Museum City Washington DC

Reception in the sky

Reclaiming the waterfront

Public plazas

Roofs – Our roof

Roofs – Film screening

Spring indtroduces a new layer in the city: the roofs. In the second week of good weather we find ourselves going out to roof events, every second day. Thus duplicating the number of uncovered spaces in the city, roofs serve as communal balconies of both Manhattanites and Brookynites.

Cherry Blossom Festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Demonstrations pro and contra Atlantic Yard

Project for Public Spaces

The Project for Public Spaces, a non-governmental and non-profit organization elaborating and initiating the design of public spaces, recently held two workshops in Budapest. They represent a peculiar role of the planner: that of the animator and facilitator of participatory design processes. A few weeks aqgo I visited them in their fancy Broadway office.

Markets

Yesterday I visited the new flea market (dubbed Flea Market v.2) in Fort Greene, only a few blocks away from our house. I read about it in the Brooklyn Rail last week: it opened two weeks ago, after long months of organization and an intensive publicity campaign, through mailing lists, blogs and newsletters. The weather is worse than in the previous days, but the vast square in front of the school building at Lafayette and Vanderbilt is packed with people: strolling around, shopping or eating, sitting on the stairs leading to the building, the market found its place in the weekend schedule of the locals. The vendors include the Housing Works bookstore from SoHo, but mostly they consist of small businesses of the Brooklyn neighborhoods, like the recognizable French pastry set of Choice. An immediate success, the flea market works. Slightly detached from its original conditions, that is, remaining-abandoned-found objects for low price, it still represents (or reintroduces) a great variety of objects, goods, and social interaction. And according to the organizers, these are the points of creating a market.

Today after noon I went down to a presentation on the ground floor. The Department of City Planning conducted a detailed research to find out about the food supply of each neighborhood of New York City and now they presented it. Not very surprisingly, the areas with the lowest consumption of vegetables and fruits coincide with the areas with the least variety of food on offer and more importantly, with the areas with the most serious problems of obesity. The low variety of food available is a result of the scarcity of supermarkets and green grocery stores in certain neighborhoods. It seems that the City is serious about the health of its inhabitants. As a matter of fact, the City had better taking care of its folks: health problems and diseases return to the administration as extra costs, family and community tensions. What to do with all these findings? The City plans to create mechanisms to promote and support providers of fresh, healthy food.

These things happen in a city where development constantly revaluates the value of land and its uses. Where the world’s largest forces of real estate speculation are supposed to concentrate. If it’s possible here, why are we keep on eliminating our markets in Eastern Europe, in the name of development?