The woman who led the transformation of New York into a friendly city

Yesterday, like today, Janette Sadik-Khan (San Francisco, 63 years old) went to work as director of Bloomberg Associates—a philanthropic consultancy for the improvement of urban space—by bicycle. Tomorrow, the former New York transportation commissioner between 2007 and 2013 will once again use Citibike, a public and privately managed bicycle rental system that she herself inaugurated in her last year in office. “Yesterday there were 143,000 of us who used the system in the city!” She announces with enormous effusiveness through a video call (without video) on a hot afternoon at the end of April. The project started with 600 stations and about 3,300 bicycles. It now has 2,613 stations and 36,280 bicycles.

“It will never work. It’s too cold in New York. It’s too hot in New York. New York is too dangerous. New York is too New York,” Sadik-Khan remembers with a laugh all the bad omens that portended the project to provide the city with this bicycle rental system that had been operating in Barcelona (Bicing) or Paris for about six years. (Vélib). This story of New York urban transformation and others that took place in that same city, but also in Rio de Janeiro, Auckland or Toronto, make up Fight in the street (Captain Swing), a book written with his collaborator and also transportation expert Seth Solomonow, which narrates the nature and implementation process – renderings, before and after photos and even images of protests illustrate the explanations – of many of the most relevant changes that cities have experienced in the last two decades, from superblocks to tactical urbanism, through intervention during restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. covid-19 which converted 10,000 parking spaces in New York into terraces for bars and restaurants. “The pandemic helped us remember that we must reclaim the streets,” says the American.

What has defined Sadik-Khan’s work to date has been his daring. While it is true that some of the transformations that she led in New York with the help of the then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, were already in operation in other capitals, the speed and determination with which she put them into operation is unparalleled. “You have to move quickly, because people don’t believe that cities can change. If you show what can happen, even if it is using tactical urbanism, painting a street one night, the city already mutates, it is something else. Reduce anxiety about change. And being temporary makes people relax. It is understood that little has been invested and perhaps that itself makes the perception of the change less than what it really is,” says she, who has a degree in Political Science from Occidental College in Los Angeles. You also have to move on a smaller scale. And the book offers various examples of small interventions, such as, for example, the attack on Pearl Street, in the Dumbo district of New York. A chamfer converted into a small park that can be called a plaza. “This helps you see what could be achieved.”

The work of pedestrianizing streets, eliminating parking spaces… All of this, which may sound objectively positive, has been facing open opposition from citizens and the political establishment every time it tries to establish itself in almost any city in the world. There are people who even bother flower pots. After two decades dedicated to making cities a better place to live, Sadik-Khan has understood that his responsibility “is not to avoid controversies, but to lead transformative projects.” “You have to be ambitious. And able to show the economic benefits, because, in most cases, the data supports us. With them we must confront those who say that pedestrianization is bad for commerce, or even discredit those who understand that a superblock prevents ambulances from entering,” he points out regarding some of the reluctance shown regarding this type of projects. It has been said that the 15-minute city is a ghetto designed by governments to keep us under control.

Sadik-Khan’s great enemy is the car. She claims to be tired of a century of cities built for cars. “I want the human being to be at least as important in the city as the car,” jokes the former vice president of the consulting firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. “The point is that, in the end, a car is a car,” she insists. “I don’t care that it is autonomous, electric… It occupies the same space, a space that is not its own.” After all, cities already existed before cars.

The problem arises when the city was not built long before the arrival of the vehicle, but almost at the same time, as happens in many American capitals. So, the process is not one of demanding the return of streets to pedestrians, but rather the transformation required is much deeper, longer, more expensive. Humanizing Milan or Valencia is not the same as Phoenix or Houston. “But it’s not impossible. It is true that it is necessary to create areas with greater density to be able to articulate a different transportation system.” Los Angeles could be an example of how you can bet on this type of change in a place that was built only with the car in mind, where there are streets without sidewalks, where until recently walking was a suspicious activity. The Los Angeles city has opted for density, both by building huge condominiums and by developing groups of five or six-story buildings with green areas and bike lanes. “In recent years, Los Angeles has invested more in public transportation than New York.”

One of his most celebrated interventions was the one that took place in Times Square, probably what until then was one of the busiest and at the same time least pedestrian-friendly spaces in the world. He cut off traffic, paved and placed tables and chairs, taking advantage, it must also be said, that the area was no longer an Apache District as in the seventies of the last century. “Even though it is a tourist area, you never do this thinking
about the tourist. Everything you undertake in the city should only be thinking about its inhabitants,” he points out.

The fact that these changes have been undertaken in large cities such as Milan or Paris and in emblematic places such as Times Square may lead one to think that this is an exclusive deal for large cities, with their million-dollar budgets, their brand spirit and their media impact. . “No!” he intervenes. “All cities are transformable. If this goes well in London, the mayor will be re-elected, of course, but it is not a gesture for the gallery nor something that should make other cities think that they cannot change. “Everyone can do it”

_