Modeling Community Visions for a Future Without the BQE Workshop
Monday, June 23rd
Community Board 7
4201 4th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11232
︎︎︎ Modeling Community Visions ︎︎︎ BQE2053
Modeling Community Visions for a Future Without the BQE is a series of free and open to the public community design workshops where Brooklyn residents reimagine their neighborhoods in a vibrant post-BQE future. The divisive and polluting BQE, built by Robert Moses from 1937 to 1964, is falling apart. With the City’s recent federal funding appeal for repairs denied, local community groups have amplified their call for a holistic rethinking of the entire BQE corridor. To support that effort, IPA Fellows Marcus Wilford and Severn Clay-Youman, with IPA Research Assistant Jennifer Pham, developed large-scale detailed physical models of neighborhoods adjacent to the BQE. The models, with a removable kit of parts including buildings, landscapes, and alternatives to the highway, are modified by workshop participants, with their proposals documented and then shared with local leaders and elected officials. Workshops include presentations by architect Adam Paul Susaneck, founder of Segregation by Design, featuring specific buildings, civic spaces, and social groups in the neighborhood that were destroyed by the construction of the highway.
Brooklyn residents gathered to discuss ways to redress the damage that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) continues to inflict on their communities. Modifying large-scale physical models of urban fabric along the BQE, workshop participants collectively removed the highway and proposed housing, retail, offices, schools, parks, gardens, recreation, and urban farms in the former right-of-way, sharing their visions for the future of their neighborhoods.
In his remarks on June 16th during the inaugural MCV workshop, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso contrasted the BQE with the West Side Highway, a former elevated highway that was replaced by a street level tree-lined boulevard with bike lanes and waterfront parks, saying “it’s up to political will, it’s up to us, to fight together, to say that we don’t want the status quo.”
Brooklyn residents gathered to discuss ways to redress the damage that the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE) continues to inflict on their communities. Modifying large-scale physical models of urban fabric along the BQE, workshop participants collectively removed the highway and proposed housing, retail, offices, schools, parks, gardens, recreation, and urban farms in the former right-of-way, sharing their visions for the future of their neighborhoods.
In his remarks on June 16th during the inaugural MCV workshop, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso contrasted the BQE with the West Side Highway, a former elevated highway that was replaced by a street level tree-lined boulevard with bike lanes and waterfront parks, saying “it’s up to political will, it’s up to us, to fight together, to say that we don’t want the status quo.”
