Planning the Future of NYC (3/16)

In A Region at Risk, the third regional plan compiled by Robert Yaro and Tony Hiss, the authors begin by describing the current state of New York City.  They say that currently, the city sits in a position where they can’t afford to make modest growth in the upcoming years because that will “mask the beginning of a long, slow, and potentially irreversible and tragic decline” (5).  They go on to remark on how in pretty much all metropolitan areas in the United States, during the 1980’s and some years previously, there was a strong correlation between the growth and decline in income between the central cities and the surrounding suburban regions.  The important thing that they realized is that all of the communities within the macro of the major city are intertwined and all of these communities share a “common destiny” (6).

So what did this plan consist of?  One of the most important lessons they learned from the past was that a city can’t only focus on tackling one issue at a time.  In Professor Larson’s book “Building Like Moses With Jacobs in Mind”, he discusses how the compilers of the third plan lived in an age of “one issue at a time strategic planning” (63).  He goes on to say that the new plan, which was named the “three E’s” was a comprehensive approach for planning the city’s “economy, equity and environment” (63).  Through this plan they would rebuild all three of these aspects in conjunction with each other as opposed to building up one at the expense of the other two.

As Tom Wright relates, the three E’s “formed the basis of a region’s quality of life, prosperity and vitality”.  Additionally this new plan would focus on the downtown employment and residential areas.  This is something that was clearly influenced by Jane Jacob’s philosophies of urban development.  The plan also included aspects of Robert Moses’ philosophy.  The drafters stressed the ability of people to be able to get around, which would help foster a suburban growth.  So they expanded transit access to New Jersey and Long Island, and paid for this by charging automobile tolls.  There are still aspects of the third plan that are being constructed (such as the 2nd avenue subway), but in general “the RPA’s vision of a metropolitan region with strong, vibrant urban communities, seems more achievable than ever”.  With that being said, there are constantly new challenges, which is why the RPA has a fourth plan in the works that will use social media to reach out to the region’s 22 million inhabitants.

 

Works Cited

Larson, Scott. Building like Moses with Jacobs in Mind: Contemporary Planning in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. Print.

Wright, Tom. “The Regional Plan Association: A Civic Planning Model for New York.” SPUR. N.p., 12 Aug. 2013. Web. 13 Mar. 2015.

Yaro, Robert D. A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut Metropolitan Area. Washington, D.C.: Island, 1996. Print.