Tags: urban planning

The American Planning Association has released its top ten list of great public spaces for 2009.  #1 is New Haven Green in New Haven, Connecticut, which, it seems, was selected as much for its aesthetics as for its political significance:

General George Washington spoke here during the American Revolution.

Wednesday the 28th, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) will host a discussion called The Infrastructure of Urban Ecologies.  Speakers will include William Morrish, Dean of the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons, and Kazys Varnelis, Director of Network Architecture Lab at GSAPP. 

Four giant coal gasometers, built as part of Vienna’s municipal gas works in the late 1800s, have been refashioned into a complex of residential, commercial and municipal facilities.  Formerly Europe’s largest gas plant, the gasometers now house 800 apartments, a student dormitory, a music hall, over 70 shops, restaurants, bars and cafes, a movie theater and the city’s municipal archive.

Toward the Sentient City, an exhibit organized by The Architectural League of New York, examines the implications for architecture of the proliferation of sensor, mobile and other new technologies.  According to curator Mark Shepard:

The exhibition examines the relationship between ubiquitous computing, architecture and the city in terms of the active role its citizens might play – or neglect to play – as both designers and inhabitants, in the unfolding techno-social situations of near-future urban environments.

A volunteer coordinator from Transportation Alternatives and Staten Island bike advocates will be leading a ride around the borough tomorrow morning, October 10th, ending at Lee’s Tavern in Dongan Hills.  The group will be “discussing the current challenges facing cyclist, pedestrian and mass transit users in Staten Island, and developing some advocacy plans for the future.” 

This Saturday and Sunday, October 10th and 11th, is Open House New York weekend.  OHNY’s 7th annual offerings include building tours and site visits of unique locations across the five boroughs.  Staten Island is represented by its array of historic buildings as well as two Parks-related listings: Freshkills Park and the Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC). 

The Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation will be leading free public tours of one of its first phases of park development this Sunday, October 4th, as part of the Atlantic Avenue Development Corporation’s Atlantic Antic street festival.  The Pier 6 section of the park, which connects with Atlantic Avenue, is scheduled to open in early 2010, will include a 1.6-acre playground, a dog run, a promenade, a restaurant and three sand volleyball courts.  

Two projects in San Francisco are turning underused and unsightly public spaces into green urban gardens and meeting places.  Pavement to Parks, a program run by the city’s Planning Department, converts wasted street space and rights-of-way into plazas and parks. 

Infrastructurist has posted its list of the ten greatest large urban parks.  It’s interesting to see them all viewed from above at roughly the same scale, and to see how they interact at that scale with the form of the urban fabric around them. 

Pruned’s three-part “Under Spaces” survey (Parts 1, 2 and 3) explores the problems cities face when planning under and around elevated infrastructure like rail lines and highways.  Recent projects have converted these typically neglected landscapes into urban public centers, mountain biking and skating parks and waterfront green spaces.

The aim of Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat’s recent ReBurbia design competition was to reimagine the American suburbs in the context of the current home foreclosure crisis and rising energy costs.  The competition’s cheeky winning entry posits the transformation of abandoned suburban mansions into wetlands and water purification systems for urban centers: the buildings become machines housing micro-ecosystems, and the front yards become micro-wetlands, providing habitat for wildlife. 

The Hudson River Park Trust has selected a winning design for its reimagining of Pier 57, near Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.  LOT-EK‘s design makes use of disused shipping containers in the construction of a mixed-use community facility on the 375,000 square-foot pier. 

Mary Miss makes site-specific artwork aimed at making abstractions like site history and environmental function tangible to the public.  Her work, from the 1960s through the present, has engaged issues and practices of landscape, architecture, infrastructure and ecology.  She has participated in a number of park design projects, including proposals for New York City’s Riverside Park South and Orange County California’s Great Park.  

Transportation Alternatives is requesting submissions for POP.Park, a competition to design a pop-up park for Park(ing) Day in New York City. Since its inception in 2005 by art and design collective Rebar, Park(ing) Day has celebrated pedestrians by transforming parking spaces all over the city into temporary parks.

The WRT/Marpillero Pollak-designed infrastructure and public space project that we wrote about in June has broken ground in Long Island City, Queens.

There are exciting green roof projects emerging all over New York City these days: the experimental setups at the Parks Five Borough facility that we visited last month; The US Postal Service’s brand new 2.4-acre installation of native, drought-resistant plants–reportedly the largest green roof in the country–atop their Manhattan mail processing facility; the green roof farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which has been hosting volunteers and giving lectures since opening this spring.  

It’s increasingly rare to come across new, untouched land for park development in cities. In the May issue of Landscape Architecture, Peter Harnik explains how “squeezing innovative green spaces into crowded cities requires looking for land in unexpected places.”  He outlines the potential of a variety of urban spaces to function as parkland: cemeteries, school yards, rooftops, community gardens, reservoir lands, stormwater channels, closed streets and reclaimed parking areas.  

The Obama Administration is reportedly considering a program called “Shrink to Survive,” which would selectively bulldoze blocks of abandoned real estate in 50 economically depressed US cities and replace them with parks, forest and meadows. The plan is based on a downsizing scheme in Flint, Michigan–once the home of General Motors–where citizens are already advocating the use of vacant lots as community gardens. 

[vimeo vimeo.com/4951004]

Last week, the Municipal Arts Society (MAS) hosted a panel called Urban Parks in the Twenty-First Century: Creating a New Model.  Park designers, administrators and other experts discussed the some of New York City’s most innovative new park projects: Concrete Plant Park  in the South Bronx, Riverside South on the Upper West Side, and, of course, Freshkills Park.  

Harvard’s Graduate School of Design hosted a conference in March called Ecological Urbanism: Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future.  Podcasts of talks included in the conference are available for streaming.  Sessions focused on sustainable urbanism, what that means or might look like, and how on earth might we accomplish such a daunting task.