Esquire profiles Janette Sadik-Khan in their series The Brightest: 15 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope. Although it initially seems curiously focused on her personality instead of her accomplishments, the piece makes a convincing case that the two are inseparably linked, and as such, is a good example of the political and social acumen that designers who wish to operate in the expanded field would do well to develop. I give her bonus points for being a hacker:
Whereas most city officials and past DOT commissioners would have insisted on capital funds for something like, say, a bike lane, Sadik-Khan teases them out on the cheap. When you use capital funds for a project, you need approval from a few different places, and it takes months, sometimes years. So she takes a bunch of guys already painting double lines and gets them to dot a bike lane with the extra paint. Where she wants a plaza to swallow a car lane, she convinces abutting stores and the local business-improvement chapter to pay for the cleaning and to take the chairs and tables in every evening and set them out every morning. She tells them that shutting down the street will actually help their business, the way it did in Times Square. She shows them the numbers and where once they may have been against her, suddenly they are footing her bill. She doesn’t even need to check in with Bloomberg. Like a high school a cappella group trying to get to Ibiza for spring break, Sadik-Khan finds money between seat cushions. She uses her guile and glamour to get what she needs, craftily but lawfully.
More downright rebelliously, she sometimes circumvents the community by experimenting with test swatches called pilots, like little harbingers of the future. With a pilot change, you don’t necessarily need community permission, since the idea is that you may end up just taking it down. For example, with the DUMBO parklet, a past commissioner might have educated the residents first, tried to get them to buy into the plan. But it takes months to convince a neighborhood to agree to a change. Instead, she just painted. She did the same thing in the Meatpacking District, when she drummed up a plaza next to the Apple store, and again on Willoughby Street in Brooklyn. She’s figured out a quiet way to get her way without getting the pesky public in her face.
Part of this is psychological warfare. Moses once said, “Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up.” Sadik-Khan has co-opted those words. Under her rule, bike lanes materialize overnight. Sidewalks become pop-up cafés and flowers bloom inside repurposed pots in quick and cowering deference. New Yorkers aren’t used to this kind of change. So there they sit at their new café and they sip their Darjeeling, looking rather stunned or drugged and if not pleased, then at the very least seated.
And extra bonus points for this anecdote about the endurance of cities, and the importance of engaging the city we have:
“Broadway,” she says, “was simply a powerful farmer’s precolonial footpath, and the great thing it did was create these wonderful squares.” But now she doesn’t need it anymore. So she restored the grid by doing the math. There were seventy pedestrians for every ten cars in Times Square, but cars were louder and more catered to, so, “you know, the balance was in the wrong direction.” She turned it into a village green, where tourists have room to rubberneck on the sidewalks while busy New Yorkers can zoom out of their way across the plaza. That’s a pretty monstrous change, and it happened over a long weekend.
The full profile, which is well worth reading, is here.
[mammoth has mentioned Janette Sadik-Khan before in the context of Bus Rapid Transit here — also be sure to visit this comment by FASLANYC in that same post for a series of links to things he has written about Sadik Khan.]
