urban planning

 

Divided and conquered: Museum of the City of New York reveals how lines on paper created the Manhattan we inhabit

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At the exhibit’s center is one of the three original copies of the nearly nine-foot-long map of the Commissioners’ Plan, its size and detail a measure of the ambition it represented. Generations of canny politicians, imperious real-estate developers, and visionary architects have tried to implement changes or carve out exceptions to its rule, yet the Manhattan this map depicts is recognizable to us today: a somewhat claustrophobic, undifferentiated mass of right angles that cedes almost nothing to topography or the human need for variety.

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By Brian Sholis

December 19, 2011 8:33 am

 

PlaNYC guru plays West Village; gig sold out

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Behind Michael Bloomberg’s long-term plan for he city is a Danish professor and urban planner named Jan Gehl, who has been for several years helping to quietly, if not slowly, reshape New York. More

By Katharine Jose

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September 17, 2010 7:06 am

 

A plan to spare the village from N.Y.U.'s next monster-dorm

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Seven people testified at the City Planning Commission’s public hearing on a proposed rezoning of an area being called the “Third Avenue Corridor,” and not one of them was against it. All but one were representing someone else, which may have been because this particular issue was taken up two-and-a-half hours into the session, after an incredibly passionate debate about a proposed halfway house somewhere in Brooklyn, or because some of the bosses felt the issue was not controversial enough to require them to make an appearance. More

By Katharine Jose

August 25, 2010 6:58 pm

 

To fight Vornado behemoth, Empire State owners deploy sentiment

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At a City Council hearing yesterday on a proposal for the site of the Hotel Pennsylvania, David Greenbaum, president of the New York office of Vornado Realty Trust, argued that New York City, “like great cities around the world," has “a skyline that changes." Peter Malkin, the chairman of Malkin Securities, the company that owns the Empire State Building, said in his testimony, "The city's skyline has only seen a handful of changes in 80 years since the Empire State Building was constructed." More

By Katharine Jose

August 24, 2010 7:04 am

 

On missing a chance to shape New York

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The problem—cited by speaker after speaker at the event, which took place at the Michael Schimmel Center For The Arts at Pace University—is the that upcoming reform of the city’s charter by a commission appointed by Michael Bloomberg in March, will not to address land-use issues at all. More

By Katharine Jose

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July 22, 2010 7:34 am

 

Team Lindsay reminds us, again, that they told us so

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From a planning perspective, the Lindsay administration was most extraordinary, said City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, and since Bloomberg appointed her, "each principle of the Lindsay administration we have tried to embrace and honor." More

By Katharine Jose

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June 24, 2010 9:54 am