Archinect - News

Oceanwide Plaza: Graffiti 'vandalism' or the greatest tag 'takeover' of all time?

2024-03-09T08:00:00-05:00

The New York Times has entered the debate surrounding LA's troubled Oceanwide Plaza development this week after social media and the outside press tied its celebrity status to the neglect of downtowns, housing rights issues, and their relationship to developer capitalism.

The Times piece follows news of the city’s recent order on Oceanwide to install a security fence to prevent against interlopers' vandalism and the 'public nuisance' the highly publicized graffiti artwork has turned the unfinished project into.

'Vandalism' is a charged term to apply in this case, but it has affected other sites near Downtown Los Angeles, like the copper wire-stripped Sixth Street Viaduct, in the midst of its delayed economic rebound. The street art community is here portrayed alongside BASE jumpers as a lawless quandary that considers their “takeover” a bar-raising move geared mainly at promotion and exposure. A smarter take is that taggers have the broader consensus of society so well-figured tha...

Penn Station's proposed redevelopment is raising the specter of 'blight'-backed urban planning tactics in Manhattan

2022-12-29T14:46:00-05:00

The congested, chaotic section of Manhattan near Pennsylvania Station is undeniably drab. Does that make it blighted? New York State has decreed that it is, and Gov. Kathy Hochul has recently likened the Penn Station area to “a Skid Row neighborhood.” She was defending the controversial plan to allow developers to build 10 towers around the decrepit train station — the busiest transit hub in the nation — in exchange for some of the $7 billion the state needs to renovate it.

The same tactic was used in the urban cores of major American cities such as Los Angeles to break apart mostly residential areas and redevelop them into high-rise-laden commercial districts, a practice which may now be boomeranging in the post-pandemic economy. New York is claiming “economic stagnation” (in addition to “blight”) in the redeveloped area. However, opponents say only 8 of the total 61 lots targeted by the project meet the definition outlined by the state’s apparently vague threshold.

“It’s so extreme in this case, I don’t think they can get away with it,” an attorney representing various opposition groups’ legal challenge to the plan told the Times.

Previously on Archinect: Empire State Development approves massive Penn Station redevelopment proposal

Eventually, the redevelopment — which was approved in July — will yield ten skyscrapers, 1,800 units of housing, and the $73 million expansion of Penn Station led by Arup. CRE titan Vornado owns half of the sites included...

VACANT NEW YORK maps Manhattan's shuttered storefronts

2016-09-02T13:23:00-04:00

This is high-rent blight. The vacancy problem is immediately visible but lacking in hard data. The intent of this project is to provide some background around commercial vacancies and use a map to give some insight into the extent of the issue, ideally doubling as a tool for community groups and policymakers to identify areas for intervention. It's an obvious problem without a clear set of causes or solutions, but there are several contributing factors [...]

Click here for the interactive VACANT NEW YORK map.

A look at some cities revitalizing their blighted rivers

2016-08-24T13:52:00-04:00

Los Angeles wants to rethink its river. [...] And LA isn’t the only metropolis looking to reclaim its once-mocked waterway. Cities around the world are realizing that water can be a cultural and recreational asset, not something to hide or pillage, and it seems no waterway will be wasted for long.

How Detroit can learn to revive its derelict industrial sites from other cities

2015-07-13T15:43:00-04:00

Heading east along I-94 from Detroit’s resurgent Midtown area, two massive structures loom on the horizon. For passing drivers, they’re awe-inducing symbols of both the city’s former industrial might and the dismaying scale of its post-industrial challenges. [...] At the Center for Community Progress’ May Reclaiming Vacant Properties conference, planners and developers discussed examples from around the world of cities that are finding opportunity in derelict industrial properties.

Previously: Repurposing Old Rail Stations in the Rust Belt: What Buffalo, Detroit, and Cincinnati can tell us about adaptive reuse

Related on Archinect's sister site Bustler: Reanimate the Ruins winners reimagine Detroit’s Packard Motor Plant

Robin Hood Gardens residents dare Lord Rogers to spend a night in the blighted estate

2015-06-23T18:12:00-04:00

When Lord Rogers launched a campaign to save one of London’s most notorious housing estates from demolition, he was adamant that it was a desirable place to live. [...] It is a claim he may regret. Unhappy residents of the estate have challenged the peer to be true to his word and swap his £12 million Chelsea townhouse for a few nights in one of their blighted flats.

Previously: Robin Hood Gardens Set For Demolition

Detroit's struggle to distinguish between graffiti (boo!) and murals (yay!)

2015-02-20T14:50:00-05:00

But how to draw the distinction between unauthorized graffiti and murals? Late last year, city officials issued thousands of dollars worth of fines before admitting they couldn't tell the difference between vandalism and authorized artwork (they eventually dismissed the fines). To correct this, Castañeda-López says the city is working on the seemingly Herculean task of creating a registry for all Detroit's existing street art.

About Detroit's too often skewed media coverage

2015-01-12T14:25:00-05:00

In Detroit, the American Dream has become an American Paradox: Corporate-backed revitalization downtown belies the continued deterioration of sprawling neighborhoods of single-family homes; [...] white newcomers trickle in by choice, just as many black natives have no choice but to stay where they are. What’s that? It doesn’t sound like the up-from-the-ashes, post-industrial renaissance Detroit you’ve been hearing about of late?

For more about Detroit, take a listen to episode 11 of Archinect Sessions, and our chat with Mitch McEwen:

New map tool reveals NYC's vacant lots zoned for revitalization

2014-11-11T11:46:00-05:00

Developed with the help of a team of volunteer researchers, urban planners and designers, this new online tool allows anyone to view the staggering amount of publicly-owned lots that once had an urban renewal plan in the pipeline but were scrapped due to bureaucracy. By mapping out all of the vacant spaces across the city, 596 hopes that we as a community can take a top-down approach to turning these urban blights into public gardens, play lots, and spaces where people can “co-create.”

From 1949-1974 NYC took on an urban renewal project that resulted in the bulldozing of "slums" across Manhattan. The vast majority of the proposals planned for the land floundered and today nearly 15,000 lots across the city lay vacant. 596 Acres, a grassroots land access nonprofit, had developed a map tool called Urban Reviewer that pinpoints all of these spots—most owned by the public—already zoned for action.

MacArthur Fellow Rick Lowe Reclaims Urban Neighborhoods Through Art

2014-09-19T17:11:00-04:00

Grassroots, place-based arts initiatives got a boost yesterday when the artist Rick Lowe was named a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. Earlier this week, I profiled Lowe’s dynamic approach to arts-driven revitalization in “Street Makeover: Artists Bring Visibility to a Low-Lit Alley.” Lowe is currently working as a multi-year resident of the Pearl Street Project, an alleyway transformation launched by Philadelphia’s Asian Arts Initiative.

In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass

2014-08-29T13:22:00-04:00

On a breezy summer afternoon here in the newly renovated Sanayeh Garden, children are climbing the monkey bars, pedaling on bikes and kicking a ball by the huge water fountain in the park’s center. [...] While this would be an ordinary scene in Paris, New York or Singapore, it’s practically a new invention for today’s residents of Beirut. Functional public parks have been virtually nonexistent here for decades.

Will “Blexting” Help With Detroit Blight?

2014-07-29T15:12:00-04:00

A Motor City Mapping app will make it possible for users to snap photos of properties and text them to the public database. (They are trying to brand a new word to describe this process — the awful-sounding “blexting.”) These will be quality-checked before going onto the database, and the hope is that users will participate in training sessions before pointing, clicking and sending. Several “blexting bootcamps,” will be held in coming weeks.

Previously: Despite Successes, Blight Still Threatens Detroit’s Future

Despite Successes, Blight Still Threatens Detroit’s Future

2014-07-02T14:07:00-04:00

Urban blight is the single biggest challenge to large-scale revitalization efforts underway in the city of Detroit, where roughly 84,000 properties and vacant lots are considered blighted or at risk of blight [...]. In an interview with DLA Piper attorney and ULI member Jay Hailey, Gilbert kicked off the Institute’s public/private partnership conference in Detroit.

The Peril of Hipster Economics

2014-06-15T15:10:00-04:00

The Wall Street Journal calls this "Fighting Urban Blight With Art". Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it "an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day". The project is not actually fighting blight, of course - only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.

Reminds me of NYC in the 1980's when the city put large vinyl decals depicting shutters, potted plants, Venetian blinds and window shades over the yawning windows of abandoned city-owned buildings that face the Cross Bronx Expressway.

The tragedy of Tampico, Mexico: a city of violence, abandoned to the trees

2014-06-02T14:00:00-04:00

As a result of the violence, the local real estate market has bottomed out. Those who flee the city usually can’t sell their homes and businesses, so more and more buildings, including some of Tampico’s largest and most impressive ones, lie abandoned. Buildings that could easily survive for another century are mere empty shells, with huge trees growing through the roofs and out of the windows. Such levels of abandonment are rarely seen in the centre of a major city.

Blighted Cities Prefer Razing to Rebuilding

2013-11-20T20:11:00-05:00

Shivihah Smith’s East Baltimore neighborhood, where he lives with his mother and grandmother, is disappearing. The block one over is gone. A dozen rowhouses on an adjacent block were removed one afternoon last year. [...] For the Smiths, the bulldozing of city blocks is a source of anguish. But for Baltimore, as for a number of American cities in the Northeast and Midwest that have lost big chunks of their population, it is increasingly regarded as a path to salvation.

In light of yesterday's decision to allocate a chunk of the $13 billion JPMorgan Chase mortgage settlement to anti-blight measures across the country, I also recommend this NPR interview with Jim Rokakis, director of the Thriving Communities Institute in Cleveland, Ohio.

NPR host Melissa Block: "How much do you figure it cost to tear down a house?"

Jim Rokakis: "It's an average of about $10,000 a home. So in a state like Ohio where there's still around 85 to 90,000 vacant, abandoned, never-to-be-reoccupied houses, it's an 815, $900 million problem."