Amanda Burden: TED Talk

So, this semester in college, we did an interesting study on Placemaking and Public Spaces, as part of our design of a Civic Centre in Kanchipuram, a temple town in South India. And the highlight of that particular study was this TED Talk by Amanda Burden, New York’s Chief city planner. She begins by emphasizing how a city is fundamentally about its people and goes on to state examples from all over New York, where good Urban Design essentially meant a design by and for the people. The transformation of the Highline and HydePark in New York is beautifully captured in her talk, which ends with her rightly saying, public spaces are why we stay in a city.