Brooklyn Waterfront and Neighborhood Public Spaces: A Discussion

There's a critical need and opportunity to guide the development of our waterfront and preserve and enhance our neighborhoods. The neighborhoods impacted include Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook and Brooklyn Heights

Brooklyn isn't Getting What It Deserves

The city's and state's vision planning process for the Brooklyn Maritime District presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reconnect our historic Brooklyn neighborhoods to the waterfront and create a significant community destination.

This resource guide is intended to inspire local residents to reimagine the full potential of the waterfront and our neighborhood public spaces. The waterfront can become an active destination with pedestrian promenades and active public piers that catalyze local economic development with markets, maker spaces, and cultural activities. However, the opportunity is more than just the waterfront: understanding how each neighborhood can shape its own public spaces is just as crucial.

Each neighborhood should create an identity for its streets and public spaces, defining the types of neighborhood residential and commercial streets they want for the future. In particular, there is a significant opportunity to enhance now-broken east-west pedestrian connections to the waterfront, reconnecting the communities that divided the BQE in the 1950s.

In this changing context, traffic will remain the most significant threat to our neighborhoods if we don't act comprehensively. The development of the Brooklyn Maritime District will likely result in significantly more traffic on top of the snarl of BQE traffic we currently live with.

Neighborhoods need to work together to find ways to restrict through traffic and reduce speeds; activate sidewalk space and convert parking spaces to gathering places and local hubs; bridge the BQE via walkways and community parks; and make interactions safer for pedestrians by designing for increased walking times, fewer turn lanes, and sidewalk bump-outs to reduce crossing distances. It is a big opportunity, but one that can only be realized with a concerted effort by all citizens.

Great Waterfront Examples and Models Around the World

Top Waterfront Issues and Features

Connecting Communities

Waterfront features/elements

Piers

Promenades

Markets

The Power of Neighborhood Connections: Brooklyn Streets and Sidewalks

Who we are

The mission of the Social Life Project is to incite a renaissance of community connection in public spaces around the globe. It is based in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. Through our online publication, presentations, campaigns, and catalytic projects, we can create transformative impact on communities everywhere. Our work grows out of more than 50 years devoted to building the global placemaking movement. It is an initiative of the Placemaking Fund, along with PlacemakingX — a global network of leaders who together accelerate placemaking as a way to create healthy, inclusive, and beloved communities.

Who we are

The Place Man: Watch the New Documentary on the Placemaking MovementWe have recently created a documentary, The Place Man, about our work in placemaking over the last 50 years, made by the wonderful Guillermo Bernal. It got us thinking about the state of the placemaking movement and what’s next.

Social Life ProjectFred Kent