Say you have two hours between classes on Thursday afternoons, an hour and a half to kill between your first job and your second job, or some time between your first evening plan and late-night engagement on a Friday evening. You don’t want to go back home, and don’t want to pay for a drink to sit in a coffee spot or a bar. Maybe, like today, it’s going to rain, so sitting in the park is out. What to do?

A list of museums you can visit for free, or pay-as-you-wish, can be found here. Or if you prefer calendar format, here.

A few that are not to be missed: the Studio Museum of Harlem, free every Sunday, the Museum of Chinese in New York, which is free every Thursday, The Jewish Museum, free every Saturday, and the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens, which is pay-as-you-wish every Friday.

Several of the city’s excellent museums are free or nearly free, always. The National Museum of the American Indian–New York, for example, is open every day but December 25 at no charge. And in case you ever forget, two of the largest and oldest of New York’s cultural institutions, the Met and the Museum of Natural History, are always worth a visit, and always pay-what-you-wish.

Images: American Museum of Natural History, Noguchi Museum 

New York City has been adapting, innovating, or neglecting its waste stream across four centuries of settlement and growth. Longtime cartographers of the city, globe, and environment Greenmaps have combined some of the history, and where we stand now, into one resource: a map for New Yorkers who want to consume and waste less. Which is handy, as research seems to show that you get a better return on different uses of money.

The pdf of the “Less is More” map for New Yorkers, which should be downloaded to see in rich full detail, is designed by fellow City Atlas contributor Aaron Reiss, with research help from Alex Purdy. Funding for the printed version provided by Con Edison. Among the highlights: our thrifty mayor has gone through three terms in office with only two pairs of shoes.

To find the printed map in local stores follow Less=More Green Map of NYC on Facebook.

A parallel tagged Google map with icons for waste and recycling resources is here.

There are about 1,700 parks, playgrounds, and recreation facilities across the five boroughs. Do you have a park among these that’s “yours?”

The sunshine is pouring in today, so now is a great time to enjoy the outdoors and plan a way to engage in, feel a part of, and give back to your neighborhood’s grassy spaces. We’ll be keeping you updated on free concerts and events in the parks as the summer comes, too.

Starting this coming weekend, Partnerships for Parks is collaborating with hundreds of neighborhood groups to organize and celebrate “It’s My Park Day” across the five boroughs.
Check this listing to find the date that you can join neighbors in cleanup and celebration.

For pre-celebration of It’s My Park Day, we hope you get to take your lunch outside this Monday afternoon. If you make it as far as your local park, we salute you.

This month, a once-promising and lauded electric car company, Fisker, has gone completely under in Detroit. Another electric car company, Tesla, reported profits for the first time in ten years. Consumer Reports has also tested Tesla’s roughly $95,000 Model S sedan and gave it the a nearly perfect review. Stocks for the company have soared, and more affordable models of the electric vehicle are slated for production — but not till at least 2017.

Is Tesla’s market victory cause to celebrate for those who mourned the death of the electric car? And, on a further-thinking scale, should an electric car’s projected success give environmentalists a breath of fresh air? Between Tesla’s successful model and Google’s autonomous car, the tech industry seems to be getting behind the continued use of private vehicles with their words and dollars. Their vision of the future involves cars that may do better in emissions. But they are still cars — heavy objects that do not transport people efficiently and require costly, wasteful infrastructure no matter what. And the concept of zero emissions — a promise of the electric car industry — may be a faulty one at best.

Projjal Dutta, Director of Sustainability Initiatives for the MTA, has serious doubts to share about the zero emissions claim. In a post on UBM’s Future Cities site, Dutta, an adviser for City Atlas, argues that the claim of a ‘zero-emissions’ car, whether from Tesla, or manufacturers like Nissan and India’s Mahindra, cannot be true now and will likely not be soon. Dutta argues that “electric cars are merely displacing emissions.” Further, Dutta warns, “For large parts of the auto-dependent world, emissions-free electric generation is not only not happening right now, it’s unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.” (Italics ours.)

Dutta points out that that electricity is often powered by coal, so that the while addition of a larger electric car market to the grid may reduce emissions in some parts of the planet, depending on the source of electricity by location, conversely “…in a part of the world with lots of coal-fired generation (sadly, much more of the world fits that latter description than the former) it could lead to more emissions and more emissions-related deaths.” In displacing our emissions and conflating this with the too-good-to-be-true figure of ‘zero,’ perhaps we are displacing our energies as well.

Another contributor to Future Cities recently offered a 3-step plan to electrify transit by 2030. The first two steps involve creating an electric vehicle infrastructure and building out incentives aimed at converting urban car owners to EV users. The last step is to eliminate single-user vehicle use as public transit converts to electric.

So why not move directly to step three? Creating more infrastructure, producing electric batteries, and combating the 225 million registered internal combustion cars in the U.S. with more cars may do little for the overall health of the planet, and will likely do nothing for the majority of Americans who currently cannot afford to benefit from the prestige and potential subsidies that electric vehicles may offer. The bottom line is that attention focused on cars — whether electric or not — is still a misplacement of energy, effort, and dollars. Support for cleaner, more energy-efficient public transportation (and actual forms of zero emission transport) will likely provide a clearer, cleaner, more sensible route toward the future.

Is the new Tesla sedan — the shining image at the top of this page — already a symbol of the past? To fully grasp the transportation and emissions challenge, take a look at Hans Rosling’s latest video for the Guardian, which shows the disproportion between the Tesla-shopping world and the rest.

In a video for the pop-up shop’s successful Indiegogo campaign, Goldwater explains that “This shop is the pilot program of a larger project aimed at breaking the cycle of use-and-discard consumer goods.”

Beginning June 1, you can take your household goods to Pop-Up Repair’s home at 4975 Broadway. There, a staff of theater professionals with years of on-the-job experience in making and fixing a wide range of objects by hand will be on hand to repair your lamp, chair, kitchen item, small electronics, bag — or whatever else you may bring in. According to the shop’s description, “The first few customers will be ‘pay what you will,’ and from then on we will charge a reasonable fee (this is part of the experiment, to learn whether and how much people will pay).”

One factor barring consumers from seeking repair on their bought goods is the matter of cost effectiveness — with manufacturers and retailers constructing products that quickly break or obsolesce, it is often less expensive to buy a new replacement than it is to fix what’s broken. The Repair Shop is an experiment aimed at disrupting this wasteful cycle through a positive model: affordable, thoughtful, community-based labor.

For more information on the Pop-Up Shop, follow them on Facebook and watch the video below to meet the repairers you’ll find at 4975 Broadway:

Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, is an inspirational figure in the worlds of tech and design. Ito was an early investor behind Flickr and Twitter, and he has played a role in many other tech startups and nonprofit initiatives. He dropped out of college twice, but his personal vision has attracted the attention of some of the best minds around the world.

A notable crowd was in attendance to hear Ito’s keynote launch of the four day forum IDEAS CITY, on May 1st. Ito is the kind of thinker people look to in times of rapid change, and Cooper Union’s historic Great Hall, built in the mid-19th century, provided a resonant setting for a talk about the future.

‘From BI to AI’

After sharing a joke with the audience, Joi neatly dove into his theme: the untapped capital of the internet. He pointed out that the world has evolved from ‘BI to AI’ — before and after internet. 

Life in BI was slow and centralized. Experts were the sources of authority, and the distribution of knowledge was from top to bottom. Prior to the internet, innovation was costly, inflexible, and time consuming. Corporations often worried about the substantial risks involved in their investments and developments. Without constant feedback, end products risked misalignment with market needs. In this environment, large corporations often felt reluctant to make new adjustments because they wanted returns on their initial investments, instead of providing optimal products, or services.

In AI, life is fast-paced, information is complex, and knowledge is disseminated from the bottom up. In Joichi’s own words, the theme of AI is “anarchic.” Rapid connectivity empowers people to share, organize, and act quickly to the degree that no single entity (governments, corporations, or individuals) can fully control the accesses to knowledge and information. In fact, open-source, or open-content formats have forced businesses to adapt bottom-up designs and provide competitive pricing. Since the capacity of information technology doubles roughly every two years (according to Moore’s law), the cost of innovation has gone down drastically. 

New World, New Attitude & New Approach

Open and low-cost innovation equals opportunities. Joichi encourages individuals to take risks and to become entrepreneurs. When I asked if that includes dropping out before finishing a degree, he clarified that he didn’t encourage students to drop out of college — but to embrace risk-taking afterwards.

However, he repeatedly emphasized the difference between theory and practice. AI, our turbulent era, is inherently fast paced and unpredictable. One cannot afford to theorize their ideas and hope for the market to follow. Entrepreneurs need to face reality by directly testing their products and services. Fail, learn, and then adjust accordingly.

“Agility” and “resilience” are critical traits. Google did not have a business plan at the early stages of the company’s development because it did not know where the business model for search was, until the service evolved. YouTube, which originally integrated a dating site with a self-made video platform in 2005, failed miserably at its early launches. The founders cried for a week, made quick adjustments of the ideas and became successful. Entrepreneurs often cannot pick the winning idea at the very first try, and they simply need to stay flexible and keep trying.

Joichi also touched on the connection between needs and services. In the business world, products and services need to address creativity and locality. He gave an example about Detroit; local residents do not welcome corporations, who romanticize the region, making big changes without engaging the communities. Applying the same concept to governance, a group of concerned individuals, who did not have any disaster experience prior to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, did better jobs than the Japanese government. They achieved success by driving a car around to collect radiation data and provide constructive assistance to the victims. 

Future Opportunity

3D printing is the next big thing. 3D printing encourages customization and creative expression; it will manifest the trend of “self-learning” in the information age. With 3D printing, hardware startups can act similarly to Internet startups; the ability to fabricate designs on site will permit low production and innovation costs while allowing a high level of creative customization.

For Ito, the bottom line of the future is: Think big, write your own rules, design your own things and print your own stuff.

9 Principles:

Let’s summarize Joichi’s wisdom with his 9 principles:

Disobedience over compliance: Learn the system and find ways to innovate beyond it.

Emerge over authority: Do not let the authority or norms to limit your potential and creativity.

Practice over theory: Build first, theory later; build prototypes first, draft business plans later.

Resilience over strength: Test and fail quickly to understand the market, then make new adjustments accordingly.

Risk over safety: Do not let over-protection take away your learning opportunities.

Pull over push: Start your project first, and then pull resources together while you need; do not plan for everything at the beginning.

Compass over map: Be creative; draw your own maps.

Embrace serendipity: Embrace unexpected changes and events; read more about the 3M’s Post-It Notes story.

Pattern recognition: Keep your vision and thinking open and flexible; laser focus may kill innovation at the development stages.

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Ito provided a jolt of enthusiasm to the launch of the four day IDEAS CITY event; subsequent panels (as covered in City Atlas, including panels on Waste, Play, and Youth) each detailed the challenges the future brings. One hopes the ingenuity of the AI world, so brightly described by Joi Ito, can be a model for solutions across all aspects of the urban future: that takes determination too, as described by the writer Bruce Sterling in a recent talk in Berlin. Sterling’s very hard question begins at about 6:20.

]]> http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/lifestyle/joi-itos-principles-success-time-change/feed/ 0 http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/lifestyle/ideas-city-waste-untapped-capital/ http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/lifestyle/ideas-city-waste-untapped-capital/#comments Tue, 14 May 2013 16:15:36 +0000 Aaron Reiss http://newyork.thecityatlas.org/?p=24539

“We produce waste. Perhaps even more importantly, we define what is waste and what is not, and we adopt practices for managing (or pushing out of sight) what we have defined. What if one of our practices, recycling, is actually damaging to the overall environmental project we should be pursuing? What if everything we now define as waste was redefined as Untapped Capital, and the concept of waste was banished from our vocabulary?” – from IDEAS CITY, a four day explo­ration of the future of cities, held in Lower Man­hat­tan from May 1 – 4, 2013, orga­nized by the New Museum.

Speaking to the real significance of the issue, IDEAS CITY‘s panel on ‘Waste’ offered more warnings and frustration than it did solutions to our problems. Moderated by Jonathan Rose (of Jonathan Rose Companies LLC), the panel brought together scholars, architects, and artists whose work has focused on waste.

The most interesting moments concerned waste in NYC specifically. Two New York waste scholars, Max Liboiron and Samantha MacBride, offered somber reflections on our city’s efforts to tackle our flawed garbage and recycling systems. Samantha MacBride (Author of Recycling Reconsidered) cites, for example, Mayor Bloomberg’s much lauded push to open recycling to all rigid plastics. The SIMS Recycling facility that actually handles the sorting of NYC’s recycling in New Jersey will still have to find a major market for these plastics. If they don’t, the rigid plastics will just end up back in a landfill, or shipped abroad in mixed bales to be sorted by cheaper labor.

In general, recycling is a field often glossed over with heartening-but-simplified statistics and back-patting, and MacBride specifically cautioned against falling victim to “pseudo-solutions” and tempting statistics. Liboiron (activist, trash artist, and postdoctoral researcher at NYU) similarly referred to recycling as “an industrial process, not an environmental good.” Recycling in NYC is a commodities operation wherein we only sort out and recycle materials for which there is a large secondary market. While it’s certainly better than a land fill, our recycling facilities ultimately are still consumptive industries.

Rose began the panel by warning of the growing “middle class”– forecasting a doubling in the world’s middle class population between 2007 and 2025. This is an increase which he fears may be accompanied by a 10-fold increase in consumption. Though the growth of populations in countries like India and China will put new magnitudes of stress on our garbage and recycling systems, the panel ultimately pointed to the nature of our production rather than our consumption as the place to make a real difference. Liboiron believes that meaningful solutions to our societies waste problems will not be about intervention in consumer choice, which are largely unavoidable, but interventions much higher up on the chain–interventions that challenge a purposefully designed “Throwaway Society” and the structures that keep it functioning.

The panel included:


Mai Iskander: a producer, director, and cinematographer. Her directorial debut, Garbage Dreams, follows a trash-collecting community in Egypt.


Lydia Kallipoliti: a practicing architect, engineer, and theorist, currently teaching at the Cooper Union and at Columbia University in New York.


Max Liboiron: an activist, trash artist, and postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.


Samantha MacBride: Assistant Professor of Public Affairs at Baruch College – her most recent book is entitled Recycling Reconsidered.

Jonathan F.P. Rose: founder of real estate development, planning, consulting, and investment firm Jonathan Rose Companies LLC

The recorded talk at IDEAS CITY can be seen on this page.

Image: The New Museum

Citi bike stations will be filled by 6,000 bikes over the coming weeks in time for a May 27 launch for members, and followed by a June 2nd grand opening for short term users. This first phase will put 333 stations into operation across Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Members that sign up before May 17 will still get their keys by the May 27 members’ launch.

Last weekend, cycling enthusiasts got a chance to hop on the uncomplicated Citi Bikes at the NYC Bike Expo. Bikes were available to ride in a cordoned off parking lot, and proved easy to handle with their heavier weight and wide handle bars. Built in lights and internal drum breaks protected from the elements are a welcomed safety feature.

These inaugural weeks will allow Citi Bike, operated by the Alta Bike Share company, to work out any kinks and figure out if their user predictions were correct. Bikes may need to be trucked around over night to renew the distribution, or perhaps Citi Bike will incentivize riders to take bikes back to preferred and less popular destinations or on any uphill or otherwise difficult routes like the wildly successful Paris bike share does with reduced fares.

More info on the Citi Bike share here.

Photo: Citi Bike share

“As world-renowned American psychologist Charles Schaefer says, ‘we are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.’ The city itself has long been conceptualized as a ‘playground,’ and play is an inescapable part of our current cities, which are a hybrid of physical and electronic spaces. How can play and gaming assist us in reimagining and co-creating urban environments, foster deeper engagement, propel education, and provide solutions to urban problems?” – from IDEAS CITY, a four day explo­ration of the future of cities, held in Lower Man­hat­tan from May 1 – 4, 2013, orga­nized by the New Museum.

What does “Play” have to do with Untapped Capital? According to a diverse and dynamic set of panelists at IDEAS CITY, a whole lot.

Designers, researchers and creators Kemi Ilesanmi, Charles Renfro, Eric Zimmerman, and Constance Steinkuehler, joined by moderator Yancey Strickler, come from pretty distinct backgrounds. Kemi runs the Laundromat Project, which transforms community laundromats into havens of artistic expression led by neighborhood artists; Charles was one of the architects who designed the High Line; Eric is a game designer and professor of game design at NYU; Constance is a games and education researcher at the University of Wisconsin; and Yancey is one of the co-founders of Kickstarter.

They’ve each spent significant amounts of time thinking about play and what it allows us to do.

Through their individual speeches and their complementary visions, they made a hugely compelling case for the importance of play. Eric proposed that we think of play with reference to the free play of a steering wheel. It is the movement of the steering wheel before it affects the rest of the system; what exists because and despite of the systems that are meant to determine its behavior. As we rearrange the boundaries of these systems in productive conflict, we make meaning out of our actions, seeing them through different lenses.

Charles suggested that the city is one such system, and that at its best it encourages the play of exploration and the re-making of meaning. In designing the High Line, his team sought to create a space that “rescripts the city by de-scripting it,” “provoking behaviors without knowing what exactly it provokes.” The space invites a certain set of behaviors, but more than that it invites us to re-visit and re-view our engagement with the space itself and with the city that surrounds it.

Kemi picked up this notion of the role of play in re-envisioning our cities. She spoke of the work they do in the Laundromat Project, which consists largely of transforming underused spaces like community laundromats into playgrounds of artistic expression. In their work, they focus on the importance of low-stake engagement with alternative possibilities. They create spaces within which neighbors can play with what could be. They do this because they believe play unlocks human potential, that most underutilized of resources.

And this is exactly what Constance researches. She focuses on how playing can help young people learn more effectively. In her research, she has shown that learners who read below grade-level in school reading tasks almost always perform at least two grade-levels better than expected when these reading tasks are in the context of a game. For her, this has everything to do with play. Part of how play unlocks potential is through voluntary engagement. No one plays because they have to. We play because we want to, and when we want to do something, we excel at it. This, Constance said, is why play is so important.

If we bring it all together, we can see that play might indeed have something important to say about untapped capital. It is how we unlock some of our human potential and begin to explore the alternative possibilities embedded in our cities. It is how we re-envision where we are and where we could be, both individually and collectively. This vision, in turn, is crucial to the process of co-creating a future that works for everyone.

Image: The Laundromat Project at the IDEAS CITY Festival

“’Youth,’ according to Oscar Wilde, ‘is wasted on the young.’ While this old adage remains today, it is this panel’s contention that, with proper nurture, youth has the potential to be a powerful force. Youth is, after all, a vast global neighborhood replete with its own government, social networks, and modes of learning. Youth’s problems emerge from the unstoppable shadow of the world it enters. Youth as Untapped Capital is the subject of this panel, where mentors and innovators discuss the incredible capacity of today’s youth as innovators for change.” — from IDEAS CITY, a four day exploration of the future of cities, held in Lower Manhattan from May 1 – 4, 2013, organized by the New Museum.

CITY ATLAS was glad to participate in the IDEAS CITY StreetFest this year with our Share Your City tattoo project. We also took the opportunity to attend several of the conference panels held at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, which we will cover in these pages, beginning today with the IDEAS CITY panel on youth at a time of rapid transformation.

Dennis Scholl of the Knight Foundation moderated the panel, which explored how organizations can access the energy and capabilities of young people in cities everywhere. Four panelists were invited to present their work: Naomi Hirabayashi of DoSomething.org, visual artist Barry McGee, visual artist Carlos Motta, and Ellin O’Leary of Youth Radio.

DoSomething.org is a platform that allows young people to participate in social activism without needing “money, a car, or an adult”.  There are pre-defined campaigns with action items that people can participate in, or people can create their own. Naomi talked about the great success of their programs in mobilizing youth to act on diverse issues, from homelessness to texting while driving. She showed how DoSomething.org taps into the unique and advantageous position young people have over an adult authority figure when educating other young people.

Barry McGee

Barry McGee’s interests are in “youthful activities and things that are slightly agitating”, mainly in the form of street art. He sees graffiti as a venue for self-expression in public spaces, contrasting it with large print advertisements: “A tag isn’t selling anything but yourself…[just] your beautiful name.” He also talked about how kids in San Francisco are subverting authority by tagging using the free anti-graffiti paint intended for painting over graffiti. McGee showed us how youth are persistent in making their mark “in the landscape of things”.

Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta’s presentation focused on his documentation of queer youth activism, in particular, activism that lies outside of mainstream politics. The national focus on gay rights mainly involves the institutions of marriage, military, and the prison industrial complex. Motta is interested in radical activism that works outside of this space. In his research, Motta has interviewed Queerocracy, a group that has worked on AIDS funding and criminalization based on HIV status, and Felipe Baeza, an undocumented U.S. resident and queer activist, who focuses on the rights of undocumented residents, especially their right to an education.

Ellin O’Leary spoke about her organization, Youth Radio, which gives low-income youth the resources to produce radio shows, videos, music, and other forms of digital media. This allows young people to share their experiences with a wider audience, via a channel they have complete control over. She also talked about the integration of Youth Radio into the Oakland community.  Young participants at the organization helped transform the exterior of the building into a memorial to Oscar Grant. They also helped start Art Murmur, a night street festival centered on the arts. Allowing the youth to start their own initiatives at the organization has helped the program to be accepted by the community.

Dennis Scholl started off the panel discussion by asking how we can get youth ‘onto the board.’ At this statement, a man jumped up from the audience and launched into a spoken word performance about the importance of education and the negative impact that will be caused by budget cuts for many school systems.  He also remarked on the fact that many important life lessons are missing from the school curriculum; for example, money and physical appearance aren’t everything. The panelists looked on, surprised and interested. At the conclusion of the performance, Dennis revealed that we had experienced a “Random Act of Culture number 1,245”. The performer was Jamarr Hall, a member of the Philly Youth Poetry Movement, and Dennis had invited him to the panel.

During the subsequent Q&A, the speakers touched on the themes of empowering youth, self-organizing, and the digital revolution. Speakers commented on the importance of giving youth choices and options as a way to empower them. Carlos mentioned youth activists in South Korea, who were able to self-organize and find safe places to meet. The speakers also discussed the digital revolution and the benefits and challenges that come with any change. Social media and SMS gives youth a way to self-organize and communicate quickly but at the same time, there are some groups that are marginalized on these platforms.

The audience speaks back.

The first audience member that spoke gave a critique rather than a question. He challenged the entire premise of the panel, remarking that youth did not want to be on “the board” with the panelists, and they were more interested in making their own board. He told the panel that instead of trying to solve society’s problems, “you need to focus on the obstacles you present…We’re worried about you. We don’t trust you.” He also pointed out that there were very few young people at the panel.

The panelists did not reply.

More questions followed from the audience, from educators and adults who work with young, low-income people, about how to allow kids to be freer and unrestricted and how to get low-income students interested in participating in community service.

But none of the ensuing discussion was as interesting as the challenge from that first audience member. The interaction left me thinking, what was the purpose of a panel about youth put on by adults for adults? Are people co-opting the talents and enthusiasm of young people for their own purposes or empowering them? Teens today face a world undergoing rapid change, and young people’s opinions on critical issues don’t yet match up with the scale of the issues themselves. Every step that helps young people engage more fully cannot be valued highly enough, and maybe they should be making their own board.