OWS Cartography

Six high quality click-to-enlarge maps showing the services provided at Zuccotti Park during its #occupation. The self-regulated division of the camp into an uptown and a downtown (between Brooklyn college hipsters and their middle class library and the ghetto and their crack smoking) is in these maps if you know where to look. This process of social stratification has been called psychographic but that is nonsense; it's just good old fashioned human strife and animosity. The best source on emergent camp urbanism is 'Occupying Wall Street'.

The Ikea of riot control

Open Street Map does a better job than Google maps.

The Situationists critique of urbanism was inspired by the redesign of their city. Paris recreated by city planning to make it easier for the police to control it; this in the light of France's long history of revolutions and uprising. San Francisco Digger Emmett Grogan gives an riot-control-through-architecture example for New York: Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side of New York. This park has a long history of political dissent and rioting (even OWS was planned here) and its architecture has been adapted to meet any infringes protesters there might want to make on public order.

Tompkins Square Park had been the setting of many riots earlier in the city, and after they took place, several city departments and agencies got together and redesigned the park, stringing it with so much cast-iron fencing that gave the place the look of of a labyrinth and made it virtually impossible for any crowd to move anywhere en masse. The four-foot-high iron railings were placed randomly throughout the park, successfully dividing it up into small sections, and at the same time, separating into easy-to-handle groups any large mob that might gather. Also, in case of trouble, there were handball and basketball courts in the north-east section of the park enclosed and encircled by thirty-foot-high chainlike fences - that could quickly be converted into a makeshift jail or temporarily holding facility for prisoners apprehended during a mass arrest. 

I would love to know more about this...

Foraging in Central Park [guide included]

The latest episode in the debate surrounding the sustainability of urban foraging is that NYC will put a total ban on foraging in Central Park to put an end to the overgrazing of Manhattan's most iconic green space. Rebecca Lerner writes about it here. This reminded me of the four-page edible plant guide for Central Park compiled by Norman Collin and Charles Kennedy and included in Marie Winn's 'Red Tails in Love' (earlier). Click to Enlarge.

Time Landscape [fence=frame]

Just because Jane Jacobsen supported it does not mean it is a good idea. 

"Time Landscape" (1978) is a prominently located land art piece by Alan Sonfist recreating a pre-Columbian Manhattan forest. Or as Michael Pollen describes it:

A Pedestrian standing at the corner of Houston Street and La Guardia Place in Manhattan might think that the wilderness had reclaimed a tiny corner of the city’s grid here. Ten years ago, an environmental artist persuaded the city to allow him to create on this site a “Time Landscape” showing New Yorkers what Manhattan looked like before the white man arrived. On a small hummock he planted oak, hickory, maples, junipers, and sassafras, and they’ve grown up to form a nearly impenetrable tangle, which is protected from New Yorkers by a steel fence now thickly embroidered with vines. It’s exactly the sort of “garden” of which Emerson and Thoreau would have approved—for the very reason that it’s not a garden. 

A project like the Time Landscape is not so much of interest for itself but for what people make of it over time. A garden, even an anti-garden, is just a place to be in, a forest, even a cryptoforest, is a state of mind, a psychological condition that attracts shrinks and social health workers and the rest of the Cuckoo Club.

The Village Voice website has a 2007 article on a volunteer mass clean-up that sought to eradicate invasive (non-native) species as well as the creation of sight-lines to prevent people from hiding in the bushes.

"Although a chain-link fence encloses the area and entrance is by key, there is a hole in the fence and it is possible to climb over the waist-high barrier." 

The fence is not to frame the art but to keep art lovers outside of it.

Nonnative plants and weeds have spread to the garden, and the sight of morning glories clinging to the fence troubled many.


“The concept was to have native species,” said Tobi Bergman, chairperson of the C.B. 2 Parks Committee, in a phone interview before the cleanup. “But there is a reason we call them invasive species: They have no natural enemies.”


Sonfist dismissed these criticisms.


“This is an open lab, not an enclosed landscape,” he said. “The intention was never to keep out all nonnative species, but rather to see how they come into the space with time.”

The Time Landscape is a hegemonic plant community that refuses to interact, like a silent Indian who is the last of his tribe and who refuses to engage with his own feelings or those of outsiders and instead just waits and waits and waits.

In terms of PR the fence is the problem: in contrast with the Ramble it doesn't allow visitors who in turn cannot become participants as they create a bond with the landscape.

As a challenge to the peasant obsession with productivity, order and plow-schedules the problem with Time Landscape is that the fence is not high enough. It functions as a screen on which urban sub-conscious fears and phobias are projected: 500 year after Robin Hood the outlaws are still hiding in the forest.

Google streetview on Time Landscape.

The forest in the city [The Ramble]

Recently I purchased Marie Winn's 'Red Tails in Love' (1999), subtitled 'A wildlife drama in Central Park'. I didn't think it would be much but for one Euro you can take a guess and it turned out to be money well spent. The title of the book refers to two hawks who raised their hawk children on a Manhattan balcony; yes this is a bird watchers opera. Its entertainment value is not so much because of the birds but because of the way Winn describes the birdwatchers in Central Park as an example of a successful ad-hoc community that is open, enduring and, in a modest way, able to get things done. The book closes with useful lists of the birds (190 species), butterflies (53), dragonflies (50) and edible plants (200) that can be found in Central Park on a yearly basis.


The main scene for the Central Park birdwatching community is The Ramble, which is presented in Winn's book as a, well, cryptoforest.Wikipedia describes it as a ill maintained woodland park that was popularly believed to be in the process of becoming a proper forest, a belief that the wikipedia author describes as misguided and having led to impoverishment.


The city ecologist of Rotterdam recently complained on Twitter that often when he was chasing some rare nightly animal he would end up in places where he would be invited to illicit gay sex. These were not the alpha males he was looking for. The Ramble has its own night life like that too to make up for the starry eyed birdwatchers and foragers. Simplesteps offers a slideshow of what edibles are to be found in Central Park and here is an interview with Steve Brill who has been doing forage walks in the park for at least twenty years.


Winn's book taught me something else about a psychogeographically themed Dutch picture book called 'Stimmy or the jungle in the city' by Daan Remmerts de Vries en Philip Hopman. Stimmy is a city boy who dreams of going wild and one day after school he decides to leave the beaten track in the hope of ending up in the jungle. The setting is obviously New York and the the jungle must therefore be the Ramble.