A 3-D printer is a machine that prints objects by laying down successive layers of plastic or other materials. 3-D printers have existed since the 1980s. Today, several companies are working to create models that are available for personal use and at a low price point. In the last few years, the rise of 3-D printers in rapid prototyping has popularized and democratized the creation of objects at an individual level, proving that there is a viable alternative to the previous dependence on industrial mass production. This radical change has meant a turning point for a variety of fields, most notably biomedicine, architecture, and design. Thus, 3-D printers are changing the way we understand and construct our built environment.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin hosted a two-week period of programs focused on making in which visitors used 3-D printers to do rapid prototyping. Portable 3-D printers were also developed, built, and donated to various cultural producers in Berlin.

• Marathon of Making Things

Accessibility design is urban design that takes into account the full spectrum of other-abled (including elderly, disabled, and handicapped) individuals by creating a user-friendly urban and domestic environment. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) was revised in 2010 to include regulations and standards for accessibility design in the United States. Accessibility design allows for an urban landscape that is more considerate of the needs of every citizen.

Designer John Schimmel and accessibility activist and organizer Raul Krauthausen conducted a workshop intended to identify and map locations with and without equal access.

• Accessibility Walkabout

Active transformation is a state of continual movement, improvement, and change of the urban commons. Motivated individuals can trigger moments of transformation, changing city life into something more collaborative, sustainable, and conducive to well-being.

Lab Team member Rachel Smith’s Lab Platz program called attention to the importance of public space, by transforming parking spaces for one whole day and turning them into places for leisure, cooking, socializing, and learning.

The Marathon of Transformation gathered together a group of more than fifteen international and Berlin-based influencers and transformers and presented the ways in which they are actively bringing about urban change.

• Transforming Parking Space: Lab Platz
• Marathon of Transformation

Activist citizens are committed to community life and the urban environment. Rather than relying on institutions or the government to fix things, they lead change independently and embrace active community involvement. In 2011, Time named “The Protester” the person of the year. This choice came after a turbulent year of uprisings in the Arab world that influenced the development of the Occupy movement worldwide. These movements illustrated the central role activism plays in city life.

At the Lab, Ernst-Dieter Lantermann of the Institute for Psychology at the University Kassel examined activist groups from a psychological perspective, exploring how activism works and what positive and negative effects it can have on satisfaction in life. Lantermann argued that the way an individual sees himself as a part of the larger society hugely affects that individual’s emotional well-being.

• Social Involvement—Life Satisfaction and Participation

Today, 20 percent of the population is older than sixty-five; in 2060, every third person will have reached that age. The effect of the aging population on the urban environment and on social services is one of the most significant global challenges and opportunities of the next fifty years. Intergenerational exchange creates opportunities for knowledge sharing and social interaction. Urban design, community initiatives, and public services can help meet the needs of young and old citizens alike.

The Ageless Evening at the Berlin Lab offered an evening of intergenerational encounters through cooking, dance, age simulation, and more.

• Ageless Evening

“Anthropocentric urbanism” refers to urban planning and city design that revolves solely around the needs and desires of human beings. Mostly as a result of the anthropocentric theories developed during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the human being has long constituted the gold standard by which all things are measured. Historical architectural styles have operated on this assumption for centuries. However, more recent thinking and twentieth-century urban and environmental theories advocate for a separation from anthropocentric thinking in urban planning and argue that it is this mindset that has caused many of the challenges faced by cities today. Cities that flourished under an anthropocentric mindset were not created with a larger context in mind that could be inclusive of the environment and other living creatures.

Natalie Jeremijenko, artist and engineer, explained how artistic interventions and urban actions can be successful prescriptions for a more inclusive urban design that tackles environmental issues including pollution, overcrowded cities, and lack of wildlife in city areas.

• Natalie Jeremijenko: Toward a Healthy Urban Environmental Commons

The architecture of necessity is design conducted by everyday citizens in response to individual or collective needs and site-specific conditions. Due to political restrictions and/or low-income scenarios, neighborhoods and individuals make customized and informal alterations to their living spaces, thus creating innovative new typologies for architecture and urbanism. Ernesto Oroza coined the term in his 2006 book, For an Architecture of Necessity and Disobedience, to refer to the efficiency and ingenuity of Cuban citizens under Fidel Castro’s regime and their approach to self-made solutions for their everyday needs. Virserum Art Museum has also used the term to talk about sustainability in architecture.

Ernesto Oroza led a two-part workshop at the Berlin Lab that had visitors documenting architectural hacks in Berlin neighborhoods and compiling them into a customized tabloid. He also gave a lecture about the Architecture of Necessity in Cuba.

• Ernesto Oroza:
  Provisional Space/Collaborative Design
• Architecture of Necessity and Disobedience

An Arduino is a piece of electronic hardware—a single-board microcontroller used to create basic hardware-to-software communication through circuitry control. Developed by a team of inventors led by Massimo Banzi, Arduinos are widely used in computer programming. As an easy-to-use module, the device can be employed to test basic programming functionality or even operate a small robot. The Arduino is particularly practical for rapid prototyping. Its design is distributed under the Creative Commons license and low-cost kits are available through a number of organizations.

At the Lab, Making Sense with ­Arduinos was a workshop that empowered visitors to engage with basic electronics and programming in an effort to make small-scale interventions into our urban environment.

• Making Sense with Arduinos

Behavioral change is an ongoing process of replacing the ways we respond to our environment with newly acquired patterns of action. Behavior standards respond to social norms and needs; in an urban context, certain targeted behavior-al shifts can lead to important changes in urban interaction and design. The key to large-scale urban improvement lies in the majority of the population adopting and maintaining more behaviors that produce small but incremental change for the common good. These could include more responsible consumption and waste practices and greater conviviality and sharing.

Through his programs, which explored the power of technology in cities, Lab Team member Carlo Ratti argued that sensing and actuating is a powerful transformative process that can lead to behavior change—the first step in large-scale transformation.

• Carlo Ratti’s Introduction

Bicycle-sharing programs provide bikes for rent or temporary use in urban environments. Today, there are bike-sharing programs in 165 cities around the world. Bike-sharing systems typically involve customized bike design, docking stations, and an affordable membership fee to avoid theft and promote financial sustainability. Bike sharing provides free or low-cost transportation with no emissions. The system was first employed in Amsterdam in 1969 when a fleet of bikes was painted white and distributed throughout the city. Other cities with bike-sharing programs include Berlin (with two programs, started in 2003 and 2009) Paris (2007), Barcelona (2007), and London (2010), among others. New York City will be launching one in the spring of 2013. In major cities around the world, the programs are typically sponsored by major corporations.

Cycling Fast Facts featured a group of biking experts to showcase a crosssection of the Berlin cycling community to discuss the challenges and opportunities of biking in cities.

Copenhagenize Index presented a program at the Lab about the world’s most bike-friendly cities. The Copenhagenize Index was developed in 2011 by Copenhagen Consulting as an index for measuring support of urban cycling in cities worldwide. The index measures eighty major cities around the world based on specific criteria including bicycle infrastructure, bike-sharing programs, perception of safety, and politics. When these needs are met, cities experience an increase in cyclists, which has a positive effect on city livability and infrastructure.

• Cycling Fast Facts
• Sidsel Birk Hjuler: The World’s Most Bike Friendly Cities

Biking and traffic regulations are the rules that ensure the orderly and safe operation and interaction of motor vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, and others during transit. More recently, some urban and traffic planners have come to believe that over-regulation of traffic and pedestrian flows can be counterproductive to the safety and efficiency of urban mobility, and that adequately designed, more flexible and intuitive systems can lead to better mobility performance in cities.

Philipp Poll from ADFC Berlin e.V. ex-plained biking and traffic regulations and showed how pedestrians, drivers, and bikers can be conditioned not to break traffic rules. Poll discussed how thoughtful design and planning that responds to psychological responses to space can offer intuitive guidance for those on the road. Such improved planning efforts can be more effective than mandatory rules in promoting road safety.

• Cycling Fast Facts

Bicycle safety includes rules and strategies designed to protect cyclists from risks associated with riding. Some of these include personal safety precautions like helmets and lights. Others require collective action from government or community organizations including bikeways, traffic laws, and riding conduct. Higher bicycle-safety levels result in a greater number of bicycle riders sharing city streets.

During the Cycling Fast Facts presentations, Jorg Leben spoke about the needs of cyclists and other road users. He touched upon the importance of bicycle safety, the problematic of mixed traffic issues, the inefficiency of pavers, and the issues of rights-of-way in different countries. Leben concluded that sufficient space and keeping bikers away from main roads would lead to an increase in bicycle use.

Copenhagenize Index presented a program at the Lab about the world’s most bike-friendly cities. The Copenhagenize Index was developed in 2011 by Copenhagen Consulting as an index for measuring support of urban cycling in cities worldwide. The index measures eighty major cities around the world based on specific criteria including bicycle infrastructure, bike share programs, perception of safety, and politics. When these needs are met, cities experience an increase in cyclists, which has a positive effect on city livability and infrastructure.

• Cycling Fast Facts
• The World’s Most Bike-Friendly Cities

Body language is a form of non-verbal human communication. While we mainly focus on verbal strategies for sharing information, body language is a powerful form of communication that connects with our senses. Most of the communication that occurs in urban public space occurs through conscious or unconscious body language signals. For this reason, understanding, learning, and analyzing body language is of crucial importance for urban psychologists.

At the Lab, the programs devoted to the topic of Urban Micro Lens explored how all forms of communication represent a skill that can be developed and perfected. When this is done successfully it can dramatically improve our urban life.

• Corinne Rose: Basics of Perception and the Urban Micro Lens

Bottom-up urban engagement places the citizen at the root of urban change. The term “bottom-up” first appeared in relation to its opposite, “top-down,” in the 1942 edition of Harvard University’s Quarterly Journal of Economics: “In the long run it is part of the larger question of whether ‘bottom-up’ control can be as efficient as ‘top-down’ control.” In an urban context, this approach has two key, complementary directions: first, a trend that encourages social, cooperative models of city organization; second, a growing interest from government officials, academia, and the professional sector in resorting to digital, open-sourced data and models as key resources for understanding urban interactions.

Dietmar Offenhuber’s research centers on the possibilities and limitations of self-organized infrastructure. Based on the work of the SENSEable City Lab, Offenhuber discussed the effectiveness and potential of bottom-up infrastructure at the Berlin Lab in a lecture titled Can Infrastructure Be Crowdsourced?

• Can Infrastructure Be Crowdsourced?

The city center is often the location of the most significant, historical, cultural, and political landmarks and institutions. At times, this area also serves as the economic hub, and is commonly frequented by tourists. Hence cities are often characterized or known by the more stereotyped postcard visions of their city centers. Traditionally, the center is the most highly valued area, in contrast with the city periphery, which has often housed artists, immigrants, and those with low income. This creates a tension that leads to various types of urban regeneration and gentrification process-es. Both areas require attention and can serve as creative incubators and urban transformation sites for rapid gentrification. With the development of megacities, the notion of center versus periphery is a blurred one, as cities develop multiple centers and urban sprawl continues to expand urban surfaces beyond precise limits.

Maurice de Martin organized C-Zone, a tour of Berlin’s fringe and often-neglected outer ring in the East Berlin neighborhoods of Lichtenberg, Treptow-Köpenick, and Marzahn. The tour visited local experts and residents of non-central Berlin areas to underscore the fact that Berlin consists of more than just the central zone more usually seen by tourists.

• C-Zone I
• C-Zone II

Cities are successful forms of organization because they attract people. And when people gather together and interact, innovation happens and new ideas are generated. Thus, urban theorists and economists identify cities as engines of progress and idea generation since their inception.

Identifying cities as centers for innovation and collaborative thinking, Barry Kudrowitz ran a workshop on idea generation through improvisational practices that engaged visitors and encouraged them to interact.

• Idea Generation through Improvisation

Citizen empowerment is the state of feeling that one’s actions actively contribute to urban decision-making processes and change. By creating opportunities for communication and participation, citizens feel empowered to contribute their time, energy, and ideas in the city.

Carsten Joost, a well-known Berlin activist from Media Spree Versenken, shared various strategies for social involvement during his lecture at the Lab, while giving examples of how activists had changed the urban landscape in Berlin.

Ernst-Dieter Lantermann of the Institute for Psychology at the University Kassel, examined activist groups from a psychological perspective, exploring how activism works and what positive and negative effects it can have on satisfaction in life. Lantermann argued that the way an individual sees himself as a part of the larger society hugely affects that individual’s emotional wellbeing.

• A Waste of Time and Effort?
  Twenty Years of Civic Participation
• Social Involvement—Life Satisfaction—
  Participation

“City as organism” refers to the similarity between an urban system and a complex live organism formed by multiple, interrelated components. As with an organism, many of the elements that form a city are not apparent to the naked eye, yet they are essential to the city’s ability to function. It is important to give equal importance to both the visible and invisible areas of a city, as both are crucial to its development.

Maurice de Martin organized C-Zone, a tour of Berlin’s fringe and often-neglected outer ring in the East Berlin neighborhoods of Lichtenberg, Treptow-Köpenick, and Marzahn. The tour visited local experts and residents of non-central Berlin areas to underscore the fact that Berlin consists of more than just the central zone usually seen by tourists.

• C-Zone I
• C-Zone II

Climate change is the slow alteration of weather patterns that occurs over time as a result of various conditions, including natural geographic transformation, orbital variations, evolution, and human influence. There is serious debate about the current and future repercussions of climate change. These effects may be ultimately irreversible and are largely due to an increase in carbon dioxide levels—of which the highest levels are produced in cities. Through large-scale governmental guidelines (such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997) and individual initiatives, urban planners and citizens are becoming more aware of these issues, resulting in more responsible design and lifestyle choices that can lead to urgently needed reductions in emissions.

Climate Media Factory presented a session on climate change, cities, and mobility and questioned how we can better communicate climate change to encourage more individual action. They presented a variety of methods, including social media, which could encourage better education on Berlin’s climate-change data.

• Tell Your City: Lectures on Narrating Climate Change

“Closing the loop” is an expression used to define the closure of a process, from its inception to its end, in a manner that leaves no loose ends. In the urban context, “closing the loop” is increasingly used to allude to the effectiveness of digital-to-physical interactions in cities. Successful uses of digital technologies in cities, through sensor devices or social media, for instance, are of no use if they do not manage to achieve an impact on the physical world. That is, if we amass large quantities of urban data through cutting-edge sensors, but we fail to implement a practical solution in the real world to the questions the data was asking, we will not have closed the loop. Similarly, if we have thousands of friends on Facebook, yet fail to meet anyone for coffee in weeks, the digital-physical loop is not closed.

Carlo Ratti devoted a series of programs to the topic of Scripted Spaces in which he analyzed the ways in which physical “actuation” has become increasingly important in the highly digital cities that we inhabit.

• Scripted Spaces

Collaboration—the act of cooperative work undertaken to achieve a common goal—is at the core of human interaction. Since the beginning of civilization, people have gathered in search of protection, conviviality, and exchange. Within cities, collaboration is crucial to the achievement of common goals for improving the shared urban experience.

Lab Team member Corinne Rose’s Make Space project initiated and implemented a collaborative process through which a group of senior citizens worked together to create a community garden in a Berlin neighborhood. Through a blog that described the working process, the project functioned as a how-to guide for brainstorming solutions for spaces for common use. The garden and blog also served as sources of inspiration for residents and neighbors ready to transform a space of their own.

• Make Space/Räume schaffen:
  A Community Garden Project

People have been documenting place and advancing the science of cartography for thousands of years. Unlike early maps, today’s mapping offers the ability to display a plurality of data and information with a high level of precision. Furthermore, the role of the cartographer as a singular author has been replaced with a form of mapping that is produced through collaboration and open-source data sharing, leading to maps that can contain several layers of information in one single digital source.

During the Marathon of Transformation day of programs, Joe Peach, the founder of This Big City, explained how digital urban citizen engagement projects, in particular collaborative urban mapping, contribute to city transformation.

Foodscape Mapping engaged visitors in collaboratively mapping waste and parasites, sewage systems, smells, markets, and the food supply chain, as well as the economic trends in the area connected with food.

• The Marathon of Transformation
• Foodscape Mapping

Comfort is a sense of physical or psychological ease, often characterized as a lack of hardship. Maximizing comfort has not only fostered the ability to cope with sometimes grueling urban conditions, but it has also become a measure of individual wealth, success, and status. Unfortunately, the irrepressible human aspiration to find ease often creates behaviors that challenge individual health, ecological sustainability, and economic moderation—hence the need to look for sustainable, responsible ways to find comfort in urban environments.

Anton Burdakov’s Anchor Points program revealed how our perception of space can create feelings of comfort and security by identifying whether we are inside or outside a so-called protected space.

• Anchor Points

“Connectivity” refers to the ability to connect people in better, more efficient ways that allow them to thrive to the best of their capacity. Cities have become the larger connective tissue that can provide the basis for connective strategies. In urban environments, citizens can connect through the proliferation of widespread technology, and just as importantly, through personal, narrative connections that reflect microhistories of place.

As a nexus for the exchange of ideas, the Lab functioned as a connective hub for experts and non-experts alike to put forward urban theories, test out new methods of urban participation, and share personal stories of transformation and experimentation.

Through his programs, Lab Team member Carlo Ratti explored the power of technology in cities. In a video for the Lab, Carlo explains how the Lab is a mobile platform that gives people an opportunity to think about architecture and design—and how both relate to cities. Ratti points out that today, new technologies have allowed people to connect and act on a different level and come together in new ways.

• Carlo Ratti on the BMW Guggenheim Lab

Creativity is the ability to make connections that are not necessarily obvious between seemingly unconnected things, leading to new ideas. Associative learning theories support a variety of methods to connect abstract concepts in our brains in order to find novel outcomes, thus promoting creativity.

Barry Kudrowitz led an active and engaged workshop and talk about idea generation and creativity and suggested a variety of tools to increase innovative thinking, from mind mapping to games that can help release our inhibitions. The most successful designers and thinkers don’t innovate through seriousness, but through playful brainstorming and idea-association, which are proven to foster creativity.

• How Play and Humor Help Us Innovate

Crowdfunding is a fundraising strategy that relies on the collective support of many individuals who contribute a small amount of money to support a cause, start-up, artistic project, or relief fund. This strategy relies primarily on the Internet to market needs and garner support. Websites like Kickstarter have made this type of fundraising popular. The trend has extended to the world of architecture and design: a variety of product-design and urban projects have sought funding through these avenues. Crowdfunding is a symptom of a larger social trend toward sharing and gift-based transactions.

At the Lab, Coralie Winn and Ryan Reynolds from Gap Filler spoke about DIY urbanism and regeneration in post-quake Christchurch, New Zealand, and gave examples of crowdsourced projects that had changed the fabric of the city after a natural disaster; Heidemarie Schwermer developed her views on a society based on sharing; and Van Bo Le-Mentzel presented his crowd-sourced Karma Economy project and book.

• Marathon of Transformation
• Living by Sharing:
  Heidemarie Schwermer
• Karma Economy and Book Release Hartz IV Moebel

Crowdsourcing is a problem-solving model that relies on the voluntary sharing of information or skills with others—a public group, a corporation, or other audiences. Often relying on the Internet as its platform, crowdsourcing allows for collaboration and participation between a variety of people from different backgrounds and levels of expertise. The term was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe, in an article for Wired.

At the Lab, Dietmar Offenhuber discussed how crowdsourcing could be applied to city infrastructure. In this talk, he gave examples of how this is being done and explained the main issues and possibilities of this approach. Crowdsourcing is thought to be a tool that could create smarter cities by allowing the addition of real-time sensing to all elements of an urban system.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel held a book-release event for a text that he created with collaborators from around the world—
a project that was facilitated through crowdsourcing.

• Can Infrastructure Be Crowdsourced?
• Karma Economy and Book Release Hartz IV Moebel

Customization is the method of respond-ing to individual needs and directives. Customization is often used to refer to a shift in manufacturing and production to a more flexible methodology. The term, which dates back at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century, was featured in the 1997 book Future Perfect by Stan Davis in which he discussed its application to mass production. The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in products and services that are designed and built to user specifications. Customization has the potential to transform the way we build and inhabit cities, making them ever more flexible, personalized, and livable.

Dale Dougherty discussed the turn towards customization and personal fabrication rather than mass production in his talk What is the Maker Movement? He claimed that making has created a prototyping revolution that fosters experimentation, customization, and innovation.

• What is the Maker Movement?

Data visualization is the representation of information through graphs and other visual means. The purpose of data visualization is to translate complex data sets or subjective information into easily digestible, graphic forms, bringing together the practical need to communicate with an aesthetic sensibility. Visualizing urban behavior and patterns can create awareness about important urban conditions (traffic, cell phone use, bike use, pollution levels) and can also enable planners and other observers to diagnose situations that need improvement.

Dissected Trash Objects allowed visitors to engage in real-time data collection, analysis, and visualization. Led by Dietmar Offenhuber and Pablo Rey from Basurama, the workshop exposed the hidden waste processes associated with global consumables.

• Dissected Trash Objects

Decentralization is the process by which elements of a whole are dispersed. The term is commonly used in the context of government to refer to a process that involves a greater sharing of power among various sectors and players. In the field of economics, the term refers to responsible investment strategies that allocate funds to diverse lots, rather than keeping all assets in one place. In urban planning, decentralization has been referred to as an alternative to cities’ central infrastructure and social systems. A dispersion of centers is seen as a way to avoid dependency on a centralized system whose malfunction could cause widespread disruption.

A key component of decentralization has been the increase in democratizing the uses of technology. This concept was the core element of José Gómez Márquez’s programs at the Lab.

• Empowerment Technologies

Deregulation is a process whereby the government decreases its involvement and limits its amount of regulations. It has been argued that, in some cases, deregulation can increase individual or institutional initiative, which allows for more personalized and localized solutions to emerge in cities. However, the term and its applications are the subject of highly polarized debate.

Ben Hamilton Baille, architect and urban designer, explained the principles of street design and place-making by presenting new approaches to traffic engineering, speed, safety, and civility practices. He claimed that deregulation of traffic and pedestrian rules is a crucial step towards street safety.

• Street Design and Place-Making:
  New Approaches to Traffic Engineering, Speed, Safety, and Civility

Design-build is a process whereby the design and construction of a structure is conceived of and implemented by a single entity. This process is particularly effective when working with students or amateurs who can be exposed to the full spectrum of processes that go into the creation of a building or development initiative. The term has been adopted by artists and architects who create temporary projects on a short timeline.

The Lab hosted a four-day collaborative design-build project led by Peter Fattinger. Visitors were involved in the brainstorming, planning, and ultimately the building process of this structure, which became a temporary, mobile kitchen that later hosted cookouts and cooking events at the Lab and at offsite Berlin locations.

• Learning by Doing

Digital democracy is the implementation of information technologies, communication technologies, and social media in service of political and government processes. In a successful form, it provides broader citizen participation while in-creasing transparency. Digital democracy also serves to increase accountability among government agencies and the participating public.

The Open Governance Panel at the Lab discussed the influence of new technology on our communication and decision-making processes. Panelists included Dieter Zinnbauer, Senior Program Manager of Emerging Policy Issues, Research and Knowledge Group at Transparency International; Anke Domscheit-Berg, the founder and director of opengov.me; and Helmut K. Anheier, Professor of Sociology and Dean at the Hertie School of Governance.

• Open Governance Panel

“Disneyfication” refers to the transformation of the built environment to resemble the logic of a theme park. While the term has been used broadly by social scientists, it was first coined by Sharon Zukin in 1996. The term is used to describe a process of urban transformation that increases homogeneity and simulated reality rather than the preservation of historical elements and cultural difference.

Cold War Center: Checkpoint Charlie sought to observe and analyze the prevailing spectacle culture that has come to unfold in one of Berlin’s most iconic historic locations. The panel of experts discussed the need for a Cold War museum at Checkpoint Charlie and the benefits or disservices that the theme park effect can have on collective urban memory.

• Cold War Center: Checkpoint Charlie

“Do-it-yourself (DIY)” refers to an impulse to learn and make without relying on experts. The term was first used in the 1950s as home improvements were popularized by a widespread shift to the suburbs. Today, this approach has been adopted by skilled builders and hobbyists alike who have taken making into their own hands to improve their domestic and urban environment.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel talked about his collection of DIY home and furniture design, instructions for which are available for download online and in his new book, Hartz IV Moebel. The project seeks to democratize good, cheap design and affordable homes, and engage people in the building process.

• Karma Economy and Book Release

An electric car is an automobile that is propelled by partial or full electrical energy. Since the mid-2000s, the production of electric cars has experienced a renaissance due to advances in battery and power management technologies and concerns about peak oil prices and the environmental consequences of carbon dioxide emissions. The current debate around electric cars points to the near-future possibility of urban environments with 100-percent electric car usage. This would dramatically change urban spaces, given the need to create charging and parking spaces for these new types of vehicles. The adoption of hybrid vehicles, which combine oil usage with partly electric-powered engines, is a transitional step toward an all-electric automotive environment.

Plug In Park Up explored e-mobility and the future of parking by inviting experts from the fields of mobility, cycling, and climate change.

• Plug In Park Up

Emission reduction is a process of energy efficiency intended to decrease pollution. Cities have the capacity to approach emission reduction in innovative ways, allowing for a full-systems approach to this challenge.

During the Cycling Fast Facts presentations, Frank Müller, CEO, Urban-e GmbH, talked about how to replace your car with a cargo e-bike. He showcased the advantages of e-bikes and cargo e-bikes and advocated for replacing cars with electric bikes for more sustainable urban environments.

• Cycling Fast Facts

While today we have more and more digital friends, we experience fewer emotional connections in our “real-world” daily lives. In growing cities, we are seeing a decline in the number, value, and duration of our physical interactions with people. Designers and architects are approaching city planning in a way that facilitates meaningful interactions.

Bubble Lab was an event meant to foster communication between strangers in an age of growing cities with increasing-ly anonymous interactions. Strangers met and spoke, illustrating the need to communicate, collaborate, and share common visions in urban life.

• Bubble Lab

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the capacity to identify, measure, and control one’s emotions and recognize emotional information as it is expressed by others. The EI, as opposed to the IQ (intelligence quotient), is a measure of one’s capacity to perceive emotional signals. Peter Salovey, Daniel Goleman, and John D. Mayer are the leading psychologists working on the subject, and have been active in this area of study since the 1990s. EI combines the ability to perceive with empathetic emotions—critical skills for urban dwellers who seek to create a more convivial social network.

At the Lab, Isabel Dziobek used the Emotionstrainer software to ask if our daily interactions would change if we taught people how to better read emotions.

• Emotionstrainer

Empowerment technologies are innovative uses of technology that empower citizens in the process of actively contributing to their built environment. Following a do-it-yourself philosophy, tangible actions like making, building, and hacking lead to greater citizen participation and thus empowerment within the urban environment.

The Lending Library and Engineering Genius Bar developed by José Gómez Márquez empowered visitors to use technology to meet their own needs.

• Lending Library and Engineering
  Genius Bar

The ecological footprint is an indicator of human pressure on the Earth’s natural resources. In particular, it represents the amount of land or water needed to sustain a segment of the population or an individual. Each year, the UN publishes a number that is calculated based on various metrics measuring humanity’s stress on the environment, which is increasing at unsustainable rates, especially in cities. A recent report claimed that by the year 2030 we will need approximately two Earths to support us. This hyper-consumption is a pressing issue that requires everyone—from high officials to average citizens—to commit to collective problem solving.

Natalie Jeremijenko, artist and engineer, explained how artistic interventions and actions can be successful prescriptions for environmental issues including pollution, overcrowded cities, and lack of wildlife in city areas.

• Natalie Jeremijenko: Toward a Healthy Urban Environmental Commons

Experiential technology is an immersive digital environment that allows citizens to experience an event or a place without being there physically.

C.A.P.E. is a Computer Automated Personal Environment, created by the Brussels-based performance group CREW, that was showcased at the Berlin Lab. Using guided virtual-reality headset devices, visitors explored the site of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, Japan and took a walk through Brussels, questioning the limits of reality and asking whether we even need to be in a city to experience it.

• C.A.P.E: Into the Heart of the Experience

Experimentation is a word that comes from science and refers to methods of testing a thesis. It is a process of action, reflection, and learning whereby new ideas can be tested and, if successful, implemented. Experimentation is a key element of healthy cities, which should embrace challenges to the status quo and seek ways to push thoughtful progress forward in creative, original ways.

The Lab project itself is a form of urban experimentation through creative urban interventions and programs. At the Lab, certain experiments were also carried out, such as Testing, Testing!, an experiment and study by the University of Waterloo’s Professor Colin Ellard, which launched at the Lab in New York. Through Ellard’s ongoing initiative, visitors take part in a study of the emotional and physiological effect of various urban spaces.

• Testing, Testing!

Food consumption is the act of eating animal or vegetable elements in order to sustain life and provide energy. Historically, the location of markets and food-distribution centers has been a crucial component for the establishment and planning of cities, and has also affected economic and social transactions. Food is not equally accessible in cities around the world: hunger affects 925 million people and 98 percent of them live in developing countries. Cities are working to eradicate hunger through innovative new initiatives facilitated by technology. Eliminating extreme hunger worldwide is one of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.

Nicola Twilley, author of the blog Edible Geography and co-director of Studio X at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, gave a talk and led a workshop that explored the need for making food production and consumption processes in cities more transparent.

• Foodscape Mapping

Forecasting is the practice of making predictions about events that have not yet occurred. Forecasting typically involves data analysis and statistical methods to predict the future. Founded in 1968, the Institute for the Future pioneered the field of forecasting and currently offers a compelling look into future trends, possibilities, and challenges.

Matthias Böttger of Raumtaktik and DAZ (Deutsche Architektur Zentrum) involved a group of students from the University of Montreal and other participants in a planning session at the Lab for the future of cities. The participants broke into groups, and each one was charged with forecasting a future scenario for a city.

• The Future is the New “But”: Wild Speculations about the Future of Cities

Parking—the practice of storing one’s automobile—typically happens along city streets in blocks of pavement reserved for the purpose. This practice of using street space for parking is draining city infrastructure and space. As our cities become increasingly populous, we have less space to store cars. With this in mind, “the future of parking” explores alternatives for personal automobile use and storage.

The Parking 2.0 panel at the Lab explored the negative impacts of our existing personal mobility system and what new demands urban parking will face in the near future. In addition, the daylong event, Labplatz called attention to the importance of public space by transforming parking spaces into places for leisure, cooking, socializing, and learning.

• Parking 2.0; The Future of Parking
• Labplatz

Gentrification is a global, urban phenomenon whereby underdeveloped areas are transformed. The process is often coupled with rising rents, a shift
in the social fabric of neighborhoods, and in many cases, the influx of multinational corporations. Gentrification is one of the most polemic terms in urban discourse today. To some it implies the beautification and positive development of previously underdeveloped areas. However, it goes hand in hand with the negative effects of lower-income residents being priced out in favor of those who can afford increased rent prices caused by the process of rapid transformation.

Tracking Gentrification was a gentrification tour led by urban curator Jurgen Breiter. For more than five hours, participants had the opportunity to walk around two already gentrified areas: Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg. The tour gave an insightful view of the origins, causes, and physical manifestations of gentrification in the area, and analyzed how the same process is starting in the nearby area of Wedding.

• Tracking Gentrification Tour by
  Jurgen Breiter

Hackerspaces offer a place for like-minded individuals to gather and share ideas and resources. Emerging out of the Maker Movement over the past few years, hackerspaces have proliferated globally. Hackerspaces serve a diverse group of individuals, most commonly those involved with engineering, science, computer programming, art, and digital technology. By pooling resources and expertise, hackerspaces provide a gen-erative platform for citizens to innovate and build digital and physical interventions in the city.

Bilal Ghalib talked about the proliferation of hackerspaces around the world in the last four years. He shared his research into hackerspaces in countries in the Middle East, where governments have traditionally been less supportive of open-source or free information, and how these spaces have created new opportunities for learning and sharing.

• Skillshare Workshop

The Happy City is the concept that cultivating “urban joy” can dramatically improve the city on an emotional, infrastructural, and economic level. Coming down to the core value of trust, citizens who feel good about where they live are more likely to take care of it, spend money, and socialize with strangers.

At the Lab, Charles Montgomery led a tour to test the theory that urban design can alter the way we feel and treat other people. Later, he gave a talk about his research for his forthcoming book, The Happy City.

• Green City, Grey City, Good City:
  Workshop with Charles Montgomery
• The Happy City

“Hybridity” is a term that originated in biology to refer to the offspring of two different species. It has since been adopted by theorists working with identity politics, post-colonialism, race, and multiculturalism. With their dynamic mix of cultures and ideas, today’s cities are places where hybridity thrives.

In his talk about socially engaged architecture, Andres Lepik, Director of the Architekturmuseum of TUM, discussed the new hybrid role of the architect and the shifts and ethical obligations that the architectural profession now faces.

Mirko Zardini, Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), also discussed how he sees the role of the architect evolving. The profession is changing rapidly and demands flexibility in addition to the traditional, more defined work scope of architects and urban planners.

• Andres Lepik: Moderators of Change—
  Socially Engaged Architecture
• Actions: What You Can Do with the City

An influencer is a person whose actions affect change on a large scale or within a group of people. The term, commonly used in sociology, psychology, ethics, geopolitics, and economics, recently has been widely adopted online to refer to websites or web content that exerts a strong effect on public opinion.

The Marathon of Transformation gath-
ered together a group of more than fifteen international and Berlin-based influencers and transformers who presented the ways they are actively affecting urban change.

• Marathon of Transformation

Innovation refers to activities at the forefront of society that challenge the status quo and push for meaningful progress. Often used in the field of science, technology, and the arts, the term implies the production of new ideas or notable improvements to existing ideas.

Toy designer Barry Kudrowitz led an interactive talk that focused on the connections between innovation, humor, and play.

• How Play and Humor Help Us Innovate

Intergenerational interaction is the sharing of activities, space, and knowledge between the old and young. As our aging population surpasses that of any previous time in history, it is becoming increasingly important that the barriers, both physical and mental, that keep people of different ages apart are removed.

Ageless Evening brought together psychologists, artists, and theater performers to create an evening of intergenerational socializing and sharing.

• Ageless Evening

Intuition involves the use of sense-based abilities and the unconscious to make decisions rather than relying entirely on reason or comprehensible, tangible information. Originating from Carl Jung’s writings about ego in the 1920s, where he posited that intuition comes from a person’s clarity of perception, the term has been used in the field of psychology and neurology to refer to right-brain activity. Intuition is a key component for the creativity and innovation required in urban development and design.

At the Lab, Gerd Gigerenzer argued that intuition can be a powerful tool for decision making and should be considered more widely in addition to other hard data or reason-based methods.

• The Power of Intuition

A laser cutter is a device used to sever durable materials with a powerful, targeted laser beam. Originally used in industrial manufacturing, the tool has recently been democratized for wide-spread use among independent citizens, makers, and crafters.

During its first weeks in Berlin, the Lab housed a state-of-the-art laser cutter and ran daily workshops to teach people how to use it to make customized creations.

• Marathon of Making

“Learning by doing,” a theory that comes from economics, refers to the capacity of workers to self-educate and improve their skills on the job. In the realm of pedagogy, it refers to a style of learning that resists the traditional hierarchy of education and elevates practical activity and experience as viable sources for knowledge. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright were important advocates of learning by doing in architecture and design. These leaders in the field based their designs and educational methods on teaching architecture students to make things with their hands in order to incorporate experience into their theoretical education. Architects and designers can validate learning by doing by encouraging participation by experts and non-experts alike, and by valuing participation over being correct or highly skilled.

Fattinger Orso Architektur, a Vienna-based design and fabrication studio, led a workshop in which participants collectively conceived of, prepared plans for, and built a temporary outdoor structure over a period of only four days.

• Design Build: Learning by Doing

Liegenschaftsfonds is the policy where-by city-owned plots in Berlin are sold in a bidding process where monetary value determines the selling process. The policy raises a number of important issues, including the privatization of public land and the support of organizations whose social contribution is high, but whose operating budget is low. The Liegenschaftsfonds was established in 2001 in Berlin as a company, the full shareholder of which is the city of Berlin.

Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the Berliner Liegenschaften invited key stakeholders and politicians to discuss the crisis of the sale of public land in Berlin.

• Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the Berliner Liegenschaften

The Maker movement is a participatory, social culture that invites and inspires all kinds of people and communities to invent, build, and hack. Making and doing with your hands encourages creativity, innovation, and ultimately, design thinking. This mentality advocates for transparency in design and production and resists built-in obsolescence. It also favors self-initiated production over consumerism. The Maker Faire, which was founded by Dale Dougherty in 2006, is an important meeting point for makers worldwide, as are the two leading maker-oriented journals, Make and Craft.

Dale Dougherty, founder of Make, explained the basics of the maker movement, the attributes of a maker, and the long-term effects of the maker philosophy on personal life, business, and culture.

• What is the Maker Movement?

“Megacity” is a term used by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements to describe “urban agglomerations” consisting of more than ten million people. One of the greatest challenges facing society today is the rapid acceleration of the population concentrated in these urban centers. Despite the challenges of megacities, they are thought to be the key to a sustainable future for the planet, mainly due to their efficient concentration of services, products, and people.

As part of its film series, the Lab featured Megacities (Michael Glawogger, Austria, 1998), a movie that tells stories of survival in four megacities around the world: Mumbai, Mexico City, Moscow, and New York.

• Megacities

Large-scale change is usually the result of the accumulation of many minor changes. It is through this minimal variation that we will achieve the maximum impact. Many architects and designers today are concerned with making small changes in order to create a more sustainable and socially responsible city.

Architecture curator and historian Andres Lepik spoke about the social responsibility of architecture, art, and design. Beyond its function, architecture has a strong influence on society: forms, materials, proportions, and the design of buildings as a whole permanently shape the everyday life of individuals.

• Andres Lepik: Moderators of Change—
  Socially Engaged Architecture

Mixed-use buildings are designed to incorporate a variety of uses for otherwise single-use structures. Rejecting the notions that buildings should be confined to specialized or themed purposes and that people of different ages and socio-economic status should be separate, proponents of mixed-use development seek to encourage a healthy balance that stimulates social well-being, creative industries, and the economy at large.

During his Happy City lecture, Charles Montgomery brought up examples of how the implementation of mixed-used building in the city of Vancouver brought tangible examples of social improvement and neighborhood development.

• Happy City

“Multidisciplinary practice” refers to a collaborative approach that encourages those with diverse backgrounds to contribute to a project or to solving a problem. The term can be traced back to scientific publications of the 1930s and ’40s, where it was sometimes used to describe work conducted across multiple fields. In our current age of over-specialization, multidisciplinary projects have a central role in bringing together the most advanced knowledge from each area and applying it towards a common goal.

The Lab itself is a multidisciplinary urban project that brings together experts from a multiplicity of fields to focus on one topic: cities. All programs, collaborators, and staff of the Lab study cities from a multidisciplinary perspective in order to crowdsource a richer, more holistic learning experience about our urban environment.

A non-expert is an individual who engages in an activity despite having no formal training or background in it. This type of participation is essential to city development because cities are made up of individuals who are not necessar-ily experts. Rather, these people have powerful lived experiences that can be harnessed as valuable resources for identifying issues and solutions in cities. The notion of the non-expert resonates
in the context of the rise of crowd-
sourced urban initiatives. Relying on the power of the many non-experts that constitute a city, such measures work to create a detailed piece of information or infrastructure.

At the Lab, several programs spoke to the importance of the non-expert in city life, including The Power of Intuition and Can Infrastructure Be Crowdsourced?

Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer argued that intuition can be a powerful tool for decision making and should be considered more widely as a complementary addition to other hard data or rational-based methods.

Dietmar Offenhuber shared how crowdsourcing could be applied to city infrastructure. In this talk, he gave examples of how this is being done and what the main issues and possibilities are. Crowdsourcing is considered a tool that can create smarter cities by allowing the addition of real-time sensing to all elements in an urban system.

• The Power of Intuition
• Can Infrastructure be Crowdsourced?

“Open governance” refers to citizen access to government information, data, and processes to enable widespread participation and collaboration in
governmental decision-making processes. Often, this type of engagement harnesses technology to facilitate a more active and open communication between citizens and government, leading to more efficient use of budgets and improved quality of life for city dwellers. Open governance has the potential to make urban governments more accountable to their citizens, while enhancing the legitimacy of those in power.

The Open Governance panel brought together Dieter Zinnbauer, Transparency International; Anke Domscheit-Berg, the founder of Opengov.me; and Helmut K. Anheier, Dean of the Hertie School of Governance to discuss the possibilities and challenges of open governance.

• Open Governance Panel

“Open-source” refers to any software whose code is designed in such a way that the user participates in the creation of data. The term was originally coined by a group of engineers in 1998 when they founded the Open Source Initiative. This term is closely related to free software, Copyleft, and Creative Commons—all initiatives that seek to democratize access to information.

Joseph Grima spoke about open-source architecture at the Lab. Grima analyzed this trend, which allows the ideas of multiple people and especially end users to come together in the form of a built artifact.

• Open-Source Architecture

Public space is a term that derives from the Latin word poplicus (people). It describes the free use of shared land over which no one person has sole ownership. This concept of the commons goes back to Greek and Roman ideals and has percolated throughout Western culture to shape the notion of public space in contemporary cities. The right for people to peacefully assemble is inscribed in the United States Constitution. However, in each country, public space and the right to it is defined differently. Strategies that seek to give back public space to the citizens come as a reaction to the elements of exclusion that can happen in public space.

Putting public space back into the hands of citizens was a core element of several Lab programs, including Labplatz and Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the Berliner Liegenschaften.

Labplatz called attention to the importance of public space by transforming parking spaces for one whole day and turning them into places for leisure, cooking, socializing, and learning.

Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the Berliner Liegenschaften invited key stakeholders and politicians to discuss the crisis of the sale of public land in Berlin.

• Labplatz
• Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the Berliner Liegenschaften

Participation is the process by which citizens make valued contributions within any collective activity. Participation is particularly important in maintaining a functioning democracy. Internet culture and open-source platforms have in-creased citizen participation in recent years. The Occupy movement and other participatory movements have also helped take citizen participation in urban social welfare to the next step, generating citizen-involvement initiatives and questioning city governance that is neither transparent nor participatory.

Ernst-Dieter Lantermann discussed the psychology of participation at the Lab in his lecture about social involvement, while activist Carsten Joost described his lifelong experience as a highly participatory citizen.

• A Waste of Time and Effort?
  Twenty Years of Civic Participation
• Social Involvement—Life Satisfaction and Participation

“Place-making” is a term that refers to a practice of making inclusive design decisions for the well-being of all. Place-Making involves policy-makers, designers, and community members who are interested in creating new urban environments and places that can bring people together and be conducive to various needs.

Jörg Stollmann led a tour of Gropiusstadt, where he and his team are working with and for its residents in a setting of community-based research and design. Their goal is to turn this urban complex, built in the 1960s, into a new place for improved design and social interactions.

• Step by Step: A Walk through Gropiusstadt

Rapid prototyping—a model for quickly realizing new designs using 3-D printing and other digital platforms—has caused a prototyping revolution in just the past few years. As the first and second industrial revolutions signified a shift from the handmade to the machine-made to the assembly line, this third revolution represents a dramatic shift in manufacturing. With 3-D printing technology, we are able to produce at low cost, in low quantities, with minimal labor, and with a new level of precision and customization. This technology is creating remarkable opportunities for the technology and medical fields; for cities, rapid prototyp-ing allows us to dramatically alter the urban landscape to meet our needs at an accelerated rate.

The Lab in Berlin hosted a two-week period of programs focused on making, where visitors used 3-D printers to do rapid prototyping. Portable 3-D printers were also developed, built, and donated to various cultural producers in Berlin.

• Marathon of Making Things

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is the motto that has been adopted to educate and promote responsible ways to discard waste while making it useful. The “three Rs” explain a hierarchy of processing waste, with the first tier being the reduction of consumption, the second, the reuse of existing materials, and the third, recycling.

Jo Royle, build project manager and skipper of the Plastiki, presented the Plastiki project: an eighteen-meter-long catamaran built from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles and other waste products.

• Plastiki Expedition: Jo Royle

Responsive infrastructure is the theory that the relationship between user and system can allow for two-way feedback. Responsive infrastructure is directly related to the notion of intelligent build-ings and smart cities. Responsive city infrastructure systems are designed to measure, respond, and alter their services and appearances based on a specific set of needs.

Poiesis Fellows Orit Halpern and Nerea Calvillo, together with Poiesis program director Harel Shapira, discussed the dangers and opportunities of fully responsive cities, such as the extreme example of Songdo, Korea—a city built from scratch and used as a testing ground for cutting-edge sensor technologies by Cisco Systems.

• Beautiful Data: Visualization, Territory, and the Future of Urban Space

Self-regulation is a model whereby the user is asked to monitor and control his or her own behavior, rather than relying on an outside entity to do so. If properly implemented in cities, it can effectively mobilize a participatory civic body that collectively monitors and improves city life without the input of policing or heavy-handed control.

Ben Hamilton Baille, architect and urban designer, explained the principles of street design and place-making by presenting new approaches to traffic engineering, speed, safety, and civility practices. He claimed that deregulation of traffic and pedestrian rules is a crucial step towards street safety.

• Street Design and Place-Making:
  New Approaches to Traffic Engineering, Speed, Safety, and Civility

Self-solving is a process of independent problem-solving facilitated by creative-thinking strategies. It helps to build up people’s skills while minimizing their reliance on various federal and state apparatuses. Self-solving is an important mindset for the responsible citizen, who, with the power of technology or other means, can solve most of his problems without relying on the expertise of specialists or the need to buy new devices.

Upstall Kreuzberg, a Kreuzberg-based group of architects and urban planners, presented their proposal for the transformation of a coveted empty lot of land in the district of Kreuzberg. The five-hectare lot for sale is owned by the federal government, and at risk of being sold to the highest bidder without contemplation of the neighborhood’s qualities and needs. Upstall was founded in 2011 by a group of professionals interested in active citizenship who took it upon themselves to responsibly develop the empty lot based on a series of carefully considered criteria.

• Marathon of Transformation: How Would You Transform Your City?

A sensor is a tool that measures the prescribed physical quality or presence of something and communicates that data through an electronic or digital device. Examples of common sensors include a thermometer, a smartphone, or a carbon dioxide detector. Complex sensors are becoming ever more ubiquitous in cities—especially as the popularity of smartphones increases—and are usually mentioned when discussing smart cities. However, without a meaningful understanding and analysis of the data they are built to collect, sensors can prove senseless and devoid of any real interest or usefulness.

Physical Objects That Talk Back was a workshop that explored how to turn inanimate objects into intelligent devices that respond to human input.

• Physical Objects That Talk Back

Even though sharing is a concept as ancient as human culture itself, in recent years technology has enabled sharing on an unprecedented level. Through community websites, live interface, and social media, sharing has become a viable alternative to monetary exchange on- and off-line. Sharing is most common in transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces. While sharing thrives on a peer-to-peer level, it is also a logic that must be considered in city planning to be implemented on a large scale as more people demand carpooling, bike sharing, shared Internet connection, and other collective resources.

Heidemarie Schwermer shared her experience of living without money for more than sixteen years. She engaged Lab participants in a conversation about how she has managed to live without her own apartment and with only a few possessions, just by sharing.

• Living by Sharing:
  Heidemarie Schwermer
• Swap Shop

A skill share is a platform for individuals to exchange knowledge. The most notable skill share, Skillshare International, has roots in the Service Civil International (SCI), an organization established in the wake of World War I to encourage servicemen across borders to share skills and services. In the city, this ethos of skill sharing can create solidarity based on cooperation and generosity.

The Lab in Berlin became an active center for skill sharing between locals and international participants and visitors. Workshops like the Lending Library and Engineering Genius Bar encouraged MIT program organizers to share their skills with visitors and vice versa.

• Lending Library and Engineering
  Genius Bar

“The smart city” refers to the city that offers both the physical infrastructure and the technological apparatus to support a sophisticated, underlying information, communication, and sensing network. The presence of cutting-edge technology in an urban environment does not, in itself, constitute a smart city. Smart cities can only become such when the balance between technology and its benefits to people is successfully achieved.

Poiesis Fellows Orit Halpern and Nerea Calvillo, together with Poiesis program director Harel Shapira, shared their research about smart cities, with a focus on the city of Songdo, Korea.

• Beautiful Data

Space activation is the practice of bringing life to unused urban spaces. Turning spaces into vibrant areas can be undertaken by city governments or by individual initiatives. Spaces that are used and lived in increase safety, encourage socio-economic interactions in neighborhoods, and lead to an improved feeling of ownership and belonging to a city area.

Dynamic Public Spaces was an intensive two-day workshop led by researchers from the MIT SENSEable City Lab and the Austrian Institute of Technology. The first part of the workshop covered the basic theory and science of crowd dynamics and how humans act in public spaces. The workshop then continued with a hands-on component where a group of visitors went to Alexanderplatz for a site-specific action. They altered public space and, with the help of image processing and 3-D cameras, document-ed the effects of the intervention.

• Dynamic Public Spaces

Individuals can be associated with two opposing attitudes when it comes to city space and how it is created and used. Some may identify with the more passive approach of a consumer of urban spaces, while others might consider themselves active space producers. The passive, consumerist behavior is encouraged by a more capitalist trend of thought that imagines citizens as end receivers. However, leading urbanists and city activists stress the importance of encouraging citizens to take on the producer role. Through ownership of one’s space, changes and actions can be made in the fabric of our cities.

Lab Team member Rachel Smith’s Labplatz program called attention to the importance of public space by taking over parking spaces and transforming them into places for leisure, cooking, socializing, and learning.

• Labplatz

The sustainable city is engineered to create the smallest possible ecological footprint by employing state-of-the-art conservation strategies and public education, and minimizing waste, pollution, and resource consumption. Environmental consciousness in architecture goes back to Reyner Banham’s 1969 book, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Since then, the field of “green urbanism” has grown and produced ecological strategies designed to maintain and build more sustainable urban models. Many buildings seek LEED certification in order to be granted sustainable, green status. However, more recent trends indicate that LEED certification for buildings does not solely determine sustainability in design. Rather, LEED criteria should become the rule for responsible building, with an additional set of behavior-centered practices leading the way towards more sustainable cities and buildings.

Making Environment explored how do-it-yourself technologies can enable citizens to better understand and improve their environmental footprint.

• Making Environment

The objective of sustainable tourism is to support the local economy by channeling the best assets of a city into tourism in a responsible way. This can be achieved through communication, inspiration, and positive deviance from tourism norms. The future of a positive, socially engaged tourism relies on resilience, ecology, economy, and prosperity. Sustainable tourism is built on a foundation of social and community connections and can thus empower citizens and neighborhoods.

Manda Brookman, director of CoaST, One Planet Tourism, led a two-part master class about sustainable tourism practices.

• Sustainable Tourism Master Class

“Temporary architecture” refers to structures that are meant to exist only for a limited amount of time. Sometimes, temporary architecture can also be mobile. Temporary architecture is not created with the goal of permanence—rather, its value lies in the impact it can have on people within a limited period of time. It can encourage architects to think on a more cross-disciplinary plane and inspire inhabitants to act, think, and feel in unconventional ways. Temporary architecture can give a sense of place without stasis, while challenging the concept of what a building can be. Temporary architecture also enables the subversive. In a world of cloud living, temporary architecture has become the expression of a society in constant flux.

The Temporary Architecture panel included Teddy Cruz, Estudio Teddy Cruz; Robert Kronenberg, Roscoe Chair of Architecture, University of Liverpool, School of Architecture; Jürgen Mayer H.; Lena Kleinheinz, Magma Architecture; and Peter Fattinger, Design-Build. The panelists engaged in a deep discussion of the purpose and potential of temporary buildings.

• Temporary Architecture Panel

Human beings have created spaces and built structures since prehistoric times. However, the specialization and definition of those who build as architects is a modern phenomenon. During medieval times and earlier, those in charge of building were more anonymously associated with craftsmen or artisans. Only in the modern era did architecture become differentiated from the work of the craftsman or engineer as a profession in its own right. This elevation of the architect reached its apogee at the end of the twentieth century with the rise of the so-called “starchitect.” In the last decade, the profession of architect has undergone dramatic shifts, due in part to the combination of economic hardship and slowed-down construction practices with the impossibility of sustaining starchitect aspirations for yet more iconic creations. Specialists and theorists in the architectural sphere point to a need for a New Architect, a revised role whereby the architect acts as a social catalyst, community organizer, and facilitator for organizing space and brokering urban relationships.

Andres Lepik, architecture curator and historian, spoke about the new role of the architect who needs to act more like a community organizer than a top-down designer in the traditional sense.

• Andres Lepik: Moderators of Change—
  Socially Engaged Architecture

Thinkering is a combination of the words “tinkering” and “thinking.” It suggests a mode of thinking that brings together the thought moment with the execution moment, a shift that is facilitated by technology and rapid prototyping platforms.

Joseph Grima explained that “thinkering” is the idea that, through a mix of tinkering and thinking, design can reach new levels of functionality and efficiency. In the past, reaching the consumer with a finished product was the goal. Now, we often see the end user participating in the packaging and creation of the end product.

• Joseph Grima and Carlo Ratti on
  Open-Source Architecture

A tinkerer is someone who enjoys repairing or inventing with machine parts. This act of innovation through doing and repairing is what tinkering is all about. The word derives from “tinker,” used as early as the twelfth century to refer to someone who repaired household utensils. It has been widely appropriated by the maker community.

Making Things Digital engaged visitors in tinkering, an act that gives us the possibility to change our relationship to machines and electronics, creating a two-way dialogue.

• Making Things Digital

Active transformation is a state of continual movement, improvement, and change of the urban commons. Change agents and motivated individuals can trigger moments of transformation and make full system change possible for cities. The best way to achieve transformation is through “transformation champions,” individuals who push possible transformation forward by showing successful examples of their own transformative power.

The Marathon of Transformation gathered together a group of more than fifteen international and Berlin-based influencers and transformers who presented the ways in which they are actively affecting urban change.

• Marathon of Transformation

Effective urban relationships are largely based on notions of trust, rather than systems that rely on control. While strategies of trust imply uncertainty about the outcomes—which can prove challenging for some—they are also known to benefit process-driven thinking and experimentation. Trust leads to more convivial cities in ever more diverse urban contexts.

Field Trips took visitors on biking excursions to meet individuals from various backgrounds and professions as they told their own personal Berlin stories. For each edition, in an act of trust, Berlin citizens opened the doors of their homes and businesses, letting Lab visitors in to learn about their way of life.

• Field Trips

As opposed to recycling, which converts and downgrades used materials, upcycling is the practice of reusing available materials for new purposes of equal or higher value than that of the object they originally came from. The term became popular in the mid-1990s when the effectiveness of recycling was being questioned and a rediscovery of craft and making was taking place. Upcycling gives value to repurposed materials by adding a design element to the final product and investing it with the “cool” factor that sustainable items have acquired in recent years. Some argue that upcycling can render a product counterproductive if the amount of packaging to market it results in the creation of more disposable materials.

Andreas Strauss, artist and designer, explained how, by adding function to everyday items, we can create a mentality of reuse. Strauss engaged visitors in a workshop to collectively convert a waste receptacle into a mobile stove. When closed, the object looks like a regular trash bin. When opened, it looks like a gas stove with surfaces for serving and preparing food.

• Soupermobile: Build a Dumpster Kitchen

Urban beauty is the subjective assessment of the aesthetic values of a city. Some argue that allowing layers of history and urban decay to be revealed produces the ultimate urban aesthetic. Others prefer new, pristine developments that are clean, orderly, and employ the newest technology or building techniques. This multiplicity of perspectives, and the patchwork that the city becomes as a result, is the ultimate manifestation of urban beauty.

What is Beautiful? featured presentations and a panel discussion about the perception of beauty in cities by leading academic and professional figures in the fields of aesthetics, architecture, and urban planning in Berlin. Wolfgang Welsch discussed the subjectivity of beauty as a condition of unique human-centered vision. He analyzed one of modernity’s key principles—that only from a human perspective can we understand the world as valuable.

• What is Beautiful?

Urban data is the information that cities produce, which is measured and turned into facts, figures, and visualizations. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google, the amount of data collected between the dawn of humanity and 2003 is equivalent to the amount we now produce every two days. This phenomenon of massively proliferating data, increasingly referred to as “big data,” comes with the task of filtering and making accessible this new wealth of information.

Poiesis Fellows Orit Halpern and Nerea Calvillo, together with Poiesis program director Harel Shapira, delivered a talk about the use of data in Smart Cities.

• Beautiful Data: Visualization, Territory and the Future of Urban Space

Urban fatigue is a condition common in city dwellers, where city life results in increased anxiety, fatigue, stress, and overstimulation. Stress produced by the demands of city life is one of the leading silent epidemics of the modern era, with serious physical and psychological effects.

Body Cartography revealed that, in cities, we often censor our feelings to push against overstimulation created by overcrowded, loud, densely populated urban situations. The program worked on undoing this behavior by trying to promote empathy with our physical surroundings.

• Feeling the City: An Investigation in Urban Empathy

Urban history is the branch of history dedicated to the study of cities. Its focus is on the ways cities originated and how the process of urbanization developed from the time of the first human settlements to the present. Urban history is of great importance to discussions about the future of cities. No city can know its future without first analyzing, understand-ing, and accepting its past.

Cold War Center: Checkpoint Charlie sought to observe and analyze the history of one of Berlin’s most iconic historic locations. The panel of experts discussed the future of Checkpoint Charlie and the need for a Cold War museum in its location, as well as the benefits or disservices that the theme-park effect can have on collective urban memory.

• Cold War Center: Checkpoint Charlie

“Urban intervention” refers to activities that disrupt the habitual functioning of a city. Interventions are typically performed by artists or activists. Ranging from street art and design challenges to ephemeral gatherings, flash mobs, and celebrations, this type of activity achieves a temporary social cohesiveness and surprise factor that urban dwellers crave.

Mirko Zardini, Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), described the CCA’s Actions project in which they documented and catalogued practical and poetic urban interventions and actions carried out throughout the world.

Joe Hatchiban runs a notorious weekly Karaoke event in Prenzlauer Berg’s Mauerpark that brings thousands of strangers together. Similarly, Music on the Move transformed urban space through a mobile karaoke unit.

• Actions: What You Can Do with the City
• Music on the Move

“Urban livability” refers to a level of well-being based on various measurable criteria in an urban setting. Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey rates major cities based on various criteria including political and social environment, economic environment, and medical and health considerations, among others.

Colin Ellard, research psychologist and professor at the University of Waterloo, talked about environmental design as it relates to health and described how our minds and bodies respond to the design of the urban environment that surrounds us.

• Colin Ellard: Environmental Design and Human Health

Urban microhistories are individual or collective stories that often go unnoticed in large cities. Microhistories distance themselves from the official narrative of a city and focus instead on the importance of smaller, valuable experiences that create the true fabric of city narratives. Urban microhistories offer a powerful portrait of the city that preserves cultural difference and personal voices.

The Lab placed a high value on the exploration of Berlin microhistories. Two programs in particular explored hidden narratives that took visitors on unusual city explorations: Field Trips took visitors on biking excursions to meet individuals from different backgrounds and professions as they told their own personal Berlin stories. Another program organized a visit to the home and studio of Ekkehard Maaß, German Democratic Republic (GDR) civil rights activist and musician. Maaß gave an introduction to his art salon where—behind the Iron Curtain—GDR artists and dissidents secretly met.

• Field Trips
• Ekkehard Maaß

“Urban mobility” refers to the ability to get oneself from point A to point B in an urban environment. The options for city transport are varied, and include walking, biking, and other forms of privately or publicly operated transportation. Expanding populations, urban sprawl, and the dangerous effects of carbon dioxide are all issues to consider when addressing the challenges and opportunities related to urban mobility. Encouraging multi-mobility systems that incorporate walking, car sharing, bike sharing, public transportation networks, and new city design that reduces commuting are examples of strategies designed to improve urban mobility.

Lab Team member Rachel Smith’s Dynamic Connections Map, developed for the Berlin Lab, is the world’s first interactive biking map to explore urban mobility through biking. The Dynamic Connections Map rates different Berlin streets on their amenability for cycling, based on traffic volume, topography, and safety considerations. Users can identify which streets should have future biking infrastructure, creating a crowdsourced map of the potential future biking network in Berlin.

• Rachel Smith’s Dynamic Connections Map

Urban psychology is the study of our environment and how it affects us. Urban psychology studies the effects of cities and urban living on people’s mental health and well-being by addressing a variety of areas such as urban fatigue, stress, overstimulation, fear, anxiety, happiness, and our relationship to space.

At the Lab, most of the programs organized by Lab Team member Corinne Rose were connected to the larger topic of urban psychology. Notable among these was a talk by renowned psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer about the power of intuition and Tom Stafford’s lecture on the psychological perception of cities.

• The Power of Intuition
• Lenses and Filters: the Mind and the City

“Urban sound” refers to the vast range of sounds that the city produces. From the rhythm of the steam engine to the drone of the automobile, the sound of our cities has always been a defining characteristic of urban life. While these sounds have served as creative inspiration for various artists, from the Futurists to John Cage, they also contribute to overstimulation. Through recent developments in technology, sound can also be harnessed as a valuable tool for measuring various datasets in the city.

Shintaro Miyazaki led a workshop that made audible the invisible waves through which information travels. We learned that sound can be a valuable tool in visualizing information, especially ephemeral data networks.

• Infoscape Listening

Like urban beauty, urban ugliness is the subjective assessment of the aesthetic values of a city. Some argue that allowing layers of history and urban decay to be revealed produces the ultimate urban aesthetic. Others prefer new, pristine developments that are clean, orderly, and employ the newest technology or building techniques.

As a part of the What is Beautiful? Panel, Jürgen Krusche, Institut für Gegenwartskunst, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, gave a presentation where he analyzed the locally well-known statement, “Berlin is ugly and it is good.” Krusche described the value of the ugly in the discourse about urban development and the need for complexity in cities to make them more functional.

• What is Beautiful?

Vacant space is land that has temporarily fallen out of use. In cities, vacant lots provide opportunities for spontaneous urban interventions, public gathering, and leisure, but can also become determining factors in the city’s economic well-being. If not managed correctly by city governments, an abundance of empty lots can lead to urban speculation and safety issues.

At the Marathon of Transformation, Gap Filler presented a variety of urban projects that made temporary use of vacant spaces in New Zealand after the Christchurch earthquake. They explained how short urban experiments provide an opportunity for citizens to test long-term solutions.

• Marathon of Transformation

After opening in New York in the summer of 2011, the BMW Guggenheim Lab traveled to Berlin. Over the course of thirty-three days, the Berlin Lab offered free programs, including workshops, screenings, and tours, and implemented urban projects in Berlin neighborhoods and online—all centered on “doing and making” to activate urban change. All programs at the Berlin Lab were developed around four main topics: Empowerment Technologies, Dynamic Connections, Perception and Urban Micro Lens, and the Senseable City.

As part of the culmination of the Lab’s experience in Berlin, this glossary aims to identify 100 of the most talked-about trends in urban thinking that played a role during the Lab’s first European venue. These terms and their definitions aim to document and take the “temperature” of a particular time and place —Berlin in the summer of 2012— and to understand what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what cities were, are, and can be. Each definition concludes with an example of a Berlin Lab program that illustrated the relevance and context of each term.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. One hundred of them, discussed at the Berlin Lab, follow.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in Berlin from June 15, 2012 through July 29, 2012.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin was developed by Maria Nicanor, Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab, and Amara Antilla, Curatorial Assistant, BMW Guggenheim Lab.

Design: Sulki & Min, Seoul

Photos: Luke Abiol

All text and photos © 2013 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Site design by
Collective Assembly

Development by
Tom van de Velde

The 74th Amendment of the Indian constitution was passed in 1992 in an effort to encourage decentralization of government and to improve the effectiveness of urban governance and planning. It grants municipalities more power on the local level than they had previously held, and specifies the structures that will facilitate governance and decision-making, such as ward committees and district-planning committees.

Speakers at various sessions of the Lab’s Meet in the Middle series frequently mentioned the amendment. During Participatory Planning, several panelists pointed to it as a significantly underutilized tool in citizen empowerment.

• Participatory Planning

Originally conceived as safety devices, vehicle horns have become a top concern relating to sound pollution in cities. Honking regulations appeared as soon as the first vehicles with manual bulb horns were introduced. Today, honking is illegal in most cities around the world. However, enforcing anti-honking rules has proven an almost impossible task. New York’s Department of Transportation decided to begin removing “no honking” signs in January 2013, a measure that was seen as a reflection of the signs’ ineffectiveness. In Mumbai, honking is ubiquitous, a cultural lingo used at all hours, day and night. Honking is often a substitute for the turn signal and serves as an all-purpose form of communication for drivers. Even when they have no apparent reason to do so, Mumbaikar drivers honk. In 2008, taxi drivers in Mumbai took an oath not to honk; the pledge had little to no effect.

In December 2012, celebrity cricket player Sachin Tendulkar visited the Mumbai Lab, and in a conversation about the city’s issues, he suggested a 10,000-honk rule that would allot every car only 10,000 honks after the time of its purchase; the regulation would control sound pollution in Mumbai’s streets and roads, and could fund urban noise-reduction projects: drivers who needed to use more than 10,000 honks would have to purchase them from the government.

• A Visit from Sachin Tendulkar

It is unfortunately common that violent or abusive acts occur in urban areas while witnesses stand by and fail to intervene. In metropolitan public spaces, this is known as the “bystander effect,” in which the likelihood of an individual intervening in a violent or emergency situation decreases as the number of other witnesses increases. In the home or in social settings, bystanders may not respond because of social boundaries, psychological shock, or a fear of repercussions.

The interactive performance Being Brave: Privacy and the World Around You used improvisational theater to discuss how we can and should intervene in situations of abuse, and change our behavior relating to violence.

• Being Brave: Privacy and the World Around You

“Accessibility” describes the ease with which something can be reached, obtained, used, or understood by as many people as possible. Though often used in reference to accessibility design—urban design that takes into account the full spectrum of other-abled (including elderly, disabled, and handicapped) individuals by creating a user-friendly urban and domestic environment—“accessibility” can also refer to a citizen’s ability to obtain basic services such as health care, education, employment, or information, or to participate in political or cultural activities.

Accessibility is a major concern for many Mumbaikars, especially the poor. The issue relates to the great distance one has to walk to get to the water supply; public spaces that are unsafe for women; and the government‘s lack of transparency. In Split City Mumbai, the first session of the Meet in the Middle series, the discussion largely focused on public space as the key issue to address in equalizing access for all.

• Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity

An Advanced Locality Management (ALM) group is a type of official residents’ association that became formally recognized by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) in 1997. Originally formed by residents of Joshi Lane, a northeastern suburb of Mumbai, in an effort to tackle issues of waste management and collection, ALMs have since spread throughout the city and have expanded their scope to include other small-scale, non-emergency issues such as road repair, tree planting, and neighborhood beautification. Though ALMs are primarily confined to middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, local residents created the first slum-based ALM in 2012.

Seema Redkar, advanced locality management officer for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, attended the Lab’s Meet in the Middle session on participatory planning. She discussed how ALMs could be better utilized in the city, and advocated for them to be more effectively integrated into the planning system.

• Participatory Planning

Conversations about the importance and necessity of affordable housing are happening in cities around the world. However, affordable housing plans often do not account for the fact that an affordable lifestyle depends on other factors related to housing: access to a vast range of other products and services at a low price point and community relationships that help bring down the cost of day-to-day life. Affordable communities are those that offer a holistically affordable lifestyle by actively enabling such services and relationships to prosper within close proximity of affordable housing.

During a vibrant debate in the Meet in the Middle session Mediating Public-Private Housing, it was noted that the current slum typology enables affordable communities to flourish naturally. Rather than just focusing on housing, conversations about new affordable housing solutions in Mumbai should be framed around affordable communities to ensure the practical sustainability of affordability-related housing initiatives.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

Bureaucracy generally refers to the infrastructure and set of administrative policies that govern public bodies. Citizens often view bureaucratic procedures and structures as impersonal, distant, and cumbersome. In the early 1900s, the German sociologist and political economist Max Weber used the notion of bureaucracy to explain the division of labor, and he praised its benefits and the way that it fostered specialization that increased efficiency. The rise of technology has reduced the amount of bureaucratic paperwork in some cities, particularly in the West. In cities like Mumbai that rely on older models of administration and information processing, an analog bureaucracy based mainly on the use of paper continues to be prevalent, meaning that everyday transactions can sometimes move slowly.

After six weeks of looking at specific areas of Mumbai through the Meet in the Middle series, select participants from previous discussions returned to the Lab to frame a manifesto for Mumbai advocating for greater communication and less bureaucratic obstruction in the ways city groups and agencies function.

• ME=WE Memorandum

Architectural restoration is the process of bringing back dated, damaged, worn, or structurally unsound pieces of the built environment to their original state and improving their condition. This includes the restoration of buildings, districts, waterfronts, and pavements. Although a seemingly outmoded term, architectural restoration is at the forefront of modern-day urban-renewal efforts and is often a more economical, sustainable, and efficient approach to redeveloping parts of the city than the comprehensive demolition and rebuilding of structures.

Planning in a Dynamic City brought together stakeholders from all levels to speak about the city’s future urban plans, and the possibilities of architectural restoration as an approach to confronting some of the city’s issues.

• Planning in a Dynamic City

In a social context, “aspiration” refers to the desire to achieve the wealth, social status, and material possessions that some people want, but very few actually obtain. Aspirational role models may inspire some to work hard and to be ambitious in the effort to achieve success. In some places with marked socioeconomic differences, including Mumbai, such role models play an important role. While some societies negatively perceive those who achieve social success and amass wealth and material goods, other cultures view such figures as the epitome of achievement.

Children from the poorer sections of Mumbai face a variety of daily struggles and hardships. At the event Creating the City for Our Children, a group of disadvantaged children shared their feelings with other, more well-off children and adults, expressing optimism and deep aspirations for themselves in their ideal future city.

• Creating the City for Our Children

An auto rickshaw is a vehicle commonly used in developing countries as a form of public transport. These motorized rickshaws provide city dwellers with cheap and efficient transportation. Typically three-wheeled and having no doors, these vehicles for hire are motorized versions of traditional cycle rickshaws or pulled rickshaws and are characterized by a small, covered cabin for the driver and passengers. Due to the intense traffic congestion in the city and their ability to maneuver more adeptly than cars through traffic, auto rickshaws (known as “autos” in Mumbai) are essential modes of transport for Mumbaikars. Autos are both beloved and hated in the city—they are seen as unsafe, yet are also considered efficient and more environmentally friendly, since new autos run on natural gas.

During An Auto-Taxi Discussion, participants examined central issues about the role of motorized rickshaws in Mumbai, such as the regulation of metered fares and the necessity for autos as a means of conveying passengers from public transport hubs to homes.

• An Auto-Taxi Discussion

Bollywood is the informal name for the popular Hindi mainstream film industry based primarily in Mumbai—and an allusion to its American counterpart, Hollywood. The B in the name is derived from the city’s former name, Bombay. Bollywood produces twice as many films per year as Hollywood, and with an average daily audience of fourteen million, it is the largest film industry in the world, second only to Hollywood in terms of overall revenue. Bollywood films are typically characterized by melodramatic plotlines, love stories, and elaborate song-and-dance numbers.

Through its portrayal of Mumbai on the silver screen, Bollywood has greatly influenced the psyche and self-image of the city, especially regarding the experience of public space. But its depiction of the city is often far from realistic. A Lab event showcased a series of independent films about Mumbai, investigating the alternative, less sanitized version of the city and its public-private tensions. A group of Bollywood artists responsible for crafting the iconic, though rapidly disappearing hand-painted Bollywood billboard advertisements also gave a hands-on workshop at the Lab’s Mahim Beach location.

• Film series
• Painting (Bollywood Art)

Bottom-up urban engagement places the citizen at the root of urban change. The term “bottom-up” first appeared in relation to its opposite, “top-down,” in the 1942 edition of Harvard University’s Quarterly Journal of Economics: “In the long run it is part of the larger question of whether ‘bottom-up’ control can be as efficient as ‘top-down’ control.” In an urban context, this approach has two key, complementary dimensions: first, a trend that encourages social, cooperative models of city organization; second, a growing interest from government officials, academia, and the professional sector in resorting to digital, open-sourced data and models as key resources for understanding urban interactions.

In the face of enormous challenges, Mumbaikars are masters of DIY problem-solving; bottom-up solutions abound in the city. However, these measures are not enough to address the large-scale challenges of water, sanitation, transportation, and other essential needs that rely on extensive infrastructure. The ten-part discussion series, Meet in the Middle, brought together public and private stakeholders—ranging from grassroots thinkers to city officials—to discover how they can work together and how top-down and bottom-up planning solutions can complement each other.

• Meet in the Middle series

As in many cities in the developing world, much of Mumbai’s urban fabric has taken shape without formal, comprehensive master planning. Formal systems such as water, sanitation, transportation, and housing have often been developed in isolation from one another, and generally bypass the informally developed sections of the city—the slums—where the majority of the population lives. Bridging infrastructure suggests a need to better connect and align those formal systems to allow them to work efficiently with one another, and to bridge the gap between formally and informally developed sections of the city.

During Heart of Mumbai Workshop: Bridging the Infrastructure, consensus emerged that bridging infrastructure, like other public works projects, must be seen as a social investment for the city—not merely a financial one.

• Heart of Mumbai Workshop: Bridging the Infrastructure

Bus rapid transit is a system of public transportation that assigns buses to dedicated lanes to provide high-speed mass transit. Because they do not require as much financial investment in infrastructure as other forms of high-speed transit, such as subways or light rail, bus rapid transit systems are often viewed as a relatively cost-effective mass-transit option that can be easily and quickly integrated into a city’s existing road system.

Mumbai’s public transit system—with buses continually caught in congestion, and a train system operating at crippling over-capacity—is in desperate need of new infrastructure. There was strong consensus among panelists in the Mediating Public-Private Transportation talk that bus rapid transit is an essential solution to Mumbai’s transit problems.

• Mediating Public–Private Transportation

A centralized urban platform is a system that collects and organizes city data from a wide variety of sources to allow various types of data to be streamlined, accessed, and integrated into city planning processes. With so much data being produced about cities today, whether by NGOs, private crowdsourcing initiatives, or mobile applications, city governments have the potential to gather more in-depth knowledge than ever before about the on-the-ground reality of how their cities are functioning. A centralized urban platform enables designers to be better informed, and helps make city governments and planners more agile and responsive to the city’s needs.

Due to Mumbai’s relatively low levels of formal, government-collected data, and the large number of grassroots organizations collecting and crowdsourcing data, the digital strategist Sam Lockwood stressed the need for, and the great utility of, a centralized urban platform for Mumbai during Meet in the Middle’s Planning in a Dynamic City panel.

• Planning in a Dynamic City

A form of architecture unique to Mumbai, chawls were built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in an effort to house the thousands of new migrants arriving in the city to work in its booming industrial sector—most notably, its cotton textile mills. A typical chawl consists of a long corridor attaching many small, one- or two-room units, with shared toilets on each floor. The rooms may house many people at one time.

In “Girnichi Chav”—A Taste of the Mills!, visitors learned about the remarkable and vibrant system of food distribution and the unique fusion cuisine that emerged in the chawls in the wake of women’s job losses at the mills. Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Angers Albert Pinto?), shown as part of the Lab’s film series, depicted life and aspiration in the chawl community. Both events took place at the Lab’s Batliboy Compound satellite location, a former mill workers’ colony surrounded by chawls.

• “Girnichi Chav”—A Taste of the Mills!
• Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Angers Albert Pinto?)
• Batliboy Compound

Not simply a reference to education, “children engagement” refers to the importance of actively challenging children at an early age to think about their city as a place that shapes them, and that they, in turn, can shape. Children engagement can occur through fun, participatory activities that may not necessarily speak directly to city issues, but that spark curiosity and generate awareness in the city’s youngsters—its next generation of citizens—about their city and its future.

The Lab held a multitude of programs that asked children in Mumbai to consider and envision the city’s future, that examined urban ideas and innovations in a fun and thoughtful way, and that used sports and special events as a means of beginning the conversation about cities. In creative, hands-on activities, Mumbai’s youth expressed their artistic visions and their imaginings of the future urban landscape.

• Creating the City for Our Children
• Kite Festival

Citizen empowerment is the state of feeling that one’s actions actively contribute to urban decision-making processes and change. By creating opportunities for communication and participation, citizens feel empowered to contribute their time, energy, and ideas in the city.

Meet in the Middle’s Participatory ­Planning panel explored new forms of citizen engagement that would be appropriate in Mumbai.

• Participatory Planning

The proliferation of mobile apps in recent years has had an impact on the urban realm: enterprising developers have created a variety of apps devoted to better understanding, navigating, and maximizing city resources. These city apps usually make use of open-source data and are a valuable civic tool. They often utilize mapping and GPS technologies and can address a variety of urban needs relating to transportation, municipal requests, tracking city developments, or rating municipal services.

Mediating Public-Private Transportation brought together a panel of experts who examined the concept of the city app as it could be used for public transportation contexts. One potential app would allow users to track and see when the next vehicle would arrive and depart.

• Mediating Public-Private Transportation

City mythology is the weaving together of mythological places that appear in folklore and religious texts with real, physical urban spaces. Often, such spaces are protected from construction and development. City mythology can play an important role in creating a sense of unity, pride, and cohesion among urban dwellers in a city, as well as in fostering a type of imagined historical memory.

The Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces project asked Lab visitors to consider where they find privacy in public spaces in Mumbai. A few responses included Mumbai’s peaceful Banganga Tank, a man-made water tank whose water, according to local legend, comes from the holy—and far-away—Ganges River.

• Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces

“Class,” short for “social class,” is a term drawn from social science and political theory that has different resonances based on its contextual meaning. Generally, it is a concept that organizes society into a socially stratified hierarchy most commonly characterized by three categories: lower, middle, and upper. These distinctions are made based on socioeconomic, cultural, hereditary, and educational factors, among others. Class categorizations can be used as unifying or divisive tools that can create social unrest and spur activism. Class can greatly define who you are and where you can go (physically and socially) and can be seen as a means of keeping the upper classes in power, while preventing those in the lower classes from attaining it.

The Bridging Program series brought together people with similar interests and varying backgrounds from the formal and informal sectors to interact with each other through playful workshops and games. These interactions enabled participants to experience how those of different classes and educational backgrounds can learn and share knowledge with each other.

• Bridging series

As shared spaces, community gardens offer the possibility of outdoor space in urban areas to those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to green spaces; they can also provide a certain measure of independence for city dwellers who are able to grow their own food. The gardens produce a feeling of ownership and care for a collectively owned piece of land.

During Fooducate, community members worked together to build a community garden in Sambhaji Park.

• Fooducate

Complaining is the act of voicing one’s personal concerns or grievances in a public space. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution defines the right of people to peacefully assemble and petition, and in London, Speakers’ Corner, located in Hyde Park, is one place where people are free to voice their opinions. A more recent development in the United States is the use of “free speech zones,” a tactic the Bush administration employed to isolate protestors by offering temporary and physically constrained areas of protest.

During Participatory Planning, it became evident that barrier-free communication with the government is essentially non-existent in Mumbai. The city has few areas set aside for people to voice opinions, and citizens are in desperate need of a way to communicate their problems to the governmental bodies that should address them. Chetan Temkar, founder of the app developer Smart Shehar, discussed an app he is creating to kick-start this process. The app is intended to have much the same effect as SeeClickFix, a digital mechanism for reporting urban issues that is now used in some Western countries.

• Participatory Planning

Congestion on the roads occurs when the volume of traffic has surpassed a road’s capacity to allow vehicles to move smoothly. Congestion can be attributed to a few primary causes, including saturation of vehicles on a road, traffic accidents, road work, and weather conditions. Rapid population growth in cities and insufficient or poor infrastructural planning to accommodate citizens’ need to move efficiently through the city make it imperative that city governments determine how to effectively combat congestion. Initiatives to do so have included large infrastructural projects to improve transportation flow; the development of an accessible, efficient, and comprehensive public transportation system; and incentives to deter the use of private transportation.

Measures to address Mumbai’s congestion were examined in Mediating Public-Private Transportation, a panel discussion focused on public transportation and exploring new ideas for efficiently moving Mumbaikars around the city.

• Mediating Public-Private Transportation

Political corruption is the abuse of power by government officials for special interests and/or personal gain. Corruption is manifested in many forms, including bribery, embezzlement, and extortion, and may facilitate various criminal ventures. To qualify as corruption, the illegal act must be directly related to official duties. Activities that constitute corruption vary by country or jurisdiction, so an act may be deemed corrupt in one place but not in another. Political corruption has the power to permeate cities on all levels and is particularly dangerous when it turns into a culturally accepted practice. Dealing with corruption not only requires effective institutions and credible leaders, but also political action and shared responsibility.

The film Invoking Justice examined the corrupt system in Southern India that continues to use religion to justify violence toward women.

• Invoking Justice

Citizens working in the informal economy generally have no documentation to prove their level of income or their employment status. This often prevents these workers from obtaining traditional credit options such as loans, lines of credit, or mortgages, and from buying a home or starting a business. “Credit for the undocumented” is the term used to describe a number of systems that are emerging to fill this niche that offer alternative credit opportunities to informal workers, particularly in developing countries with high levels of off-the-books economic activity.

Micro Housing Finance Corporation is one organization providing private mortgages to informal-sector workers. Madhusudhan Menon, the organization’s chairman, spoke about the venture during Meet in the Middle’s Mediating Public-Private Investment panel.

• Mediating Public-Private Investment

Crowdsourcing is a problem-solving model that relies on the voluntary sharing of information or skills with others—a public group, a corporation, or other audiences. Often relying on the Internet as its platform, crowdsourcing allows for collaboration and participation between a variety of people from different backgrounds and levels of expertise. The term was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe, in an article for Wired.

Chetan Temkar, founder of the app developer Smart Shehar, presented projects that are crowdsourcing transit usage data and information for the company’s transportation apps. The data for the apps is not available from the city, and since mobile phones are used more widely in Mumbai than personal computers, they are an ideal platform for crowdsourced information.

• Participatory Planning

In cities, “density” refers to human population density, which is the number of people per unit of area. The world’s most densely populated cities are those with a small land area and a high level of urbanization. High-density cities are often confronted with the challenge of maintaining a reasonable quality of housing, infrastructure, and access to resources for their residents.

Mumbai’s growing population and rising density remained at the forefront of conversations during the Meet in the Middle program series, which brought together public and private stakeholders to address how to accommodate and better fulfill the needs of Mumbai’s citizens in future city development plans.

• Meet in the Middle series
• Stacked Population Index: Mumbai Stacked City

Development incentives are benefits that governments offer to developers in order to attract them to build certain types of infrastructure, or focus their development in a certain location. These benefits can include—but are not limited to—tax cuts, reduced land prices, or strategic exemption from standard zoning regulations. Development incentives are often offered when there is a need for a particular kind of infrastructure that is not within the city government’s mandate to build, such as market housing (residences that are sold or rented at market value); when the government does not have the financial capacity to build a certain type of infrastructure, such as affordable housing; or when the government is trying to encourage the expansion into, or revival of, a certain area of the city.

During the Planning in a Dynamic City session, participants debated whether the government should be offering better incentives to developers in order to tackle prominent infrastructure and housing issues, or whether the government should take on more of the responsibility itself. Uma Adusumilli, the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority’s chief planner, advocated for the latter.

• Planning in a Dynamic City

Diversity reflects the degree to which a singular entity is composed of different elements. A diverse city is one where a variety of people (e.g., of race, ethnicity, class, background, profession, culture, religion, age, etc.) live within its boundaries. Diversity in cities can create friction, leading to disputes between groups of people with different backgrounds, and it can also act as a catalyst for varying perspectives to coalesce into new and hybrid ideas and innovations. Diverse cities can foster open-mindedness, awareness, and mutual respect and understanding for neighbors and fellow citizens of different cultures or backgrounds.

The Lab’s programs embraced the diversity of city residents through initiatives that welcomed visitors of various ages, cultures, religions, genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in events, collectively sharing and celebrating the city’s vibrant life.

• Bridging series
• Unwrapping Mumbai series

Dynamic cities are those that have evolved, or are evolving, faster than any formal planning vision that has been made for them. This phenomenon leads to high levels of informal physical and economic development of the city, and often a certain lack of properly functioning systems and institutions. The result is that citizens are often forced to improvise systems and solutions for themselves, creating a city in a permanent state of physical, social, and economic flux.

Mumbai is certainly one such dynamic city. Planning in a Dynamic City brought together experts from a variety of fields to discuss how the city’s planning should function to best reflect that reality and be adaptable to it.

• Planning in a Dynamic City

While the exact definition of “middle class” differs among various international institutions and organizations, it generally refers to a group of people who, relative to others within their society, are neither poor, nor rich, and who earn sufficient income to support a comfortable lifestyle. This may encompass stable housing, education, health care, job security, retirement opportunities, and some discretionary income. This segment of the population is typically associated with high levels of consumerism. The “emerging middle class” refers to a growing number of people—particularly in developing Asian countries with rapidly growing economies—who are currently moving out of poverty and causing mass shifts in consumer and land-development patterns, particularly in relation to housing and transportation (due to increased automobile ownership).

India’s large emerging middle class is causing enormous shifts in the country’s housing needs and market. During Mediating Public-Private Housing, Vishnu Swaminathan, director of Ashoka India’s Housing for All program, spoke about the organization’s purely market-based model of providing affordable housing to the emerging middle class. Though the organization operates in many cities throughout India, staggeringly high land prices have kept it from working in Mumbai so far.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

Encroachment—the advancement of something beyond accepted or comfortable limits—can take on many forms in an urban context. The physical permanence of those forms varies. For example, in Mumbai, illegal hawkers who do not hold a license to sell goods in highly trafficked public places such as busy roads and transport hubs would be described as encroachers upon public space, blocking roads and footpaths, and are typically removed by authorities. But encroachment can also take the form of unauthorized construction of homes and commercial establishments. Urban dwellers who illegally live in homes or work from establishments built on public property can be evicted; the structures are often demolished. Individuals who are part of rising populations and migrant influxes in cities unable to absorb the population flow often resort to the construction of these structures. Many countries have state and municipal laws regulating encroachment. In some cities where illegal encroachment is a particularly pressing problem there are city departments and anti-encroachment squads dedicated to the task of removing them.

The 1985 documentary, Bombay: Our City, screened at the Lab, shined a light on the still salient issue of illegal housing on public land in Mumbai.

• Bombay: Our City

Suburban sprawl has generated a proliferation of suburbs around many of the world’s largest cities. However, despite the inherently urban quality of these new areas of growth in neighborhoods outside of city centers, we continue to refer to them as “the suburbs.” This has led to the emergence of a fake suburbia, in the sense that these peripheral areas might geographically qualify as suburbs, but otherwise look, feel, and function like an urban center. For instance, the Mumbai Suburban District—which extends from Bandra to Dahisar, from Kurla (Chuna Bhatti) to Mulund, and from Kurla up to Trombay Creek, and is the largest district in India in terms of population—does not differ in landscape from the urban fabric of central Mumbai, but is under a different district authority.

The Planning in a Dynamic City program took into account the Mumbai Municipal Corporation’s work toward framing its twenty-year development plan in 2014, taking into account planning for Mumbai’s “suburbs.”

• Planning in a Dynamic City

“Feel-good urbanism” refers to the ubiquitous presence of certain frequently used terms that describe positive, politically correct practices in urban spaces and architecture. Through mere repetition and the trendiness that these terms have acquired, many have become the go-to adjectives when defining contemporary urban projects. Some examples of these overused feel-good urban adjectives include “green,” “sustainable,” and “LEED-certified.”

Feel-good urbanism terms are often used in the context of architectural competitions. Design Challenge brought together architecture students and a slum contractor to share their knowledge about design and construction as they submitted proposals for the construction of slum dwellings.

• Design Challenge

A flash mob is a seemingly impromptu assembly of people who gather in a public space to perform a fleeting act—generally fun, pointless, entertaining, or artistic—and then disperse. Harper’s editor Bill Wasik organized the first flash mobs in Manhattan in 2003, and the term was coined shortly therafter. Today, flash mobs are commonly organized and coordinated through social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, and can involve just a few people or hundreds.

The Lab organized its own version of flash mobs. On a weekly basis, the Lab’s Mobile Lab Units went out to the initiative’s designated satellite locations to engage with the city’s residents, heighten awareness of the Lab’s presence, share its message of “ME=WE,” and welcome onlookers to participate in lighthearted and festive flash mob events.

• Mobile Lab Units

Floor Space Index, also known as Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and Floor Space Ratio (FSR), are terms that describe the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the area of the land on which it is built. The regulations pertaining to FSI limit the floor space available for residential and business development, since they dictate how much floor area a builder can construct on a plot of land, which in turn relates to how high the builder can make a structure. FSI can be used during the zoning process to limit how much can be built in a certain area—in order to preserve the skyline—or as a tool that controls bulk development on a plot and across a zone. In practice, the assessment of FSI can be very complex. Many jurisdictions have rules defining what counts as allowable gross floor area, as well as rules about what can be assessed as the permissible area of the plot.

In Mediating Public-Private Housing, participants discussed the pressing issue relating to the lack of affordable housing for Mumbai’s citizens and the impact that the city’s historically low FSI has on residential and city development.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

“Food distribution” refers to the broad range of services through which food travels from the producer to the consumer. These services can include, but are not limited to, food-transportation systems, wholesalers, farmers’ markets, shops, supermarkets, street food purveyors, and restaurants. The geographic distribution of these services within a city determines citizens’ access to certain types of food. Areas with a severe lack of food-distribution services are known as “food deserts.”

In Food Bazaar, a panel discussion during the Food for Thought series, the speakers examined issues relating to food distribution in Mumbai, and the link between India’s rural and urban areas.

• Food Bazaar

Food education is the sharing of knowledge to increase awareness and understanding of topics related to food, including nutrition, food systems, food safety, and food production, among others. Food education is imperative in a healthy, sustainable society and has the potential to change the way people make food choices—from purchase to preparation to consumption. Food education often motivates people to stand up for their right to better-quality foods and allows people to be more aware of how their choices affect food systems.

In the Food Bazaar program, panelists discussed the lack of food education in Mumbai, which was one of the reasons for the cost increase and over-fishing of a particular species of fish in comparison to those of another abundant, similar, and local species.

• Food Bazaar

A gated community is a residential development that is excluded by a wall or fence from the surrounding area. Within the confines of a gated community, residents can make use of a variety of amenities, including sports facilities, spas, childcare, and independent sanitation or power infrastructure. These residential compounds are often designed by a single developer and therefore display a high level of formal uniformity among the housing units. To ensure the security of residents, gated communities are often closely patrolled by private security companies and kept under video surveillance. Furthermore, the cost of living in a gated community is usually high. For these reasons, some have argued that gated housing compounds create antagonism and division in the larger communities where they are created.

Mediating Public-Private Housing explored the inequalities in Mumbai’s housing, which has some of the world’s most expensive homes and at the same time the largest expanse of informal settlements.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

In an urban context, “green space” refers to an open space with natural vegetation such as grass, trees, bushes, flowers, and other plants. Urban green spaces can include parks, greenways, nature paths, gardens, and waterfronts. Green spaces provide ecological functions for cities—carbon sequestration, water purification, and cooling—and also allow people to interact with nature, which has been proven essential to mental and physical human health. Thus, plentiful public green spaces are a critical feature of good urban design.

During the workshop Pop-up Garden, women explored and prototyped ideas for a green space, open only to women, that will be built in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz neighborhood.

• Pop-up Garden

A hawker is a street vendor who sells merchandise or food in a public space— usually on the sidewalk, road, or in public squares—in such a way that his or her goods and/or equipment can be easily transported.

Mumbai’s urban dialogue is peppered with ongoing debates about whether or not hawkers should be allowed on the city’s streets and sidewalks. Some see hawkers as menaces to walkability who steal space from the already crowded sidewalks. Others consider them a vital part of a complex social and economic system. This debate emerged many times at the Lab, particularly during discussions relating to sidewalks, in the sessions Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks and Mediating Public-Private Transportation.

• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks
• Mediating Public-Private Transportation

Homegrown housing refers to the ability of a neighborhood to build its own affordable-housing stock. The development of this type of housing takes place primarily in slum neighborhoods and is typically completed by a complex network of local, small-scale contractors, builders, and other related professionals. These professionals are usually informally educated in their fields, but possess specific knowledge about building in the context of the existing neighborhood, and about producing high-quality, community-appropriate housing at a relatively low price point.

In Mediating Public-Private Housing, representatives of the Mumbai-based research organization URBZ discussed their work documenting the often overlooked merits of homegrown housing, and advocated for homegrown models to be integrated with formal, affordable housing efforts.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

The concept of the citizen goes back to the city-states of ancient Greece and refers to the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of a city dweller. Inclusive citizenship refers to the need for all urban dwellers to be treated and considered as full-status citizens, regardless of their socioeconomic background or living conditions. In describing a situation in which all citizens are given equal treatment, inclusive citizenship evokes the goal of unity among all who belong to a city.

In the Meet in the Middle panel Participatory Planning, Himanshu Burte, an architect/researcher from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, discussed how the concept of “the public” needs to be properly defined in a city where the majority of people live and work in informal settlements and sectors. Citizenship, he emphasized, needs to be completely inclusive for all.

• Participatory Planning

“Incremental development” refers to a process of gradually changing or upgrading the physical fabric of a city district or neighborhood. In contrast to large-scale redesigns, incremental development typically maintains the overall structure or typology of the district, and can help ease the disruption of social structure that sudden large-scale redevelopment may cause.

In Mediating Public-Private Housing, participants pointed to examples of successful incremental development—such as initiatives in Tokyo—that could provide lessons for Mumbai. The panelists, who noted the failure of most government slum redevelopment schemes where slums were razed and residents were moved into towers, presented models of successful incremental slum upgrading schemes that could present a better alternative.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

An informal economy refers to a system of economic exchanges and activities that occur without government regulation or taxation. By operating in the informal sector, both the employee and employer may earn higher wages or incur lower costs due to the evasion of taxes. However, informal-sector jobs are usually illegal and often lack the security, safe working conditions, and other benefits that formal-sector employment may ensure. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that half the world’s workers are employed in the informal sector.

Ninety percent of Mumbai’s workforce is employed in the informal economy. This fact permeates nearly every aspect of city life and planning, and is at the root of many inequalities. It served as the spark for discussion at the first Meet in the Middle session, Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity.

• Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity

Informal transit systems are networks of privately operated transportation carriers that fill gaps left by official public transit systems. Though sometimes found in the developed world, particularly in large American cities, informal transit systems are most common in the developing world and tend to serve poorer segments of society. Popular informal transit modes include bicycle-powered or motorized rickshaws, minibuses, and vans. These carriers are often unsanctioned by government bodies.

Informal transit systems play a crucial role in Mumbai’s transport sector, filling gaps in both long-distance mass transit and last-mile connectivity. An Auto-Taxi Discussion brought together stakeholders from the arena of informal transit to discuss win-win solutions for its improvement.

• An Auto-Taxi Discussion

Coined by Mumbai Lab team member Neville Mars, the term “infraspace” refers to the space taken up by infrastructure in a city, upon or into which other forms of infrastructure can be built or integrated. The term is intended to prompt designers to reenvision existing infrastructure as viable space for creative development, so that land use can be maximized, especially in hyper-dense urban environments.

The Mumbai Lab’s Landlink Design Prototype proposed a creative use of infraspace—to transform a set of enormous soon-to-be defunct steel pipes into an auto-rickshaw highway/pedestrian boardwalk and business district—in an effort to spur discussion about the opportunities such spaces present in Mumbai.

• Landlink Design Prototype
• Learning from Landlink

Infrastructure development refers to the political process through which city infrastructure is created—and especially to how it is financed. As city governments around the world become more and more financially pressured, many are looking for new models for financing infrastructure development, such as public-private partnerships, density “bonusing,” or other development incentives.

Panelists in Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks criticized the city of Mumbai for taking a “projects before planning” approach to infrastructure development—an approach to developing infrastructure that may be inappropriate for the city, but is easily funded—instead of exploring new funding models to build the infrastructure the city really needs.

• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks

“Interdependence” refers to a reciprocal relationship in which two or more entities (individuals, groups, or objects) mutually rely on one another. Every natural, political, social, and economic system exists within and relies on a vast network of interdependent relationships.

The divide between Mumbai’s formal and informal city—non-slum and slum—is significant, but the worlds exist in a tightly woven relationship of interdependence, with neither able to function or survive without the other. In Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity, this important relationship was acknowledged, and that recognition served as an established basis for future Meet in the Middle discussions.

• Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity,
  Space Scarcity

There is no consensus as to what qualifies food as “local,” but generally speaking the term refers to food that is produced, processed, and sold all within the same region, or within a short geographical distance from its point of origin. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act adopted by the US Congress in 2008 states that food must travel less than 400 miles from its source, or be sold within the state in which it is produced, to be considered a “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product.” Though local food still accounts for a small fraction of US agricultural sales, the market is growing rapidly due to increased demand for fresher produce and consumer desire to support local economies and reduce environmental impact. City dwellers commonly access local food through farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture, and increasingly, in conventional grocery stores.

Food is an integral dimension of the multitude of cultures and religions in Mumbai. The discussion We Like it Spicy explored patterns of food identity throughout the city, and what the occasional clashes between food cultures reveal about the city’s cultural politics.

• We Like it Spicy

Loss of livelihood occurs when an individual or a group of people loses the ability to secure the necessities of life. Though sometimes equated with job loss, loss of livelihood tends to be associated with a severance from a deeper connection with one’s means of sustenance, and is often used to describe situations in which individuals or groups are no longer able to carry out traditional occupations due to the impact of environmental change or modernization.

In Mumbai, both environmental pollution and over-fishing in the commercial sector put the livelihood of the Koli fishing community—the original inhabitants of the city—at risk. Maazhi Maach (Our Fish) celebrated the Koli community’s culture while providing a platform to learn about and discuss solutions to its struggle.

• Maazhi Maach (Our Fish)

“ME=WE,” a phrase coined by the Mumbai Lab Team, refers to the interconnected and constantly shifting individual (“me”) and community (“we”) needs that shape city life. Individual needs, actions, and decisions ultimately affect those of the community, just as the community’s needs, actions, and decisions affect our own. By examining how citizens negotiate the blurred and regularly oscillating concepts of the “me” and the “we” in their urban environment, we may be able to redefine notions of the divide between the individual and community, the private and public, and the part and the whole, which can inform urban design for the future.

The Mumbai Lab’s programs and projects were all developed with the idea of examining how Mumbai’s urban dwellers effectively and constantly morphed the notions of the “me” and the “we.”

• Meet in the Middle series

Megaprojects are exceptionally large-scale investment projects that typically cost more than 1 billion US dollars. They can include bridges, tunnels, highways, railways, airports, power plants, and public buildings. These projects typically have a substantial impact on communities, the environment, and government budgets. Critics have assailed megaprojects for their top-down planning approaches and the way that the communities most affected by the initiatives are disregarded in the planning process. While not always financially advantageous, desired by the general public, nor environmentally friendly, megaproject investments have been used by governments as a tactic to stimulate the economy. Incremental infrastructure development, smaller interventions, greater transparency, and inclusion of those most affected in the planning and development process would help to ensure that these municipal projects fulfill the needs of end users and are a long-term asset to the city as a whole.

In this vein, the Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks session focused on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. This controversial megaproject has garnered criticism for its massive expense, poor traffic design, and lack of accessibility and availability to the majority of the city’s residents due to the prohibitive cost of the sea link’s toll.

• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks

Micro-solutions are small-scale interventions that improve the lives of individuals or small communities and, in so doing, help contribute to the gradual relief of a large-scale problem. While micro-solutions such as micro-loans, rural health clinics, or education programs are often initiated by an NGO or the government sector, micro-solutions commoditization refers to the notion that the private sector can contribute to the resolution of global issues by creating and marketing products that address problems on a small scale. Ideally, these products can be bought and sold at a price point affordable to the communities and individuals who need them.

In Comfortably Sustainable, panelists suggested that micro-solutions commoditization could help address the needs of individuals while the city is developing large-scale solutions to issues such as water and sanitation.

• Comfortably Sustainable

Modernization is the process of putting into place structures and systems that fulfill contemporary needs. In cities, this can refer to upgrading physical infrastructures such as architecture, roads, or bridges; replacing sanitation and water systems with more efficient, healthy, and environmentally friendly systems; and shifting political and bureaucratic processes or social structures. Mumbai is schizophrenic in its degree of modernization: parts of the city, such as its economic structure and architecture, are modernizing too rapidly for its citizens, displacing populations and leaving many historic treasures behind. Other aspects of the city, such as its paper-laden analog bureaucracy, are mired in the past and could benefit from increased efficiency.

Social modernization in Mumbai is causing enormous shifts in living patterns, and even in psychological concepts such as privacy. Your Space, My Space, or Our Public Space?: Privacy and Spaces in Mumbai explored these transformations.

• Your Place, My Place, or Our Public Space?: Privacy and Spaces in Mumbai

The psychology of learning has established that there are multiple ways for individuals to acquire new knowledge. Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s analysis suggested that learning styles result from an individual’s preferred way of adapting based on experience, observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. In 1983, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner introduced the concept of multiple-intelligence theory, a notion that is widely used today, which suggests that each person has a proficiency for different kinds of intelligence.

All the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s programs focus on different approaches to learning about cities. Serious urban issues are approached from a variety of perspectives that range from the academic to the playful, all the while maintaining a keen focus on experimentation and hands-on participation. The programs in the Bridging series generated an environment for multi-way learning, allowing people with similar interests, yet different backgrounds, to share knowledge (about football, music, dance, and architecture/construction), interact with each other, and learn from one another through different methods and techniques.

• Bridging series

The rapid growth of Mumbai’s economy throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was largely due to its cotton textile milling industry. At its peak, the industry employed nearly 250,000 people. Mill workers typically lived in chawls, an arrangement that allowed multilayered social and economic networks to form within the mill community. The decline of the industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to massive job losses and factory shutdowns. In the aftermath, the former mill lands, which covered more than 600 acres in the center of the city, were supposed to be distributed by a formula in which one-third of the land would be put up for sale for private development while the other two-thirds would be made into affordable housing and public space. But in 2006, India’s Supreme Court issued a decision that allowed much of the land to be sold for private development. The redevelopment of the former mill lands has been and remains the most contested and controversial issue regarding land use in Mumbai.

One of the Lab’s satellite sites was located directly adjacent to the crumbling mill smokestacks at the Batliboy Compound, which was once a mill workers’ colony.

• Satellite Location: Batliboy Compound

Unlike most cities around the world, which have elected mayors who represent the city’s population and are directly accountable only to them, Mumbai is governed primarily by the government of Maharashtra—the large state in which it exists—with the chief minister of Maharashtra assigned the greatest governing authority. This means that no local official elected by the city’s population has the power to make final, large-scale decisions, and no local entity has the funding to implement large projects. Many commentators and citizens believe that putting power in the hands of an official responsible for representing the interests of Mumbaikars only—someone who is held accountable to them during city elections—would allow Mumbai a greater degree of autonomy from the state government and facilitate more efficient solutions to city problems.

The need for municipal autonomy permeated nearly every Meet in the Middle session discussion. It was clear that city thinkers and designers in Mumbai feel a great sense of frustration and powerlessness as a result of the current political structure.

• Meet in the Middle series

Shrinking cities, as defined by sociologist Saskia Sassen, are those that over a relatively short period of time have suffered from a considerable loss of population, seriously affecting their capacity to continue existing as urban centers. The idea of the “new shrinking city,” however, seeks to address a new kind of loss within urban contexts: rather than shrinking population, most cities today are suffering from over-growth. As citizens become overwhelmed by the vastness of urban areas, we tend to shrink our areas of action, rather than expand them outward at the speed that the city itself is growing.

The Heart of Mumbai Workshop: Bridging the Infrastructure program touched on the issue of disconnectedness in the city’s transportation infrastructure, which plays a role in confining Mumbaikars’ movements to areas that are in close proximity to their homes.

• Heart of Mumbai Workshop: Bridging the Infrastructure

“Open governance” refers to citizen access to government information, data, and processes to enable widespread participation and collaboration in governmental decision-making processes. Often, this type of engagement harnesses technology to facilitate a more active and open communication between citizens and government, leading to more efficient use of budgets and improved quality of life for city dwellers. Open governance has the potential to make urban governments more accountable to their citizens, while enhancing the legitimacy of those in power.

In Meet in the Middle’s Participatory Planning panel, Himanshu Burte, an architect-researcher from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, discussed how planning cannot be considered separate from governance—thus, participatory planning cannot happen without participatory government. “If we are serious about participation in planning, we have to be serious about it in governance,” he said, alluding to the important connections between politics, economics, and development.

• Participatory Planning

“Open-source” refers to any software whose code is designed in such a way that the user participates in the creation of data. The term was originally coined by a group of engineers in 1998 when they founded the Open Source Initiative. This term is closely related to free software, Copyleft, and Creative Commons—all ­initiatives that seek to democratize access to information.

In some of the Mumbai Lab’s programs, the term “open-source” was used to describe the reuse of existing infrastructural city elements. During Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks, Lab Team member Neville Mars suggested that currently existing skywalks in Mumbai, which are often underutilized, should be treated as open-source infrastructure and retrofitted by citizens and designers for more community- and place-appropriate uses.

• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks

Contrary to popular belief, ostriches do not bury their heads in the ground when threatened. This myth is thought to have its roots in the accounts of Pliny the Elder, a philosopher and naturalist who lived during the first century A.D. A description Pliny wrote contributed to the false notion that ostriches cover their heads and believe that, in doing so, they hide their entire bodies. This body language and the associated metaphor has come to signify an attitude of denial, which can be used in urban settings when referring to social interaction among citizens that communicates an indifference to the adverse or harsh conditions of everyday street life.

Using role-play and open, direct discussion, Being Brave addressed the issue of physical and psychological violence that afflicts communities in the city. Individuals who suffer such violence often stifle their reactions with silence due to fear, inconvenience, and shame, among other concerns; similarly, witnesses of this abuse exhibit characteristics of the ostrich effect and refrain from looking at or acknowledging the abuse inflicted by others.

• Being Brave

Participatory urbanism is the condition, often facilitated by technology, in which citizens are empowered to collect and contribute data, ideas, and proposals to city decision-makers. The idea is grounded in the fact that community members are experts on their particular urban situations and contain within them the knowledge and solutions for any number of issues. Participatory urbanism allows professionals to identify real needs and tap into local knowledge and human resources rather than implementing change from the top down.

The panelists in Meet in the Middle’s Participatory Planning session discussed how citizens could play an active, participatory role in planning in Mumbai.

• Participatory Planning

A pet slum is a slum that has become popularized to the degree that it has become a tourist attraction. Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world, is an example of a slum that has received so much attention that tour operators offer “authentic” guided tours through it. Because of this popularity, it has been featured in Hollywood blockbusters and is often referenced in academic papers. In addition, a majority of NGOs in the field focus their work in the area instead of other lesser-known slums equally in need of attention.

Rather than seeing slums as exotic or beautiful—as many pet slums are imagined—the 1985 documentary Bombay: Our City depicts the realities of how slum dwellers struggle to survive in extremely harsh conditions.

• Bombay: Our City

Play spaces are public spaces where people of all ages can engage in physical activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than for serious or practical purposes. Safe and accessible play spaces are important for urban residents, promoting good physical health and well-being, and allowing for community-building activities and an increase in positive interactions between individuals.

A ping-pong table and carrom board were placed at the Lab’s satellite locations to create a play space for visitors. These recreational games created a platform for friends and strangers to meet and interact. Also, children who attended the Football with a Kick program showed excitement not only about the sport of football, but about the opportunity to have the time and a dedicated space to play.

• Football with a Kick

Mumbai was once famous for its cotton milling, as well as its chemical and other major industries. But during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city went through a massive process of deindustrialization, as did much of urban India. This transformation was coupled with a substantial shift toward a service-based economy, which employs far fewer people and requires workers to have a higher level of general education. The result has been large job losses in the formal sector and the rapid growth of Mumbai’s informal economy, which currently employs an estimated 90 percent of the city’s labor force.

During “Girnichi Chav”—A Taste of the Mills!, Lab visitors learned firsthand about the experience of one group of women who moved from formal mill employment to Mumbai’s famous, and informal, tiffin food production and distribution service sector.

• “Girnichi Chav”—A Taste of the Mills!

Privacy is an elusive and emotionally complex concept that even experts still have trouble defining and interpreting. It has been related to anonymity, silence, seclusion, solitude, and autonomy, but its definition—and the perception of it—shifts based on context. Individuals seek privacy in different forms and through diverse methods. Urban dwellers often find privacy in their homes, but due to the limited space in most residential urban situations, many seek privacy in public spaces.

The Your Place, My Place, or Our Public Space? research project engaged visitors to participate in a study about the relationship between privacy and interior and exterior spaces in Mumbai by asking questions about how Mumbaikars perceive privacy, where they find it, and with whom they experience it.

• Your Place, My Place, or Our Public Space?: Privacy and Spaces in Mumbai
• Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces
• Privacy, Please

Private-sector players are becoming increasingly involved in the creation of public infrastructure through public-private partnerships, or even private ventures. However, they are not held accountable to the public in the same way that governments are. Without this potential for negative political repercussions, there is less incentive for private-sector stakeholders to work with the sole benefit of the public in mind. Private-sector accountability denotes a need to ensure that stakeholders in the private sector are somehow held accountable to the public.

During Meet in the Middle’s Mediating Public-Private Investment panel, sociologist Saskia Sassen stressed the importance of creating a private-sector accountability mechanism in Mumbai and other cities that have extensive private investment in public infrastructure projects.

• Mediating Public-Private Investment

Privatization is the transition from public to private ownership, or from government to business or non-profit status. Privatization can have a dramatic impact on the accessibility, maintenance, and diversity of services or goods offered in cities. Those against privatization argue that it creates a system of economic elitism, one in which only those who can pay will benefit. These critics believe that there are fundamental goods and services that the state should provide to all citizens. Those in favor of privatization believe that all goods and services can be offered for profit by private businesses and organizations, creating incentive for those entities to function optimally.

During Comfortably Sustainable, panelists unanimously agreed that the concept of “basic necessities,” which includes such essentials as water, should be legally defined, and they concurred that these resources should not be privatized under any circumstances.

• Comfortably Sustainable

Public-private partnerships (PPP) bring together public, governmental entities with private corporations or institutions to develop a project together or share its funding. A PPP can be a good alternative to projects or businesses that are solely financed through public funds, particularly during times of economic crisis. Such arrangements also have the potential to lessen the contribution of taxpayer funds that would be invested if the project was solely funded by government entities.

Panelists assessed and debated the delicate, yet essential, nature of public-private partnerships and infrastructure development in Mediating Public-Private Investment, part of the Mumbai Lab’s Meet in the Middle series.

• Mediating Public-Private Investment

A public space is a plot of land that is open and accessible to all people. Though often used to refer to social spaces used for gathering or recreation, such as plazas or parks, “public space” also refers to streets, sidewalks, and government buildings that are open to the public and not privately owned.

The Mumbai Lab’s ongoing visual survey project, Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces, encouraged Mumbaikars to map the public spaces where they go to find moments of solidarity or privacy.

• Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces

Public transit is a communal passenger transportation service available to the general public. This system of transportation often encompasses buses, subways, trains, trolleys, and ferries. Most public transit operates on a scheduled timetable and is typically funded, regulated, and subsidized by the government. Cities are investing in and expanding public transit services to alleviate economic, energy, and environmental challenges. Due to rapid urbanization, more urban dwellers living in dense, highly populated cities are relying heavily on accessible, efficient, and cheap public transit. However, many cities are struggling to effectively provide adequate service to their growing populations.

Mediating Public-Private Transport sought to find a solution to some of Mumbai’s growing transportation needs by exploring the opinions of advocates for public transport as well as supporters of private vehicles; the group discussed how resources can be allocated to benefit both constituencies.

• Mediating Public-Private Transportation

Rainwater harvesting provides an independent water supply by capturing, diverting, and storing rainwater for later use. Rainwater harvesting is beneficial, since it reduces demand on the existing water supply and reduces runoff, erosion, and contamination of surface water. A rainwater harvesting system can range in size and complexity, but is easy to understand, install, and operate; it generally has negligible operating costs. The systems have been adopted in many countries to supplement the main water supply.

ME=WE Memorandum, a discussion held at the end of the Meet in the Middle series, introduced innovative new ideas and prototypes for urban improvement initiatives by Lab Team member Neville Mars. Two of the proposals included affordable and scalable solutions that would use rainwater harvesting as a means to make a local freshwater supply available year-round.

• ME=WE Memorandum

Redevelopment introduces architectural and planning changes to an area, often drastically altering it from its previous state. Redevelopment projects can be small- or large-scale and can include the demolition or rehabilitation of existing structures. Typically, redevelopment is received with mixed reactions, as it is often a top-down initiative, prompting resistance in some quarters; yet it is welcomed by other groups, since such efforts may bring in lucrative profits and revitalize a neighborhood or city. Redevelopment projects generally involve the displacement of residents or small businesses that are routinely under-compensated and have little or no power to contest the plan.

The Mediating Public-Private Housing panel discussion considered the citizen’s role in the government’s slum redevelopment plans and how Mumbai can explore alternative solutions.

• Mediating Public-Private Housing

Retrofitting infrastructure is the reimag-
ining of an existing piece of major organizational infrastructure (e.g. transportation, water, sewage, and electricity). More than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, new and old. Although cities are more energy efficient than areas of suburban sprawl, they still face challenges to sustainable living—mainly due to the fact that the major infrastructure necessary to provide essential needs for residents and businesses has already been put in place. Rather than expending additional energy, resources, and funds on demolishing heavy infrastructure to improve city living, retrofitting infrastructure has become an alternative solution. This approach involves the transformative reuse of an existing piece of infrastructure into an alternative entity, such as an old train track into a green pedestrian walkway. These transformations often improve efficiency in existing systems and benefit the greater public.

In the Landlink Design Prototype, Lab Team member Neville Mars proposed retrofitting the Tansa Pipelines, which comprise 75 kilometers of massive water-system infrastructure that runs above ground through the city. Mars suggested the pipelines, now slowly being phased out, could be resurrected as a pedestrian bridge, thereby improving connections within the city. During Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks, participants suggested strategies of retrofitting infrastructure as a way of enabling currently existing, yet underutilized skywalks to better serve the public. One audience member suggested that, in a city greatly lacking open, public green spaces, skywalks could be retrofitted into public parks like New York’s High Line.

• Landlink Design Prototype
• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks

In 2005, the government of India passed the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which guaranteed Indian citizens the right to obtain information from the government about the activities of any government body or public authority owned, controlled, or substantially financed by the government. While the Constitution of India implicitly grants citizens the right to information, the RTI Act explicitly entrenched the right as it relates to public institutions, and established a clear system through which citizens should channel their information requests. Many countries around the world have similar acts. They are now considered a necessary cornerstone of transparency and democracy.

During Participatory Planning, Shailesh Gandhi, an RTI activist and former information commissioner for the government of India, advocated that citizens should make better use of the RTI Act and submit an RTI request every day. At least one-third of those requests would make a small change, he said, which is a good start to generating a more transparent and accountable government.

• Participatory Planning

Rural migration refers to the movement of populations from rural to urban regions. With industrialization and globalization, rural migration within and between nations is fueled by rural poverty, loss or degradation of farmland due to development, pollution, conflict, and natural disasters; it is also caused by unequal economic development, among other factors. An increasing number of rural migrants have been moving into cities—especially within developing countries—which has contributed to the exponential population growth in cities. Rural migrants generally work in labor-intensive jobs, send remittances to family members who remain in their villages, and live in low-income enclaves or slums due to a shortage of affordable housing. It is not uncommon for urbanites to impose social stigmas on rural migrants, who are often discriminated against and marginalized.

The Lab featured a screening of the film Presence (2012), in which migrant workers in Bangalore recount stories of seeing ghosts, thus revealing forgotten histories and their own personal narratives.

• In Transience, Presence, and Printed Rainbow

Sanitation—the expedient removal of waste material—is necessary for the health of citizens and the urban environment alike. Cities are responsible for providing their residents with properly functioning sanitation systems that include services such as garbage collection, wastewater disposal, and other hygiene-related activities. An inadequate or dysfunctional sanitation system can result in severe public health problems.

The Comfortably Sustainable session considered how private entities and public organizations could work together to solve urban problems and deliver such services as sanitation and water in a way that would allow Mumbai to become more comfortable and sustainable.

• Comfortably Sustainable

A service economy is an economic system based on the buying and selling of services. In the last fifty years, there has been a shift in industrialized economies from manufacturing goods to providing services. High-paying manufacturing jobs are rapidly disappearing, only to be replaced by low-paying service-sector jobs that produce no physical product. The service economy in developing countries is growing exponentially and is mainly concentrated in hospitality, retail, information technology, and human services. Those services that can be outsourced are often sent to developing countries. Not only does virtually every product today have a service component to it, but most products are being transformed into services, changing the economic landscape and dynamics of interchange in cities and around the world.

The protagonist in the film Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Angers Albert Pinto?), screened at the Mumbai Lab, deals with daily struggles as a member of the working class in his job in the service economy.

• Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Angers Albert Pinto?)

Sharia law is the Islamic code of criminal justice that is based on the principles of living and ethics that many Muslims accept as part of their faith; the system is delineated in the Qur’an and by the prophet Mohammed. Sharia law is practiced in many Muslim countries, and also integrated, in part, into some Western judicial systems. Its implementation has sparked controversy around the world due to its traditional restriction of the woman’s role, voice, and rights, as well as the violent nature of its traditional punishments.

As part of the Mumbai Lab’s film series at the Mahim Beach satellite location, the film Invoking Justice was screened. The film documents a group of Muslim women who live in an area of south India where Sharia law is practiced. The group created a women’s jamaat (the term for the traditionally all-male assembly that investigates crimes) to bring greater equality and rights to women whose cases were being investigated.

• Invoking Justice (2011)

A skywalk is a type of elevated pedestrian walkway whose purpose is to give pedestrians an efficient means to move from commercial or transportation hubs to specific destinations. Skywalks give pedestrians a safe alternative to cross a highly trafficked traffic junction, while simultaneously easing traffic congestion, and they strategically and efficiently disperse commuters from congested areas. Safety and convenience are the main reasons for the development of the walkways, but without proper planning, they can be a costly and underused public investment.

Skywalks have been the subject of heated debate in Mumbai. Pedestrians complain that they are often inconvenient to use, that they have been built in areas where sizable pedestrian pavements already exist, and that they are awkwardly designed. Rethinking Sealinks and Skywalks explored the qualitative potential of the Lab’s proposed network of alternatives.

• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) defines a slum as “a heavily populated urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor” where residents lack one or more of the following: durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions; sufficient living space; easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an affordable price; access to adequate sanitation; and security of tenure that prevents forced evictions. While the term “slum” is sometimes viewed as pejorative—particularly in academic settings—it typically lacks such a connotation in the developing world, where most slums exist. Approximately one billion people around the world live in slums of varying quality. Nearly 60 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. Some areas are formally recognized with legal tenure, and have been able to develop into higher quality permanent settlements, while residents in other areas face the threat of eviction every day, and their living conditions remain dismal. The slums are rarely included in discussions around city visioning, and they are often entirely left out of the city planning and development process—leaving residents to improvise solutions for their daily necessities.

In Nukkad Natak, girls from Dharavi, a slum situated in central Mumbai that is considered Asia’s largest, produced and performed a play about their vision for Mumbai. Without acknowledging, accepting, and considering Mumbai’s slums, it is impossible to have a productive conversation about the future of the city’s development.

• Nukkad Natak

“Slum eviction” refers to the eviction of slum dwellers from their homes—in many cases unfairly—to make way for upmarket developments. Many slum redevelopment projects, while designed to move populations out of harsh living conditions, result in a loss of livelihood for slum dwellers, who rely heavily on the economic and social networks established within the slum. Often, slum dwellers are offered free houses in exchange for the land where their homes are located. However, many exceptions to this arrangement make them ineligible for a free home and would most likely result in them being displaced to another slum.

The Lab featured a screening of the documentary Bombay: Our City, which questioned the notion of illegal housing and slum eviction on public land and examined the unfair treatment of Mumbai’s working-class citizens who live in these areas.

• Bombay: Our City

In many older slums that have developed over time, an architectural typology has evolved that is uniquely suited to the social and economic systems of the community. In Mumbai, this typology is best represented by a building sometimes referred to as the “tool house,” which encompasses a work space on the ground floor, living space above, and sometimes opportunities for rental accommodations; the cumulative arrangement serves multiple functions and is built to shift and change with family dynamics.

During Design Challenge, an event that was part of the Mumbai Lab’s Bridging series, architecture students were challenged by a slum contractor to design a house suited to slum typology; the project’s goal was to help them better understand the importance of the typology’s many intricacies.

• Design Challenge

With an estimated density of more than 20,000 people per square kilometer, Mumbai is more tightly packed than almost any city in the world. This, combined with sky-high real estate prices, means that space in the city, whether public or private, is scarce, and comes at a premium.

During Mediating Public-Private Investment, Lab Team member Neville Mars discussed new ways of thinking about increasing space in Mumbai, such as the creation of “infraspace,” a term he coined to describe urban expansion that is paralleled and facilitated by the development of high-speed transit.

• Mediating Public-Private Investment

The idea of the split city refers to the various interdependencies between the formal and informal components of a city (“formal” and “informal” defined as sectors officially or unofficially recognized by the government). In a split city, there are severe institutional and infrastructural gaps that exclude citizens from access to water, housing, and transportation, among other needs. While this dichotomy is a provocative lens through which to view the city, it prevents us from imagining pragmatic cross-collaborations that can bridge this divide. Rather, framing an integrated policy that reconciles the bottom-up views of the local population with the top-down perspective of planners requires the participation of stakeholders from all sides, sectors, and levels.

The split city concept inspired the Mumbai Lab’s Meet in the Middle series of ten events that brought together stakeholders from all areas of the development spectrum to discuss how to bridge top-down and bottom-up planning efforts in a way that will serve all citizens.

• Meet in the Middle series

“Stacked Population Index” (SPI) is a term developed by Mumbai Lab Team member Neville Mars as an alternative way of measuring population density based on Floor Space Index (FSI) and building typologies. Using Google Earth to create a detailed map of the current population density of Mumbai, this methodology examines the average density in gridded map cells of 500 square meters. These numbers form the basis of the new SPI index, revealing precisely how it varies and reflects living conditions throughout the city.

A visual representation of the city of Mumbai, rendered as a model and derived using the city’s SPI data, was placed in the Lab to illustrate an alternative way of depicting the city’s density and revealing where gaps exist in access to transportation and resources.

• Stacked Population Index: Mumbai Stacked City

Time scarcity is a condition that leaves urban dwellers with restricted amounts of time for activities outside of work, including transit and activities related to everyday subsistence. It is a constraint that most greatly affects those with limited economic means, as time scarcity has an inverse correlation with financial earnings. Poor urban transport systems and overburdened infrastructures often hold citizens hostage to varying amounts of time scarcity. Those urban dwellers who have greater wealth are better able to negotiate this time constraint by employing others to handle household chores—such as cleaning, cooking, and shopping for groceries—and they may rely on other strategies such as hiring a driver, or living in closer proximity to their place of work, so they can avoid losing time to commuting; in effect, these tactics “buy” them more time for more leisurely activities.

Split City: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity was a program that examined the lack of time that Mumbaikars must contend with due to the city’s overtaxed infrastructure and urban layout; participants in the conversation sought to define a feasible solution to the issue.

• Split City: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity

The transactional capacity of a neighborhood refers to the number of community, economic, or business transactions for which the area allows. Dense, mixed-use environments tend to have high transactional capacity due to the diversity of economic and social activities the typology supports.

Many of Mumbai’s typologies, particularly slum typologies, support high levels of transactional capacities, while consuming fewer resources than high-rises. In Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks, architect Rupali Gupte discussed how megaprojects “ruffle” this logic and break existing networks, putting residents into infrastructural situations with fewer transactional capabilities than they once had and sometimes reducing the cumulative transactions to a very small number.

• Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks

Effective urban relationships are largely based on notions of trust, rather than on systems that rely on control. While strategies of trust imply uncertainty about the outcomes of certain interactions—which can prove challenging for some—they are also known to benefit process-driven thinking and experimentation. Trust leads to more convivial cities in ever more diverse urban contexts.

Two blindfolded tours of Mumbai challenged Mumbaikars to trust unknown guides, and the strangers accompanying them, who would ensure their safety while moving blindfolded through the city; in doing so, participants discovered the benefits of such interactions while gaining a new perspective on the sensory experience of Mumbai.

• Sensing Mumbai, Part I: A Blind
  Guided Tour

City governments typically use twenty-year plans when determining and communicating their medium- to long-term visions for a city’s physical development. Twenty-year plans typically set broad overarching goals that provide direction for the city’s land-use allocation, related zoning and bylaws, and other land-use policies. While the plans are considered important for ensuring a cohesive, comprehensive, and strategic approach to city planning, they are often criticized for being inflexible in cases of unexpected shifts in city dynamics.

In 2014, Mumbai will roll out its next twenty-year plan. One session of the Lab’s Meet in the Middle series, Planning in a Dynamic City, was dedicated to discussing how the plan could be developed in a more collaborative fashion to better represent the visions of the city’s residents and be more flexible in response to the city’s constant fluctuations.

• Planning in a Dynamic City

Urban data is the information that cities produce, which is measured and turned into facts, figures, and visualizations. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google, the amount of data collected between the dawn of humanity and 2003 is equivalent to the amount we now produce every two days. This phenomenon of massively proliferating data, increasingly referred to as “big data,” comes with the task of filtering and making accessible this new wealth of information.

During Planning in a Dynamic City, digital strategy consultant Sam Lockwood emphasized how data-led planning would enable Mumbai to be more agile and adaptive to its own rapidly changing needs.

• Planning in a Dynamic City

Urban farming—the practice of cultivating edible plants in densely populated areas—aims to produce organic food for consumption or sale to meet the needs of the local population through local resources. Urban farming can empower city dwellers to take charge of their own nutrition, increase awareness about health, and create food and financial security. Urban farms can be as simple as a selection of edible plants planted in discarded plastic bottles or an installation of grow bags set up in someone’s home. More sophisticated examples include rooftop plant beds that utilize rainwater irrigation systems.

Children learned the basic skills necessary for urban farming during Fooducate, the hands-on Food for Thought series event held in Sambhaji Park.

• Fooducate

Urban sensory experience speaks to the vastly complicated network of human senses and interactions—generated by the interplay between individuals and groups, by one’s own physical sensory system, and by the experience of the physical layout and appearance of city spaces—that impact the way one perceives and moves through the city. These obvious and sometimes undetected stimuli shape our everyday decision-making and well-being (consciously and subconsciously). Being more attuned to how the built environment can affect citizens’ decisions and well-being may inform future urban design in a positive way.

Gaining new perspective on this dimension of daily life, Lab visitors experienced Mumbai in an entirely new way during two Sensing Mumbai blindfolded tours of the city.

• Sensing Mumbai, Part I: A Blind Guided Tour Around Mahim Beach

“Urban sound” refers to the vast range of sounds that the city produces. From the rhythm of the steam engine to the drone of the automobile, the sound of our city has always been a defining characteristic of urban life. While these sounds have served as creative inspiration for various artists, from the Futurists to John Cage, they also contribute to overstimulation. Through recent developments in technology, sound can also be harnessed as a valuable tool for measuring various data sets in the city.

After taking a blindfolded tour of Mumbai, visitors to the second part of Sensing Mumbai discussed their surprising findings, including what the many sounds of the city conveyed to them when they were unable to see.

• Sensing Mumbai: Part II

“Urban violence” refers to physical, emotional, and psychological abuse that occurs in cities, in both public and private spaces. Such violence can take the form of premeditated or impromptu individual, group, or institutional acts. Urban violence can result from a diversity of causes including social, economic, political, and institutional pressures. It is a serious issue that is accompanied by an increase in fear and insecurity and often requires intervention. There has been an increased acknowledgement that government, the private sector, and civil society alike should continue to prioritize violence reduction and prevention by providing more cross-sector solutions, making more channels accessible for the abused and abusers to seek help, and identifying appropriate interventions.

Being Brave: Privacy and the World Around You was a program that spoke directly to the challenging issue of urban violence by openly addressing domestic and street violence that permeates everyday lives of many local populations. During the Women and Social Spaces session, Mumbai women expressed a strong wish that urban spaces would be safer for women; they discussed the fact that they ought to be able to feel safe in the city at any hour, dressed in whatever way they want, without fear of violence or harassment.

• Being Brave: Privacy and the World Around You
• Women and Social Spaces

In cultures in which gender inequality is pervasive, girls and women are often afraid to be seen in the public sphere, except when absolutely necessary. In cities, this cultural dynamic manifests itself in unsafe environments for those women who do venture out. The concept of “visible women” represents a movement that advocates for more women to make themselves present in urban public spaces: in streets, playgrounds, markets, public squares, on public transportation, and elsewhere. This movement is guided by the belief that the more women are present in public spaces, the safer those spaces become for all women. The effort is part of a larger, evolving movement that demands women’s safety be a priority in urban environments around the world.

During the event Women and Social Spaces, the need for visible women in public spaces throughout Indian cities emerged as a key theme in a discussion led by the women’s advocacy group Blank Noise.

• Women and Social Spaces

Walkability is a measure of how pedestrian-friendly an area is. Factors that affect walkability include the presence and quality of pedestrian footpaths; traffic and road conditions; and accessibility, safety, density, connectivity, and proximity. Walkability is also influenced by how well neighborhoods and major commercial or transportation hubs are connected to each other. Design details that improve walkability include clear pedestrian crossings, safe and well-maintained sidewalks, well-lit paths, shade or sun in the appropriate seasons, the presence of street furniture, and human-scaled street frontages. Cities that promote walkability achieve many positive health, environmental, and economic benefits.

At the Lab, professor and author Colin Ellard described the development of “street psychogeography,” sharing some of his findings about how the walkability of a city affects a person’s psychological and physiological response. Ellard also discussed future prospects for this fruitful method of studying the human response to place.

• Psychology on the Street
• Testing, Testing! Mumbai

Water quality refers to the potability of water and its condition for human consumption or use. Urban development has had a profound effect on water quality due to the impact of large-scale development over extensive areas. As cities grow, there is an increase in factors that can harm the quality of local water resources. This has driven governments to implement measures to protect bodies of water and to increase the standard quality of urban water supplies distributed to its citizens.

In Comfortably Sustainable, participants discussed access to clean water. Panelists analyzed a pilot project for water privatization in K East ward as a possible model for how the city could solve some issues relating to water quality and supply.

• Comfortably Sustainable
• ME=WE Memorandum

After its launch in New York in the summer of 2011, and its subsequent presentation in Berlin in the summer of 2012, the BMW Guggenheim Lab traveled to Mumbai. The Mumbai Lab engaged local organizations on citywide research projects and Mumbai-specific design projects to explore and suggest new ways for citizens, designers, and city officials to approach public space in Mumbai, with a focus on individual and community needs. Over the course of six weeks, at six locations, the Lab offered free public programs related to these city projects and studies that included participatory studies, tours, talks, workshops, film screenings, and cultural activities. The programming in Mumbai was developed as a set of series based on a variety of topics. These series included Meet in the Middle, Bridging, Unwrapping Mumbai, Food for Thought, City Dreams, Transformers, and Film.

As part of the culmination of the Lab’s experience in Mumbai, this glossary aims to identify 100 of the most talked-about trends in urban thinking that played a role at the Lab’s first Asian venue. These terms and their definitions aim to document and take the “temperature” of a particular time and place —Mumbai in the winter of 2012 and early 2013 — and to shed light on what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what cities were, are, and can be. Each definition concludes with an example of a Mumbai Lab program that illustrated the relevance and context of each term.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. One hundred of them, discussed at the Mumbai Lab, follow.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in Mumbai from December 9, 2012, through January 20, 2013.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab Mumbai was developed by Maria Nicanor, Curator,
BMW Guggenheim Lab; Stephanie Kwai,
Curatorial Assistant, BMW Guggenheim
Lab; and Christine McLaren, Resident
Writer, BMW Guggenheim Lab.

Design: Sulki & Min, Seoul

Photos: UnCommonSense

All text and photos © 2013 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Site design by
Collective Assembly

Development by
Tom van de Velde

A 3-D printer is a machine that prints objects by laying down successive layers of plastic or other materials. 3-D printers have existed since the 1980s. Today, several companies are working to create models that are available for personal use and at a low price point. In the last few years, the rise of 3-D printers in rapid prototyping has popularized and democratized the creation of objects at an individual level, proving that there is a viable alternative to the previous dependence on industrial mass production. This radical change has been a turning point for a variety of fields, most notably biomedicine, architecture, and design. Thus, 3-D printers are changing the way we understand and construct our built environment.

Children and adults explored the possibilities of rapid self-manufacturing with miniature mobile 3-D printers at Make Your Own Anything Day with the educational services cooperative HTINK and MakerBot Industries, a company that manufactures 3-D printers.

• Make Your Own Anything Day

The Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” references the vast income divide in the United States, where an extreme concentration of wealth exists among the top-earning one percent of the population, and recognizes the power associated with that wealth. “The 99 percent” refers to the rest of the population, and conveys the suggestion that both wealth and power should be more equally distributed. The Lab’s run in New York coincided with the time when the Occupy Wall Street movement took root. As the movement developed and its message spread across the world, “the 99 percent” became a commonly recognized, understood, and utilized term. This term has been credited with transcending traditional polarizations of left and right and reframing political dialogue to center around the concept of inequity.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan. Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for skyscrapers.

• Wall Street Occupation Tour

“Accessibility” describes the ease with which something can be reached, obtained, used, or understood by as many people as possible. Though often used in reference to accessibility design—urban design that takes into account the full spectrum of other-abled (including elderly, disabled, and handicapped) individuals by creating a user-friendly urban and domestic environment—“accessibility” can also refer to a citizen’s ability to obtain basic services such as health care, education, employment, or information, or to participate in political or cultural activities.

Free Community Health Care Day offered complementary holistic health services such as acupuncture, massage, and herbal medicine consultations to the public, while highlighting how such services can be provided affordably for all.

• Free Community Health Care Day

“Accessible health care” refers to health services that can be obtained by a population, without physical, financial, organizational, social, or cultural barriers limiting their utilization. Access does not refer merely to the supply of services, but also to the affordability, physical accessibility, and social and cultural acceptance of a citizen’s need and right to those services. In the United States, health insurance is a major determinant of a citizen’s access to both preventative and acute health care; employment and income heavily determine barriers to health-care access.

As part of the New York Lab’s Sunday Salon Series, Dr. David Ores discussed his work as a provider of low-cost, general medical care to the poor and uninsured. He is a founder of the Restaurant Workers’ Health Care Cooperative, which enables restaurants on the Lower East Side to inexpensively provide their workers with access to his services.

• Sunday Salon Series

In the United States, as in many other countries, “affordable housing” is generally understood to refer to housing for which a household pays no more than 30 percent of its annual income. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Families who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing are considered cost burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and medical care.” Recently, there has been a movement to encompass other costs within the definition of affordable housing, as reflected in the MIT/CRE Housing Affordability Initiative’s Housing Affordability Index, which takes other factors into account when determining area affordability, such as adequate access to jobs, school quality, and environmental amenities associated with a residence’s location. Especially in the context of the economic recession, the issue of housing affordability is emerging globally as a pressing subject in both developed and developing countries.

New York Lab Team members ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] discussed gentrification and the local effects of globalization processes during their time at the Lab. Access to affordable housing emerged as a salient and critical issue in the Lower East Side and New York as a whole.

• ZUS: Conclusions

Today, 20 percent of the population is older than sixty-five; by 2060, every third person will have reached that age. The effect of the aging population on the urban environment and on social services is one of the most significant global challenges and opportunities of the next fifty years. Intergenerational exchange creates opportunities for knowledge-sharing and social interaction. Urban design, community initiatives, and public services can help meet the needs of young and old citizens alike.

During the New Aging event, architect Matthias Hollwich shed light on how our cities often shut out the elderly through inaccessible design, and proposed solutions as to how architecture and urbanism can be reengineered to support new, aging-appropriate living typologies.

• New Aging

“Altruism” refers to the belief in, or act of, showing concern for the well-being of others in a manner that is selfless or disinterested, and that may occur at some cost to oneself. A person is understood to behave altruistically when he or she acts in a way that benefits other people, even if it is to his or her own detriment to do so.

During Love Night, psychology and neuroeconomics experts were challenged to design the ideal environment that could coax even the most hardened New Yorker into behaving altruistically. They explored how design-related and citizen-initiated actions can encourage more friendly and altruistic behavior in day-to-day city life.

• Love Night

A bailout is the act of financially assisting a failing business or economy in order to save it from collapse. Today, the term “bailout” is frequently used in reference to the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, in which the US government acted in response to the international credit and subprime mortgage crises by spending $700 billion to purchase troubled assets.

The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting Time Sit-In was an event that brought together Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marcel van der Meijs, and activists from the Lower East Side for a sit-in to share squatting stories, strategies, and analysis of spaces used for formal and informal social interaction.

• The NY Leftover Bailout:
  Squatting Time Sit-In

“Bike politics” refers to the debate on greater bike infrastructure in cities. From the need for more bike lanes and more secure bike storage to better safety and traffic laws to reduce cyclist fatalities, bike politics covers many issues and can vary from city to city. In New York, advocacy groups like Transportation Alternatives have made incredible achievements for the biking community; Janette Sadik-Khan, New York Department of Transportation Commissioner, has overseen the addition of more than 285 miles of bike lanes since taking office in 2007.

Mobility in Cities involved a discussion between Benoit Jacob, head of BMW i Design (the BMW division devoted to sustainability in transport), and New York City Department of Transportation chief of staff Margaret Newman. The duo explored the future of urban mobility as it relates to public transportation, bikes, and cars.

• Mobility in Cities

Bottom-up urban engagement places the citizen at the root of urban change. The term “bottom-up” first appeared in relation to its opposite, “top-down,” in the 1942 edition of Harvard University’s Quarterly Journal of Economics: “In the long run it is part of the larger question of whether ’bottom-up’ control can be as efficient as ‘top-down’ control.” In an urban context, this approach has two key, complementary dimensions: first, a trend that encourages social, cooperative models of city organization; second, a growing interest from government officials, academia, and the professional sector in resorting to digital, open-sourced data and models as key resources for understanding urban interactions.

The Hester Street Collaborative launched the website, peoplemakeparks.org, at the BMW Guggenheim Lab New York. The People Make Parks initiative facilitates bottom-up urban engagement by making the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s capital-projects design process accessible to local community groups and citizens, allowing them to participate in park design.

• People Make Parks Launch

Carbon fiber is a composite consisting of fibrillated acrylic resin, polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and pitch (oil), which has been treated with heat. It is extremely strong, low-density, heat-resistant, and lightweight, making it desirable for use in a wide variety of fields, from aerospace and aircraft to electronics and medical science. On a smaller scale, the material can be found in automobiles and bikes as well as tennis rackets and fishing rods. The material’s origins date back to the late 1800s, when Thomas Edison exposed bamboo fibers to high temperatures to make filaments for light bulbs.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab’s initial architectural structure was conceived and designed in carbon fiber by Tokyo-based architects Momoyo Kajima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow, making the Lab the first such structure ever to be made primarily out of carbon fiber. Kaijima spoke about the firm, past projects, and the reasons for utilizing carbon fiber in the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

• ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], ­Rotterdam, and Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo: Projects

Chameleonic citizenship is the state of flexible identity that is required of urban dwellers today. In response to continuous shifts in life and work and ever more fluid borders, the individual is no longer bound to an established national allegiance. Rather, chameleonic citizenship implies an open identity in which citizens are free to take on different roles, adapt to ever-changing urban needs, and build communities and networks independent of proximity and facilitated through technology. This transformation on the part of the individual mitigates the inability of urban infrastructure to respond rapidly to his or her needs. This shift will influence policymaking and political-decision processes, as well as the physical organization of urban spaces.

In Our Migration Story, the Latin American and Caribbean Community Center led participants in mapping their personal migration stories and identifying the complex nature of identity in cities.

• Our Migration Story

Changemaking is the act of working toward the goal of changing systems on a fundamental level in such a way that they benefit society as a whole. While closely related to social entrepreneurship—the use of entrepreneurial principles or enterprises to solve social problems or effect social change, which was popularized in the 1980s by management-consultant-cum-social-entrepreneur Bill Drayton—changemakers can work in a number of capacities or frameworks to achieve their goals of systematic change.

In Smart Living in a World of Multiple Modernities, FreedomLab’s Thieu Besselink discussed how individual citizen actions and interventions, on personal, societal, and global levels, can create small- and large-scale change.

• Smart Living in a World of Multiple Modernities

“City manifesto” refers to a public declaration of actionable steps for a city. The word “manifesto” was adopted into English during the seventeenth century, derived from an Italian word meaning “make public”; it is originally from the Latin manifestus, meaning “palpable” or “obvious.”

Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] presented their conclusions about this topic after hosting the Lab in New York, where they encouraged the creation of a collective manifesto for the city of New York.

• ZUS: Conclusions

“Cityness” is a term coined by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her 2005 essay, “Cityness in the Urban Age.” She refers to urban agglomerations that do not necessarily have all the attributes associated with traditional Western notions of the city but still produce meaningful public spaces. Our definition of urbanity is steeped in certain tropes that do not support the full range of informal urban activity. The term “cityness” refers to those interstitial spaces, areas of differences, and moments of intersection that constitute contemporary urban life. Shanghai is an emblematic example of this new kind of urbanism, as seen in the city’s ability to create new situations from existing structures (such as a bus shelter that, as observed by architect QinYu Ma, becomes a place to play cards at night).

Sassen, who is the Robert S. Lynd professor of sociology at Columbia University, examined notions of comfort and cityness in the global city of New York.

• Saskia Sassen:
  Talking Back to Your Intelligent City

Climate change is the slow alteration of weather patterns that occurs over time as a result of various conditions, including natural geographic transformation, orbital variations, evolution, and human influence. There is serious debate about the current and future repercussions of climate change. These effects may be ultimately irreversible and are largely due to an increase in carbon dioxide levels—the highest levels of which are produced in cities. Through large-scale intergovernmental guidelines (such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997) and individual initiatives, urban planners and citizens are becoming more aware of these issues, resulting in more responsible design and lifestyle choices that can lead to urgently needed reductions in emissions.

While many hope that good planning and new technology will help cities lead the way in reducing and mitigating the negative effects of climate change, others believe cities are doomed in the face of it. Two critics from opposite ends of the spectrum, James S. Russell, author of The Agile City: Building Well Being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change, and James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, debated the future of urban life in Renaissance or Long Emergency? A Debate on the City’s Future.

• Renaissance or Long Emergency? A Debate on the City's Future

The term “collective memory,” as it is commonly used today, can be traced back to the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is closely related to the concept of collective consciousness. It refers to a memory shared by a group of people, sometimes passed from one generation to the next. In sociology, it can also be defined as group representations of the past that inform actions in the present. The concept of collective memory has been challenged in academia on the grounds that being conscious of—or remembering—something is an act that can only be done by an individual. However, the term is widely accepted and used within the social sciences.

On the date of the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, Jake Barton, of the design firm Local Projects, presented his firm’s work on interpreting and integrating collective memory into the media design of Manhattan’s 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and discussed the role of collective memory in the creation of public memorials.

• 9/11 Memorial and Museum: Collective Memory

A combined sewer system collects multiple types of water—rain or storm-water runoff, domestic sewage, and sometimes industrial wastewater—in the same infrastructure. Introduced in 1855 as a solution for cesspool ditches, combined sewer systems are still used by many older cities, though they are currently seen as problematic due to the risk of combined sewer overflows. This type of overflow occurs during times of heavy rainfall when the system becomes overwhelmed by runoff, forcing untreated water and raw sewage to bypass treatment and flow directly into nearby streams, rivers, or other bodies of water. Combined sewer systems have been abandoned in most up-to-date urban infrastructures.

Most of New York still operates on a combined sewer system, which results in hundreds of combined sewer overflows per year. During his two-and-a-half weeks of programming at the Lab, wastewater biologist Olatunbosun Obayomi focused on waste and water infrastructure in New York and other cities around the world, presenting ideas for neighborhood-scale waste-treatment structures that could help mitigate the negative impact of combined sewer overflows while also producing renewable energy.

• Olatunbosun Obayomi: Infrastructure of Waste and Water—A Recap and Analysis

As shared spaces, community gardens offer the possibility of outdoor space in urban areas to those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to green spaces; they can also provide a certain measure of independence for city dwellers who are able to grow their own food. The gardens produce a feeling of ownership and care for a collectively owned piece of land.

In New York’s East Village neighborhood, there are more than thirty-five community gardens that have been active since the 1970s. These urban oases emerged after local citizens decided to occupy vacant lots throughout the area, which were prevalent at the time, and turn them into gardens. The Lab’s location in New York was First Park, a community garden on First Street and Second Avenue that had been derelict for several years. The three-part workshop series What’s Next? was led by the local community group First Street Green. The group collectively gathered and analyzed data from the community surrounding the Lab in an effort to determine what the space should become once the Lab left. After the Lab concluded, First Park became an open, community-run space for cultural activities.

• What’s Next? The Legacy of the New York BMW Guggenheim Lab, Part 1

Community-led development is a model wherein community members, local businesses, nonprofits, and local government agencies collectively take a leadership role in development projects. Through community cooperatives and task forces, citizens are empowered to identify local issues and generate solutions based on local knowledge. The positive outcomes of this type of development, when combined with appropriate city collaboration and follow-up, include greater citizen support for development plans relevant to the real needs of a neighborhood.

Lab Team member Omar Freilla offered a workshop on how to start a worker cooperative. Sunset Park Toxicity Tour and Community Visions was a tour through Sunset Park, Brooklyn, led by Freilla and activists from the advocacy group United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE). Participants heard from community members about their struggles and victories against the city and state regarding the area’s polluting industries.

• How to Start a Worker Cooperative
• Sunset Park, Brooklyn Toxicity Tour and Community Visions with Omar Freilla

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a system of farm operation whereby producers (farmers) and consumers share both the benefits and risks of food production. Typically, CSA shareholders pay a sum up front each season to join the CSA. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s production throughout the growing season and harvest. CSAs are a relatively recent phenomenon, sparked by widespread concern about food security, quality, and industrialization. They date back to the 1960s in Japan and Europe, and to the mid-1980s in the United States.

Community Supported Agriculture is one method of obtaining fresh, local produce, the importance of which was stressed at Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan.

• Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan

How we get from the home to the workplace is one of the most important factors in modern urban dynamics. Commuting is a phenomenon characteristic of the industrialized era. The meaning of the word “commute” as we refer to it here dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when train travelers could purchase a “commutation ticket”—a rail pass for multiple trips that “commuted” the price of travel by combining individual fares in a single ticket. Today, commuting can involve any form of transportation, and is closely related to flows of movement within cities and the existence of morning and evening rush hours. Commuting has had a crucial impact on the type and speed of growth in the urban landscape, facilitating the creation of suburbs and dormitory towns.

At the Lab, Alejandro de Castro led the program Your Brain on Commuting. He was joined by author Tom Vanderbilt and psychologist and urban-transit expert Carlos Felipe Pardo; together, they analyzed the impact of commuting on the way we think and behave daily. Carlos Felipe Pardo led the Transit Psychology Tour, which explored the psychological effects of commuting. He concluded that the quality and length of a commute can have significant effects on a person’s well-being and quality of life.

• Your Brain on Commuting
• Transit Psychology Tour

Complaining is the act of voicing one’s personal concerns or grievances in a public space. The First Amendment of the United States Constitution defines the right of people to peacefully assemble and petition, and in London, Speakers’ Corner, located in Hyde Park, is one place where people are free to voice their opinions. A more recent development in the United States is the use of “free speech zones,” a tactic the Bush administration employed to isolate protestors by offering temporary and physically constrained areas of protest.

Growing Up and Old on the Lower East Side invited locals to share five-minute stories about their changing neighborhood. Here, the act of public speech allowed people to feel a sense of community and understand the shared nature of their concerns and memories.

• Growing Up and Old on the Lower East Side

“Comfort” is understood as a feeling of relief or contentment. In order to achieve this desirable state, people have pursued diverse means to alleviate their troubles. Encompassing communication commodities, fancy gadgets, and privacy and security devices as well as comfort food and other ways of appeasing our bodies, these temporary forms of relief help us divert our minds from the repetitive activities of everyday life. Maximizing comfort has also become a measure of individual wealth, success, and status. Unfortunately, our irrepressible aspiration to find ease often leads us in unsustainable directions that benefit only a select few. Confronting comfort is the practice of finding a balance between notions of modern comfort and the urgent need for environmentally responsible solutions that empower us all.

Architect and Lab Advisory Committee member Elizabeth Diller spoke at the Lab about architecture that enables and encourages urbanites to slow down and stop—such as New York’s High Line park—as a means of seeking, and designing for, comfort in urban settings.

• Elizabeth Diller: Comfort in Our City

Container architectural involves the use of shipping containers as construction units and goes as far back as the creation of shipping containers themselves. The first modern shipping container was put into service in 1956 by American trucker and entrepreneur Malcom McLean, who built a whole shipping fleet around the concept. Container architecture involves prefabricated, stackable, and cheap modular structures that can be easily transported. Typically, the containers are built out as makeshift shelters that house construction trailers, toilets, dressing rooms, military-related structures, or disaster-relief solutions; they can also be built into more permanent homes and offices. In recent years, the structures have increasingly been used in creative and commercial industries, which have adopted the containers’ industrial, rugged look as a fashionable expression of temporality. No longer as much of a cutting-edge practice as it once was, container architecture now appears in cities like New York, Berlin, and London, and is used for art gallery spaces, trendy retail stores, and pop-up offices.

Video artist Kelly Loudenberg’s New Urbanism series looked at imaginative and sustainable applications of inventive urban architecture, from rooftop farms to dumpster swimming pools and underground opera houses.

• Screening: New Urbanism

A cooperative is a business or organization jointly owned and run by its members, who share its benefits or profit. Unofficially, cooperatives have existed since the dawn of human society, but today in many countries they are considered legal entities that operate under cooperative laws. The first known official cooperative was the Fenwick Weavers Society, formed in 1761 in Fenwick, Scotland. However, the Rochdale Pioneers, a group of twenty-eight cotton artisans in Rochdale, England, in the mid-1800s, are generally credited as the founders of the movement, creating the prototype of the modern cooperative. Today, cooperatives extend to many sectors, most notably housing, banking, agriculture, and business.

The Celebration of All Things Cooperative explored cooperatives as a viable form of democratizing services or access to goods and ensuring fair and equal benefit for workers.

• Celebration of All Things Cooperative

Corporate sponsorship is a way for corporations to financially support individuals, projects, or institutions, sometimes merely in exchange for brand recognition but also to advance the ideals of giving back to communities, broadly known as corporate social responsibility. By supporting certain kinds of initiatives, corporations seek to align themselves with the philosophy and core values represented by the supported project of choice. Corporate sponsorship also has tax-relief implications and can be seen as a type of philanthropy, with roots reaching back to ancient Greece. Today, corporate sponsorship is most often associated with efforts by institutions to secure funds from large companies. Corporate sponsorships are often associated with nonprofit organizations. Without them, many initiatives would never come to fruition due to increasing lack of governmental support or dwindling institutional resources. The risk of corporate sponsorship is that corporations, given their financial contributions, can feel entitled to shape the projects they fund. Positive and meaningful corporate sponsorship assumes the integrity of the content of the projects being funded. While it has had a long tradition in the United States and is a practice on the rise in Asia, corporate sponsorship has generally been less socially accepted in Europe, where it is associated with the commercialization of society and the spread of an advertisement mentality. Corporate sponsorship and brand-driven marketing shapes the visual landscape of our cities through common practices such as the funding and naming of new stadiums, performance centers, and other prominent urban sites. When done correctly, particularly in the financial-crisis-minded twenty-first century, corporate sponsorship can be a powerful supplement to private and government support and can lead to a greater sense of social responsibility within large corporations.

Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, touched on corporate sponsorship in the talk she gave about how the confluence of sustainability imperatives, economic stagnation, and digitally enabled creativity has given rise to a movement of connected consumption.

• Juliet Schor

Data visualization is the representation of information through graphs and other visual means. The purpose of data visualization is to translate complex data sets or subjective information into easily digestible, graphic forms, bringing together the practical need to communicate with an aesthetic sensibility. Visualizing urban behavior and patterns can create awareness about important urban conditions (traffic, cell phone use, bike use, pollution levels) and can also enable planners and other observers to diagnose situations that need improvement.

In City of Bits, Bytes, and People, Assaf Biderman, associate director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, discussed how recent developments in technology are enabling us to extract and visualize more data from cities than ever before, vastly broadening the spectrum of how we can understand our cities today.

• City of Bits, Bytes, and People

De dépendance is a term coined by the Rotterdam-based architectural studio ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] to refer to the process of culture becoming independent and financially self-sufficient. ZUS established De Dépendance—Center for Urban Culture as a way to bolster cultural potential in Rotterdam.

Momoyo Kaijima, principal of Atelier Bow-Wow, and Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman, principals of ZUS, discussed the role of architecture in community building.

• ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], ­Rotterdam, and Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo: Projects

The Department of Listening is an imaginary city office designed to receive and respond to citizen feedback. This fictional, 311-like government entity would truly listen to the real needs of citizens with a sense of immediacy, and would allow for a more direct path of citizen-to-government communication, thanks to new uses of technology freed from the burdens of bureaucracy. The Department of Listening would bridge the gap between the city and its inhabitants at the street level, and allow for a two-way exchange of resources and information. The term was coined by Lab curator Maria Nicanor during the United Nations Social Media week in October 2011, in a session devoted to the possible uses of social media for more effective citizen participation. An example of active city listening can be found in initiatives like Boston’s Citizens Connect, a mobile-phone app developed by city officials that allows Bostonians to report and immediately address neighborhood issues.

Participatory Budgeting was a tutorial on a new form of open-source governance where neighborhood residents can vote on priorities for government spending.

• Participatory Budgeting: What It Is and How to Do It in Your Community

Design barriers are construction choices that limit or control an individual’s access to urban spaces. From “No Loitering” signs to benches with armrests designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them, our cities are full of devices meant to disperse and divide citizens along lines of race, class, and age.

Architecture for Everyone was a discussion led by Interboro Partners about how design decisions can either include or exclude.

• Architecture for Everyone, by Interboro Partners

Dumpster design is an approach that employs used or discarded objects as raw materials for new products. Dumpster design has emerged out of a growing trend toward sustainable consumption, which promotes alternative economic structures facilitated by sharing, recycling, and “freecycling.”

Trash Mappers was a workshop led by the collective Basurama that empowered visitors to analyze their own waste and design new alternative uses for it. Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 10: A Nonconsumer Wandering, Gleaning, and Foraging was an urban foraging walk led by spurse, a creative collective.

• Trash Mappers: Understanding Waste with Basurama
• Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 10: A Nonconsumer Wandering, Gleaning, and Foraging by spurse

Emotional cityness is the rejection of impersonal and cold relationships in large urban areas in favor of face-to-face, convivial, and empathic interaction. In a climate of rapid urbanization and uncertainty, with dynamics leading toward social fragmentation, there is an increasing need for new connectivity in urban environments that can be achieved through the strengthening of personal relationships. Social interaction within cities is a vehicle toward community cohesiveness. The need for an increased emotional cityness was identified by Lab curators Maria Nicanor and David van der Leer as one of the overarching topics of the New York Lab.

Love Night explored the effects of kindness on the behavior of visitors through various experiments designed by neuroscientist Paul Zak and psychologist Emanuele Castano. The event People Make Parks celebrated the launch of an interactive website, peoplemakeparks.org, that allowed New Yorkers to participate in the design of their parks. The website makes the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s capital-design process accessible to community groups throughout the city. During Strangers, Terror, and Kindness in Cities, Castano and Zak explored the role that chemistry, empathy, and compassion play in urban life.

• Love Night
• People Make Parks Launch
• Paul Zak on Kindness

“Empathy” is defined by psychologists as the ability to recognize the emotion of a fellow human and, consequently, experience the same emotion oneself. Not to be confused with sympathy—the ability to feel pity for another—empathy is recognized as a key driver in the evolutionary development of human society by leading us to care for and tolerate other humans, even strangers. First coined in English in the early twentieth century, empathy is a direct translation of the German equivalent, Einfühlung (“feeling into”), and is modeled on the Greek en (“in”) and pathos (“feeling”). All mammals experience empathy to varying degrees.

Psychologist Emanuele Castano engaged in a public dialogue with neuroeconomist Paul Zak about the science behind empathy, how it effects our treatment of those dissimilar from us, and our behavior toward strangers in the public realm.

• Strangers, Terror, and Kindness in Cities

Environmental justice is the idea that all people, regardless of race, class, or gender should benefit from a healthy environment. Research has shown that the most unpleasant elements of city infrastructure, such as landfills, waste-processing facilities, and energy plants, are routinely placed in marginalized communities. The term “environmental justice” dates back to the 1960s and ’70s. During that period, a string of protests across the United States decrying the unfair dumping of hazardous waste in low-income neighborhoods sparked a heated debate and investigation into the correlation between polluted and unsafe geographies and those inhabited by poor or minority populations. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), established in 1970, had not yet sufficiently acknowledged environmental racism. As a result of a call for action by the Black Congressional Caucus, the EPA established the Office of Environmental Equity in 1992; its name was later changed to the Office of Environmental Justice.

Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 6: Just Systems and Environmental Justice by spurse was a tour of the Bronx River collaboratively organized by Lab Team member and environmental activist Omar Freilla and research and design collaborative spurse. The goal of the tour was to identify how injustice is perpetuated via natural and built environments.

• Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 6: Just Systems and Environmental Justice by spurse

Environmental psychology is a relatively new field of study that examines the interrelationship between human behavior and our built or natural surroundings. The term itself is believed to originate in the work of German physician and psychologist Willy Hellpach (1877–1955).

Environmental psychologist Colin Ellard presented his work and codesigned an experiment with Lab Team member Charles Montgomery that expanded the boundaries of environmental psychology—previously only examined in a laboratory setting—by testing people’s mental and physiological reactions to actual urban environments.

• A Sense of Direction: Talk with Colin Ellard, Author of You Are Here

While “democracy” generally refers to a system of governance for a state or organization in which all eligible members partake or exert control equally (usually through elected representatives), “everyday democracy” describes a system in which equality, access, and individual agency extend beyond the electoral system to a number of other social dimensions. These can include the workplace, public services, education systems, family, or social society. The Everyday Democracy Index, a measurement tool initially introduced for European countries, assesses the extent to which democratic principles and practices pervade all features of day-to-day life.

During the session Making Democracy Part of Everyday Life, Lab Team member Omar Freilla kicked off his two-and-a-half weeks of programming by challenging Lab visitors to imagine how various dimensions of day-to-day life—education, work, spirituality, or family life—would look if they were to function in a truly democratic fashion.

• Making Democracy Part of Everyday Life

Eviction is the forced removal of occupants from a residence or business. While the word comes from the Latin evictionem, “recovery of one’s property,” in the present day the owner’s “recovery” often occurs at the expense of the tenant who is forced out.

Organized by Bullet Space, an anarchist squatter community that has existed since 1988, Your House Is Mine presented a collection of artwork and writing produced in the wake of the 1988 Tompkins Square riots.

• Your House is Mine

Evolutionary infrastructure is an approach to infrastructure, city planning, and architecture that allows for natural and artificial systems to work together to create a more inhabitable landscape. It refers to the idea that both engineered and natural systems must be considered as reciprocal evolutionary forces. Large-scale architectural commissions that have become dominant in recent years, where architects are required to take on projects that encompass city blocks or neighborhoods, mean that a more holistic approach to infrastructure is now possible and necessary.

Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss and their Harvard University Graduate School of Design studio led a presentation and workshop on evolutionary infrastructure, highlighting select inhabitable infrastructure proposals and completed projects from the early part of the twentieth century.

• Evolutionary Infrastructure: An Unfinished Utopia

Feelings of fear influence the way we interact with and behave toward others, especially strangers, in the public realm. Fear can be acquired from negative personal experience or social observation. The fear of crime especially can inhibit trust in urban interactions.

Psychologist Emanuele Castano presented his work studying terror theory and “othering” in Strangers, Terror, and Kindness in Cities, and discussed the underlying psychological patterns that lead us to fear and inhibit our empathy and trust toward others.

• Strangers, Terror, and Kindness in Cities

“Food distribution” refers to the broad range of services through which food travels from the producer to the consumer. These services can include, but are not limited to, food-transportation systems, wholesalers, farmers’ markets, shops, supermarkets, street food purveyors, and restaurants. The geographic distribution of these services within a city determines citizens’ access to certain types of food. Areas with a severe lack of food-distribution services are known as “food deserts.”

In Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan, Tanya Fields shed light on this issue by relating her personal struggle to access healthy food for her family as a single mother in the Bronx. She presented her work to improve healthy food distribution and food sovereignty in predominantly black neighborhoods through her organization, the BLK ProjeK. As part of the Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork sessions, creative consulting and design collaborative spurse led a tour through and around Hunts Point, the largest wholesale food market in the world, located in the Bronx.

• Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan
• Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 2: Co-opting Place by spurse

A genius hub is a city that attracts the best minds from all areas of the arts and sciences. This occurs when the right combination of educational opportunities, research resources, and job possibilities exist in one place, providing a generative crucible for innovation, creativity, and creative production. Silicon Valley, nexus of the information-technology boom, is one example of a genius hub.

In What’s Next? The Legacy of the New York BMW Guggenheim, Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] presented a workshop to discuss, speculate, and provoke ideas about how to help First Park continue the Lab’s role as a local genius hub.

• What’s Next? The Legacy of the New York BMW Guggenheim, Part 1

Gentrification is a global, urban phenomenon whereby underdeveloped areas are transformed. The process is often coupled with rising rents, a shift in the social fabric of neighborhoods, and in many cases, the influx of multinational corporations. Gentrification is one of the most polemic terms in urban discourse today. To some it implies the beautification and positive development of previously underdeveloped areas. However, it goes hand in hand with the negative effects of lower-income residents being priced out in favor of those who can afford increased rent prices caused by the process of rapid transformation.

The Lower East Side, where the Lab was located in New York, has undergone an extensive gentrification process over the past several years. Sharp increases in land value have caused numerous iconic establishments to close (the beloved Mars Bar on Second Avenue is one example) and many long-time residents have left the neighborhood, unable to afford rent. The ongoing process of gentrification in the neighborhood came up in many discussions during programming led by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], which focused on the city’s sociopolitical systems.

• ZUS: Conclusions

“Glocalism,” a term that combines “local” and “global,” speaks to two forces at play in all neighborhoods. In a climate shaped by rapid globalization and multinational corporations, widespread sameness is evident in any cosmopolitan hub. Conversely, each city has its own local, vernacular traditions. Glocalism is the merging of these two seemingly opposing forces.

Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] introduced their weekly programs using the notion of glocalism as a starting point.

• Neo-Globalism: An Introduction to Week 3 at the Lab by ZUS

A grassroots movement is an effort launched on a local level by volunteers or members of a community with the goal of achieving political change on a larger scale. During the time the Lab was open in New York, the grassroots movement Occupy Wall Street formed in the city’s Financial District, protesting against the concentration of wealth and power among America’s top-earning one percent. As a game-changing phenomenon in political activism, the movement made its way into many conversations and programs at the Lab. In response, a tour of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park was organized, and participants learned firsthand how the movement functioned and planned to create change.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan. Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for skyscrapers.

• Wall Street Occupation Tour

In an urban context, “green space” refers to an open space with natural vegetation such as grass, trees, bushes, flowers, and other plants. Urban green spaces can include parks, greenways, nature paths, gardens, and waterfronts. Green spaces provide ecological functions for cities—carbon sequestration, water purification, and cooling—and also allow people to interact with nature, which has been proven essential to mental and physical human health. Thus, plentiful public green spaces are a critical feature of good urban design.

Testing, Testing! was an experiment co-designed by Lab Team member Charles Montgomery and environmental psychologist Colin Ellard to measure the mental, emotional, and physiological effects of various types of urban environments. Green spaces proved calming to participants, and elicited positive emotions and higher levels of concentration.

• Testing, Testing!

Hacking the city means transforming the system of a city through informal actions by its own inhabitants. Sociologist Saskia Sassen developed the idea for this form of grassroots participation as a means of avoiding the implosion of a future city characterized by machinelike buildings. According to Sassen, the widespread model of what are called “intelligent cities” leads to a closed technological system that has the potential to turn cities into cemeteries of obsolete machines. Open-source urbanism could allow people to interact with—and therefore propose—constant changes in their city’s structure.

Sassen spoke about methods for hacking New York in personal yet transformative ways.

• Saskia Sassen: Talking Back to Your Intelligent City

The Happy City is the concept that cultivating “urban joy” can dramatically improve the city on an emotional, infrastructural, and economic level. Coming down to the core value of trust, citizens who feel good about where they live are more likely to take care of it, spend money, and socialize with strangers.

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery introduced the concepts and underlying science of urban joy in the introduction to his two-and-a-half weeks of programming, where he further investigated and experimented with the concept of the Happy City, examining how urban design and interactions can make or break human happiness.

• Charles Montgomery: Comfort, Cities, and the Science of Happiness

“Inclusive design” refers to design based on a user-centered approach. The goal of inclusive design is to ensure that devices, products, environments, and experiences remain equally accessible to everyone, regardless of age, culture, or ability. In today’s world, we see an increasing need for this kind of approach, since a diverse population requires more accessible environments, consumer items, interfaces, and services.

Led by Interboro Partners, Architecture for Everyone explored the different ways in which our cities have a large preponderance of design devices meant to directly (and often subliminally) disperse and divide citizens along lines of race, class, and age.

• Architecture for Everyone, by Interboro Partners

An infrastructure of waste is a necessary component for every city to control, manage, and dispose of its waste production in sustainable and responsible ways. Since the very first human settlements, proper management of waste has been a differentiating quality of human behavior and one that characterizes urban development and sophistication, evidenced in the complexity of waste systems. According to a project from Lab Team member Olatunbosun Obayomi—a microbiologist, inventor, and TED Fellow—the intelligent integration of sewage, water, and sanitation systems could help cities overcome several problems. Using sewage to produce biogas, the system would be able to simultaneously treat wastewater, generate green energy, and provide clean water to the population. Several NGOs have acknowledged the promise of Obayomi’s project, and his goal is to generate support from governments in developing cities that face problems such as frequent floods, open sewers, and potable water contamination.

Sharing insight on the potential impact of new models, Obayomi spoke about his innovative work in the field of wastewater management in Nigeria.

• Olatunbosun Obayomi on Wastewater Management: A Common Issue with Complex Challenges

There is no consensus as to what qualifies food as “local,” but generally speaking the term refers to food that is produced, processed, and sold all within the same region, or within a short geographical distance from its point of origin. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act adopted by the US Congress in 2008 states that food must travel less than 400 miles from its source, or be sold within the state in which it is produced, to be considered a “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product.” Though local food still accounts for a small fraction of US agricultural sales, the market is growing rapidly due to increased demand for fresher produce and consumer desire to support local economies and reduce environmental impact. City dwellers commonly access local food through farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), and increasingly, in conventional grocery stores.

Local chefs and food distributors cooked and displayed locally produced food, and provided information about how to access local food in New York in Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan.

• Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan

While the traditional definition of “local knowledge” refers to the bodies of knowledge maintained by groups of people with extended histories of interactions with the natural environment, in the urban context it refers to cumulative and complex knowledge, understanding, and practices that people in a given neighborhood, institution, or community have developed over time. Due to the complexity of such contexts, local knowledge is essential in understanding potential impacts and determining best practices when considering interventions or developments in cities.

The three-part workshop series What’s Next? was led by the local community group First Street Green. They collectively gathered and analyzed data from the community around the Lab in order to determine what the space should become once the Lab left. The lot where the Lab was located, known as First Park, became an open, community-run space for cultural activities.

• What’s Next? The Legacy of the New York BMW Guggenheim Lab, Part 1

Micro architecture is the practice of using design solutions to adapt small urban spaces, thereby changing the behavior of city dwellers and activating underutilized areas. Lightweight and compact, the mobile structure for the New York and Berlin presentations of the Lab—designed by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier Bow-Wow—was conceived as a “traveling toolbox,” a structural skeleton that was inserted within the footprint of a former tenement building on the Lower East Side.

Momoyo Kaijima, principal of Atelier Bow-Wow, and Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman, principals of the Rotterdam-based architecture studio ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], discussed the role of architecture in community building.

• ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], ­Rotterdam, and Atelier Bow-Wow, Tokyo: Projects

The mortgage crisis was the result of a sharp rise in mortgage delinquencies and home foreclosures in the United States starting in the mid-2000s, due to the high number of subprime mortgages (mortgage loans given to those who may have difficulty paying them back) being issued. The mortgage crisis led to the 2008 global financial crisis, deemed by economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The economic impact was so severe that the federal government had to intervene with a bailout for banks and other financial institutions.

The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting Time Sit-In brought together Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marcel van der Meijs, and activists from the Lower East Side for a sit-in to share squatting stories, strategies, and analysis of spaces for formal and informal social interaction.

• The NY Leftover Bailout:
  Squatting Time Sit-In

Multicultural cities are the result of rising globalization, where cosmopolitan centers see a greater share of their population made up of international immigrants, expatriates, or foreigners. In the United States, more than half the children born each year belong to ethnic minority communities. This new level of diversity has dramatic effects on the economic, social, and physical design of our cities. Visible in the heterogeneity of ethnic cuisine, religion, language, and skin color, global diversity has the potential to expand a city’s cultural offerings and improve livability. Conversely, greater difference can lead to separation and conflict and increases the need for social cohesion. When communities are not integrated, often because of social stigma and economic determinants, groups can be pushed to the edges of the city into poor neighborhoods with higher crime rates. City officials must create equal access to opportunity and put into place systems and resources that have the potential to enrich our urban fabric.

Clara Irazábal, an assistant professor of Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University—also director of the school’s Latin Lab project—spoke about the conditions of immigrants in this country and the challenges that a multicultural population poses to architecture, planning, and development. The Latin American and Caribbean Community Center led participants in mapping their personal migration stories and identifying the complex nature of identity in cities.

• Multicultural Comfort: Place Making in/with Immigrant Communities
• Our Migration Story

A neighborhood icon is a person who becomes respected in a particular community because of long-term community organizing, advocacy, and/or general friendliness. While usually not holding any official title or qualifications, these individuals are essential to community cohesiveness. They excel at effectively mobilizing other community members and addressing community issues. They often possess strong leadership and teamwork skills, dexterity in conflict resolution, and the ability to identify goals for community action.

The Sunday Salon Series consisted of five events hosted by Clayton Patterson, longtime East Village resident and activist.

• Sunday Salon Series with Clayton Patterson

Neighborhood loyalty, a sense of individual loyalty to one’s own neighborhood, can be a powerful tool to effect collective change in a positive way and to coalesce an authentic community. Remaining loyal to the needs of our local surroundings can also allow neighbors to generate a unified front in the event of threats from gentrification.

Exploring this subject, documentarian and activist Clayton Patterson spoke about his long-term commitment to New York’s Lower East Side.

• Captured: A Film/Video History of the Lower East Side—A Conversation and Screening with Clayton Patterson

“Neo-localism” is a term that refers to direct action taken to support local economies, despite the encroachment of global influences. Neo-localism can be an important way to support local businesses that are threatened by larger corporations.

Design collective spurse led visitors on a walking tour of the East Village to see how the local is made and remade by our collective actions.

• Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 1: Making the Local by spurse

The term “non-iconic architecture” is a reaction to the proliferation of iconic architecture and the “starchitecture” trend of the late twentieth century. Iconic architecture has been related to globalization, consumerism, and the celebrity status of the architects who build such spectacular structures; in contrast, non-iconic architecture strives to prioritize the human scale of a space over its merely sculptural value and defends the importance of simplicity and functionality in design.

The design of the BMW Guggenheim Lab by Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow is one example of non-iconic architecture.

• The Architecture of the BMW ­Guggenheim Lab

Occupy Wall Street is a global grassroots protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, with a two-month occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district. The original occupation inspired encampments and a variety of protest activities around the globe in resistance to social and economic inequality, corporate influence on government, and a widening divide in income distribution. The movement produced the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” which refers to the divide between the wealthiest one percent and the rest of the population.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan. Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for skyscrapers.

• Wall Street Occupation Tour

Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for mammalian bonding, trust, empathy, and pro-social behavior. While best known for its functions during childbirth, sex, and breast-feeding, and in connection with maternal bonding, studies have shown that oxytocin acts as the social glue that enables us to trust and act generously and altruistically toward strangers.

During Love Night, neuroeconomist and author of The Moral Molecule, Paul Zak, explained the science and evolutionary functions of oxytocin and gave participants tips for inducing oxytocin release in themselves and others. He encouraged them to perform generous actions and random acts of kindness, share meals with loved ones and, above all, hug one another as often as possible.

• Love Night

Participatory budgeting is a democratic process through which citizens or members of a community directly determine how parts of a public budget—usually the discretionary funds—will be allocated and spent. The process has been in existence since the late 1980s when it was put into use in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, and is increasingly used around the world as a means of direct democracy and participatory development.

With participatory budgeting now being introduced in parts of New York, the Lab held a workshop on participatory budgeting to teach interested citizens what the process is, how it works, and to discuss what potential it might hold in New York and other American cities.

• Participatory Budgeting: What It Is and How to Do It in Your Community

Participatory urbanism is the condition, often facilitated by technology, in which citizens are empowered to collect and contribute data, ideas, and proposals to city decision-makers. The idea is grounded in the fact that community members are experts on their particular urban situations and contain within them the knowledge and solutions for any number of issues. Participatory urbanism allows professionals to identify real needs and tap into local knowledge and human resources rather than implementing change from the top down.

Celebration of All Things Cooperative highlighted the democratic potential of cooperatives. Worker cooperatives from the area were invited to share strategies and stories, while acknowledging the cooperative’s fundamental role in garnering citizen participation.

• Celebration of All Things Cooperative

The concept of peak oil—the point in time when global oil production reaches its highest point—emerged in the mid-1950s when geophysicist and geologist Marion King Hubbert produced a graph predicting that US oil production would reach its peak between 1966 and 1971. Though it remains debatable whether or not peak oil has been or will be reached, the concept conveys recognition of crude oil’s status as a finite and non-renewable resource.

The role that peak oil will play in the economic and environmental pressures guiding city development over the coming decades inspired Renaissance or Long Emergency? A Debate on the City’s Future.

• Renaissance or Long Emergency? A Debate on the City’s Future

“Personal accountability” refers to an individual’s willingness to accept responsibility for his or her own actions and the consequences that those actions have for him or herself, others, or the greater public.

Artist and curator Ou Ning discussed the importance of individual action in finding and implementing solutions to problems in the era of urbanization. The challenges we face are too great to be met by government actions alone, he argued—we must accept our role as influencer and actor in both the problem and the solution.

• Comforting Ourselves: The Urban ­Solution

Protest is a direct action (peaceful or violent) in opposition to a situation, person, or idea for the purpose of inciting change. Protests, which generally take place in the public realm, can take various forms and range in size from the actions of a single person to mass demonstrations. In 2011, Time magazine named “the protester” as their Person of the Year after people around the globe took to the streets in support of equality, transparency, and justice. Historically, this form of public assembly has impacted the way city planners design public space, either to facilitate public gatherings, or to easily manage crowd control. For instance, in the nineteenth century, the Haussmann plan for Paris included, among other urban planning measures, regulations to control the city’s long-standing tradition of subversive street revolts.

A screening of The Starlite Project: We Came to Sweat and the following discussion focused on the Starlite Lounge, an African American–owned gay bar in Crown Heights, and the protests that ensued after the bar was given an eviction notice.

• Screening: The Starlite Project: We Came to Sweat

Public-private tension is a condition that occurs in densely populated areas where personal space is limited. Most prevalent in megacities like Mumbai, London, New York, and Tokyo, this tension is created through the confluence of various factors such as small living quarters, lack of nature or public space, and overtaxed public transportation. The increasing use of social media to display and share details of everyday life further complicates this issue, making it a tension that extends beyond physical space into the digital realm.

Testing, Testing! was an ongoing tour that measured participants’ physiological responses to environmental stimuli, crowdedness, and aesthetics.

• Testing, Testing!

A public space is a plot of land that is open and accessible to all people. Though often used to refer to social spaces used for gathering or recreation, such as plazas or parks, “public space” also refers to streets, sidewalks, and government buildings that are open to the public and not privately owned.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan. Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for skyscrapers.

• Wall Street Occupation Tour

“Resilience” refers to a city’s ability to cope with and recover from hardship. Though a city can show resilience in relation to a number of potential difficulties, a resilient city today is typically defined as one that is prepared and equipped to contend with and mitigate the multiple effects of climate change.

Greg Greene, director of both the documentary The End of Suburbia and the ResilientCity project, hosted a panel discussion on how New Yorkers can build resilience into their communities over the next twenty years and conducted a hands-on workshop with Crowdbrite inventor Darin Dinsmore on using Crowdbrite for neighborhood-level resilience organization.

• On Building Urban Resilience,
  by Greg Greene & ResilientCity

“Segrification”—a combination of “gentrification” and “segregation”—describes the phenomenon that occurs when rising rents cause families to move away or prevent individuals of diverse socioeconomic brackets to have access to affordable housing. Segrification describes the process, common in cities throughout the world, by which gentrification increases the cost of living, resulting in a diminishment of racial and income diversity.

In two events, Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] discussed segrification and glocalism, and presented their conclusions after their time hosting the Lab in New York.

• Beyond Segrification: Models for Equal Glocalization
• ZUS: Conclusions

Even though sharing is a concept as ancient as human culture itself, in recent years technology has enabled sharing on an unprecedented level. Through community websites, live interface, and social media, sharing has become a viable alternative to monetary exchange both online and offline. Sharing is most common in transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces. While sharing thrives on a peer-to-peer level, it is also a logic that must be considered in city planning, to be implemented on a large scale as more people demand carpooling, bike sharing, shared Internet connections, and other collective resources.

Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, gave a talk about how the confluence of sustainability imperatives, economic stagnation, and digitally enabled creativity has given rise to a movement of connected consumption.

• Juliet Schor

While modernist urban-planning philosophies typically focus on moving people and vehicles as quickly as possible, “slowing down” refers to an alternative way of thinking: that some places and parts of a city should be dedicated to a slower and more enjoyable, experiential way of moving through and being in the city.

Architect Elizabeth Diller spoke at the Lab about architecture that enables and encourages people to slow down and stop—such as New York’s High Line park—as a means of seeking, and designing for, comfort in urban settings.

• Elizabeth Diller: Comfort in Our City

Social design reminds designers of their responsibility toward society. Since we live in a social world defined by interaction, it is natural that our actions have an impact on other people’s lives. Design can be seen, therefore, as a tool to promote social change. The development of projects engaged with communities, governments, and other organizations enables design to deal with social issues and commit to its important role in society.

People Make Parks celebrated the launch of an interactive website that allows New Yorkers to participate in the design of their parks. The website, peoplemakeparks.org, makes the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s capital-projects design process accessible to community groups throughout the city.

• People Make Parks Launch

“Squatter” is a term used to describe someone who occupies empty and neglected properties. Squatters in the East Village flourished in the 1970s and 1980s when they inhabited properties in order to recover abandoned buildings and find low-cost shelter. Squatting can lead to the revitalization and gentrification of previously neglected neighborhoods, thereby forcing out the very individuals who originally built them up.

The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting Time Sit-In was a day-long event, organized by Jeanne van Heeswijk, that invited activists from the Lower East Side for a sit-in to share squatting stories, strategies, and analysis of spaces for formal and informal social interaction.

• The NY Leftover Bailout:
  Squatting Time Sit-In

Before the development of written language, oral storytelling was the main method of passing on important information, establishing forms of social norms by illustrating examples of behavior, and engaging our imagination through true or fictional accounts. Today, despite the ubiquity of technology and other narrative media, storytelling remains a powerful form of interpersonal communication. In cities, it can greatly strengthen ties and foster local knowledge of a neighborhood, particularly when local stories are passed down from older to younger generations.

The Storytelling Café advocated for storytelling as a model for social organizing and radical education, and the singer/performance artist Justin Vivian Bond gathered local artists and community members together for an evening of sharing personal histories.

• Storytelling Café: A Media and ­Storytelling Workshop
• Neighborhood Stories with Justin Vivian Bond and Neighborhood Guests

Stranger interaction is the willful engagement between people who have no previous relationship. This act of spontaneity can have significant effects by interrupting the expected narratives of daily life, shifting perspective, and forming unexpected connections.

Hello Stranger, with Kio Stark, was a workshop that gave visitors specific missions where talking with strangers was mandatory. These exercises illustrated the powerful serendipities that can result when momentary bonds are created through stranger interaction.

• Hello Stranger, with Kio Stark

A street facade is the outer shell of a building or structure. Facing a street or sidewalk, this veneer becomes the repository for an array of visual and aesthetic communication, ranging from personal statements and graffiti to commercial signage and architectural interventions.

Testing, Testing! was an ongoing tour that measured a person’s physiological response to environmental stimuli, crowdedness, and aesthetics. Contrary to popular conception, people tend to prefer the friendly personality of old building facades to that of new, pristine developments.

• Testing, Testing!

Suburban retrofitting is the act of filling in, redesigning, and adding to the fabric of existing suburbs to make them denser, more urban, and sustainable. Examples of suburban retrofits can include the renovation of abandoned malls or other large commercial buildings to create pedestrian shopping districts or public amenities; dividing blocks to improve connectivity and walkability; and wrapping big-box buildings and parking lots in long, shallow structures to create space for small shops that will provide continuous streetscapes.

Visitors learned the key concepts and tools of suburban retrofitting in a hands-on design and charette workshop conducted by June Williamson, coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia, and Galina Tachieva, author of the Sprawl Repair Manual.

• Retrofitting Suburbia: The Workshop

Suburban sprawl is a type of outward urban growth in the form of automobile-oriented, low-density development. It has persisted in cities worldwide since around the end of World War II. Suburban sprawl is typically characterized by single-family or other low-density housing structures; the segregation of residential and commercial areas; and the conversion of agricultural or “greenfield” land to residential use. The trend of suburban sprawl became a concern in the 1980s, and this type of suburban development has begun to slow down and shift toward a model of denser urbanization.

Sprawl: Past, Present, Future was a multidimensional panel discussion and artistic exploration of the history and present-day reality of the suburban sprawl phenomenon, and examined what the future might hold for the world’s sprawling communities.

• Sprawl: Past, Present, Future

Just as the distribution of wealth is not equal across the cityscape, neither is the distribution of environmental burdens such as garbage dumps, industrial processing facilities, hazardous waste sites, or other environmental hazards. Toxic neighborhoods bear the majority of environmental burdens, and tend to be poorer neighborhoods populated by minorities.

Environmental justice advocacy group United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE) conducted a tour of some of New York’s toxic neighborhoods, including Red Hook and Sunset Park in South Brooklyn.

• Sunset Park, Brooklyn Toxicity Tour, and Community Visions with Omar Freilla

Transportation psychology is an emerging field that investigates the social psychology behind the actions and attitudes of road and transportation users, as well as individual and social mobility issues and management.

While both traffic and transportation psychology tend to focus heavily on automobile users, psychologist and transportation-policy specialist Carlos Felipe Pardo explored and compared people’s perceptions (and the psychological effects) of traveling by public transit or by foot in New York. The Transit Psychology Tour was codesigned with Lab Team member Charles Montgomery.

• This is Your Brain on Commuting
• Transit Psychology Tour

Trash mapping is a strategy of following the path of waste to learn more about the consequences of consumerism or to encourage accountability on the part of the waste infrastructure system. Trash mapping reveals that a significant amount of industrial and household refuse is disposed in places far from their original site of use. Sophisticated systems for tracking trash, like the one designed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, revealed that trash is often sent by train and freight ship to places all over the world, especially poorer countries that offer cheaper disposal.

Garbology toured New York’s five boroughs by bus, highlighting various types of waste processing plants and garbage dumps. Trash Mappers, led by Barcelona- and Boston-based collective Basurama, empowered visitors to analyze their own trash and think about where it would end up. In Actuating Cities, Assaf Bidermann explained the potential of wireless connectivity in transforming how citizens will take part in programming and improving their environment and in city governance. In particular, the Trash Track project showed the waste-removal chain.

• Garbology: A Trash Tour with Basurama and Trashpatch
• Trash Mappers: Understanding Waste with Basurama
• Actuating Cities

“Trauma” is defined as a distressed psychological, behavioral, or physical state resulting from severe mental or emotional strain or some kind of physical injury. In certain circumstances, such as war or natural disaster, trauma can affect a social body as a whole, making lasting marks on the design and development of a city.

During 9/11 Memorial and Museum: Collective Memory, Jake Barton of the design studio Local Projects explained the methodology behind his design for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. He discussed the algorithm he created to process and display the names of those honored by the memorial.

• 9/11 Memorial and Museum:
  Collective Memory

Effective urban relationships are largely based on notions of trust, rather than systems that rely on control. While strategies of trust imply uncertainty about the outcomes—which can prove challenging for some—they are also known to benefit process-driven thinking and experimentation. Trust leads to more convivial cities in ever more diverse urban contexts.

Participants in the Love Night event were tasked to challenge their inhibitions and engage in trusting encounters with strangers.

• Love Night

Unconscious perception represents the automated processes the body goes through to take in the surrounding environment and its metaphysical status. While our five senses help us perceive the physical world, unconscious perception connects us to the realm of intuition.

To shed light on how we are influenced by this dimension of our minds, artist Dan Graham spoke about his practice, which challenges our perceptions of space through performance, installations, video, sculpture, photography, and writing.

• Confronting Comfort with Dan Graham

Urban beauty is the subjective assessment of the aesthetic values of a city. Some argue that allowing layers of history and urban decay to be revealed produces the ultimate urban aesthetic. Others prefer new, pristine developments that are clean, orderly, and employ the newest technology or building techniques. This multiplicity of perspectives, and the patchwork that the city becomes as a result, is the ultimate manifestation of urban beauty.

Testing, Testing! was an experiment co-designed by Lab Team member Charles Montgomery and environmental psychologist Colin Ellard to measure the mental, emotional, and physiological effects of various types of urban environments. Green spaces proved calming to participants, and elicited positive emotions and higher levels of concentration.

• Testing, Testing!

Urban data is the information that cities produce, which is measured and turned into facts, figures, and visualizations. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google, the amount of data collected between the dawn of humanity and 2003 is equivalent to the amount we now produce every two days. This phenomenon of massively proliferating data, increasingly referred to as “big data,” comes with the task of filtering and making accessible this new wealth of information.

Assaf Biderman, associate director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, shared a presentation about how digital devices allow us to capture information in real time about our cities. This urban data has enhanced our ability to make smarter design decisions.

• City of Bits, Bytes, and People

Urban foraging is the practice of harvesting indigenous, seasonal food in cities. From finding food from more conventional sources such as fruit trees to the advanced science of identifying edible weeds and mushrooms, urban foraging allows for cheap, sustainable nourishment. Urban foraging is about finding, identifying, and consuming food that is growing with little or no human intervention. (Care should be taken to avoid eating plants that grow in heavily polluted areas.) More broadly speaking, the practice of urban foraging can refer to recovering any reusable item from the street or dumpster, such as discarded food, furniture, or raw materials.

Dutch researcher/consultant Michiel Schwarz and facilitator Vincent Rump of FreedomLab Future Studies shared a vision of the future in which sustainability, localism, and social connectivity take precedence and new principles of sustainability shape everything from design, food, and our environment to consumption, community, and our sense of place. Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 10: A Nonconsumer Wandering, Gleaning, and Foraging was an urban foraging walk led by spurse, a creative collective.

• Sustainism as the New Modernism?
• Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 10:
  A Nonconsumer Wandering, Gleaning, and Foraging

Urban games are played with the city as a backdrop, either in single or multiple urban locations. They use the city as a playground and aim to bring a traditionally enclosed experience to the street. Urban games are intended to be experiential and promote social interaction in a real-life setting. They can adopt the analog form of a human-scale urban board game and may be enhanced by the use of location technology.

Urbanology is an interactive urban game developed by the New York Lab. Urbanology is available to play online at the Lab’s website, and could originally be played at the New York Lab’s site on First Street and Second Avenue. The game empowers its users to act as city planners for a day, lobbying for various initiatives regarding innovation, transportation, health, affordability, wealth, lifestyle, sustainability, and livability. The game experience for Urbanology was developed by Local Projects, and the physical design was created by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles].

• Play Urbanology online
• Urbanology Analysis
• Urbanology: Understanding the Data Part I

Urban inequality—disparity in access to jobs, opportunities, housing, education, services, and amenities in an urban setting—exists in all cities. Political, historical, and social determinants are all factors in the emergence and persistence of urban inequity, where the powerful and wealthy often dictate city development schemes and laws that benefit the upper-class minority. It plays a role in urban citizens’ well-being and is commonly evidenced in cities as residential segregation (also a feature of suburban areas) and disparities in the quality of urban schools. The cumulative result is a city divided by class, race, and economic background.

Free Community Health Care Day challenged notions of urban inequality through workshops led by Third Root Community Health Center. The sessions demonstrated how it is possible to bring affordable, community-based health services to everyone, including those who would otherwise have little or no access to such healing modalities.

• Free Community Health Care Day

“Urban intervention” refer to activities that disrupt the habitual functioning of a city. They are typically performed by artists or activists. Ranging from street art and design challenges to ephemeral gatherings, flash mobs, and celebrations, this type of activity achieves a temporary social cohesiveness and surprise factor that urban dwellers crave.

In the hands-on workshop Smart ­Living in a World of Multiple Modernities, FreedomLab’s Thieu Besselink explained how small-, medium-, and large-scale interventions are the keys to effecting change.

• Smart Living in a World of Multiple Modernities with Thieu Besselink of FreedomLab

“Urban livability” refers to a level of well-being based on various measurable criteria in an urban setting. Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey rates major cities based on various criteria including political and social environment, economic environment, and medical and health considerations, among others.

Video artist Kelly Loudenberg’s New Urbanism is a video series that explores imaginative and sustainable solutions for urban living, from rooftop farming to dumpster swimming pools and underground opera houses. Traveling around the world, she highlighted small-scale interventions by designers and architects that improved urban livability.

• Screening: New Urbanism

Urban meditation describes the cultivation of awareness in a busy urban setting. The practice has the possibility of increasing social connectedness and belongingness in environments that otherwise promote agitation and alienation. By practicing guided meditation or repeating positive mantras, the chaos of an urban setting can be transformed into fuel for spiritual enlightenment.

I Meditate NY offered visitors a weekly meditation session in the Lab during its ten-week run.

• I Meditate NY: Urban Meditation Series—Social Connectedness in a High-Tech World

“Urban mobility” refers to the ability to get oneself from point A to point B in an urban environment. The options for city transport are varied and include walking, biking, and other forms of privately or publicly operated transportation. Expanding populations, urban sprawl, and the dangerous effects of carbon dioxide are all issues to consider when addressing the challenges and opportunities related to urban mobility. Encouraging multi-mobility systems that incorporate walking, car sharing, bike sharing, public transportation networks, and new city design that reduces commuting are examples of strategies designed to improve urban mobility.

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery led a conversation between Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, transit psychologist Carlos Felipe Pardo, and Alejandro de Castro Mazarro from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, as they offered insights into the psychology of commuting and urban mobility.

• Your Brain on Commuting

Urban psychology is the study of our environment and how it affects us. Urban psychology studies the effects of cities and urban living on people’s mental health and well-being by addressing a variety of areas such as urban fatigue, stress, overstimulation, fear, anxiety, happiness, and our relationship to space.

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery discussed multiple studies and concepts considered by the field of urban psychology during his talk, Comfort, Cities, and the Science of Happiness. Montgomery argued that by providing a physical space for the psychology of happiness and urbanism to meet, the design of our cities interacts with the design of our brains. When you design a city to be happy, you simultaneously design one that is green and resilient—even if that was not the original intention.

• Charles Montgomery: Comfort, Cities, and the Science of Happiness

Urban salons are neighborhood gatherings that allow for local inhabitants to share resources, skills, and stories relating to city life and their neighborhoods. Bringing together individuals for socializing and learning in someone’s home can create stronger personal bonds and connections.

The New York Lab’s Sunday Salon Series consisted of five events hosted by long-time East Village resident and activist Clayton Patterson.

• Sunday Salon Series with
  Clayton Patterson

Urban sensory experience speaks to the vastly complicated network of human senses and interactions—generated by the interplay between individuals and groups, by one’s own physical sensory system, and by the experience of the physical layout and appearance of city spaces—that impact the way one perceives and moves through the city. These obvious and sometimes undetected stimuli shape our everyday decision-making and well-being (consciously and subconsciously). Being more attuned to how the built environment can affect citizens’ decisions and well-being may inform future urban design in a positive way.

Testing, Testing!, an ongoing guided tour that took participants through a variety of urban landscapes, gathered evidence about the psychological and physiological effects of public space on our minds and bodies.

• Testing, Testing! New York

“Urban sound” refers to the vast range of sounds that the city produces. From the rhythm of the steam engine to the drone of the automobile, the sound of cities has always been a defining characteristic of urban life. While these sounds have served as creative inspiration over decades for various artists, from the Futurists to John Cage, they can also contribute to overstimulation. Through recent developments in technology, sound can also be harnessed as a valuable tool for measuring various data sets in the city.

Sound Sweep was a variety show dedicated to the sounds of New York, organized by Audio Visual Arts (AVA) and comedian Greg Barris. The show addressed issues of noise pollution, noise prevention, sonic comfort levels, and quiet zones in New York.

• The Sound Sweep, Part 1: A Variety Show Dedicated to Sound
• Reggie Watts at the Sound Sweep

The term “urban spontaneity” refers to the importance of occasionally engaging in unpredictable actions in our cities, as opposed to moving through them with expected, predictable patterns of behavior. The element of surprise is an important one in discovering new ways of seeing our streets. Actions like flash mobs, street dancing, impromptu conversations with strangers, and unplanned behaviors in our everyday lives play an important role in our sense of ownership of our own streets and help promote a healthy connection to our sense of freedom and expression in public space.

Kio Stark, a self-described “independent learning activist,” engaged visitors in a discussion about what happens when we interrupt the expected narratives of daily life through random encounters with strangers.

• The Future Is Now: Community ­Interventions for First Park
• Hello Stranger, with Kio Stark

Urban systems are the various elements of urban infrastructure that make cities function. By analyzing these systems as one unitary entity, urban problems can be redefined and conventional disciplinary boundaries can be overcome. The realization of this overarching unity between systems—those related to decision-making and government, housing, waste, transportation—necessitates a rethinking of the way cities run, allowing for a more holistic approach.

Infrastructure of Waste and Water–A Recap and Analysis was a talk by Lab Team member Olatunbosun Obayomi that explored how city infrastructure can benefit by an integration of infrastructure systems. Obayomi, a waste specialist, gave examples about how neighborhood waste-processing units—which are integrated with transportation, water, and power networks—can improve the functions of the city at large.

• Olatunbosun Obayomi: Infrastructure of Waste and Water–A Recap and ­Analysis

The BMW Guggenheim Lab was launched in New York’s First Park, a New York City Parks property in the East Village. During its ten-week stay in the city, from August 3 to October 16, 2011, the Lab functioned as a platform to offer free tours, workshops, debates, roundtable discussions, screenings, performances, experiments, and the New York Comfort Lecture Series, which invited a series of urban thinkers to give their views on a variety of city topics. The programs at the New York Lab focused on the topic of Confronting Comfort and analyzed cities as organic and interconnected systems.

As part of the culmination of the Lab’s experience in New York, this glossary aims to identify 100 of the most talked-about trends in urban thinking that played a role during the Lab’s first American venue. These terms and their definitions aim to document and take the “temperature” of a particular time and place — New York in the summer and fall of 2011— and to understand what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what cities were, are, and can be. Each definition concludes with an example of a New York Lab program that illustrated the relevance and context of each term.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. One hundred of them, discussed at the New York Lab, follow.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in New York from August 3 to October 16, 2011.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab New York was developed by Maria Nicanor, Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab; Amara Antilla and Stephanie Kwai, Curatorial Assistants, BMW Guggenheim Lab; and Christine McLaren, Resident Writer, BMW Guggenheim Lab.

Design: Sulki & Min, Seoul

Photos: David Heald (opening and closing pages) and Kristopher McKay

All text and photos © 2013 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Site design by
Collective Assembly

Development by
Tom van de Velde

Over the past two years, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile urban laboratory centered around the topic of life in cities today, has offered free programs and workshops and implemented urban projects in New York City (August 3–October 16, 2011), Berlin (June 15–July 29, 2012), and Mumbai (December 9–January 20, 2013). Created as a resource, 100 Urban Trends aims to identify the most talked-about trends in urban thinking, as they were discussed in these three venues. Each individual glossary offers 100 contextualized definitions that apply to the way we understand, design, and live in cities.

Integral to 100 Urban Trends is the concept of cities as “idea makers.” In cities, people come together, share their thoughts and common interests, and generate the ideas that shape our world. Dense, growing cities have been and continue to be the catalyst for human progress, powered by daily proximity among their citizens as much as anything else. Despite some of the drawbacks of such massive urban centers, they may well embody the future for human life. Today’s cities are competing to attract more people; greater urban density can mean more conflict, but it can also produce a greater diversity of viewpoints and more opportunity for positive change.

In recent years, there has been an unequivocal shift in the study of cities. Urban thinking, whether related to architecture or urbanism, has become dramatically less focused on infrastructure, and more on the ultimate goal and reason for the existence of cities — that is, the well-being of the people that inhabit them and constitute their very soul and essence. “Cluster,” “concentrate,” and “collaborate” seem to have become the three big Cs of urban thinking of late — but that story is not new. Clustering, searching for a concentration of people, and finding ways to collaborate have been part of the human experience since prehistoric times. Then, as now, people gathered in search of protection, conviviality, and exchange.

The terms presented here reflect this type of urban exchange. They are new and old, classic and ephemerally fashionable. Among them are some of urbanism’s “usual suspects,” which interestingly, keep reappearing in the urban discourse of the early twenty-first century. Each definition concludes with an example of a Lab program that illustrated the relevance and context of that term. Some terms are shared between the three glossaries, as they proved relevant in all of the Lab’s locations.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. Find some of them here—and tell us about the Urban Trends people are talking about now in your city.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab was written by Maria Nicanor, Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab; Amara Antilla and Stephanie Kwai, Curatorial Assistants, BMW Guggenheim Lab; and Christine McLaren, Resident Writer, BMW Guggenheim Lab.

Design: Collective Assembly

© 2013 Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York