Pitching the Grid | Competition
New York, NY
Masterplan

If pedestrians and their ability to move around the city carries so much value, then why do cars get such a disproportionate amount of the ground plane for transportation? This proposal offers some preliminary thoughts on what options would be available for the square footage currently assumed by car travel, highlighting a series of possible uses, each with different relationships between people, buildings and existing infrastructure.

With an implementation starting on Broadway, the spatial spine of the city, these insertions could grow over time as the city transitioned into new utilization of its own space. This move could liberate the grid from the sectional constraints of auto travel, allowing a new, imaginative urban landscape of hills, pools, bicycle highways, advanced public transit, internet infrastructure, food lifecycle programs and uses which challenge the pavement / park dichotomy of the current city. The purpose of the proposal is not to prescribe what the grid should be, but spark some conversations around all that it could be instead of miles of asphalt.

Project Team: T. Caine & Shelby Doyle