Streetfilms: Intersection Intervention

2:09 PM EST on February 23, 2007

Intersection Intervention
A Clarence Eckerson Streetfilm
Running time: 3 minutes 56 seconds

As people living in the neighborhoods around Downtown Brooklyn are learning the hard way, New York City government's installation of pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures is remarkably slow and expensive. Even as children are dying while crossing the street in potentially preventable crashes, and even with projects approved and funded, New York City's bureaucracy appears to be organizationally unable to move faster than a snail's pace when it comes to installing fine-grained, spot-by-spot pedestrian safety and traffic calming measures.

Sometimes, when city government is unable or unwilling to act to make streets safer and more friendly to local communities, neighborhoods take it upon themselves to re-envision and reshape their own streets. In Portland, Oregon, a group called City Repair has been doing it for years. In this Streetfilm (an old BikeTV clip, actually), City Repair's Mark Lakeman shows what happens when neighborhoods reclaim ownership of their own streets:

City Repair engages people at the most local levels to come together and to directly transform the commons where people live. City Repair began with a kind of creative uprising at this location where we just came out into the streets and we took them over and we said, "You know, we don't have any public squares, we don't have any places of gathering right where we live. It's about time that we came out together and just created a commons that actually reflects our common vision."

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

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