The Hunter College East Shore studio has completed it's plan. The amount that the studio team was able to learn over the past months was incredible, and we are very grateful to our clients, Zone A New York, and SImagines for involving us, to our dedicated and faithful leader Prof. Pablo E. Vengoechea for guiding us, and most of all to the residents of the East Shore of Staten Island for sharing their time, knowledge and stories with us.
For the full booklet layout of the plan, please visit this link
And for an easier to read on the web full page version, please just click the 'East Shore Final Plan' tab on this blog.
Thank you.
Foreword:
Hurricane Sandy was a catastrophic storm that wrought havoc on New York City’s coastal areas and exposed structural weaknesses in our infrastructure, planning and development strategies. It caused many deaths and left many more homeless. For New Yorkers in general, and Staten Islanders in particular, it was a loud wake-up call: address these vulnerabilities and put in place better and more efficient building practices.
Recovery in these coastal neighborhoods, such as the East Shore of Staten Island, has been uneven: flood insurance claims and government assistance programs have not been able to cover the cost of reconstruction for many homeowners and businesses, and dissatisfaction with the pace and ad hoc quality of the Buyout and Acquisition Programs has left many feeling that the process is improvised, with the State and City seemingly working at cross purposes.
You are about to read the results of one community-based planning response: the East Shore Planning Studio, a fast paced, one semester production that attempts to make order of this disarray and sort through conflicting reconstruction goals and ideas. Working together with the residents of the area this plan responds to their concerns and addresses the reasons for these inequities, and offers a blueprint for achieving a sustainable long-term vision. It is a plan that dares to make some of the hard decisions regarding the area’s suitability for habitation and looks at the larger picture to set the framework for the next steps. It is based on extensive fieldwork and direct communication with residents in the impacted areas through surveys, planning workshops and interviews.
The plan proposes bold ideas: it does not lay out the specifics of the programs needed. There’s nothing finished here, the tools of community planning have been used to craft a redevelopment concept for the area. This planning studio is on the frontlines of what must be an on-going dialogue on a complex problem, one that in my opinion, these gifted and committed apprentices have tackled successfully. The questions that haunted the Studio from the onset – whether we can link redevelopment and affordability, sustainability and social fairness – still resonate. To meet the challenges we will need more of the dedicated thinking that has taken place in the Studio within a pragmatic, theoretical, passionate and interdisciplinary setting. Inclusive urbanization with the direct participation of the community is the model for moving forward.
I am impressed as always of the way planning students rise to the occasion and the sense of responsibility they bring to their work, how they worked both independently and collaboratively, and how they built their plan on work that preceded the Studio: SImagines East Shore Community Planning Workshop, the Special Initiatives Resiliency Report and of course the visioning workshop they organized with the residents.
I thank all of the participants who were so deeply engaged in a planning process that in many ways was a visceral, yet professional, response to the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Such was the need in NYC to address the issues posed by the staggering losses that at least one student delayed graduation by one semester while working full time to be in this studio and indeed, additional seats had to be added to meet the demand.
Pablo E. Vengoechea, Architect
