Cooper Trapezoid
About Us
CityGAP
CityGAP is an experiential gap year program in which college-age participants engage with the city as classroom, laboratory, studio and community.
We explore the built and natural environment to wrestle with and address urgent challenges facing NYC at this critical moment.
Our participants work on both group and individual projects, producing a portfolio of original work in a variety of media, designed to contribute to making NYC a more just, equitable and resilient city.
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What We Do
We, as the CityGAP Fall 2022 cohort, are a group of eight students from California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Copenhagen, brought together by our shared interest in New York City and its urban evolution. In studying the city through its public spaces, we have examined and explored NYC’s architectural and urban form and the equality, diversity and resiliency of its different communities.
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Together with the history, heritage and memories of the city and its ever inspiring creative culture, we’ve discovered what it means to create engaging, inclusive and viable public spaces for the community.
In achieving this understanding, our process began with exploring the nature and history of public space in the city, through readings, fieldwork, slideshows and public space site analyses. From this rigorous process, we developed an intimate understanding of the complex elements in public spaces. We then turned this emerging understanding toward a four-day Public Space Design project, in which we designed public spaces in teams of 2-4 persons.
This work led us into a group design thinking process that produced our Equitable Public Space Manifesto, our criteria for what a public space should accomplish. Once we established this, we evaluated several possible sites for a deeper redesign project, resulting in our choice of Cooper Square and Triangle. We then set out on a public engagement process and exploration of potential redesign and programming options for the space, based on what we heard and saw.
Finally, with the support of our architectural and community partners, we have created a proposed redesign, along with new, community-driven programming, and an implementation plan that places decision making in the hands of the community. We presented our work to the Shore Corps students at RISE, and to our partners at Leroy Street Studios for feedback, before preparing our final designs, website and exhibition.
Our Process
