NJIT Faculty in the Spotlight at United Nations Urban Planning Conference
Experts supported by the United Nations wanted to know about the impact of digital technology on public spaces, and two NJIT professors had a seat at the table.
Gernot Riether co-organized the conference, The Power of Public Space in a Digital Age, at U.N. headquarters in New York last week. Riether is director of the architecture department in NJIT's Hillier College of Architecture and Design. HCAD's Georgeen Theodore was also a speaker there, along with several non-NJIT speakers including ambassador Michal Mlynár of Slovakia who is known to support sustainability causes.
The Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization and the American Institute of Architects New York chapter were conference co-producers, while the U.N. is observing its annual Urban October theme.
"One of the major challenges is the ability to reinvent the public space as a platform for sharing, representation, and interaction. With the help of digital tools we can transform public spaces into collaborative areas, sources of creativity and innovation, but after all immense opportunities," Mlynár said.
However it's nothing new for technology to create quick changes in a cityscape. Riether showed a slide of a busy Manhattan intersection from 1905, full of horses and carriages, with one hard-to-spot motor vehicle. He showed another from just six years later, full of cars with one hard-to-spot horse.
"Today information technology is the precondition for anything to function," Riether observed. "It is the backbone of anything in our personal and public life. Many physical objects that were expanded with information technology dramatically changed."
Riether suggested that the handful of massively influential technology companies controlling our access to communication need to be more regulated. "If we don't do anything, large corporations will define the public spaces for us," he said.
Theodore focused on specific events in New York. "An important question for urbanists is, how can the constructed urban environment contribute to such moments of plurality and playfulness in public life? This is the key question that drives our work," she said.
Theodore discussed a project in Queens where she and colleagues used methods such as games and an ice cream truck to expand citizen inclusion in the project planning stages. "The goal here is to build a constituency of kids who have a stake in the design and get them to feel ownership," she explained.
Presentations by other speakers included the Hudson Yards project; public demonstrations such as Tahir Square and current events in Hong Kong; the mechanisms and substance of digital technology; and the critical global importance of public spaces using digital technology.