Department of City Planning. Image credit: DCP
City Planning revamps website for the first time since 2012; hopes to foster public engagement. On January 29, 2016, the Department of City Planning announced its new and revised website. The new site has a more attractive user interface, improved site navigation and revised content that better presents the Department’s priorities, work program and processes.
City Planning Director Carl Weisbrod said, “As the world moves more and more online, having an accessible and informative website is essential for any government agency. DCP’s more efficient website will make it easier for the public to become knowledgeable about our various initiatives, studies and research found online. Thanks to the hard work of our Information Technology division, DCP’s digital presence is stronger and more useful than ever.”
“Community engagement is a core objective.” The new website has a “get involved” page, allowing citizens to stay current on public meetings and community plans. Each page now allows for one-click sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Tumblr, and email to better disseminate City Planning content.
“Moving forward, DCP will continue to introduce new features to its website in order to improve the users’ experience, to increase transparency and to encourage community engagement,” according to a public statement issued by the Department.
This is the first time that the Department of City Planning has revamped the site since 2012. The site was built within the overall NYC.gov website architecture and therefore delivers to the public a look and feel that is uniform across City agencies. The new website can be located here.
I hope the CPC will work with individual communities (not just community boards who are not communities, but a collection of neighborhoods) to create a master plan for each neighborhood respecting its historical context, and current needs and vision for the future. A perfect example of the absence of a master neighborhood plan is 500 feet on the FDR Drive in Yorkville with no adjacent services or amenities or traffic studies for the neighborhood people most impacted by the project. The project did not begin with the residents and they simply could not keep up with or get ahead of the CPC and its legal team so that the impacted community was taken seriously and compensated for the lack of services for this monstrosity. A computer driven traffic study is not real data and so far the studies of traffic and other negative impacts that were promised have not happened. By the time the project is finished, no changes to its destructive size and scope will be possible. The neighborhood will be destroyed. Throwing money around within a community board, but not within the impacted community, via text amendment insults and destroys the people who have to live with these new supertall towers forever. We need to change CPC’s thinking to be more neighborhood-conscious and more neighborhood-friendly and to build based on neighborhood need, not developers’ opportunity for profit, from the very beginning of the planning process. What is needed, not always what is profitable or even convenient for corporations.