Cynthia Nikitin on Public Spaces and Resiliency

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Brett Barry  0:03  
Welcome to Kaatscast, a biweekly podcast delivering interviews, arts, culture, and history from New York's Catskill Mountains. This week, "People, Places, Possibilities," a conversation with Cynthia Nikitin. Sustainable Hudson Valley is working to accelerate progress against climate change through programs to scale up the Clean Energy Marketplace and by helping communities plan for more resource-efficient patterns of living and working. Like everyone in the Hudson Valley, we are confronting four major crises: COVID-19, social injustice, economic recession, and climate change. SHV is spearheading a large-scale public conversation on responding to the urgency of each crisis, while understanding how they are connected and using that understanding to generate more sophisticated solutions. It's an ambitious idea that SHV is developing with its network of experts including six senior fellows this summer. One of them is Boiceville resident Cynthia Nikitin; a 28-year veteran of the project for public spaces. She has managed hundreds of placemaking projects around the world; helping people to design downtowns, transit facilities, libraries, and government buildings in ways that enhance sociability, connectivity, and usefulness, for example, by developing residences and workplaces near transit and each other. Right now, Cynthia is excited about the way that communities and businesses are being forced to rethink how space is used, even expanding restaurant space into parking lots and surrounding neighborhoods for safety. She thinks this small shift can drive bigger changes in reclaiming excess streetscape, parking lots, and underutilized land for community revitalization and resilience. I visited Cynthia at Brunel Park in Boiceville, New York. If you've ever driven up Route 28 in Boiceville, there's a good chance you've seen the totem poles on her property.

Cynthia Nikitin  2:18  
The Brunel Sculpture Garden was created in the 1920s by a man named Emile Brunel, who came here from France, who bought the land in 1921, and spent the next 20 years building these amazing concrete statues and totem poles, celebrating the wonders of nature and Native American history and culture and he ran a hotel on the property, which is no longer Le Chalet Indien, which was very popular after World War I and before and during World War II with artists and designers, mostly from Europe, who came here to escape the Nazis. He also was friends with the Roosevelts, Enrico Caruso was a visitor, Irving Berlin spent time here, Jimmy and Max Ernst as well ... artists ... so it has sort of a long tradition of being sort of an ... a Community Arts and Cultural Center, which is really our vision for the place moving forward. We are a non-profit organization founded in the end of 2018 and we created the Friends of Brunel Park to steward the land and the sculptures sort of for the next seven generations, so that we were hoping that there'll be an entity to continue to manage and operate the place, take care of the gardens, and run public programs, you know, long after we're no longer able to, so we really see it as sort of as a legacy for the community. It's one of only two historic designated properties in the town of Olive and we think it's important sort of to that local history that this place continues to just survive and thrive and welcome visitors.

Brett Barry  3:58  
Pushed most recently by the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts are bound in reclaiming and reimagining space.

Cynthia Nikitin  4:07  
Yeah, this has been happening in about 260 cities [at least 260 cities around the country] with the advent of COVID is looking for ways for people to be outside safely and to sort of take advantage of the public space that cities and towns have and repurposing them for outdoor dining, walking, cycling, active transportation, and socializing. You know, 80% of the public space of any city are streets and roads and this is like the first time that 80% of the population are being served by them ... it's not just for cars. So it's really the first time in about 50 years that we've been having this sort of widespread dynamic conversation about streets as public space that's not being led by traffic engineers in the transportation departments ... what it's doing by creating more space for people in streets and turning parking spaces into parks, et cetera, cities are democratizing the streets for the first time. Because, as I said, they are a part of the public realm. They're everyone's property and we sort of we have a right to them. It's really an issue of what Professor Julian Agyeman calls spatial justice, which is how planners, local governments, traffic engineers, and departments of transportation allocate street space ... is it allocated to those who rely on walking in public transit to get around or to the privileged people driving the largest private vehicles and mostly the people with the car is won ... they were the ones that got to use the space and it's kind of an experiment and, you know, in the entire interstate highway system and suburbia was an experiment that happened everywhere around the United States at once. But, unlike most experiments, it was never evaluated. The success was never measured. It was never questioned and it's kind of been in place for half a century and it's largely failed us in a lot of ways, so this is like a new dynamic [again] experiment, where it just seems to make sense that if you have ... if people are not going out and they're not driving on streets, you've got all this vacant real estate and there's a much better use for it than just parking vehicles or, you know, supporting commuters moving through a town. I've been working in the field of public space for the last 28 years, so this has been work that I've been personally involved in for like two decades; training traffic engineers in designing streets to support the communities that they go through building communities through transportation rather than building transportation through communities; working with transit agencies to think about their bus stops and train stations as public spaces and places and portals to communities; the movement has been around for quite a while. This is just sort of an unprecedented moment where all of this work, all of this research, these pilot projects have sort of come together to show ... let's do it. You know, it's gonna work and the fact of the matter is it is working.

Brett Barry  7:03  
Well before the pandemic, major cities had been taking ambitious steps to reclaim public spaces from traffic: New York has pedestrianized Times Square and created hundreds of miles of trails, San Francisco's Market Street as a car free promenade. The Mayor of Paris has made reclaiming public space from cars [a major political platform] reducing traffic 40% and winning her re-election. Hudson Valley communities are experimenting as well from the slow street strategy in Hudson to many restaurants expanding into their surroundings in Rhinebeck and other towns. How can these steps be the beginning of a more comprehensive and enduring shift from car dominance to people-centered public spaces with more pedestrian and bike opportunities?

Cynthia Nikitin  7:54  
We've seen experiments like this before. You know, Times Square in New York was an experiment and the reason everything was done with plastic tables and chairs and bollards and plants and pots was in case it failed miserably; they could clear everything out overnight and let the traffic flow. We had the temporary street closures like CicLAvia, you know, where people are out using the streets for walking and biking and it's good for people's health, the environment, and the air quality improves those three hours on Sunday when people are biking instead of ... instead of driving. So we are seeing that these experiments are working. They need to be evaluated, you know, the positive impacts measured, documented, and disseminated. You know, we ... we see the concept. We now need to sort of do the documentation to prove exactly what the benefits are. But, in terms of making them permanent, I mean, the longer they stay in place, the longer they are likely to be permanent. You know, people are not going to want to come in and take them out. There's also money being spent, for example, the city of Cork, Ireland spent 2,000,000 Euros to create four kilometers of new cycle lanes in Downtown Cork, which is not a very big city. So if you're going to spend 2,000,000,000 Euros as an experiment and then you're going to cancel it, you know, that is that money down the drain. So there's a financial incentive to keep them going and making them permanent, but people really need to speak up and tell the local municipalities and their local authorities that they want these changes to stay—and when there are discussions about reverting back to, you know, four lanes of through traffic, the community and the people that really want this to happen—actually need to be at the table and make their voices heard. These kinds of changes [the street closures and bike lanes] should be implemented not only on commercial streets, you know, in like the wealthier parts of town, but in commercial streets in minority and low-income communities like the Neighborhood Design Center is doing in Baltimore, you know, to support local and minority-owned businesses that are at the heart of their communities. We find sometimes these changes happen in, you know, in the wealthier ... wealthier parts of town and so in terms of sort of spatial justice that really needs to be a consideration.

Brett Barry  10:07  
This kind of flexibility is a sign of resiliency, which is the focus of Cynthia's professional practice today. I asked her what are some other aspects of resilience that are important in local planning, especially in light of climate change.

Cynthia Nikitin  10:21  
I think what's important in local planning is there has to be a recognition that a community's connection to a place is at the very heart of resilience. We can build physically resilient places that also build social resilience. They kind of work together: public spaces support interaction and cohesion and communities, but if you're just doing resilience for its own sake or, you know, the green infrastructure, it has limited value if residents don't really feel attached to it or don't feel invested in it, so the future of resilient cities depends on residents and their investment in an environment in ... in the places where they live. So engaging impacted residents in planning for their future is absolutely vital: collaboration needs to be inescapable, co-designing with neighborhood residents and citizens, you know, at the neighborhood and district scale and we need to build equity into every decision. You know, the goal is environmental quality and human equality. Great places are not only just environmentally sound, but they're socially just. So I think planners need to sort of reflect upon their underlying preconceptions in terms of what defines success and who ultimately benefits because many of these initiatives [as wonderful as they are] are implemented by urban designers and engineers and architects not by citizens or mainstream organizations or environmental groups. So as such, they ... they run the risk of systematically reproducing many of the urban spatial and social inequities and injustices that have characterized cities for more than a century, so not everyone can afford to live on a lightly trafficked street, which is where complete street treatments generally take place and the question is ... when sidewalks are taken over by restaurants to provide space for outdoor dining, it's generally to the benefit of their patrons in the restaurants themselves, but where are the rest of us, you know, supposed to wait for the bus or walk when the sidewalks are full of, you know, wealthy diners from the suburbs. So these are questions that ... that on the surface, everything looks great but, you know, who is really benefiting and who is sort of not being taken into consideration ... who is missing out?

Brett Barry  12:32  
Cynthia Nikitin lives in Boiceville and founded the Friends of Brunel Park to support a beautiful sculpture garden. I asked what she's learned from that experience about how to encourage people to care about public space.

Cynthia Nikitin  12:46  
What I learned is no one will invest in you, if you don't invest in yourself. No one will invest in your main street or your downtown, if the city does not invest in itself. So when people say, "We don't have money to make main street better, we need to get more businesses here." It's ... the argument is flipped. You really need to show that you care about your city and your town because that will attract other people to want to shop there, live there, open businesses there, et cetera. So, you know, you need to ... you need to invest in yourself first, but this idea about attachment is what gets people to care about public space. There was a Knight Foundation study done a number of years ago called "Soul of the Community," and people said, "Oh, what makes people attached? Oh, jobs and good schools and, you know, quality of life," and it's really ... they found three things: social offerings for activities, aesthetics that the place was attractive and comfortable and safe feeling, and openness, which meant it was welcoming and inclusive and this was a study of 26 communities, so it's really about fostering attachment and that also emerges when people feel a sense of belonging, which includes feeling recognized and heard and respected and given an opportunity to contribute to the place they love, you know, with their time, their energy, their knowledge, their wisdom, and expertise, you know, as well as with in kind and financial donations, you know, to make it even better, so we're hoping to encourage people to come here and figure out how they want to contribute to it. Is there a program they'd like to run? Are there other folks they'd like to bring in? Is there a workshop or a class they'd like to take? Are there other sort of resources or people that they know that might be of help to us? We are looking to continue to maintain and expand the pollinator native gardens, and of course our statues are almost a hundred years old and several of them needs some repair, so we're hoping to sort of create that sense of belonging here where people will feel that they are welcome and that this is part of their community and they want to ... they want to support—keeping it, you know, looking wonderful.

Brett Barry  14:52  
The Boiceville Trailhead to the Ashokan Rail Trail is just a quarter of a mile from Brunel Park. Cynthia sees possibilities for trails and towns to connect.

Cynthia Nikitin  15:04  
Having trails not only for exercise and recreation but for, you know, active transportation where people, you know, you can ride your bike, you buy some chocolate, you know, it's fruition chocolate and the trails are really also sort of connected to commercial corridors. We've been thinking about connecting trails to trails, but we haven't really been thinking enough about connecting trails to community centers or to retail areas or even to let people know when they're at the Ashokan Rail Trail that there's pizza and chocolate in Olive's Cafe, just a hundred yards away, and there's outdoor seating and dining. These are economic engines in many, many places. How can we capitalize on that? I don't think there's been enough attention there about sort of this old trail town concept. And then, of course, sort of tying public transit into that and looking at people's complete experience of the area where you can put your bike on a UCAT bus and get dropped off the trail and they'll have lunch and it's sort of how do we connect. We have so many wonderful resources here, but it's just generally my experience from doing this work for so long. Connecting the dots is just needs to happen more. You know, people need to think a little bit outside the box and think about the unlikely suspects and who they can partner with and how we can activate these programs in a way that's socially and economically beneficial.

Brett Barry  16:26  
To learn more, follow "Sustainable Hudson Valley" and to check sustainhv.org for dates of upcoming webinars. Thanks to our sponsors: Sustainable Hudson Valley and the 52-mile Catskill Mountains Scenic Byway; following New York State Route 28 through the heart of the Central Catskills. For maps, itineraries, and links to area restaurants, shops, and accommodations, visit sceniccatskills.com. Kaatscast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio. Please don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you again in two weeks. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.