 But we're going to start off with one particular article. We've been discussing the kind of very difficult ways in which the word public is used, misused, mistaken, overused, assumed to be something. It's kind of a very basic piece of our urban design vocabulary, public space. And it's politically vital and socially vital that we understand what's involved with the term public. I look at it. This semester, we started off by looking at pedestrian spaces specifically. So there could be a little bit of a focus. That's why it's called pedestrian rhetorics, which is that many spaces that are pedestrian only tend to be the ones that we, as urban designers, focus on, which is not to say they don't want to look at streets where there are cars, but in fact, one of the responses to changes in the desires and aspirations for public space has been to actually place limits on transportation, especially the cars with respect to open spaces in the city. So we've been looking at all sorts of projects. We've been looking at various histories. And one of the terms that has come up is this idea of the commons. Another word that kind of is emerging as a kind of counterpoint, let's say, if we take the public space debate and pair it with the usual private space, and you have public or private or semi-public and semi-private, sometimes those distinctions, we assume things, historical trajectories or particular audiences. And in some ways, we forget that the history of public space is also a history of exclusion, different forms of participation, different forms of technology or lack of technology. That around the world, the term public space is actually highly differentiated and highly fronked. And so last week and then this week, we're looking at this other term, commons, and seeing if it helps us refine some of our categories, refine some of the ways we think. And for the students' analyses projects to think about how the word commons might help us think differently about some of the work. And I think it's not always going to be distinctly something that we could look at, the commons or the verb commoning. But it's just a useful kind of parallel lens. So we read an article which I'm happy to share with all the guests. I can send PDFs to you afterwards. And it's called Reclaiming the Commons. So there's a long history to the term commons as well. And it's a historical role in changing the nature of ownership and questioning how tenancy and stewardship work with respect to shared spaces. So I'd like to start our class discussion with having us kind of go backwards in the articles to start with the, there are three examples. And we'll start with the last one. The first example in the paper is time square, which is, you know, that's the kind of ground zero of all sorts of tensions and fun about public space. But we're going to end with that today. In between, the second one is a place based in Queens, Jackson Heights, where some students may actually be more familiar with. And then we're going to start with actually the most digital version of all this, which is actually an online site called 596 Acres. And so let me see if I can't master the screen business. OK, I want to change screen change. OK, so I'm going to start just with this simple image. And for those of you joining us, 596 Acres. Well, wait a second. Why don't I get a student to explain it? What a great idea. Can somebody help me out here and give us an introduction to 596 Acres? Well, I'll get it started. Right. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Bless you. So it's an initiative started by, I think, two people. So they just mapped all the open public spaces or like open spaces in Brooklyn. And it counted to 596 Acres. And they started with this tag line that states that there's land. And you could use it if you wanted. So I think something of that sort where, yeah. So it's just an initiative where you could just get the land and you could do whatever. I mean, it's not like you could do whatever you want, but you could facilitate a conversation. OK, let's see if I can't. Oops, lost that. OK. In a little more detail, what 596 Acres was started by someone who was an attorney, Paula Segal. And she started in Brooklyn. We're looking not just at open spaces, but open spaces that didn't actually have access. So open spaces that were either community gardens or more likely fenced off lots, which is a typical condition in many underserved communities, and recognizing that those lots were owned by someone, and whether it be the city itself or by private land owners. And so the living lots was a way to help people access and provide information about the location of these empty lots. And so here's block number 624, several lots owned by the city of New York, but it's actually underutilized, or worse, in this case, it's become a playground, but it's actually not an official New York City playground. It's a kind of a mesh between the city and a private user. And so 596 Acres is trying to create a database that people could contribute to and use in order to take action about it, in order to say, hey, let's turn this into something. And so in some cases, what you'll see is let's find a community garden. So here's a city-owned lot. That is just kind of a city-owned lot that actually has it's technically owned by one city agency, but is more or less empty. And so 596 Acres sought to place itself as an intermediary for people to be able to change the use of these things. I'm looking for, here's another one, where here's an instance where it's owned by a church, and it's become a community garden. And so this is one of those kinds of examples that the 596 people were really seeking, which is how communities are taking the initiative to turn lots into useful spaces for their communities. So can someone kind of take off on that and put this into the context of commoning, or what is the process that we're talking about here with respect to action in public spaces? When we were reading about this, when we were reading this article for today, one of the conclusions was this idea of identifying opportunities as a way to showing or advancing hope. So I guess this is a great example of how to see opportunities in places that are not so empty, or are usually related to bad things like empty lots, or people who can congregate and assault someone. Instead of doing that, these people are trying to give it a more positive outcome by giving the knowledge and the power to other people. It's just a seed, and then other people take over. Yes. I'm building on that. Not just the tool, not just the place, but the tools as well, because the online map and the fact that you can give them data makes it more playful and more engaging for people. Because you can supplement whatever you see if you are working in the city with the information you find online, or the opposite. You can find it online, and then you're compelled to go there and see how it looks like. You can find them in your own neighborhood. Yes, and also the fact that they started also a more not so digital platform, like guerrilla tactic on the fences of these places, posting as if it was digital, if it was a news feed of the lot. But on the fences, it makes the project more accessible to people that don't have access to digital tools. So what kind of Larry is referring to is that one of the tactics used by 596 was to encourage people to, if a place was not accessible, to put up a fence, put on the fence, put up signs that say, you could be using this lot. See if I have one of those. I mean, their goal is to encourage people to recognize their power merely by sharing information, by organizing around, let me just get back to a different image, sorry, the original image. So the idea was that this group would publicize, even by putting on fences that were not accessible to them, they publicized the idea that this could be used land, this could be useful to a community. And so they started in Brooklyn, and then they moved to, they did some work on the Lower East Side of New York, and then eventually, I think that right now, they're not active, but their archives are still available, they lasted about five or six years, which is a question that we should all be thinking about is we talk about organization and urban intervention. One of the problems that we can see in today's examples, but we've seen also muster is the problem or the question of what is temporary, and is temporary useful? Is it a mixed blessing? Is it necessary? The things that are temporary, put them in a different category, let's say, but maybe that category is also quite useful. That temporary changes, the article makes some argument for, which is that small scale and temporary are actually a part of a larger trajectory of change. Is some of a question? Yeah. Sorry. Just to go to the other side of the spectrum. At what point this becomes a tool to create critical mass in order to, not momentarily, but to effectively change ownership of a specific private law? I think that would be ideal in some ways, but ownership has its own problems as well, comes with responsibilities. So in some cases, there's two kinds of owners, I guess you'd say. One is that if the city owns the land, so this is not just New York City, but in many cities around the world, much of the land, open land or built on land is publicly owned. And so that's one set of constraints, but also opportunities because neighborhood groups often don't have the capacity. We'll come to that question in the Queen's example. And then if it's a privately owned lot, that's a whole different set of questions, which means that on the one hand, the owner might say, you want to buy it, make me an offer. But that's probably unlikely because neighborhood groups don't have that kind of money. So sometimes, I've mentioned an organization that I work with called the Center for Urban Pedagogy. And one of the projects, we had some high school students where we, a typical thing we do is we give them cameras, video cameras, or now they just use their iPhones, but we give them cameras because not all have it, and go out and start photographing empty lots and then find out who owns the lot. Do some research about the institutional and bureaucratic and market mechanisms that led to a particular lot being empty. And typically, the students are amazed when they realize that there's any piece of land is deeply embedded in all sorts of regulations and ownership patterns and public regulations and dummy corporations and it's a really good exercise, which is not quite the mission of 596, but it's a related mission, which is that every inch of land is subject to regulation and rule and control. And if you can insert a wedge into that and say, hey, look, there's other possibilities, then that is a kind of something that this article, the term they use is called disruption. So perhaps someone could help me out with that word disruption in this context. It's a paradigm shift. It sort of throws out these little, I guess, micro societal dynamics within that neighborhood by being a change and bringing in different players, potentially people from outside of the neighborhood. It changes, I guess, a system within a bigger system, possibly. Yes, yes. The disruption is an interesting word. And this article makes a big point of using that word. And it's funny because much of the terms about the new economy, the kind of techno digital economy is also about disruption, that a startup company will disrupt an economic model and disruption being a good thing, which is funny to begin with. So in this, it's the same language, which is the disruption of what they call stable systems. And so that's a really fascinating concept because we think of stable systems as a positive thing. And in many ways, stable systems are needed for society to function. But it also hints that sometimes stability also means inertia and means lack of action. And that disruption becomes a way of changing a system through destabilizing it in some way, which turns out to create new opportunities, new changes, new audiences, new ways of participating. So it's a really, I was kind of taken aback because I think of disruption and that kind of gig economy startup language. But actually, this is a kind of disruption as a community goal, which is to get involved with institutions and change them or change the way they work at a very local level. I mean, they're not overthrowing institutions. They're changing them and for what they hope will be the better. I think that's a really useful concept from this article because there's a couple of points where it says, we want to disrupt the resilient system. So that's almost backwards from the way we often think about creating resilience. But the authors let us know that sometimes resilience can be a form of inertia, as I mentioned, that prevents change. So there's some good dynamic, a kind of language problem there about what words we use and how we think of them. But in this case, there's a good shift to understanding, let's say, good resilience, if I may use that expression, requires periodic disruption in order to show that it is actually a result. And it's a large question, I think, that comes from this work. So I'm going to go ahead. In that note, disruption doesn't mean one thing where you're talking about using publicly owned land and another when you're talking about private property. It's different because the actors who would be involved, the participants in any discussion of public, privately owned land would be very different. In a public land example, you would be talking to the city agencies. You would be kind of leveraging publicness, the official publicness of the government or profits to put in place different ways of thinking about a place in the private sector disruption that they're kind of talking about might entail. One very important way historically is that in the 1970s in the United States, community organizations started asking banks to change their loan patterns to put more money into the communities where their branches sift. So there was a history where banks would exist in a neighborhood, but those banks were not investing in that neighborhood. So they were extractive. They were taking money out of a neighborhood, and those neighborhoods were usually poor, and they were stressed and under terrible conditions. And so in the mid-70s, there was Community Redevelopment Act passed that said that if you want to have a branch on that street corner, that you need to lend in that neighborhood. So that's the private sector getting being tasked with contributing to a community. And the CRA, Community Redevelopment Act, is still enforced. It's still highly debated, and in fact, I don't mind saying it's under threat pretty much every election cycle, especially now at the current administration, where the idea of community lending is a way of regulating the private economy, because lending is the core of how private property works. So that's a bit of the difference between public and private, but there are both ways in which disruption is basically saying we need to take the systems that are in place. And this is kind of a policy question, but it leads to urban initiatives. How to change the way that these institutions or private institutions work so that land or community assets can be changed and reconfigured and given over to the use of neighborhoods? Yeah, I think it was an original point of view of putting it in the way of residences, of diminishing the resilience of the already established systems and institutions, because, yeah, they are resilient. They succeeded. Yeah, it could be that we need to, since we use the word resilient from the opposite point of view very often, that resilience is an important thing in ecology and in infrastructures and such things. Basically, we could substitute the word stubbornness and say they're trying to disrupt stubbornness, which actually makes it easier since we don't mix our resilience meaning. But it is a good reminder that resilience doesn't always mean flexibility. It could also be resistant to change. That's a great point, yes. David, I've got a doubt. So good or bad, just coming to the public-private conversation, is it OK to intervene in a private lot because it's already owned by somebody else? No. Thank you, Nino, for speaking free market to us. There's not a good or bad. It's kind of like, well, you could say that any form of property is always part of a network of ownership institutions and patterns. And the state protects that private property. The state in the US anyway, private property is kind of sacred, if you will. And that is something we see at play to this very minute. That private property is something that is untouchable in a way. That's not actually how things work because private property is taxed. Private property is zoned. Private property has health requirements. Private property has height and pollution requirements. Doesn't matter if it's public or private. There's always a form of regulation that couches property in one form or another. So what the resistance that you raise is like, well, can we intervene in private property? That's a general way of putting it. But I would say private property is already always in play in the kind of an overlap with the public sector. And since private property is also part of a consent as to, OK, people agree that private property is a good thing and that we need it, that doesn't mean it can't be challenged. Your use of this property is detrimental to my community. OK, so what? Get lost. But the community can say, well, we know that you have a tax deduction that you are taking or that the bank that is lending you money won't lend me money. So you can start to question even how a system of capital, which works fine much of the time, also needs to be pushed. And it's essentially a kind of political question. If you want to insert a different value into the use of property, then give it a shot. And then that's what 596 is saying is, all right, this land could be used better. And it turns out that this land is actually just in tax arrears, which is not unusual in a place like New York City. This owner hasn't paid taxes in 20 years. But the city can't be bothered to go after them because it's too much work and they don't have the budget for it. But if this community starts getting some publicity, then the Congressperson or the Councilperson would say, hey, we should take possession of this private property because it's in tax arrears. So even private property, though it is considered a kind of, it is an owned entity, it doesn't mean it's not part of a political system where challenges can come from anywhere. That's what zoning is. I mean, and the fact in the United States, the origin of zoning was challenged at the very first as an overreach into private property. And the Supreme Court essentially said, well, there's something for the public health and general welfare that should allow zoning. Private property is not outside of the social system. And that's what zoning has been about. That's what community politics is often about is challenging zoning and challenging land use to more benefit the general welfare in the large republic. So no, we're not overthrowing the property system, but that doesn't mean we can't push and pull on the property system because we live in a political condition where that's fair. And it changes and it goes back and forth. Let's move on to this second example in the reading, the 78th Street Police Street. David, one more question about the other one. Is there a way in, I don't know if the mechanism exists in the United States, but if this property is owned by the city or by a person who's not using it and it's been abandoned for some time, other people come and claim it, is there a way that they get ownership through use over time or that never happens? That pretty much never happens because of good lawyers. So there's no public mechanism for that. I'm asking because in the United States there is, like if you have a property and other people come and live in it, for example, I think for over a period of 10 years, if you haven't been able to kick them out, it's theirs. It's not yours anymore. There have been, I'm sorry, there are certain laws and I'm a little bit out of my depth here, but there is something called common use. I think that's what it's called. Interesting that the word common. Where that if you don't use a property for X amount of time, then it can be challenged. And that has happened historically, but it tends to not get very far in the courts. There's a famous case in Rockefeller Center. If you walk around Rockefeller Center today on the sidewalks, you'll see a kind of bronze insert into the sidewalk that says property line. And I think there's a placard, there used to be a placard that said you have the right to use this land, but it is still the property of, which is a response to challenges that said they built their building where open space on the sidewalk was in the private, within the lot. And there was some discussion about could that be claimed. And so I think that that kind of stuff doesn't get very far in a place like New York City. I don't know how that works in other regions of the US. And certainly I have heard of those instances in other countries that abandonment essentially can lead to the removal of ownership. Yes. Someone is, OK, I will answer those questions. Sorry, go ahead. No, just extending on that, at least in India, what they do is, in a lot of cases, especially the real estate market, they don't construct anything, they just leave the land abandoned, they just wait for the property value to go up. So is that the motive here too, because I'm not aware of the real estate, especially in New York? Yes. Someone asked a similar question about squatters rights. There are no squatters rights in the United States. Some countries do have them. But if you occupy a place for some time, then, yes, that is not the case in the US. There are all sorts of challenges, like I say. But in the US, it's very rare, because property is considered a kind of very, someone is asking about this adverse possession, which is another form of squatters rights. It's a very important political tool in other countries, especially, as Antonio was saying, in South America. And I think there's some. In the 1970s, in the US and in European cities, squatters rights were tested quite a bit. And there's actually some good movies about the lives of squatters in one of the British cities. And it continues to be important. In Berlin in the 1980s and 90s, there were squatters who were able to take possession of buildings and were given ownership, although at some point, they also actually reversed the policies and took the buildings or demolished buildings. So squatting is actually, though illegal in many cases, it still serves as a kind of temporary commenting of space that challenges the existing institutions to act. Sometimes they act in ways which is not helpful to those squatters, but actually it gets institutions to either renovate buildings or to actually change the use of the buildings. So the whole kind of history of squatting is a remarkable way of perhaps describing this idea of a challenge to overly resilient institutions. And oftentimes, in the 1970s in New York, actually now I recall this, there was a period in which, if on the lower side, if you were able to claim that you could squat through starting a squat and then showing you had the capacity to fix a building, the city would sell it to you for $1. So there are these kind of, I guess you could say, their workarounds in the terms that we use today. And so this other project. Can I also ask a question about this one? When I read it, I was wondering about the job of New York municipality or the planning departments, because I felt like they were being presented in a very positive light for eventually embracing or incorporating the community initiatives. And I was wondering if there have any other responsibilities because we were talking a lot about these comments and publics and collective. And the initiatives are always being presented as a holistic thing. And I was wondering if there may be some voices that are not being heard. And maybe that's where the municipality or the decision maker's job comes in. Maybe make sure those voices are heard. Or I don't know, what is the kind of the clerk? I don't know how to put it, what their job is. I think that I have an example that might be answered in your question. There has been a strong tension in New York City. Let me see if I can't even find something. I was wondering if it's more than just implementation and funding. I mean, there was a period in the 1980s and 1990s in New York where there's a lot of vacant land that people used, even before 596, for community gardens. People would just go in and start a garden. It was empty. Nobody seemed to care. There's one on 113th Street, 112th Street. You may have seen that. That started off as like, hey, let's make a garden. And that was basically nobody was paying attention. The city had other issues. And essentially, it got in under the radar. But what ended up happening is in the 80s, the need for housing, which never went away and is still with us, the city decided, hey, we're going to develop some of these lots. They're perfect. They're not too big. We can make affordable housing in these lots through city agencies. And so you had a kind of fight among very good people, the people who wanted to build housing and the people who wanted community gardens. And so the city actually had to kind of come in and kind of negotiate with both parties. And some gardens stayed. And some gardens did not get to stay. And some housing was built. And some housing wasn't built. So I think what you're saying is like, who manages the players who claim this open land? So for instance, the people who want to put a community garden there, that seems like a great thing until somebody else comes along and says, hey, we need more housing. So it's not a unified field of audience or participants by any stretch of imagination. And I think that's a good question and thus leads us to this idea that there's a lot of competition, even among nonprofit community serving actors. And that's especially in a place like New York, like many other cities, where there's not a lot of land that is well-served already by transportation, by infrastructure, and so that the battles become very, very tense. That happens a lot with not far from Columbia also. There's a good another story about competing actors. There were some garages on 108th Street near Manhattan Avenue. And then a nonprofit housing developer came in and said, we want to build some low income affordable housing also and for people with special needs. And so that hit the community against a nonprofit. But the community was trying to protect their parking garages. And so that kind of brought out different audiences, like how dare you put cars ahead of people. And then other people came in and said, hey, that car is part of my livelihood. So you get a very, there's a lot of claims that can be made in a complex situation. So 596 was one way in which people could claim kind of the right to participate in land use decisions. So because of the time, I'm going to go a little bit quicker through the car for 78th Street in Queens, near Jackson Avenue. Do any of the urban design students, were you near Jackson Avenue in the summer studio? No, OK. This is an instance where it's a really good instance where if 596 was a situation of kind of distributed network of people using the tool, using the kind of the internet as a form of distributed knowledge to encourage participation in urban life, kind of moving more towards just the space itself, this was a kind of really typical example of how a community saw an asset that they wanted to repurpose in order to create a necessary open space in their community. In some ways, now this is kind of textbook. We understand in urban design anyway that these kinds of processes take place all the time. And in New York City anyway, the city government is much more sympathetic to these than it had been a decade or two ago because of the need for open space and recreation has become much more of a kind of understood by the powers that be as an essential form of equity, not just of health. And so in this case, we're seeing how that came together through a very ad hoc situation and then became a kind of local neighborhood nonprofit, then became a part of a nonprofit citywide agency. And so what are some of the takeaways that some of you have from this example? Hearing nothing? Oh. I think that the power of a community voice, I mean, initially their proposal was knocked down. Yes. They were passionate about it. And organized and kept pushing and pushing. And it sort of then sort of morphed into something where they were able to scale up and get the DOT on board. But it just snowballed from there. So I mean, it's the power of the people. Yeah, there's some good, I mean, aside from the detail of the example, there's some of the way in which this article frames this. I think sometimes this article is a little bit wordy. I admit it. But they really frame it. We already talked about this idea of disruption. And this is another example where it was less disruptive than what they call a reconfiguring of existing urban situations or existing urban governances. And I think that the language, some of the terms of this article, are very helpful in understanding the way in which the actions of communities to insert their knowledge, to insert their rights, to insert their needs is a form of participation in governance and policy and spacemaking that the authors call for scaling. It starts at the small scale, and then they want or they watch how these things become vertically scaled. Now, they use that term vertically scale, which means that these organizations start out, let's say at the bottom, where they're only talking to themselves about themselves, but they move into or they start having relationships with city bureaucracies, larger and larger city bureaucracies or nonprofit organizations. And so what's interesting about this example and the authors call it, as I say, scaling vertically, they scale up between nested urban systems and integrate with higher level bureaucratic institutions. So this is kind of politics and policy, but it shows you that having a spatial idea or a kind of planning idea in a complex system requires integration with institutions and power systems and that to create custodianship and stewardship just doesn't happen by you, you know, let's say sweeping in front of your street every day, but it scales up to have to deal with city officials. And that is both a plus and a minus. I mean, I think what's interesting about these examples is that I think you read there was an example where was it the city that the nonprofit interested in this street had to fundraise, which they were completely unprepared to do. They didn't know how to fundraise, like we want a place treat. And the city said, sure, we'll give you a place treat, here's some stuff, we'll help you with this, but oh, and by the way, you need to also start pitching in with fundraising. So on the one hand, it's like, well, you know, Mr. City Agency, hello, that's not what these people know how to do. They express the need and it's the public sector's responsibility to answer that need. And the public sector comes back and says, well, we can't help everyone. And for better or worse, we live in a time of a kind of entrepreneurial point of view that says you want this, you've got to do some fundraising, which again is a very mixed blessing. As we know, competition and such things can be difficult. But one of the things that this organization helped do, okay, I'm gonna do one of those screen sharing switches again. Hold on. Okay, share. Hold on, I have to find something. The city said and there was an attempt to say, okay, we need a nonprofit, we need another organization that can participate in this. And lo and behold, somebody started one. And of course, I have to know about it because it's a cup project from a few years ago. I'm gonna scroll through this and then I'll show you. So you can see here, partnerships for parks. This organization started out in the organizations in Queens and other places that said, well, we need that nonprofit to help between the community and the city. There needed to be an intermediary to assist. And this is pretty much the role of nonprofits in many places, especially the US. And so this organization, the Center for Urban Pedagogy came in and created a kind of knowledge device to say, oh, well, how do you do that? How do you deal with maintenance? How do you deal with capital? How do you deal with decision makers? How do you deal with coalition building? How do you address specific things? And this document was circulated among all the organizations that were trying to get local parks and local play yards made in their neighborhoods. And so, no, no, no, no, stop it. So anyway, I just wanted to say that the story of the article dealing with that actually had a good outcome with respect to the partnership for parks becoming a spokesman, a spokesperson, a spokes org for those communities who are not equipped to do the kinds of things that a nonprofit or a government knows how to do, but that with the assistance, with basically kind of civic learning, or you could say, commoning that this nonprofit introduced a kind of new level of knowledge to create a kind of commons of shared interests so that the residents with these interests, the businesses with these interests, the community members with these interests could have a means to scale up their involvement. And this is a kind of example of what I think would be called commoning in the way the article kind of pushes us towards. So finally, the first example in the reading but I think is the most problematic and yet also the most interesting has to do with Times Square. We've talked a bit about time in our class, I'm always trying to avoid actually, because some ways Times Square is easing and credible, but also most annual of because kind of local asset, but it's really a global asset. Is it an asset? It's so tied into so many intersecting systems and different scales, but this article takes it on as part of this, reclaiming the commons. And I was at first shocked that the urban commons could include Times Square in some way. So that was a shock to my kind of own ideas about what commoning could entail and even notions of public space can entail because Times Square, as the article does eventually make reference to is not only a public space, but it's a highly commodified public space. So let's see, I'm trying to remember what I'm trying to see what's being shared here. So I'm going to give you a very short history lesson. Although there's nothing I do that's short. Let's see if I've discovered, but we'll try. Times Square, you all know it in one way or another through movies, through images, through news. It's a kind of phenomenon way beyond itself. You could say that the image of Times Square is far more circulated around the world than any real knowledge of specific knowledge of economics and politics and cultural disputes and such things, which is what makes it such a interesting teaching device. I've got too many softwares. David, yeah. Okay. Great, thank you. So Times Square essentially was an intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, and it's not a square, just in case those of you have never been there. New York actually, people are always shocked when they come to New York and everything that's called a square is not really a square. I don't actually recall why that's the case, but we get used to it. So this is Times Square in the 1940s. The center of both images see the New York Times building, the newspaper building, and that's why it was called Times Square. In the 19, from the 1920s to the 1950s, it was a center of commerce as well as, as well as fun. Fun in the sense of becoming full of hotels and movie theaters, especially in the 1920s and 30s. Before that, live theaters of comedy and what we call Bodville, which is a form of comedy presentations. But notice in both these images, it's the cars, it's the streets that dominate. And somehow that shows you how the perception of what a proper place could be is this, that the cars were it. And the image on the left is a great demonstration that the people are kind of standing there, the cars whizzing by, but because the commerce and the commercial advertisements are so big that it kind of works. And that became the means of understanding Times Square, which through the billboard, through the sign. Let's see. Okay, in the 50s, this continued. You see a lot more advertising. You see, especially for appliances and cars and liquor, still very busy, still very traffic crazy and complex with all sorts of temporary road systems to try divert cars on the upper right. You can see an ad for a movie called The Third Man. I highly recommend you see that movie. It's a great movie in 1949. Of course, it wells, isn't it? But it shows you that Times Square became another term for it was the kind of neighborhood of lights that it was lit as a kind of permanent billboard or a permanent place of advertising and consumption and theater going and fun. Also during this time, the theater industry traded starting in the 30s, but especially in the 50s, when on the side streets, not on the avenues, you had many, many, many Broadway theaters, still a major industry today. And then down below, just kind of the boring version during the day. But still, you can see the scale of building the billboard and advertising as a kind of form of what a kind of urban entertainment zone can be. This camel ad, I don't think we're seeing it on this one, but some of the cigarette ads had mechanisms to blow smoke through the person's mouth. That just, you know, one fun detail. It's like an early Las Vegas. It is, except to this case, the buildings are big and at the street, whereas, as we know from Las Vegas, you had the sign, then you had parking, and then you had the buildings, but yes, very much decorated sheds, as Torey would put it. But the street, still the dominant armature of the place. Times Square went through what we gently call hard times, but in fact, what we should understand hard times to be is not just Times Square having a hard time, but in the 1970s, New York City, like much of the US and all over the world, went through a kind of economic collapse for various reasons that had to do with oil, that had to do with austerity policies, that social austerity policies that were advocated by governments to cut down on social spending and the rise of corporations who took their money elsewhere. So there's a very complex array of global political economic reasons that you can see taking place in Times Square when essentially white middle-class patrons left either to just not coming to Times Square or most classically moved to the suburbs. And landlords still had buildings and spaces to rent and one of the changes had to do with, I don't know what the right word is, but what you might call alternative cultures of less socially accepted forms of pleasure and entertainment. So very famously prostitutions, pornography and all sorts of, how shall I put it, alternative activities that were in the public realm, but in the street, that is. And so Times Square in the 1970s became quite famous for being troubled and kind of as the city put it, a kind of a blemish at the center of the city. But mind you, the 1970s were also probably one of the most prolific times for the music scene in New York City and for arts and culture in New York City. So remember that what, when they're saying that Times Square is having troubles, what they're meaning is that the powers that be, the corporations and the city itself is not making any money on the buildings and the uses of Times Square. So another way to put this is that the value of land in Times Square, which had been so high, collapsed in the 1970s. And thus other forms of entertainment took their places. Now that kind of thing usually has a kind of arc in the sense that quite quickly or quite, by the end of the 70s into the 80s, there were also movements to get rid of this alternative form of entertainment. And these are just one image that against pornography, against the kind of low rent hotels, against the kind of unseemly uses as they would put it. And so it wasn't far soon that it was very soon that the city tried to figure out how to repurpose Times Square, how to change it, how to make it more valuable into real estate terms and how to regulate it in ways that were, that would draw kind of your middle class tourist back to the area. And one of the very famous things, which gives rise to a whole concept of the role of art is when they started, when the city started using billboards and art projects. And on the right, you see a very famous example of Jenny Holzer with a sign, one of the early large billboards, the same one on the left, to use art to begin to notice a place again through artists and there were programs to use empty storefronts on 42nd Street as galleries or exhibits for short term, mind you. And so during the late 70s and into the early 80s, there were forms of rethinking of Times Square as a place kind of controlled and regulated once again. On the left, a pedestrian mall project from 1977, which essentially said, here is a way to keep the advertising, to keep something of the spirit of Times Square, but make it close it off to cars. This idea did not do well at the time. Other examples on the right, this proposal to kind of create a space of Times Square in Times Square to create a kind of massive billboard system that actually made a form of enclosure. I mean, it was a very fascinating time for experimenting and Times Square was because of its fame, because of the kind of almost global real estate interest in the nature of Times Square became iconic for ways to change the understanding of the public space of Times Square. There were examples to try to rezone it to build bigger buildings. And so you see examples here of zoning studies with some idea that there would still be billboards, but it kind of, this is a kind of half-hearted attempt yet the beginning of recognizing that Times Square had a character of some sort that might have been worth keeping. Still really looking at the vertical surfaces, not at the life of the street. One of the sun got a little bit. So there on the left, you see 42nd Street and it's image, the reality of the movie, the types of movies on the lower right, you see a kind of lack of development, which enabled these industries to survive. Film processing, video, triple X, video parlors. And then, but also in the 70s and especially in the 80s, notice the, on the upper right, it's a postcard that says New York City Tourist dot com. So this is maybe in the late 80s when dot coms actually existed. But the recognition that New York had an image to sell, and the internet, which was not new, of course, Times Square was always about selling images, but now it's on a digital, which is bringing that imagery into a global audience. But notice it's always still the billboards and the vertical surfaces. And there's very little to say about the street itself. Another funny example, John Gerde, who's a pretty well-known internationally for doing large, large buildings in the US, but also in Asia. So this is an early one where the life of Times Square would be inserted into the lobby of a hotel, whereas the street itself is almost untouched. It's still that same messy Times Square, which actually some people were quite happy with in one way, but taking the life of Times Square and putting it inside a building, which in the 70s and 80s was not unusual, that there was a kind of idea, there's a little off topic here, but the rise of the atrium as a kind of public place emerged in the 70s and 80s when the streets themselves were considered not worth paying attention to. But that actually fuels a lot of the shift of publicness that we still see today in atriums and there are a lot of tensions there about public views. It wouldn't be fair to leave out Philip Johnson's great proposition for Times Square, which happened in the late 80s, I think maybe early 90s, in which the kind of full corporatization of Times Square, these massive buildings where Times Square would more or less cease to exist. And then he called up Venturi and Scott Brown and said, hey, can we use your Apple? And somehow that would revitalize this, give it a sense of identity, whereas these buildings were completely, the demolition of Times Square. And luckily enough, people said, oh my God, please, no, thank you. I'm just gonna skip that one. In the 90s, there's the emergence of the recognition that the signage at the street, not just above, was part of the excitement of Times Square. Being in Times Square on the street in Times Square was part of its allure. In 2006, there was a competition for the ticket's booth. I don't know if some of you have probably been there. This is a rendering, it's not a photograph. And it's quite amazing because it truly begins to activate the life of the street. This massive kind of sitting piece of amphitheater that allows you to look at Times Square from amidst the busyness of Times Square. So this is beginning of the paying attention to like, what is good about Times Square when you're in it, not just in an automobile? And that brings us to the present, more or less. We're starting in the, after the 2008 economic crash discussions about how to rethink Times Square emerged where there was a kind of recognition, not just in New York, but all over the world in the early 2000s to basically say, whoa, we need to reign in the automobile, that the automobile is not the main constituent of public space, but people are. So you can see here the firm's snow heta, which is actually spelled wrong, I apologize for that. It's not snow as in the stuff that comes in the sky. And so what you see here is the kind of epistemial, the kind of shift from understanding the street as the public space of the street through the automobile and through the bus and taxi to a recognition that pedestrians are the primary constituents. Notice that this view is from on top of the ticket booth stairs. So we're actually at a second floor level on a public device, which is this red spot right there. And so I think, yes, this continued with a temporary painting of the street. For the last about a year, kind of this artist worked with snow heta to create this kind of installation to again rethink and repurpose the identity of Times Square. And I'm sorry, that's the most recent image of how the firm snow heta really reinstated the ground plane for pedestrians amid all of the business and commerce and visual excitement of the square itself. Now, I'm giving a kind of a simple story and I think there's two things for us to think about here. One is that this article, I think I have to say kind of much on with it. I think it's an interesting thing that isn't to let it is to frame the change of Times Square as a continuum of ways of audiences together in the planning process. And so I'd like to hear if you folks have ways in which you could describe how these authors describe the reconfiguration of Times Square from the point of view of commenting. I can't stay on that image because the typo is driving me crazy. What I found interesting was it was the way in which there was this massive power shift away from this. I mean, it's still very sort of commercial and everything else, but there was not a great deal of focus on the individual people as a public place. They went through a process when they closed it down in 2009-10 to trial a few different sort of options and seeing how people use the space and using that as a mechanism to test whether something worked or didn't work to start moving forward with schematic design options to close the street and turn it into an actual full public place was interesting. And it totally changed the way, I guess the place was used. I mean, now it is very commercial. It seems that not a lot of New Yorkers really go there. It's a tourist destination, but it's also very, I mean, it's the most, it's probably the pinnacle of public places in the world, really. Yes. And the authors kind of mentioned that, right? They say New Yorkers joke that New Yorkers don't go to Times Square. I'm looking, sorry, I'm taking a quick shift to find some other images of the, of that process. Sorry, this will just take a sec. David, I have a question. Yeah. How much of this transformation that you talk about was quote unquote allowed because they just realized it was very hard to look at the billboards if you were in a car. Meaning the whole idea of having more people staying there is that you can have more eyes on the publicity. Well, you cut to the chase, right? It's all about commerce. Sorry, I'm looking for one other image. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Where did I put it? Where did I put it? Almost there. Are you seeing that? The chairs? Somebody say yes? Yes. Thank you. So, Lena's question is that, was this a marketing means of getting more eyes for the billboards? And I actually think that's a fair question, but I have no idea. I don't think that it came from that because the only reason I think that didn't come from that was because the businesses were unsure if the lack of cars would drain what they saw as the identity, the kind of constant movement. But I think they saw very quickly that, wow, this is unbelievable. So, I think very quickly they were on board and supported it very much. One of the things that the article talks about is the Times Square Business Improvement District, now called Times Square Alliance. And I think that's one of the kind of key players here. And I think with very, very mixed, very complex political and social implications, they realized that Times Square is not a New York business. Times Square is an international global commodity. And so, at the same time, Times Square could be packed and should be packed. And they figured that out pretty quickly. And they were the ones who supported SNHETA and they supported the various attempts at pedestrianization. But only after the city and other professionals urged them to do so. Like many businesses, they're kind of afraid of change. So there's one of those resilient business models which turns out to be a problem, but which eventually came around. And so we see public space here. This is an early test in 2008, 9, 10 where the city just put out chairs. They didn't even paint the streets yet. They just put out traffic diversion to bollards and chairs and waited to see what happened. And in fact, it was hilarious. People, you know how, what's the word? It's like, when you know you're not supposed to walk somewhere and then you put your foot down and it's like, can I go here? Can I walk here? And then also when people discovered they could just hang out in the streets. It was a breathtaking shift because people were coming up against their own programming that the street is not for pedestrians. It became extremely popular. For a while, even New Yorkers went because it was such a dramatic shift in one of the most kind of loved and hated by New Yorkers places that you can think of. So, how do we view this? Let me come back to this question of the Times Square Alliance. How do we view the Times Square Alliance generously for a moment as part of the commons that this article is trying to make an argument about? Nobody, come on. I think the experiment, I think the experiment part was a big issue, I mean, to look at it as a commons, I don't know, because it's like something you do together and then you revise it and you like maybe discuss it in some way, but that's like- Right, experiment, temporary. I think the global versus local thing is really interesting in that because it seems that it's like very outside of anywhere else in New York. It's like it could be anywhere. So, I mean, commons, yes, but they even said in the article that like there were no locals involved because there were no local stakeholders in this. So then how it becomes a place in the city, like it's not really in the city. It's in like that weird threshold. I think what you're saying is really important because it was powered and supported by very heavy-waded institutions and agencies from the very beginning. So, I mean, yes, there is a commons, but who is this commons? Are these people in power? But let me read you, and I mean, I admit that I more or less agree with you, and that's why I wanted us to be shocked by the way in which this project can be put in the same sentence as 78th Street plays Street and five and six acres. I'm gonna just read it up a little bit. Times Square's transformation demonstrates that iterative tactical strategies provide a means for large bureaucracies to achieve rapid urban change, thereby highlighting the transience of apparently stable urban configurations. So here we see that the authors are getting us to see how urban change is taking place even among the powerful. And then there was one other sentence. I think for me, it's similar to the High Line in some things that- Yes. Of course, the High Line had a lot of issues here in New York. There are problems with the community that it was supposed to serve, and it didn't in the end, and how projects like that become a different monster. But when you look at them from abroad, like I remember learning about the High Line from Chile and Times Square, you saw how this street changed, and those two became huge opportunities, like not because of the context within themselves, but what other examples can learn from them. Anybody else respond? I wanna kinda add to what Antonia said. They talk a lot in the article about scaling horizontally and vertically, and I found them both deal mainly with replicability. So like the scaling embodies in replication, yeah, replicativity, I guess. But I don't know, maybe it's a matter of definition, but I didn't understand scaling vertically and also replication. I thought it was more of how you take one case study, you understand the mechanisms of it, and maybe use the same ones other places and more bigger-scale projects, for example, but not actually replicate the same thing you did in another place. So I think the term you're looking for is iteration, and there's a difference in iteration and replicability, or the difference between a series, each of one is a little different, versus stamping out the same one. And I think that's a clearly, one of the urban design questions is, what can you reuse versus what do you need to invent, or what can be applied anywhere versus what can only be applied in certain places? So I would totally agree, this appears to be a strategy that has already been globally circulated. And so that is deeply problematic from our point of view. Can you say, for example, taking, I guess there's no similar space in the world, taking a very crowded space with commerce-oriented and pedestrianize it, and maybe do some other iteration on it, does that consider scaling it vertically, horizontally? No, I think scaling vertically has, their goal is not, I mean, they say this in a very simple, almost simplistic way, that this whole thing has to, through the Department of Transportation and its leaders, they wanted to allow the DOT to plan and design in a people-focused rather than form-centric way. I have to admit that's kind of sophomoric, because they're overlapping categories, and that's certainly not a useful distinction, but it is a distinction that we have to respect that people see. And I would say from a form-centric way, if I were as to, can I do this? Can I crop the image? No, I can't do that. But if we were to like, I will, if we were to cut this image off, I could open Photoshop, but never mind. If you just cut off the image from at the top of the umbrella, I would say you could be anywhere. And if you travel the world, I'm sure you see this. I mean, I've seen pictures. Whoa, all right, who's doing something there? You know, if you see pictures of entertainment spaces in Qatar, or in Calcutta, or in Moscow, I mean, this is where you're doing, thank you. You're hired. Oh, yeah, now they're pointing out to me that I could be doing it, so okay, never mind. And so we, replicability, as in repetition, is clearly possible, even with some minor changes. But I wanna go on, is I wanna get to where, I wanna bring out one piece of this, which is these authors are very insistent on this process. And I'm trying to be sympathetic, and I've always been, you know, it's a good challenge to our thinking. I'm gonna read this part again. David? Just one sec. Tactical urbanism of this sort, loosens rigid social and institutional norms that are enforced through urban design. So that is their goal. That's what the vertical scaling is. It's how do institutions change? How do the people who make the regulations, how do the people who make the laws, how do the businesses who invest in additions to public spaces, like the businesses that support the Times Square bid? And how does the original idea of pedestrianization, which in some ways is like, let's make it easier for people to walk, how does that scale up the bureaucratic political ladder? That is their measure of a kind of success, is that commenting is not just something that takes place horizontally at a particular sector, but that it engages institutions that are above its scale and scope. That is a really good hypothetical.