Author: Anne Leonard (Page 3 of 3)

Next week everyone will present their midterm case study analysis and research projects. Presentations should be about 7 minutes long; expect about 3 minutes of Q&A as well. We will form working groups and spend some time sketching, so please bring a notebook and pen or pencil for this activity.

Prof. Montgomery showed us the Living in Brooklyn Conference report from 2019. Rafael pointed us to a very useful EPA website on the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site. When I was looking around on the NYC  Department of City Planning’s Environmental Review Process site, I found a 2019 draft Scope of Work for an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) — only 237 pages long — and contains a lot of contextual information, need for environmental remediation, zoning information, community resources, and more. If you have found other websites or research resources, please share them with everyone in a post on the course blog, or leave a comment below.

Partners for Case Study Analysis & Research Project

Today’s site walk took us from the Smith/9th Street subway stop to tour Heights Woodworking, then to a close view of the Gowanus Canal from the park that fringes the Whole Foods parking lot, over the Third Street Bridge to the waterfront promenade adjacent to the residential housing development at 365 Bond Street.

As we discussed at the beginning of class, the next assignment is the Case Study Analysis and Research Assignment (AKA midterm). Pairs will present their work in class on Thursday, March 5. We will spend time in class on February 27 working on the midterm assignment. For now, pairs should review the assignment guidelines, share the media (photos, videos, audio) they created, and begin communicating about how to complete the tasks of the assignment.

~Profs. Montgomery and Leonard

Hope everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable long weekend. We ran out of time to finish watching the documentary films My Brooklyn (Feb. 6), and Human Scale (Feb. 13) together, but you can finish watching at home or wherever you like for free on Kanopy by logging in with your City Tech library barcode # on your college ID card; it’s the 14 digit number that starts with 22477.
Citizen Jane is available to stream on Hulu and Amazon (not free unless you already have a personal subscription).

A reminder about the blog post due before this Thursday’s class:

Please start a new blog post and write at least 150 words of reflection using the prompt below. Choose the category Reflections for it. Also, please comment on at least one other student’s reflection.

Prompt:

Describe the way each film (My Brooklyn, Citizen Jane, Human Scale) and the lecture presentation (Healing Spaces: Marching On! Blackness and the Spatial Politics of Performance) discuss public space and its role in cities. Which notion of public space appeals to you? How to you feel about public space in New York City?

~Profs Leonard and Montgomery

In class today we reviewed the guidelines for the neighborhood analysis assignment; see guidelines here.  Your presentation should be about 5 minutes long and make use of the voice memos and videos you recorded and photos you took. Use Prezi, PowerPoint, or other presentation software to create your presentation. The first hour of our February 6 class meeting will be devoted to finishing up your presentations.

We reviewed a few mapping websites in class: NYCityMap, which displays aerial photographs from 1924-2012 (choose Map Type menu on upper right) and OASIS, best for displaying land use. The New York Public Library’s Digital Collections are a great place to search for historic primary sources, and OldNYC.org geolocates historic photos from the NYPL collection on a map of New York City.

Looking forward to your presentations next week. Please get in touch with any questions about the assignment.

~Prof. Leonard