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There's a City Planning Expert Offering Office Hours in New York

By Nicole Levy | January 12, 2017 1:26pm | Updated on January 13, 2017 2:51pm
 Former New York City chief urban designer Alexandros Washburn delivers a TED talk in 2012.
Former New York City chief urban designer Alexandros Washburn delivers a TED talk in 2012.
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Flickr/Neil Macbeth

It sounds like a veritable alphabet-and-numeral soup: R6A, C2-4, FAR.

A former chief urban designer for the City of New York has set up open office hours in his Red Hook home to explain what all that zoning jargon means, answer other questions residents have about their properties, and aid them in articulating their hopes for the future of the neighborhood.

“People have the chance to tell stories about what they hope for the future of the neighborhood and at the same time they can apply some really good expertise,” Alexandros Washburn, now the director of the Center for Coastal Resilience at Stevens Institute of Technology, told the Brooklyn Paper. “It’s something that’s just more relaxed and people are able to get ideas out on the table in a setting that feels like home.”

The city planning guru is opening the doors to the ground floor of his house at 373 Van Brunt St. on Wednesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. Visitors can consult with him and his research assistant, as well as access specialized software and handbooks.

blackboard

A blackboard inside Washburn's window announcing his office hours (credit:DNAinfo/Amy Langfield)

We can bet there's demand for Washburn's services in Red Hook, a neighborhood that was submerged by several feet of water during Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and has attracted an influx of upscale development projects.

But the language of city planning — wonky though it may be — is a useful tool for anyone living in New York, where a municipal zoning resolution enacted in 1916 and updated in 1961 to control the height, bulk and use of city buildings continuously shapes the physical environment.

The once 12-page code emerged at a time when the city's immigrant population was exploding, developers were itching to build skyscrapers with newly invented elevators, and citizens were concerned that those steel behemoths would engulf the streets below in darkness. You can thank the code for giving rise to those Art Deco masterpieces the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, which architects designed to cast fewer shadows by making top floors progressively more narrow as they approached the spire.

Today — at a length of roughly 1,300 pages and with recent changes spearheaded by Mayor Bill de Blasio —  the code is spurring development around the city that will create more affordable housing, according to the mayor's office, and accelerate gentrification in low-income neighborhoods, according to critics.