Department of City Planning

Well over a hundred people filled the auditorium of the Saint Thomas Aquinas Church last week for a forum on the future of Brooklyn's Fourth Avenue put on by the Park Slope Civic Council. The stretch of Fourth Avenue on the western edge of Park Slope saw a wave of residential construction after a 2003 rezoning, but walking there still feels akin to navigating the shoulder of a highway. The new buildings and promises of a grand boulevard have raised expectations for the street, however, and the Brooklyn Paper reports that the forum conveyed a clear public desire for traffic calming and additional pedestrian space.

In the last eight years, Amanda Burden's Department of City Planning has rezoned 20 percent of New York along relatively transit-oriented lines, while simultaneously promoting quasi-suburban projects at prominent sites and maintaining parking minimums that erode the pedestrian environment. In other words, the planning department is promoting growth in the right places, but enabling the wrong kind of development. So in the next four years, will New York's planners adopt more sustainable practices or continue the status quo?

This is the second installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets. Read the first part here.

This is the first installment in a three-part series on the reshaping of New York City and its consequences for sustainability and livable streets.

City officials, architects, planners, and public health advocates crammed into the Center for Architecture last night for the unveiling of New York City's Active Design Guidelines.

Walking through parts of New York can feel like walking through a tunnel. The city's ubiquitous sidewalk sheds -- typically blue scaffolding holding up green plywood to protect pedestrians from construction overhead -- corral people into cramped, dark spaces wherever development or building repairs are underway. There are about 6,000 of these sheds throughout the city.

New York may be the most transit-rich city in the nation, but that doesn't mean big changes to the city's planning policies aren't necessary. That's the message Jeff Speck, a leader of the New Urbanist movement and co-author of the newly released Smart Growth Manual, delivered yesterday to the City Planning Commission. 

The Department of City Planning proposed new rules last week that should keep sidewalks safer and reduce conflicts between pedestrians and cars. The zoning regs, if approved, would also cut down on the proliferation of "parking pads" -- off-street spaces paved over front yards -- in some parts of the city. Overall, the amendment includes some much-needed measures to keep the pedestrian environment from deteriorating. But not all the news is good: The amendment also creates a new rule, reinforcing parking requirements for residential buildings.

We continue our series on the next four years of New York City transportation and planning policy with today's essay by Ron Shiffman. Co-founder of the Pratt Center for Community Development and a professor at the Pratt Institute's Graduate Center for Planning, Shiffman served on the City Planning Commission from 1990 to 1996. Read previous installments in this series here, here, and here.