Volume Magazine: Art & Science of Real Estate

Volume 42 Art & Science of Real Estate In today’s rapidly changing World, the role of real estate has been affected deeply. To such a degree that the Center for Urban Real Estate sees an opportunity to transform the profession from within, stressing its creative potential and introducing an ethical code. CURE’s ambition is to create a continuum between architecture and real estate, as part of the design disciplines. It may be a good moment to dive into the archives and look at some architects’ attempts to provide for an open society. How much help do people need? Art & Science of Real Estate INSERT INSIDE Cedric Price INSERT INSIDE To beyond or not to be V42_omslag_def.indd 1 Archis 2014 #4 Per issue € 19.50 (NL, B, D, E, P) Volume is a project by Archis + AMO + C-Lab + CURE Struc­ turalism ... AND Kate Ascher Guus Beumer Piet Blom Eleanor Bron Vishaan Chakrabarti Benedict Clouette Paul Finch Samantha Hardingham Joop Hardy Dirk van den Heuvel Jeffrey Inaba Catherine Ingraham Lada Hršak Jesse M. Keenan David A. King Andrew Laing Steve Mullin Jan Nauta James Sanders Francis Strauven Julia Vitullo­Martin Piet Vollaard 4/12/14 15:30 Volume 42 Table of Contents In today’s rapidly changing World, the role of real estate has been affected deeply. To such a degree that The Center for Urban Real Estate sees opportunity to transform the profession from within, stressing its creative potential and introducing an ethical code. CURE’s ambition is to create a continuum between architecture and real estate, as part of the design disciplines. It may be a good moment to dive into the archives and look at some architects’ attempts to cater for an Open Society. 2 Editorial Arjen Oosterman 12 The Art & Science of Real Estate Development Jesse M. Keenan 20 Volume 42 28 1 36 42 48 Want to Save Public Housing? Integrate it into the Neighborhood, Starting with Retail Julia Vitullo-Martin 54 Building the Digital City James Sanders Property in Common: Co­disciplinary Nexus between Architecture and Real Property Catherine Ingraham 68 The Implications of a Networked Urban Landscape for Architectural Programming Andrew Laing A Value Add Proposition – the History of Real Estate Development in New York City Kate Ascher 76 The Discipline and the Profession Jesse M. Keenan interview 81 Structuralism insert 113 Cedric Price insert Value Propositions Vishaan Chakrabarti interview Mobility and the City: Dismantling Automobility for a New Development Paradigm David A. King 146 Colophon, corrections & additions Volume 42 Editorial 2 3 Volume 42 o n d Volume 42 C i 4 Volume 42 t 5 i o n s o n d Volume 42 C i 6 Volume 42 t 7 i o n s o n d Volume 42 C i 8 Volume 42 t 9 i o n s o n d Volume 42 C i 10 Volume 42 t 11 i o n s Practitioners and academics in the built environment have struggled for generations to define the professional and intellectual role of the real estate developer. The anecdotes of unscrupulous developers building the lowest quality buildings at the highest and quickest possible financial return dominate popular conceptualization. Yet developers come in all shapes and sizes and very often include not-for-profit and community driven enterprises that serve a higher mission to improve spatial and economic equality. Irrespective of the diversity of the practice of development, developers yield tremendous power to dictate every facet of a building and its place within Volume 42 The Art & Science of Real Estate Development Jesse M. Keenan CURE’s Jesse Keenan lays out a new agenda for real estate: the development of an ethical orientation, not only for the good of the profession, but for the benefit of the city at large. By constructing a discipline around real estate as practice, and situate this in between the fields of economy and design, a richer understanding of what values can be created becomes possible. 12 Credit: Jesse M. Keenan (2011) Volume 42 Transient Shadow State of Capital in Real Estate 13 a larger urban context. As the scale of the practice has been amplified from the local to the global, so too has the efficiency seeking tendencies of an industry amplified the risk of poor quality development resonating in greater magnitudes over longer periods of time. The notable failure of speculative development on an awesome scale from Atlanta to Zhengzhou raises some fundamental questions about the ethical implications of development beyond the immediacy of projects and portfolios. After all, if real estate development is ever to transition from a trade to an autonomous profession, it must have an ethic that defines and regulates its institutional norms and behaviors. Academics such as Warwick Fox and others have over the years developed a framework for interpreting and developing ethics in the built environment. However, as a practical matter, there is little empirical evidence to suggest that the systematic application of codes of ethics result in positive outcomes such as greater spatial quality. Various architectural movements from post-modernism to new urbanism have experimented with a codification of one ethic or another (e.g., bioethics, feminist ethics, sustainability ethics, etc…), but the results – aesthetics aside – have been ambiguous at best when manipulated by a higher economic influence. However, history has served as guiding point for examples of best practices in development that have given consideration to social, environmental and economic factors, as well as to supply and demand, and have been able to internalize these otherwise external phenomena to advance some measure of prosocial behavior. In other words, history has consistently demonstrated that when developers build higher quality and better-designed buildings that accommodate a certain durability of variable stresses of people and places, there are latent values + ) ( The Federal Reserve ( U.S. Treasury - Consumers 2 ) ( ) - Global Investors - Citizens + FDIC Local Banks IRS Pension + Insurance National Banks Government Sponsored Enterprises Investment Banks Trustee Securitization FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS MBS Primary Servicer Credit Rating Agency AA+ B BBBAAA+ B B+ AA B+ BB A BBAA B BB+ CDO CDO Special Master Servicer Servicer Appraiser Derivatives 2 Credit: Jesse M. Keenan & Nicholas Chelko (2012). Museum of Modern Art, New York. + Broker Advisor Lawyer Program Design Works Purchase, Sale Mgmt Operation Maitenance Major Repairs Program Design Works Equity G.P. Real Estate Agent Tax Professional Property and Facilities Managers Equity L.P Architects + Consultants Accountant FINANCIAL SERVICES Financed Equity OWNER (Equity) General Contractors + Sub Contractors Design + construction mgmt REnovation SALE/ DEMO (Construction Financing) (Permanant Financing) (Capital Financing) (Payoff) Developer that have positive long-term implications for price appreciation of the asset. Contrary to the intuition of many practitioners, such prosocial behavior has been rather profitable in the practice of development as the creation of intangible value transitions to one, which can be financially underwritten. It has also led to the bankruptcy of more than one developer; as the notion of best practices is itself highly contextualized wherein what may be a best practice in one location may be a violation of a certain order in another. This raises the question whether it is even possible or desirable to develop or codify a stable institutional ethic for a practice that is subject to place-specific relative customs, mores and norms? The Art The answer to this question is fundamental to the theoretical development of a larger disciplinary foundation for real estate development. Yet what is undeniable is that those abstractions of supply and demand that derive sensitivities in everything from economic equality to environmental stewardship are grounded in a value framework that transcends the discrete outcomes of finance or the physics of construction. These abstractions are a wholly subjective amalgamation of memory, perception, biases, illusions, intuition, and imagination. In this sense, development is both an art and a science, and the science is merely an exercise in the development and testing of a logic that justifies the rational risk of the art. The art is merely the imagination of the developer of a future physical and operational state of being that addresses some of the riddles of those abstractions that plague the relationship between people and the built environment. This isn’t to say that all new development should be for affordable housing or have a zero-carbon footprint, but it merely acknowledges that there is a treasure chest of hidden, unacknowledged and yet-tobe-created values that defy objectification as a financial unit and are wholly reliant on the exercise of creativity. Therefore, at its core, development is a process dependent on the envisioning and realization of value, which is not entirely different from the mode of intent of a designer in a conventional sense. Designers create value through a parallel synthesis of analysis and construction as mediated and derived from one’s imagination. A designer’s value may be a formal aesthetic, experience, or technology that either serves to address a problem or merely the self-satisfaction of the designer through the exercise of the design itself (i.e., there are positive, neutral, and negative values to design and innovation). In either event, there is a newness to the process of design – the creation of novelty that has never before existed. Newness – not so much in the modernist trope but as a matter of truth or, more specifically, as a matter of differentiated innovation. Anything short of this newness is merely replication. The efficiency-seeking tendencies of the modes of production in real estate have historically favored replication but at an opportunity cost. This is particularly true when one examines the multitude Volume 42 The Architecture of the U.S. Real Estate Industry 14 Credit: Jesse M. Keenan & Nicholas Chelko (2012). The Bauhaus Academy, XII Kolleg: After Levittown. Principal Right Off Negotiated + NPV Rent or Cash Tendered Non-Cash Rent Credit + GOVERNANCE CLASS A Residual CLASS B (Board of Directors) Equity = Rent > Inflation (Participants) Dividend Reinvestment Mortgagees x2 + x3 DISTRIBUTIONS REINVESTMENT Local Government x2 - 90% of Revenue 10% of Revenue Owner + + Renter w/ Equity 2 ( ) QCD - RMBS Investors Foreclosing (NonParticipants) GSEs REO Nat’l Banks Renter w/o Equity (Traditional Tenure) TENURE Local Deposit Banks CAPITALIZATION REIT AREA (Housing Stock) Title/Deed Cash Mortgages Infrastructure Credit Enhancements Owners & Renters + + Volume 42 The Community Growth REIT 15 of costs (i.e., net negative values) associated with unmanaged suburban growth patterns. In this sense, development is a type of commercial art that is distinguished from architecture and urban design only by scale and method – the design intent is the same if the problem is perceived to be the same. To this end, real estate development’s professional challenge is one of perceptibility. Architects are not just the agents of developers but developers are also the agents of architects. The economic history of patronage has long been the rallying call for the death of the autonomy of the art of architecture. But, one could argue that architecture, like all built environment professions, has never truly had any exclusive autonomy but for the point in time when the ‘architect’ cleared the land, fashioned the materials, and built the structure himself – to the limited satisfaction of himself as sole user and critic. To the contrary, there has been in recent years a great deal of architects and firms who have taken on the practice of development. Case in point: the 2014 Pritzker Prize was given to Shigeru Ban, who has notoriously served humanitarian ends as not only an architect but as a developer. While he has consistently derided developers and their ‘monuments to capitalism’, ironically Ban has a long and distinguished career as a developer, as he has independently secured the land, the approvals – the financing and the materials –, and has undertaken many other developer functions as a hybrid architect-developer. The Discipline So if real estate development is both an art and a science (more specifically, social science), how does one try to understand the discipline and how do you communicate this understanding for the advancement of a profession? At the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE), we have endeavored to build a historic narrative and theoretical foundation for advancing an autonomous discipline of real estate development separate and apart from the academies of urban planning and real estate financial management often found in business schools. In contrast, real estate development is the confluence of an intricate composition and operation of design, finance, and law. To this end, we have focused on three areas of research that we believe are categorically representative of a larger set of challenges facing the discipline and the profession: housing, digital urbanism, and adaptive design and development. Each of these domains of research brings specific methodological and theoretical conventions that inform a larger co-disciplinary perspective between art and science. Real estate development research is complicated by the parallel tracks of subjectivity and objectivity, which require a certain requisite cognizant separation by the investigator – hence, co-disciplinary as opposed to transdisciplinary. Likewise, this requires a clear distinction between logic and reason, which raises a larger ontological problem for real estate development. Is real estate development from the reality of the building, the user, the manager, the public, Credit: Lucien Wilson, Muchan Park & Jesse M. Keenan (2011). etc…? Yes, buildings operating with systemized artificial intelligence possess a reality that is a valid foundation for both theoretical and empirical research. In less than three decades of real estate development scholarship, the focus has largely been on the manager and the constructor. However, the dynamic relationship between the aforementioned realities belies a new foundation that scales across objects and actors and over the entire useful life of a building and its supporting land and infrastructure. The Method While the domain of scientific research is well defined, the notion of architectural design research is much more ambiguous in its methodological foundation outside of historical, theoretical, and technological academies. One approach advocated by CURE has been to undertake exploratory research that objectively analyzes phenomena as a matter of science – technically, often social science – but ultimately leaves open the door for a subjective interpretation of the resulting physical and operational manifestations as a matter of both art and science. For instance, in NYC 2040: Housing the Next One Million New Yorkers, we quantified the metrics for the cost and impact of housing a future population, but qualitatively limited the physical manifestation of the simulations to rule sets that imposed urban design standards that gave deference to the use, the accessibility, and the experience of buildings, lots, blocks, and districts. We were explicit in qualifying these form-based rules as oriented towards process and not outcome. The methods then become an iterative tool set that rejects optimization in favor of the complex realities of urban development. Iteratively representing, channeling and testing the flow of capital into and out of the built environment is a never-ending exercise in the study of real estate. While the search for efficient outcomes based on form manipulation and optimization are interesting, they are ultimately adjudicated in their application by an economic order that often offers little rational foundation – or, just the opposite, a rigid rationality of choice whose subjectivity defines objective empiricism. From this institutional perspective, some of our more important contributions have been in terms of normative organizational research that provides the foundation – if not a rule set – for design exploration. Jazz musicians had to know the western diatonic before they could play the whole tone scale outside of the ‘box’. To this end, we have attempted to experiment with this institutional and organizational box in order for designers to experiment with their own envelope with the assumption that greater variability of form leads to a more diverse decision space and hence greater flexibility to accommodate an increasingly complex urban environment. The resulting conceptual work can be thought to fall within capitalist realism, as it does not advocate an alternative framework to capitalism but an internal reconfiguration that is accessible to modes of operations and action within an existing capitalist hierarchy. As such, the outcome may be defined by the development of a discourse that challenges the reordering of the Volume 42 XIM: Parametric Real Estate and Urban Design Platform 16 Credit: Lucien Wilson, Muchan Park & Jesse M. Keenan (2011). Center for Urban Real Estate. Lower­Lower Manhattan (LoLo) Plan for Coastal Adaptation Volume 42 hierarchy, but does engage in delineating an alternate domain to what is assumed to be a regulated state of evolutionary capitalism. 17 The Work Examples of this work include the development of the Community Growth REIT and the Community Growth Corporation for the Museum of Modern Art, New York’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream and Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities exhibitions, respectively. These investment vehicles were designed to serve different purposes under different conditions, but were aligned in their efforts to internalize flows of capital, to promote stronger community governance, and to draw a nexus between material construction of the built form and flows of capital (e.g., both social and financial) that serve to mitigate excessive speculation and its negative consequences. Through a combination of analytical rigor and normative organizational development, rule sets were defined to guide the timing, depth, and scale of more formal design interventions in the advancement of spatial quality and sustainability. By aligning certain values of spatial and economic quality (i.e., economic quality is a component of economic equality), this research highlighted many frictions and challenges that are reference points for conventional empirical research in economics, organizational management, and urban design. To this end, a significant component of the exercise of any research is framing the questions and not necessarily the answers. Defining the appropriate questions in research relates to the larger process of managing and responding to the unknown in the built environment. As is always the case in science, it is a matter of distinguishing between the existence of truth in its observable or unobservable state and the ripeness of the occurrence of a truth – if at all. Nowhere is this more challenging than in the study of climate change. While much of the academic focus has been on planning and governance in the public realm, real estate as scaled from a building to the institution of the market has been grossly underevaluated in scholarship. Yet in the face of climate change, it is the private market that arguably has most to lose and hence is most incentivized to proactively prepare for what is now an inevitable occurrence of global warming and sea-level rise. While many have referenced this larger paradigm of property and climate within the polemic of common pool resources – and even the tragedy of the commons or anti-commons – we have worked in reverse order to examine private resources framed as buildings, properties, and organizations that are on the front lines of catastrophic risk. It is only after we understand private behavior that we can fully comprehend public capacities. In Adaptive Capacities of Commercial Real Estate Firms in NYC to Climate Change and Material and Social Construction: A Frame­ work for the Adaptation of Buildings, we have undertaken novel empirical and theoretical approaches to understanding the nature of how people and buildings are adapting to risks from climate change. The selection of adaptation as a core foundational concept among Credit: Jesse M. Keenan & Vishaan Chakrabarti (2013). NYC 2040: Housing the Next One Million New Yorkers. New York, NY: GSAPP Books. competing heuristics of resilience, coping, and mitigation is in itself a meaningful exercise. While resilience dominates the rhetorical usage in the U.S. as a catch-all responsive concept, its underlying meaning is one of maintaining the entire operations of the status quo, which is highly problematic in light of the implications for the potential of the perpetuation of existing power regimes, which themselves may serve to perpetuate inequality and inefficiencies. Adaptation on the other hand represents a state in the future that is superior to its predicate state in its ability to respond to a variety of stimuli through a process of transformation across multiple domains of operations. The progressive implications of the extension of this concept have potential application across scales, from the artificial intelligence of building systems to the human intelligence of building owners across an infinite range of stimuli. To this end, adaptation as manifested through adaptive capacities offers a framework, not just for a response to climatic stimuli but for a variety of stimuli, ranging from an aging demographic in Tokyo to the increasingly disruptive emergence of a booming technology sector in NYC. In recent years we have studied at length how changing market and organizational conditions at Goldman Sachs have revolutionized the world of corporate real estate. While this ongoing case has yet to be completed, the preliminary results highlight how an accelerated pace of change can fundamentally drive the development adaptation strategies which have precise yet dynamic resolution in the integration of operations planning, architectural design, corporate real estate and asset management. In our project with Hulic Co., Ltd., under the call sign Tokyo: Adaptation of Buildings and Real Estate, we have synthesized independent demographic and economic projections together with a narrative of the evolution of consumption preferences as manifested in architectural design, interior operational plans, and even furniture configurations. This work has been positioned within the context of an emerging hypothesis of the economic desirability of a 100+ year useful life of a commercial building, which is a bit of a strategic anathema in a culture that values land disproportionately to even the replacement value of a structure. With low levels of real inflation in rents, significant economic disincentives for redevelopment in a tight land market, and international competition for capital placement, the resulting necessity for longer periods of amortization support an argument for the design and development of extended-life buildings. The resulting research has developed an analytical framework for evaluating life cycling of buildings, which takes on program-to-program phasing and the associated engineering and design challenges facing long-term modulation of uses as market demands shift and evolve. This has raised the question as to where adaptive reuse begins and adaptive intent ends. However, it is possible that this is a matter of semantics and that adaptive design is merely a potential precondition to effective adaptive reuse. The normative implications of this work are potentially profound, as mature cities around the world age and are subject to a variety of stimuli, which are historically unprecedented within the institutional memory of markets, organizations, and professional practices. Our Building the Digital City initiative is another extension of a framework of adaptation, but at the scale of the city. We have tried to understand how the urban colocation of technology companies, the rise of independent contractors, digital workflows, and other forms of decen- Volume 42 Massing Outputs from Iterative Design + Development Modeling 18 Volume 42 tralized labor practices are radically challenging the conventions of office design and development. As referenced in Work and Workplaces in the Digital City, the associated low levels of capitalization and disintermediation championed by the shared economy are advancing a new paradigm oriented around workspaces that are challenging the definition of workplaces as they transition from the insularity of the water cooler to the heterogeneity and rhetorical serendipity of urban spaces. Like Frank Duffy and many before us, we have attempted to understand how the dynamism of work and workers are shaping space and operations planning. However, we have extended this work to envision and test typological and market variations that can position emerging models along this continuum of change, whether that is a short technology cycle or a larger structural shift in the labor economy. Despite – and in light of – historically low cap rates in prime office, the world’s vertical bank vaults are just as likely now found in luxury residential towers as they are in trophy office properties. Does this portend the end of spec office tower? Probably not, in the age of vertical consolidation of vertical multinational conglomerates. However, as it relates to one of the fastest areas of tenant growth in urban markets, our preliminary research has suggested that the same level of adaptability found in the technology sector in terms of seeking and differentiating innovation translates into the types of physical spaces they desire to work in. Even the horizontality of the organizations are represented in the preference for equally horizontal over-engineered often historic buildings that possess the capacity to adapt from prior manufacturing uses to contemporary hardware and workspace configurations that are constantly in flux. To this end, the parallels of adaptation of real estate actors to climatic, technological, and social change are striking to the extent that the perception of risk has translatable physical manifestations that are a consequence of designed operational sensitivities. 19 The End The desire to position a technology, an economy, or simply a strategy within a larger range of dynamic change is a hallmark of the study of capital and the meandering ways it leaves a glacially scaled urban terrain of buildings and assets. The works cited herein are not so much intended to serve as a self-aggrandizing reflection but as a highlight of the range of challenges – and methodologies – that face a discipline caught between being an art and a science in a world that is subject to unprecedented change. Real estate research has to date been trapped in a world of economic discourse that discounts the three dimensions of space in favor of the two dimensions of investment returns that are grounded by a limited set of historical precedents. As a consequence, practitioners and academics have too often inquired as to how to produce efficient and/or aesthetically marketable buildings as a means to optimize financial value without challenging the nature of value – much less challenging value as an outcome grounded in an art and evaluated by a science. Yet nothing in cities can be truly optimized when there is a delicate balance of human and environmental elements that offers near infinite variability. Our ambitions are to set the stage for future generations of researchers as they attempt to shed light on the transient nature and forms of value and to question the hierarchy of these values within economies and societies. The one caveat grounded with a sense of advocacy is that we hope that there is a parallel development of theory robust enough to support the proliferation of an ethical construct which translates these emerging domains of knowledge into evolutionary practices – not for the manipulation of existing power regimes – but for the perpetuation of a profession that honors the values of equity and justice in the exercise of the provision of a built environment whose useful life will far exceed the limited human conditions that define the present. Volume 42 Property in Common: Co­disciplinary Nexus between Architecture and Real Property Catherine Ingraham Architecture and property live in split screen worlds. The necessary occasion of their confluence compels different systems and logics – which do not readily mesh – to find common ground in order to form a nexus. In almost every discipline, we speak out of one side of our mouth about economic, business, and legal issues and out of the other about cultural, creative, and intellectual work. The dialectics 20 Volume 42 of philosophical pairs such as real vs. unreal, fact vs. fiction, form vs. function – so familiar to us – fuel themselves like thermodynamic engines, establishing gradients from one state (for example, hot) to a contrasting state (cold). By employing the concept of nexus, which means, among other things, an adjudicated agreement, I am seeking to slightly calm this dialectical compulsion. What, for example, would constitute common ground between real property (real estate) and architecture? 21 To begin with, both architecture and real property systems are speculative. Architecture is often called a projective practice because design forecasts a structure and a spatial organization for that structure before either building or space exists in any literal sense. And the speculative practices of property valuation are legendary. Rem Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, writes about the almost ludicrous power of speculative real estate development proposed by the New York Commissioner’s Map of 1811, which gridded the land north of lower Manhattan in advance of its occupation: “…the land it divides, unoccupied; the population it describes, Credit: Jose Antonio Ramirez (2012) conjectural; the buildings it locates, phantoms; the activities it frames, nonexistent.”1 When an architectural building is commissioned, architects, client(s), developer, financial and legal institutions mutually focus on a specific site of construction, which over-determines that site in a particular way. Materials and abstract processes are superimposed on this site in something like the following order: first the land as property (entitled, legal), then the land as ground (composed of certain kinds of soil and natural features), then the land as financial entity (tax status, comparable value), then as an urban or architectural site (speculative project design that models real consequences), then as construction site and so on. The players use similar terms – value, site, space, building, design – and contractual agreements are drawn up to co-define these terms. A contract is necessary because, in fact, none of the parties are interested in the same ends nor do they mean the same thing when they use these terms. Multiple discussions and meetings are required to hammer out these differences and gradually form a nexus. A nexus is thus specifically a contractual common ground that facilitates negotiations between parties who not only have conflicting interests but also navigate different coordinate systems. Real estate developers wish to embellish the property in order to transfer it. Architects wish to use the property to practice architecture. Politicians wish to improve a district for a particular constituency. A nexus, financially, attempts to fairly compensate each side for the concessions it makes to the other. This invariably entails an exchange of money but the value of common ground in a nexus agreement is not established exclusively as a financial value. It is also established by the fit of a built project in relation to a site. I am using the concept of fit in an evolutionary sense, which is simultaneously economic (connected with natural resources and exchange systems) and material (connected with the development and assembly of a building on a site). It is also both designed and serendipitous.2 The character of this fit is revealed over time and, for the most part, architecture is the discipline that best understands the implications of finding, or not finding, such a fit. Historic preservation law is a form of eminent domain law that often constructs nexus agreements. Its goal is to structure cooperation between material and legal interests, as well as private and public property interests, in order to establish a broad cultural archive of human settlement. Historic preservation would seem, thus, to be an ideal case study for studying the nexus between architecture and real property. However, the problem is that historic preservation almost entirely exiles architecture from its engagement with a temporality that organizes one of its deepest affinities with real property systems and its site. Preserved architectural works such as those taken by eminent domain on behalf of the public good – about which we feel both a sense of gratitude and ambivalence – become relatively fixed in time. Time produces both financial and creative gain or loss, and this is why takings, the word used to refer to eminent domain (the taking of private property for the public good), are commonly said to weaken property. There are different time frames for different uses of property: infrastructure and parkland, for example, are usually very long-term usages of land. Buildings, by comparison, turn over more Volume 42 San Bernardo, Bogota 22 Volume 42 23 quickly. Eminent domain slows the relation of both architecture and property to time in order to capture and situate specific clusters of culture in a historical framework. This makes sense. Preservation’s enemy is time. But it is also impossible, in some sense, to sequester a building. In giving property and real estate issues much more visibility in the discipline and practice of architecture, I do not mean to reprimand architectural work for its failure to understand itself as an economic or commercial practice. Nor do I want to collapse the concept of property into its contemporary capitalist expression, although there is every reason to stand guard over the tremendous destructive power, say, of the American property machine. There is some truth in the observation that an architectural practice that is not aware of finance, construction, and law, on the one hand, and the whole artistry of its discipline, on the other, could easily end up supplying an architectural interior or an envelope, a drape, for a non-architectural corpus built according to entirely different principles. At the same time, I have found it perplexing that architecture is so profoundly mistaken by those very entities that freely employ its conceptual language to describe forms of organization and the glories of civil settlement. The subject of property is incredibly interesting from an architectural point of view. It seems to lie seductively beneath our practices and places and yet to be also fervently at work directly in front of us. Property invariably leads us not only to systems of law, finance, governance, and questions of liberty and justice, but also to pre-legal territorial claims, infrastructure and environmental systems. Property and architecture ultimately form matrices that are remarkably similar. In Enzo Melandri’s descriptive words, both act as “concrete, paradigmatic, and transcendental” systems that give form, rule and norm to our physical and conceptual environments.3 Architecture and property’s alignment with, and estrangement from, each other are, thus, deeply consequential for both sides, as well as for the shaping of culture at many levels. The Seagram Building (to begin to articulate this consequentiality more specifically) was one of the most precise architectural coalescences of two hundred years of American property law in the history of the United States. I am referring to Seagram as the iconic modernist skyscraper we know it to be, but also Seagram as the actualization of Mies van der Rohe’s diagrammatic explorations of structures with lightly conceived floor plates barely bound together by a diaphanous membrane, and Seagram as the most expensive building of its day. The much discussed urban status of the building, whose response to zoning restrictions resulted in one of the first privately owned public plazas in New York City, are linked, in an unusual way, with its architectural status. Mies’ architectural assumptions – ingeniously accommodating and slipping by the strictures of zoning and real estate constraints – significantly revised both the regulatory and legal framing of New York City development and the design of skyscrapers worldwide. Most pointedly, of course, Seagram took a heavily codified footprint of property and turned it into an architectural envelope that, in principle, could be expanded infinitely into the air – each subsequent floor-plate compounding the value of the footprint. This was not, at first, a real estate revelation. There were skyscrapers in New York prior to Seagram that treated this principle as a bar graph version of property development, placing the edge of the building almost exactly on the property line. Seagram was, instead, a nexus revelation of the hitherto barely conceivable interlock of architecture and property. The building was light enough and flexible enough – retaining some of that diaphanous quality of Mies’ sketches – to make newly intelligent use of the air around and above it. It understood air, in particular, as expandable space that interacts with the complex currency of an urban site, not as a simple extrusion of value conforming to the footprint’s dictums. It would be worthwhile to examine other air rights projects, such as the current Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn, or Marcel Breuer’s proposal for a modernist office building over Grand Central,4 not only for their developmental plans, but also for their theories of property’s seemingly inherent tendency toward expansion, architecture’s vertical capture of that expansion, and, bluntly, their theory of how air is to be taken. There are multiple, and pressing, contemporary reasons for looking at these issues. For example, the financial meltdown that took hold in 2008 was centered on property – insecure housing mortgages that had been bundled and globally brokered – as the central player in a world-wide economic crisis that has not, even now, been fully resolved. Of crucial concern, not only for architecture but for all practices of that strange yet immensely powerful thing we call design, is the ongoing undervaluation in both the marketplace and the public imagination of what design can do. Architects’ current difficulty in the United States in designing credible public space has not helped matters. Further, there are multitiered conflicts between design, property, and ecological systems that global infrastructural projects now encounter at every turn. Questions surrounding these issues are not idle. The valuing of, say, vast waterfront properties that could become a liability overnight due to future climate change will alter political policies and deeper rhythms of civilization and settlement. Settlement, urban and rural, consolidates around the legal, or quasi-legal, homeostasis of societies in relation to resources. The relative fragility of using incentivizing financial structures (tax credits in particular) – whose return path rarely can resist being structured as an inflated profitability system for lending institutions through an abuse of the multiplier effects of interest – is hidden by the facileness with which they are forwarded. A somewhat extreme, perhaps apocryphal, example of this was an ownership scheme developed in the 1950s that gave impoverished urban dwellers the right to buy and own a roof, and only a roof, of a house whose completion was thus incentivized at the expense of the roof owner. This kind of paternalistic social engineering is common in both federal and private real estate legislation. At the same time, there have been incredibly dynamic and productive relationships between finance, property, and architectural work. It is important to understand, as a closing coda to these initial remarks, that current legal definitions of real property do not define property in terms of things. Property rights are defined as relations among people “with regard to things” and they are a bundle of rights, not one right. It is also important to know that property ownership is legally understood to be the control and disposition of valued resources. The subject of property no longer automatically invokes the nineteenth-century polemics that were responses to the widespread exploitation of labor by capitalists during Britain’s industrialization. Labor, however, remains a significant political issue and has been under recent discussion in architecture, particularly with respect to modular construction. Late twentieth-century historical and philosophical debates discipline of real estate as a tripartite partnership between finance, policy, and design. The seminar I taught in CURE in the Spring of 2014 as a senior visiting fellow proved to be incredibly helpful in setting a framework for understanding both abiding divisions and common ground between architecture, public policy, finance, and real estate development. One central curricular question is whether developers and real estate students need to know how to design in order to incorporate urban design and architecture into their thinking about development. In architectural work, there is a complex interaction between the how of design and the what. The typologies of what to design – a cultural institution, a movie theater, a housing development – must be deliberately interfered with by the how; how are you going to now design that canopy or repetitive façade, which has been done a million times before? At the same time, the how of architecture – because it often is attracted by technical solutions to building problems (materials, modes of construction) – can preoccupy architects so completely that they neglect to use the how as a way of operating on the what. Thus we have massive architectural statements that seek a radical aloofness from all the forces that are at work in them and spread around them. Architecture is neither simply fabrication – which any builder can carry out – nor isolated abstract or aesthetic theories about form. The discipline and practice belongs to a deep historical structure of experimentation and thought about design and its milieu, large or small, public or private, urban or rural, rich or poor. There is, further, an ethical dimension to architectural work that conditions its design agenda. Architecture has a fiduciary responsibility to its client and has taken something like a Hippocratic oath to better the worlds it acts within. We know this has gone wrong more than once, and, indeed, it is not at all transparent what this might mean. But my question here is directed toward what piece of design processes can constructively be cordoned off from the rest in order for non-architecture students to grasp what is at stake. Like any discipline, if a person is interested in design they need to study the discipline of design in its contemporary formats in order to perform the practice. One thing – perhaps the first thing – might be to examine the common terms, mentioned earlier, used by finance, design, and policy: public/private, value, space, title, risk, city, environment, infrastructure and so forth. It becomes quickly apparent that each partner in CURE’s new tripartite team uses these terms in very different ways. Space, for example, means one thing for a designer, another for a planner, and another thing for a developer. Real estate development typically is interested in property – legally defined space – as well as proximities that determine comparable value. Architecture is typically interested in space as something that is made visible through design processes. It is not unusual for architects to find more and different kinds of space than meet the eye. I have often said that whereas the money view in a high-rise apartment building, for a real estate developer, is the park or water view, for an architect the money view can be rendered anywhere. It is understood as a place of particular attention or intensity, not necessarily a view. From a financial standpoint, space is understood as a speculative property that carries a certain risk. From an architectural point of view, square footage refers primarily to the management of a building’s spatial plan, whereas real estate development uses square footage as a unit of valuation. In current digital architectures, Volume 42 around the existential status of subjects and objects – some of which filtered into architectural scholarly work – are now more concentrated on the nature of complex systems. There have been a number of attempts in economics and law to redefine property, particularly private property. Caroline Rose, a legal scholar, argues against John Locke’s enduring theory of property as the original right to oneself and one’s own labor, in order to redefine property as “a clear declaration”.5 Huge tracts of land were acquired by the United States, for example, through acts of proclamation followed by decades of violent confrontations with those who contested these egregious but ultimately successful claims. The terms of architectural work are also changing as the field increasingly embraces new digital paradigms, as are the terms of real estate development, which is now academically aligned with urban design and public policy studies as well as finance and business. Property, it seems (or is this some capitalist trickery?) cannot now legally claim sufficient status as a thing to be easily charged with the reifying and commodification powers we once ascribed to it. We are all implicated by the universal, and homogenous, spread of certain business models, the monetization of human psychology, and the persuasiveness of private property. Property’s power, throughout its history, has constantly shifted. Distinctions between public and private property, for example, are no longer as easily or cleanly definable as they were in the mid-twentieth century, and the possibilities of private property systems that are non-exclusionary and non-appropriative are being newly theorized. In some instances too, global control of resources, which is a highly complex and often corrupt process, is seeking, in some places, co-managed rather than executive or corporate (top-down) solutions. The discipline and practice of architecture, using those diverse digital formats just mentioned, is increasingly drawn toward articulated surfaces that carry programmatic information and move more flexibly between structure and landscape. These practices press against property boundaries awkwardly; they may have the power, eventually, to revise private property law to yield some aspect of its exclusivity to infrastructure maintenance and development – urban, exurban, environmental.6 Further, a number of architects are seeking new forms of common space. My remarks are not meant to downplay the deep influence of capitalism, and its critique, on architecture and social equity. There is no reason for optimism. Yet we are learning lessons daily from global transfers of information and capital that suggest that those who would monetize the world in its entirety may not be able to pull it off and still have an intact resource base. Such a take-over may be increasingly undercut by the massive lack of resiliency and the expense of the models and apparatuses being implemented, not to mention environmental and political push-back. Hurricane Sandy, for example, taught us some things we really needed to know; it continues to alter, in significant ways, future planning for waterfronts and public/private property holdings in threatened areas. There are thus, however haltingly, a number of new relationships to property, resources, design, and culture now emerging.7 In light of this discussion, some of which has been taken from a book manuscript I am completing on the relation between property and architecture,8 I have become very interested in how the Center for Urbanism and Real Estate (CURE) at Columbia is creating the 24 Credit: Juan Pablo Ortiz, Taller-301, Geografía Urbana and Mauricio Uribe (2014) Volume 42 Proyecto Ministerios in Bogota 25 square footage has become more complex because the plan is no longer a primary generator of space. Since developers, financial institutions, planners, and architects have often worked together, these divergent terms are frequently adjudicated, as suggested earlier, into that nexus agreement that allows a building to go forward into its construction phase. It would make sense, accordingly, for real estate students to understand something about what is at stake not merely for their own profession, but also for architecture, finance, and urban planning. Finance is a natural partner for real estate development – this is why most real estate programs are aligned with business schools. But Columbia University is attempting to establish additional lines of affiliation: finance and business plus architecture (design) and planning (public policy). I don’t think non-architectural students need to learn, in depth, the specific ways in which the how and the what come together in architectural design, but they do need to understand what is at stake in this work. The architect Mark Rakatansky said recently, in relation to this question, that architecture gives more location to the location. Public policy and planning, for their part, add the crucial context of sovereignty to property development and architecture. All three are required to define cities and infrastructure, as well as potential paths of change. I believe that between and within new formats that keep finance, design, and policy both semi-autonomous yet consciously connected lie the best systemic solutions to complex environmental and development questions that now face us. I would call this a co­disciplinary, rather than an interdisciplinary, strategy. The seminar I undertook was precisely focused on these issues. Fortunately, the students in the seminar were completely up to the task. They were from academic backgrounds that represented many of the pertinent fields: planning, environmental policy studies, architecture, and real estate development (with the notable excep- tions of economics and law). The case studies presented by the students framed a co-disciplined approach to specific contemporary developments. For example, Jose Antonio Ramirez-Orozco, a Ph.D. student in the Columbia urban planning program, presented his work on the dilemma of how to design a modern urban center in Bogotá that could negotiate with traditional (diverse) ideas of centricity in Colombia’s settlement history. A real estate student, Brendan McLaughlin, studied the intersection between transportation infrastructure, modern urban planning, finance, and real estate in San Francisco. An architect/real estate student, Daniel de Riva, who had studied the Seagram Building in depth, presented a history of private and public space. In the class, we operated on these studies from different angles and with no absolute privilege given to one point of view. Decision-making (a form of critical selection) can no longer rely on simple, pre-given, hierarchies. Each discipline or point of view was pressed to expand its borders without giving up its central vitality. Systemic differences in relation to the terms of discussion – due not only to different disciplines but also to both delicate and powerful differences between cultures – were part of our study. Property law, for example, is forged in relation to extremely local traditions and circumstances. The New Yorker recently published an article that said we should all learn “money talk” in order to be part of a conversation that has been held, to date, in the hands of the priesthood of financiers. This would give us, the article suggested, ways to avoid the mystification endemic to secret languages.9 I would recommend the same with respect to the languages of design and of public policy. At the same time, the concentration of a disciplinary view has to remain intact in order to use the powers and talents of experience and training. One of the terms I explore in the book I am completing is the word happiness – a loaded word from the standpoint of American politics and life. This term has Credit: Juan Pablo Ortiz, Taller-301, Geografía Urbana and Mauricio Uribe (2014) been under recent discussion by the Supreme Court because it exists in the Constitution as a rhetorical promissory note for evidence of good governance. Jefferson substituted the phrase “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” for John Locke’s list of inalienable rights: Life, Liberty and Property. Jefferson (who believed in allodial property – i.e. no federal interference of any kind except taxes) seemed to want to introduce into a roster of individual rights something like a civic right. Jefferson (like Aristotle) believed that life, liberty and property ultimately depend for their success in a democratic context on the happiness and prosperity of all. I bring this up here because a number of people in architecture, public policy, planning, and real estate are concerned about the health of these fields in ethical terms. There is a new conversation underway about ethics that is reexamining the bond between humans and their technologies (finance, architecture, law, property) and how those instruments have framed the civic realm. It is less happy in some respects than it once was, which is to say that while there is a need to stand close to our terminologies, there is also a need to periodically throw them into relief. Developers, urban planners, public policy wonks and architects find immense interest in their respective disciplines and practices. Finance and economics are incredible bodies of knowledge, as are architecture and urban design. Cities will continue to show emergent organizations that are unpredictable, as will climate and environmental systems. Ideology has no place here, although, as always, one remains aware that all disciplines/practices have, within themselves, the capacity for fostering malevolent forces that sometimes prevail over exploratory and responsible work. A co-disciplinary approach guarantees nothing in advance but it sets the stage, under certain circumstances, for redesigning and dislodging apparatuses that are getting in the way of making intelligent, diverse, and creative use of shared ground. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: The Monticelli Press, 1994), p18-19. Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and development evolutionary biologist, was famous for his theory of ‘spandrals’, which are resultant features in the development of an organism that are not ‘selected’. They arise as a consequence of other actions. This is to say that ‘fit’ cannot be fully determined in advance. Enzo Melandri, ‚Michel Foucault: L’epistemologia delle scienze umane‘, Ligua e stile 2.1 (1967), p. 147. The term ‘taking’ refers to the Fifth Amendment in the Constitution which states “…nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” Property owners who challenge historic preservation laws sometimes argue that “such laws…amount to a taking of private property.” Historic preservation uses eminent domain law to take architecture out of private ownership into the public domain. Cf. Penn Central Transportation Co v City of New York 438 U.S. 104 (1978) landmark United States Supreme Court decision on compensation for regulatory takings. Carol M. Rose, ‘Possession as the Origin of Property’ (1985). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 1830. http://digitalcommons. law.yale.edu/fss_papers/1830. See Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (New York: Basic Books, 2008). See Eric Nelson, ‘Property without appropriation’, theory workshop at Stanford University, October 5, 2012 Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Property, and the Pursuit of Happiness, anticipated completion 2015. John Lancaster, The New Yorker, August 4, 2014. “I realized that you can’t really write a novel about London and ignore the City – London’s financial center – because finance is so integral to the place that London has become…I came to think there was a gap in the culture: most of the writing [on economic forces] …was done either by business journalists…or by furious opponents… who thought that everything about [finance] was so terrible that all that was needed was rageful denunciation. Both sides missed the complexities… A shared language doesn’t necessarily imply a shared viewpoint; what it does is make a certain kind of Volume 42 Proyecto Ministerios in Bogota 26 Credit: OMA-Lorenzo Castro and Julio Gomez (2013) Credit: OMA-Lorenzo Castro and Julio Gomez (2013) National Administration Center (CAN) Renewal Project in Bogota Volume 42 National Administration Center (CAN) Renewal Project in Bogota 27 Volume 42 A Value Add Proposition The History of Real Estate Development in New York City Kate Ascher It can be argued that nowhere in the world does real estate matter more than in New York City, as it relates to the history of the physical development of a city and the role of the private sector in defining and executing a vision for that physical development. In this case, ‘real estate’ means not just the land and the buildings but the institution as defined by the people who develop it and the projects they deliver. 28 Volume 42 Real estate developers in New York are not seen as merely one component of the economy of an urbanized place; in the constrained vertical city that calls Manhattan its heart, developers stand as close to raw power as any group of professionals, and are arguably more involved in the civic realm than they are elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad. 29 New York’s role as a global city turns on its ability to constantly reinvent itself and to grow, whether that is through the reinvention of products or through the transformation of entire districts. That growth depends not only on the manufacturing and service industries that provide jobs, but also on the companies who provide the physical infrastructure for both workers and residents: those who build and maintain apartment buildings, commercial office towers, warehouses, hotels, and increasingly parks and transit facilities. As the real estate industry expands in the face of globalizing pressures to reinvent itself, a new class of developers is united by a shared set of institutional norms and a common history, which is often underappreciated in its relevance to the cyclical nature of urban growth. The rise of the real estate development industry and its enormous visibility in New York has its roots squarely in a history defined by geography, events, and people. Together these factors contributed to professionalizing the development of land in the city and to crafting an outsized role for the profession at the heart of government policy and planning. Therefore, the education of the next generation of real estate developers is grounded in a history whose experiments in the definition of value provide a foundation for the continuity of a profession whose service is as much to the city as it is to an industry. Geography The physical circumstances of New York have played a central role in the rise of the real estate development industry. Together, the city’s natural harbor and the configuration of the island of Manhattan created sustained demand for a finite amount of land at the heart of the city – and with it a robust real estate market. The island of Manhattan began life as a marshy and rocky outcropping of land, not entirely desirable for settlement or agriculture; indeed, the name ‘Mannahata’ is believed to be derived from a Native American word for ‘many hills.’ But, its location at the mouth of a great river, once thought to continue westward across the continent and at the heart of a natural harbor, served it well as a site for the trading post of New Amsterdam: a safe, easy base from which to trade furs from the Dutch West India’s landholdings to the north. That location City of Manhattan or New York, 1861 Credit: City of Manhattan or New York (1861): New York, NY: Common Council. 30 Volume 42 Credit: The Ratzer Map of New York City, 1767 (circa 1767). London, UK: Longmans, Green & Co. The Ratzer Map of New York City, 1767 Volume 42 would remain important for trade under subsequent English rule, but would be celebrated most after 1825 when the opening of the Erie Canal provided a longsought waterway to the interior and led to the city’s rise as the world’s busiest port. The city’s role as a commercial capital created tremendous demand for land as close to the docks, and to the money they produced, as possible. That demand was funneled onto a small narrow island: Manhattan consists of only 23 square miles (59 square km) of land today – and much of that total (+/- 10%) has been added over the last two centuries. At its tip, in the area that includes Wall Street, the island today is even less than a mile wide. Not surprisingly, given the volumes of trade occurring there, demand for both commercial and residential real estate underpinned the local economy as far back as the eighteenth century and served as a stable foundation for the growth of the wider region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth. 31 Events While the geography of Manhattan and its suitability for trade all but ensured a demand for land, a series of events facilitated the rapid and robust growth of the real estate market. Foremost of these was the adoption of the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 – among the most ambitious and far-reaching acts of urban place-making in recorded history. At a time when the city itself extended no further than Greenwich Village and comprised a random net- work of winding streets, a plan to regularize the island’s development along a rectilinear, level street grid was adopted and gradually implemented. The impact of this plan cannot be overstated: it made clear the nature and direction of the city’s future development, inserting an unprecedented degree of predictability into land speculation and development; and, it also commoditized land into very simple rectilinear blocks, making the buying and selling of land incredibly simple. The filling of marshes and laying of streets that followed the grid’s adoption made clear to all that development was afoot, and created strong demand for land to the undeveloped north of the evolving city: as an island, there was no other direction in which the city might grow. But demand for land in the older portions of the city would rise in the early 19th century as well. The Great Fire of 1835, which started in a warehouse on Merchant Street (now Beaver Street) and destroyed much of the city’s financial heart, contributed significantly in this regard. Much like the Great Chicago Fire thirty-six years later, it left in its wake a strong demand for land downtown and the opportunity to rebuild better, bigger and taller. A third factor that pushed real estate development to the heart of the city’s evolving economy in the 19th century was the great wave of immigration ushered in by the industrial revolution. Hundreds of thousands of European immigrants swelled the city’s ethnic enclaves in search of work and places to live, giving life first Credit: Costello, Augustine E. (1887). Our Firemen. A History of the New York Fire Departments, Volunteer and Paid. New York, NY: A.E. Costello. Pg. 295. The Great Fire of 1853 People The geography and events that gave rise to the demand for land in Manhattan are not alone in explaining the rise of real estate development as a credible and important business in New York. A handful of private actors played seminal roles in the evolving industry during the 19th and early 20th century, and in many ways set the parameters and ethical underpinnings of what we know of as the profession today. Among the first to make real estate speculation a recognized road to wealth and success was John Jacob Astor, who started life as a fur trader but by 1834 realized how much easier and safer it was to invest in land. Astor bought property to the north of the expanding city and waited for its value to grow, subsequently either selling it or developing it himself. He was the richest man in America by the time of his death in 1848 – proving to any doubters that there was indeed money to be made in investing in New York property. Astor was a towering figure, but he was a largely apolitical one. The origins of the industry’s pivotal role in civic issues are more readily traced to a lawyer and politician named Samuel Ruggles who pushed for important changes to the original grid plan – including the creation of additional north-south transportation cor- ridors (Madison and Lexington Avenues) and the reconfiguration of proposed open spaces around the Union Square area. He also lobbied successfully to create an untaxed park at the heart of his holdings in the Gramercy area. He argued that the city would benefit more from the value of the parkland created on the lots around it than it would from developing the park itself. Ruggles’ value-capture philosophy would be echoed soon after in another, larger grid-breaking initiative: the acquisition of land for Central Park. Ruggles’ notion of public space as an important tool in the creation of real estate value would be interpreted once again a century later by John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose wealth came from oil but was often invested in real estate – a certain phenomenon that persists in today’s capital markets. Just as the value of Ruggles’ holdings around Gramercy Park were in part derived from the park at its heart, Rockefeller Center would offer a dramatic lesson in how public space and other amenities could be woven into the fabric of a place to create value. The idea of developing multiple buildings on a mega-bock, tied together with open space, through streets and retail amenities and connected to transit, was a visionary and risky undertaking during the Great Depression. However, today, these models provide an accepted and often preferred approach to urban development at scale. The Modern Era The leading lights of New York’s real estate industry today are no longer industrialists like Astor or Rockefeller; indeed the portfolios of the modern ‘captains of property’ often do not reach beyond the region. Many are the Volume 42 to the business of tenement construction downtown and subsequently to the rise of the apartment building uptown. The success of both typologies proved that money could be made in dense and vertical living, marking in some sense a turning point – and a huge area of opportunity – for the nascent real estate profession. 32 Credit: Shackleton, Robert (1928). The Book of New York. Philadelphia, PA: Penn Publishing. Pg. 109. Volume 42 Tenement Housing on Rivington Street 33 scions of German-Jewish families who formed part of the wave of immigration to the city in the late 19th century and who were largely excluded from the more established professions of law, medicine and finance. The patriarchs of families like the Zeckendorfs, the Dursts, the Tishmans, and the Rudins found few barriers to entry in property development. Starting small, they founded family firms that now manage tens of millions of square feet of residential and commercial real estate – and shape the city in ways both physical and philosophical. The lessons that inform the way these families and their professional colleagues carry out their occupation are very much rooted in history. They typically invest for the long term, and their investments reflect a deep understanding of the respective roles that government and private sector can play. Like Gramercy Park or Rockefeller Center, developments at places like Hudson or Atlantic Yards today owe much to the hand of government in making development deals possible – in providing financial incentives, in reducing risk, and in amending existing zoning or other regulations. These investments also reflect an understanding of how civic goods like public space, parks and transportation serve as integral elements of successful private development. This connection between the profession and the public good manifests itself in ways that go far beyond buildings themselves. Real estate practitioners serve as the mainstay of many civic and good government organizations – places like the Association for a Better New York, the New York City Partnership, or the Citizens Budget Commission. Prominent members of the industry regularly chair and serve on government taskforces and commissions, as well as more permanent government boards overseeing infrastructure delivery agencies, such as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or the New York Power Authority. On a more granular scale, the industry is largely responsible for the success of Business Improvement Districts throughout the city – entities funded by supplemental commercial property assessments that provide services such as trash collection, landscaping, and ground maintenance. Notwithstanding the industry’s large civic voice, there are those who suggest that the new mayoral administration in New York, publicly committed to an ‘equity’ manifesto, will look less favorably on real estate development than the Bloomberg administration did: smaller packages of incentives for mega-projects, fewer gleaming towers, and more limited access to private sector decision makers. But with affordable housing squarely at the center of the new political agenda, it seems inevitable that those who know best how to create value from land will remain in the inner circle and will continue to be called on as professionals to sustain the city’s growth and reinvention well into the twenty-first century. Therefore, as value and its hierarchy within public policy is redefined from one political era to the next, it is the continuity of the history of real estate which demonstrates that value derived from a mutual public good as manifested in spatial quality and public amenities can serve as a platform from which other societal goals such as affordable housing can be advanced. View from the RCA Building 34 Volume 42 35 Volume 42 Credit: The Story of Rockefeller Center (1942): New York, NY: Rockefeller Center, Inc. Volume 42 Value Propositions Vishaan Chakrabarti interviewed by Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette As a partner in SHoP, the New York-based architecture firm behind large scale projects like the Barclay’s Center and the Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment, Vishaan Chakrabarti knows a thing or two about how architecture can shape a city. In his other capacity, as the Director of CURE and Holliday Professor of Real Estate Development at Columbia University, 36 Chakrabarti is at the forefront of conversations regarding the role that real estate can play in the policies, culture, and economy of cities. Chakrabarti sat down with Volume’s Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette to share his thoughts on the recent history of American cities, and what architects and developers can contribute to their future. Jeffrey Inaba Volume 42 Who would you describe as CURE’s target audience? What are the conversations that CURE is promoting, and what parties does CURE wish to engage? Vishaan Chakrabarti We’re trying to address a very plural 37 audience, which is an interesting challenge. Of course, we’re trying to involve the development community and talk with them about what they’re building. We also want to engage politicians and regulators, people who have a voice in how development plays out, and certainly also communities, the people who work and live in any development. Speaking to those groups is a bit easier than speaking to architects and urban planners in academia, who often feel so frustrated or disengaged from development that they tend not to want to deal with it at all anymore, and instead they say, “That’s all market forces, and I can’t be bothered with it, because it’s not anything I believe in.” And frankly I think that’s too easy. You can’t just disengage from the way that the vast majority of the world is building today. In contrast, I sense among design and planning students a real hunger for a better understanding of devel- opment. I don’t think they’re ready to turn their backs on it and say, “I don’t care, it’s just development.” We’re also trying to reach the lay audience and explain why it is that urban development matters. I was in Australia recently, and I gave a talk about some of these issues to a group of architects and city planners who work for the city. After the talk, a number of people came up to me and said, “We’re always speaking the language of our industry – FARs or fights about what kind of development can go at this train stop or whatever it is – but we don’t really talk about larger global issues that people on the street care about: the impact of climate change, for example.” With CURE, we want to take these issues that we think are socially significant and make them accessible to the general public. JI Of the professions that work to realize build­ ings, real estate development has historically had the most direct relationship to a definition of value. As long as real estate development was tied to the bottom line of financial risk and return, it was relatively simple to quantify the value of a decision. Part of your ambition seems to be to introduce new Volume 42 Vishaan Chakrabarti in his office at Columbia. 38 concepts of value into the discussion of real estate development. What are the forms of value that most interest you in the work of CURE? VC It’s a great question and it’s very much true. I think the idea that the value associated with real estate is only about the bottom line or the direct return to the developer is so limited. Fundamentally, there’s also societal value and environmental value. But even in terms of longterm value to the developer or the building community, even in the last few years in a city like New York, we’ve started to understand that over time neighborhoods change, and therefore a developer’s investment in a neighborhood can pay off in long-term dividends – think of the area around the High Line, for instance. Generally speaking, developers gain more value if they’re looking at something broader than just the bottom line of their projects. But at a societal level, we also have to think about the negative externalities of development. Any economist will tell you that any industry out there has negative externalities, and society needs to capture and price those externalities. The classic example is if a factory pollutes a stream, we expect the factory owner to clean up the stream, because that’s part of the negative externalities that they incur in the course of doing business. And yet, we don’t really do that in most of the development that we see, particularly in suburban development, which has huge negative externalities – pollution, congestion, depressed land values around highway ramps, and the lobbying of governments to build more roads and other infrastructure that make it easier for suburban developers to get their direct bottom line without having to provide society with the value that should come from those investments. CURE is really dedicated to describing longterm societal value, environmental value, and architectural value in the work that developers do. JI How do you see those values stacking – the Volume 42 architectural, environmental, and societal values? Are they all of equal value, or do you see hierarchies? 39 VC I wouldn’t try to prioritize any of those values over the others. For example, in New York City, social equity was a major issue in the recent mayoral election, and is now being translated into a couple of key policy issues, like affordable housing and universal pre-Kindergarten,, issues that development bears on very significantly. But I’m not ready to say that those values are more important than architectural values for instance. Value tends to play out over time, and there are values that determine whether a great building gets built or a great neighborhood created that could last hundreds and hundreds of years, well beyond the direct deliverable value of affordable housing, for example. It’s all important. Now, that doesn’t mean that every project has to do everything the same way. One project might innovate on the delivery of affordable housing units through microunits or something like that, another project might innovate in architectural design, another one its building systems. I don’t think you should ask every project to do everything perfectly. In my mind, we should view every project as an experiment toward reaching better values. Even a project like LOLO (Lower Lower Manhattan), which was developed by students in one of our studios at GSAPP when CURE was in its infancy, was important because it forced people to think again about values and tradeoffs. Today, we can’t do land reclamation to that extent in New York, and that’s driven by a set of environmental values that I would argue should be tested, and they should be tested against other values: affordability, or flood resilience, or other values that LOLO could deliver. And obviously, that was an academic exercise: no one is going to go out and build LOLO tomorrow, although at the end of the Bloomberg administration, the did embark on the Seaport City initiative, which I think was influenced by the LOLO proposition. But to me, our major goal should be to ask questions that force us to think about our values. Recently, we’ve seen supporters of [recently elected progressive Democrat Mayor] Bill di Blasio fight against affordable housing near Brooklyn Bridge Park, and to witness progressive values colliding into each other is fascinating. And it’s more fodder for CURE – that’s exactly the kind of thing that we want to discuss and understand how to cut through, because you can’t have progressives saying we don’t want inequity and we don’t want affordable housing in our neighborhood. That doesn’t work. Benedict Clouette One idea that you raise in your book A Country of Cities is the notion of the equitable city. First, what is the equitable city? And second, if the common perception of real estate development is that it works against equality, that it causes gentrification and displacement, how do you think real estate development can contribute to the equitable city? Can real estate development lead, or does it necessarily respond to the mandates created by government? VC In the book, I primarily talk about social mobility, rather than societal equity in the way that someone who thinks about it outside of a capitalist framework might use the term. I think the book tries to be clear that within a late capitalist framework, I’m interested in what generates social mobility. And I think real estate has a tremendous amount to contribute to social mobility, for example, through the creation of jobs, or the creation of tax base. The real estate industry in New York generates about 49% of the city’s tax budget, and so the things that create social mobility, whether schools or parks or public housing, are all funded through our tax base. And we talk about housing so much, but I think it’s also important to talk about affordable work space. Now, you ask if real estate can do as much as government. I would argue that most government policies concerning land use have made a more inequitable city, often because of this tension in progressive politics between the need to develop housing and a general antidevelopment sentiment, because people believe that development creates gentrification. I would argue that New York is an expensive city because our supply of housing is not keeping up with demand. An even better case study is San Francisco, which has so constrained housing supply that they have been their own worst enemy in stemming their affordability crisis, because there is so much NIMBYism associated with new development. Add to that the fact that the tech community, who ten years ago were happy to live in San Jose, now want to live in San Francisco and reverse commute every day. These are high wage earners, so suddenly ‘techies’ in San Francisco are talked about the way that bankers are in New York City, because its understood that they increased housing demand relative to supply such that it made the city unbelievably expensive and unaffordable. Similarly, it’s probably very frustrating for New Yorkers to hear that despite the building boom of the early 2000s, we’re not building anywhere near the kind assist development in meeting the housing demand, if not land use reform? The book suggests that the major policy problem is at the federal level, that we massively subsidize sprawl in this country. That has led, in my mind, to a lot of the inequity problems that we have. When you start pulling apart the federal budget, you understand that there are massive subsidies of land use, whether through the mortgage interest deduction, or the fact that we spend four times as much on roads as we do on rail, or our low gas taxes, which in most of the country are about 48 cents a gallon, when most economists will tell you that to capture the negative externalities of gas usage, gas should be about $10 per gallon. It’s an issue across the whole economy. The situation in the country today – and by the way, this is true also in the Australian and English context – is that the demand for multi-family housing is through the roof. I’ve spoken to developers in places like Dallas, who say that they’d be happy to build multi-family housing but that the zoning won’t let them do it, because most of the country has been downzoned, often at the behest of communities who don’t want multi-family housing in their neighborhoods, because for them, multifamily housing is associated with people of color, more traffic, or any number of things that they perceive as threatening their lifestyle. You can find sources of inequity in our land use everywhere, whether it’s government, parochial community politics, or the real estate industry. JI How do you see CURE’s role in exerting influ- VC ence on the issue of equality? CURE is trying to explain to people – whether it’s general audiences, or policymakers, or the media, or people in other fields – that how we develop and use our land has an enormous social, economic, and environmental impact on our lives. So let’s start there, because most people don’t think that way. People think about all manner of other factors impacting economy, environment, and social equity, but most people don’t think about real estate development or land use as a major variable in that equation. And yet, it demonstrably is. Certainly, in terms of climate change, the data on its impact is very significant. But also, we have data on the economy, for example, in the correlation between density and innovation, which suggest that innovators need to be closer to one another, and like to live in denser circumstances. In terms of social equity, in much of the developed world, suburbs are getting poorer, and as suburbs get poorer and more segregated – whether in the periphery of Paris or suburban Long Island – a very similar and dispiriting picture emerges, in which urban life is becoming more attractive, and suburbs are becoming ghettos, locking people into intergenerational poverty. We have European suburbs as the prime evidence of this, putting people in a cycle that’s very difficult for them to break out of. In contrast, in the affordable, mixed income urban models that CURE discusses, there’s a better chance that a child will attend VC a mixed-income school, there’s a better chance that someone can take mass transit to their job, there’s a better chance that they have access to quality health care. And so, where people live dramatically affects their social mobility. And again, these relationships vary from country to country. As much as I’d like to see sound urban development happen in places like New York City and Sydney, those cities are trying to solve a different set of questions than, for example, Sao Paulo, where there’s a tremendous amount of urban development, but they’re essentially building vertical suburbs. There’s no mixed income or mixed used, it’s all very automobile-oriented, and it’s only going to exacerbate the traffic problems for which Sao Paulo has become famous. And that condition has become commonplace in cities in the transforming economies of the world: you see it in Mumbai, for example, a form of growth that looks urban but is entirely suburban in how it is instrumentalized. JI What can real estate development do for cities that governments can’t do, or that they struggle to do? VC I believe that real estate and development belongs pedagogically in a school of architecture and planning, and I believe that because all of those fields share a sense of investigation into a world that does not yet exist. One of the things that I always try to emphasize to students is that development is a creative act. Having worked in government, there are times when a developer will come to the government to break the rules because they actually have a better idea. They’re creating – they’re responsible for building on that site, they’re investing enormous capital, and so they’re trying to push their own thinking about what can happen on that site. And often, they have ideas that are in conflict with the rules. This is similar to architecture, where sometimes zoning codes or other regulations prohibit good design. Being able to create a safe territory for discussions – so that it’s not another argument that’s mired in the local politics of a specific site – this is one of the fundamental roles of academia in a professional school environment, to create some neutral ground for people to come and debate those issues. I’m by no means saying that developers are always right, but just that there needs to be creative tension between the development community, the design community, and the planning and regulatory community. I find when developers enter this territory and engage with CURE, they start to understand their social responsibilities better, and they begin to recognize that what they’re building has effects at the scale of the block, of the city, of the country, and of the planet. JI Up to a certain moment in time, architects struggled to convince clients in the private sector that design has value, that it’s worth spending a little bit more on a building with an aesthetic value, because ultimately that has economic benefits. But now, one no longer has to make that argument – it’s accepted as a fact. What do you think caused that shift? VC In general or in New York, in particular? JI Let’s talk about New York, just to give it context. What do you think was the tipping point? In New York, a couple of things happened as we moved into the post-Cold War Era. New York has always thought of itself as a global city, but in the 90s, New York, along with London, went through a dramatic VC Volume 42 of supply that we need to, and especially not building the supply that we need to in the ring of the first few subway stops from Manhattan all around the city in the five boroughs. So to me, that’s the heart of the affordability crisis. Now, is that the same as the ‘equitable city’? I’m not sure. That’s a very loaded term, and I think the mechanics of affordable housing are only one piece of that. BC In that example, what can government do to 40 internationalization. People started to look around and compare it with other cities internationally, and wonder why we were churning out such ugliness day after day. To me, the seminal moment happened at the end of the 90s with the two towers on Perry Street by Richard Meier. It was one of the first times in a long time that a major developer had used a well-known architect, probably since [developer William] Zeckendorf using IM Pei for the Kips Bay Plaza, which opened in 1960. With Meier’s buildings, the entire development community noticed the premium a fairly unknown developer, a guy named Richard Born, had generated through the use of a very well-known architect. So that shift happens right at the end of the 90s. And then of course, 9/11 occurs. For architecture, one of the odd silver linings of 9/11 is that suddenly on the pages of the New York Post, people are debating Libeskind versus Foster versus Viñoly, and there’s this larger architectural discussion happening in the city about quality, and the need to have a competition for the site. Suddenly, architecture achieves a social currency that it just didn’t have before. And then, the Bloomberg administration begins, and encourages an emphasis on design and public art, influenced by [Deputy Mayor] Patti Harris and [Director of the Department of City Planning] Amanda Burden. And meanwhile, the real estate market is accelerating extraordinarily quickly through the 2000s. And so, by the time you get to the rezoning of the area around the High Line, there’s already an extraordinary emphasis on architecture. When you say that people associate real estate with gentrification, well, people also associate good architecture with gentrification. And it wasn’t until later, with Grimshaw’s Via Verde affordable housing in the South Bronx for the developer Jonathan Rose or David Adjaye’s project in Harlem, that you started to see well-known architects working for different forms of housing, rather than just luxury condos. But there’s no question that there’s been an enormous sea change. JI Do you anticipate a similar tipping point in Volume 42 the future, where it will be worth it to spend the extra money to do a development that will have benefits to the block or to the larger community? 41 VC Yes, and I’m attuned to that less through the work that we do at CURE than through the work that we do at SHoP, for example, the plaza in front of the Barclays Center. It also points to the new-found importance of landscape architecture, which has taken on enormous significance. At the Domino Sugar Factory redevelopment site, Field Operations did an amazing job with the park, through a very deep community process. I see a level of design sensitivity all around the city, and not just among developers. In Williamsburg, where the Domino Sugar Factory is located, there is a creative community, and a very mixed community, and they were sick and tired of the banal architecture that’s being built up and down the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront. They wanted something different, and they engaged us on the architecture. They were less concerned with the height of the buildings, but were very concerned with the use of material. It was a very interesting educational moment for the developer. JI What do you see as the big issues facing urban development worldwide? One of my interests is what I’m calling ‘The New GLUE’, an acronym that I invented to describe a new ‘global urban ecology.’ Development is fundamental VC to the New Glue, but it’s also the problem standing in the way of achieving it. If you consider a city like Sao Paulo, new development doesn’t create a socially coherent experience, particularly at the street level. It’s the opposite of the kind of urban development that we’re advocating at CURE. In the future, I hope CURE will address how to engage the development community to build that social coherence in these transforming economies – to build it at the street level, and build it in a way that is specific to that place, not emulating Paris or some other city, but rather, an urbanism that specifically speaks to the social intelligence of that place. It’s a huge challenge, and I don’t even pretend to understand the instrumentality of it. But it needs to be one of the next steps. Volume 42 Mobility and the City: Dismantling Automobility for a New Development Paradigm David A. King In many ways cities are a solution to transportation problems. Dense urban areas reduce the costs of sharing and trading ideas, goods and services. Transport policy has long reflected the primacy of lowering transport costs through higher speeds. Policies that favor high-speed mobility mean that people now travel extremely long distances, and mostly by automobile. Recent trends suggest this paradigm is 42 Volume 42 43 changing, as people want higher quality travel rather than simply more travel. The trappings of automobility are being dismantled, from the redevelopment of parking lots to the elimination of driving lanes in favor of dedicated bicycle lanes. As the function and design of streets change to reflect new demands and uses for streets, developers, planners, and architects must lead the transformation of streets from automobile thoroughfares to activity spaces defined by a multiplicity of uses that are as diverse as the communities they serve. Credit: Deepak Bhaskari Cheong Gye Cheon, Seoul contextual urban fabric are designed around parking rather than people. Even Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr. complained about how streets deviated from their local context. In 1910 he wrote, “[t]here has been a decided tendency on the part of the official street planners to insist with quite needless and undesirable rigidity upon certain fixed standards of width and arrangement in regard to purely local streets…” The challenge ahead is not simply to redesign the street grid or layout, but also to conceptualize what activities belong on a street and how to connect the activity spaces of streets with the function of buildings. The era ahead moves beyond previous scholarship on desirable qualities of streets4 in that relationships with travel, place, and technologies have changed. Transportation issues are as much about the quality of a place as they are about getting from here to there. Dismantaling Automobility There are three broad trends challenging automobility on autopilot. The first is a decline is personal travel across all modes. The second shift is the function of streets, roads and neighboring spaces. The third is technological advances that may finally unlock promises made long ago about new ways of getting around. Together, these Volume 42 Automobility On Autopilot In practice, transportation has long been viewed as a utility with a focus on improving mobility.1 Within transport engineering, mobility has a specific definition: the ability to travel. Within this definition of mobility, the ease of travel or the quality of travel are left out. Importantly, in the context of mobility, transportation is considered a derived demand wherein people travel because of what they do at the end of their trips, be it working, shopping or simply going home.2 As a derived demand, travel is treated as something to minimize. This means out with the Sunday drive or evening stroll, and in with the productivity loss associated with not traveling in free flowing traffic. Streets are designed with speed as a goal, and in the end the streets that knit our communities together act as thoroughfares through neighborhoods rather than pieces of them. Automobility is a natural extension of the outmoded mobility paradigm. Cars are popular because they allow people to travel exactly where they want to go without transfers. While cars are a perfectly useful part of overall transportation systems, accommodating cars has taken over all aspects of our cities. In many cities, parking has become the dominant feature of streetscapes and intrudes on the design of buildings and public space.3 In too many cases, buildings and their 44 Credit: Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism Volume 42 Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston MA 45 trends suggest that urban transportation planning and practice is starting to dismantle automobility. In cities of all developed nations auto travel has peaked and passenger travel is declining.5 This is partly explained through economics, especially high levels of unemployment among the young. For those employed, many are substituting telecommuting for a physical commute, and even more people are choosing to do their shopping online with rapid delivery. As driving declines, less space needs to be devoted to it. However, as space needed for cars declines, more space is needed for other uses, both because of substitutes away from driving and because of heightened interest in placemaking. An extreme example of dismantling automobility and reorienting the function of streets is seen in cities that are actively removing expressways to make room for parks. In Seoul, the Cheong Gye Cheon expressway was torn down for a linear park, and the new amenity helped increase nearby property values.6 In Boston, the replacement of a highway with the Rose Kennedy Greenway is anticipated to stimulate private real estate development, which will inure to the provision of public infrastructure that would otherwise have been slow in coming – if at all.7 While not all expressways and roads are ripe for removal, many are actually coming to the end of their useful lives and need substantial overhauls.8 Maintenance and rebuilding costs are coupled with higher costs for owning and operating cars. Road tolls, fuel costs and parking fees will all continue to go up as cities search for money to pay for infrastructure. These increased costs will accelerate a move away from driving, and cities will have to decide how they will reduce the size of their networks of roads. The most vibrant cities realize that their existing parking lots represent ideal sites to develop for people, apartments and businesses rather than cars.9 Overall, as automobility declines, streets become more valuable space for people to enjoy outside of their cars. These shifts affect the size and types of buildings that succeed, and increase the premium on quality of place rather than speed of getting there. The built environment is an opportunity to connect transportation options with new technologies that enable lots of choices as to how we travel. In most U.S. cities, and many cities around the world, developers are required to contribute to the system of automobility through the supply of parking spaces for cars. Even New York City requires parking for most buildings, and this adds an undue burden on transportation choices, adaptive reuse and affordable housing. Technology enabled transportation such as taxi services, online shopping and shared vehicles represent a way forward Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate and SHoP Architects Park Avenue Median Design Proposal Rendering, New York, NY Conclusions Planners and urban designers have long argued for a stronger connection between transportation and land use policy. Yet this is too simple a claim, as in many ways the problem that cities face with automobility is that transportation is too intertwined with real estate development, and it’s just that the only choice for transportation is to drive. For many reasons the paradigm of automobility is weakening and this will create new opportunities for cities, developers and architects to build places that connect buildings with the street and sidewalk in ways impossible when streets and basement parking are filled with cars. Street design has long been an afterthought for development and planning efforts. The era of automobility is closing and streets should be considered part of the local urban fabric rather than a conduit through which people use to go elsewhere. Orienting streetspace toward truly local uses will increase the value of nearby properties, and become part of the amenities buildings offer, as well as make streets safer for people to linger, play and enjoy time well spent. Developers have an opportunity to rethink how to incorporate multiple transportation choices into their projects, and city regulations must be flexible enough to allow creativity. While many cities still require parking for specific land uses, a growing share of cities are freeing developers from such a constraint. Ridesharing, home delivery, and new technologies affect public streets and the function of buildings. Ultimately, cities are not only a solution to transportation problems, but also places with many choices for how to get around, including not traveling by vehicle at all. Transportation choices and street design are things that developers, planners and architects will use to enhance quality of life for people and differentiate themselves from their competition. 1 2 3 4 5 Appleyard, Donald, Gerson, M. Sue, & Lintell, Mark. (1981). Livable streets. Berkeley: University of California Press. Susan Handy, Accessibility versus Mobility­Enhancing Strategies for Addressing Automobile Dependence in the U.S. Paper presented at the European Conference of Ministers of Transport, May 2002. HRA Advisors, Rose Kennedy Greenway: Creating Long­ term Value. Report Prepared for the Boston Redevelopment Authority, March 2010. Allan B. Jacobs, Great streets. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). Chang Deok Kang & Robert Cervero, ‘From Elevated Freeway to Urban Greenway: Land Value Impacts of the CGC Project Volume 42 to reduce the orientation toward autos, but with the caveat that a reduction in driving will lead to increased use of all alternatives. How to incorporate multiple travel options into building and street design is unresolved. Yet freeing buildings from the tyranny of accommodating often empty parking spaces will let the built environment serve people and will redefine how city dwellers interact with new and existing construction. 46 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Volume 42 15 47 in Seoul, Korea’. Urban Studies, no. 13 (Dec 2009), 2771-2794. doi: 10.1177/0042098009345166 David A. King & Jesse M. Keenan, ‘Understanding the Role of Parking Lots for Urban Redevelopment: Interim Uses of Permanent Presence?’ (2012). Vikas Mehta, ‘Lively Streets: Determining Environmental Characteristics to Support Social Behavior’. Journal of Planning Education and Research, no. 2 (2007), 165-187. doi: 10.1177/0739456x07307947 Michael D. Meyer &Eric J. Miller, Urban Transportation Planning: a decision­oriented approach. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). Adam Millard-Ball & Lee Schipper, (2011). Are we reaching peak travel? Trends in passenger transport in eight industrialized countries. Transport Reviews, no. 3 (2011), 357-378. Anne Vernez Moudon, Public Streets for Public Use (Morningside ed.). (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). Vinit Mukhija & Donald Shoup, ‘Quantity versus Quality in Off-Street Parking Requirements’. Journal of the American Planning Association, no. 3 (2006), 296-308. doi: 10.1080/01944360608976752 Francesca Napolitan, & P. Zegras, (2008). ‘Shifting Urban Priorities?: Removal of Inner City Freeways in the United States’. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, no. 1 (2008), 68-75. doi: 10.3141/2046-09 Steven Polzin, X. Chu & L. Toole-Holt, ‘The Case for More Moderate Growth in VMT: a Critical Juncture in US Travel Behavior Trends: Slide’. (2004) Robert Puentes, Have Americans hit peak travel? A discussion of the changes in US driving habits. (2012) Donald C. Shoup, The high cost of free parking. (Chicago: Planners Press, American Planning Association, 2005). Volume 42 Want to Save Public Housing? Integrate it into the Neighborhood, Starting with Retail Julia Vitullo­Martin Can America’s public housing be better intergrated into the city, starting by reversing the pattern of monofunctional residential blocks and overturning zoning practices that exclude commerce, nightlife, and industry. Some New York examples show that it took a while for Jane Jacob’s lessons to reach the offices of planners and clients in this area of initiative, but today there cannot be any 48 Volume 42 excuse to continue this practice. Julia Vitullo-Martin, a fellow with CURE proposes some strategies. 49 American public housing had the misfortune of being conceptualized and built in the early twentieth century, when truly destructive ideas were fashionable in planning, architecture and real estate development. Especially damaging to public housing and its neighborhoods was the idea that commerce is bad, both because it rewards greed (profits) and because it encroaches on and depresses residential values. This idea was, of course, borrowed from the upper classes, whose members were constantly battling to keep commercial and industrial uses away from their urban neighborhoods – thus the widespread embrace of Euclid-style zoning to segregate uses, keeping residential in splendid isolation whenever possible.1 Jane Jacobs’s intellectual innovation in The Death and Life of Great American Cities was to look to working-class neighborhoods, like her own Greenwich Village, rather than to aristocratic ones, as Lewis Mumford and his contemporaries had done. Upper-class enclaves were intent on protecting themselves by keeping undesirable uses out – including stores, bars, liquors stores, most businesses, and all industries. The enclave concept became the model for public housing, most of which was deliberately designed and built without commercial or retail space. In contrast, Jane Jacobs’s Village was an utter jumble of uses, which welcomed proprietors happily and efficiently living over their stores, the very essence in one building of what is now called mixed-use. It can be hard to remember today just how revolutionary it was of Jacobs in the 1960s to respect and celebrate workingclass households and their conservative, old-world but socially attentive morals. Ethnic neighborhoods had been emptying out into the suburbs, either voluntarily via financing mechanisms like the G.I. Bill or coercively, driven by the deadly combination of bank redlining and government urban renewal.2 Either way, many intellectuals writing on the urban crisis were glad to see the ethnics go, making way for what some viewed as enlightened progress. Jacobs saw tragedy in the exit of the ethnics. She admired not only their communal attachments but their commerce – delis, trattorias, taverns, hardware stores – enterprises that were often held in contempt as too parochial and insignificant both by the academic elite of the times and by government officials. Equally important, she cheered the development patterns by which work was mixed in naturally and continually with residences – basically New York’s neighborhood development pattern up until the zoning code of 1961. In many ways, traditional high-rise public housing projects are the essence of anti-Jacobs development. She opposed virtually all single-use development, but particularly what she called “massive public housing projects” that “tend to cause their city surroundings to deteriorate”. As the blocks around public housing decline, the result is that “as time passes, less and less healthy adjoining city is available to tie into”. In her admiration of cities as “delicate, teeming ecosystems” she disdained public housing projects as places of concrete monocultures deliberately designed without the functional and commercial diversity she advocated. The street-level merchants who kept traditional neighborhoods safe both by their watchfulness and the activity they promoted were typically obliterated by urban renewal – leaving public housing tenants bereft of grocery stores, restaurants, or services, since virtually none were provided in their own buildings. Indeed, decades after Jacobs wrote Death and Life, most New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) buildings still have no retail or business services. Of its 343 developments, only 28 offer commercial leases. Certainly NYCHA should be rethinking its commercial policies that somehow deprive the vast majority of its residents of basic retail services. But neighborhoods, for their own health, should also be pressing NYCHA for a retail rethink. After all, unlike most cities, New York distributed public housing projects throughout its territory, which means that New Yorkers in all five boroughs have an ongoing interest in what happens in public housing. Take Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood as an example. Chelsea’s Ninth-Avenue spine hosts traditional development on the east side and NYCHA projects, the Fulton Houses, on the west side. The picture on page 50 shows is a typical low-rise, mixed-use block front – the east side of Ninth between 18th and 19th. The stores are modest and active, customers streaming in and out at all hours, with apartments above. Opposite sits the northern-most part of Fulton Houses – with no retail or commercial use. A bus stop encourages a few people to use that side of the street, which is otherwise forlorn. What’s wrong with the picture on page 51? Bereft ground-floor entrance to Fulton Houses with no retail on the west side, flourishing commerce on the east side, which has a remarkably transformed building at 16th Street – the Maritime Hotel, once the headquarters of the National Maritime Union. The union, its building, and indeed much of Chelsea plunged into steep decline (along with the Manhattan waterfront) in the 1950s. After a few years as a residential shelter for homeless children, the building was converted to a high-end hotel, opening in June 2003. Its five-foot porthole windows overlook the Hudson. Its bars and restaurants attract a glam crowd. Most important, it has a spectacular outdoor space above the sidewalk that contributes to street life, even though it is slightly high – in part because of the building’s original structure but doubtless also as a security precaution for the moment. While the neighborhood has many restaurants and food vendors (the famous Chelsea Market is a neighbor on Credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin (2014) 9th Avenue Retail Between 18th and 19th Street Across from Fulton Houses, New York, NY Council and a longtime supporter of public housing. “NYCHA is still being driven by the bad architectural concepts of the 1960s.” As the city’s housing commissioner in the first Bloomberg administration, Ms. Perine encouraged NYCHA to include retail in its new developments. “I couldn’t get them to budge”, she recalls. “On 5th Street and Avenue C they were designing a project to obliterate the retail strip. They said, ‘The federal government won’t pay for retail, so we won’t design it that way’.” But the federal government has pretty much withdrawn from public housing, leaving NYCHA to fend for itself. Redeveloping old projects with attractive groundfloor retail and commercial uses would simultaneously reap income (now foregone) for the projects, help reintegrate them into their neighborhoods, and improve street life. This is especially true in areas where retail is part of the natural development, like Chelsea, the Lower East Side, the Upper West Side, and Washington Heights. But it’s also true in neighborhoods like East Harlem and the Rockaways, where government bulldozed commercial sections, leaving thousands of residents bereft of commercial services. The projects have nothing to lose but their isolation. 1 2 Euclidean style zoning refers to a strict division and segregation of uses as rationalized and ratified by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926). The G.I. Bill was a piece of legislation following WWII that allowed for free university education for veterans. Bank redlining was a process undertaken by the Federal Housing Association (FHA), a unit of the U.S. government, wherein the FHA refused to extend mortgage credit to certain inner city neighborhoods, Volume 42 16th Street), it is short on basic services and retail, which could easily be accommodated by Fulton Houses. Asking rents on Ninth and Tenth Avenues range from $275 to $375 a square foot, according to Robert K. Futterman, CEO of retail marketers, RKF. NYCHA could make money for Fulton Houses, provide services and needed retail, and lure pedestrians to the west side of the avenue. Chelsea is an extraordinarily vibrant neighborhood long blessed with every routine urban amenity – and now home to what may be America’s most acclaimed new urban park, the High Line. Between Ninth Avenue and the High Line, 17th Street is composed nearly 100% of retail-less, foreboding projects. But at 17th and 10th one encounters Artichoke Pizza, the High Line, and two renowned buildings – the IAC by Frank Gehry and 100 11th Avenue by Jean Nouvel – in the distance. Was any public housing ever so clearly ripe for better, more integrative urban development than Fulton Houses? Despite her harsh criticism of public housing over the years, Jacobs said in a 1992 speech that it was possible to rectify “the ground levels of self-isolating projects” by relinking the projects to the normal city and by refitting them with plentiful new connecting streets. More important, the projects should be converted into “urban places” by adding diverse new commercial facilities along the newly built streets. The catch, though, was the new commercial facilities would have to respond to their markets and work out economically – as proof “of their genuine and not fake usefulness”, Jacobs said. “The retail question is huge”, says Jerilyn Perine, the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning 50 Credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin (2014) Volume 42 Credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin (2014) Retail-less Fulton Houses on 9th Avenue Between 18th and 19th Street, New York, NY 51 9th Avenue, Maritime Hotel Across from Fulton Houses, New York, NY 10th Avenue with Buildings by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel in the Distance, New York, NY 52 53 Credit: Julia Vitullo-Martin (2014) Over the past decade, with astonishing speed – and to the surprise of nearly every observer – New York has risen to become what is arguably the second most important hub of digital activity in the world after Silicon Valley. By any measure the recent growth of the city’s tech industry has been nothing less than explosive – in the number of funded start-ups; in the success of its fastest-growing companies; in the meteoric rise in New York-based venture capital; in the boom in commercial leasing; and, not least, in the growing gravitational attrac- tion the city is exerting on established tech companies from the West Coast and elsewhere. Indeed, in the final years of the tenure of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg – whose administration had aggressively supported the sector’s growth through a series of public-private initiatives, including new applied-science campuses on Roosevelt Island (CornellNYC Tech), in downtown Brooklyn (NYU/Poly’s Center for Urban Science and Progress) and in upper Manhattan (Columbia’s Institute for Data Sciences Volume 42 Building the Digital City James Sanders James Sanders, a New Yorkbased architect and CURE Fellow, describes the urban implications of the growing tech industry in New York, pointing to the differences in work culture between tech and previous business booms, and their import for architectural design and planning in the city. If workplace can be any space, what has real estate to offer? 54 Credit: James Sanders Volume 42 Midtown South, the Center of New York’s Tech Industry 55 and Engineering) – the city’s tech industry solidified its position not only as a leading engine of growth in research and development, but also as a transformative urban force which is redefining the very nature of city life and work in the twenty-first century. In 2013, responding to this important new presence in New York’s real estate landscape, a multidisciplinary team at the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) embarked on a multiyear research initiative called Building the Digital City – the first of its kind to explore not only the dramatic growth of the tech industry in New York, but also its increasingly significant impact on the design, planning, and development of every facet of the city, which scales from the workspace to the workplace to the larger urban fabric and draws an increasingly hybrid function between the foregoing. In its first year, the initiative garnered the support of several major corporate partners in the city’s tech, real estate, and planning sectors, including Google, Airbnb, Jamestown Properties, Cisco, and the Control Group, as well as a key research and creative partner in a team established within the global engineering firm Arup. Research Initiative In setting out to explore the transformative impact of digital culture and economy on the physical city, the research team was impressed from the start by the sheer range of urban scales at which that impact is taking place, and, no less importantly, the ways in which changes and innovations at one end of the spectrum – at the scale of a single building, for example, or even a single interior – are tightly intertwined with those at the larger scale of neighborhoods and districts, and indeed with changes to the city as a whole. At the scale of the individual workplace, for example, this tech culture is pioneering significant innovations through the development of new collaborative models – including ‘co-working,’ ‘shared-service,’ ‘incubator’ and ‘accelerator’ spaces – that are reshaping basic notions about the layout and structure of the urban office and the very process of working. These new Credit: Mesh Architectures (2013) types of workplaces, in turn, are driving the development of new tech-driven urban districts, whose distinctive character built around a complex mix of live/work uses, a rich layer of urban amenities, and a decided preference for older, smaller, more idiosyncratic structures over conventional modern office buildings has profound implications for the future of the city. The rise of these new tech districts carries longterm implications for the built landscape of the entire city, as a dramatic move now under way from the traditional tech cluster around Midtown South to downtown Manhattan, and, especially, the East River waterfront districts of Brooklyn and Queens, are poised to challenge the historic ‘hub-and-spoke’ orientation of New York to its midtown central business district, in favor of the development of a more complex multi-nodal urban network. Accordingly, the research was carried out at a range of scales, to understand not only the full breadth of the underlying phenomenon but also the deeply interconnected nature of tech’s innovations to the city’s real estate markets—and its urban landscape. At the smallest scale – that of the individual commercial operations that are driving the change – the research began with a broad survey of the co-working or incubator spaces that represent the most distinctive and innovative examples of the new tech urban typology. An ingenious market solution to a commercial dilemma – that tech startups typically cannot afford (nor, as new companies, have the credit history for) standard multiyear office leases – these membership institutions function less as traditional workplaces than as something akin to a university library, providing a wide variety of environments in which their members can carry out their business without a private desk, or file cabinets, or any kind of fixed office and hence fixed expenses.1 One of the key attractions of these co-working or incubator spaces is the rich array and diversity of the working and social environments they offer their members. We began our analysis of their intricate spatial and functional layouts with a systematic classification (the first of its kind that we have seen) of these fundamental working and social environments – the basic ‘elements’ or ‘units’ of tech culture, as it were. Our next step was to understand these individual workplace elements more fully by organizing a matrix that described, in consistent and comparable fashion, the spatial and functional characteristics and requirements of each component classification. Shifting to a larger scale, our team studied the overall floor plates of several typical urban co-working spaces in New York, using architectural plans provided by their architects and tenants, onto which these various workplace elements could be overlaid to scale. By rendering these plans at a common scale and using a consistent color-coding system among them, we could analyze the variety of ways in which these complex conceptual assemblages of elements played out in, and were adapted to, the concrete architectural layouts (and limitations) of specific commercial buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Conversely, comparing these color-coded floor plans side by side allowed us to begin to abstract the functional patterns and adjacencies of these new kind of workplaces, in a way that transcended the specifics of the buildings in which they had been placed. Volume 42 New York Media Center, Brooklyn, NY 56 Credit: General Assembly (2013) Volume 42 Credit: WeWork (2013) Incubator Space, Manhattan, NY 57 Co-working Space, Manhattan, NY High-Back Chair A semi-isolated compartment, resembling traditional Phone booth and usually located off a hallway or perimeter of a large space, this space allows a single person to make private cell-phone conversations with out disturbing (or being overheard by) others. Usually includes a seat or stool, a shallow or full-depth shelf to place laptop or papers, and an acoustic absorbing wall finish of fabric or cork, and can be outfitted with doors (for additional privacy) or a 120V power outlet (which tends to encourage longer-term use). A Furniture item that provides comfortable seating and partial privacy for one or two users within a larger interior space. Most are wide enough for two persons but are almost invariably used by one, and, though they can be deployed in groups, facing each other, they are rarely used for social interactions or meetings. The chair’s high backs provide considerable visual isolation but only modest acoustic isolation. Work Desk Loung Grouping Similar in height to a communal work table but shorter in length and not continuous, these tables are generally intended for four to six people working on a single project. Some offer a large (30 inch diagonal or larger) monitor at a short end of the desk, to which all users can link by cable, allowing all users at the table to look at and work on a single screen, without having to retire to a formal conference room. A ‘living-room’-like lounge area, comprised of one or more comfortable upholstered Sofas or lounge chairs, around a low coffee table, serving a variety of purposes: meetings with clients or visitors, formal or informal team meetings, individual work sessions or work-related reading, or individual rest and relaxation. Located within a larger area, often near the core or hub of the co-working space, these groupings are social in nature and do not provide acoustic or visual privacy. Classroom Studio / Media Room A medium to large-sized room, generally acoustically isolated from the larger space, intended for classes and other formal learning programs. Furnishing consists of a series of long, narrow tables with desk chairs (for 10 to 40 persons) arranged in rows, all oriented to one short end of the room, where the instructor stands or sits. As in conference room, classrooms usually include a ceiling-mounted projector and a large drop-down wall screen, or one or more large wall-mounted monitors, located behind the instructor, as well as presentation surfaces on the side walls, such as whiteboard, or cork or fabric pin-up surfaces – and one or more of the room’s walls may be fully or partially glazed (or flexibly opened) to encourage a sense of openness. A dedicated, visually and acoustically sealed environment intended for video or music production, sometimes accompanied by an adjacent (but acoustically isolable) control room. Used to create lectures or live-action performances, these studio spaces usually feature a simple lighting plot, a camera on tripod, ‘stage-area’ with desk and chair, and background ‘green-screen’ wall behind performer or instructor, which can be digitally adapted in post-production to include additional images or data. Volume 42 Phonebooth 58 Volume 42 59 Communal Table A high round table surrounded by two or three high stools or chairs; these are usually arranged in groups in a ‘café’ layout, near a serving bar. Informal and flexible, these groupings accommodate one person working alone, several people in meetings or joint work, one or several people enjoying meals or snacks, or tabletop use during a party or reception. Because the tables can be used either seated or standing, they encourage spontaneous interactions; passers-by can easily look at work or speak with those at the table while remaining standing, without the formal commitment to sit down and join. Also known as ‘benching’, or a ‘hot seat’, the long communal table – whose places are generally not reserved but used on a first-come, first-served basis – is the workhorse of collaborative spaces. With no fixed divisions between work areas, the communal table flexibly accommodates single users working alone or groups of users working in parallel or together. Tables often provide 120V power outlets, but data is usually provided via wi-fi. A dedicated version of the long table, reserved for a single user or group of users – typically a start-up – can provide room for permanent desktop computer and storage. Seminar / Conference Room Editing Suite An enclosed room, designed for acoustic privacy and used mostly for meetings, these rooms usually center on a large conference table and include seating for 6 to 12 people working on a single project. These rooms, which generally must be reserved, include a drop-down projection screen (often with ceiling-mounted projector) or one or more large wallmounted monitors. Wall finishes serve work-related purposes, including whiteboard surfaces, cork or fabric pin-up surfaces, or presentation rail to place display boards, etc., and one or more walls may be fully or partially glazed (or flexibly opened) to allow for visual communication with larger space and encourage a sense of openness. A small, fully isolated room intended for working with media projects such as film, video or music production, features a wall-facing built-in table for computer / keyboard / monitors, and seating for two to four people – often desk seats for those directly involved in editing, and one or two lounge chairs behind. The editing suite is acoustically and visually isolated in both directions – neither sound nor light can travel in or out – and typically a low-light level, ‘inward-focused’ environment for long, intensive collaborative work sessions. Commons Theater A large area, located near the center or entrance of a collaborative space, combining a variety of furniture groupings (café tables, lounge groupings) with general circulation space, and serviced by a bar and kitchen area. During the day, the commons serves as a ‘town square’ where visitors can be greeted, members circulate through the overall space, and users work or relax at tables, seats, and sofas, much like people at a café, overlooking a traditional civic square. In the evening, the area can be converted (by moving furniture or opening flexible walls) into a large reception space for meet-ups, receptions, screenings and other events mixing social interaction with networking. A large area, located near the center or entrance of a collaborative space, combining a variety of furniture groupings (café tables, lounge groupings) with general circulation space, and serviced by a bar and kitchen area. During the day, the commons serves as a ‘town square’ where visitors can be greeted, members circulate through the overall space, and users work or relax at tables, seats, and sofas, much like people at a café, overlooking a traditional civic square. In the evening, the area can be converted (by moving furniture or opening flexible walls) into a large reception space for meet-ups, receptions, screenings and other events mixing social interaction with networking. Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate (2014) High-Top Café Table Grouping real-estate market. Indeed, in many cases these companies were eager to unload space they had optimistically taken on in the expansive cycle a few years before and now no longer needed (nor could afford). Newly emerging tech companies could thus take advantage of relatively cheap pricing for space in these Class B office buildings, either from landlords directly or by subleasing space from other companies. These buildings, in turn, were well-suited to their new tech tenants, offering the solid, over-engineered shell structure they had enjoyed since their construction in the early twentieth or late nineteenth century, and, in most cases, having undergone at least a modicum of upgrades and improvements – in lobby finishes, elevator cars, bathrooms, and building systems – since they had been ‘discovered,’ a few decades ago, by creative and professional tenants seeking an alternative to midtown. The relatively minimal rents (as low as $35 to $40 per square foot per year in many cases), plus the generally low capital cost for necessary tenant improvements, offered a rare moment of affordability for tech companies who suddenly could find attractive, functional, reasonably priced work space in Manhattan, even as they rapidly expanded in size, and thus allowing New York as whole to ‘incubate’ a new industry, as it rarely has done in the past century. The long-term impact on the city’s economic future of this unusual historical circumstance may ultimately prove immensely significant. The policy implications of this initial research are striking in at least two areas. One is the role that historic architecture generally – and landmark designated architecture, specifically – has played in the emergence of this new industry, which is regarded as so crucial to the city’s long-term viability. The value of historic preservation and landmark designation as an economic development tool, often discussed in vague and generalized terms, is here given specific and stark evidence: it is not incorrect to say that the city’s future has chosen its past, that its youngest industry has chosen its oldest buildings. The second policy issue emerges from the consequences of the historical situation that gave rise to the industry in the first place. The city’s economy is no longer in recession, its commercial real-estate market is booming, and the brief window of affordability that the tech industry enjoyed in Manhattan a half decade ago is long gone. Furthermore, the city’s emerging ‘tech districts,’ as is so often the case in New York, have become the victims of their own success, their very desirability raising prices and making them unaffordable to newcomers in the same industry (rents in many of Midtown South’s more desirable tech-related buildings, for example, have well exceeded $60 per square foot per year, about 150% percent of their price five or six years ago). In response, the continued expansion of the tech industry has now begun to shift elsewhere: to the financial district in lower Manhattan, and above all to the older industrial and commercial districts lining the East River along the Brooklyn and Queens waterfront. How to encourage further expansion in those areas – and what policy proposals, urban design concepts, transportation improvements, and development strategies will best ensure that the tech boom in the city not only continues but grows – will be a major area of focus as the initiative continues. Finally, in order to capture and present these findings to a wide audience in a format that is simple, engaging, and easily accessible, the team is producing Volume 42 Fundamental as it is, this initial step in the systematic analysis of these spaces may not only lead to a deeper appreciation of their architectural, urbanistic, and social implications for the city, but may well assist these novel operations to better understand their own functioning – especially in terms of valuing more precisely the various spaces and services they offer.2 Finally, to capture the impact of the burgeoning tech sector on the real estate and urban landscape of the city as a whole, the team carried out a specialized survey and mapping study, which looked at the locational and building preferences of the city’s tech industry. The study began with the ‘Made in New York’ digital map – an innovative effort by NYC Digital (a department within the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment) – to identify and locate all of the tech companies in the five boroughs, onto which our team superimposed layers of information, drawn from various sources, about the nature of the buildings in which those companies are located. The first mapping study looked at the age of the buildings, divided into four categories (before 1920; 1920 – 1945; 1945 – 1980; 1980-present), which were consolidated onto two maps, showing pre- and postwar buildings. From our interviews, surveys, and select samples, our team had already developed the hypothesis that many tech companies preferred older prewar buildings over newer postwar buildings for their homes, but we were surprised, upon completing this more rigorous survey, to find how striking that preference was: 86% to 14%. The second mapping study reinforced this initial hypothesis – but with potentially significant implications for public policy – by showing what percentage of New York tech companies are located in a designated NYC landmark building or historic district (70%) versus those that are not (30%). A final mapping study, evaluating the height of buildings in which tech companies are located, was broadly consistent with the other findings, revealing that 68% of tech companies are located in lower buildings, which we defined as all those under fourteen stories – not necessarily low-rise, to be sure, but not skyscrapers either. Indeed, only 9% of New York tech companies were located in true skyscrapers – defined as buildings over thirty stories tall. There are diverse reasons for this decided preference for older, lower, historic buildings, a number of them the kinds of broader ‘cultural’ issues, such as the aesthetic appearance of older buildings and districts and their heightened sense of ‘authenticity’ (especially as compared to traditional Class A office districts). But a few are specific to the unusual market circumstances during which the tech boom in New York began, and to the distinctive architectural character of these buildings. Historically, the city’s tech industry began its truly substantial expansion in the mid-2000s, allowing it to take advantage of a ‘silver lining’ amidst the otherwise chilling economic conditions of the second half of the decade. By 2006 and 2007, many established New York companies (in law, advertising, public relations, fashion and retail, architecture and engineering, traditional media, and other fields), who had settled in the older commercial areas below 34th Street in the decade or two prior, had stopped expanding and had no need to take on any new office space, thus dramatically depressing the commercial 60 Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate (2014) Legend common space amenities commons reception lounge grouping kitchen / bar / cafe circulation coats lockers work space bike storage communal table / ‘hot-desks’ services dedicated bathrooms company office server room phone booth elevator high back chair fire stair flexible event space access corridor general support rooms seminar / conference classroom resources & attributes folding walls screens transparent / glazed specialized rooms library projector + screen monitor editing suite theater Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate (2014) Caption Legend common space amenities commons reception lounge grouping kitchen / bar / cafe circulation coats lockers work space bike storage communal table / ‘hot-desks’ services dedicated bathrooms company office server room phone booth elevator high back chair fire stair flexible event space access corridor general support rooms seminar / conference classroom resources & attributes folding walls screens transparent / glazed specialized rooms library Volume 42 editing suite 61 theater Caption projector + screen monitor Tech Companies in Post-War Buildings Tech Companies in Landmarked Buildings Tech Companies in Non-Landmarked Buildings Volume 42 Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate and ARUP (2013) Tech Companies in Pre-War Buildings 62 Tech Companies in Buildings Under 14 Floors Volume 42 a short animated video – inspired by the 1974 educational film, ‘Powers of Ten’, by the office of Charles and Ray Eames – to bring to life the transformative impact of digital culture on the twenty-first-century urban environment – at a wide variety of scales, from the individual desk, to the interior of a co-working “incubator” space, to the landscape of a new tech hub district, to the city as a whole. 63 Conference Program As a culmination of the first phase of the initiative – and as a means of disseminating and testing the initial research findings – CURE organized a multidisciplinary conference in the fall of 2013. Held in a specially designed and curated multimedia event space in the Chelsea district of Manhattan – the very heart of the tech industry in New York – the conference gathered together key figures from New York’s digital and venture-capital worlds with members of the city’s real estate, planning and architectural communities, as well as government officials, civic leaders and academic experts. The conference venue included a pop-up co-working space (operated by WeWork), multimedia exhibitions and digital projections, and working demonstrations of portable manufacturing technology – notably by MakerBot, Tomorrow Lab, and others. Discussing the layout and design of tech-oriented workplaces, participants noted the value of collaboration that is intrinsic to these spaces, and emphasized as one of the city’s irreplaceable strengths the fundamental urbanity of its tech districts, in two complementary ways. On the one hand, the design of the workplaces themselves has been inspired by the nature of urban life – replacing the ‘monoculture’ of the traditional Class A corporate office interior with something more resembling (and ideally as stimulating as) a vital city street – with multiple overlapping activities, a variety of social gather- Tech Companies in Buildings with Greater than 30 Floors ing places, and a rich mix of specialized uses, situated within an overall layout based on flow and movement rather than a static, compartmentalized office interior plan. On the other hand, as CURE’s own research has observed, the city itself is becoming a kind of giant workplace, its cafes, hotel lobbies, public spaces and parks becoming as much a part of the overall business environment as formally designated workspaces within commercial buildings. The afternoon panelists, looking at the implications of tech for real estate, development, and the large-scale growth of the city, outlined in some detail the significant obstacles to the continued growth of tech workplaces, beyond the existing Class B spaces they have already occupied in Midtown South and a few areas of Brooklyn. They described the formidable commercial challenge in constructing a new workspace that is financially viable both in terms of affordability for tech start-ups (who, as noted, are highly price-sensitive), and as an alternative to residential condominium development, which remains in such extraordinary demand in the city that it can command far higher prices per square foot than nearly any tech-related commercial space. As one author questioned, “Is this the rise of an affordable workspace movement in tandem with affordable housing?” Panelists pointed the way to two possible solutions. On the private side, one approach is to incorporate tech space within a larger mixed-use development, which spreads the financial burden across a broader portfolio of elements, and indeed may serve to enhance the desirability (and thus value) of adjacent residential units by providing a more ‘urban’ and energized environment for the project as a whole. On the public side, panelists agreed, government needs to acknowledge the larger value of providing affordable tech space for the city a whole, and create innovative policy mechanisms to compensate for the financial Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate (2014) 264% 135% 122% disincentives that are currently limiting the ability of owners to renovate existing buildings for commercial purposes, or to construct new ones. These might include tools such as zoning bonuses, or site rezoning plans accompanied by use covenants – both of which have been used in recent years and could be expanded. Nonetheless, the obvious competition for scarce city land between residential and commercial use – a contest that recent city policies have tilted decisively toward the former – seems only poised to grow in the future, especially as the current mayoral administration embarks on its well-publicized effort to increase the supply of affordable housing in the city. Needless to say, there has not been an equivalent drive for an ‘affordable office’ initiative (nor is there likely to be), though the future of tech as a promising growth area – and indeed the city’s economy as a whole – may well depend of the availability of reasonably priced commercial space.3 The knowledgeable and focused observations offered by the conference’s participants – building on the initial research findings presented at the event – helped shape the initiative’s forthcoming phases, including an urban design and development study that incorporates and tests the application of many of the concepts that emerged in these initial undertakings. In the meantime, more than thirty video excerpts of the conference panels are available online through CURE’s website. Volume 42 Frames from Building the Digital City Film 64 Credit: James Sanders (2013) Volume 42 Building the Digital City Conference and Pop-up Workspace 65 Urban Design + Development Research In addition to the ongoing empirical research of the team in an attempt to understand and explain certain market phenomena, the initiative has endeavored to undertake design research to develop a prototype of a twenty-firstcentury tech hub in New York, located on one or more specific sites within the emerging ‘tech corridor’ along the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront. These tech hub prototypes will incorporate both new construction and adaptive re-use, and will offer a mix of programmatic elements, including co-working and incubator spaces, and workspace for entrepreneurial startups; expansion workspace for established midand large-sized tech companies; live-work prototypes, including affordable housing and micro-units; facilities for applied-science academic programs, for digitally enabled manufacturing and prototyping, for digital and broadcast media, and for multimedia cultural programming; and importantly, facilities for community-oriented training and educational programs, specifically designed to address the issue of ‘the digital divide’ by supporting segments of the population which to date have benefited less directly from tech sector growth. More generally, these tech hub prototypes will include an ample provision of the kind of urban amenities, activities, and social spaces that have proven crucial to the growth of tech culture in New York and other mature cities, both in the United States and abroad. The experiment will also explore a policy proposal, originally offered by CURE, to establish a new ‘Class T’ to supplement the traditional Class A, B, and C commercial real-estate categories, in order to provide incentives for older Class B and C buildings to be adapted to techoriented commercial purposes (or as mixed-use projects) rather than converted strictly to residential use, as market conditions currently favor. In developing their study, the team will draw upon adaptive design theory and research, crucial in conceptualizing physical design and development proposals for a culture of innovation, whose very essence lies in accepting and incorporating experimentation, failure, and evolution in astonishingly rapid cycles. The challenge will be to develop architectural, urban design and development concepts that enjoy the latent capacity to evolve and adapt to what will inevitably be dramatic shifts in technology and applications as well as the basic structure of the city’s tech ‘eco-system’ itself. Indeed, if the story of New York’s tech industry to date demonstrates anything, it is that the powerfully adaptive capacity of the city to accommodate new kinds of urban enterprise and activity – often in the most unexpected and unanticipated of ways. Conclusion The goal in advancing this design and development initiative has been to advance thinking on ways in which New York’s burgeoning urban tech culture can more widely impact the design and development of the city – encouraging not only technological and commercial innovation but a platform for exploring broad-based Brooklyn Queens Tech Corridor Credit: Center for Urban Real Estate and Arup (2013) 66 Volume 42 economic prosperity, responsible and sustainable urban development, widespread educational advancement, and social equity. In the coming years, Building the Digital City will extend from research of the existing tech landscape to developing innovative models and prototypes that at once stimulate a larger dialogue while containing concrete propositions for policy and strategy, in both public and private sectors, to help guide future development. The project’s focus will also widen. Initially oriented toward issues and opportunities in New York, Building the Digital City will explore tech developments not only in the metropolitan region, but in cities across the country and around the world that are increasingly looking to tech and digital enterprises as a source of prosperity and urban growth in the twenty-first century. 1 Volume 42 2 67 In real-estate terms, these co-working or incubator spaces (such as WeWork, NeueHouse, or General Assembly) provide the valuable function of shifting risk from the small startup tenant (who would otherwise be responsible for a long-term lease worth many hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of dollars) to a larger operation that can effectively serve as a middleman between the startup and the building’s landlord or management company. These co-working operations are comfortable carrying that risk because they can aggregate the combined risk of their many hundreds of small members. In return, these companies rent space to their startup members at a considerably higher cost per square foot than the space itself would otherwise command. These co-working operations usually pay landlords somewhat higher rents than their Class B spaces would otherwise be worth, but they remain profitable, in part because of the premium rent (usually in the form of a monthly fee) that their members are willing to pay, and in part because their spaces operate with such high density of use and productivity per square foot. The startup and other small companies that are their members are willing and indeed eager to pay that premium rent (or fee), in part because they do not have to assume the long-term risk of a lease (or sublease), in part because they receive a variety of valuable services and work environments as part of the arrangement, and in part because – thanks to the technology of powerful, universally connected laptops and handheld devices – they require so little in the way of workspace that even the smallest formal sublease arrangement would involve too much space and too great a transaction cost. The exact nature of the pricing of the various spaces and services within these co-working operations remains a question for further study. It will be especially important in determining the long-term viability of what remains a new and relatively untested commercial real-estate model (and one, furthermore, in which the operator bears a disproportionate amount of risk, at least when compared to conventional leasing arrangements). Of special concern is the ability of these co-working operations to withstand multiple business cycles, which, on their downside, could potentially wipe out their base of shortterm tenants, most of which are young and relatively fragile companies. It might be the case, on the other hand, that the existence of such spaces could act as a buffer in a recessionary cycle, allowing larger, more established companies to use them as flexible workspace for some reduced percentage of their work force. In any case, our analysis of the spatial layouts and functional innovations of these co-working spaces will, we believe, provide a foundation for more detailed evaluation to come. 3 Those who dismiss New York’s tech industry as primarily the province of a well-educated elite, with limited economic or social significance for the larger population, might be reminded of the finding, in a 2014 report commissioned by the Association for a Better New York, called The New York Tech Economy, that one-half of all tech workers in the city have no college degree. (www.nyctecheconomy.com) Volume 42 The Implications of a Networked Urban Landscape for Architectural Programming Andrew Laing Information technology has had a particular impact on the mobility of how we work and use space, such that the container of the program of the workplace is no longer the simple category of ‘office building’ but rather the city at large. This shift to what we might call an ‘urban scale’ in patterns of working and using space points to a much wider transformation in how all 68 Volume 42 kinds of spaces are programmed, designed, and used. It suggests that our inherited conventions of programming, and even our understanding of the nature of building types, should be reexamined. The role of the architect in programming and designing for these new patterns of use will also need to be reinvented. 69 My starting point in this speculative exploration is the direction of change we have seen toward an urban scale in the nature of work and workplaces. As technology enables individuals to take their work with them and work across the city in various kinds of unconventional workspaces, such as apartment, hotel lobby, co-working space, coffee shop, client location, train station, and so on, the whole notion of the program of the office building is challenged. Work has escaped the ‘box’ of the office building. With it has gone the certainty of the twentieth-century perspective on the architectural program in defining the prescriptive, typologically based, brief for the design of the office building. I would like to argue that this disruption of the program for the office workplace or building presages a wider transformation of the role of the architectural programming activity for all kinds of activities, spaces, and building types. The impact of information technology on the programming and design of the workplace is merely the first and most obvious site of this disruption of the nature of architectural programming. The office workplace has been a central site in which the nature of our social relationships to space has been transformed by information technology. It is where the most investigation into the relationships between new patterns of use of space enabled by information technology has occurred. Many organizations have invested heavily in programs that have changed how their real estate is used, redefined how their workspaces are planned, and re-thought how their spaces are allocated to users. Shared space practices usually involving some kind of ‘hoteling’ or flexible space use are underpinned by the mobility provided by information technology, which supports work across a range of environments inside and outside the office building and across a distributed network of work settings across the city and region.1 This experience of new ways of working and using space suggests we should explore the wider opportunity (beyond the workplace) to reinvent how we program the design of everyday life, as information technology gives users increasing power to dynamically control how they use space for every activity. In a sense, the user is increasingly able to self-program, co-create, and ‘design’ his or her spatial experiences.2 But more than merely challenging the allocation of space, information technology is also disrupting the processes of acquiring space and challenging the conventions of how real estate and workspaces are supplied and delivered to users. Technology in the so-called ‘sharing economy’ of collaborative consumption is allowing users to become empowered consumers of space, bypassing and to some extent making irrelevant the old conventions of how space is brought to market. Users are becoming active agents in the process of design and programming of the spaces they use. Office space is the environment in which information technology was most highly developed to support radical changes in the nature of the work process. The office has thereby also been the site of the most developed efforts to reimagine the conventions of the functionalist approach to architectural programming. Even though the level of scholarly research into the performance of the design of the workplace for new ways of working in offices is limited and crude in comparison to other fields of social science, as Duffy noted in his review of the status of architectural knowledge, the workplace is nevertheless a major arena of change in the nature of architectural programming.3 And it is being increasingly explored as an aid to organizational productivity.4 These transformations in work and workplaces allow us to explore the wider potential of significant change in the role of the architect and the responsibility for the architectural program. Underlying this transformation is the expanding role of the end user, empowered by networked information technology and operating at an urban scale to program and use space in new ways. Mitchell and Duffy analyzed the extraordinary potential of information technology to erode the categories of the functionalist programming of types of spaces and to dissolve the segregation of activities in time and space that drove so much of twentieth-century urban planning.5 Mitchell argued that the digital era would transform how we design and use space and buildings: “The network is displacing, subverting, and redefining notions of place and urban life”.6 Digital information, he argued, acts as a solvent, decomposing traditional building types, resulting in a ‘recombinant’ architecture. Old correspondences between buildings and institutions no longer hold.7 The result is a transformation in how we conceptualize and use space. We are living and working in what Mitchell called “post sedentary space”.8 Users enabled with technology appropriate the diverse sites they need, blending the activities of living and working. The specialization of spatial requirements and the dichotomies of home/ office, café/office and hotel/workplace are broken down. The traditional architectural program is therefore decreasingly relevant as activities take place in a wider field in which people-to-place relationships are destabilized. The conventional architectural program is replaced by Volume 42 Working at Tec de Monterrey, Mexico 70 Volume 42 71 what Mitchell called “flexible, diverse, human habitats for electronically supported nomadic occupation”.9 Mitchell noted how the industrial cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century created rigid demarcations between work in the factory or office and the home, segregating functions across time and space in ways which were further reinforced by functionalist zoning and planning policies. Duffy in Work and the City, further explored how the impacts of information technology are challenging conventions about work time and work space long taken for granted.10 The use of information technology has overturned what Duffy called the two great “iron laws” of twentieth-century work and the office buildings and cities that were built to accommodate them: the synchrony and collocation of work activities. As Duffy notes, the office building no longer maintains a monopoly on accommodating office work, and the office building, as such, is therefore now a misleading unit of analysis. The boundaries of work and space have shifted to such an extent that work has in a sense “spilled out into wider and more complex spatial and temporal landscapes”.11 What appears to be happening now is not merely the displacement of the conventional typological building or space by a binary virtual equivalent as predicted by Mitchell, in which the virtual campus replaces the school house, the servers replace the book stacks, or the virtual museum replaces the gallery but rather a systemic dissolution of the separation of activities taking place in designated spaces or types of buildings.12 This is driven by the imbrication of technology into daily activities within spaces rather than, as was once forecast, that technology or virtualization would somehow replace physical spaces and places.13 Hybrid virtual/ physical activities replace the singular activity. This hybridization of virtual and physical activities in space is accelerated by the increasing technological power and agency of users to more directly procure, control, and manage their use of multiple spaces for many different simultaneous activities. Information technology is not only enabling more mobile and virtual ways of using space and the city, but also revolutionizing the modes of obtaining and supplying space. The sharing economy of collaborative consumption enabled by new applications and geo-location services is beginning to revolutionize how organizations and individuals procure and obtain spaces and many other kinds of resources for living and working. In so doing, the supply-side driven processes of landlords, developers, and the real estate industry are challenged.14 The collaborative consumption model provides users with a much wider range of choices and new abilities to obtain the environments and services they want to use on an as-needed basis by the hour or day. This shift to a more individualistic and consumerist model of use means that space can be consumed collaboratively in the same way that in the sharing economy we can pay for the use of cars or movies. Services such as LiquidSpace (for offices) and Airbnb (for apartments) not only create new ways to access and use space, they also enable owners and landlords to better utilize their own under-occupied space. They suggest a model for the sharing of all kinds of urban spaces. The ability to obtain workspace in a more flexible as-needed way is further associated with new ways in which the provision of space is increasingly offered as a service: workspace-as-a-service. New kinds of work- place providers are entering this marketplace. Examples include the collaboration between Steelcase and Marriott to offer a service called ‘Workspring’, which provides workspace services within hotel environments.15 Similarly, Westin hotels offer a workspace service called Tangent.16 Again, it is the workplace that is among the first domains in which technology is enabling a new service model that is redefining our social and economic relationships to space. From being a resource that we own or rent, space becomes a service. We can begin to imagine policies and institutional frameworks for thinking of urban space as a resource to be shared and used over time by multiple organizations and individuals. In the same way that office buildings are now increasingly used in a dynamic ‘desk sharing’ model that increases utilization and occupancy levels (and decreases carbon footprint), we can think of urban areas and districts as space resources to be intensively shared and dynamically occupied for multiple kinds of complementary living and working activities, intensifying their usage over 24 hours. (One can imagine a kind of Airbnb for the spatial resources of the city as a whole rather than merely for the use of individual apartments). A Networked Landscape Urbanism As the narrow definition of programs by functions tied to a rigid taxonomy of spaces is dissolved, there is a shift in the scale of programming to what we might call ‘the urban’. What we mean by ‘urban’ in this sense is a pattern of use of spaces and buildings in the future that will depend on a wide scale networking of multiple organizations and individuals, who will pool resources and socialize their use of space over time in a dynamic way. The city becomes in effect a networked digital and physical landscape of connectivity in which users are increasingly empowered to design and remix their programs of activities across spaces, buildings, and the city. The shift toward nomadic patterns of work in a distributed landscape of work settings is indicative of wider shifts in which technologically enabled and empowered users will roam and navigate what has been called a landscape urbanism to obtain spaces and services for all of their needs.17 The concept of landscape urbanism takes our sprawling decentralized urban regions as a site in which we can recombine landscape, buildings, and the city into a new kind of object of design. It takes Mitchell’s idea of a recombinant architecture to the urban scale.18 It demands a transformation of the scale and nature of architectural programming, as activities are situated in wider platforms or infrastructures that can be reformed and reshaped over time by users in multiple ways. In contrast to the modernist ideas of functionalist city planning and zoning, in which the architecture of the discrete building was expected to fulfill a program of designated activities, an alternative approach to planning the city now might consider architecture and urbanism as a continuous field of operations.19 The city is better viewed as a ‘terra fluxus’ or a ‘living arena of processes and exchanges over time’, allowing for changing activities and patterns of occupancy.20 It can be viewed as a large-scale performative infrastructure, to be reconfigured, revitalized, and reimagined in a fluid program.21 Stan Allen has described this as a process of radical incremental planning in which the city and buildings allow for a ‘re-jiggering’ of activities. Formerly distinct domains of design responsibility and user experience may be merged or collapsed. Contingent planning processes would allow for the constant re-staging of patterns of living and working. This theatrical analogy of staging or restaging activities in space over time was also central to Duffy’s and DEGW’s ideas of the office and office building as a system of elements having specific life cycles associated with particular professional design responsibilities and degrees of user control (the building shell, services, scenery and sets).22 These ideas were explored further by Stewart Brand as ‘shearing layers of change’ in which the different rates of change of the ‘site, structure, skin, services, space plan, and stuff’ contributed to a dynamic of how buildings ‘learn’ and adapt to change over time.23 As we extend this way of thinking to an urban scale in response to the ways in which technologies enable new patterns of urban space use, we now need to conceptualize ‘how cities learn’ rather than merely how discrete buildings learn. As Allen notes, our understanding of the urban scale as a wider field of operations suggests a way of planning (or non-planning) that would take into account the provisional allegiances of users, who move itinerantly from location to location over the course of a day to the various communities and environments of which they are members.24 The Value Of Networked Urban Spaces What Mitchell described as post sedentary working suggested to him that buildings will provide fewer specialized spaces, as users behave more like ‘cyborg foragers’ as they appropriate the spaces they need.25 Yet, our more recent experience of how nomadic users make choices of where they want to work, for example, suggests that the design of space and the particularities of different locations are by no means irrelevant. Users make very particular choices in relation to the specific spatial experiences that they desire, so that the act of choosing where to work amongst many different co-working spaces, for example, is more than merely the ‘appropriation’ of space. The ways in which information technology is ‘decomposing’ the conventional prescriptive programs for how spaces and buildings might be used, have not served to decrease the significance of the design or architecture of particular spaces. It does seem, however, that people are attracted to new kinds of special spaces and places that serve as what Mitchell called condensers of activity which maximize face-to-face interaction but which also organize and control access.26 Vibrant co-working places and very active hotel lobbies come to mind as examples. But these condensers of activity go beyond the limits of individual buildings to encompass urban neighborhoods and districts, often areas in which several different kinds of working and living cultures intersect and overlap to create highly attractive urban ecosystems. The question now becomes how should these urban ‘condensers of activity’ be programmed and designed? Information technology is changing how we program, design, and use such places which reinforce the role of Volume 42 The Hub Islington, London 72 Credit: Impact Hub (2012). Volume 42 the city as the ultimate network of networks of physical and virtual activity. Technology is doing more than merely enriching and augmenting the value of physical places; it is helping us to reimagine a future of urban living and working as a new kind of blended experience of everyday life. It suggests that we can plan cities to be more multifunctional and mixed use. Technology is enabling us to repurpose single-user under-occupied buildings into dense intensively used hubs of social connectivity and interaction. It is enabling us to repurpose our homes as workspaces for part of the day or the week whenever it suits us. It enables us to repurpose our office buildings to be community, cultural, or educational spaces for part of the day or the week. The separation of living and working spaces and many of the distinctions of building types are increasingly unnecessary. Technology is enabling us to not only intensify and densify the use of the office and other kinds of workspaces, but also suggests we can redesign the very categories of building types and urban places. 73 Programming The Networked Urban Landscape The urban scale within which technologically empowered users will in a sense self-program and selfdesign how they use space and the city suggests the need for new kinds of architectural programming, new roles for the user in the process of design, and new responsibilities for the architect and the designer. Duffy suggests that buildings can be used by a greater variety of functions and activities that are less homogeneous.27 As work and other living activities supported by networked technology spill out of monofunctional types of spaces, the spaces between buildings become part of the programmable area of the city. New ways of working and living enabled by networked technology create opportunities to mix up scales of units of space to support lively, diverse, and interconnected activities. The direction is toward a more permeable architecture that provides layers or degrees of accessibility. This is an urbanism that blurs the boundaries between the building and the city. It suggests programs for spaces that are amenable to change and adaptation by users in self-organized and open-ended strategies for design and use. Significant user research will be needed to understand how to program and design these highly performative kinds of spaces, settings, and places. Programming methods will need to be redesigned to involve the collaboration of more highly empowered users. Methods of design will need to be more closely connected to such methods of programming with active user participation. As Mitchell argued, programs and briefs for this kind of networked landscape urbanism will need to respond to the higher expectations of those using technology to discover and claim, in ways not yet imagined by Henri Lefebvre, their ‘rights to the city’.28 The methods of programming will be driven by understanding the affordances environments should provide to users who will increasingly be able to program in a ‘live’ way the spaces Credit: Neaj Jean (2008). Working outside, Bangkok tectural profession to systematically engage with the problems of briefing for the needs and desires of users, their technologies, and their changing relationships with a new kind of urban landscape. This article draws on a longer paper ‘Work and Workplaces in the Digital City’ by Andrew Laing, published by the Center for Urban Real Estate (CURE) at Columbia University, November 30, 2013. 1 2 3 4 5 F. Duffy, Work and the City (London, UK: Black Dog Press, 2008). For a useful exploration of ‘user’ in modern architecture, see A. Forty, Words and Buildings, a Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. (London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 2000); for a recent history of the office workplace, see N. Savil, Cubed A Secret History of the Workplace. (New York, NY: Doubleday, 2014). F. Duffy, Architectural Knowledge: the Idea of a Profession. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998). B. Waber, J. Magnolfi & G. Lindsay, (2014, October). ‘Workspaces that Move People’, Harvard Business Review, (October 2014), pp. 69-77. W.J. Mitchell, City of Bits, Space, Place and the Infobahn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); W.J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); F. Duffy, Work and the City (London, UK: Black Dog Press, 2008). Volume 42 they occupy.29 Programming and design will have to recognize and respond to users’ ‘do-it-yourself’ engagement with space, technology, and the city. Our argument is that the dissolution of the conventional ideas of the program by no means suggests that space or the design of space do not matter, or that somehow the problem of space has been in a sense virtualized. On the contrary, and perhaps paradoxically, the dissolution of the conventional functionalist approach to the programming of spaces enables us to reimagine the particular value of space, and of the particular contribution of the design of spaces, in an increasingly virtual world. Space and design matter! The spaces and places that empowered networked individuals and groups will choose to use (and increasingly will design for themselves) will not merely be neutral or undifferentiated, technologically enabled, ‘universal’ environments. Nevertheless, the increasing autonomy of how users access and control the spatial and temporal resources of the city, actively curating their own urban experiences, suggests that the professional responsibility of the architect and designer will need to be recalibrated. The architect and designer will need to open up the processes of design creation to higher levels of participation of the end user. The end user and the designer will need to work together in new ways to create dynamic urban condensers of activity. It suggests an investment in the knowledge of the archi- 74 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 Volume 42 29 75 W.J. Mitchell, City of Bits, Space, Place and the Infobahn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 8. Ibid. W.J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Idem, p.162. F. Duffy, Work and the City (London, UK: Black Dog Press, 2008), p. 46. Idem, p.16. W.J. Mitchell (1995), p. 57. S. Graham, From Dreams of Transcendence to the Remediation of Urban Life, in the Cybercities Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 3-23; K. Varnelis & A. Freidberg, Networked Publics. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). R. Botsman & R. Rogers, What’s Mine is Yours, The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2010). http://www.workspring.com/ http://westinwellbeing.starwoodpromos.com/work-well/ tangent-at-westin/ For the nomadic shift, see: (Harrison, 2004). For … Allen, 2011; Corner, 2006). W.J. Mitchell, City of Bits, Space, Place and the Infobahn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p.8. S. Allen, ‘Urbanisms in the Plural: The Information Thread’. In D. Cuff & R. Sherman (Eds.), Rethinking Architecture’s Engagement with the City (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), pp. 36-61. J. Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’. In C. Waldheim (Ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), pp. 23-33. Ibid., p.30. F. Duffy & A. Hanney, The Changing City (London, UK: Bulstrode, 1989). S. Brand, How Buildings Learn (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 13. S. Allen (2011), p. 30. W.J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 159. W.J. Mitchell, City of Bits, Space, Place and the Infobahn. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p.21. F. Duffy, Work and the City (London, UK: Black Dog Press, 2008). W.J. Mitchell, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 165. A. Fayard, A. & J. Weeks, ‘Who Moved My Cube?’ Harvard Business Review (July 2011). Volume 42 The Discipline and the Profession Jesse M. Keenan interviewed by Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette As the Research Director of CURE, Jesse Keenan leads many of the center’s projects, drawing on his diverse professional and academic background in law, sustainable development, and housing policy to shape a bold intellectual project for CURE’s research. Keenan talked with Volume’s Jeffrey Inaba and Benedict Clouette about the need for an 76 ethical foundation in the practice of real estate development, and the role of disciplinary knowledge in informing the decisions of professionals. Benedict Clouette What is it that interests you about the idea of real estate development as an academic discipline? Why frame it as a discipline autonomous from the practices of development in the profession? Jesse M Keenan I see real estate as having a dispropor- tionate influence on the decisions that are made concerning the design and construction of the built environment. And, in my own experience, I have observed the modes of communication through which developers have engaged design and urbanism, and I’ve seen that the decisions made based on this communication have resulted in a higher or lower quality of designs and/or spatial or environmental outcomes – generally lower quality outcomes. To me, this speaks to a very practical need to promote the professionalization of real estate, as the consequences of getting it wrong are significant. To this end, professionalization is a function of both private and public obligation. What distinguishes a profession from a trade is ethics, which has been historically grounded or rationalized as a public obligation by virtue of contract theory in exchange for the exclusive right of practice. As a more practical matter, a profession is self-regulated and perpetuated by ethics, and the only way that you can have an ethic is through the elaboration of a theoretical framework that connects the decisions, the language, and a higher order of intelligence to the external phenomena that drive the subjectivities that ultimately shape the built environment. BC So you’re suggesting that without a discipline, Volume 42 there is no profession? JMK I think you could argue that both the profession 77 and the discipline of real estate development are in the process of coming to fruition; but, to create a discipline on which a profession is based, you need not only a theory but also a historical narrative. All disciplines share the commonality of having both a theory and a history. Without those, you really can’t build an evolving professional ethic – or, a notion of value, and of course one of the mechanisms of differentiating real estate from other built environment disciplines is the notion of value. If, as a profession, we want to create a sensitivity to value or even to redefine values, history provides many examples. Kate Ascher’s piece in this issue of Volume looks at Samuel Ruggles [the 19th century developer responsible for New York’s Gramercy Park and Union Square, ed.] and John D. Rockefeller, [Jr., the financier who bankrolled New York’s Rockefeller Center, ed.], two historical figures that were very sensitive to the public realm, and saw that as a value-driver. Likewise, Catherine Ingraham’s piece advances the richness of theoretical foundations that have yet to be explored. How does one underwrite this expanded notion of value within the conventions of mortgage or financial underwriting, for instance? It’s a bit of a challenge, but it’s not a methodological impossibility. I think that to recalibrate these notions of value, and their hierarchy within the process of development, it requires a rigorous discipline with its own history and theory to inform the profession. Without a discipline, a profession is dependent on other allied disciplines, for example, urban planning or urban design, which are probably the most closely related cousins of real estate development, but have their own ideological and intellectual imports and biases. I think these other disciplines do not provide clarity with regard to the types of decisions, the modes of analysis, and the variability that exists in real estate development, which operates at the intersection of economy and design. Of course, there’s much to be learned from other disciplines – design, in particular – but I think that the expertise they provide is not quite consistent – particularly at scale – with the challenges that we face in real estate today. Jeffrey Inaba: Can you talk more about an ethics for real estate? What would that look like? JMK The origins of real estate development as an academic discipline go back to the early studies of land economy at the turn of the last century. Early in the evolution of the discipline, the diversity of real estate practice – from brokers, to land developers, to planners – led to substantial frictions, speculation, and even fraud in the market caused by indeterminate unregulated practices. It came at a time of tremendous growth in population, and therefore in demand for housing and real estate, and the need for internal regulation by virtue of a codification of ethics became very clear as a function of bringing stability to very unstable markets. There were two sides to the debate within the dominant professional body of the day – the National Association of Real Estate Boards. One faction, later to splinter off and become the Urban Land Institute (ULI), argued for a codification of ethics, as a practical necessity that would unite the real estate practices under a common profession. The values and ethics into real estate development. But, to play devil’s advocate, why should a developer listen to CURE? What advantage is there for developers to look outside the values that they’ve been using for their whole careers? JMK You might say that real estate serves a very simple function – housing people and commerce – and the modes of differentiation are only somewhat variable. However, this perspective is based on certain assumptions about environmental, economic, and social conditions that have been fairly static within the last several generations, at least in developed economies and mature cities. The complexity and concentration of the urban form now amplifies the impact of small changes in people and places. Consider climate change in the Netherlands (i.e., specifically not enough water), or the aging society in Japan, or countries shaped by violence, for example in Mexico. In each of these countries, these changes are not only driving the social construction of buildings, which then manifest themselves in material construction, but they’re shaping the very abstractions of supply and demand which will reverberate for generations. Of course, everyone could just build the same product. But, the work of CURE provides an opportunity to evaluate and test a range of alternatives that can not only mitigate the risks of the unknown but add value; and, by extension, we seek to translate these value-added innovations to differentiated real estate products and urban models that balance these present and future interests. Ironically, we tend to think more about the future than the urban planning discipline these days, which is often caught up in placating the interests of a very static perspective of ‘community’ in their roles as public advocates. Somewhere along the way, they forgot that planning should also serve the interests of people who are not yet born, or have migrated or immigrated to the jurisdiction for which they are planning. The world around real estate is changing at a rate that is far greater than the capacity of the industry to adapt to it. In my work on the topic of adaptation, I argue that adaptation is not just a theory or a framework for responding to climatic and environmental conditions, it’s a framework for changing environmental, social and economic conditions. In many cases, many of these stimuli are changing beyond our institutional and individual capacities to comprehend and respond to them. I point to a distinction between fast violence and slow violence. Our bodies and our cognition are evolutionarily biased toward responding to fast violence: a bus is headed right at you, your brain fills with adrenaline, you’re ready to respond, and you jump out of the way. That’s fast violence. But slow violence – the transitions of our economies, of our culture, and our environment – we are not well-suited to understand. And that’s amplified by the problem that, when we build real estate, we’re making a gamble on something that lasts between fifty and one hundred years and is based solely on existing conditions at the time of design and development. When those conditions on internal designs change – and sometimes radically so – then we’re setting ourselves up for a built environment that will not only serve our core functions of shelter but will also absorb huge amounts of capital which will otherwise be wasted. Advancing an academic perspective provides an opportunity to aggregate knowledge and empirical information in order to reposition that slow violence as something that we can respond to, that we can act on, that can be operationalized in a way that would never otherwise be possible in our dayto-day existence given our various commercial and personal biases. JI Isn’t what CURE does what a department should do? What distinguishes CURE’s work from what an academic department does? JMK In research, you take risks: very often, there’s an experimental aspect where it is easy to fail; or worse, you spend a career trapped in a world of paper without application. Most academic units focus on the empiricism of the here and now. But, they aren’t necessarily well-suited for taking intellectual risks. For CURE, which performs this hybrid function caught between applied research and scholarly inquiry, that ability to take risks is something that is perhaps both an advantage and a burden. BC In architecture, research can perform a kind of counter operation to the academy. Consider, for example, research into technologies of mass production in the early 20th century that was, in part, an attempt to resist the education that was being handed down by the Beaux-Arts educational system, and to question and displace that knowledge. And I wonder if CURE serves a similar function in relation to the academy. JMK CURE is not necessarily aligned exclusively with the interests of the real estate industry or under the conventions of a real estate academy: in equal proportions, its students and faculty are from architecture, planning, and real estate. In that sense, we’re resisting an organizational structure that tends to silo knowledge, silo skills, and silo students and faculty. When you’re siloed, you have a tendency to think, where does this new information fit within the existing literature, or where does this sit within existing knowledge? Or, worse, how do we position this knowledge to fit within the status quo? Yes, it is important to contextualize new information with the status quo and to submit to the critique of an academy; however, one has to temper these considerations with a certain path-dependency that can lead to a trajectory which is grounded in historical empiricism, which is an easy trap for the complacent. BC In your research on adaptability, you’re interested in how to create longer-term value that is independent of changing economic and political situations. But real estate development itself Volume 42 other faction, which would later become the National Association of Realtors, disagreed, citing the adversarial position of real estate professionals within the economy, and the fact that they benefit from asymmetrical information. Their argument was that, short of committing fraud, they didn’t have any higher duties other than the promotion of transactional real estate. Fair enough, but even still, all economic transactions require some measure of trust, for example, trusting that brokers are acting in your best interests and are not colluding with other brokers just to close the deal. If you look at the history of regulations and real estate law in the United States, there are tremendous problems with exactly that kind of corruptibility – we are still dealing with it in the mortgage servicing industry. That and other similar problems could very well have been mitigated by adopting a framework of ethics. More importantly, I suspect that we would have a much higher quality of built environment today had real estate developers developed a more sophisticated ethical construct which translated into the quality of the buildings that they produced. BC Part of CURE’s mission is to introduce new 78 Jesse Keenen on Bloomberg TV, March 18th, 2014 Volume 42 is so ‘path-dependent’ on politics and economics. What do you hope to produce that can sustain itself beyond the short horizon of those circumstances? For example, Aldo Rossi offers the case of a Roman amphitheater in Arles that was later adapted to workers’ housing. The building as a material fact outlasted not only the political and economic collapse of the Roman Empire, but also a wholesale technological regression – the loss of the knowledge of concrete construction, which made the adaptation of that building to new uses enormously advantageous. Thinking about that example, I wonder which buildings will survive the current political and economic situation, which seems unlikely to last in a recognizable form for another two hundred years or whatever the horizon for a long-life building today will be. If I, as an architect, can imagine that what I design could, like a Roman amphitheater, outlive my civilization, what do you see as the corollary within real estate research? What aspects of the knowledge produced in the field of real estate development will be applicable beyond the market economy, or is it the buildings themselves, as material facts with a certain durability irrespective of social and economic conditions, that will endure? 79 JMK My goal is not to derive a specific output, but rather to position a capacity. I think the most we can hope for is to build a more robust capacity of real estate development professionals and organizations to create sensitivities to their changing environment. At the end of the day, it’s about judgment calls, and judgment calls are inherently subjective. Judgment can be reinforced with an analytical capacity, an ethical or moral foundation, etc, but we’ll never be able to remove the necessity of judgment as a subjective exercise grounded in both the art and the science. We can only hope to inform that subjectivity through a more sophisticated notion of values and interests which are operationalized as a capacity to adapt. Even with all of the most sophisticated machine learning and adaptive building systems in the world, a building and an industry will still resolve itself to adapt by virtue of human judgment. JI Is the discipline of real estate like the discipline of economics, in that it has a quantitative driven side and a qualitative driven side? And if so, what do you see as the relationship between the amount of quantitative knowledge that’s available and the judgment that can be made in a given situation? JMK Real estate financial management, which is different from real estate development, has a strong quantitative bias. I think the use of quantitative data is certainly powerful for informing probabilities and managing risk. In many ways, real estate is a distillation of risk. It’s a highrisk endeavor, in that the process of designing, developing, and building real estate is often focused on the managing, shifting, and transferring of risk. In that regard, risk and the associated methodologies of risk management are biased toward a quantitative analysis and the utilization of large sets of data to derive some probability of particular outcomes, whether that is an expected value or standard deviation of an internal rate of return. The limitation of that analysis is its dependence on history – you can only build upon phenomena that have occurred to date. But in order to look into the future, to experiment and to speculate, I think that those histories, and the dependent empirical data, are of limited utility. Had people better understood the limitations of history on their underlying methodologies, the financial collapse led by the mortgage market would not have happened. But it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t qualitatively evaluate and interpret the quantitative information. Very often in real estate development, as in many fields, Volume 42 you’re making qualitative assumptions, determinations, and interpretations in relation to quantitative information and analysis. The absolute, statistical application of quantitative information is not very helpful without qualifications. Finally, the two sides are dependent on each other, and that’s very much the case in real estate development. But, I have my own bias toward qualitative research. I understand the power of quantitative methods and theories that rationalize quantitative information as a function of the scientific process; but, I’m a qualitative social scientist. That’s what real estate is – it’s a social scientific phenomenon, so qualitative methods are indispensable. However, I am also an artist and I have to constantly resolve and mediate the art and the science, as is consistent with the larger practice of real estate development. And that’s the challenge for ethics in real estate: what is the capacity for any profession in the built environment to establish ethics, if ethics are a wholly subjective and localized social phenomenon, and cannot be easily ratified through quantitative outcomes? If we develop ethics in the United States, are those going to be the same as the ethics in Brazil or China? Absolutely not. They may mutually speak to a neoliberal transactional economy, for better or worse, but they’re not necessarily going to reflect either the judgments of professionals, or the moral foundation by which a society orders itself. I think real estate and the property it is built upon is nothing more than a mirror to those orders and values. 80 Advertentie Colophon Volume 42 Contributors VOLUME Independent quarterly for architecture to go beyond itself Kate Ascher is Milstein Professor of Urban Development at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Editor-in-chief Arjen Oosterman Contributing editors Ole Bouman, Rem Koolhaas, Mark Wigley Feature editor Jeffrey Inaba VOLUME is a project by ARCHIS + AMO + C-Lab + ... ARCHIS Lilet Breddels, Jeroen Beekmans, Joop de Boer, Martynas Mankus, Anais Massot, Alex Retegan, Kai Vöckler – Archis advisers Ethel Baraona Pohl, Brendan Cormier, Thomas Daniell, Christian Ernsten, Edwin Gardner, Bart Goldhoorn, Rory Hyde, César Reyes Nájera, Vincent Schipper AMO Reinier de Graaf, James Westcott C-Lab Jeffrey Inaba, Benedict Clouette, Phillip Denny, Susan Surface – C-Lab advisers Barry Bergdoll, Gary Hattem, Jiang Jun, John S. Johnson, Lewis Lapham Materialized by Irma Boom and Sonja Haller Structuralism insert by Patrick Coppens Cedric Price insert by Jeremy Jansen VOLUME’s protagonists are ARCHIS, magazine for Architecture, City and Visual Culture and its predecessors since 1929. Archis – Publishers, Tools, Interventions – is an experimental think tank devoted to the process of real-time spatial and cultural reflexivity. www.archis.org AMO, a research and design studio that applies architectural thinking to disciplines beyond the borders of architecture and urbanism. AMO operates in tandem with its companion company the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. www.oma.eu C-Lab, The Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting is an experimental research unit devoted to the development of new forms of communication in architecture, set up as a semi-autonomous think and action tank at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation of Columbia University. c-lab.columbia.edu VOLUME is published by Stichting Archis, the Netherlands and printed by Die Keure, Belgium. Editorial office PO Box 14702, 1001 LE Amsterdam, The Netherlands T +31 (0)20 320 3926, F +31 (0)20 320 3927, E info@archis.org, W www.archis.org Subscriptions Bruil & Van de Staaij, Postbus 75, 7940 AB Meppel, The Netherlands, T +31 (0)522 261 303, F +31 (0)522 257 827, E volume@bruil.info, W www.bruil.info/volume Subscription rates 4 issues: €75 Netherlands, €91 World, $99 USA, Student subscription rates: €60 Netherlands, €73 World, Prices excl. VAT Cancellations policy Cancellation of subscription to be confirmed in writing one month before the end of the subscription period. Subscriptions not cancelled on time will be automatically extended for one year. Back issues Back issues of VOLUME and forerunner Archis (NL and E) are available through Bruil & van de Staaij Advertising pr@archis.org, For rates and details see: www.volumeproject.org/advertise/ C-Lab administrative coordination Margel Nusbaumer General distribution Idea Books, Nieuwe Herengracht 11, 1011 RK Amsterdam, The Netherlands, T +31 (0)20 622 6154, F +31 (0)20 620 9299, idea@ideabook.nl For North American Distribution Disticor Magazine Distribution Services, 695 Westney Road South, Suite 14 Ajax, Ontario, L1S 6M9, Canada, T +1 905-619-6565, F +1 905-619-2903, W www.disticor.com ISSN 1574-9401, ISBN 9789077966419 Vishaan Chakrabarti is Holliday Associate Professor of Real Estate Development and Director of the Center for Urban Real Estate, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Catherine Ingraham is a Fellow of the Center for Urban Real Estate and Professor of Architecture, Pratt Institute. Jesse M. Keenan is Research Director of the Center for Urban Real Estate and Adjunct Professor of Real Estate Development, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University and TU Delft, School of Architecture, Department of Real Estate and Housing. David A. King is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Andrew Laing is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Urban Real Estate, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University, a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University and Global Practice Leader with Strategy+, AECOM. James Sanders is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Urban Real Estate, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Julia Vitullo-Martin is a Fellow at the Center for Urban Real Estate, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. Disclaimer The editors of Volume have been careful to contact all copyright holders of the images used. If you claim ownership of any of the images presented here and have not been properly identified, please contact Volume and we will be happy to make a formal acknowledgement in a future issue. Corrections / Additions To our regret, two images were missing from Ruth Lang’s contribution to Volume 41. Our apologies to the author. The complete set of illustrations can be found here: www.volumeproject.org/category/ volume-41/