Urban Design Week 2011. Urban Design Week 2011. American Society of Landscape Architects - Alexandros Washburn, Urban Design Chief, New York CIty, on PlaNYC. New York City has created a new emphasis on urban design excellence. How is the city defining this? What can New York City do to bring more innovative landscape architecture to the city, like the new Highline project in Chelsea? Well, the city is working hard to bring innovative landscape architecture to New York, to all the boroughs in a multiplicity of scales and projects. It’s a very exciting time for landscape architecture in the city because Mayor Bloomberg has put out PlaNYC, which is a set of programs, 127 of them actually, to adapt the city, at a time of rapid population growth, to climate change. And what this does is it puts a premium on techniques of landscape, and an understanding of nature in forming our city for the 21st century.
Mayor Bloomberg has pledged to plant a million new trees in the five boroughs in the next decade. How does this goal influence park development? New York City aims to become one of the world’s most sustainable cities. Absolutely not. Environmental Simulation Center – Planning and Urban Design. By the City/For the City: Making a Better New York. Last week, the international news media was atwitter over a dispute between Philadelphia’s Redevelopment Authority (PRA), and OCF Realty, a real estate developer widely known in Philadelphia for a high-profile branding effort that has spawned a popular real estate blog and brought trendy cafes named for the company into neighborhoods where it has invested in property. A trash-strewn parcel of vacant land, owned by the PRA and adjacent to an OCF cafe at 20th and Federal, became a flashpoint after developer and cafe owner Ori Feibush spent $20,000 cleaning and landscaping the land.
The developer said the blighted lot was costing him business, the city said he was trespassing. With no public dialogue, the PRA in April resurrected a seemingly dormant plan to build affordable housing in the Point Breeze Urban Renewal Area, a redevelopment zone created by the agency in 1971. Point Breeze is to many advocates a last vestige of black, working-class South Philadelphia. The Forum For Urban Design. Home. NY Chapter - Planning & Urban Design Committee. The Forum For Urban Design. Institute for Urban Design.