URBANEER

And here in Urbanier is anybody really, whether you have experience or not, that wants to enact some level of change in cities. And it's a combination of two really fantastic people. It's Jane Jacobs, who is the power of the pen, the community activist, the person that wrote Death and Life in the Great American City, who's all about kind of creating a grassroots level change in neighborhoods and stopping big projects that destroy wonderful, glorious, historic neighborhoods. And it's kind of a combination of her alongside her nemesis, which was Robert Moses, who is I guess is known as to be a total jerk and an actual racist, but he would get massive projects done. So he had the top-down power, as a power broker actually, to get major highways finished, bridges, tunnels, housing projects, swimming pools, parks, everything kind of finished. But he really didn't care about the community. We actually had this thought that the two of them were secretly lovers while they were arguing in public, and a condom broke or something, and they actually produced a love child, which would be Frederick Law Olmsted. I know it's not accurate historically, but Olmsted combines both of their powers. He was someone that invented the New York City Parks Department, invented landscape architecture. He had a keen understanding of neighborhood, but he also wanted to bring fabulous productive green spaces to cities and really combine both worlds really well. So he became a kind of a founder for kind of the work that we're doing. So following in the footsteps of Jane Jacobs, who said, cities can offer something to everybody only because and only when they're created by everybody. So we decided in order to create these urban years, we had to start our own school, where we created a curricul And we call that school One Lab, New York School for Design and Science. We've been running it since 2009. And here'some of the workshop. Here Dr. Oliver Medvedek is teaching our students the principle of synthetic biology. We are learning parametric design actually using physical objects and vacu And we'll show you more about this project. And finally, we are working with Living Matter here. Our students guided by landscape architect Walter Meyer, they are shaping this wall, plething living trees together. And it's going to grow into a structural wall that you can create a whole building. We are also experimenting with filtering water using the principles of phytoremediation, using plants to create these units that can be installed on the roofs all over cities. We can collect rain water and clean it using the root systems of this grass to convert it into drinking water. And we are taking this idea to a larger scale. We moved our studio last year to the Brooklyn Navy Air. These are 300 acres of industrial park right on East River where we are taking this old ship building factory and creating New Lab. This is a space for innovators where they can work together, combining students from different schools, Col