[Originally posted to polis] Plans for Governors Island are gaining momentum! Located in the New York Harbor less than half a mile from Manhattan, the island offers breathtaking views of the city. For nearly 200 years it was a military base with limited public access. In 2003, the state purchased the island for a dollar with the stipulation that it not be used for permanent housing or casinos. It is now open on weekends from the end of May through mid-October.

Big ideas have been proposed, including a New Globe Theater by Foster + Partners and a gondola system by Santiago Calatrava. Perhaps even more impressive are the steps initiated by Leslie Koch of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation (GIPEC). There is now a ferry service free of charge. There are wooden bikes to borrow, hammocks along the shore, and a miniature golf course designed as part of an annual arts festival. The island is currently hosting Plot/09, an exhibition curated by Creative Time. GIPEC has sought ideas from the public and proposals from private developers. They’ve commissioned the design of a park with allées, wetlands, flower gardens, and scenic hills built from local debris covered with soil.

Funding for the island’s renewal is tenuous, so I’d like to ask how you might go about making ideas happen inexpensively. This takes a creativity that compliments the generation of ideas. It brings together the contributions of many, and can gain momentum through a succession of small victories. It is an essential part of shaping the world around us for a common good. If you’d like to get involved or follow the island’s development, more information can be found at govisland.com and govislandblog.com.

Credits: Photo of Governors Island from the gallery section of the GIPEC website.

[Originally posted to Where] The High Line is an elevated park that runs along a portion of Manhattan’s west side. It was once a railway, in use from 1934 until 1980. As vegetation took over, it became an informal and (not completely) inaccessible greenway above the streets. Neighborhood residents Joshua David and Robert Hammond started Friends of the High Line in 1999, hoping to save the structure from demolition and build support for the park idea. The city approved funding in 2004, and the lower section (from Gansevoort to 20th Street) opened in June.

The park was designed by James Corner Field Operations, Piet Oudolf, and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. It is made up of pathways that weave through the original train tracks, as well as diverse plants inspired by those that grew in the absence of maintenance. The city plans to continue the park along the Hudson Yards to the Javits Convention Center. According to Mayor Bloomberg, the first section has sparked considerable neighborhood development, with more than 30 new plans now in the works. The Whitney Museum is building an extension designed by Renzo Piano at the Gansevoort entrance.

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The Municipal Art Society of New York has sponsored an exhibition titled “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York” at the Urban Center in Manhattan. It focuses on Jacobs’s life, work, and enduring influence on civic activism. The accompanying website contains pictures, multimedia, and a great deal of information from the exhibition.

Exhibition website, includes an interactive map, videos, and podcasts:
http://www.futureofny.org/multimedia

Related article, a different perspective on the Jacobs legacy:
Outgrowing Jane Jacobs and Her New York by Nicolai Ouroussoff of the NY Times

The Manhattanville Project is an excellent article by Daphne Eviatar on the challenges faced by Columbia University in developing their new campus extension, designed by Renzo Piano, in Upper Manhattan.

Photo by Brenda Ann Kenneally

Quoted: In contrast to the gated, stone Beaux-Arts-Renaissance campus built more than a century ago in Morningside Heights, the new West Harlem campus would tell a more contemporary story: filling almost 18 acres parallel to the waterfront, it would open Columbia to the surrounding community. Some buildings could reach 25 stories, and the streets would remain publicly accessible…Yet the university has met remarkable resistance. One man’s urban improvement, it seems, is another man’s urban debacle.

The Information Exchange/Greenacre Reference Resource at the Municipal Art Society of New York looks like an outstanding collection of information on the urban environment, with a focus on New York City from the 1800s to today.

Photo appears on the Municipal Art Society site.

Quoted: Established in 1978 as The Information Exchange/Greenacre Reference Resource and affectionately dubbed TIE, the MAS reference library is a well-known and esteemed repository of materials on New York City’s built and natural environments. The heart of the library is an exceptional and ever-growing collection of several hundred thousand clippings culled from major city dailies as well as neighborhood weeklies, national periodicals, and local newsletters. Urban planning, historic preservation, buildings, public art, open spaces, real estate development, and zoning are among the general topics…

Jane Jacobs’s observations on city neighborhoods are so insightful, including her early advocacy of mixed-use communities where people can live, work, walk, and shop at viable local businesses. She is critical of modernist planning that placed low-income people in “projects” and uprooted urban neighborhoods in favor of highways and sterile civic spaces. Her ideas on the benefits of local economies, population density, and decreased reliance on automobiles are very well aligned with sustainable development and environmental conservation.

Synopsis from Powells Books: A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century. The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy. Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs’s monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

Photo credit: things magazine

Sustainable South Bronx was founded by Majora Carter of Hunts Point. SSB addresses issues of land-use, energy, transportation, water/waste policy, and education in order to advance the environmental and economic rebirth of the South Bronx and other urban areas around the world. The pictures above show “before and after” plans for the South Bronx Greenway, courtesy of SSB.