IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Urban synergy has long been touted as what makes a city thrive. While complex computational city models have opened up new ways of examining urban policy outcomes, they often work within the confines of top down quantitative and reductive analyses. For creating liveable urban design solutions, one must triangulate the quantitative with the uniquely spatial in order to reveal a city in its prismatic complexity. This session attempts to explore methodologies that could “expand the operations of urban design practice, outside the circumscribed box of client, program, design and construction. By necessity, an operation blending “professional boundaries which are artificially set by economic and political framework.” (Mattern, 2021) Using a large mixed use redevelopment project in New Jersey as a case study, we examined ways in which a highly specific program element such as a parking garage could be analyzed differently to reveal hidden spatial synergy, one enlivening and transforming disparate urban experiences together, producing a more liveable and ecologically sensitive urban environment. We will investigate marketing tactics such as user storyboarding, interactive visual essays, and incremental pop-ups as alternative frameworks for methods to reveal underlying urban synergistic experiences. These frameworks will be incorporated into the urban design process in addition to more normative quantitative processes such as circulation analyses, adjacency diagrams, energy analyses and financial performances. This exploration could point to alternative ways in thinking about urban design strategies that incorporate quantitative data as well as qualitative experience in programming a liveable urban environment.