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Designing Cities Conference: New York City 2012

Designing Cities New York 2012 Conference Program (PDF)

Schedule of Events

Back to Conference Details

Wednesday, Oct 24

Wednesday, Oct 24 - 9:00 am - 10:30 am (1 Event)

Opening Plenary

Plenary
Keynote Address: Ray LaHood, Secretary, US Department of Transportation

Wednesday, Oct 24 - 10:45 am - 12:15 pm (7 Events)

Outreach in the Digital Age

Breakout Session
Outreach in the Digital Age will highlight outreach tools to reach new audiences, share information, collect feedback, and improve the public’s perception of an agency’s transparency and effectiveness.

Partnerships for Urban Design

Breakout Session
Partnerships for Urban Design highlights the perspectives and potential role that private sector partners can play in creating a more dynamic, successful, and sustainable built environment in cities.

Car & Vehicle Sharing

Breakout Session
Car & Vehicle Sharing will help foster a better understanding of how cities can best partner with car sharing organizations to meet mutual goals and reduce auto travel, congestion, and car ownership.

Financing City Transportation Infrastructure

Breakout Session
Panelists explore value capture and innovative financing structures that cities are increasingly using for transportation infrastructure investments.

Creativity in the Curb Lane

Breakout Session
Creativity in the Curb Lane will explore new tactics cities are using to enliven their curbsides and to create successful public spaces out of parking spaces.

Interactive Design Workshop

Breakout Session
Learn how to to cheaply and efficiently implement safety improvements and create thriving public spaces in your municipality in a multidisciplinary workshop.

Complete Streets in Constrained Corridors

Breakout Session
Complete Streets in Constrained Corridors explores how municipalities work to moderate conflicts and prioritize users for select corridors, without sacrificing safety or compromising a project’s intent.

Wednesday, Oct 24 - 12:30 pm - 3:15 pm (1 Event)

Lunch

Meet the Cities "Speed Dating" Activity Check out the latest sustainable transportation projects around the nation.

Wednesday, Oct 24 - 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm (11 Events)

Safer Streets

Breakout Session
Safer Streets will focus on how their cities are taking bold and systematic steps, informed by data and community knowledge, to reduce fatalities and severe injuries for all users.

Healthy Lifestyles and Transportation Choices

Breakout Session
Healthy Lifestyles and Transportation Choice will focus on how to transition the discourse of public health and transportation from facts and figures to active public engagement and targeted outreach.

Legible Cities, Walkable Cities

Breakout Session
Legible Cities, Walkable Cities will highlight international efforts to create pedestrian wayfinding systems for large central cities.

Parking, Pricing and Management

Breakout Session
Parking, Pricing, and Management will explore the latest and best solutions cities are using to get the most out of their curbsides, from new payment systems to apps and sensor technologies.

Guidelines for a New Paradigm

Breakout Session
Guidelines for a New Paradigm will explore how cities are translating vision to reality, using new urban design guidelines, presenting their struggles, unexpected hurdles and opportunities for education and partnership.

The New Garden City

Breakout Session
The New Garden City will highlight the projects, partnerships, and actors that helped to facilitate the transformation of New York City's waterfront.

M15 Select Bus Service: First and Second Avenues Complete Streets

Walkshop
Explored New York's first BRT service. Serving Manhattan’s East Side, the M15 carries more passengers than any other bus route in New York City.

Gansevoort Plaza and Ninth Avenue Protected Bike Lanes

Walkshop
Gansevoort Street, the heart of the Meatpacking District and a center of design, fashion, nightlife, and technology in New York, was once a traffic free-for-all. Explore transformations including a plaza, protected bike lanes, and floating parking.

Broadway Boulevard, Herald Square to Union Square

Walkshop
This tour covers the design and implementation of Green Light for Midtown and two major public spaces, Flatiron Plaza and Union Square.

Urban Art

Walkshop
Attendees are invited to join Urban Art Program staff on a tour of Downtown Brooklyn and Dumbo to discover a variety of public art projects produced by the NYC Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program.

Downtown Brooklyn & Dumbo

Walkshop
This tour will focus on recent streetscape and public space improvements in Downtown Brooklyn and Dumbo, two neighborhoodsundergoing significant growth and public sector investment.

Wednesday, Oct 24 - 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm (1 Event)

Reception

Enjoy cocktails and mingling at Battery Gardens in Lower Manhattan.

Thursday, Oct 25

Thursday, Oct 25 - 9:00 am - 10:30 am (1 Event)

Plenary

Plenary
Keynote Address: Bruce Katz, Vice President, Brookings Institution, Director of Metropolitan Policy Program.

Thursday, Oct 25 - 10:45 am - 12:15 pm (6 Events)

Bike Share

Breakout Session
Understanding the latest urban transportation phenomenon—how it works, where it’s headed, and what are the ingredients for success.

Shared Streets, Slow Zones

Breakout Session
This session explores select initiatives underway in the United States to create shared streets and slow zones, looking at design challenges, and the legal and regulatory implications of these projects.

Inclusive Urban Design

Breakout Session
This session brings together vantage points from key stakeholders to discuss smart and targeted investments that can make cities more accessible.

Food Trucks and Street Vendors

Breakout Session
The panel explores how cities are addressing the food truck phenomenon from a regulatory standpoint, and how vibrant urbanism may be balanced with effective city management.

Money Talks

Breakout Session
Panelists discuss quantifying the economic benefits of urban street improvements and highlight specific examples where cities have utilized economic data to increase buy-in to specific projects or their overall programs.

Transforming City Streets

Breakout Session
Panelists offer critical lessons for innovative retro-fit projects, and create a blueprint for reimagining America’s urban streetscapes over the coming decade.

Thursday, Oct 25 - 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm (1 Event)

Lunch Plenary

Plenary
Panelists discuss special events as a catalyst for transportation investments.

Thursday, Oct 25 - 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm (8 Events)

Complete Streets in Constrained Corridors Workshop

Breakout Session
Nelson\Nygaard will highlight the varied dimension that shape our rights of way, as well as the role NACTO's upcoming Urban Streets Design Guide will play in the future of city street design.

Signals: Integrating Space and Time

Breakout Session
Panelists present creative signalization strategies traffic engineers and planners in US cities are employing to re-balance and reconfigure their rights of way, without gridlocking their system.

Asphalt, Paint and Gravel

Breakout Session
Cities are discovering fast, low-cost, and effective opportunities to re-purpose excess roadway capacity at or near intersections into public spaces.

Managing Risk

Breakout Session
This panel interrogates the legal perspective in defining how we can transform the street, how we use them as public spaces, and how we regulate their activities and customs.

Open Streets

Breakout Session
Panelists discuss key ingredients to make Open Streets events successful, and how they may be best coordinated with street projects and initiatives.

Smarter Streets, Smarter Cities

Breakout Session
How are cities leveraging mobile technology in city life to better manage our streets, inform us of how we are using resources, or entertain us with artistic expressions that create interactive built environments?

Transit Priorities in Street Design

Breakout Session
Panelists focus on the process and procedure for analyzing the impact of complete streets on transit operations, timetables, and procedures.

8-80 Bikeways

Breakout Session
Explore initiatives underway in the US to create more protected bikeways and connect facilities through busy intersections, looking at design challenges as well as the trade-offs that these types of projects involve.

Thursday, Oct 25 - 3:45 pm - 5:00 pm (10 Events)

Place It! Pop-Up City Model Workshop

Breakout Session
PLACE IT! is a design-based urban planning initiative that uses model-building workshops and on-site interactive models to help engage the public in the planning and design process.

Getting Value from TOD

Breakout Session
Panelists focus on new city approaches to coordinating TOD that break down agency silos and marshal resources to achieve true transit-oriented development rather than just transit-adjacent development.

Engaging the Community

Breakout Session
Panelists discuss new methods and practices in public participation, from place-making charrettes and neighborhood walks to crowdsourcing and guerrilla gardening.

Streetscape Ecologies

Breakout Session
The panel explores the best and latest examples of green street treatments being deployed in cities across the country, as well as new directions for the future.

Performance Measures for Sustainable Streets

Breakout Session
Panelists spotlight cutting-edge approaches for evaluating access, mobility, livability and environmental sustainability, examining how cities can take the next step to incorporate new performance measures into standard operations.

Artscapes for Urban Design

Breakout Session
Panelists highlight the most exciting art initiatives in transportation today, how and when they are integrated into new projects, and who is driving them from concept to reality.

Allen Street Malls and East River Esplanade Bike Tour

Walkshop
This bike tour will cover the one-mile long stretch of center median malls along Allen and Pike Streets between Houston and South Streets, from the Lower East Side to Chinatown.

The High Line

Walkshop
This WalkShop will follow the length of the High Line and will explain how it was transformed from an abandoned rail viaduct into a successful new public park.

Broadway Boulevard, Columbus Circle to Herald Square, and 6 1/2 Avenue

Walkshop
This tour covers the design and implementation of two major pedestrian projects: Green Light for Midtown and 6 ½ Avenue.

Grand Army Plaza and Prospect Park West

Walkshop
Over two years, NYC DOT completely overhauled Grand Army Plaza, adding 35,000 sq-ft of plaza space, a two-way bike lane around Plaza Street, and changing traffic signalization to make driving much safer.

Friday, Oct 26

Friday, Oct 26 - 9:30 am - 10:00 am (1 Event)

The Future of City Streets

Plenary
Remarks from Janette Sadik-Khan, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation

Friday, Oct 26 - 10:00 am - 10:30 am (1 Event)

Keynote Address

Plenary
Keynote Address from New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Friday, Oct 26 - 10:30 am - 11:30 am (1 Event)

Commissioners' Panel

Plenary
The Commissioners’ Panel presents an opportunity to explore the politics of sustainable transportation in the 21st century. This conversation among major US city transportation leaders is moderated by Chris Hayes, MSNBC.

Friday, Oct 26 - 1:00 pm - 3:30 pm (6 Events)

Midtown in Motion and NYC DOT Traffic Management Center

Walkshop
NYC DOT traffic engineers will lead a tour of the Traffic Management Center and discuss congestion mitigation strategies for both Midtown in Motion and the city as a whole.

Jackson Heights and Corona

Walkshop
This tour will cover four pedestrian and bicycle improvement projects in the neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Corona in Queens.

Dutch Kills Green

Walkshop
Dutch Kills Green is the transformation of a desolate commuter parking lot into an inviting green space with wetlands, native plantings, historical elements, and artist-designed furnishings in a multi-modal crossroads of Long Island City, Queens.

World Trade Center Transportation Infrastructure Tour

Walkshop
Participants will take a tour to see the construction progress to date at a number of the various elements within the site.

Financial District and Dumbo

Walkshop
This two-borough tour will cover pedestrian plazas and spaces in the Financial District and Dumbo, from Bowling Green to the recently renovated Whitehall Ferry Terminal, Peter Minuit Plaza, and Water-Whitehall Plaza.

Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Design and Implementation Bike Tour

Walkshop
This tour will focus on the planning, design and implementation of 14-miles of waterfront route along one in one of the most dynamic parts of New York City, the Brooklyn Waterfront.