Best of #ModernMonday: Designing for Resiliency

Dwell: First off, when did modern wayfinding come about? What large-scale historic and present-day wayfinding projects did you research and how did these inform the WalkNYC plan? Michael Bierut: Wayfinding is as old as mapmaking, and maps of New York go back almost to its first European settlements. There were probably three useful precedents for the work we did on Walk NYC. First were a series of urban wayfinding programs in Great Britain that many of our team members, including CityID and T-Kartor, have been involved with over the years. Second was a wayfinding system I worked on for the downtown New York business district back in the '90s. This was, at the time, the largest single coordinated wayfinding program in New York City and we learned a lot, not only about how people navigate a complex urban district, but what you have to deal with when you install things like maps on the streets of New York in terms of regulations and maintenance. Finally, there were the graphics that Unimark did for the New York subway system in the late sixties and early seventies. I worked for Massimo Vignelli at the start of my career, and I was always impressed by the way the Unimark system managed to superimpose an abstract visual logic on a city that seems so illogical at every turn. WalkNYC attempts to do the same thing.

Field Assessment of Property Damage Near Atlantic Ave. in New York "I was surprised about how many people wanted to go above and beyond with repairs and rebuilding," says Minnery. "People really wanted to invest in making sure this didn’t happen again, demonstrating a greater appetite for mitigating risk. If our government leadership were to become aware of it, that would motivate them to create more policies that would allow citizens to do that work." Photo by Open Architecture Network

The 1.7-mile-wide tornado hung over Greensburg for eight minutes and destroyed nearly all of the 1.5-square-mile town.

What types of small, easy, or even invisible updates to cities can support our environment in the long term? @thisisheatherc: Design should work with, not against, its location. Local, sustainable materials, native plants, etc., make a difference @OlyTsav: Water retention, solar panels, and wind harvesting. Just basic energy renewal. @Adrian_Benepe: No spot in a city is too small to capture storm water & help reduce flooding and water pollution

By replacing asphalt, the new playground manages nearly half a million gallons of stormwater annually, improving the health of local waterways. At various public school sites in New York City, green infrastructure components proposed by The Trust for Public Land have included small green roofs on storage sheds, rain gardens, rain catchment systems, and artificial turf fields with a gravel base that allow stormwater to pass through and be absorbed into the ground. With such improvements, green infrastructure components can capture at least the first inch of stormwater that falls on the playgrounds each time it rains.