How can artists spark a new type of conversation about the future of the public realm in neighborhoods undergoing rapid demographic change? As part of a Kresge-funded, city-wide project called Crossing the Street, Gehl curated projects in two neighborhoods that explored the future public life and public space of two intersections east of the river in Washington, DC. We paired Philly-based Public Workshop with local black-owned activist radio station We Act Radio to design and build two SUPER bus stops over three weekends. Working with 75 people ages 4-74, many of whom learned how to use a power tool for the first time, we prototyped a better bus stop. With Hissing Black Cat Theater we hosted a playback theater conversation about neighborhood change that used performance that was able to tap into emotions in a way no community meeting ever could.
Listen to the Boombench Sit-In Playlist here.
Case Study here
Photos from Anna Muessig and Public Workshop
Project Team: John Bela, Anna Muessig, Kasey Klimes, Tyler Jones
A public realm action plan for Pittsburgh, PA
Over the last year and a half I have worked with Envision Downtown, a special Mayoral task force, to think about the future identity of downtown Pittsburgh as it undergoes massive demographic transitions. A large Public Space / Public Life survey informed an action plan that lead to an effort to amplify public life on Pittsburgh’s major civic spine by optimizing public transit and improving public space. Working with Sam Schwartz Engineering and Transit Center our team worked with city stakeholders to prototype a future vision of the street through short-term pilot projects.
Project Team: John Bela, Anna Muessig, Celsa Dockstader, Tyler Jones
How can a large real estate developer build culture before building buildings? The Giants professional baseball team asked Gehl to prototype neighborhood culture before they developed a major site on the San Francisco waterfront. I drafted The Yard's activation and programming plan. The Yard has become a local destination and informed the site’s long-term development.
Project team: Blaine Merker, Ghigo DiTommaso, Anna Muessig, Kristin Saunders, Celsa Dockstader with OpenScope Studio
If we value cities and their public spaces for the social diversity and social mixing they foster why don’t we have the tools to measure what we care about? Supported by a major grant from the Knight Foundation, I have been leading a series of projects to prototype methods of measuring the socioeconomic diversity of public spaces, and the design and programming cues that catalyze social mixing. As part of this project I co-curated the Next City In Public series that was featured at Next City.
Read the Toolkit
Project team: Jeff Risom, Anna Muessig, Erik Scharnhorst
The Market Street Prototyping Festival, a collaboration between SF City Planning and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, asked designers and artists to develop and test ideas to enliven the sidewalks of Market Street, San Francisco's major civic and commercial spine. The Festival built on the design process for Better Market Street, a five-year effort to redesign Market Street, by prototyping one of the concepts from that plan: Streetlife Zones. Street redesigns usually have a frontage zone, a loading zone, a pedestrian through-zone, and other areas related to getting people from A-to-B - why not a streetlife zone? Over 200 artists submitted concepts and 50 were selected to develop and install their concepts on the street.
I helped lead the evaluation of the Festival, which looked at the impact on public life and public perception. The evaluation also provided design and programming recommendations for future festival iterations and developed a rating system for each prototype.
Read the Evaluation Part I: Makers on Market here.
Read the Evaluation Part II: Planning by Doing here.
Learn more about the festival here.
Project Team: Anna Muessig, Mayra Madriz, Kasey Klimes, numerous volunteers
What if artists could use the city as a palette and shape the public's vision of their future city?
In 2010 a small group of urbanists, filmmakers, artists, technologists, and activist journalists came together to create Nuit Blanche New York.
Patterned after White Night events around the world, we were dedicated to creating immersive experiences with light-based art that transformed the walls of the city.
As a collective we produced three major public art installations in New York City: Bring to Light on the Greenpoint waterfront and Flash:Light on the Bowery in collaboration with the New Museum Festival of Ideas for the New City.
Images of our work can be seen here.
Project Team: Ken Farmer, Ethan Vogt, Anna Muessig, Tom Peyton, Pepin Gelardi, Stephen Zacks, and others.
Graduate Thesis: After a century of economic and planning trends that sent industry overseas and to the suburbs, manufacturing is stabilizing, if not growing, in American cities. This is good news for many urbanists eager to attract the economic benefits of industry. However, while economic arguments for urban manufacturing are mature, the spatial strategies for supporting it are scattered or nonexistent. Planning codes and urban design ideals remain set in a 20th century mindset, while today's manufacturing has changed dramatically, becoming smaller and more networked than its previous iteration. Outdated perceptions of manufacturing block progressive policy reform at the highest level.
Two thriving manufacturing centers, the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in New York and the American Industrial Center in San Francisco, provide clues for how 21st century manufacturing is spatializing in cities. These facilities are cultural beacons in their mixed-use neighborhoods and help create a framework for thinking about why urban manufacturing matters in our re-industrializing metropolises.
This thesis describes each facility in detail, drawing conclusions about their key characteristics at four spatial scales. Few urban design ideals adequately describe the industrial activity occurring in cities today. Therefore, this thesis builds a system of meaning that values history, economics, and the lived experience of cities as a way to approach urban manufacturing. The emerging lens of Creative Placemaking is invoked as a way to unify these theories, suggesting that urban manufacturing is a superlative form of Creative Placemaking. In conclusion, this thesis provides recommendations and tools for cities looking to cultivate industrial urbanism by offering lessons, developing a framework for a new type of land use classification, and outlining a research brief. The thesis ends with a call for action: as industry continues to change its character, becoming leaner and more technologically driven, cities have great competitive advantage.
Planners have a critical opportunity to bring manufacturing back into cities through sensitive, mixed-use zoning that connects people to the process of making and awakens policy professionals to manufacturing as a vital element of the contemporary creative city.
Link to full thesis here.
The Awesome Foundation sponsored a competition to reinterpret Robert Moses' legacy through a game. Heather Smith, Audrey Nieh, and I created a game that explored the comically evil side of this master builder by asking each player try to out-Moses the others. Moseses collect cards to assemble iconic Moses infrastructure while undercutting each other with cheat cards like "a bunch of mothers", "eminent domain", and "surprise limo meeting."
Moses vs. Moses won honorable mention.
Featured in Hyperallergic and the Awesome Foundation
