Architecture Commons^™

The Production And Destiny Of Public Space In An American City: Examining The Emergence And Disruption Of Brooklyn City Hall Square, Jason Montgomery

Publications and Research

Urban form should reflect collective value for place in communities. Urban squares in particular have the potential to serve as the nucleus of communities, urban artefacts that link place to memory and heritage while serving basic needs for everyday life in the city. Civic squares, those linked to governmental institutions, have further potential to facilitate community gatherings for memorialisation, commemoration, celebration and political action. Despite these important functions and potential, the incremental planning of Brooklyn in the early nineteenth century placed little emphasis on squares of any kind, despite the community’s expressed desires. Brooklyn’s first civic square, here referred to …

Rights Of The Way: Investigations Of Streetness, Mike Lidwin

Haslam Scholars Projects

Current urban planning often valorizes large scale interventions in the city, reducing the complexity of the street into a mere element for beautification, redirection, or compartmentalization. In doing so, urban planning glosses over the impact that small-scale interventions can have in affecting larger urban metabolisms. This project explores architecture’s capacity to reengage public infrastructure with streetness, which describes the underlying quality and latent situations that occur along the street’s contested territory.

Rights of the Way addresses issues of agency. It delights in the possibility that individuals can control access to urban spaces and author public life. It involves corporate space, …