Broadway: 1000 Steps

ONGOING thru 2013

Twenty “hubs” dispersed along the length of Broadway will serve as sites for collaboration between MMStudio, research scientists and other experts, municipal policy makers, and local community groups. Installations that are small in scale but which aggregate to reveal the vast network of systems vital to a sustainable city, are designed to make sustainability tangible to citizens at street level and catalyze future projects by artists and environmental designers. The sense of incremental transformation—of many individual instances working together to create a powerful cumulative effect—is the overarching idea for the project and the basis of its title “1000 Steps”. The central message to be communicated – generated out of a year-long collaboration with a prestigious scientific and community advisory board – is that nature is everywhere and in action at all times, that the city is an urban ecosystem, that an innumerable number of small decisions over time have shaped the environment to be the one we inhabit today, and that our decisions (behavioral choices) impact the future of all of nature.

To ensure the quality of information being communicated, Mary Miss Studio has formed partnerships with senior personnel at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science, Center for Research on Environmental Decisions at the Earth Institute of Columbia University, The Institute for Sustainable Cities at CUNY, the Wallerstein Collaborative for Environmental Education at NYU, and with the writer Tony Hiss. The partners have met monthly to develop learning goals, shape the information gathering framework that informs the deployment of art markings, and curate the specific information that will be included at each hub. In order to secure municipal partnerships, permits, and permissions, there is an ongoing dialogue with the Department of Planning, Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Transportation, Department of Buildings, Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability.