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 from Spain about Home

leaving Madrid, from the sky

A few years ago, in the development of a project called This is Later with Aaron Davis, I became rather obsessively interested in the smaller towns of rural Spain. As a late-industrializing nation, certain policies of the first half of the twentieth century pulled young people out of these regoins toward the city as necessary labor in new factories. Disinvestment in agriculture created a condition without incentive for them to ever return. Today, these towns are quickly becoming ghost towns -- depopulated and decaying ruins of the twentieth century. They represent the flipside of an urbanizing world. They represent the forgotten despite having thrived for centuries before the last hundred years. Further, they represent a fate ready to befall so many regions worldwide, as populations migrate to cities and the replacement rate in rural areas is simply not being met.

Cleveland (left) & Soria (right) : image credits linked in text

My last few days in Spain spurred a conversation that at once reminded me of these ghost towns and reminded me of the soon-to-be-ghost-town suburbs resulting from the American foreclosure crisis. (The above photos represent "Foreclosuretown" (i.e. Cleveland, OH) and Soria, Spain.) Despite the history and ocean that separates them, they share both an apparent future and interconnected economic causes.

Given my research on The Buell Hypothesis and the upcoming Foreclosed show based on that research, I had been necessarily focused on the phenomenon of suburbs failing for having been built on speculation and supported by an unsustainable building industry boom and the financial structures that enabled it.  What I hadn't yet considered is the global extent of the same phenomenon. And now I have learned that while long-standing towns of Spain are quickly disappearing (in population only, of course), so too are brand new satellite suburbs ringing around Spain's major cities. The global financial crisis seems to have similar manifestations in the built environment despite the differences in structure and place.

I feel new comparative research emerging.

Some Recent Love for Rehousing the American Dream

photo: Gavin Browning's phoneThe Buell Hypothesis: Rehousing the Dream, which serves as the research brief for the upcoming exhibition Foreclosed: [same subtitle] at the Museum of Modern Art, is getting a little pre-show love at the MoMA in 194X-9/11: American Architects and the City.

Other mentions along the Information Superhighway include this brief description of the exhibition, this commentary on an early-in-the-process event (by one-time classmate Troy Conrad Therrien), and the MoMA PS1 blog throughout the design process.