john schettino design

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John Schettino is a graphic design consultant with a strong interest in mobility. He often works on projects aimed at producing equitable outcomes in built environments and the public realm.

 

Services provided by John include research, strategy, and visual design to support outreach, engagement, and orientation. In practice that includes deliverables such as communication design products, facilitation tools, visual identities, application guidelines, maps, wayfinding systems, and more.

 

John has been a fellow with the Design Trust for Public Space, a design awardee of the NYC Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) program, a Van Alen Institute NYSCA grant nominee and a David Prize candidate. His New York Penn Station Atlas project has been recognized by Curbed New York, Untapped Cities, AIGA Eye on Design, SEGD Global Design Awards and others. In tandem with The Atlas John also organized a public dialogue on the future of Penn Station for an audience of eight hundred at The Great Hall of the Cooper Union.

As a member of the AIANY Transportation + Infrastructure Committee and as past Director of Programming for that committee John has developed and coordinated many public programs, panel discussions, and forums to examine the subject of mobility in the public realm. Most recently he co-led development of Delivering the Goods, an AIANY initiative and document focused on countering the negative impacts of urban freight (movement of goods and services) in New York City by using design and policy strategies to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders.

 

John also maintains an active practice as an artist and occasionally accepts design projects that support creative and cultural goals.

Past work includes design for retail, fashion, and consumer-product businesses. Many previous projects focused on development of merchandise and product lines for retailers, especially apparel industry brands like Gap, Disney, Champion, and others. This work, focused on discrete design objects, gradually expanded to address the overarching context of the store itself, with projects aimed at shaping the customer experience and influencing consumer behavior through design strategies to optimize navigation of large, complex, retail environments.

 

By using design to guide decision-making and reduce friction in the shopping experience early retail environment projects were often able to deliver increased profitability at the checkout counter, including one system for visual product identification that was directly attributed with increasing sales conversion by +4%.

 

Many of these retail environment projects were consulting engagements for architecture firms with end-clients such as FAO Schwarz, Bliss, Virgin Megastores, Coca-Cola, and others. Approaches and deliverables for these projects typically included interviews, wayfinding strategies, circulation plans, signage systems, environmental graphics, information design, as well as design of actual products and merchandise.

 

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The public art project Sonic Gates is a sculpture walk comprised of a series of art installations that offer opportunities to publicly perform or ‘play’ the sculptures and create improvised sounds and compositions. Sonic Gates installations are located on Staten Island’s North Shore and distributed across a distance of about 1.5 miles through the towns of St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton.


The artworks are a pilot project based on the Future Culture recommendations developed through the Design Trust for Public Space and Staten Island Arts. Siting of artwork across dispersed locales is a response to specific opportunities for change identified in the Future Culture recommendations, including a central theme of imagining ways to use creative production to help strengthen spatial and cultural connection in the North Shore.

Sonic Gates wayfinding design meets the needs of two groups, visitors and local community, by collapsing and expanding space accordingly.


For visitors and first-time guests the feeling of distance and anxiety of unfamiliar space is decreased by signs installed through the three towns that always display a full system map which highlights time (over distance) between key locations. These signs are supplemented by a persistent system of graphic markings on sidewalk surfaces that act as trail markers to indicate and confirm a user’s path.


For local residents customary space can sometimes be circumscribed by habit and mode of mobility. Additionally, local streetscape at town margins can seem low in distinctive features, resulting in intermediary spaces being perceived as gaps between destinations rather than as unique spaces in their own right. The persistent signs and markers of the wayfinding system act as interventions to bridge gaps, add engagement opportunities to low-feature areas, and provoke an expansion of the space of routinized mobilities. Black & white concept images show original design vision. Final implementation adapted to budget and city regulations.

The public art project Sonic Gates is a sculpture walk comprised of a series of art installations that offer opportunities to publicly perform or ‘play’ the sculptures and create improvised sounds and compositions. Sonic Gates installations are located on Staten Island’s North Shore and distributed across a distance of about 1.5 miles through the towns of St. George, Tompkinsville and Stapleton.

The artworks are a pilot project based on the Future Culture recommendations developed through the Design Trust for Public Space and Staten Island Arts. Siting of artwork across dispersed locales is a response to specific opportunities for change identified in the Future Culture recommendations, including a central theme of imagining ways to use creative production to help strengthen spatial and cultural connection in the North Shore.

 

SHAPING SPATIAL EXPERIENCE
Sonic Gates wayfinding design meets the needs of two groups, visitors and local community, by collapsing and expanding space accordingly.

For visitors and first-time guests the feeling of distance and anxiety of unfamilar space is decreased by signs installed through the three towns that always display a full system map which highlights time (over distance) between key locations. These signs are supplemented by a persistent system of graphic markings on sidewalk surfaces that act as trail markers to indicate and confirm a user’s path.

For local residents customary space can sometimes be circumscribed by habit and mode of mobility. Additionally, local streetscape at town margins can seem low in distinctive features, resulting in intermediary spaces being perceived as gaps between destinations rather than as unique spaces in their own right. The persistent signs and markers of the wayfinding system act as interventions to bridge gaps, add engagement opportunities to low-feature areas, and provoke an expansion of the space of routinized mobilities.

(Black & white concept images show original design vision. Final implementation adapted to budget and city regulations.)

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This exhibition at the Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries at Parsons The New School for Design reconceived a touring exhibit that was based on the scholarship in Alison J. Clarke’s book Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. The book is a deeply researched social history of Tupperware that explores the relationship between 20th Century consumer culture and the self-organized social and entrepreneurial activity of the Tupperware business – a model Clarke has posited as an alternative to the patriarchal constraints of the mid-century workplace.

Featuring hundreds of Tupperware products, many dating back decades and on loan from the Smithsonian Institution, the exhibit design conveyed the social narrative in wall texts and video while spotlighting displays of modernist form that helped to distinguish Tupperware as an embodiment in Bauhaus attitudes towards mass production.

Signature imagery used in the exhibit design and promotion was developed around a concept of Tupperware as totemic objects of consumer culture, with a nod to the influence of contemporary art (Brancusi) on everyday design stylings of the era.

Most of the products on exhibit, as well as the Fifth Avenue gallery window, were installed in the form of light tables and light boxes, showcasing the translucence and material properties of the products, transforming inexpensive polyethylene containers into vessels glowing with jewel-like colors.

The design decision to use illuminated displays in dimmed rooms was aimed at drawing attention to and elevating the physical qualities of the objects and to echo a typical experience of the product as a modernist artifact glowing in a refrigerator – an encounter layered with cultural, economic, and social implications that are explored in Clarke’s book.

The Visiting Artist Series at RISD is an ongoing initiative across the school’s many departments that is designed to bring in working artists who embody and represent what it means to be committed to the life of a working artist and who can help provide students with creative and career insight. For the RISD Film, Animation, and Video (FAV) department this means bringing in artists who will excite the students and expand their notions of what cinema is and – critically – expose the students to accomplished professionals who are inspiring and relatable. This often includes younger makers, and filmmakers of color; filmmakers who work with contemporary issues in relevant, innovative, and compelling ways.

 

To support the 2019 edition of the RISD FAV Visiting Artists Series a communication design package was developed to promote the diverse cohort of artist who were individually screening their films/videos and speaking at the school. A set of posters was developed to showcase each artists screening, and a postcard was designed to announce the full season of screenings and dates.

Founded in 1992 by musician Peter Gabriel, WITNESS is dedicated to using the power of video to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses. By partnering with local organizations around the globe, WITNESS empowers defenders of human rights to use video to shine a light on those most affected by human rights violations, and to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools of justice.

When WITNESS wanted to increase the visibility and impact of their work, they commissioned a technology audit that recommended new functional requirements for their website. The goal for the reimagined site was to become a platform rooted in community review, with the posting and review process a means of ensuring safety and accountability in the distribution of critical social and political content.

To promote this vision and kick off the fundraising required to make it real, WITNESS needed to transform dozens of pages of highly technical recommendations and requirements into a compelling and easy to understand overview of the project and goals, with the overview to be used as a presentation at The World Economic Forum (WEF) to support development efforts.

Working in close collaboration with the WITNESS technology manager, the WEF presentation was developed under a new name and identity; “The WITNESS Video Hub.” The Hub was articulated through a set of diagrams and visualizations to help explain how the new approach could be realized in interface and functionality of a fully built site. The overview presentation used at Davos, Switzerland was shared as a digital slideshow and a printed book.

When the Film Media program at University of Rhode Island (URI) articulated a new program vision they asked, “what do students expect to gain from majoring in Film Media, why would they choose URI over other competitors, and what how is URI Film Media differentiated in its pedagogy and messaging?”

Reponses to this visioning exercise included development of new academic strategies, a new mission statement, and a series of design explorations to establish a distinctly expressed program identity aimed at communicating value and values that would be meaningful for all program constituents, faculty, students and prospective students. Development of a new visual identity for Film Media began with renaming the program, evolving it from Film Media to Film/Media. A small but significant shift to emphasize a perspective rooted in the history of cinema and film theory while also connected to and advancing a contemporary understanding of media.

From the pre-cinematic work of Edward Muybridge to the digital channels that convey media today, the visual language for the Film/Media identity incorporates a rich array of references to the history, technology and narrative of film and media.
Frances Whitehead is a civic practice artist bringing the methods, perspectives, and strategies of contemporary art to the processes of urban design. Her approach prioritizes deployment of the knowledge of artists as a means of driving culturally informed change, sustainability, and new concepts of heritage and remediation,

When Frances Whitehead was invited by The University of Rhode Island (URI) to join them in collaboration as a Distinguished Visiting Artist the partnership was initiated as a week-long residency for research and relationship-building at the university. The centerpiece of this week of kickoff work was a community-focused public program on approaches to integrating of art, landscape, and environmental sustainability. To promote the talk and to raise local awareness of the role and value of having a Distinguished Visiting Artist, URI launched a public relations campaign that included media interviews, public events, and social media strategies. All of these efforts were wrapped in a suite of distinct and consistent communication design elements. A minimal ‘seal’ was developed for the program and used as an imprimatur across the communication design system and the system itself served to elevate the role and visibility of their Distinguished Visiting Artist.

Developed in response to an open call by the New Sanctuary Coalition, this visual system uses a simple image of heart and home as the core of an extensible program designed to convey the principles and politics of the New Sanctuary movement. The home/heart mark conveys a sense of compassionate shelter and doubles as a functional, visual sign for actual sanctuary spaces and for the allies who can help direct vulnerable individuals to safe spaces.

 

The mark is a clear, distinct image intended as beacon for migrants in the shadows, and a banner for solidarity and dissent. Its modular design allows adaption for use across a range and scale of applications including stickers, banners, signs, clothing, and accessories; all of which can become vehicles for conveying the principles and politics of the Sanctuary project. The mark is legible regardless of language, while also including options for multilingual applications and easy adaption to the language needs of local communities. The image of home and heart aligns with the notion of sanctuary as the type of radical welcome practiced by faith-based communities that take an activist approach to their beliefs., from liberation theology to the words of Pope Francis when he said “suspicion and prejudice conflict with the biblical commandment of welcoming with respect and solidarity the stranger in need.”

 

This project operates from the position that the radical welcome is rooted in defiance of one’s sense of personal vulnerability vis-a-vis fear of ‘the other’. That defiance is actualized by exposing ourselves to the deeper humanity that can be realized through acting with compassion.

Prior to the current reconstruction of New York’s Penn Station this analysis, prototype, and accompanying public forum were developed to help focus attention on feasible design strategies that could help relieve pedestrian congestion and the pervasive sense of chaos in the station.

 

While crowding in Penn has largely been a factor of a station that is over capacity (designed for 200,00 people/day, it now hosts over a half-million users each day) congested circulation is also amplified by the confusion resulting from the absence of a coherent, unified wayfinding system.

 

Delivering wayfinding help in Penn means providing relevant information for a very large number of unique contexts. An effective response would provide users with options, different perspectives, and multiple maps – an atlas. The New York Penn Station Atlas uses a comprehensive set of 2D and 3D visualizations as to  explain layouts, pinpoint locations, and diagram clear paths that show exactly how to get to any destination in the station. Importantly, this user-centric tool is designed to filter out irrelevant information and equip people with maps that are tailored to the context of their specific needs. And because getting a grasp on the station environment is often impeded by its many obscured and compartmentalized areas, The Atlas uses models and images to provide visual reference for the real spatial relationships between levels, across floors and with the exterior. The Atlas is designed to help to visualize that sometimes hard-to-see general picture of the environment, what Kevin Lynch described as “the environmental image”

 

Related links:

Project Documentation Book – Detailed design analysis of station, prototypes, and photo essay. 382 pages, heavily illustrated.
Project Video – 2-minute concept overview.
Public Program – Forum at the Great Hall of Cooper Union featuring presentation of The Atlas and discussion with leaders and representatives of RPA, MAS, PANYNJ, Design Trust for Public Space and others.

Staten Island Arts (SIA) commissioned this website audit to identify opportunities for furthering the learnings and impact of the SIA-Design Trust for Public Space collaboration, Future Culture. During the 18+ months of Future Culture’s engagement work local community members shared ideas on local cultural connectivity in a series of public dialogues. As part of that process a working group was convened to develop an understanding of how the SIA website could better serve the community by helping to realize and disseminate some of the work and ideas being generated by Future Culture. Regarding the website People shared that:

  • “Anyone should be able to contribute to the content”
  • “People need a way to be able to see projects.”
  • “In terms of design, it should be streamlined.”
  • “We have to raise people’s consciousness about the production of art and that art is not just about something that is beautiful.”

Drawing on this advice from the community the audit outlined an approach to translating learnings from Future Culture into features and functionality that could help to define a reimagined SIA website as a community cultural hub.


Recommendations included an approach that would be defined by inscribing Staten Island’s unique North Shore culture and values into a suite of new initiatives designed to meet local cultural needs, with a special focus on ways of visually mapping local cultural knowledge, through community participation, and reconceiving the communities shared calendar tool as a more integrated and user-friendly experience, To make strategic recommendations less abstract  the audit book provides a series of interface prototypes to help visualize ways of making the recommendations real.

The project Future Culture: Connecting Staten Island’s Waterfront developed a detailed set of recommendations that Staten Island cultural organizations, civic groups, public agencies, developers, businesses, and other stakeholders can use to strengthen culture and enhance the waterfront. This set of actionable design, planning, and policy recommendations was created by a team of Design Trust Fellows and Staten Island residents, cultural producers, civic activists, and small business owners. The project aims to shape and communicate a vision for culture along Staten Island’s rapidly developing North Shore waterfront that:


  • Supports and promotes unique cultural communities
  • Develops art and cultural initiatives that connect places and people
  • Strengthens the relationship between the cultural sector and owners and stewards of property


The Future Culture project was initially proposed by Staten Island Arts through a Design Trust for Public Space open Request for Proposals. After an independent jury selected the proposal, Staten Island Arts and Design Trust partnered to begin initial research and project scoping – holding participatory mapping events with Staten Island Arts’ network of artists, meeting with potential stakeholders, securing project funding, and partnering with a Cornell University urban planning studio. Design Trust and Staten Island Arts then released an open call for Fellows, seeking expertise in the fields of participatory art, policy, urban design, and graphic design.


The Design Trust for Public Space Fellows used their respective expertise to convert learnings from sources including public officials, private stakeholders, community working groups and roundtable sessions into detailed sets of recommendations for strengthening local culture and connectivity, especially in relation to increasing development.


Related links:

Recommendations Book – Detailed strategy sets for equitable neighborhood development and approaches to design and programming for public art pilots

Design Documentation – Overview of concept and applications for all Future Culture visual components (identity, publications, exhibit, etc.)

The public art project Sonic Gates: New York City’s Sound Sculpture Walk was a sculpture walk comprised of a series of art installations with opportunities to publicly perform or ‘play’ the sculptures and create improvised sounds and compositions. Sonic Gates installations were located on Staten Island’s North Shore and distributed across 1.5 miles through the towns of St. George, Tompkinsville, and Stapleton.


Sonic Gates was a pilot project based on the Future Culture recommendations developed through the Design Trust for Public Space and Staten Island Arts. The siting of artwork throughout locales responded to specific opportunities for change identified in the Future Culture recommendations, including a central theme of imagining ways to use creative production to help strengthen spatial and cultural connection across North Shore neighborhoods.


Customary space of local residents can sometimes be circumscribed by habit and mode of mobility. Additionally, local streetscape at town margins can seem low in distinctive features, resulting in intermediary spaces being perceived as gaps between destinations rather than as unique spaces in their own right. The persistent signs and markers of the wayfinding system act as interventions to bridge gaps, add engagement opportunities to low-feature areas, and provoke an expansion of the space of routinized mobilities.


Sonic Gates wayfinding design meets the needs of two groups, visitors, and local community, by collapsing and expanding space accordingly. For visitors and first-time guests, the feeling of distance and anxiety of unfamiliar space is decreased by signs installed through the three towns, signs that always display a full system map which highlights time (over distance) between key locations. These signs are supplemented by a persistent system of graphic markings on sidewalk surfaces that act as trail markers to indicate and confirm a user’s path. (Black & white concept images show original design vision. Final implementation was adapted to budget and city regulations)


Related links:

Sonic Gates Style Guide – Identity and communication applications

Each year 365 million tons of freight move through the New York City area. This flow of goods brings economic benefits to the city but also results in congestion, emissions, and degradation of public space – burdens that are often imposed on the city’s most vulnerable communities. To better understand these impacts and develop strategies to counter them The American Institute of Architects New York Chapter (AIANY) convened a task force of designers, planners, architects, academics, and traffic engineers.

 

The task force, co-led by John Schettino, began work by mapping, and narrating prototypical NYC freight scenarios. The scenarios became a basis of engagement for interviews and listening sessions that included representatives and participants from the NYC DOT, NYC DCP, NYC EDC, NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, NY City Council, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, as well as community and industry stakeholders. Responses to listening sessions focused on task force development of system-scale and site-scale strategies with detailed, actionable, prototypes. Designed with a Stantec team under the leadership of April Schneider, the prototypes illustrate feasible approaches to improving land use and curb management, with special consideration on “the Interface” – the space where goods movement intersects with place-making, public meets private, and transportation overlaps with land use.

 

Outcomes of the AIANY task force work are published in the 70-page interactive and printable PDF, Delivering the Goods: NYC Urban Freight in the Age of E-Commerce. The document concludes with a set of short and long-term recommendations that lay out a vision of how to transform goods movement in the city over the coming decades.

 

Related links:

Project homepage

PDF Report Document

Public Program Video Documentation

The two public programs The Transformed City: Mobility Now and The Transformed City: Infrastructure Now were developed in spring of 2020 to respond to two emerging crises: in New York City, the Covid-19 lockdown – with all “non-essential” businesses closed by executive order – and nationally, the recurring waves of protests that swept across the US following the murder of George Floyd. For these programs two panels of experts were assembled to examine the relationship of transportation and Infrastructure to health and equity with a focus on to how design and policy can begin to make a positive difference in those areas.

 

Mobility Now featured participants:
Zabe Bent, Director of Design, National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO)
Danny Harris, Executive Director, Transportation Alternatives
Ashley Pryce, Advocacy Associate, TransitCenter

Heather Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP)

Sean Quinn, Assistant Commissioner for Street Improvement Programs, NYC Department of Transportation (NYC DOT)
Kate Slevin, Senior Vice President, Regional Plan Association (RPA)

 

Infrastructure Now featured participants:
Alison J. Conway, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, City College of New, CUNY
Maria Figueroa, Director of Labor and Policy Research, The Worker Institute, Cornell University-School of Industrial and Labor Relations
Clare Lyster, Founder and Principal, Clare Lyster Urbanism and Architecture, CLUAA
Margaret Newman, Principal, ARUP

David Vega-Barachowitz, Associate, WXY Architecture + Urban Design

 

Related links:
The Transformed City: Mobility Now – AIANY program description and video documentation of event
The Transformed City: Infrastructure Now – AIANY program description

The Transformed City: Infrastructure Now – AIANY video of event

The New York City Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) Logo Design Competition was held to solicit a design for a new POPS logo to be featured on signage at POPS locations dispersed across all of New York City. The POPS logo and signage is seen by millions of residents, workers, and visitors on any given day and helps to encourage the public to take full advantage of valuable, but sometimes unknown, public spaces.

 

John Schettino was one of three awardees selected from over six hundred international submissions for the New York City Privately Owned Public Space (POPS) Logo Design Competition. Competition awardees were:

Emma Reed (City’s choice for implementation)

Gensler NYC Brand Design Studio

John Schettino

 

The competition was organized jointly by Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space, the New York City Department of City Planning, and The Municipal Art Society of New York, with funding provided in part by Knoll.

 

Design Competition Panel:

Jerold S. Kayden, Frank Backus Williams Professor of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard University, and President, Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space

Glen Cummings, Creative Director, MTWTF

Katherine Farley, Chair, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts

Elizabeth Goldstein, President, The Municipal Art Society of New York

Marisa Lago, Director, New York City Department of City Planning, and Chair, New York City Planning Commission

Kim Mathews, Principal Emerita, MNLA

Justin Garrett Moore, Executive Director, New York City Public Design Commission

 

Related link:

For more information: The Municipal Art Society of New York

Developed by the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, the Envision Rating System for infrastructure projects is “a holistic sustainability framework and rating system that enables a thorough examination of the sustainability and resiliency of all types of civil infrastructure. It is the only comprehensive tool in North America that can assist government agencies and their consultants and contractors in delivering infrastructure that tackles climate change, addresses public health needs, cultivates environmental justice, creates jobs, and spurs economic recovery” The consistent, consensus based Envision framework is a decision-making guide, not a set of prescriptive measures. Envision not only asks, “Are we doing the project right?” but also, “Are we doing the right project?”


This webinar provided an overview of the Envision tool, a set of case studies of Envision in use, and a moderated panel of experts from: HDR, HNTB, the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.


The program was introduced by Anthony Kane, President and CEO of the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI). ISI was established in 2010 by the American Public Works Association (APWA), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), and the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC). Those organizations collaborated with Harvard University Graduate School of Design to develop Envision. ISI is the organization that shepherds Envision and oversees the Envision membership program, professional credentialing, and the actual Envision Rating System.


Featured participants:
Joshua DeFlorio, Chief of Resilience and Sustainability, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
Anthony Kane, President and CEO, Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure
Ruth Krieger, Associate Vice President, HDR
Jennifer Ninete, Sustainability Consultant, HDR
Matthew Potter, Project Architect, HNTB
Michaella Wittmann, Director of Sustainability, HDR


Related link:

AIANY Webinar

With the structural integrity of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) increasingly at risk – especially around its iconic triple cantilever section near Brooklyn Heights – an AIANY task force formed to assess the situation and gauge options. Outcomes resulting from this included a series of design charettes, a report released by AIANY, and a public program held at Center for Architecture. The following overview is excerpted from the report introduction:

 

Early in 2019, members of the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter’s (AIANY) Planning & Urban Design and Transportation & Infrastructure committees formed an ad hoc task force to examine issues and opportunities related to various proposals by NYSDOT and NYCDOT to reconstruct the deteriorating Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) cantilever structure adjoining Brooklyn Heights. By reframing the response within the larger context of the neighborhood, city, and region, we sought to broaden the consideration of project scope and design possibilities for the BQE rebuilding process. Several alternative proposals were released during the spring and were presented to the local community, NYCDOT, and political leaders. Following this, Mayor de Blasio appointed an Expert Panel to advise NYCDOT on a revised design scope for the project.

 

In support of this expanded dialogue, the AIANY BQE Task Force has provided a forum for the design community to apply its expertise in urban design and transportation planning to help move the project forward. Using defined goals and criteria, the task force evaluated each proposal’s issues and opportunities within a broader context in workshop format. Moreover, we encouraged workshop participants to examine design assumptions in the light of known and unknown future conditions. This report summarizes the results of these workshops, exploring a vision for the BQE that looks to the future of mobility in the city.

 

Related Links:

AIANY Public Report (PDF)

AIANY Public Program: Event Description and Video Documentation

This public program hosted by Center for Architecture grew out of conversations across committees at AIANY during 2020, a year when disability advocates and their allies in the design professions were marking the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) – and when current events were dominated by both the confluence of the global pandemic and widespread anti-racist mobilizations in the U.S. and beyond. As Covid became a painful magnifying glass on disparities in health and economic systems access to and use of space that comprises the mobile commons also came under similar scrutiny. In response, planners and designers who focus on the built environment developed a flurry of street and sidewalk tactics that activated those spaces in remarkably new ways.
 

Those interventions were met with enthusiasm by some, but also concern by others regarding access to public right-of-way and absence of community involvement in the decision-making process. These debates emerged online with blogs like CityLab, Curbed, and Streetsblog featuring numerous stories and opinion pieces focused on how safety is defined, and by whom, especially in the context of people’s experience of streets and sidewalks.


Safe and Equitable Streets: Age, Ability, and Inclusion was aimed at exploring those issues and understanding what the implications may be for design best practices.


In addition to situating the discussion in urgent current events the program aimed at understanding how progress is informed by longstanding standards and practices such as ADA, Universal Design, and contemporary Disability & Mobility Justice approaches.

Safe and Equitable Streets: Age, Ability, and Inclusion was a joint initiative of AIANY Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, The Planning and Urban Design Committee, and the Design for Aging Committee.


Featured  participants:
Moderator:
Claire Weisz, FAIA, Principal-in-Charge, WXY Architecture + Urban Design

Panelists:
Renia Ehrenfeucht, Author, Sidewalks Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space
Aimi Hamraie, Author, Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability
Jessica Murray, PhD, CUNY, Chair, NYCT Advisory Committee for Transit Accessibility
Ariel Ward, Transportation Engineer, Planner, and Designer, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA)


Related Link:
AIANY Event Description and Video Documentation

In 1960 the urban planner Kevin Lynch wrote The Image of The City and introduced his concept of wayfinding, including an outline of elements that form a cognitive basis for spatial orientation in the urban environment (paths, edges, districts, nodes, landmarks). Lynch’s core insights were founded on a way of understanding one’s surroundings through notions of imageability and legibility – seeing and reading.


The AIANY public program Visible City examined how imageability and legibility can be used to clarify complexity and help people better grasp their relationship to transportation infrastructure and how it works. Whether the need for information takes place in advance of travel, while trip-planning, or on the ground and in the experience of transit, the right diagram or map can help people understand – at a glance – the parts and places of infrastructure that comprise a system, how it’s layed out, and what to expect.


Visible City featured a group of independent designers who use visualization and narration to facilitate education and orientation towards infrastructure. Situated largely outside of the institutional stewards of transportation systems, the work of these independent practitioners offers new perspectives on how design can be used to clarify complexity and get a grasp on the large systems that help people get around cities.


Featured participants:

Candy Chan, RA, LEED AP, Architect/Graphic Designer, Project Subway NYC
Eddie Jabbour, Creative Director, Kick Design, Creator of KickMap
George Kokkinidis, Founder, Design Language, Design Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Designer, The Works: Anatomy of a City
John Schettino, Principal/Design Director, John Schettino Design, Designer, The New York Penn Station Atlas


Related Link:
AIANY Event Description and Video Documentation

Every ten years New York City produces a new NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan, a strategic document establishing the long-term vision for the city’s 520-mile waterfront. The plan includes an assessment of waterfront resources for the natural waterfront, the public waterfront, the working waterfront, and the developing waterfront. Importantly – as mandated in the City Charter – public input is integral to developing this plan.


From 2019 through 2020 the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP), in partnership with a Waterfront Taskforce at AIANY/Center for Architecture, hosted The Future of the NYC Waterfront, a series of seven outreach events that served as professional and public forums. Each program was organized to provide an opportunity for architects, design experts, and the engaged public to share knowledge and perspectives on the city waterfront.


Insights captured at these public programs informed the work of the Waterfront Management Advisory Board, who advise city administration on matters related to waterfront and waterways and provides guidance to development of the final NYC Comprehensive Waterfront Plan by NYC DCP.


The AIANY Waterfront Taskforce was guided by Michael Marrella, Director, Waterfront and Open Space Planning, NYC DCP and Jay Valgora, Principal, STUDIO V Architecture, and coordinated through a partnership between the AIANY Planning and Urban Design Committee, the Committee on the Environment, the Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.


Related Link:

Concluding event to full series of waterfront programs:

New York City’s Waterfront: Reflecting + Projecting

On February 23, 2020, Ahmaud Arbery, an innocent, unarmed, 25-year-old African American man, was shot and killed while jogging in Glynn County, Georgia. Reports of the killing were kept quiet by local police and officials until May when a radio station posted a video of the shooting online. During that spring, as media coverage of Arbery’s murder intensified the US was experiencing the first wave of Covid-19. As cities locked down, urban planners were formulating pandemic strategies like slow/open streets to encourage public activity outside. In some cases, plans were imposed with little or no participation from effected residents, notably in communities of Black, Brown, and marginalized people.

 

For Dr. Destiny Thomas of Thrivance Group, the overlapping events of the Arbery murder, the 2020 protests against anti-black racism, and the top-down changes to city streets exemplify the interconnectedness of race, space, and urban planning.

 

Dr. Thomas wrote: “people like Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd have their lives stolen because their visibility in public space goes against the ways we’ve come to understand who should have access to “outside” and how they should be allowed to access it. Without a plan to include and protect Black, Brown, Indigenous, trans, and disabled people, or a plan to address anti-Black vigilantism and police brutality, these open streets are set up to fail.”

 

In response to these issues Thrivance Group launched the Unurbanist Assembly, a 23-hour virtual community dedicated to confronting the legacy of racism in urban planning. On Juneteenth of 2021, the first Unurbanist Assembly launched online and was attended by over 8,000 people from around the world seeking to develop new perspectives on planning for cities and communities. Since then annual Unurbanist Assembly panels and breakouts have focused on transformative justice, healing and atonement, decarceration, and spatial reparations.

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