"Seeing the Light"
Zak Stone, SeeClickFix
Urban sustainability is often thought of in terms of large-scale, flashy projects, like rooftop gardens, green buildings, and solar panels. However, as conversations on SeeClickFix attest to, taking care of the nuts and bolts issues can have an enormous impact on sustainability as well as livability more generally. Consider the case of the Court Street Bridge.
Since SeeClickFix’s launch in 2008, there has been an outpouring of activism around the issue of the pitch-black Court Street Bridge that connects Wooster Square with Downtown (click here, here, or here to check out the different issue threads). Darkness provides a convenient screen for muggers to lurk behind, and the SeeClickFix threads tell the stories of the many muggings that have occurred along this route. As one fixer pointed out, it’s a catch 22 for residents: no one wants to walk on the bridge because it’s unsafe, but it’s unsafe because there is no one else out walking.
SeeClickFixers have made it clear that the city needs to install lighting. As one user posted, “Fixing this lighting problem will solve a host of other problems in this location, from the broken glass endangering the health of pedestrians and canines, to the muggings happening in this dark area.” And it’s a matter of economics as well. A strong downtown depends on residents in outlying neighborhoods coming in for the evening to enjoy themselves. Yet, this dark bridge is seen by Wooster Square residents as a barrier between themselves and the central city. As another fixer wrote:
Now that it's dark at 5pm I don't go downtown to dinner or drinks as much because I have to walk this bridge to get there and back. I'd be spending a lot more money downtown this winter if I felt safe getting there! With 360 State nearing completion, it's a no-brainer: this bridge has got to be a safe and more inviting conduit between neighborhoods! Please fix.
Sustainability comes into the picture as well. Many people avoid walking places in New Haven because the streets ‘feel’ unsafe, whether that threat is more imaginary than real. In reference to Court Street, another Wooster Square resident posted, “It's a shame that the couple of blocks linking our fantastic neighborhood with downtown make most of us so uncomfortable that we drive!” Think about how many streets in New Haven have this very problem, of feeling dangerous, and how many residents this keeps from walking to locations near their houses. Improving the feel of streets—by lighting them up, by removing graffiti, by mending sidewalks, by cleaning up broken glass, and by planting trees and flowers—will help make the city more sustainable as well as more livable, by encouraging residents to walk and bike, even at night. Best of all, these solutions are relatively cheap and simple to implement.
As the community comes together on SeeClickFix to brainstorm about improving their neighborhoods, we are seeing more of these citizen-generated ideas for fixes come to the foreground. This crowd-sourced approach allows the good ideas to rise to the top, and SeeClickFix’s “Watch Area” alerts spread these ideas to the people in City Hall and the community who can put these ideas into action. SeeClickFix’s new “Community Action” feature encourages New Haven residents to transfer these digital fixes into the real world, by organizing fixing events to tackle certain problems, like park clean-ups and tree-plantings. Other fixes come more gradually, like the Court Street Bridge. Two years after its initial posting, we received a reassuring message from a Wooster Square community group: “The first ever solar lights in New Haven to be installed on the Court Street Bridge have been ordered,” wrote woostersqwatch. “They are to be installed this month, God willing. Keep harping, yes, until we see light.”
See Zak's colleague Ben Berkowitz along with Carol Coletta and Ethan Seltzer at TODAYS! Ideas Panel: Livability, Localism, & Urban Utopias: What Does it Mean & What Does it Take?