DARKNESS

For a class I teach about artists and / in the city, Rachel London did a great project called "Baltimore Sky Space Project." According to the website, Sky Space Project is "a project that aims to alter dark spaces through installations and events around viewing the night’s sky in Baltimore." The premise of the project is smart, simple, and, frankly, touching: Baltimore is a notoriously dark city, with blocks of abandoned rowhouses and relatively few streetlights. As a symbol of neglect, darkness is thus a bad thing (and a dangerous thing), but there is a silver lining. Baltimore's relative darkness means stars are more visible in Baltimore than they are in other cities. Baltimore, it turns out, is a relatively OK place to stargaze.

But, as evidenced by last Friday's inaugural "Night Lights" event--which brought a diverse group of people to an abandoned lot in Baltimore's Greenmount West neighborhood to watch live projection feeds of the night sky, look through telescopes, talk to a guest astronomer, listen to local starry music and drink iced tea--Sky Space Project is not about solitary stargazing. Sky Space Project is about community. As Rachel puts it, Night Lights "takes dark, empty lots and utilizes them to create feelings of safety in the city through a greater neighborhood presence. The events themselves literally use the darkness of the area to inspire patronage there."

The inaugural event was a great one that, incredibly, was broken up by the Baltimore Police. According to one eyewitness, as the event was nearing its end, patrons were told to leave or risk arrest, and were told that they were "a bunch of sardines in a shark tank."

Greenmount West is a dangerous neighborhood. So on the one hand, it's hard to not sympathize with the sentiment the police officers expressed. On the other hand, the police acted inappropriately, especially in light of the fact that no one was doing anything illegal (on the contrary, the event was a healthy, positive expression of community spirit). What's worse, if you take a long view of things, the police are acting as their own worst enemy. When they call the neighborhood a "shark tank" and shoe everyone away, they are in some respects creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. It would be naive to say that public perception and presence makes or breaks a neighborhood, but they can certainly contribute to its safety. Safety, after all, is a two-way street. Police have to do what they can but so do we: occupying a space a la Night Lights is a modest, but ultimately important thing that we can do to make a difference.

BOAT TOUR

Everyone should check out the amazing waterfront planning work Damon Rich is doing in the Newark Planning Department. Go on a boat tour of the Passaic!

FIRE ZONE

What's up with fire zones on Rockaway?

Here is a typical street in the Beach 140s between Beach Boulevard and the actual beach:



Interesting how there are no cars parked on the street. Why are there no cars parked on this street? This might have something to do with it:



A fire zone--or lots of fire zones--lining both sides of the street, prohibits street parking - not just on weekends, or on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 8 and 11, but always.



This is true of every street between Beach Boulevard and the actual beach until you get to this street (Beach 125 Street), where, predictably, the mansions stop:



The situation is also different one block inland:



Here there are cars parked on both sides, but this is only owing to the fact that it is still April:



Why FIRE ZONE (and to a lesser extent, NO PARKING ANYTIME) is in the Arsenal of Exclusion hardly needs to be explained. The wealthy owners of these opulent beach front mini-mansions declared their entire neighborhood a fire zone to keep away the summer riff-raff. FIRE ZONE is thus in the same category of BEACH PERMITS, FIRE HYDRANTS, and those famous low UNDERPASSES that Robert Moses built to ensure that buses couldn't deliver the poor, urban masses to Jones Beach. (For our Arsenal of Exclusion / Inclusion installation in the IABR, William Tenhoor and Meredith Tenhoor wrote about FIRE HYDRANTS in this capacity.) Granted, there must be enormous demand for street parking around these parts, but Rockaway is still part of the city, and shouldn't be closed off in such a manner.

SIDEWALK MANAGEMENT PLAN

A former student of ours posted this ridiculous video on Facebook today. If you don't have time to watch it, it pitches a "sidewalk management plan," which proposes a 6' - 8' "pedestrian use zone" in which pedestrians "must move immediately to accommodate the multiple users of the sidewalk." Importantly, the zone measures out from the property line, ruling out leaning on (or sleeping on) buildings.

As this former student points out, this is a really pathetic, barely disguised attempt to rid Portland of homeless people.

But also: a sidewalk management plan in downtown Portland? Such a plan isn't needed on the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan; what, beyond the "homeless problem," would justify one in relatively serene downtown Portland? According to the resolution the problem is that "people and bicycle racks, signal controller boxes, drinking fountains, fire hydrants, parking meters, transit shelters, light poles, mail boxes, telephones, retail and commercial doorways, garbage cans, newspaper boxes, benches, permitted carts and cafés, “A” board signs and public art among other items must share sidewalks that can range from five to fifteen feet wide."

The problem, that is, is that downtown Portland fulfills the function of a good city street: it is a dense urban space, where lots of different programs are forced to negotiate with each-other. Isn't Portland supposed to be progressive? The great William Whyte is rolling in his grave.

SPILL

On my walk from office to home today, I felt compelled to document what we might call "spill." Different programs obviously differ on the inside, but they also "spill" differently: firehouses, parking garages, supermarkets, restaurants, bars, physic shops, and Italian ice purveyors all create unique social spaces when their private, interior programs spill out and intersect with the public life of the street. Bar spill, for example, usually takes the form of a designated smoking zone, where different people might come together who otherwise might not. Firehouses, as evidenced by the photographs below, create a friendly space of encounter for parents, their curious children, and the firefighters.

For the most part, spill is a good example of how a space can be made without architecture (since the space is really the product of the intersection of two programs). However, architectural accoutrements can sometimes exaggerate this intersection of private and public. As an example, consider the apartment canopy. In Celluloid Skyline, James Sanders analyzes a scene from the film Butterfield 8, in which a woman (Emily Liggett), exits a cab and journeys "from curbstone to doorway." Sanders writes that "this piece of sidewalk is already home. . . For a moment, two paths have crossed at right angles: the stream of public life running the length of the sidewalk and the short domestic path set perpendicular to it, from curbstone to doorway." As Sanders points out, it is the canopy alone that makes this crossing possible, "this place where a single plot of ground has two completely distinct meanings as different as home and city."

Spill is not a tool per se, and thus fits somewhat awkwardly in this lexicon of things that open and close the city. In any case, spill was especially evident today, a sunny Spring day that drew the entire neighborhood outdoors. Here are a few snapshots of the "spill" outside a few businesses I passed by this afternoon on Union Street between 5th and 7th Avenues, and then again on 7th Avenue between Union and Garfield.

PIE

Who doesn't like pie? Like baseball and jury duty, pie is one of those things that has the capacity to assemble people who might not otherwise assemble. Presumably, that is the thinking behind Pielab, a "welcoming community space on Greensboro’s Main Street that provides delicious pie and coffee, as well as retail and hospitality job training for local youth." PieLab also operates as a community design center "focusing on community development projects and small business incubation in Greensboro and the surrounding five counties."

There are of course many ways in which food serves to open the city. For the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Meridith Tenhoor looked at the "multi-ethnic gastronomic paradise" that can be found in the aging shopping plazas of New Jersey’s secondary suburban commercial corridors, and that serve to open the region. Pielab takes a cue from this phenomenon, but purposely uses the food as bait, producing a quite clever outcome.

For this, "pie" gets a place in our Arsenal of Inclusion.

SCHOOL DISTRICT

How did "School District" escape our original list of 101 things that close the city? Especially here in Park Slope, and extra especially here in the shadow of PS 321, the segregating effect of school districts is something I can witness each and every time I leave my apartment on Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street. Thanks in part to the stellar reputation on PS 321, it seems sometimes that mine is one of the only non-family households in the neighborhood. That vision of baby stroller armageddon that even tourists can conjure by now is by no means inaccurate, but let's remember why the neighborhood is so full of baby strollers (and, by the way teenagers, which were few and far between in Fort Greene, Williamsburg, and any number of other neighborhoods I have spent time in): yes, Prospect Park is nice to play in, and yes, the retail mix is just right for a young family, but it is the school district that is coveted most. As is to be expected, the money mom and dad save not having to send Ella and Emma to private school is tacked on to the cost of housing. The result? Many people who don't have kids might find that it is not worth their while to live there, when they could live outside of the 321 district where their rent would be cheaper, and where they might find better retail amenities (indeed, if I ever go out in Park Slope, it is almost always on the south side, outside the 321 district, where there are better restaurants and where bars actually exist). The result? A certain kind of segregation that separates family households from non-family households. In this way, PS 321 is what Lior Jacob Strahilevitz calls an "Exclusionary Amenity." Like golf courses, churches, prayer speakers, and Shabbat elevators, PS 321 is an amenity that creates a demand that only certain people are willing to pay for.

No wonder Park Slope sometimes feels so much like the suburbs.

JURY DUTY

Roger Cohen has an interesting piece in today's New York Times about what he calls the "Narcissus Society." Community, writes Cohen, has vanished or eroded. Instead we have "frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs." It's a perhaps hackneyed sentiment, but what makes the piece interesting is the fact that these feelings were provoked by serving on jury duty. Cohen writes" "Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done."

Sounds like "jury duty" might be a good candidate from the Arsenal of Inclusion. Indeed, "jury duty" is included in Interboro's list of 101 things that open the city. Interboro writes:

Jury Duty is the obligation of a citizen to serve on a jury to jointly render an impartial verdict in a courtroom trial and set a penalty or judgment; it accrues from the constitutional right to be tried by a panel of one's peers. As an instrument of direct government participation, it asks all formally recognized citizens to judge each other based upon a presumption of innocence and the rational weighing of facts. The summons process and the spatial organization of the jury chambers are such that they do not discriminate based on background, wealth, or ethnicity.

Jury Duty is in the Arsenal of Inclusion because it brings together a heterogeneous cross-section of the community to exercise an important civic right and responsibility. The shared tradition, practiced in small-town community courthouses and metropolitan judicial centers across the country, has long been a window onto the diversity of the American populace.

LECTURE

Interboro's friend Adam Kleinman curates an amazing lecture series for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council called "Access Restricted" Access Restricted is "a free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited spaces in Manhattan to the general public." Once inside these unique interiors, Adam writes, "the audience is treated to a site-specific lecture and discussion addressing a range of topics revolving around issues of architectural history and preservation, social justice, and urban development." This year's theme, "Law and Representation," explores current issues in law, while also investigating the law in art, architecture, and the media.

Aside from being a great series, it is a great candidate for our "Arsenal of Inclusion." Adam writes: "Even though Manhattan possesses one of the richest legal infrastructures in the country, the general public hardly ever interacts with these buildings and their use except for a few, very specified situations." Brilliant!

BIKE LANE

Two hipsters painted DIY bike lanes on the Hasidic-controlled stretch of Bedford Avenue between Flushing and Division avenues, where a city-installed bike lane was recently removed. According to posts on Gothamist and The Huffington Post, local Hasids asked the city to remove the bike lanes because they posed a "safety and religious hazard," and the Bloomberg administration, fearing retribution from an important constituency during an election, complied, claiming that the operation was "part of ongoing bike network adjustments in the area."

Communities have protested bike lanes for safety reasons before, but, so far as we know, this is the first instance of a community citing a "religious hazard." The source of this hazard? Hasids have been disturbed by “hotties” who traverse their neighborhood on bikes in “shorts and skirts.” Hotties in shorts and skirts may violate the community's dress code, but in case anyone forgot, in New York City, streets are part of the public realm. Unlike in say, a gated community, streets in the city are the jurisdiction of the city, not the community. By catering to this ridiculous criticism, the city is setting up a frightening precedent indeed.

MARKET

This semester and last, I gave my students an assignment I call “Open City Spaces.” The point of the assignment is to get students out and about, qualitatively evaluating public space in a way they might not be used to. Like most good assignments, it's interesting to students and professor alike: they walk away with a better understanding of the Open City, and I walk away with a larger inventory of interesting spaces.

One of the spaces that is routinely nominated is Downtown Baltimore's gritty (in a good way) Lexington Market. Lexington Market is the largest running market in the world. It has occupied its current site—at the intersection of Paca and Lexington Streets—since 1782.

That it is so often nominated is a testament to how smart my students are, since it is the same space that I would nominate. In any case, this semester, we decided to take a class field trip to the Lexington Market. What's open about it? There's the market itself, but then there is what's on its perimeter: a variety of shops, bus stops, homeless shelters, street vendors, drug dealers, offices, parking garages serving the inner harbor, Camden Yards, and the CBD: the diversity of programs is incredible. The market's food and programs (concerts, mostly) make the market a destination in itself, but the market is also a crossroads, generating an overlap of publics that rivals even New York’s Union Square for sheer diversity. A true Jacobsian / Whyte-ian dream of urbanity if ever there was one.

WALKING TO SCHOOL

There is a fairly heartbreaking story in today's New York Times about walking to school, and how few students do it. The Times cites a National Household Travel Survey that reveals that in 2001, only 13 percent of children either walked or biked to school, down from 41 percent in 1969. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Of course, this reflects suburbanization and the ensuing de-densification that makes walking infeasible, but it also reflects a fear of the public realm. As one woman put it: "I wouldn’t trust my kid with the street” (the woman who said this asked that her full identity be withheld "to protect her children").

The "transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school" has become an increasingly worrisome affair. Motivated by national headline-grabbing stories of abduction, parents have resorted to some extreme tactics, including driving their child to a school that is only a lock away, installing surveillance cameras, or insisting that their child wait for the bus with them in a car parked at the end of the driveway.

I don't have a kid, but it seems obvious that this violates healthy rapprochement. Can instilling such an intense fear in a child of the public realm possibly be healthy? No, it can't, and that's why "driving to school" merits a place on our Arsenal of Exclusion

STOREFRONT

Kees Christiaanse, being the curator of the 2009 International Architecture Biennale, is the person who got us thinking about the Open City in the first place, so it's no surprise that he has much to contribute to this Arsenal of Exclusion / Inclusion. Rereading [limited access] or the open city for my Open City seminar, I was reminded of the clairty of the Chinatown example. Christiaanse writes: ". . . although a Chinatown in an occidental city is a concentrated, closed community, at the same time she open her doors for others through commerce and gastronomy in her active street fronts. She has no fixed borders but overlaps and interacts with other communities that settle in the open system."

The emphasis in the passage is really on how the condition of the Open City is achieved through a balance between open and closed, but here I want to appropriate it, and use it as evidence that "store front" deserves a place on our Arsenal of Inclusion.

PLAYING IN THE SIDEWALK

In this short piece on the RPA Spotlight, Marshall speculates that the over-structured, over-scheduled life of city kids precludes the sort of open, unstructured playtime that is so important for growth. This is probably true for non-city kids too, but city kids have something non-city kids don’t: vibrant, mixed, monitored sidewalks that are open to anyone. Marshall writes that while "the classic image of kids and city life is of reckless, unescorted children playing in the street," in fact, it is on the street where kids learn to cooperate, innovate, self-govern, and--if the street is the right kind of street--encounter difference (this is the case for Marshall's kids, who live across the street from low-income housing). Thus we take Marshall to be saying that it’s a shame city kids don’t make better use of this resource: over-structured, over-scheduled life is the stuff of the suburbs, where city sidewalks don’t exist, and where encounters have to be planned.

So on the one hand the piece is a variant of the Jacobsian theme of efficiency v. inefficiency, talked about in Economy of Cities in the context of inefficient but innovative Birmingham v. efficient but stagnant Manchester (but also throughout Death and Life of Great American Cities in the context of, well, city kids, parks, and sidewalks). The point here is that if you're not obligated to a prexisting plan, you'll be much more open to making up a new one.

On the other hand, the piece is about the sidewalk, which is perfectly inefficient. It is for this reason that playing on the sidewalk gets a spot in our Arsenal of Inclusion.

MORTGAGE CRISIS

The New York Times's "Beth Court Loss and Opportunity, Side by Side" is a series of articles that explore how a block of eight homes in Moreno Valley, Calif., about 60 miles from Los Angeles, has been reshaped by the housing bust and recession. It's a really great series, and it highlights some personal stories that are as heartbreaking as you might expect.

But then it also highlights something that much of the coverage on the mortgage crisis overlooks, namely, that one person's loss is another person's gain. When home values plummeted, homeowners became desperate to sell, and suddenly the dream of the single-family house on a quiet, suburban cul-de-sac became a reality for people for whom it previously wasn't. The series points out that on Beth Court--the block examined in the series--most of the new home buyers were atypical. And while the series dwells a bit too much on how the new neighbors don't fit in (they moved in with their extended family, they don't speak English, they don't participate in the neighborhood association, etc.), the fact is that they introduced much-needed diversity into the community.

And this is why "Mortgage Crisis," for all of its negative implications, deserves a spot on the Arsenal of Inclusion. This "glitch" has introduced new classes, races,and lifestyles into areas that looked as if they would remain stable, homogeneous, and exclusionary. It's not just Beth Court in Moreno Valley, Calif: today, one can find many new, suburban subdivisions in which multiple families share one large house, where shift workers go in on rentals together, and where transient construction workers get put up in luxury homes.