While Hudson Yards delivers on some advanced infrastructure, its initial promises of urban data-driven management have (so far) proved more aspirational than practical.
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[The] high-tech focus came at a particular moment: the Bloomberg mayoralty, an administration that branded New York as a luxury product and saw data as key to its success. Shannon Mattern, professor of media studies at The New School, wrote in a 2016 Places Journal article that Bloomberg’s pitch for Hudson Yards was like “selling a vision of the future city.” This shining neighborhood would be an example of a “unique experimental environment” for testing new tools for collecting and analyzing urban data.
In a city with famously limited real estate, the Hudson Yards property would be a rare ground-up prototype for tracking energy use, traffic patterns, pollution, noise, public safety, and public health. To develop their plan, Related and Oxford partnered with the Center for Urban Science & Progress (CUSP), an NYU institute born of the Bloomberg administration that focuses on such urban data technologies. By measuring data comprehensively across an entire neighborhood (conveniently owned by a single private entity), Related and CUSP believed they could break new ground in the emerging field of digital urban systems.
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As it turned out, these designs were more aspirational than practical. Jay Cross, president of Related Hudson Yards, confirms they’re on hold. “We concluded that big data is probably the last thing we’ll get to,” he says. “It’ll be years from now before we’re in that world.” The developers have been occupied with the not-so-insignificant task of building a neighborhood. Technology has changed rapidly in the decade since planning began, Cross notes, and running data feedback loops or grappling with privacy concerns isn’t something the real estate company is equipped to tackle. If Related and Oxford were to install sensors, the collection and analysis of their data would be outsourced to a third party, he says.
If Hudson Yards—with a seemingly infinite budget and a blank slate—couldn’t build it, who can?
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