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ABOUT PlanNYC
PlanNYC is a web-based tool to give citizens and organizations interested in housing and development in New York City easy access to facts, news, and events related to major urban planning projects. Unlike traditional media web sites, PlanNYC is organized by both planning project and neighborhood. Unlike government agency and many advocacy websites, PlanNYC links to organizations with perspectives on all sides of each issue.
PlanNYC is a complete urban planning web portal, with news summaries and links to development-related articles, official documents such as environmental impact statements, and a calendar of upcoming planning events with local community board meetings as well as citywide panels and hearings. PlanNYC brings together information from advocacy organizations, government agencies and authorities, academic institutions, neighborhood groups, and media organizations -- all in one location.
This website is maintained by NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. PlanNYC complements the Furman Center's yearly report, the State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods, as well as the Center's other online information tool, the New York City Housing and Neighborhood Information System (NYCHANIS).
PlanNYC was originally developed by Jordan Anderson as part of his New York University Master of Urban Planning Capstone project at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service.
Please email contact@plannyc.org with questions, comments, or complaints.
About the Furman Center
The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, a joint center between NYU School of Law and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, is the leading academic research center in New York City devoted to the public policy aspects of real estate, land use and housing development. Please visit our website for more information on the Furman Center’s publications, research, and events.
Contact us
Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy
New York University School of Law
40 Washington Square South, Suite 314-H
New York, NY 10012-1099
Telephone: 212-998-6713
Fax: 212-995-4341
Email: furmancenter@nyu.edu
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Why don't you have the full article/report text directly on the website?
What makes PlanNYC unique? Can't I get all this information from other websites?
A story's link requires that I register or pay to view the article. Why?
Who collects all this planning news and information?
What are the technical details of the site?
Where are all the maps, graphics, and photographs? This website is boring!
ANSWERS
What is PlanNYC?
PlanNYC is a web-based tool that improves access to information about major urban planning projects in New York City. Unlike traditional media web sites, PlanNYC is organized by both planning issue and neighborhood. Unlike government agency and advocacy websites, the Portal links to organizations with viewpoints on all sides of each issue.
You might think of PlanNYC as a well-organized collection of Google results. For example, imagine you're searching for information on the Atlantic Yards development. Rather than listing 82,000 unfiltered hits when you type "atlantic yards" into Google, PlanNYC:
- Shows the neighborhoods affected by the project
- Links to the key sites on the project
- Lists dozens of representative stories from major media, web logs, civic organizations, and neighborhood groups
Who can use PlanNYC?
We designed the Portal to be friendly to everyone from the average New York City resident who is interested in neighborhood developments to the hard core urban planner who has no time to search a dozen websites for information on a project.
Why don't you have the full article/report text directly on the website?
Some websites do copy the full text of news and magazine articles into their sites. However, this may not be covered under the "fair use" provision of the Copyright Act. We want the Portal to be as informative as possible, but we also want it to be legal.
What makes PlanNYC unique? Can't I get all this information from other websites?
There are three differences between PlanNYC and some other sources of planning information on the Web.
First, PlanNYC is neutral. Advocacy websites, civic blogs, and even official city agency sites are designed to persuade as well as inform. The mission of the Portal is to link to information that will help you make up your own mind. In fact, we hope that you end up reading a point-of-view opposite your own--that's what deliberation is all about.
Second, PlanNYC organizes planning and development information in the way that people think about such information--by project and neighborhood. Some websites organize news and information under more general topics like 'land use' and 'transportation'. Those topics are useful but incomplete. Take the Atlantic Yards development as an example. It involves land use, transportation, economic development, and historic preservation to name a few.
Finally, PlanNYC is designed to be comprehensive. Planning projects last years--if not decades--from inception to implementation. And they may not stop there. PlanNYC links to news and information over a project's entire life cycle so you can watch the project unfold from beginning to end.
All that being said, there are some terrific sources of New York City planning and policy information on the Web. We highly recommend Gotham Gazette for its editorials, thoroughly-researched stories, and balanced links to articles on topics ranging from urban planning to education to local elections.
A story's link requires that I register or pay to view the article. Why?
Some news websites, such as nytimes.com require free registration in order to read most articles. Although this registration can be cumbersome, these websites often contain valuable information on planning and development in New York City.
A couple of websites, for example the New York Sun, require a paid account for full access to most articles. Although some stories are free, articles requiring payment will only be available in a shortened form. In such cases you would have to either purchase an online subscription to the Sun or pick up a paper copy of the newspaper.
In addition, many news organizations only make stories available for a week or two before adding them to a pay-per-view archive. You may find older articles from major newspapers at the New York Public Library.
What is RSS? How do I use it?
RSS allows you to read news from a lot of sources without visiting a lot of web pages. It's useful if you're trying to keep up with more than a dozen web logs or news sources on a daily basis. It's not useful if not. You need to have a news aggregator (such as Bloglines) or a web browser that allows you to keep RSS-based bookmarks (like Firefox).
To use it, click the orange RSS button for the project or community district you want to monitor. Highlight the URL that comes up and copy it (Ctrl-C). Open your news aggregator and create a new news feed. Paste in the URL. From now on, whenever there is news in your community district or about your project of interest, you'll see it in your news aggregator.
Some useful links: (these are not endorsements)
Bloglines (a web-based RSS reader)
FeedDemon (an RSS reader for Windows)
NewsMac (an RSS reader for Macintosh)
Who collects all this planning news and information?
Harvesting, summarizing and posting the information contained on PlanNYC is a large task. To assist in the daily search for relevant news stories, Jordan Anderson wrote a program (based on Julian Bond's GNEWS2RSS) that searches Google News several times per day and proposes stories based on keyword matches for each project. Ultimately, though, good old-fashioned human beings review, summarize, and post all news and information. The site is maintained daily by research assistants from New York University School of Law and the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
Based on the articles you've selected and left out, I can tell you support project X and you're against project Y. I thought you were supposed to be neutral?!
We certainly intend to be neutral about the way we present information on PlanNYC. And we appreciate your comments if you feel we're consistently leaving out an important point of view.
In keeping with the Portal's mission, we try to give you the straight facts on each planning project as well as informative or persuasive editorials on one side or the other. In the latter case, we try to maintain an editorial balance in the long run.
What are the technical details of the site?
The site runs on a Linux box, served up by an Apache web server. The web pages themselves are dynamically generated from content in a mySQL database by a combination of custom PHP scripts and the PostNuke content management system.
We're happy to release any and all new code we've written under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Until we have time to clean it up, it's ugly. But it works!
Where are all the maps, graphics, and photographs? This website is boring!
In this broadband age, we should probably be streaming video fly-bys of planning projects, displaying lots of full-screen interactive Macromedia Flash movies, and including galleries of 10 megapixel photographs.
In reality, we're trying our darnedest to make browsing easy for people with text-only browsers, reduce access times for people with modems, and increase the signal-to-pretty-picture ratio on the site. Plus, we do link to sites that provide (and actually own) the maps and pictures.
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