How to Reclaim Broken Public Places
From Dirty Streets in Bangalore to a Ragged River in L.A., Revival Requires Community
How do you revive a broken place?
That’s a question that I have pondered for more than 15 years, visiting and reading about places broken after long slow declines—from vacant lots in New York and Bangalore to the Los Angeles River—as well as places broken by sudden disasters like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and Japan after the 2011 earthquake.
I first became inspired by efforts to fix broken places in 1998, when I visited what had been a bus parking lot contaminated by diesel oil on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Local …
