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It's where I (John Surico) share thoughts & writing each month on cities & their contents: streets, people, energy, cultures, food, form, etc. Thanks for being here, and hope you enjoy your time!
This July, I turned 31 years old, and this newsletter turned 30 months old. Although it feels like more has happened in the last 30 months than in the last 31 years. 2020, 2021 and 2022 have been years of such upheaval; this poor newsletter, when I started it in January 2020, had no idea what was coming. And it’s been a rollercoaster. But it’s slowly adapted and grown as a result of this chaotic time, like, hopefully, the rest of us. What began as a way to keep folks in the loop of my work has morphed into something different for me: a space to jot down my thoughts as multiple crises unfold in our world; an opportunity to highlight some neat stuff happening in our cities that gets me hopeful; and, most importantly, a chance to connect with you all each month.
We recently hit 500 subscribers, and I couldn’t be happier. I was actually going to start this newsletter off saying that this edition is summer short (which it is, relatively speaking), but instead got sappy. Oh, well. Anyway, thanks a million for your continued patronage, and allowing Streetbeat to thrive in its 30s.
Now, onto everything else:
School’s Back for Summer
The first day back in class teaching at New York University, after a year and a half remote, Hurricane Ida struck. Several students emailed me, most for the first time, to say that they couldn’t physically reach the class, because the subway system snapped like brittle from so much rainwater. (I remember rushing out of class to write something up quick on it.) Others arrived late—that first day of class haze about them, but add in climate catastrophe. The university had hoped to leave one crisis behind, and then entered another.
The rapidly warming climate once again forms the backdrop for a new summer course I’m teaching this summer, but this time it’s more apropos. Greening the City: How Can NYC Fight the Climate Crisis? is all about these sorts of extreme weather events that are no longer so extreme, and how we, as storytellers, can write about the attempts to both mitigate and adapt. And we’re using the wet hot New York summer as our classroom.
Each week, we travel to a site that shows a potential climate solution, hear insights from an expert about policy, and then double back to campus to write something on deadline. Shout-outs so far to Irak Cehonski for East River Park; Adam Walker for The Battery Urban Farm; and Jackson Chabot for Broadway Vision. And to the team of five, who, with varying degrees of journalistic experience, have already put some impressive work.
Hello, UDF!
A special thank you to the staff at the Urban Design Forum, who nominated me to come on as a Fellow “due to [my] contributions to journalism and the public realm.” That means a ton! I’ll be joining over 750 architects, designers, policymakers, planners, writers, and thinkers from 50 cities worldwide, who are invited to engage with the great events and initiatives the Forum puts on. (Most recently, their Streets Ahead work has been most impressive.) Looking forward to getting more involved!
OSA: Universal Appeal
The volunteer who leads operations and communications for the 31st Ave Open Street owns a car. The folks behind the Saturday farmers market often drop off all of their fruits and veggies with a car. The team who hosts a weekly trivia and nuts stand uses a pick-up truck. Another has a smoker hooked to a rig, which needs a pick-up to roll it around. Most of the vendors who participate in our monthly market either use a car for loading, or park one nearby. Programmers, too. And a good chunk of the core team are drivers.
But everyone agrees that each weekend, that doesn’t matter. It’s a recognition that most of the time, our streets are used for vehicles, but for these few hours, maybe they should be used for something else. Like a fundraiser concert for a local food pantry, a free queer book club, or a come-as-you-are witchcraft circle. (To note, this is the schedule for this upcoming weekend.)
This is the idea behind flexible streets, which isn’t exactly a new concept. Up until the mid-to-late 20th century, streets were places for commerce, movement, and socializing. (Bridgerton fans may notice that half of the show’s scenes take place on London’s Victorian streets.) Look at any old photograph or sketch if you don’t believe it. Cities have lost that spirit, but it’s revived with every block party, ticker-tape parade, and street fair. We’re just doing it more regularly.
I’ve been thinking about this shared characteristic of our group a lot, because it folds into this larger debate about communicating the changing nature of our streets—to encourage greener modes, to lower traffic fatalities, to encourage healthier lives, etc.—to the car-owning public. This was sparked recently online: instead of “ban cars,” the shouted mantra of many advocates, perhaps it’s politically smarter to say “ban cars and offer better, cheaper forms of transit.” Or shifting “from cars required to cars optional,” as transit advocate Jerome Alexander Horne points out.
Of course, activists would say that’s not as catchy, and thus ineffective at capturing people’s attention. But catchy, while it certainly starts a conversation, doesn’t always get results—it could be offensive to some, or isolating, which isn’t what you want if you’re looking to build consensus. ( One might think of “Defund the police” as naturally analogous.) It begs the question: how do we articulate but not dilute our arguments while also achieving the policy outcomes we want?
It’s deeply personal for all of us, since it’s likely that most of our loved ones drive most of the time. And I’ve found that questioning that status quo can lead to heated debates, even if it’s not the intention. But I think the Open Street offers a potential argumentative remedy. It’s an incrementalist’s compromise, just like asking someone to drive less is probably more realistic than saying don’t drive at all. Why? Because there are known positives. Each weekend, we get all of this fun stuff in Queens if you do this one simple thing (don’t bring your car, or just park it down the block, like my dad does). Drive less because driving can be time-consuming, costly, and sometimes really annoying. Wouldn’t you agree?
Bright Side: DALL-E
No, it’s not Pitbull meets Pixar. DALL-E is AI that is trained to conjure images out of text. It’s fed an endless stream of text-image pairs from a dataset, and then spits out all sorts of different things: an avocado-shaped arm chair; cat sketches turned into reality; even storefront signs. I’m no AI expert, but if you want to read more about tokens and computer language models, check it out.
Now, imagine if you applied DALL-E to our cities. You described your ideal streetscape—widened sidewalks, a protected bike lane, outdoor dining, and maybe access-only passageways for cars—and let the machine do the rest. How would AI reimagine the road then?
That’s the aim of BetterStreetsAI, a Twitter account, run by safe streets advocate Zach Katz, that has taken the urbanism/planning world by storm. In a matter of days, DALL-E (or in this case, DALL-E 2, its next-gen beta) has created an alternate reality for some of the world’s most famous streets. It’s turned Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive into a beach. It’s pedestrianized Edinburgh’s George Street. And my bias aside, it’s put the park in Park Avenue. Katz is letting anyone take the photos and run with them, sometimes striking up a more serious tone, like the AI’s redesign of Manhattan’s 85th Street, which would’ve saved Carling Mott’s life this week.
Maybe there is something to smart cities, huh?
City in Spotlight: Lisbon
When I was doing research at UCL on how cities were responding to COVID, I remember reading a bunch about Lisbon. Like other cities, the Portuguese capital used pop-up-then-permanent lanes as part of their longer-term strategy to double their bike lane count from 65 miles to 124. The result? A 25 percent spike in cycling in a year, particularly amongst women.
So it was a pleasure to be able to visit this month for the first time. (To be fair, I went for a music festival, not to see cycle lanes. But really, what’s the difference?) The waterfront is where the work was most pronounced; as far as your eye could see, there were shared scooters, mopeds, and e-bikes—most needed for the city’s hilly landscape—streaming up and down a protected lane.
But another thing that stood out were markings that read “A rua é sua,” or “the street is yours.” In pockets of the city would be these small pedestrianized outlets, some with outdoor dining, others with activities or food. I later learned that the program started in 2019 (notably, before COVID) on Avenida da Liberdade, a central corridor, as a way to flip space to people for a limited time. It’s since then localized. Some are permanent; others happen on the last Sunday of each month between May and December. Sort of like Bogotá’s Ciclovía, which turns swaths of the city into cycling highways on Sundays, or New York’s Summer Streets, which is notably shorter and only a few weekends each year. But tinier and for varied uses, almost like little backyards. And a phrasing that packs a punch way more than Open or Shared Streets: the street is yours.
If you want your city to be featured, shoot me an email!
Public Space of the Month, July 2022 Edition
Programming note: the Parklet of the Month will now become the Public Space of the Month! Parklets started to be a bit limiting for me. Was it commercial space? What connotes a parklet? Does it even matter? Instead, I want to set our sights higher to all public spaces: a library, a park (or parklet!), a plaza, a train or bus station, a community center, a street—anywhere where anyone’s welcome, and there’s not any price of entry. Send me your faves!
In the meantime, I’ll nominate the first one: the western Queens waterfront.
My neighborhood finds part of itself in New York City’s “asthma alley,” the moniker given to a stretch of communities, namely in the South Bronx, that have disproportionate rates of asthma due to major polluters. In our case: power plants. Like many industrial cities, the waterfront here is saturated with them, and not by coincidence, of course: originally, they had to be sited near water to receive and unload coal or oil, and they’ve lasted because of the stifled voices of poor communities, who had little choice but to live nearby, where real estate developers didn’t want to go. (For reference: the east side of most U.K. cities is typically poorer than the west because that’s the way the dirty wind blew.)
But in recent years, things have started to look different. For one, the waterfront is now valuable; a place where people want to live, which has developers colliding with toxic lands and public housing developments. The polluters are being forced to clean up their act (literally), and decades worth of environmental remediation, started in the 1970s with the EPA, is coming to fruition. (That helps explain all the shark sightings.) But also, there’s been a huge attitudinal shift in value placed on the waterfront as a place to preserve, not trash.
For most of my seven years in Astoria, the photo above was a decrepit abandoned dock, smothered in debris and litter. Now, it’s undergoing ecological restoration and will serve as a pleasant passageway to a new ferry station. (The seagulls are thrilled.) At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, residents of the public housing development next door, Astoria Houses, said the debris was there so long they hadn’t questioned it. It became part of their cityscape. That’s over.
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