The Social Life Of Small Urban Spaces

From JP Bikes, looks like a good time.

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Come to the Connolly Library in JP on Monday Jan. 9th at 5:30 for this excellent documentary and forum on how people use public spaces. It’s especially relevant given all of the local efforts to rework local street networks into more pedestrian and bike friendly environments.

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Description

The Boston Cyclists Union, JP Bikes and LivableStreets Alliance invite you to watch and discuss with an expert forum the classic 1980 one-hour documentary “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” by the witty journalist William H. Whyte. This documentary surprised everyone with its revelations on how people actually use public spaces, and what makes them use some more and some less, and it’s super fun to watch. If you’ve ever enjoyed people-watching on a sunny day—this is the ultimate version, early 80s style.

Afterward, discuss the movie and the future of place-making in Boston with three renowned experts in different aspects of the built environment, Dr. Walter Willett, Aaron Naparstek, and Peter Furth. These three speakers come at the built environment from the fields of public health, medicine, transportation engineering, community organizing and journalism. It should be a very interesting evening!

Dr. Walter Willett MD DrPH is the Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition, and Chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health and also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is considered one of the world’s experts on nutrition. Willett is the principal investigator of the second Nurse’s Health Study, a compilation of studies regarding older women’s health and risk factors for major chronic diseases. He has published over 1,000 scientific articles regarding various aspects of diet and disease and is the second most cited author in clinical medicine. In the public eye, Willett is perhaps best known for his 2001 book Eat, Drink and Be Healthy, which presents nutritional information and recommendations based on the currently available body of nutrition science.

Aaron Naparstek is the founder of Streetsblog (an online publication providing daily coverage of transportation with blogs in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Washington DC. Launched in 2006, Streetsblog has played a significant role in transforming New York City transportation policy as well as cities all over the world. Based in Brooklyn, Naparstek’s advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bike network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Peter G. Furth is a professor of engineering at Northeastern University and the author of “A Greenway Network for the Boston Area,” a study of the possibilities for an interconnected system of off-street paths in Boston, as well as several other studies regarding improving transit, bicycling, and walking conditions. His work led to the experimental sharrow (bicycle shared lane marking) with guidelines on Longwood Avenue in Brookline, and several other improvements for biking and walking in Boston and neighboring towns.

More on the movie: In the late 1970s, William H. Whyte, author of “The Organization Man” and the first to publish Jane Jacobs in Fortune Magazine, took a leave of absence from his job there to study one of the issues he’d always cared most passionately about: cities. He started with a simple topic: public plazas. His hometown of New York City had recently begun giving developers incentives to build public plazas to give people some breathing room in the crowded city and he decided to investigate which plazas worked. He took to the task like a scientist, setting up time-lapse cameras with digital clocks and making charts and graphs and notes. And the conclusions he came to surprised everyone. The result was this movie “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” and a book of the same title.

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