In advance of
next week’s Cityscapes meet-up on the Grand Concourse, I put in a call to Deborah Marton at the
Design Trust for Public Space for a preview of what she’ll be talking about Tuesday evening on the boulevard. Here’s what she said: the role of design in the service of a healthier society.
That’s a big departure from your usual walking tour, with its entertaining tidbits and “on this spot” history. But it’s a shift that mirrors a broader change in thinking about the cityscape.
Architects, designers, urban critics and sociologists have been talking about it for years. More recently, politicians and bureaucrats, in New York especially, have caught on as well. The big idea is that streets, parks and plazas—public spaces—should not only be evaluated for their decorative qualities, nor how much traffic they manage to move. Instead, they should be measured for their very
publicness: for their ability to be true living rooms of the city.
“Good public spaces can make people feel like they have room to experience who they are, but also feel connected to a larger culture,” Marton said.
Being in one, you don’t have to be a shopper (like at a mall), an athlete (like at a ball field), or belong to any race or class. In a good public space you can be most fully yourself—and so can everyone else.
But here’s the catch, to be addressed Tuesday evening: we’re talking about streets. Plain old streets. What’s exciting about the Design Trust’s
competition, and the broader movement behind it, is that it sees enormous possibility the overlooked and taken-for-granted spaces of the city. And it sees a role for designers and architects in cultivating that possibility.
What does this mean for the Grand Concourse? That’s for the competition entrants to say, and it’s early yet. The finalists won’t be on display until this fall, at the Bronx Museum. Marton didn’t want to give too much away, but she did say this: the best schemes put people before cars. The medians got bigger and the access roads got smaller. (A few entries even took the idea to extremes, re-imagining the Concourse as a farm or a watery canal.) All of them recognized that there’s a lot to work with on the Grand Concourse. It is a street of history—and even more so of possibility.
