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Curated by:
Lisa Drogin | a University of Michigan Urban and Regional Planning Graduate Student studying Physical Planning, Urban Design, and Neighborhood Development. //
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via GOOD | New ‘Slow Zones’ Make NYC Streets Safer and Greener
“This week, New York City opened its first neighborhood slow zone, a six-block-square area of the Bronx where the speed limit is now 20 mph, compared to 30 in the rest of the city….The neighborhood is mostly residential, with a high concentration of schools and a history of injuries and fatalities. The city’s transportation commission, Janette Sadik-Khan, spoke at the opening ceremony for slow zone about how it will make the streets safer. But it will also make them greener: slower speed limits make roads more accessible to anyone not in a car….
The real triumph of slow zones is that they acknowledge that streets don’t need to be reserved for cars. The more they’re used for other forms for transportation, the more people will feel safe trading in one form of wheels for another….Green transportation advocates support measures like traffic calming and slow zones because they open up the streets and indirectly promote the use of alternative forms of transportation.”

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theoriginalchingy:

An urban legacy in need of renewal by Anthony Flint - “Fifty years ago this month, Random House published “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.’’ The author was Jane Jacobs, a housewife from Scranton who had no formal training in urban planning, but had managed to get a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and was encouraged to write a book that would change the world. And that it did. The book took on city governments, planners, the business establishment, modernist architecture, and the policy of urban renewal, charging that all were misguided, ravaging our cities with ill-conceived plans that sucked the life out of communities, while depriving residents of any say in their future…”
via The Boston Globe.

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via GOOD | New York Turns the Spotlight on North Brooklyn’s Creative Communities
“Love them or hate them, it’s undeniable that the North Brooklyn neighborhoods Williamsburg and Greenpoint have served as a laboratory of creativity for longer than a decade. Urban activists in the trendy enclaves have created models for more collaborative, locally focused economies, mapping out a blueprint for a sustainable approach to urban life. Amplify Brooklyn, an exhibit and event series officially opening tonight, will explore the work and ideas generated in those neighborhoods. Workshops will showcase organizations like Green Map System, which uses mapping to promote sustainable community development, and ioby, a social media and fundraising site for activists that’s debuting a new toolkit for neighborhood problems…
The exhibit is part of a two-year initiative called Amplifying Creative Communities, which investigated Manhattan’ Lower East Side last year before shifting the focus across the East River for this year’s Amplify Brooklyn. Graduate students and faculty affiliated with Parsons’ Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Lab interviewed leaders from 30 different community organizations about socially innovative solutions to urban problems, from community gardening to alternative transportation….”

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via New York Times | A Search for Subsidized Housing, Simplified
“A NEW interactive database developed by New York University lets renters and buyers track nearly all the privately held subsidized housing in New York City.

The need to take stock of affordable apartments, which were quickly disappearing in the last decade as market-rate real estate boomed, led city officials to select the university’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy to compile the database, called the Subsidized Housing Information Project …
Of the 235,000 affordable rental units in the database, about 171,000 continue to receive some sort of government subsidy and have a rent or income restriction associated with them, she said. The new database will enable city officials and affordable-housing advocates to see which housing subsidies are about to expire, so they can plan ahead and focus on housing that can be saved …

The center’s Institute for Affordable Housing Policy has already used the database to identify 227 properties throughout the city that are at risk of expiring out of affordability programs by the end of 2015.”

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citymaus:

nytimes. click to view large.
Taming the mean streets: A talk with NYC transportation chief Janette Sadik-Khan.grist.org, 21.12.10.

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black-wolves:

New York Skyline (by welshio)

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