Recent Goings On

Talking about a printed document containing things others said online. (photo: Cindy Hwang)Clearly, I've been remiss. The lack of writing is, fortunately, not due to a lack of things to write about but rather an alarming lack of time. So, this short(-ish) post will have to suffice as a quick update of my recent goings on as well as a future-telling list of things to come soon to this site. 

Stemming from my work with the Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health at NYU, there are two recent papers out. The first (International Journal of Hispanic Psychology) summarizes some of the initial work on HIV risk behavior within a tourism ecology, including spatial analysis of alcohol venues within a tourism town and the behaviors and populations that converge in those venues. The second (Drug and Alcohol Dependence) describes a latent class analysis of those venues and likewise includes a map of those classes by location. 

Wrapping up my four(-ish) years at the Buell Center, Comments on Foreclosed (publication and website -- ed. me, preface by Reinhold Martin) was launched last month, four years after The Buell Hypothesis takes place to the day (a magically unplanned coincidence). I've recently realized that I have not yet shared opinion of the project or the MoMA's Foreclosed here, which I plan to rectify soon.

CaerusGeo, on which I've had the pleasure to collaborate, has officially launched its public beta. The site is designed to allow data collection activities in low-resource environments to include a geographic component, augmenting the analysis possibilities, with (importantly) minimal changes to existing collection workflows.

Also with Caerus, I had the pleasure of taking part in a local, open, community mapping pilot project. Thile this was now some months ago, it deserves some note here given the tremendous coordination between Caerus, the World Bank, the ICT Directorate in Benin City, Nigeria, and a collection of diverse professionals and practitioners stationed on three continents. 

This school year has been among my busiest -- teaching, coteaching, and otherwise participating in a total of eight courses since the beginning of summer 2012. I've returned to the planning department at Columbia, teaching GIS courses as an adjunct. Also at GSAPP, I taught a visual studies course aimed at critically evaluating what can and cannot be known about cities via the data they seemingly produce in abundance. I've been enormously happy to start teaching in the Barnard-Columbia urban studies program and remembering all of the great things about a liberal arts women's college (despite the many differences between Barnard and my alma mater). And having cotaught a housing studio at NJIT last fall, I'm now one-half of a teaching team for an undergraduate architecture studio on public housing post-Sandy, asking students to simultaneously engage a public housing site in desperate need of attention before the storm and the challenges posed by the damage suffered and the many climate-related warnings for the future Sandy brought with her.

Lastly, a handful of small design and consulting projects have led to the formation of a new entity. However, official discussion of those goings on are still slightly premature.

That's perhaps the briefest update I can give. Each of those little summaries warrant elaboration and reflection. As the semester winds down, I plan to convert some of that elaboration and reflection into something worth sharing. In the meantime, baseball season is approaching and I, for one, cannot wait for opening day.

Some Thoughts on Smarter Spending & the ACS

I am by no means the only person who has written on this, but here goes. In May, the House of Representatives passed (232-190) a bill to cut the American Community Survey (ACS). The bill was championed by Representative Daniel Webster (R) from Florida's 8th District. On the floor of the house, Webster said the survey is "intrusive," "unconstitutional," an "inappropriate use of taxpayer money," and "the very picture of what's wrong in DC." On every point, he is categorically wrong as are the 231 representatives who voted with him.

Yes, a very small number of the questions are somewhat personal (maybe?), but the survey responses are aggregated and made anonymous. Still, the very Constitution he cites allows for this survey, which includes questions that have been asked since Thomas Jefferson (Director of the 1790 Census). Also, let's recall my prior frustrations at opposition to the ACS (in which I rant about the difference between a citizen's reasonable right to privacy and that same citizen's responsibilities as a constituent in a representative democracy).

Regarding the use of taxpayer money and "what's wrong in DC": For literally centuries, the US government has been asking questions about how Americans live in order to responsibly determine how taxpayer money needs to and should be spent. Programs, policies, funding, and investment are created and calculated according to the results of the American Community Survey. While I will definitely agree that there are places where the federal government spends wastefully, the money spent on determining how to spend smarter is perhaps the most efficient use of taxpayer funds I can think of.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure how Representative Webster can legislate, adequately representing his constituents, without the information offered to him by the ACS. Maybe he would guess? Go with his gut? Maybe he believes everyone in Florida's 8th District is just like him? Or maybe he believes that there won't be problems requiring leglislative attention if we stop collecting information about those problems?

Well, because it's the sorta helpful thing I do, here are some things I learned tonight from the ACS about Webster's district. If he has his way and this nonsense attaches itself to a bill that passes the Senate, this might be the last bit of reliable information we have about the counties included within his boundaries. I'm covering some common topics -- information about the state of the housing market while we continue to battle the housing crisis in the country, information about employment and education, information about what people earn and whether that allows them to afford their homes.

And on that note, Happy Fourth of July.

Some Thoughts on Data-Driven Change

See? I was there. (Me with Rosten Woo, Photo: Ford Foundation via Flickr. Click Image for Source)

I was honored and delighted to join some incredible thinkers and doers on Monday for a one-day conference, Change by Design, at the Ford Foundation. The audience was chock full of many of the foundation's amazing grantees doing essential work on some of our toughest issues. 

The day's speakers addressed a range of topics all stemming from the proliferation of complex data, the techniques and technologies developing around its use, and its applications within the nonprofit world -- from research to advocacy to communications strategies. I was asked to discuss a project I hadn't touched in some time and attempted to frame that research within the frequent hope that through solid data alone we might make sound decisions. In addition to the opportunity to meet the speakers and grantees, I admit that much of the fun of the day came from revisiting the work in my own presentation as well as Laura Kurgan's presentation of Architecture and Justice and the Million Dollar Blocks project.

One of the several take-aways from the day (and a recurrent theme in conversation) was the inherent politics of information and the constant subsequent need to redefine the parameters and purposes of that information. Human data is generated, collected, and organized by people -- people with agendas and agendas that serve specific purposes. What was clear throughout the day, and in particular within my panel, was the need to redefine the context of that data in order to appropriate its use, whether that be to effectively address an argument on its own terms, to challenge existing assumptions, to shed light on what is absent from the conversation, or even just to make do with the often insufficient data out in the world. When you are not the person or organization collecting and generating information, it is that act of redefinition and appropriation that affords you control over the politics of the dataset. It is through redefinition and reframing that your work need not be constrained by the assumptions and values of the data sources you use, but can rather stand atop your own assumptions, injected with your own values.

Also mentioned in the day was the idea that people who use data for the purpose of driving social change (like me) might consider offering a list of online data (re)sources that they (we, I) frequently use. I'm officially taking this suggestion and will start compiling that list to make available here on my site. Please expect that new development soon.

Again, I'd like to thank the Ford Foundation, specifically Jenny Toomey and the Change by Design team, for a fantastic experience.

Looking toward the Thing After the Thing Before

PRE-Office in Brooklyn in 2010. Taken from a photo by Noah Kalina for Architect magazine. (click image for source)

In the spring of 2008, Aaron Davis and I had a series of conversations regarding modes of architectural practice and wondered what a sort of collaborative office might constitute given our very different methods, approaches, and scales. We were graduate students with a year left while the bottom was falling out of the buiding industry in the US. A year later, we had our degrees in hand with almost no easy way to put what we had learned to use, save of course for the idea of collaborative practice we conconcted a year before. Along with two others, we formed PRE-Office, and we got busy researching the business of architecture. Perhaps more specifically, we researched the aspects of practice that were allowing some offices to weather the storm better than others, those others being seeimingly hopelessly tied to the larger economy. While we did a few other little things, it was this body of research that has had a lasting effect on me, my thinking, and my work.

practice. noun
1. habitual or customary performance; operation. 2. habit; custom. 3. repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency. 4. condition arrived at by experience or exercise. 5. the action or process of performing or doing something.

The complex relationship between architecture (the academic discipline, the profession, and the practice) and the world it helps create continues to fuel my investigation of multiple topics and at multiple scales. It has continued to shape my own relationship with what I see as my personal and professional agency. That there are modes of practice which remain not only relevant, but viable, despite an economy determined to see them fail is telling. What has been the fate of offices that follow profit-seeking development without diversifying their practice is also telling. That social responsibility is also a means toward financial sustainability is critical. That architecture should be held accountable for its role (however large or small, however active or passive) in the creation of the crisis is, to me, undeniable. It was through that research that I found the need to identify the functional, pragmatic, and instrumental meanings of practice, intervention, and place-making. The research asked whether what we design is directly influenced by how we work, by our business models, by our office structures -- sometimes asking whether a principal's relationship to his/her staff or partners might perhaps reveal something about his/her relationship with the work and with the world. Absolutely. The places we make are, in every way, the result of how we make them.

Last week, over a few beers, I signed myself out of PRE-Office, handing over my share of the company to Aaron who will be carrying on as only he could. I am very much looking forward to the future of PRE, the future of the thing that comes before, whatever that might mean or be. I want to thank him, along with Danny and Zach, for all the things people do when they don't know what they're doing, for the opportunity to live out a most unusual research experiment, and for the opportunity to practice in so many ways. As should always be the case I think, I can say that the thing that comes next for me comes out of the thing that came before.

An Early Summer Update

No-Go Zone at Citifield

Admittedly, it's been a bit too long since I've posted here. In that span several changes -- some minor, some a little more than minor -- have taken place, and this summer is shaping up to be a doozy. So, perhaps a brief update is in order.

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream opened without a hitch at the MoMA in February and has since been extended into August. The catalog (designed by the ever-fantastic MTWTF*) is now available at the museum and online. In response to some of the early discussion surrounding the show, I wrote this piece for the Metropolis P/O/V blog in March about the need to think bigger, more strategically, and more structurally.

[*Also, a couple months ago I had the very fun opportunity to provide "additional editorial support" (as the colophon states) for this delightful read enabled by a fellowship created by Glen Cummings at MTWTF.]

Despite incredible effort and remarkable work, the first half of the year saw the scaling back of Urbanscale. As I wrote at the end of 2011, working with Adam, Jeff, JD, and Mayo was an invaluable learning experience with long-term payoffs, many of which I can already see forming.

There are several other irons in the fire these days. In a bit of follow-up work on the Foreclosed project, I've returned to the Buell Center through the summer. Work at NYU is moving steadily along, and a handful of exciting new projects have me considering cities and technologies I've thus far not had real opportunities to engage. This month, I'll be getting a new grant proposal out the door and speaking on design and technology for social change. If all that weren't enough, please expect updates regarding PRE-Office and a possible new organization as the summer unfolds. I realize I've offered no concrete specifics here, but with any luck there will be plenty of details to disclose on these and more before the end of the summer.

Lastly, baseball season is in full swing, and with a month left before the All-Star break it seems that 2012 might be the season no one saw coming. We've seen the Os on top and the Yanks at the bottom of the AL East. We've seen 19-year-old Bryce Harper (big fan here) steal home plate after being intentionally plunked in a blatant act of hazing. (And last night getting his first walk-off win?!) As sometimes shocking as the MLB has been so far this year, the icing on the cake was being told at Citifield, after the seventh inning, that management would rather have an almost fully empty section visible on television than allow paying customers the opportunity to upgrade their seats. So much for Pareto.

Happy summer...more to come soon.