Attention, New York artists and designers: the city’s Department of Transportation just announced  that it is soliciting conceptual designs to refresh the new pedestrian plazas at Times Square. As you may recall, Mayor Bloomberg decided last month to make permanent the five plazas that DOT installed in the area last May. Now the DOT is looking for “a series of economical, temporary surface treatments” to keep these spaces looking good until it’s able to implement a permanent build-out (currently slated to for 2012). Designs must enhance the pedestrian experience, improve the setting for Times Square events, and accommodate fire lanes, crosswalks, and other “use zones.” The complete request for proposals is supposed to go up on the DOT Web site sometime today.

Update: Here’s a direct link to the RFP.

Now that green design has gone from a fringe concern to an absolute imperative for the architecture community, you have to wonder what, if anything, is the next frontier. The recent publication of New York City’s Active Design Guidelines suggests one possible answer: architecture to get people off their butts.

The Guidelines, which were unveiled at the Center for Architecture last Wednesday, outline how architects, city planners, and other design professionals can encourage daily physical activity among city dwellers. Strategies range from the simple (posting signs encouraging office workers to take the stairs) to the formidably complex (creating a vibrant streetscape with mixed land use, attractive public plazas, and designated bikeways). And although they’re specifically geared to New York, many of them would be relevant anywhere. Read more…

One of the great treats in working on our “1-5-10 Issue” was talking to experts and inviting them—urging them, really—to speculate on the future. Toronto-based Ken Greenberg—our urban-planning talking head—is currently working on a book, due out next year, on the future of cities, and he took the opportunity to ruminate on all of the changes he sees on the horizon. It was a fascinating and far-ranging talk. We took highlights from our interview for the print edition, but Greenberg’s expansive view of cities is worth a longer look online.

What do you see on the ground now in urban planning? What’s engaging you and the clients you’re working with?

I’m pretty convinced we’re in the midst of a transformation which is probably as profound as what happened immediately after the Second World War, when we got all excited about automobiles and in a sense turned our backs on cities. There are all kinds of things that are propelling this. Some of it has to do with the environment; much of it has to do with the cost of energy. I don’t know if you know the book that came out recently called Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. It was written by Jeff Rubin, a former chief economist of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce who actually resigned to write this book. From an economic standpoint he is talking about peak oil and the effect it’s going to have on cities. Right now I’m in the midst of a series of skirmishes, as people adjust to this new reality and we change our entire tool kit when it comes to how we deal with cities.

How is that tool kit changing?

Almost everything that we’ve inherited and put into practice in the post-WWII decades has in some way become obsolete. Read more…

At the newly unveiled Web site Shape Vancouver 2050, users are given a digital model of the Vancouver skyline, the ability to extrude buildings upwards, and a visual gauge of the resulting effects on the city’s downtown. As the user drags the digital towers higher and population density increases, meters at the bottom of the screen go up too—energy saved, carbon use curbed, dollars added to the city coffers.

It’s a neat tool, if a bit of a one-liner: the more tall buildings you insert, the better things get; make nearly all the buildings tall and you’ve created an “Urban Paradise!” (Leave most of the buildings as low-rises and you’re chided for fostering sprawl.) It’s not entirely clear whether the site’s creators—the architecture firm Perkins +Will and the developer Concord Pacific—intended Shape Vancouver as an honest solicitation of planning input from the public, or a sneaky way to educate (or indoctrinate?) residents in the environmental benefits of high density. Either way, their message is clear: Want a better Vancouver? Build tall.

Who dares say what counts as “smart” when neighborhoods evolve? Look no further than the beige-and-black cover of The Smart Growth Manual. That’s the guide to repurposing American land use, not a guide.

Who could claim such authority? Look down the cover for the author credits: this is a volume “from the authors of Suburban Nation,” Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, whose indictment of sprawl in that book inspired legions of citizens to learn mind-numbing public review procedures in order to give their towns a center again. Now Duany and Speck (who is a Metropolis contributing editor) say that this book is a go-to resource for citizens who have enlisted in that fight, complete with rounded corners for easy thumbing. Actually, they say it’s the go-to resource. It situates places along a rural-urban continuum and lays out how people should plan, circulate, live, and work in those places for a healthier life and climate.

Unsurprisingly, the authors easily defend their claims. We caught up with them via conference call with Speck in Washington, D.C., and Duany in Miami. An uninhibited discussion, with stirrings of a sequel, followed.

Who’s the audience?

Andres Duany: This is a response to the empowerment of citizens in planning. The public process has become very broadly based—it’s expected now [that citizens will participate in charettes] and often the outcome is questionable. That has to do with expertise. So this manual is for elected officials and for citizens who participate in the [planning] process.

Jeff Speck: You can read it in the public hearing, while you’re waiting for your project to come up. Read more…

Image: courtesy Architecture Research Office

When, after 9/11, discussions began on rebuilding the World Trade Center site and its surroundings, it seemed likely that the area of Lower Manhattan south of Liberty Street would share in the money and attention appropriated for the development effort. At that time there was talk of revitalizing the area by building new schools and public space, and a vague plan (ultimately scuttled due to its estimated $2 billion price tag) to connect the neighborhood to Battery Park City by burying West Street.

Eight years later, after several contentious design competitions and much political wrangling, the Ground Zero site remains largely unbuilt. To its south, the area along Greenwich Street north of the Battery looks much as it did a decade ago—remarkably underdeveloped given its prime location for residences and its potential as an extension of Lower Manhattan tourist attractions. Read more…

Last week I had the good fortune (finally) to take a bike ride around Governors Island with Leslie Koch, president of the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation. It was a glorious day, warm and breezy—a perfect introduction to this beautiful, strange, haunted place. The island, located in New York Harbor between Lower Manhattan and Red Hook, Brooklyn, was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1996 and then given to the state (for a buck) shortly after. At one point it was home to more than 3,500 people. Today it still feels like a small New England coastal town or a liberal arts college (albeit an empty one, just eight minutes away by ferry.) Read more…

Tom “Mayor-for-Life” Menino made a name for himself as a pothole-fixing regular guy with a thing for green building. He’s a popular four-termer who’s set to become the longest serving mayor in Boston’s history, so it came as little surprise recently when he started thinking legacy, evincing SimCity–like ambition with his scheme for relocating City Hall and his support for an ally’s thousand-foot office tower in the financial district.

That these moves were debatable on functional and aesthetic grounds—and that they would entail razing a pair of Modernist icons, Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles’s City Hall and Paul Rudolph’s Blue Cross Blue Shield Building—didn’t seem to matter. Menino is firmly entrenched in a “strong mayor” system that gives him serious leverage over development.

But there’s a recession on and it’s an election year, and he now finds himself on the defensive about open construction pits and cronyism. Read more…

Starting today, Metropolis’s senior editor, Kristi Cameron, will be contributing semi-regular posts on issues regarding livable streets in a feature we’re calling The Street View. For her first post—or maybe it’s her second one?—Kristi checks in with our friends in Copenhagen.

Sundry scenes of Denmark’s superior bicyclists making Americans look bad, as usual. Photos: courtesy the Cycling Embassy of Denmark

Well, it’s official. Copenhagen has long been a model for other cities when it comes to bicycles and transportation planning. Representatives from Chicago and New York, for instance, took pilgrimages there before getting serious about improving their own streets. But in May the Danish capitol launched a Cycling Embassy. When I heard this, I pictured a fleet of ambassadors—fair-haired ladies and gentlemen spreading the word on two wheels, a kind of cross between Angelina Jolie and the Church of the Latter-day Saints. Turns out, the city is simply institutionalizing the leadership role it has already assumed. But the Cycling Embassy is not just a group of Copenhagen city planners. In addition to public space guru Jan Gehl, it comprises manufacturers, infrastructure engineers, and the cities of Aarhus, Frederiksburg, and Odense. It’s a one-stop shop for all things bike-related. I’m not usually one for proselytizing, but in this case, bring it on.

Images: courtesy Eric Gordon

Eric Gordon, a professor of new media at Emerson College, and Gene Koo, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just won a MacArthur Foundation grant for their innovative new take on community planning using Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world which users explore as avatars. I spoke with Professor Gordon over the phone last week about how holding community meetings in Second Life transforms the planning process.

Tell me about the site that your workshops were focusing on.

We had the opportunity to work last summer with Library Park in Allston, which is a neighborhood of Boston. The park is being designed by Harvard University as part of their expansion into Allston, so it’s the first piece of a much larger development.

What’s wrong with the way architects’ plans are used at a typical community meeting?

The typical two-dimensional plans assume that the people viewing them have some understanding of architecture or urban planning—they adopt a professional discourse and bring it to a lay community, without enough thought into how to communicate abstract spatial ideas in a way that people can relate to. Read more…