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https://placesjournal.org/article/instrumental-city-new-york-hudson-yards/

S H A N N O N M A T T E R N A P R I L 2 0 1 6

I n s t r u m e n t a l C i t y : T h e V i e w f r o m H u d s o n Y a r d s ,

c i r c a 2 0 1 9

The worlds most ambitious smart city project is here.

Should we worry that New York City is becoming an

experimental lab?

The first tower at Hudson Yards opens in May 2016, with Alphabets Sidewalk Labs as a premier

tenant. View east from the High Line across the West Rail Yard, Manhattan. [Shannon
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https://placesjournal.org/article/instrumental-city-new-york-hudson-yards/ 2

Mattern]

The observation deckwont be finished for a few years yet. If you want to

see the future of New York, walk north along the High Line, round the

curve at the rail yards, and turn your back to the river. Amid the highway

ramps and industrial hash of far-west Manhattan, a herd of cranes hoists

I-beams into the sky. This is Hudson Yards, the largest private real-estate

development in United States history and the test ground for the worlds

most ambitious experiment in smart city urbanism.

H u d s o n Y a r d s w i l l b e t h e n a t i o n s f i r s t q u a n t i f i e d

c o m m u n i t y , a t e s t i n g g r o u n d f o r a p p l i e d u r b a n d a t a

s c i e n c e .

Over the next decade, the $20-billion project spanning seven blocks

from 30th to 34th Street, between 10th and 12th Avenues will add 17

million square feet of commercial, residential, and civic space, much of it

housed in signature architecture by the likes of Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill; Diller Scofidio + Renfro; and Bjarke Ingels Group. But you dont

have to wait that long to see where this is headed. The first office tower,

Kohn Pedersen Foxs 10 Hudson Yards, opens next month, with directaccess to the High Line. The new subway stop is already in business (and

has already sprung a few leaks); an extension of the 7 train line connects

the diverse, middle-class neighborhood of Flushing, Queens, with this

emerging island of oligarchs.

Its a major transformation for the grim streetscape of the Far West Side. A

decade ago, The New YorkersJohn Cassidy described the neighborhoods

notable architectural features:

The Port Authority Bus Terminal, the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel,

the cavernous Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which blocks access

to the river and the Manhattan tow pound. The M.T.A. rail yard,

which is hidden behind concrete walls. a Greyhound-bus parking

depot, a Sanitation Department refueling station, and several vacant

lots.

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The terminals and tunnels and tracks are still there, but now someone has

flipped a switch, and a whole new section of the city is coming online.

(Stick with me for a few thousand words, and youll understand thats not

a metaphor.) New Yorkers havent seen anything like this since the

construction of Rockefeller Center transformed Midtown in the 1930s.

Hudson Yards is even more impressive, as it rises atop two massive steel-

and-concrete platforms that span a working rail yard. [PDF]

Its also rising on a bed of data. Reports say it will be the nations first

quantified community, a fully instrumented testing ground for

applied urban data science. If youve read my work forPlaces, you know

Im not about to let that claim pass unnoticed. To understand what

Hudson Yards portends for smart citiesand smart urban citizens around

the world, it is crucial that we examine the ground on which this

experiment is taking place the people and powers that converge here,

and the epistemologies and methodologies and urban fantasies they are

enacting.

The rail yards, 1929. View west from a building on 31st Street. [Ewing Galloway, NYPL Digital

Collection]

T h e L o n g - U n p r o g r a m m a b l e T e r r a i n

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T h e L o n g - U n p r o g r a m m a b l e T e r r a i n

For nearly a century, this forlorn if frenetic infrastructural terrain has

invited and impeded repair. The 1929 Regional Plan proposed to

relocate New York Citys shipping facilities to Newark and open the

waterfront to improvement. A generation later, the John Lindsay

administrationhad a go at it, but developers were stymied by the tracksand tunnels and blocked by opponents in Hells Kitchen, who won Special

District status that preserved the neighborhoods low-rise, residential,

affordable character. Lindsays allies pushed through only one major

project on their punchlist, the Javits Center, and concessions left little

room for future development on the Far West Side.

Yet real estate always finds a way. In the early 1970s, Richard Ravitch,

developer and head of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, demonstratedthe untapped potential of the MTAs Caemmerer Hudson Rail Yards 26

below-grade acres that served as parking for Long Island Railroad trains

by ordering the construction of columns that could support a deck above

the tracks. Once it was possible to build over the yards without disrupting

their transportation functions, writes anthropologist Julian Brash,

development proposals quickly emerged. In the mid-80s, Olympia and

York, a Canadian development firm that had worked on the

London Docklands, offered to raze Madison Square Garden (itself a

symbol of destruction, standing on the rubble of McKim, Mead and

Whites glorious Penn Station) and build a new arena, office towers, and

retail complex atop the rail yards.

H e r e o u r s t o r y c r a s h e s i n t o D a n i e l D o c t o r o f f , t h e m a n

w h o g a v e H u d s o n Y a r d s i t s n a m e . H e h e a d s a s t a r t u p

c o m p a n y o w n e d b y A l p h a b e t t h a t w a n t s t o b u i l d a f u t u r i s t i c

c i t y f r o m s c r a t c h .

Those plans were killed by the 1987 stock market crash, but a half mile

south, organic growth was happening among the warehouses, garages,

fringe nightclubs, and auto-repair shops of West Chelsea. The Kitchen, a

legendary performance-art venue, had relocated from SoHo to West 19th

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in 1986, followed by the Dia Art Foundation, and then by trailblazing

gallerists like Matthew Marks, Barbara Gladstone, Andrea Rosen, and

Lawrence Luhring. As Chelsea emerged as the citys new contemporary

art hub, entrepreneurs toyed with the idea of building a new Yankee

stadium above the rail yards. Then came the economic boom of the

1990s and the growth of the Silicon Alley tech corridor. A collective of

business, labor, and academic leaders known as the Group of 35 saw a need

for more office space in Midtown and planned to annex the Far West Side.

Here our story crashes into Daniel Doctoroff, the man who gave Hudson

Yards its name. Youll be seeing a lot of him in 2016. Hes the head of

Sidewalk Labs, a startup company owned by Alphabet (ne Google) that

reportedly wants to build a futuristic city from scratch, as a test ground

for experimental technologies. Back in the 90s, he was a private equity

investor who pitched the idea of rebuilding far-west Manhattan around a

Stadium of Dreams that could attract the Olympic Games and later

house the Jets football team. Incoming mayor Michael Bloomberg

recruited Doctoroff as his deputy for economic development, and the

two pushed the sports complex and surrounding development as

probably the single most important economic project that New York City

has undertaken in decades.

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Failed proposal for the NYC 2012 Olympics stadium at Hudson Yards. [Kohn Pedersen Fox]

That dream burst in 2004, when the Regional Plan Association and local

community board rejected the stadium. New York lost the Olympics bid to

London, and concurrent proposals to expand the Javits Center and

relocate Penn Station also failed. Yet the core vision of a redeveloped

waterfront survived. As New York City weathered the Great Recession and

its popular mayor was elected to a third term, Bloombergian urbanism

was ascendant from Times Square to the White House. Hudson Yards was,

Brash observes, the capstone of the Bloomberg administrations urban

and economic development strategy and a microcosm of the strategy

itself. Setting aside the Olympics stadium, the mayor promised to build

the citys next great high-end office district.

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B l o o m b e r g i a n u r b a n i s m w a s a s c e n d a n t f r o m T i m e s S q u a r e t o

t h e W h i t e H o u s e .

Many of the same people have been committed to the redevelopment of

the rail yards, in one form or another, since the Lindsay years. Despite the

obstinacy of the site, the failed projects blazed the way for future

development, as first the eastern blocks and then the western blocks were

rezoned from manufacturing to commercial and residential use. In 2008,

after yet another development deal fell through, the MTA awarded a

contract to the partners who now control the site, Related Companies and

Oxford Properties. They invested $400 million to build platforms over

the tracks, and, in late 2010, broke ground on the first building: 10 Hudson

Yards, the 52-story commercial office tower now ready to open its doors at

30th Street and 10th Avenue.

Throughout the decades of negotiations, the urban context has changed

dramatically, with the flourishing of Hudson River Park, the renovation of

the Javits Center, and the transformation of an elevated rail line into the

wildly popular High Line Park. Early developers sought to demolish the

northern section of the elevated track to make way for their own

interventions, but the Friends of the High Line lobbied to save it, and we

all know what happened next. When 10 Hudson Yards opens next

month, it will be filled with tenants who see the park as an essential

amenity. The tower was built directly on top of the High Line and

designed to accommodate it, with a grand pedestrian passageway running

through the base.

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Hudson Yards redevelopment plan. [Kohn Pedersen Fox]

E m b e d d e d S m a r t S y s t e m s

Kohn Pedersen Fox, the architecture firm that master-planned thedevelopment and designed the towers at 10 & 30 Hudson Yards, has

worked with Related and Oxford to incorporate multiple intelligences

in the project. The plan itself reflects a calculus that balances profit with

physics and geology. Because the complex topology of tracks and tunnels

limits where engineers can embed caissons into the bedrock, only 38

percent of the site can support construction, so developers have to

maximize the usable area by building as high-density, and high-profit, as

possible.

C i r c u i t s a r e t h e n e w t o p o l o g y o f t h i s t e r r a i n , o n c e d o m i n a t e d

b y t u n n e l s a n d t r a c k s .

That calculus also includes public responsibility. One fourth of the

residential units are designated for affordable housing (although skeptics

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fret that affordable means studios and other housing unsuitable for

families). Sustainable features include an efficient, Cogen-powered, on-

site power-generation plant; energy management systems that calibrate

use across the grid; household meters that provide real-time readings; and

a thermal loop that ties together each buildings central plant, enabling

them to exchange heat and chilled water. Environmental righteousness

brings cost savings, too. The power plant is supposed to keep building

services running through any disruption, whether brownout or

superstorm.

Circuits are the new topology of this terrain, once dominated by tunnels

and tracks. Yet another mechanical loop a pneumatic-tube trash

removal system by the Swedish company Envac will have separate

circuits for recyclables, food waste (converted to fertilizer), and trash (fed

into a central dehydrator). While such systems are environmentally

smart they eliminate noisy, polluting garbage trucks; minimize

landfill waste; and reduce offensive smells they also cultivate an out-of-

sight, out-of-mind public consciousness. With disposal chutes on each

floor of every building, garbage becomes more of a domestic aesthetic

problem than an ecological concern. Perhaps the designers could

provide a peek into the trash-collection system so that visitors can both

marvel at its efficiency andreflect on their own contributions to thechallenges of waste management.

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Hudson Yards: Engineered City, promotional material from Related Companies. [PDF]

The master plan also calls for a contextual intelligence that acknowledges

Hudson Yardss relation to the city. The site, while marginal, should feel

connected to the rest of Manhattan, and the buildings, while monolithic,

should be deferential. The projects enormous physical presence will

feel threatening, explained KPF principal William Pedersen, unless it is
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sculpted and creates responses that are very specific to context. Some

of the buildings taper as they ascend; some lean toward one another;

some, with lopped-off crowns, seem to tip their hats; some smooth their

envelopes sharp angles into soft curves. Yet the renderings still

demonstrate a great deal of luminous bravado.

O n t h i s a r t i f i c i a l g r o u n d , e v e n t h e s o i l i s e n g i n e e r e d i t s

t h e s m a r t e s t s o i l i n t o w n .

Rather than pursuing a singular architectural vision, Related recruited a

team of prominent designers, each charged with infusing his or her

sensibility. As architecture critic Justin Davidson wrote in 2012, That

approach emulates a sped-up version of New Yorks gradual, lot-by-lot

evolution; the danger is that it can produce a jumble. Landscape

designer Thomas Woltz faces an extraordinary challenge: his Public

Square, the central plaza for the Eastern Yards, must knit together the

buildings and negotiate vast disparities in scale. In an open space next to

1,000-foot-towers, our tallest tree is going to be like an ant next to a tall

mans shoe, Woltz said. Public Square will feature an entry garden, a

canopying Pavilion Grove, a water feature, a massive interactive artwork

by Thomas Heatherwick, and, according to the developers, a stonework

installation recalling Manhattan geology the schist foundation upon

which the complex floats, and into which its caissons are anchored. On

this artificial ground, even the soil is engineered. The smartest soil in

town is designed to drain efficiently and collect stormwater in a 60,000-

gallon storage tank, which will be protected from the heat of subterranean

trains by a network of tubes that circulate chilled liquid. Public Square is

thus charged with calibrating a proper climate for plants, people, and

buildings. As Davidson put it: its the node where the sites conflictingforces reveal themselves: the tension between public and private, between

city and campus, between democratic space and commercial real estate.

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Public Square, scheduled for completion in 2018. View south toward Culture Shed. [Nelson

Byrd Woltz]

The Public Square: The Smartest Park in Town, promotional material from Related

Companies. [PDF]
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Culture Shed, scheduled for completion in 2019. [Diller Scofidio + Renfro / Rockwell Group]

Cedric Prices unbuilt Fun Palace, 1961.

Yet another mediating structure sits just south of the Square, adjacent to

the High Line. Culture Shed, a 200,000-square-foot venue by DS+R and

Rockwell Group, will serve as aKunsthallefor public and private exhibits,

concerts, screenings, fashion shows, and trade events. The signature

design element is a telescoping outer shell that can be extended over the
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adjacent lot, doubling the venues footprint for larger events. When the

building is compacted, the side lot will be free for open-air programming

and public use. Architect Elizabeth Diller has called it an open

infrastructure that could take on any form of creative expression, at any

time, at any scale. Its flexibility and openness and readiness to

accommodate an array of electro-mechanical demands, Diller says,

constitute myriad forms of intelligence. In that respect, it was inspired

by Cedric Prices hypothetical Fun Palace(1961), a data-driven

architectural machine that would calculate its users preferences and

reconfigure itself to accommodate them. Though never built, Prices

Palace, like the Shed, represents an experimental platform where data

determines form.

N e w Y o r k i n t h e A g e o f I n f o r m a t i c s

Hudson Yards is thus marked by intersections: merging infrastructures,

political-economic interests, operational logics, publics (ideally) and

urban imaginaries. According to Brash, the Bloomberg Way embraced

two distinct imaginaries: a corporate city, with the mayor as CEO and the

city as a unified corporate entity, a brand; and the city as a luxury

product, an elite, meritocratic realm. The Yards embodies both.

Other stakeholders have different hopes for the development: they see it

as the northern anchor of a vibrant cultural district (moored at the south

by the new Whitney Museum); as a workshop for smart, sustainable

construction methods; as a mixed-use neighborhood drawing diverse

publics to its offices, residences, shops, restaurants, and cultural facilities.

The metaphors begin to pile up. Hudson Yards is conceived as an

interface, as a mixing chamber, a test-bed. How will these competing

visions be reconciled on the ground? Not easily is my guess, since they areborn of different ideologies and epistemologies.

H u d s o n Y a r d s i s c o n c e i v e d a s a n i n t e r f a c e , a s a m i x i n g

c h a m b e r , a t e s t - b e d . H o w w i l l t h e s e c o m p e t i n g v i s i o n s b e

r e c o n c i l e d o n t h e g r o u n d ?

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In a recent article, Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid identified three

urban age discourses that shape our current episteme. Urban

triumphalism, as championed by economists like Edward Glaeser, regards

the city as an engine of innovation and civilization and prosperity.

Sustainable urbanismimagines cities as hotbeds of resilience and

environmental consciousness. Finally, technoscientific urbanismreflects a

neopositivist return to postwar systems thinking and centralized

planning; it is especially visible in the discourse around smart cities,

which regards the intelligence generated from spatial sensing and data

analysis as a fix for perennial urban problems.

Bloombergianism draws from all three discourses; in fact, it represents

their greatest synthesis. As Brash explains, the mayors so-called

pragmatism redefined complex urban issues as a set of problems to be

solved via the application of technical knowledge and evaluated via

quantitative measurement. He liked policies with measurable

outcomes. Yet while Bloombergs advocacy for Hudson Yards depended on

numbers cost/benefit analyses, revenue projections, square-footage

counts Brash argues that it was also rooted in fantasy. In selling a vision

of the future city, the mayor asked developers, and New Yorkers at large,

to take a leap of faith.

Bloombergs belief in the power of data shaped his initiatives. In 2010, he

launched theApplied Sciences NYCprogram, inviting top research

institutions to submit proposals to build new applied science and

engineering campuses in New York, with funding and land provided by the

city. The program was designed not only to enhance educational

offerings but also to generate innovative ideas that can be

commercialized, catalyzing hundreds of spinoff companies and increasing

the probability that the next high-growth company a Google, Amazon,or Facebook will emerge in New York City. The city had already

spawned Esty, Tumblr, and Foursquare, but to fully exploit its established

industries finance, media, advertising, real estate it would need to

expand its science and engineering sector.

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Recruitment poster for prospective graduate students, 2013. [Center for Urban Science

and Progress]

The first award, in 2012, went to Cornell University and the Technion-

Israel Institute of Technology for a joint campus on Roosevelt Island. A

few months later, the mayor announced a second award, for New York

Universitys Center for Urban Science and Progress, a research center in

Downtown Brooklyn. Since then, CUSP has become the hub in a large

network of international collaborators that includes universities

(Carnegie Mellon, CUNY, University of Toronto, University of Warwick,

and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay); tech, design, utility, and

defense companies (IBM, Microsoft, Xerox, Cisco, Consolidated Edison,

Lutron, National Grid, Siemens, AECOM, Arup, IDEO, and Lockheed

Martin, all of whom provide financial support); and city agencies

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(departments of city planning, design and construction, buildings,

environmental production, parks and recreation, and transportation; the

MTA; the Port Authority; fire and police).

C U S P w a n t s t o i n s t r u m e n t N e w Y o r k C i t y a n d t r a n s f o r m t h e

c i t y i n t o a l i v i n g l a b o r a t o r y a n d c l a s s r o o m .

Call it the academy-industry-government complex. CUSPs intermodal

teams use city data urban informatics to address challenges related

to infrastructure, energy use, pollution, noise, transportation, public

safety, public health, and so on, and thereby help cities around the world

become more productive, livable, equitable, and resilient. They start by

focusing on problems close to home and then seek to scale up solutions

that can be applied globally: CUSP will instrument New York City and use

existing data from network agencies to transform the city into a living

laboratory and classroom. Instrument. What a remarkable verb.

I first wrote about CUSPs methodsforPlacesin 2013. Earlier that year,

director Steven Koonin had written, it is now not a fantasy to ask if you

could know anything about a city, what do you want to know and to

ponder what could be done with that information. In the era of Big

Data, nearly everything can be measured, and that data can probably be

used to optimize something. More recently, deputy director Constantine

Kontokosta has insisted that CUSP does not put the data before the horse.

Whereas some scientists adopt the attitude, We have so much data, lets

just correlate it all, analyze it all, and see what interesting patterns we find

and respond to them, he says that CUSP researchers take the opposite

approach: Lets think of the important, interesting questions and then

find the data we need. Those important questions, according to

Kontokosta, are shaped by collaborations with social scientists who focus

on issues such as social equity and justice. On its website, CUSP claims

that its work is ultimately about people, i.e. the customers and operators

of urban systems, and that its mission is to understand them and their

behavior. In this universe, citizens relate to their city by consuming

and administering its systems, and by serving as sources of measurable

behavioral data.

H u d s o n Y a r d s a s O p e n - A i r U r b a n L a b

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H u d s o n Y a r d s a s O p e n - A i r U r b a n L a b

As the Bloomberg administration cultivated these centers of innovation

on Roosevelt Island, in Downtown Brooklyn, and later at Columbia

University and the Brooklyn Navy Yard it was easy to see a role for

Hudson Yards. Here was an unprecedented opportunity to rewire a large

plot of land, to create, tabula rasa, a test-bed of urban intelligence thatwould align the citys new data science industry with its expertise in

finance, real estate, design, and structural and civil engineering. In April

2014, CUSP announced that it would partner with Related and Oxford to

develop Hudson Yards as a unique experimental environment for

testing new physical and informatics technologies and analytics

capabilities. Kontokosta would lead the initiative.

H u d s o n Y a r d s w a s a n u n p r e c e d e n t e d o p p o r t u n i t y t o r e w i r e a

l a r g e p l o t o f l a n d , a l i g n i n g t h e c i t y s n e w d a t a s c i e n c e

i n d u s t r y w i t h i t s e x p e r t i s e i n f i n a n c e , r e a l e s t a t e , d e s i g n ,

a n d s t r u c t u r a l a n d c i v i l e n g i n e e r i n g .

There are many other U.S. cities Austin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and

Chicago among them that are integrating smart technologies intoexisting architectures in order to improve efficiency, safety, health, and

resilience. New York has other programs, too: a network of sensors,

video cameras, and EZ Pass readers that monitor traffic congestion in

Midtown; water meters that wirelessly report leaks; solar-powered trash

compactors that alert sanitation workers when they are full; rooftop noise

sensors that detect the acoustic signature of gunshots and help agents

geolocate their origins. And theyre making money. The NYPDs Domain

Awareness System, which links surveillance cameras, license plate

readers, radiation and chemical monitors, and police files, has been sold

to other law enforcement agencies and has yielded profit for both New

York and its partner Microsoft. The federal governments Smart Cities

Initiative, launched last fall, aims to fund new programs in the areas of

civic technology, cybersecurity, transportation, broadband infrastructure,

and more.

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And while other sites around the world Songdo, South Korea; Masdar,

United Arab Emirates; Lavasa, India have purportedly built smart

from the start, Hudson Yards offers the first opportunity in the United

States to build, from the ground up, the most connected, measured, and

technologically advanced digital district in the nation. Its new steel

and concrete structures will serve as scaffolding for the installation of a

future-proofed fiber-optic loop, as well as rooftop satellite, digital

antennae, and wireless responders that provide tenants with super-fast

connectivity without dead zones. The massive platforms and sidewalks

and building facades offer seemingly boundless surface-area for

embedded technology such as environmental sensors, sub-metering and

building data-capture systems, and devices linked to the Internet of

Things. Modeling software will process data on pedestrian flow, traffic,

indoor and outdoor air quality, energy production and consumption,

waste streams, and citizens health and activity levels. Residents and

workers equipped with tracking apps and smartphone sensors will enjoy

an interactive, data-driven experience, and developers can use the

harvested data to improve operational efficiencies, productivity, and

quality of life to build a community thats more livable, equitable, and

resilient. So the story goes.

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Construction of the platforms over the rail yards in 2015. [Patrick Cashin / Metropolitan

Transportation Authority]

T h e P o l i t i c s o f N u m b e r s

But how to operationalize and then quantify and optimize such

fuzzy qualities? What constitutes livability or equity? Why the

unquestioned supremacy of efficiency? Are allthings better when theyrequick and easy? Sustainability (that buzzword-of-yore supplanted in

some circles by the more gritty resilience) has really been a measurement

problem, according to Kontokosta. The solution is to capture a

broader array of measurements, a richer assemblage of data streams

data from the environment, data from physical systems, data about

human behavior in order to better understand urban ecosystems.

CUSP is particularly interested in how physical spaces and environmental

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conditions shape human activity. How, for example, do noise, air

quality, and social interactions correlate with educational achievement?

At a granular level, how does the use of Public Square relate to measures of

health? Koonin predicts that all this cross-referencing and collation will

produce new disciplines. Well see the rise of human-centered civil

engineering and wider applications of quantitative design.

T h e t r o u b l e w i t h m o d e r n t h e o r i e s o f b e h a v i o r i s m , H a n n a h

A r e n d t w a r n e d , i s n o t t h a t t h e y a r e w r o n g b u t t h a t t h e y c o u l d

b e c o m e t r u e .

While data science itself is an interdisciplinary practice, the translation of

data into built form requires collaboration among an even larger field of

actors, many of whom bring wildly disparate values and preconceptions.

Think of all the earthmoving that has to happen, or the negotiation with

labor unions. These are not activities that can be easily data-fied. And not

everyone in this larger field of actors shares Kontokostas concern with

putting important questions before data collection and analysis. Real-

estate developers and governments focus on measurable outcomes. They

need numbers to inspire confidence in potentially risky investments, and

to systematically guide their planning and implementation. I dont knowwhat the applications might be, admits Relateds Jay Cross, but I do

know that you cant do it without the data. Thats a dangerous

approach, argues sociologist Will Davies, as theoretical presuppositions

and hypotheses can allegedly be abandoned, along with notions of

causality, in favor of blanket surveillance of everyday life. Then its all

about data-capture and pattern-spotting and behaviorist explanations.

Built environments and technical systems are presumed to inform human

behavior, and data about that behavior is fed back into the environment to

alterfuturehuman behavior. Its B. F. Skinner with sensors.

Within this model, people do possess agency, but their actions are framed

by their roles as consumers and generators of data. What about

human activities that cannot be observed? What about all those potential

behaviors that are never enacted, and thus never measured, because the

physical space or its regulation prohibits them or because ones

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subjectivity proscribes a repertoire of possible behaviors? What about

other modes of action, other means by which people perform their urban

citizenship? How will the new methods of measurement and planning

inform what it means to be a citizen in a quantitative community?

The trouble with modern theories of behaviorism, Hannah Arendt

warned in 1958, is not that they are wrong but that they could becometrue that the very instruments used to measure behavior are indicative

of, and constitutive of, societies of automatism and sterile passivity.

The data we generate, based on determinist assumptions and imperfect

methodologies, could end up shaping populations and building worlds in

their own image.

Pedestrians outside the Hudson Yards subway station? Or automatons in a behavioral

experiment? Jennifer Gabrys critiques the rituals of smart citizenship.

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Sustainability is a common value in smart urbanism and a selling point for

residents hoping to live mindfully and ethically in their LEED Gold

apartment buildings. But what does that really mean? Media scholar

Jennifer Gabrys argues that people enact their citizenship or

empirically behave like citizens by installing smart thermostats in

their homes, depositing trash in the appropriate chutes, monitoring air

quality and noise levels while they walk the dog, and FitBitting their way

to good health. Through this self-monitoring (and the voluntary provision

of personal data to some central repository), they presumably learn to

make informed and responsible choices, to alter their behavior when

necessary, and to contribute to the collective sustainability effort. Smart

citizenship, Gabrys says, is thus equated with monitoring and managing

ones relationship to the urban environment operationalizing the

cybernetic functions of the smart city rather than with exercising

rights and responsibilities or advancing democratic engagement

through dialogue and debate, as Arendt would prefer.

P e o p l e b e h a v e l i k e c i t i z e n s b y i n s t a l l i n g s m a r t t h e r m o s t a t s

i n t h e i r h o m e s , d e p o s i t i n g t r a s h i n t h e a p p r o p r i a t e c h u t e s ,

a n d F i t B i t t i n g t h e i r w a y t o g o o d h e a l t h .

If we were to measure the behavior of these citizen-sensors as an index of

their engagement with the city, wed find that their actions are limited, as

Arendt foretold, by the instruments that render those actions visible and

worth accounting for. The result is a passive, somewhat egocentric notion

of citizenship even an automatedperformance of citizenship, wherein

self-managing environmental technologies can override citizens if they

do not perform in accordance with the rules which restricts

peoples ideas about civic action, delimits the rights to the city to

which they feel entitled, and shapes their imagination about what a city is

and can be.

Whats more, Gabrys says, the very responsiveness that enables citizens

to gather data often doesnt let them meaningfully act upon the data

gathered, since this would require changing the urban system in which

they have become effective operators. While some models of smart

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urbanism embrace the tools of e-government report-a-pothole apps,

for example, or community planning software they typically lack any

means of accommodating user input that challenges the underlying

principles and ideologies of the tools. Civic engagement platforms, in

their promotion of transparency and efficiency, tend to obscure the

politics of pervasive surveillance and offer no means for citizens to

question the goals of growth and progress (i.e., neoliberalism), or to

trace the spread of what Shoshanna Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism.

Jathan Sadowski and Frank Pasquale follow this logic to its conclusion:

Anybody who wishes to ask critical questions about the future, let alone

actually constrain and slow down technological development, is de facto

extinguishing an exploding economy and standing in the way of a

(supposedly) democratizing force.

Y o u c a n n o t c o s h a p e a p a i n s t a k i n g l y e n g i n e e r e d , s h r e w d l y

f i n a n c e d , a l g o r i t h m i c a l l y - t u n e d , m a s t e r - p l a n n e d

e n v i r o n m e n t d e s i g n e d t o p r e v e n t y o u f r o m i n f l u e n c i n g i t .

Proponents of values-driven design advocate that citizens be involved in

co-designing the technology that shapes the environments they live in

and structures their everyday lives. Yet, as The New Republics ChristineRosen notes, You cannot coshape an environment particularly a

painstakingly engineered, shrewdly financed, algorithmically-tuned,

master-planned environment designed by others to prevent you from

influencing it. Arethere opportunities for meaningful citizen

participation in creating the smart technologies that will define Hudson

Yards? And what about the visitors? What about the conscientious

objectors? What about the residents who lack the tools for participation

smart devices or technological smarts and who are thus subjected

to the citys monitoring without being able to monitor back?

I posed these questions to Related and CUSP. Representatives from both

organizations indicated that theyre still in the planning phases for the

quantified community, and they cant share concrete details.

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10 Hudson Yards, under construction in 2014. View from the High Line. [Steven Severinghaus]

D a t a S t r e a m s a s U r b a n I n f r a s t r u c t u r e

While much of the data at Hudson Yards will be drawn from building

systems and connected devices, people themselves constitute another

valuable data source. CUSP has repeatedly stated that residents and

visitors will not be tracked unless they opt in to the anonymous collectionof personal data from home sensors and smartphone apps. In 2014, a

senior official at Related proposed that residents might be incented to

opt-in in exchange for services, but when I reached out last month,

the company declined to comment on how that might work. Its not

exactly reassuring to hear CUSP researchers tell The New York Timesthat

the conditions under which people will feel comfortable sharing their

personal information will be another subject for experiment. For

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most researchers working with human subjects, consent, privacy, and

confidentiality are critical values. Its not clear that the rules of the game

are the same at Hudson Yards. Kontokosta toldFast Companythat todays

urbanites have come to demand services and conveniences that require

they get comfortable with greater surveillance and instrumentalization.

If data collected at Hudson Yards is subject to loosely regulated mining,what about the data as aphysical resource, which will require a material

infrastructure for its storage and management? It seems thats another

test bed. As Kontokosta recently explained toBisnow:

We havent seen this type of comprehensive data effort in an urban

development before. There will be a lot of challenges dealing with

the fire hose of data this is going to unleash, but were hoping this will

eventually become a model for how cities think about this type of

informatics infrastructure going forward.

Thats not much clearer than what we heard two years ago from Relateds

senior vice president of operations. Thad Sheely surmised that the data

would be stored in the cloud (where?) and managed by an outside

information technology company (perhapsHudson Yards tenant SAP?):

Basically, well be the funnel and collect the data so they can put [the

information] though their spin cycle in the cloud, and then provide

an interface for us to be able to access the information. That way,

we wont need to have a big server farm on campus.

Again, neither Related nor CUSP would confirm speculations about that

spin cycle in the cloud. But if an off-site model is realized, the physical

systems that make the development smart its tubes and cables andservers will presumably be hidden away like all the other circuits.

Whats left? A deceptively clean, shallow interface to the Hudson Yards

operating system, whose physical architecture, algorithmic operation,

and security we know very little about.

T h e c o n d i t i o n s u n d e r w h i c h p e o p l e w i l l f e e l c o m f o r t a b l e

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s h a r i n g t h e i r p e r s o n a l i n f o r m a t i o n w i l l b e a n o t h e r s u b j e c t

f o r e x p e r i m e n t .

Geographer Rob Kitchin has identified issues that governments and

developers must address in order to ensure the privacy, protection, and

security of data, which he takes to be critical rights in the smart city notsubjects for experimentation. New Yorkers would do well to familiarize

themselves with these recommendations, which include building

privacy-by-design into technologies; offering education about data

security; forming a smart-city oversight committee to monitor

governance, ethics, privacy, and security; empowering a compliance team

that works across city departments and contractor companies; and

charging a cybersecurity emergency response team. Implementing

Kitchins recommendations in New York could enable the benefits of

smart cities and urban big data to be realized, while promoting fairness

and equity, and protecting citizens (and the city itself) from harm.

Ill go a step further than that. The politics of data, and the materiality of

its infrastructure, could be made legible or senseable within the

landscape. Just as I suggested earlier that Hudson Yards designers might

offer a peek into mechanical systems like the trash chute, there could also

be civic education to inform residents and visitors about what makes the

community so smart and about their own potential for managing the

uses of the data they generate. A public library would be an ideal

venue for such public pedagogy, and for providing an interface to and

guiding patrons use of open data provided by Hudson Yards and the

city government. Further, we need to ensure that public institutions and

repositories have the resources to commit to the long-term maintenance

of open, secure information infrastructures. That is especially important

in cities powered by commercial IT and dependent on proprietary

platforms. History shows that commercial partners tend to value

innovation-driven obsolescence, exclusive contracts, and the

monetization of user data; rather than resilience, interoperability,

equitability, and discretion.

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A woman admires the Hudson Yards logo on a mobile device in the penthouse at 15 Hudson

Yards, scheduled for completion in 2018. [Diller Scofidio + Renfro / Rockwell Group]

F r o m P e n t h o u s e t o S i d e w a l k ( L a b s )

Lets pause now to consider what we know about the community forming

on the Far West Side. At 10 Hudson Yards, opening soon, tenants will

include the luxury fashion retailer Coach, cosmetics company LOreal,digital marketers VaynerMedia, Boston Consulting Group, and the

software and data analytics company SAP. Next year, a second tower

opens at 55 Hudson Yards, designed by KPF/Kevin Roche; the first

confirmed tenant is the law firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Opening in

2018 are a 70-story apartment building by DS+R/Rockwell Group and a

retail center by Elkus Manfredi that will feature more than one hundred

shops, including New Yorks first Neiman Marcus store, and restaurants

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curated by celebrity chef Thomas Keller. By 2019, Culture Shed will

begin hosting events. David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill will

unveil a mixed-used building anchored by an Equinox hotel and fitness

club. And KPF will open a 90-story tower with tenants who are moving

from the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, including HBO,

CNN, Oxford Properties, and Related Companies; as well as the

investment bank Wells Fargo Securities and at least one private equity

firm. The year 2020 will bring the highly symbolic regime change of a

62-story office tower replacing the McDonalds at 34th Street and 10th

Avenue. After that comes a second phase of development, at the Western

Yards, which will emphasize residential use; among its seven apartment

buildings and one public school, there is one office building.

T h i s i s a l a n d o f l u x u r y a n d l o g i s t i c s , f i t n e s s a n d f i n a n c e ,

m a r k e t i n g a n d m e d i a , c o u t u r e a n d c u r a t i o n , f i n e - d i n i n g a n d

d a t a a l l s i t u a t e d a m i d s t a b u n d a n t o p e n s p a c e .

What does that tell us? This is a land of luxury and logistics, fitness and

finance, marketing and media, couture and curation, fine-dining and data

all situated amidst abundant open space, including not only Public

Square and Culture Shed, but also Hudson Park & Boulevard, a four-acregreen space that will extend past the northern border up to 39th Street.

While some early boosters imagined Hudson Yards as an annex of the

Midtown business district, the current developers have a more specific

image in mind: Silicon Alley West. Relateds agents have aggressively

pursued tech start-ups, figuring that the resilient micro-grid and frontier

location will be a draw. There is even interest in growing a full-time tech

incubator on site.

Any day now, Sidewalk Labs an urban innovation accelerator will

move into the 26th and 27th floors of 10 Hudson Yards. Perhaps they are

already there. Right beside them will be Intersection, a Sidewalk

subsidiary formed last year after the acquisition of Control Group, a tech

and design firm, and Titan, an outdoor advertising company. Intersection

has already made its presence felt around the city by transforming New

Yorks 8,000-plus payphones into Links, ad-supported pylons that

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feature super-fast WiFi, free calls, and charging stations. (Among

the crucial questions for privacy and security: will the Links become

nodes in the NYPDs Domain Awareness System?)

LinkNYC kiosks installed last month in Manhattan. [Edward Blake]

Sidewalk Labs, remember, has a deep connection to the once-

unprogrammable terrain of the Far West Side. Chief executive Daniel

Doctoroff is the Bloomberg ally who recoded the territory as Hudson

Yards. Given the neighborhoods many evolutionary phases, whose

histories are carved into the landscape here, it is fitting that Sidewalk now

positions itself as an ambassador of the new infrastructural age. The

company tells its own version of urban history: After the steam

revolution, the electricity revolution, and the automobile revolution, all of

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which made their marks here, comes a digital revolution characterized by

ubiquitous connectivity, sensors, location-based services, social

networks, advanced computing power, the ability to analyze data, and new

design and fabrication technologies like 3-D printing and robotics that

promise to solve our pressing urban problems, to promote efficiency

and adaptability, to build urban community and give people a greater

sense of personalization. Is that what weve been missing all this time?

A greater sense of personalization?

S i d e w a l k L a b s a i m s t o b r i d g e t h e g a p t h a t t y p i c a l l y d i v i d e s

u r b a n i s t s a n d t e c h n o l o g i s t s , e m b r a c i n g a s e t o f p r i n c i p l e s

a n d u r b a n i m a g i n a r i e s t h a t e x t e n d b e y o n d t h e B l o o m b e r g

c o n s e n s u s .

While established smart-city players like Cisco and IBM peddle top-down,

master-planned solutions, Sidewalk Labs presents itself as a fresh

alternative, offering platforms (theres that ubiquitous, seemingly

innocuous metaphor) that users can plug into. Undergirding those

platforms is the entire Alphabet apparatus: the largest pool of capital in

the world focused on urban innovation; a deep knowledge of how cities

work, informed by the companys vast store of urban data, particularly

regarding urban mobility; a commitment to privacy and world-class

security; the leaders trust-based relationships with city governments

and major companies; and their confidence to work with, through, and

sometimes aroundexisting institutions and regulatory structures in

order to bring its products to market (italics mine). That foundation

rivaling the Yardss two massive platforms in the concentration of

funding, deal-making, and engineering required for its construction

equips Alphabet and Sidewalk Labs to build, deploy, and service any

digital technology in the physical world, which they can then test at

scale and offer on a subscription, fee, or commission model to private

parties or governments anywhere. Are you worried yet? Or thrilled?

Such a wealth of resources, and such hubris, might imply a narrowly

technocratic approach to urban betterment, but Sidewalk Labs aims to

bridge the gap that typically divides urbanists and technologists (a

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chestnut roasted often in company presentations). It embraces a set of

principles and urban imaginaries that overlap with and extend beyond the

Bloomberg consensus. While Sidewalk, like Bloomberg, recognizes cities

as engines of opportunity and actively seeks business opportunities, it

also, like CUSP, asserts that cities are ultimately about people, and that

cities must adapt to the needs (and behaviors) of their citizens. Further,

Sidewalk explicitly addresses the ethical dimensions of urban living and

urban design. Its website highlights the importance of fostering

interactions, planned and spontaneous, among urban citizens; cultivating

shared values and promoting equity, inclusion, and diversity; and

accepting the critical responsibility to facilitate coordination without

control. That last bullet is especially tricky in this new world of

ubiquitous surveillance and algorithmic governance. Doctoroff has

spoken about the need to keep the virtuous cycle going (remember:

dont be evil; do the right thing!) to maintain quality of life, protect our

privacy, keep us safe, and address equity while still maximizing profit.

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App concept from a company presentation. [Sidewalk Labs]

Although committed to a code of ethics that emphasizes local concerns

and citizen empowerment, Sidewalk Labs aims big. Working at an

ambitious scale enables the team to model the interrelationships among

seemingly disparate urban challenges. For example: the availability of

transportation affects where people choose to live, which affects housing

prices, which affects quality of life. Data-capture and pattern-spotting

show potentially actionable correlations. Solving problems is then a

matter of building the right relationships with partners and stakeholders,

and developing the right technologies.

What urban realities could those technologies effect? Sidewalk talks in the

present tense, as if the goals have already been realized:

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Modern, affordable housing is enabled by performance-based code,

advanced materials, and new and ownership models.

Digital mobility systems can manage limited road space to improve

transportation equity and air quality.

Personalized social services can deliver measurable health outcomes

while maintaining individual privacy.

Distributed energy management uses new business models,

renewable energy, and smarter storage to improve sustainability.

After Doctoroffs own battles with zoning and building codes, its no

surprise that he emphasizes the potential of performance-based codes.

In a world in which we can monitor things like noise or vibrations, he

wonders, why do we need to have these very prescriptive building codes

that only change once every several decades? It inhibits the transfer of

land so we end up having very restrictive uses. He holds that owners

and residents should be allowed to behave as they please in their

apartments and neighborhoods, so long as they dont exceed certain

thresholds, and that a regulatory system built on sensors and automatic

monitoring would produce more vibrant, mixed-use neighborhoods and

enhance the free flow of property, which lowers costs. Of course, suchmodels presume that the key variables that codes and zoning are designed

to regulate peoples health, safety, and welfare; property value, orderly

development, and community character are objectively measurable and

enforceable. Neighborly behavior has a number.

S u c h m o d e l s p r e s u m e t h a t t h e k e y v a r i a b l e s t h a t c o d e s a n d

z o n i n g a r e d e s i g n e d t o r e g u l a t e a r e o b j e c t i v e l y m e a s u r a b l e

a n d e n f o r c e a b l e . N e i g h b o r l y b e h a v i o r h a s a n u m b e r .

And given Alphabets investment in self-driving cars, its no surprise,

either, that Sidewalk is focusing on urban transportation. Last month, the

federal Department of Transportation announced that finalists in its $40-

million Smart City Challenge will partner with Sidewalk Labs to develop a

traffic management system calledFlow, which will use anonymized data

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from mobile apps like Google Maps and Waze, along with sensors on the

street and eventually (we can assume) in Alphabets cars, to help

commuters and city governments monitor and manage traffic patterns.

Flow will spot areas and sources of congestion, model the impact of

altered or expanded transit routes, coordinate ride shares, and perhaps

even identify zones underserved by public transit. LinkNYC will feed

data into the system, too, directing drivers to available parking,

recommending detours around traffic jams, and routing self-driving cars

through the streets. The kiosks may someday serve as digital

stethoscopes, monitoring flows of people, commercial activity, and

garbage removal, and perhaps inciting service or policy changes; and

as notice boards, flagging table openings at neighborhood restaurants

or warning of service delays at the nearest subway. Well be doing

Developer Days, making APIs, said Intersections chief innovation officer.

The city as platform, finally realized.

The winner of the Smart City Challenge, to be announced in June, will get

not only a Department of Transportation grant but also a license to

Flow and 100 free Links. The result: an ingenious vertically-integrated

system, with Alphabet managing city streets from A to Z from individual

automobiles and commuters navigational systems to transit informatics

and the hardware that enables data-capture and transfer. The onlycommuters out of the loop (and off the map) will be those who arent

plugged into Alphabets platforms and products. And at Hudson Yards, the

street design will make it clear who the intended users are. Justin

Davidson surmises that street activity will be managed via drop-off lanes,

so the limos are taken care of. But how to manage the shopping-cart

pushers and skateboarders and fellow misbehavers? Sidewalk Labs did

not respond to my inquiries.

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Rendering of Hudson Yards towers with Zaha Hadids 520 W. 28th and the High Line. [Related

Companies]

T h e I n s t r u m e n t a l C i t y

If you happen to be in New York next month, stop and look up at the new

building straddling the High Line. Whatevers brewing on the 27th and

28th floors, its going to be big. Sidewalks new leadership, announced inFebruary, includes former heads of key divisions at Google maps,

shopping, machine intelligence as well as Bloomberg allies with deep

experience in planning and development. Joining Doctoroff in the C-suite

are Rit Aggarwala, who designed Bloombergs PlaNYC sustainability

program, and Josh Sirefman, who helped build Cornell Tech on Roosevelt

Island. The company is hiring machine vision and simulation experts as

well as city leads focused on municipal processes like health and human

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services, public safety, and criminal justice. Presumably, these are the

urban sectors it aims to optimize. As recently as last month, Sidewalk Labs

was also recruiting a product lead for citizen experiences.

T h e s e - m o d e r n d a y H a u s s m e n n h a v e t a m e d t h e i r w e s t e r n

f r o n t i e r , s u n k m o u n d s o f c a p i t a l i n t o a b u r i e d r a i l b e d ,

f i n e s s e d t h e z o n i n g a t t h e D e p a r t m e n t o f B u i l d i n g s , a n d n o w

i n t e n d t o u s e t h e i r n e w w e a p o n d a t a t o r e v o l u t i o n i z e

t h e o l d u r b a n r e g i m e .

When Doctoroff, surrounded by his old Bloomberg compatriots and new

Alphabet colleagues, looks down upon the construction at Hudson Yards,

he must feel that his Olympic dreams, long deferred, have been fulfilled recast, rebranded for our new age of algorithmic ambition. The developers

and financiers and data-managers will behold the same scene. These-

modern day Haussmenn have tamed their western frontier, sunk mounds

of capital into a buried rail bed, finessed the zoning at the Department of

Buildings, and now intend to use their new weapon data to

revolutionize the old urban regime. Theyll remake the infrastructures

that have been entangled at the Yards; theyll overlay a new topology of

circuits and data flows atop the train tracks and tunnels. These Great Men

this is a latter-day Power Broker story, after all will have successfully

united New Yorks powers in finance, real estate, design, marketing,

engineering, technology, and now data science to construct a floating

empire that blends allthe urban age discourses: triumphalism,

sustainability, technoscientism. Theyll behold the city fully

instrumented and instrumentalized, as an engine of data and profit.

And fantasy. From the observation deck atop 30 Hudson Yards, projected

to be the highest in the city, residents and visitors will look out upon a

dream made manifest: a clean, efficient urban machine; a carefully

curated cultural experience; a Keller-fed, Equinox-toned, Coach-clad

populace; a sustainable urban ecosystem; a harmonious community that

behaves in accordance with the rules; a city that plays by the numbers.

Here, those modern theories of behaviorism, dear Professor Arendt, will


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have become true.

p j pp b .

p bb .

1. For a helpful overview of recent literature on smart cities, see Simon

Marvin, Ands Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane, Eds.,Smart Urbanism:

Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (New York: Routledge, 2016).

2. Technically, BIGs Spiral, on 10th Avenue, between 34th and 35th

Streets, is one block north of the Hudson Yards site.

3. John Cassidy, Bloombergs Game, The New Yorker, April 4, 2005, 56-67.

4. Of course, data-driven urban planning has a long history. See Jennifer

LightsFrom Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban

Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2005) and Mark Vallianatos, Uncovering the Early History of Big

Data and Smart City in Los Angeles,Boom, June 2015.

5. Julian Brash,Bloombergs New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury

City (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 146.

6. Brash, 48.

7. David Halle & Elisabeth Tiso,New Yorks New Edge: Contemporary Art, the

High Line, and Urban Megaprojects on the Far West Side (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2014).

8. After six years in the mayors administration, Doctoroff returned to the
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private sector to lead Bloomberg LP as President (2008-11) and CEO

(2011-14).

9. Quoted in Halle and Tiso, 215.

10. Brash, 123.

11. For more on Hudson Yards financing, which includes public tax

incentives, consult Bridget Fisher, The Myth of Self-Financing: The Trade-

Offs Behind the Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project, Schwartz Center for

Economic Policy Analysis, Working Paper 2015-4 (New York: The New

School, 2015). See also Halle and Tiso; Hudson Yards Development

Corporation, Financial Incentives; and New York City Independent

Budget Office, Citys Spending on Hudson Yards Project Has Exceeded

Initial Estimates (April 2013).

12. Halle and Tiso, 176. For more on the High Line, see Places articles

including Phillip Lopate, Above Grade: On the High Line,Places

Journal, November 2011.

13. Patrick J. Kiger, Hudson Yards Rises Above the Rails, UrbanLand,

October 6, 2014.

14. The developers explain, If on a Sunday, air conditioning is needed for

just a few occupants in an office building, it can come from the already-

active retail center rather than powering-up the entire commercial

towers cooling plant. See Related Companies brochure, Tomorrows

City Today, as well as website pages on Sustainability and

Infrastructure.

15. Juliette Spertus and Benjamin Miller, Pneumatic Tubes for One New

Yorks Trash, Urban Omnibus, August, 26, 2015. For more on pneumaticinfrastructures, see Shannon Mattern, Puffs of Air, in John Knechtel,

Ed.,AIR, Alphabet City #15 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 42-56.

16. Quoted in Kiger.

17. Heres Pedersen again: We tried to design our buildings to respond to

every aspect of the context around them. That responsiveness, that
http://urbanomnibus.net/2015/08/pneumatic-tubes-for-one-new-yorks-trash/http://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com/office/infrastructurehttp://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com/office/sustainabilityhttps://onlinedocs.related.com/HYDocuments/HY_Press_HYPIS_FINAL_4-15-2014_1846.pdfhttp://urbanland.uli.org/planning-design/hudson-yards-rises-rails/https://placesjournal.org/article/above-grade-on-the-high-line/http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/hudsonyards2013.pdfhttp://www.hydc.org/html/project/financial.shtmlhttp://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/images/docs/research/political_economy/Bridget_Fisher_WP_2015-4_final.pdf


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gesturing, the sense that there is dialogue between buildings, is really the

essence of what we are trying to do. With 10 Hudson Yards sloping

towards the Hudson River and 30 Hudson Yards gesturing toward the 7-

train subway station, we are creating a type of dance. See David Moin,

Stephen M. Ross Discusses His Vision for Hudson Yards, Womens Wear

Daily, March 10, 2016.

18. Justin Davidson, From 0 to 12 Million Square Feet,New York, October 7,

2012.

19. Quoted in Davidson.

20. Hudson Yards Press Kit, January 27, 2016.

21. Cynthia Davidson, Moving Parts: A Conversation with Elizabeth Diller,

Log 36 (Winter 2016), 52.

22. Brash, 17.

23. For more on urban test beds, see Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea

Cavillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch, Test Bed Urbanism,Public Culture25:2

(2013): 272-306.

24. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, Towards a New Epistemology of theUrban? City 19 (2015), 151-82. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Urban

Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1970]),

191.

25. Brash, 91.

26. Applied Sciences NYC, Overview.

27. For more, see Russell Hughes, The Internet of Politicized Things:

Urbanization, Citizenship, and the Hacking of New York Innovation

City,Interstices 16 (2016), 24-28.

28. According to Michael Manfredi, architect of the Bridge co-location

facility, Its about making connections between someone who might be

working at Microsoft and some doctoral student who is working on ways

of assembling information, and that rarely happens on an academic
http://interstices.aut.ac.nz/ijara/index.php/ijara/article/view/211http://www.nycedc.com/project/applied-sciences-nychttp://content.related.com/Lists/HYNewsAndPress/Attachments/134/Hudson-Yards-Press-Kit-01.27.16.pdfhttp://nymag.com/homedesign/urbanliving/2012/hudson-yards/http://wwd.com/retail-news/retail-features/stephen-ross-hudson-yards-retail-related-cos-10387536/


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campus. See Liz Stinson, Cornell Wants People to Collide on Its New

NYC Tech Campus, Wired, July 1, 2015.

29. CUSP website, About.

30. Shannon Mattern, Methodolatry and the Art of Measure,Places

Journal, November 2013. For a sustained critique of technoscientificurbanism, see also Mattern, Interfacing Urban Intelligence, Places

Journal, April 2014, and Mattern, Mission Control: A History of the

Urban Dashboard, Places Journal, March 2015.

31. Steven Koonin, The Promise of Urban Informatics(The Center for Urban

Science and Progress: 2013), 2.

32. Quoted in Brian Libby, Quantifying the Livable City, CityLab, October

21, 2014.

33. CUSP website, Disciplines, Domains, and Projects.

34. As the Applied Sciences NYC brief indicates, the city is focused on the

potential commercialization of such knowledge. CUSP projects that its

applied research, including the work of graduate students in its Applied

Urban Sciences and Informatics degree and certificate programs, will

generate $5.5 billion in economic activity, including nearly 200 spin-off

companies and several thousand new job, within the first three decades of

operation. Hughes observes that the recruitment of graduate researchers

into such enterprises reflects the citys commitment to equip its students

as tools for the 21st century digital economy. See Hughes, op cit., 26, and

New York Economic Development Corporation, press release, April 23,

2012.

35. A few months after the CUSP announcement, a third award went to theColumbia Data Science Institute, which, like CUSP, focuses on

informatics, but has a wider purview; their work addresses such topics as

cybersecurity, health and financial analytics, the management of large

data sets, and generalizable formal and mathematical models for data

processing. Later, a fourth award went to Carnegie Mellon, which

proposedto locate its Integrative Media Program in Steiner Studios at the

Brooklyn Navy Yard.
http://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/376-13/mayor-bloomberg-carnegie-mellon-university-will-open-fourth-new-applied-sciences/#/0.http://datascience.columbia.edu/http://www.nycedc.com/press-release/mayor-bloomberg-new-york-university-president-sexton-and-mta-chairman-lhota-announcehttp://cusp.nyu.edu/research/http://www.citylab.com/tech/2014/10/quantifying-the-livable-city/381657/http://cusp.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/CUSP-overview-May-30-2013.pdfhttps://placesjournal.org/article/mission-control-a-history-of-the-urban-dashboard/https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence/https://placesjournal.org/article/methodolatry-and-the-art-of-measure/http://cusp.nyu.edu/about/http://www.wired.com/2015/07/cornell-wants-people-collide-new-nyc-tech-campus/


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36. CUSP press release, NYU CUSP, Related Companies, and Oxford

Properties Group Team Up to Create First Quantified Community In

The United States at Hudson Yards, April 14, 2014.

37. On the politics of smaller-scale, more modest, retrofit-oriented smart

city initiatives, see Taylor Shelton, Matthew Zook, and Alan Wiig, The

Actually Existing Smart City, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economyand Society 8 (2015), 13-25.

38. Robert Lee Holz, As World Crowds In, Cities Become Digital

Laboratories, Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2015.

39. United States press release, Fact Sheet: Administration Announces New

Smart Cities Initiative to Help Communities Tackle Local Challenges

and Improve City Services, September 14, 2015.

40. CUSP press release, April 14, 2014, op cit.

41. CUSP press release, April 14, 2014, op cit.

42. Quoted in Steve Lohr, Huge New York Development Project Becomes a

Data Science Lab, The New York Times, April 14, 2014.

43. Kontokosta, quoted in Lohr. NYPD deputy commissioner of informationtechnology Jessica Tisch likewise explained that the thing that allows

you to do data-driven management is to view all the different sorts of data

at the same time and provide that data to the officers in new ways,

quoted in Holz, op cit.

44. See Kiger, op cit., and Libby, op cit.

45. Quoted in Lohr, op cit.

46. Quoted in Lohr, op cit.

47. William Davies, The Chronic Social: Relations of Control Within and

Without Neoliberalism,New Formations: A Journal of

Culture/Theory/Politics 84-5 (2015), 40-57.

48. For more on the historical relationships between behaviorism,
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/huge-new-york-development-project-becomes-a-data-science-lab/https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/14/fact-sheet-administration-announces-new-smart-cities-initiative-helphttp://www.wsj.com/articles/as-world-crowds-in-cities-become-digital-laboratories-1449850244http://cusp.nyu.edu/press-release/nyu-cusp-related-companies-oxford-properties-group-team-create-first-quantified-community-united-states-hudson-yards/


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engineering, and cybernetics, see the work of Orit Halpern. See also Ana

Teixeira, The Pigeon in the Machine: The Concept of Control in

Behaviorism and Cybernetics, inAlleys of Your Mind: Augmented

Intelligences and Its Traumas, Ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Lneberg: meson

press, 2015), 23-34. For more on behaviorism in urban design, see Eric

Gordon and Stephen Walter, Meaningful Inefficiencies: Resisting the

Logic of Technological Efficiency in the Design of Civic Systems, in CivicMedia: Technology, Design, Practice, Ed. Eric Gordon and Paul Mihaildis

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016).

49. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1958), 322.

50. Jennifer Gabrys, Programming Environments: Environmentality and

Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,Environment and Planning D: Societyand Space 32:1 (2014), 30-48. Halpern, LeCavalier, Cavillo, and Pietsch, op

cit., echo Gabryss claim that sensor-based urban smartness marks a

turn against the faith in liberal subjectivity, denigrates the place of older

political processes in decision making and operates at a level far

beneath consciousness. See also Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano, Christine

Satchell, and Martin Gibbs, Eds.,From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen:

Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile

Technology to Support Citizen Engagement(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011).

51. Christine Rosen argues that in outsourcing so many aspects of our daily

lives to technology, we are making a moral choice. With the rise of

ambient intelligence and persuasive technologies, we are replacing

human judgment with programmed algorithms that apply their own

standards and norms to our behavior, usually with the goal of greater

efficiency, productivity, and healthy living. See Rosen, The Machine andthe Ghost, The New Republic, July 12, 2012.

52. Jennifer Light discusses the use of simulation games in communities and

schools in the 1960s to help citizens understand urban systems thinking;

such programs encourag[ed] citizens to maintain the stability of the

system rather than destroy it. Residents were educated to debate the

political choices offered by the game but not to question the models of
https://newrepublic.com/article/104874/rosen-verbeek-technology-morality-intelligence


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urban systems themselves. See Urbanizing Military Information

Technology: Interview with Jennifer Light,New Geographies 7 (2015),

139-147; and Light, Taking Games Seriously, Technology and Culture

49:2 (April 2008), 347-75.

53. The goal of surveillance capitalism, Zuboff explains, is to access the

real-time flow of your daily life in order to directly influence andmodify your behavior for profit. Hudson Yardss planners plan to use

behavioral data in developing urban services but its likely that that

same data will be of great interest to local retailers and restaurateurs. See

Shoshanna Zuboff, The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism,Frankfurter

Allgemeine, March 11, 2016.

54. Jathan Sadowski and Frank Pasquale, The Spectrum of Control: A Social

Theory of the Smart City,First Monday 20: 6-7 (July 2015).

55. Rosen, op cit.

56. See Jessica Leber, Beyond the Quantified Self: The Worlds Largest

Quantified Community,Fast Company, April 22, 2014; and Lohr, op cit.

Rob Kitchin notes that many of the governments and corporations

managing smart cities claim to use anonymous data or metadata, but the

empirical evidence reveals that privacy is being eroded, people are

being predictively profiled and socially sorted and inequalities are

widening. See Grounding Urban Data: Interview with Rob Kitchin,

New Geographies 7 (2015), 109-14.

57. Kiger, op cit.

58. Lohr, op cit.

59. Leber, op cit.

60. Ryan Boysen, Hudson Yards Smart