Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Urban Design

GAPCo Wins Design Trust Fellowship

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Sculpture on the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, Grand Army Plaza On the heels of Tuesday’s press conference, here is another exciting development at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza. Robert Witherwax, an organizer of the Grand Army Plaza Coalition, sends along the following news: As you may know, GAPCo applied for a fellowship from the Design […]

A Ride Down NYC’s “Street of the Future”

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For years, Livable Streets advocates have pleaded with New York City’s Department of Transportation to just try new things. Do street design experiments using temporary materials. Give new ideas a shot. If an experiment doesn’t work, take it down, redesign it, improve it or, heck, just restore it to how it used to be. What […]

DOT Minds the GAP

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With city workers pouring concrete in the background (and StreetFilms’ cameras rolling), New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan announced pedestrian and cyclist improvements for Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza yesterday. The plan calls for 11,000 square feet of new, landscaped pedestrian islands, a separated bike path, new crosswalks and pedestrian signals. The redesign […]

Meat Market Plaza is Open for Business

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The interim redesign of Ninth Avenue and 14th Street is done. Tables, chairs, planters and some of those giant granite blocks from DOT’s Bridges Division have been set out as multipurpose bollard-bench-tables atop a gravelly, earth-tone pavement surface.  What was very recently one of the longest and most hectic pedestrian crossings in Manhattan, and no […]

Making the Case for Compact Development

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From the people at Smart Growth America comes word of a new book, Growing Cooler: The Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change, just out from the Urban Land Institute. In the book, researchers argue that more compact development (such as Atlantic Station, a mixed-use complex in Atlanta built on reclaimed industrial land, shown at […]