Transgressing the grid: adventures on (and off) Manhattan island

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

How might a city know its people? And, how might people know their city, as their self or as their other? Each numerical edifice of course erases the knowability of some, to render the knowability of others. This essay examines the long-term effects of mid-century development strategies in New York City, specifically the ways in which urban planners used forced relocation practices, and the ways in which these practices led to urban decay. Here we will see that the city’s strategic, and often disingenuous, use of data led to the disappearance of city inhabitants from the city’s archives. With these strategies in mind, this essay outlines the ways in which city governance procedures functioned in aesthetic terms, rendering the city’s grid as an ethereal medium ready for remaking. These development practices led to a catastrophic decay of social networks. Most notably perhaps, we find the disappearance and reappearance of entire city streets from both the physical reality of urban spa...

Architecture_MPS, 2022

Most people in the United States began to alter their decisions and actions beginning in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when the closures and ‘pause’ on most work were established. Studying the transforming urban conditions in New York City specifically presents a lens through which to understand how we quickly adapted to new spatial conditions as measures were put in place for keeping people healthy and encouraging businesses to stay open and approachable. Immediately, the need for social distancing asked us to consider how to navigate exposure as we moved beyond the home. Necessities for businesses to survive became a priority for the city and coalesced with people’s desire for seeking ways to do things outdoors. A focus on using city streets as urban public spaces resulted. Policies such as Open Restaurants and Open Streets were developed by the Department of Transportation to mitigate pandemic circumstances and to stir dynamic and optimistic possibilities for street use. Open Restaurants called for food/drink establishments to quickly reimagine their adjacent pavement or available street space. Open Streets initiated new ways for creating pedestrian zones in previously trafficked areas. This article highlights fieldwork documentation comparing a Cluster and Line of food/drink establishments with a newly pedestrian Avenue, in connected Brooklyn neighbourhoods. Diagrams, photographs and maps document the ingenious street constructions and the observed and felt psychological or phenomenal transformations taking place. An urban interiorism grew out of the imposed formalisation of rules for movement patterns and compact constructions, while the ad hoc or serendipitous conditions allowed for other intimate conditions. Notions of ‘village cafés’ or ‘urban beaches’ evolved through myriad forms and materials inviting unusual seating configurations and interactions. Speculations on what these internal/external spatial experiences, changing identities and continued urban freedoms are teaching us are also explored through a multidisciplinary set of voices.

This paper discusses research in progress into the historic transformations of the row house typology in New York. The study considers the urban morphological and configurational properties of the residential streetscape of West Village. The aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the way physical patterns shape socio-spatial dynamics over time. Through an historic study of the Manhattan grid, block and lot organisation, the paper proposes that whilst the regularity of the city’s orthogonal grid presupposes a uniformity of use, closer inspection reveals a variety of configurational scales and street patterns that support a diversity of land-uses in the area. More particularly, the paper examines the adaptability of the row house typology to changes in the urban grid, changes in society and the consequential changes in the building form. The row house, which was originally designed as a single-family unit, has adapted over time to a variety of use patterns: multi-dwellings, ‘work-live’ artists’ studios, as well as commercial-residential units. The analytical measures of space syntax provide an insight into the properties of the floor plan and the relationship between building and street that have allowed for these transformations to occur. Additionally, in order to understand how citywide urbanisation processes affect shifts in building form, layout and use over time, the row house is studied within its urban context. West Village is considered as an exemplar of Manhattan’s urbanisation process. The study shows that while opposing forces had an impact on the Village’s neighbourhood profile, the underlying template of a defined and rhythmical grid kept the transformations organised and unified in a well-structured spatial system. The area is a particularly interesting example of this due to the way the historic built form and streetscape of row housing in the area has responded both to increasing densities and pedestrian flows, as well as to shifts in land use allocation. Overall, the paper examines how street network, lot organisation and built form can create the flexibility for the built environment to respond to continuously shifting socio-spatial circumstances over time. It is suggested that in order to develop innovations in housing design and urban planning, a pre-requisite of these is to grasp the physical properties that can allow for spatial - and therefore social and economic - diversity in the built fabric at all scales: building, lot, block and, grid.

Public, 2012

Journal of Urban History, 2021

Review of Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square by Stephen Petrus. "Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight," observes the narrator Julius in Teju Cole's meditative novel Open City (2011), largely set in New York. Cole reminds us that the city is a tapestry, made up of distinct yet intertwined localities, each a springboard for reflection, a world unto itself. In Open City, the built environment is a text with many layers of meaning and levels of complexity. New York City is at bottom a palimpsest. These three books echo Julius' views that New York neighborhoods are unique entities and that both the quotidian and the extraordinary are worthy of historical examination. Each writer probes a specific place to illuminate broader trends in urban history. In Design for the Crowd, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury analyzes the many incarnations of Union Square Park from its origins in the 1830s as the center of an elite residential enclave to its reemergence in the 1980s and 1990s as a shopping and entertainment destination. Merwood-Salisbury views the public-private relationships that remade the Square following the fiscal crisis of 1975 as but the latest chapter in its long history of civic-business alliances and is critical of commentary that decries the "privatization of public space." Jeffrey S. Gurock's Parkchester traces the history of a planned community established by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Met Life) in 1940, from an ethnically mixed though racially segregated development to a diverse neighborhood reflective of the Bronx's demographics in the twenty-first century. Gurock focuses on harmonious relations among white ethnics in the 1940s and the 1950s and relative racial accord following the integration of Parkchester in the 1960s. And in Tudor City, Lawrence R. Samuel assesses the first residential skyscraper complex in the world, from its creation by real estate developer Fred F. French in the 1920s to the battles over the site between developers and preservationists in the 1970s and 1980s. Samuel depicts Tudor City as a largely self-sustaining community, marked by a strong identity and wariness to outside forces perceived as a threat. Union Square, Parkchester, and Tudor City all reshaped New York's landscape and at their origins represented a fresh set of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes about city living. Merwood-Salisbury 953401J UHXXX10.

London and Manhattan constitute unique urban configurations which have claimed and conquered the metropolitan vision. This paper travels back in time to look for the foundations of these cities’ architectural and urban morphology. The study is focused on the architecture of the everyday, the vernacular buildings which collectively form the character of a city’s historical built environment. It discusses how both preconceived frameworks and emergent architectural decisions and societal rules have shaped the two cities throughout their spatial histories. Drawing evidence from historical and empirical data the analysis presented in this paper builds on space syntax research which investigates morphological processes in urban configurations. The paper looks at two contrasting cases of urban grids to contribute to the understanding of the way different spatial arrangements influence city form. The urban past of London and Manhattan is considered in terms of planning intentions, architecture, urban form and the embodied socio-cultural models and ideals. The approach emphasises the way architectural and urban scales were configured together to produce each city’s historical morphological identity and spatial culture. This stems from an effort to form a parallel understanding of both the building unit and the urban realm where this is situated. In this perspective, the discussion provides an overview on the one hand, of the building aggregation rules of the London terraced house and the Manhattan row house schemes; and on the other hand, the structure of the urban grid in each case. The aim is to shed light on the interplay of these two elements, underlining the challenge for any urban design approach: to tackle both buildings and streets along the lines of a unifying and diachronic spatial logic. The study considers the syntactical and morphological properties of urban space, looking at the building, the block and the city scales. The paper aims to highlight that both for London and Manhattan there exist inherent cross-scale organisational consistencies that hold the spatial cultures of each city together.

Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography , 2012

Urban ethnographers must understand that while we look at things using close-up lenses, most policy-makers, on the other hand, employ wide-angle lens to describe what is going on at that very same street level. In this essay the authors attempt to provide a contrast between those views in the context of the radically changed public perception of the New York City Borough of Brooklyn. When the authors began their sociological research (and social activism) in the late Twentieth Century, the neighborhoods in which they were active suffered from the spread of middle-class (white) flight and urban blight. Today, in the first two decades of the Twenty-first, the fortunes of these same areas have been reversed, but longer-term residents face new 'problems' in the form of gentrification and displacement. It is suggested here that a view from the street can provide a better sociological understanding of the bigger picture. Brooklyn's Image Then and Now The image of Brooklyn as a whole, as well as its most well-known individual neighborhoods such as Bedford-Stuyvesant, Flatbush, and Coney Island, has always been a powerful independent force in creating and maintaining its concrete reality. Forty years ago these place names were stigmatized. Today, in 2015, Brooklyn and these areas are by all accounts in the popular media decidedly 'in' places. The Borough of Brooklyn currently occupies an elevated status as a gem in the crown of New York City as a Global City, and it is fast becoming a popular tourist destination in its own right. By almost every measure the 'Borough of churches' has moved far beyond 'renaissance' and 'revival' to enjoy a hard-earned, successfully promoted, chic and hip image that is presented to the rest of the world. As opposed to the 'bad old days' in the 1960s and 1970s the major challenges likely to confront local community and political leaders in the Twenty-first Century arise from such 'problems' as the rising cost of housing resulting from upscale gentrification by which investors compete for any available development space. A few decades ago the problems were exactly the opposite. No one at that time could have ever imagined a hip travel guide, Lonely Planet, would name Brooklyn as one of the top world destinations for 2007 (Kuntzman 2007). In 2015 the travel guide giant Fodor's advertised the first guidebook devoted only to the borough with this as its teaser: Brooklyn is the most talked about, trendsetting destination in the world. Fodor's Brooklyn, the first comprehensive guidebook to New York City's most exciting borough, is unlike any we've ever published. Written and illustrated by locals, it's infused with authentic Brooklyn flavor throughout—making it the go-to guide for locals and visitors alike.