Last week, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved the 850-building Prospect Heights Historic District, the largest district designated in two decades. MAS made a video about the process of creating the historic district, featuring Councilmember Letitia James, Chair of the Landmarks Preservation Commission Robert B. Tierney, historian Francis Morrone, and Gib Veconi of Prospect Heights Neighborhood Development Council (PHNDC), and showing how we worked with PHNDC to survey the historic buildings and promote the area for designation. The result was not just the designation, the act of engaging residents in the process brought the community together and provided a new sense of neighborhood identity. Continue Reading>>

MyCITI.org now links you directly to the City’s newest mapping resource: NYCityMap. Brought to you by the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication (DOITT), the new map features a much expanded selection of data, aerial photos, and much more. You can search by address, block and lot, or intersection.

To help learn to navigate this new tool, click here for a step-by-step training guide, or contact Sideya Sherman at the MAS Planning Center or ssherman@mas.org for assistance and upcoming trainings.

On Friday April 4th, MAS accompanied 20 high school students on a visit to architecture and planning firms Perkins Eastman and BFJ Planning. The students, who are part of the MAS CITI Youth program, had a first-hand look at the work of professional architects and planners — receiving an office tour and presentations by key staff from both firms.

For the past seven months, these interns have been working as map technicians at their local community board. The students attend public community board meetings where they create and project maps to help facilitate the decision-making process. As a component of their internship, MAS provides monthly professional development workshops that are aimed at helping them increase their capacity as map technicians and expand their knowledge base. Continue Reading>>

A new map produced by MAS in collaboration with the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) provides a citywide look at LPC-designated districts, scenic landmarks, interior landmarks, and individual landmarks. The map is subdivided by city council districts.

A total of 11 new historic districts were designated between January 2006 and June 2008, thanks in part to the increased funding the City Council (at MAS’ urging) has provided the LPC in recent years for research, survey, and designation work. Drawing on previous data from the LPC and the Department of City Planning, the new map summarizes their location in addition to previously-designated resources.

A quick look at the map (download the PDF here) confirms that there are more landmark designations in Manhattan that in any other borough, yet of the 11 new districts, six are located in boroughs other than Manhattan (four in Brooklyn, and one each in Queens and the Bronx). An analysis of total acreage of recently-added districts also showed that nearly 90 percent was added in boroughs other than Manhattan (37 percent in Brooklyn, 35 percent in the Bronx, and 17 percent in Queens). If the LPC is to continue its work to expand designations across the city, it will need the continued support of people who care about the city’s diverse urban forms.

The Municipal Art Society is pleased to welcome Manhattan Community Board 1 (MN CB1) and high school students Alina Lee and Karen Wang to the CITI Youth program. MN CB1, which covers Lower Manhattan and Tribeca is an ideal place for students to engage with real-life planning issues. And this new team of interns has been working very hard to understand the nature of New York City’s local government, develop new mapping skills, and exchange information with other students in the program as they learn about community planning. Continue Reading>>

This month, the MAS Planning Center kicked off its fifth year of the CITI Youth Program with a new class of map technicians from all corners of the city. Forty New York City high school students are now embarking on year-long paid internships with their local community boards, presenting live, internet-based land use maps during community board meetings. Recently, with the help of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office, the Planning Center was able to substantially expand the program in Manhattan — serving seven of Manhattan’s 12 community boards. Continue Reading>>

Knowledge is power, but local knowledge paired with the latest web-based mapping technology is empowerment. The Bridge Builders Community Partnership Initiative (BBCPI) and the MAS Planning Center partnered this summer to create a spatial inventory of neighborhood resources in South-West Bronx, with direct participation of the people who would ultimately use the maps.

BBCPI’s initiative set out to demonstrate that family well-being and child welfare will improve through collaborative networking among neighbors, parents, and neighborhood-based service providers. That collaboration, in turn, effectively connects people to the social services they need. Up-to-date maps showing detailed information on where to access and how to reach community resources, ranging from educational institutions, community-based organizations, and religious centers, to food resources and outdoor amenities for outdoor and athletic recreation, among other amenities, are now available to those who depend on these resources. Continue Reading>>

Having easy access to data and maps is critical to public participation in planning. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of community advocates and community boards around the city, more data than ever before is available on-line to assist in neighborhood-level decision-making. Property-level information on zoning and ownership, Department of Buildings data on permits and violations, district-level data on 311 complaints and health statistics, and Census Bureau demographic information are but a few of the resources available. You can access all of this information and more at  www.myciti.org.

Empowering communities with planning tools and technology is a core part of the work of the MAS Planning Center. The MyCITI initiative began as a demonstration of the utility of publicly-accessible GIS (Geographic Information Systems) data as a tool for community participation in local planning. Made possible through a partnership between the City of New York and the Municipal Art Society, www.myciti.org now provides direct access to PLUTO’s detailed property information including zoning, ownership, land use and lot dimensions. Continue Reading>>

MAS, with assistance from the Community-Based Planning Task Force, has published the latest version of Planning for All New Yorkers: An Atlas of Community-Based Plans in New York. This compendium showcases some of the most creative planning efforts in New York City — plans that come from communities that plan for themselves, illustrating how community boards and local organizations have been fighting to solve the city’s most pressing issues neighborhood by neighborhood and, in some cases, producing miraculous transformations.

These successes have been achieved only after many years of effort involving fundraising, organizing, as well as political lobbying and litigating, to leverage the resources for technical planning and implementation; and the political will to accept these innovative proposals that do not always accord with market pressures. Continue Reading>>