Moments of Supreme Nothingness
My Liveable City|January - March 2017

Buvana Murali and Amit Arya show us the importance of public spaces to New Yorkers and explain why every city should have a space where people can blissfully do absolutely nothing.

Moments of Supreme Nothingness

Elizabeth Diller, partner at DS+R and architect of New York’s latest beloved public space, is famous for having once said, “The High Line, if it’s about anything, it’s about nothing, about doing nothing. You can walk and sit, but you can’t be productive.”

Public spaces in cities that are bustling with labour and production, where people are always going somewhere and doing something, need moments like these: moments of supreme nothingness. New York is an example of a challenged metropolis where an ever-decreasing footprint of private space gets compensated by an ever-increasing accessibility to public space and new ideas of inhabiting the urban realm. In its four centuries’ old evolution, the city has also consciously redefined its approach towards open public spaces.

It is difficult to believe that a century-and-a half ago, graveyards used to be the spaces New Yorkers would visit to enjoy ‘a breath of fresh air’. That was until Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, fresh from their trips to Europe and inspired by the European planning movements, won the competition to build Central Park. Envisioned in 1858, their entry: the Greensward Plan, replaced existing farmlands and topography with fanciful, dreamlike vistas, grand promenades, enchanted forests and artificial lakes. It also displaced about 1,600 residents; many of them freed black slaves living in an area called Seneca Village. The park hadn’t been a part of the plan made for the city in 1811 because it was believed that the city’s lengthy shoreline would provide the respite the people needed.

This story is from the January - March 2017 edition of My Liveable City.

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This story is from the January - March 2017 edition of My Liveable City.

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