Category Archives: Books
Street Design on NPR
John Massengale was interviewed on “Everything Is Broken” on April 22:
The YouTube video above includes a slide show. Some of the slides are closely correlated with the interview, while others are only loosely connected. Click here for a higher resolution version of the video.
The video below only has an image of the cover and the audio track.
On May 27, Victor Dover will be on Baltimore Public Radio, WYPR.
“Everything Is Broken,” WUSB
Jim Lynch, “Streets!,” Different Wavelengths
Street Design at CNU 22
A RECENT MAILING from the Congress for New Urbanism says,
Walkology, Dr. Downtown & Dr. Street
Street Design in the Providence Journal Again
We then crossed the College Street Bridge to enter downtown, and found ourselves where Weybosset and Westminster merge to form what Dr. Street said could be a sumptuous civic plaza. It is a sumptuous civic plaza, replied this doctor, and a civic dance plaza on WaterFire nights. He said it was still too wide. He noted that Nantucket’s Main Street has a horse fountain at one end and a Civil War monument at the other, around both of which cars must maneuver. He recommended an obelisk at Westminster and Weybosset to slow the cars entering downtown. What a great idea!
Dr. Street referred often to a new “paradigm shift” for making cities less car-centric. Vision Zero was conceived by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has called for zero traffic deaths, including pedestrians, in the city. These are not unpreventable “accidents” and no level is acceptable. By focusing on safety, politicians who otherwise care nothing for the niceties of good streets will feel obliged to promote the goals of the slow-streets movement.
David Brussat is the architecture critic for the Providence Journal, as well as an Editorial Board member there. He wrote about Benefit Street for Street Design, reviewed the book, and walked the streets of Providence with John Massengale (aka “Dr. Street”).
David Brussat, “The Secret to Making Great Streets,” Providence Journal
John Massengale, “Mr. Manners Goes To MOMA: The Etiquette of Deconstructivism,” Inland Architect (September/October 1988): 66-69
Street Design Podcast
Street Design in Salon
“How cars conquered the American city (and how we can win it back)”
Two quotes from the article by Henry Grabar:
John Massengale and I are standing in the middle of 1st Avenue at East 4th Street, in New York’s East Village, and he does not like the feng shui. He points to the thick, white lines in the roadway, directing drivers toward a left turn. “Automobile-scale striping,” he notes. “It’s telling you: ‘This is not a place for you.’”
Part instruction manual, part history, part manifesto, the book argues that it is the street, more than anything, that shapes the city. In traveling to cities around the world and interviewing residents, pedestrians and businesspeople, Dover and Massengale found a remarkable degree of agreement about which streets are nice and which are not. “If there is so much consensus on what makes a good street,” they ask, “then why are we still building so many bad and ugly ones?”
John Massengale Giving CNU New England Keynote on Vision Zero
Vision Zero in New York City
On March 14, 2014, John Massengale and Victor Dover delivered this PowerPoint presentation about Vision Zero to a roundtable organized by the Regional Plan Association.