Virtual Seminars are engaging and interactive learning opportunities for small groups of mayors and their senior staff. Each one-hour seminar features a deep-dive presentation on a single timely topic, followed by a moderated group discussion among the attendees.
Social Infrastructure is Essential Infrastructure: Shaping the Affordable & Joyful City
Social infrastructure – the physical places that shape our capacity to connect – is essential for the health and vitality of communities. But how can city leaders actually plan for it? Stemming from a recently published resource by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU and Gehl, this seminar will offer practical advice for ensuring that your city’s municipal buildings, recreational spaces, gathering places, streets, and more contribute to the civic health of your community and help make the affordable, joyful city possible. The presentation will offer six key recommendations for reinvesting in civic spaces large and small and explore how those recommendations play out in real-life examples, followed by a candid discussion about how city leaders can operationalize designs that foster human connection and community.
This event is open to mayors and senior city staff only; registration is required. The presentation portion will be posted to the event page after the seminar.
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Speakers
The Institute for Public Knowledge (IPK) brings theoretically serious scholarship to bear on major public issues. Located at New York University and directed by Eric Klinenberg (author of Palaces for the People), it nurtures collaboration among social researchers in New York and around the world. It builds bridges between university-based researchers and organizations pursuing practical action. It supports communication between researchers and broader publics. And it examines transformations in the public sphere, social science, and the university as a social institution as these change the conditions for public knowledge.
Gehl is a global urban design and strategy consultancy that shapes places where people and planet can thrive. We believe that by applying a people-first approach to planning, design, and research, we are able to solve some of our communities’ most pressing challenges. Founded in Copenhagen and active globally—with studios in New York and San Francisco—Gehl has worked in over 250 cities across six continents.
Eamon O’Connor
Senior Project Manager
Gehl
As an urban planner, designer, and strategist at Gehl, he brings expertise in people-first planning and design, visual and written storytelling, and data analytics to projects that span geographies, scales and disciplines: from downtown public realm plans to global research on social infrastructure, from urban park design to impact assessments of philanthropic portfolios of public space investments. He holds a dual master’s degree in urban planning, with distinction, from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
Michael Koncewicz
Associate Director
Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University
Michael Koncewicz is the Associate Director at the Institute for Public Knowledge and was one of IPK’s on-the-ground researchers for its federally funded social infrastructure survey of New York. Koncewicz is a political historian who previously worked for the National Archives at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum and at NYU’s Tamiment Library, where he curated the archive’s Cold War collections and managed its Center for the United States and the Cold War. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Jacobin, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The Washington Post.