Carlo Ratti and Harvard's Economics department chair Edward Glaeser recently detailed their vision of New York as a “Playground City” in an interactive opinion feature for the New York Times. The six-point plan calls for a number of radical solutions — including the widespread (but not windowless) conversion of “deep core” office buildings favored in comments by Mayor Eric Adams — and apparently has parallels to life in 17th- and 18th-century London. 

“In a Playground City,” they describe, “mixed-use neighborhoods that tie life, labor and leisure together generate what the New York urbanist Jane Jacobs calls the 'sidewalk ballet,' a productive and playful dynamic in which a diversity of different users come and go at all hours.”

The plan centers on increased social interaction and a revival of street life, fueled by small businesses, green space, and recreation. They say we must “view the city as a for-profit real estate development company wholly owned by a nonprofit poverty-alleviation entity” in order to achieve their socially-balanced aims, which is supported by Ratti's research at MIT.

It may seem off-base for a pair of outsiders to suggest such a radical shift for so many, especially considering the physical distance between most New Yorkers and the remade former CBD they are proposing. The plan has parallels to Le Corbusier and more recent ideas from Dror Benshetrit, Ben Wilson, ODA, and others who want to achieve similar objectives through the supervenience of biophilia and pedestrianization. In the end, they say, it will succeed in being accepted based on the challenges that leaders in former hubs of urban office workers are currently mitigating in smaller ways.

“We need this integrative urban power now more than ever as social fragmentation, political polarization and economic inequality pull us apart,” they close in a sort of call-to-action. “As we face the climate crisis, the allure of activity-rich neighborhoods could promote sustainable lifestyles. As we fight segregation in all its forms, dense cities can bridge our divisions. As we struggle with loneliness, an irresistibly vital street life could drag a generation of people off their phones and back toward one another.”

The full opinion piece can be found here.