Development
Streetsblog Basics
The Power of Moses: Please Wield Responsibly
An op-ed piece by Eleanor Randolph in today's New York Times finds yet another lesson in the current re-examination of Robert Moses's legacy. Randolph looks at the enormously powerful entities, usually known as authorities, that Moses left behind: "public-private hybrid[s] that can collect fees, take on debt and build things with little government interference."
February 14, 2007
Sustainable Transportation for NYC: How to Make it Happen
Today on Gotham Gazette, Bruce Schaller outlines how transportation policy could fit in to Mayor Bloomberg's sustainability initiative for 2030. The piece merits a full read, but Schaller frames his argument in terms of three big ideas:
February 13, 2007
The Seed of a Revolution in Red Hook
How can we get drivers to respect the communities they are driving though? How can we make traffic slow down if we can't change the design of the street or the timing of the lights? How can a community reclaim its neighborhood streets?
February 12, 2007
Congestion Tops Citizens’ PlaNYC 2030 Concerns
The second phase of Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC 2030 outreach campaign, which has been soliciting feedback from the public through meetings with community leaders and on PlaNYC's website, has been completed, and the word is in: People in New York want to do something about traffic congestion.
February 9, 2007
Robert Moses’s Fundamental Misunderstanding
In the latest issue of the Regional Plan Association's Spotlight on the Region newsletter, editor Alex Marshall has an outstanding essay responding to the recent burst of Robert Moses revisionism. An excerpt:
February 9, 2007
New York New Visions Tackles “Sustainable” New York Future
After Mayor Bloomberg's December announcement of his PlaNYC
initiative to prepare for a sustainable New York of 9 million people by 2030, New York New Visions, the group of architects and planners originally organized around Ground Zero rebuilding, announced it was expanding its scope to tackle the new challenge. Last night, in a stark white room in the basement of the American Institute of Architects building in Greenwich Village, a collection of almost equally stark white faces began reimagining the New York of the future.
February 6, 2007
The Known Unknowns of New York City’s Streets
Unlike New York, Copenhagen, Denmark's planners measure city streets for much more than "Vehicular Level of Service." This map, for example, quantifies stationary activities on a summer weekday in the city center. From Public Spaces Public Life by Lars Gemzoe and Jan Gehl, 1996.
January 23, 2007
Flushed Away
Kevin Walsh at Forgotten NY has a new photo essay on his neighborhood, Flushing, Queens. It's not the typical Forgotten NY catalogue of historical obsurities. Rather, in this post, Walsh illustrates what he sees as the destruction of one of New York City's great old neighborhood by developers run amok. Even if you see new development and increasing urban density as a good and necessary thing, as many urbanists and environmentalists do, these Flushing photos make you wonder if this is really the only way that it can be done.
January 16, 2007
PLANYC 2030 Community Leader Meetings
Mayor Bloomberg's Office of Long-Term Planning & Sustainability is running a series of meetings with community groups. Though the meeting times are posted publicly on the PLANYC 2030 web site, no locations are listed and word has it these borough-wide "Community Leader" meetings are going to be pretty strictly invitation-only.
January 16, 2007
Making Hell’s Kitchen Less Hellish
Monday night was the first meeting of the Ninth Avenue Renaissance project. About 130 neighborhood stakeholders filled the gym at the Holy Cross School in Midtown to begin a process to transform Ninth Avenue from a dysfunctional, traffic-choked, polluted highway into, what organizer Christine Berthet says should be "a neighborhood Main Street" for Hell's Kitchen and Clinton.
January 10, 2007