Community Involvement in the Creation of Pedestrian Plazas

Hanife Vardi Topal (College of Architecture and Design)

Over the last nine years, the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) has worked with a variety of community partners including Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), neighborhood associations, and non-profit agencies to create more than seventy pedestrian plazas. These plazas are located in neighborhoods that have different social and economic characteristics. In order to identify the site-specific needs of each community, the DOT requires community participation in the creation of pedestrian plazas. In proposed plaza sites, the community partner conducts a series of public workshops and community surveys to provide feedback from the community to the DOT. This paper examines the results of public workshops and community surveys regarding recently completed plazas. Using documentation from the DOT and onsite observations, design input from communities is compared with features of the completed plazas to determine how community preferences shaped the final design