for The Arsenal of Exclusion, based as they are on one or another evil, exclusionary weapon (for example, the BLOOD RELATIVE ORDINANCE). One of the cases featured on their website today is Kennedy v. City of Zanesville, which centers on a predominantly white county that for decades has refused to service an African-American neighborhood with water. From the Relman website: "The sixty-seven plaintiffs in the case had alleged that the City of Zanesville, Muskingum County, and the East Muskingum Water Authority refused to provide them public water service for over fifty years because they live in Coal Run, the one predominately African-American neighborhood in a virtually all-white county. The Coal Run plaintiffs live within one mile of public water lines alongside the Zanesville city limits, but were denied public water service for nearly fifty years. As a result, they had to haul water from the city, collect rainwater, and store water in cisterns, where it often became dangerous for consumption. During the same time period, white residents on the same street were provided with water."

To paraphrase a talking head from a video about the case: "This is something out of the 1940s."

The tactics didn't necessarily have the effect of uprooting the community, but it did make life difficult in it (the community is called "Coal Run" because it is between two mines, both of which have polluted groundwater). Thankfully, Relman, Dane, & Colfax is really good at fighting against the evil forces of exclusion. A federal court jury returned verdicts totaling nearly $11 million against the City of Zanesville, Ohio, Muskingum County, Ohio, and the East Muskingum Water Authority for "illegally denying water service to a predominately African-American community on the basis of race." The jury also awarded $80,000 in damages to Fair Housing Advocates Association.

As with Thompson v. HUD, maps played a key rule in making the case. In the map below, you can clearly see that the water line stops where the black peoples' homes start:

Interboro's Holding Pattern at MoMA PS1

We don't post too often about the work we do on this blog (we post about it on our main website), but we would like to take some time to tell you about a project we did for MoMA PS1 this past summer called Holding Pattern. We like to think of it as a project about inclusion.

First, some background: every year, MoMA PS1 commissions an architecture firm to design and build a setting for big, Saturday afternoon parties called “Warm Ups” that are held in MoMA PS1’s courtyard. The program is: provide seating and shade for the roughly 6,000 visitors who visit the Warm Up every Saturday between June and September. The budget is small, and you have to build everything yourself in 4 months.

When we first started to think about what to design, we thought about two things: First: what happens to the stuff from a project after the project is over? Does it get thrown out? Could we design and build something that could be put it to a different use once the party is over? Second: PS1 is located in the borough of Queens, the most diverse, vibrant, and exciting part of New York City. And while MoMA PS1 is a great, community-friendly institution, in some ways, it can seem a little insulated from the great stuff on the other side of the 16-foot tall concrete walls that surround its courtyard. Look at the view from Checker Management, a taxi stand across the street:

Might there be a way to undermine this wall?

We spent a lot of time in the neighborhood, talking to people. The first person we talked to was the owner of Checker Taxi Management, Mike. To make the wait between taxi shifts a little nicer, Mike built a small, impromptu plaza with plastic chairs and tables, a shade awning, and a few planters. Here drivers sit, talk, play board games and drink coffee. We thought this was an interesting space and it suggested to us that the Warm Up’s PS1s programmatic requirements—seating, shade, and a water feature—sometimes overlap with the needs of the Warm Up’s neighbors.

This gave us an idea for a kind of radical recycling that tries to strengthen MoMA PS1’s ties to the neighborhood by matching Warm Up’s programmatic needs with the needs of its neighbors. We went around the neighborhood, and asked every business we found the following question: is there something you need that we could design, use in the courtyard during the Warm Up, then donate in the fall, once the Warm Up is over?

Now that the Fall has come and gone, we can look back at the process:

With this approach, we radically expanded our client group, from one client (the museum) to fifty clients, from the LIC School of Ballet to 5pointz Aerosol Art Center, to the Variety Boys and Girls Club of Queens. Holding Pattern operates like an urban design project, developing an environment that responds to multiple, very different and sometimes changing desires (something that a fixed piece of architecture could never do).

The project then became something effectively designed by people in the neighborhood. We hoped that by doing this, we could help strengthen the ties between MoMA PS1 and Long Island City. Towards this goal, we also also invited neighborhood institutions to make use of MoMA PS1’s courtyard for programs of their own making. These included B-Boy Workshops with 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center, Ballet Workshops with LIC School of Ballet, Readings with the Queens Library, Qulit-making Workshops with New York Irish Center, Bike Maintenance Workshops with Recycle-A-Bicycle and more. It was great to see people in the neighborhood take ownership of MoMA PS1 in this way:

Cyburbia Land Use and Zoning Forum

For fun, mindless, internet browsing, some people go to sites like boingboing or happyplace, or stalk high school girlfriends on Facebook, but our site of choice is the Cyburbia Land Use and Zoning Forum. Ever wonder how to outzone Inflatable-air-dancer-thingies? Need tips for taking down fraternities in front of the Zoning Board of Appeals? Having trouble writing setback regulations for water slides? Well look no further! If, like us, you're unhealthily fascinated by the politics of the built environment, you might find the forum as endlessly amusing as we do. Highly recommended!

Excluding "Inclusionary"

For what it's worth, the Blogger spellchecker doesn't recognize the word "inclusionary," even though it recognizes the word "exclusionary."

SPEED BUMP

None of us can quite remember how we stumbled upon this link about the documented Civil Rights abuses committed by SPEED BUMPS, and neither have we researched the issue any further (and nor do we know what it says about us that we are researching such things in the first place), but in any event, it appears that SPEED BUMPS have a shot at the Arsenal of Exclusion. To build a case against traffic calmng measures, some anti traffic-calming group points out that: "Citizens in Houston, Texas filed a complaint with HUD that gates installed as part of a calming project were used to segregate communities along racial and socio-economic lines. HUD found the City of Houston in violation of the civil rights of its citizens and ordered the gates removed. Gates were replaced with humps to effectively, though less obviously, achieve the same result - denial of access by minorities and tenants of lesser socio-economic status to the use of adjacent neighborhoods." If anyone knows more about this, please don't hesitate to let us know!

COLD WATER

We have been reading The Fires, a great book by Joe Flood about the (mostly devastating) consequences of Mayor Lindsay's decision to enlist the RAND Corporation and their "new budget science" to help New York City's Fire Department do more with less in the 1970s. There's a lot we could say about the book, which we are finding fairly riveting, but for now, suffice it to say that we have another entry in the Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion: COLD WATER. Flood writes that Robert Moses didn't heat pools in white neighborhoods near black ones because he didn't think blacks would swim in cold water. Awesome!

You're Welcome, Now Scram!

One thing we always emphasize when talking about the Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion is the fact that the entries have little meaning apart from how they are used. With the exception of things like BOMBS, entries in the Arsenal can usually go either way: they can exclude and include. This isn't just true of weapons like PUBLIC HOUSING, which theoretically opens the city to the poor but which in most cities was used as a means to foster racial segregation; it's true of weapons like RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS COVENANTS, which in at least one case (Baltimore's Morgan Park) were used by African Americans to build an affluent, vibrant, non-redlined neighborhood in the suburbs.

But one thing we rarely emphasize--and haven't written about--is the fact that our attitudes about openness in our cities can be so conflicting. This thought was provoked by this amazing window display in a real estate office near our office on Flatbush Avenue that caught our attention yesterday:

Needless to say, it seems odd to believe in one's right to live where one chooses but not stand where one chooses.

Supermarket Segregation

In Baltimore, even the checkout aisle at the supermarket is racially segregated! These two images represent the left and right sides of aisle 6 at the Waverly Giant:

ARMREST

Here's a candidate for the ARMREST ON BENCH centerfold playmate of the year, spotted on a recent trip to Washington D.C.'s Adams Morgan neighborhood:

Occupy Wall Street at LentSpace

Our phones and inboxes were abuzz this morning with news that Occupy Wall Street is trying to occupy LentSpace, the temporary sculpture space on Canal and Sixth Avenue that we designed in 2009. Needless to say, as supporters of the movement, this is very exciting news!

Below find some pictures of LentSpace from 2009:

HALLOWEEN

Halloween is Interboro’s favorite holiday, hands down.

One important reason: it is the only holiday that has an entry in our forthcoming book, The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion. Halloween is, after all, an evening when kids (and adults) from different neighborhoods and socio-economic classes share the sidewalks of the city. For one evening at least, typical boundaries between neighborhoods and between public and private evaporate.

This is apparently very true in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood, where a student of mine named Jason Gottlieb lives. Thankfully, Jason took some incredible pictures of the Hampton Halloween experience, which you can see below:

Matthew Lassiter on the Silent Majority

We were happy to see The Arsenal of Exclusion & Inclusion contributor Matthew Lassiter's op-ed in today's New York Times. Congratulations on a great piece!

MTO, Health, and New Urbanism

It's great to see so much press coverage around the publication of "Neighborhoods, Obesity, and Diabetes — A Randomized Social Experiment," an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the health gains made by women who moved to low-poverty communities under the Moving To Opportunity Program. Here's a summary from CNN: "between 2008 and 2010, Ludwig and his colleagues followed up with 3,186 women who participated in the [MTO] program. . . . Of the women who stayed in their original neighborhoods, 20% had blood-sugar levels consistent with diabetes and 18% had a BMI of at least 40 (the unofficial cutoff point for morbid obesity). These rates were not measurably different among the women who received unrestricted vouchers. By contrast, just 16% of the women who moved to low-poverty areas had diabetes and just 14% were morbidly obese."

However, one thing that no article we have seen has mentioned is how this data flies in the face of so much New Urbanist propaganda about how living in the suburbs makes people fat. In the MTO program, moves from high-poverty communities to low-poverty ones typically (though not always) meant moves from denser, more urban neighborhoods to less dense, less walkable, more suburban ones. So what is it about the new environments that accounts for the health benefits? Jens Ludwig, lead author of the study is quoted in CNN saying that the move "changed a bunch of things at one time for these families, so it's hard to tease out exactly what made a big difference for them," but that greater access to healthy foods, a safer environment more conducive to outdoor exercise, and lower levels of psychological stress all "seem like plausible explanations."

Jerold Kayden on Occupy Wall Street

In the media coverage of Occupy Wall Street, it has been great to see our former professor Jerold S. Kayden emerge as the go-to expert on publicly-owned private space. We first met Jerold in his excellent "Public Private Development" Class--which we all took at the GSD in 2000--and we subsequently helped him develop a brand around his then nascent "Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space" organization, which was founded after the publication of his exhaustive book on the topic. As most supporters of the Occupy movement know by now, one of the brilliant things about it is that by occupying Zuccotti Park, the occupiers occupied a privately-owned public space that, unlike a city-owned public space, can draft and enforce its own rules of operation (the city only requires that these rules be "reasonable"). Zuccotti Park--by almost any standard, one of the better privately-owned public spaces in the city--had very lax rules: one couldn't skateboard, roller skate, or bike through the park, but until October 13 of this year, there were no rules prohibiting camping or lying down.

As Kayden writes in his op-ed piece in the Times, "The rules remain unenforced; no one is sure what will happen next."

Occupy Wall Street

There is so much we'd like to say about Occupy Wall Street, which we find inspiring, exciting, and essential, and which we support 100%. Among other things, it's a victory for public space, and a reminder of how real democracy is impossible without it. Fortunately, someone with a much bigger audience than this blog has written a really thoughtful piece that hits the nail on the head, and says a lot of the things that this blog might have said if we were better at this. Michael Kimmelman's "In Protest, The Power of Place" is a must read. Seriously: follow the link and read it now!