About Broadway: 1000 Steps

BROADWAY: 1000 Steps is an initiative to establish Broadway as the new “green corridor” of New York City where current and planned sustainability initiatives, such as those outlined in the City’s PlaNYC, will be made tangible to its citizens. Twenty “hubs” dispersed along the length of Broadway will serve as sites for collaboration between Mary Miss / City as Living Laboratory (MM/CaLL), artists, research scientists and other experts, municipal policy makers, academic partners, and local community groups. Installations, which are small in scale but aggregate to reveal the vast network of systems vital to a sustainable city, are designed to make sustainability tangible to citizens at street level and catalyze future projects by artists and environmental designers along this corridor. The sense of incremental transformation—of many individual instances working together to create a powerful cumulative effect—is the overarching idea for the project and the basis of its title: “1000 Steps”. The central message to be communicated – generated out of a year-long collaboration with a prestigious scientific and community advisory board – is that nature is everywhere and in action at all times, that the city is an urban ecosystem, that an innumerable number of small decisions over time have shaped the environment to be the one we inhabit today, and that our decisions (behavioral choices) impact the future of all of nature.

M/CaLL’s BROADWAY: 1000 Steps continues to gain project momentum, receiving a 2011 been awarded a Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF) [Award# DRL-1115217] through the Institute for Learning Innovation and completed in partnership with the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities and New Knowledge Organization. The funding supported exploratory work in its early stages on untested, but potentially transformative, research ideas or approaches. This award allowed for the September 2011 installation of a “test hub” at 137th Street and Broadway, which coincided with Urban Design Week, and is supporting ongoing research led by psychologist Dr. John Fraser of NewKnowledge.org, regarding how art installations can influence the discourses surrounding science and engineering decisions that inform city design. Going forward, the results of this NSF funded experiment is informing tactics for delivering content in compelling ways; clarifying ergonomic and other human dimensions issues for reaching patrons in public spaces; and are helping to shape the anticipated schedule for the project’s next chapter.

The test Hub at 137th Street and parallel efforts have attracted the participation of eight regional Colleges and Universities, including the Architectural College of Boston, the City College of New York (CCNY), Marymount Manhattan College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Parsons New School of Design, Pennsylvania State University, Pratt Institute, and the University of Virginia. Undergraduate and graduate students from these schools are conducting research that will inform hub content, mapping each of the hubs, collecting photos and relevant images, and proposing their own solutions to the MM/CaLL challenge. Research, data and visual materials collected by the students can be found at http://www.mmcallpartnership.org/. Student efforts will be completed by spring of 2012, and content development, design, and testing will be advanced during the summer and fall 2012. The goal of installing a majority of the hubs has been set to take place in spring/summer 2013, and it is expected that hubs will be in place for approximately one year.

Throughout the remainder of FY2012 and all of FY2013, MM/CaLL will work with its collaborators, partners, and advisors to identify local issues at each hub, research the full breadth of topics related to environment and urban change in that area, and prepare to render the project on-site at the selected hubs in spring/summer 2013. Broadway: 1000 Steps will use the prototype Tool Kit, designed by Mary Miss, as a basis for the installations at each hub. The Kit, which evolved from experiments at Duane Park and 137th Street includes: 1) Green vertical poles; 2) Convex mirrors with reflected images and/or text; 3) Visual quantifications; 4) Walkable maps; 5) Cellphone audio guide, and; 6) Evocative, short textual explanations. These core installations will be activated and amplified by a smartphone application that allows users to visualize contemporary ecosystem flows and compare them with pre-urbanization ecosystems, public programs (lectures, panels, informal discussions, pod-casts, etc.), student docent tours, and specially commissioned projects by diverse artists and designers. This project is leveraging an exceptional partnership of scientists, artists, visual thinkers, and community representatives and will harness the distinctive capacity of art to demonstrate that the city is a unique learning environment and the most effective site to foster actionable change.