Urban Design Week: By the City / For the City Blog

The Borough Breakdown

While yesterday’s post looked at categorical trends across the city, today we’ll dig a bit deeper to examine unique conditions in each of the five boroughs. Is green space on the top of the list for concrete jungle-residing Manhattanites? Are the good people of Brooklyn as achingly unorthodox as the blogosphere seems to portray them as? Read on to learn about how each borough stacks up…

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Manhattan attracted a plurality of the ideas submitted—221, or 45.7% of the total—but differed from overall categorical norms in some surprising ways. Green Space and Recreation were both considerably less popular in the most densely-populated borough than they were across the city, by five and seven percentage points, respectively. The most common categories in Manhattan were: Transportation; Streetscapes; Culture/Public Art; Green Space; and Other.

The 115 ideas submitted in Brooklyn(23.7% of the total) follow the categorical breakdown for overall results most closely; only Safety/Health differs by more than three percentage points from the overall city-wide averages. In fact, Brooklyn is the only borough in which this category broke the top five. The most common categories here: Transportation, Streetscapes, Safety/Health, Green Space, and Other.

Queens residents shared 87 ideas for their borough (18% of the total). With 24 of those ideas relating to Recreation (31.5% of all ideas in that category), this was one of the only issues where an outer borough captured the largest percentage of ideas across the city. The top five categories across Queens were: Transportation; Green Space; Streetscapes; Recreation; and Culture/Public Art.

45 ideas were submitted in the Bronx (9.3% of the total). These were most commonly categorized as: Culture/Public Art; Transportation; Recreation; Retail/Commerce; and Green Space. The Bronx’s preference for ideas dealing with leisure and enjoyment of the city was uniquely strong. Bronxites were also most likely to categorize their ideas as impacting things at the Block-level (40%).

Staten Island received just 15 ideas (3.1% of the total). Staten Islanders were most likely to identify their ideas as relating to the Neighborhood scale (a full 93%). The top five categories here were: Transportation, Recreation, Retail/Commerce, Streetscapes, and Waterfront—making this the only borough where Waterfront was a top five issue.

Click here to register for the By the City / For the City design competition today! Entries are due by midnight (EST) on Sunday, July 31st, 2011. We can’t wait to see what you come up with!