Planning and Urban Design

While the extended crisis of the pandemic has upended long-standing practices and embedded new relationships between people and their environments, design and planning solutions are well positioned to guide post-COVID-19 recovery in New York City.

Even with the prospect of a return to “normal,” the new normal will not be the same normal.

Following 9/11, a primary ‘lesson learned’ from the leadership of the planning and design community with New York New Visions was the effectiveness of that community to organize itself in imagining the immediate future and inspiring transformational change.

Twenty years later, the allied disciplines are again poised to deploy our skills as stewards in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis by defining and evaluating built environment issues, examining assumptions and implications, proposing pathways and structuring alternative futures.

NYC Perspective

Friday, 4/23, 12:30-2pm

This moment presents widespread opportunity to advance equitable and sustainable urban strategies for healthy, transformational and economically viable futures. Convening local civic leaders, professionals, and practitioners to share their perspective in a fast-paced presentations that point to the impact of the pandemic on NYC’s urban fabric, this program initiated the Post-COVID Cities public dialog towards defining principles and strategies for the future.

Watch the replay >

Reinventing World Cities

Thursday, 6/10, 12-2pm

Reinventing Global Cities is the second of a series of three high-profile events focusing on New York City’s future. The NYC audience will mainly comprise planning and urban design professionals, students and stakeholders. In this summit, participants will learn how other global cities currently emerging from the pandemic are positioning themselves to reach aspirational social goals while implementing 21st century zero carbon policies.

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Framework for Opportunity

Wednesday, 9/8, 12-2pm

In September, the third event of the series will present interactive discussion and recommendations for potential strategies that build on the NYC Perspective as informed by approaches presented during Reinventing Global Cities.

These strategies, resulting from three months of analysis by Working Groups representing expertise in Transportation (Streets and Mobility), Land Use (Housing, Zoning, and Economics), and Sustainability (Resilience, Climate, Environmental Justice, and Public Health), will identify scenarios for future action based on the economic, social and political implications of the City’s evolving recovery.

The program will conclude with a look back at advocacy lessons learned from the model of New York New Visions, 20 years after its establishment as a response to the 9/11 crisis. One major success of that venture was its facilitation of a vehicle for the design and planning community to speak with one voice in initiating and advocating for policies and programs.

Further Reading:

Post-COVID Cities: NYC Perspective
Post-COVID Cities: Reinventing Global Cities
Post-COVID Cities: Framework for Opportunity

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Post-COVID Cities intends to set in motion a similar action program among allied design and planning institutions advocating for a transformational approach to post-COVID recovery through invests in the built environment.

Organized by the AIANY Planning and Urban Design Committee and the AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

The AIANY Planning and Urban Design Committee is seeking applications to fill vacant co-chair seat by the end of the year.

The AIA New York Planning & Urban Design Committee is a platform for practitioners and communities to test innovative strategies and advocate for livable neighborhoods.

Interested AIA members can apply by sending a copy of their CV and a 250-word cover letter outlining their interest in the committee, why they feel suited to lead it, and in what direction they hope to take it, to Joseph Corbin, jcorbin@aiany.org. Please specify which committee you are applying to in the subject line. The deadline to apply is Friday, December 18.

The New York City Department of City Planning is in the process of writing the next Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, which will lay out the guidelines for the future of New York’s 520 miles of waterfront. The Plan is due to be published in 2020, and the city has appointed a diverse group of Waterfront Management Advisory Board members to advise and provide guidance as the plan is developed.

An AIANY Cross-Committee working group between Planning and Urban Design, Committee on the Environment, Design for Risk and Reconstruction, and Transportation and Infrastructure has developed The Waterfront Initiative to bridge the gap between architects and the city during the process of writing the Waterfront Plan. Over the course of the next year and a half, a series of programming oriented around the waterfront will engage AIANY members and solicit input towards the formulation of the plan. The Waterfront Initiative will be critical to providing a platform for architects and design experts in New York City to express their points of view and experience from work on the city’s waterfront.

An AIANY cross-committee working group between Planning and Urban Design and Committee on the Environment (COTE) has developed an initiative called Net-Zero Neighborhoods. Supported by a Committee Excellence Grant, the effort aims to exemplify standing committee objectives through establishing a best-practice visionary model for encouraging the achievement of carbon-neutral development in New York City by 2050. The initiative co-locates cross-disciplinary knowledge as it tests and supports a progressive sustainable development agenda. Findings will be shared publicly upon conclusion.

Read more here: AIANY Net-Zero Neighborhoods – Summary_April’19

PROJECT NY begins with a recognition of the City as the body of work of many authors—authors that, by and large, do not collaborate with each other directly.

New York City has always been a city of constant change, responsive to the demands of pulsating economic pressures. In contrast to ad hoc measures of reactive planning, PROJECT NY sees the City as an indivisible and evolving organism, where the interrelationships of infrastructure, property development, public process, and design must be coordinated to ensure a healthy future for urban life and the preservation of the public realm. If we consider a set of projects planned for New York, even the simple delineation of public versus private creates a potential obstacle for coordination.

In a sense, the projects in these distinct “silos” are virtually opaque to each other if no clear conduit is created specifically for communication. Further complicating multi-lateral planning, there are dozens of smaller agency silos within the public silo (silos within silos), and thousands of development companies and individual entrepreneurs within the private silo. Separated from each other, a myriad of projects are conceptualized, designed, and implemented with limited opportunity for interaction and integration with others—until, of course, they are built.

The spirit of the 2016 reboot of the Planning & Urban Design Committee and Jeffrey Raven’s “Salon” format was to begin to counter this myopia. PROJECT NY is the central initiative of the refashioned committee and was first conceived as a knowledge-sharing and advocacy platform to initiate a “meta-awareness” between individual projects in the City. As the venture developed from position paper to prototype, it became self-evident that the most appropriate technological foundation for the project was a mapping platform, where both urban design projects along with the data foundations and research that support said projects could be aggregated and represented beyond silos.

The PROJECT NY Leadership Team is actively pursuing start-up funding and development partners. Once secured, they will embark upon building the first edition of PROJECT NY platform.

PROJECT NY Fall 2018 Summary