Jane’s Walk is just around the corner, and we are hosting a session! Join me on a virtual self-guided tour of your neighborhood where we’ll explore different examples of NYC street furniture during Jane’s Walk 2022.
We’re going to start live-streaming from Roosevelt Island – please follow along at home or work.
Municipalities are full of small bits of urban fabric which we almost never foreground, but are the manifestations of our public policy: street furniture. These bits of urbanity are the unsung heroes of city life. We’ll use Roosevelt Island – that Mid Century island in the middle of the East River – on a walking tour to see the urban choices made at the scale of the person, and the building.
For those who wish to go on a walk while tuning in, I recommend joining via the Zoom app on your mobile device.
About Roosevelt Island
Read more about Roosevelt Island here:
Specimens found on Roosevelt Island
About the Project
A lot of attention is paid to the big moves of the city and great work has been done, from Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, to Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, to the most iconic example, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. These are big overarching books well worth your time.
But they miss the smaller details of urban living. Municipalities – Cities, villages, urban and suburban areas – are full of small bits of urban fabric which we almost never foreground: street furniture. These bits of urbanity are the unsung heroes of city life. They help keep us moving safely about our day by deploying signage and traffic lights; hold our newspapers before and after we read them; street furniture protects us with bollards and separated bike lanes; and street furniture brings us joy with trees and art.
I envision this project to be similar to another seminal, if controversial book: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Perhaps these are the smaller-scale patterns which flow from the objects themselves. I can only be so presumptuous. This website endeavors to present a wide cross section of communities, taking into account varying densities, geographic location, community age, and mobility mix, allowing wider insights.
Read more about the project
