Panel Discussion: The New York City Streets Renaissance: Reclaiming NYC’s Streets from the Automobile

8:20 PM EST on February 21, 2007

The campaign to make NYC streets more livable and equitable takes many shapes, responds to a multiplicity of needs and appears in an array of media. In this panel, participants will discuss the process by which and the reasons why "Traffic's Human Toll," a study of New York City's street life, became a media hit and a staple of discourse about our most precious and underused public space, our streets.

The study's author, Karla Quintero, will speak on the study's design and her own thoughts on why and how it became so popular.
Aaron Naparstek of Streetsblog will talk about the opportunity to build a vibrant urban environmental movement in New York City and using blogging as a medium for social and political change.
Film maker Clarence Eckerson will talk about his work on StreetFilms and BikeTV.
Graham Beck, Transportation Alternatives' communication coordinator, will talk about the study's release to the mainstream media and how other venues, like blogs, films and events helped generate and facilitate more coverage.

Aaron Donovan

Before he began blogging about land use and transportation, Aaron Donovan wrote The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund's annual fundraising appeal for three years and earned a master's degree in urban planning from Columbia. Since then, he has worked for nonprofit organizations devoted to New York City economic development. He lives and works in the Financial District, and sees New York's pre-automobile built form as an asset that makes New York unique in the United States, and as a strategic advantage that should be capitalized upon.

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