Vishaan Chakrabarti has a message for real estate developers: Think outside your own black car.
The founder of Practice for Architecture and Urbanism and the dean of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design joined TRD‘s Hiten Samtani to discuss his proposal for a Manhattan in which private cars would be banned. Instead, all the land devoted to the private car — four Central Parks worth, by his estimate — could be used for better mass transit, bicycle lanes and real estate development that caters to the needs of more New Yorkers.
“What I find in the New York development community — not everyone, but too many people — are just too focused in their own reality, as opposed to the fact that real estate in New York, as an industry, is serving a city of 8.6 million people,” Chakrabarti said. He said city, state and federal governments would have to seriously step up to help counter the “world of hurt’ that New York is going to experience from the pandemic.
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