Report
From BeyondVoting
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Policy Recommendations to Strengthen Community-Based
Planning in New York City
contents
preface
At a time when New York is engaged in the most ambitious and widespread development planning in decades, the conflicting visions of city planners, developers and local neighborhoods have never been more apparent and the stakes have never been higher.
The constant media attention and unparalleled public and private resources being devoted to examining and monitoring the city’s plans for the next 50 years indicates that New York’s current planning process is out of date, out of touch, and out of ideas. It is time to adopt new planning tools and methods that would allow for a truly participatory process that takes community-based planning seriously.
Cities across the nation and the world as diverse as Seattle, Washington and Porto Alegre, Brazil have embraced community-based planning as the way to do business. Developers, planners, designers, communities, and municipal agencies in these cities agree that although the process is never easy, a true commitment to a planning process beginning with local visions results in faster, less costly, and more innovative planning and development.
The concept of community-based planning was at the heart of why New York City’s community boards were created—a fine innovation of the 1960s. Four decades later, despite the tireless efforts of their members and staff, community boards and community-based organizations have few real opportunities to engage in proactive planning and even fewer opportunities to ensure that development suits neighborhood needs.
It is time to rethink how we plan our city. An engine of innovation in countless ways, New York City falls short of this reputation when it comes to planning for the future of our own backyards. The Community-Based Planning Task Force offers Livable Neighborhoods for a Livable City as an invitation to begin a dialogue about using New York’s diversity to strengthen its planning process.
The Community-Based Planning Task Force - Organized in 2000, the Task Force is a group of environmental justice advocates, professional planners, community board members, and academics. They were motivated to act after seeing, on the one hand, that in certain instances, plans devised by the city did not address neighborhood needs, and, on the other hand, that the creative, proactive plans being developed by communities for their neighborhoods lacked an effective mechanism for realization. In conjunction with the Municipal Art Society Planning Center, which has spent fifteen years providing direct technical assistance to communities, analyzing the 197-a process, and documenting communities’ struggles to benefit from 197-a plans, the Task Force is directing a campaign to ensure New Yorkers their right to engage in this basic civic process.
The MAS Planning Center - Created to carry out the mission of the Municipal Art Society on the level of New York’s diverse communities – neighborhood by neighborhood. Our goal is to promote and support community-based planning in low and moderate income communities in New York City.
The Municipal Art Society is a private, nonprofit, membership organization whose mission is to promote a more livable city. Since 1893, the Society has worked to enrich the culture, neighborhoods and physical design of New York City.
To stay involved or receive more information:
- By e-mail: planning@mas.org.
- By phone: 212-935-3960.
- Work the wiki. Each section of the Report has an associated discussion tab at the top of the page. Place your comments there and/or in the editable sections of the BeyondVoting Wiki.
