NYC's Former Top City Planner Will Turn His Red Hook Home Into Community Workspace

RED HOOK, BROOKLYN — New York City's former chief urban designer is launching a new community planning workshop out of his Red Hook home.

Alexandros Washburn helped direct the Department of City Planning from 2007 until 2014, he said, before leaving to take a teaching position with the Stevens Institute of Technology, where he launched the school's Center for Coastal Resilience and Urban Xcellence (CRUX).

Washburn knows coastal resilience professionally as well as personally. As written about in a 2013 article in The New York Times, his Red Hook house, located at 373 Van Brunt St., was flooded with three feet of water during Hurricane Sandy. Washburn told the paper that he sent his family to safety, but stayed behind to observe the damage.

“I got to see what a storm does,” he told the paper of his mentality at the time. "You have to understand everything in order to solve it."

Washburn is still teaching at Stevens, but he said he's also focused on hyper-local planning in Red Hook, where he's lived for about a decade.

On Dec. 7, he's going to open up his house for the first time from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. to any community member who wants to discuss their planning priorities or ideas for the neighborhood.

"The idea is to counter the kind of top-down planning that communities are often subject to," Washburn said.

He highlighted a Red Hook redevelopment proposal recently released by global giant AECOM as an example of a planning approach that must be avoided.

"Nobody asked anybody anything about what they wanted, about what's important to them," Washburn said of AECOM. "If you want to know what's important to a community, you have to listen."

While he doesn't have a meeting schedule set yet, Washburn said he's hoping to run the workshops regularly, perhaps several times per week. He said his goal is to produce a three-dimensional map of Red Hook that will "start layering in all the ideas that we have" about the community's future.

He then plans on presenting the proposals to community boards, to the city, and to any other relevant party, he said.

Washburn said he's very proud of the community engagement work the city's planners do, such as the Gowanus PLACES study that's moving forward this week.

But he still thinks that his approach — in which he and a few students will jot down community ideas on a blackboard and help translate them into something more formal — is of value.

"This is the opposite of a kind of top-down, expert approach," Washburn said. "This is a new way of looking at planning."

Pictured at top: an old image of Washburn's home in Red Hook. Image via Google Maps.