A streetscape redesign spearheaded by the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership has quickly made many of Brooklyn’s streets unrecognizable.
Downtown Brooklyn is undergoing a transformation, going from a business and shipping district to a round-the-clock residential neighborhood.
As Nate Berg explains in Fast Company, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP) hired a design firm to reimagine the area’s streetscapes to make them greener and more pedestrian-friendly. “Now, after seven years of planning and prototypes, the designs have been fully installed.”
The project, which added planters, bollards, public seating, seating, traffic calming measures, and increased greenery, began with two small prototypes that led the city to devote $40 million to further improvements. According to Berg, “This could be just the start of a broader transformation in the area. WXY and BIG’s design has now become a system that developers can use to improve the streetscape of future projects.”
The design was intentionally “minimal in its proposed interventions,” requiring little large-scale construction and using existing infrastructure. “The plan has sailed through approvals and construction, and downtown Brooklyn’s streetscapes are almost unrecognizable from what they looked like just a few years ago.”
Read the full story: This busy NYC neighborhood just got way more walkable
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Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY)
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