Camminare a New York. Dalla lotta al Gridlock alla pedonalizzazione di Times Square

New York is the paradigm of the twentieth century industrialized metropolis, entirely devoted to progress. It’s the vertical-city par excellence that became the concretization of Koolhaas’ theory of “congestion as a culture”. The streets of the Big Apple were hyper-crowded, unhealthy places and the scenery of unsolved social conflicts. The increasing urban decay, however, has pushed the various municipal administrations to an ever-increasing commitment to improve the liveability of Manhattan by triggering beneficial mechanisms, such as rediscovering the road as a place of well-being. The action of the mayor/tycoon Michael Bloomberg was incisive due to the radical impact he impressed on the mobility and on the health policies of New Yorkers, inducing a radical rethinking even of places that had such a strong symbolic significance as Times Square, the exhibitionist space where America staged all its rhetoric and exuberance. It’s exactly in this place that the Norway-based firm Snøhetta succeeds in putting into practice its principle of an architecture seen as a "collective intuition" which, through the inversion of the power relations between cars and people, leads Times Square to become a liveable and human-friendly space.