Design approaches for a better city

A couple of weeks ago the Museum of Arts and Design hosted a symposium  entitled “Designer City: How Innovative Solutions Transform Urban Life.”

Most of the panelists were academics or government agency heads, including David Burney, the former head of the city’s Department of Design and Construction, now an associate professor at Pratt Institute, Christine Gaspar, the executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Jason Shupbach, the director of design for the National Endowment for the Arts, and Wendy Brawer, the founder and director of the Green Map System.

Each has made significant contributions to improving or explaining our built environment, but for any audience member from an outer borough there appeared to be a disconnect between the city they saw — largely composed of Manhattan and inner Brooklyn — and the rest of us. 

Moderator Julie Laskey, a New York Times deputy editor for the Home Section, asked the panelists what they found most encouraging or most dispiriting about the city we live in. 

Several of them praised former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s battle with traffic and initiation of biking as a way of getting around the city, but not one pointed out that his traffic commissioner, Janette Sadik Kahn, ran roughshod over local communities in instituting her anti-car campaign and the controversial Citi Bike program.

Perhaps they had missed the headlines in the daily newspapers about Citi Bike’s woes — poor maintenance, failure to replenish bikes at popular destinations and a lack of sufficient operating capital — while countless neighborhoods, including Riverdale and Kingsbridge, have been left out of the mix.

There was an interesting dichotomy between panelists like Mr. Shupbach, who travels the country dispensing grants for urban design projects and expressed great optimism about big plans and Wendy Brawer, who has spent her career giving environmentalists the tools to shape their own communities. 

She’s the innovator of Green Maps, whose original depiction of New York’s green living resources sparked a movement that has spread to more than 65 countries.

Essentially, her maps pinpoint all sorts of useful things, from community gardens and composting sites to energy-efficient buildings, and her process is the opposite of the Bloomberg approach. It is open and inclusive.

Just imagine if the government’s Riverdale Greenway planners had used Ms. Brawer’s approach to planning rather than their grandiose scheme.

A lively discussion among panelists and audience members took on the problem of gentrification. Most often, we think of gentrification as a housing issue, but Ms. Brawer zeroed in on the other side of the coin — commercial gentrification. She was applauded for suggesting that the city take on commercial rent control to protect Ma and Pa stores that give our neighborhoods their character. 

Within months, Kingsbridge shopping will be transformed with the arrival of two new malls, almost exclusively leased to national chain stores.

We’re happy to have the jobs and the retail choices these malls promise, but shouldn’t we be concerned about local retailers who have catered to our needs  and given our community its character?

An audience member referred the panel to an exercise that is relatively new among city council members, one that Andrew Cohen has said he favors. 

Community forums offer direction to council members about how they’d like to see their discretionary budgets disbursed. 

When they turned their attention back to the appearance of the built environment, the panelists noted that the city can actually have a great impact on what we see, not just with zoning initiatives, but by fostering good design in the public sphere. 

Mr. Shupbach praised the appearance of street furniture such as bus shelters or newsstands, but pointed out that one can have too much of a good thing when all of the bus shelters and newsstands adhere to the same design.

Going forward, the panelists agreed, meant dealing with the challenges of a city whose very success in attracting “millenials who want a walkable city” puts pressure on builders and planners to deliver.

Ms. Gaspar, an expert in bringing designers and residents together to solve problems put it succinctly. “Designers and community activists don’t coexist in the wild. We have to provide tools so people can advocate for their own views.” she said.