Engineering Change Speaker Series: Building the "Perfect City" For All

If you are a city dweller, or do a lot of walking, chances are you have an informal cartography in your head of your regular routes. How you get from your home to the bus stop. School to work. The corner store to pick up a carton of milk. There are probably blocks you avoid, short cuts you take … or don’t. Where a middle-aged white man walks can look really different than the route chosen by a young woman of color. Or a mother with kids. A wealthy neighborhood versus a gentrifying one versus a low-income community.

This process of "avoidance mapping" provides a lens through which to view and understand all these factors and how they interplay and change over time. The New York based working group “Perfect City” has been leading conversations between community members, architects and urban planners about who belongs, who gets to claim space, who can’t and why.

In our next Engineering Change speaker series, presented by The Difference Engine, on September 16 at 12:30 p.m. Pacific / 3:30 p.m. Eastern, Aaron Landsman and Jahmorei Snipes of Perfect City will talk about their experiences with avoidance mapping in New York City and how it can be used to build a more inclusive city.