Habari*
And welcome to this newsletter.
It's where I (John Surico) talk each month about cities & all their discontents: streets, environment, energy, cultures, people, food, form, etc. This month, we cover:
- A new project on tactical urbanism;
- Regulating micro-mobility;
- Arts as an economic tool;
& much, much more.
*A brief programming note: Streetbeat surpassed 800 followers this month!
To everyone who continues to read this monthly missive, and the new folks who are about to: Thanks for being here.
Long(er)form
Winter months in New York are for sneckdowns. This is a term for the subtle design changes snow brings to our streets (think of the snow islands that jut from curbs, where cars don’t drive) that visually remind us of how much wasted space there is, and how much safer we’d all be with some pretty simple tweaks. I’ve seen it described as nature’s form of tactical urbanism, an approach to city-building that shows people the power of reclaiming space through quick-build changes—like pop-up bike lanes, curb extensions, plazas, crosswalks, and the like—in the hope that it’ll catalyze actions to cement those fixes into the streetscape.
I met Mike Lydon—an early proselytizer of tactical urbanism—in 2021, when I first reported on the post-pandemic shelf life of Open Street programs for Bloomberg CityLab. (Open Streets, which we’ll discuss later, is tactical urbanism 101.) We kept in touch, over similar interests. We cycled around Jersey City for a piece I wrote at the end of 2022; his firm, Street Plans, helped the municipality achieve zero traffic fatalities then through targeted efforts. Lydon and his co-founder, Tony Garcia, wrote a seminal 2015 book that popularized the term.
So I was thrilled when the two asked me to help write a sequel for Island Press. Tentatively titled Tactical Urbanism: 25 Ways to Transform Your City, the project will cover the approach’s development and lessons learned in the wake of the pandemic, a mainstream moment for tactical urbanism. We got going on the writing this month with a projected publication date of spring 2025, ten years after the first. We’ve got a book, y’all. You can read more details here.
Green for green
When I first approached Center for an Urban Future about work in 2017, I was asked if I wanted to write a policy report on parks. To be honest, I hadn't paid much attention to parks up to that point—I mean, I loved them (because who doesn’t?) but that was kinda it. A year later, that conversation resulted in “A New Leaf," an exhaustive look at the state of New York City’s fledgling parks system, which helped foment historic advocacy and investment from City Hall. It also launched an obsession—which I assume will be lifelong—with the importance of open space in cities. (I later learned that this was predestination: both of my parents were proud parkies during their college years.)
But one question belied that research: how do we pay for it all? New York’s parks succumb to the annual 'budget dance’ between lawmakers, which is set to net a $50.5 million loss this year at a time of record usage and multiplying needs. So figuring out how to fund parks and open spaces seems more imperative than ever—they're not only key to livability, as we all know post-2020, but also vital in conversations around the climate, equity, economic development, and much more. And the issue is certainly not limited to New York.
Answering that question is at the heart of my latest report with CUF, written alongside my longtime friend and colleague Eli Dvorkin. Six years (and a pandemic) after “A New Leaf,” it offers up 20 new ideas, from a small surcharge on sporting events to scaling up concessions, that will help put parks on a long-overdue path to long-term financial sustainability. You can read the whole thing, entitled “Paying for the Growing Needs of NYC’s Parks,” here.
Since its release, our work has found its way into The New York Times, WCBS and Planetizen. We’ll hopefully have more to share next month, but in the meantime, tune in to our hybrid event on Wednesday, February 7th, where advocates and policymakers will discuss these ideas and how to make them happen. (I’ll be moderating the first panel!) You can RSVP here.
Stay (climate-)positive
A panel of climate experts recently reported that New York will only get wetter and hotter in the years to come. (But hey, at least we got snow!) Adapting to that reality—and ensuring that we somehow don’t make it any worse—is one of the greatest challenges facing cities everywhere right now. And it’ll take an all-hands-on-deck approach to crafting, and then executing, solutions.
That’s the stated goal of Rewire, a new initiative from the Urban Design Forum. I’ve been a part of the Forum for over a year now—which has been excellent!—so I was excited to be named as one of 47 Fellows who will make up the Rewrite cohort. Over the next year, an interdisciplinary bunch, including myself, will meet regularly to come up with ways to rethink a city that rains more, floods often, snows less, warms up faster, and cools down slower. (I’m in the ‘Biodiverse Places’ working group, given my background with parks and public space.) We’ll have something to share in due time—watch this space.
Micromobility, Inc.
I’ve been writing about the advent of micro-mobility for some time. (And I actually became the proud owner of a Rad Power hybrid bike this month—huzzah!) This is your e-bikes, e-trikes, e-mopeds, e-cargo-bikes, e-scooters, e-skateboards, that crazy one-wheeled platform thing that I never seem to remember the name of, and other two- and three-wheeled vehicles. All of it. In sum, we’re witnessing what I believe to be the single greatest innovation on our streets since the Model T, which shows no signs of slowing down.
And that has yielded some pretty impressive pro’s. It’s what allowed us to get practically anything delivered to our door in no time. It’s probably our best bet at getting cars and trucks off the street (outside of mass transit). And it’s a job super-creator, especially for newly arrived or low-income populations.
Yet micro-mobility moves fast, and our cities simply haven’t kept up. Sidewalks and streets can feel full and unpredictable. Recent battery fires show the danger when we don’t have smart regulation. And on-demand app companies have been resistant to calls for higher wages and job protections.
Like any innovation, micro-mobility is a double-edged sword. So New York City is trying something new: an entity specifically designed to handle the ballooning number of commercial micro-mobility vehicles on its streets. Similar to what exists for taxis and ride-shares, the entity would collate trip data, enact safety regulations, and create a ‘front door’ for companies looking to convert or hire, rather than the scattershot approach that currently exists. It’s dubbed the ‘Dept. of Sustainable Delivery,’ and it could have massive implications for how cities catch up to a key new way people and products are getting around.
I got the exclusive from City Hall for Bloomberg CityLab. Later, I was invited onto WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show to chat about it — listen for the conversation, but stay for Brian mentioning this newsletter not once but twice. We love to see it.
OSA: The sales pitch
It’s the off-season on 31st Ave. Like last year, our team is using this downtime to focus on longer-term tasks, like streamlining forms for programming, thinking through how we divvy up work, and applying for grants and other funding opportunities. As the dust settled on 2023, we finally had the energy to crunch the numbers and put out our equivalent of a Spotify Wrapped. And we also launched our latest fundraiser for next season. (We’ve got sweaters!) Otherwise, it’s quiet, allowing us to give way to other creative endeavors.
It may seem to hard to believe, reader, but I haven’t written a lot publicly about Open Streets outside of this newsletter. I think being so knees-deep in the volunteer grind has zapped my mental tap. It also felt like a line in the sand I wanted to maintain, if only to myself: I’ve stepped over the organizer threshold, and so I couldn’t return to approaching it with my journalist cap on. (If you didn’t already know, journalists suffer immensely from imposter syndrome.)
But then some time around the holidays, I got a PR email from StreetEasy about the neighborhoods ‘to watch’ in 2024. I was intrigued, because Queens—where I live—made up five of the ten spots. And when I read the brief description for Jackson Heights, not too far from where I live, it listed the 26-block-long 34th Ave Open Street (New York’s version of a ‘superblock’) as a must-see destination. I posted it to Twitter as a joke, but then the responses came flooding in: folks were seeing Open Streets appear in local real estate listings, pitching the pandemic-era program as a reason to buy or rent.
After speaking with some brokers and asking StreetEasy to crunch some data, the result is a fun, short dispatch for New York Magazine’s Curbed about how Open Streets have entered their real estate amenity era. Enjoy!
Bright Side: Art as an Economy
Each year, I look forward to reading The New York Times’ annual travel package, “52 Places.” For one, it’s beautifully done. It stretches across every corner of the planet, from entire countries to specific events, like this year’s coming eclipse. And I’m always pleasantly surprised by what they include for my homeland (Kansas City, Missouri?!). It’s not your traditional travel package—a true testament to the work of the Travel section there, and, also, a trove of content for the next year. (Yes, I am here for New Zealand by train.)
That said, my eyes spotted Massa-Carrara. I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Italy (my ancestral homeland), but had never heard of this place—which is both a town (Massa) and province (Massa-Carrara) in Tuscany. And the reason it’s included on this illustrious list is for an initiative called Uffizi Diffusi.
The Uffizi in Florence is, perhaps, the most famous art museum in Italy. It houses works from the likes of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli. As a result, it’s infamously overcrowded. So, recently, the Gallery began loaning out its artwork to small towns, in an effort to not only reduce crowding, but also, spur tourism in some of Tuscany’s lesser-known areas, which—like a lot of the country—have historically suffered from economic stagnation. For Massa-Carrara, that means famous Baroque works in their governmental palazzo. (Fans of The White Lotus will know that Italy has lots of empty palazzos.) And it’s an idea that seems exportable; an ingenious way to enliven our towns, activate public spaces, and leverage the economic power of arts as a tool for prosperity.
On the Radar
Speaking of art, I’ve been struck for some time by this work from artist Bruce Wilen. It traces the line of the Sumwalt Run, a small stream that ran through the Remington and Charles Village neighborhoods of Baltimore until the early 1900s, when our lust for cement and asphalt submerged the waterways deep below ground into culverts, which still operate for this day. What I love about this piece is its simplicity of squiggly blue lines, adorned with text. But they tell us something about what we physically and figuratively bury in our cities over time. And what, too, is hiding in plain sight; invisible, as so much of our infrastructure is. The piece is meant to be accompanied by a walking tour, which, Wilen says, “brings lost landscapes and histories to the surface.”
Streetbeat Gig Board
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The MTA needs data people for congestion pricing. (New York, NY)
Design Trust for Public Space is hiring two project fellows to help with its Green Space Connections initiative to rethink public space in public housing. (Neat!) It’s due tomorrow, so act fast. (New York, NY)
The Bike Project, which connects asylum seekers to bicycles, is looking for a new programme manager. (Hybrid; Balsall Heath, Birmingham)
There’s a lil’ hiring spree at Trust for Governors Island (New York, NY)
The nonprofit journalism outfit The 19th is on the hunt for a contract editor. (Remote, US only)