Paddy Steinschneider
Designer, planner, and developer
I am the Chief Operations Officer for the New York Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism. I have also recently helped create PLACE Initiative, which is an organization working to address climate change, social justice, and the need to create receiver cities to accommodate the migration of people who will need to move out of harm's way.
Behind The Secenes
Short description:
I helped organize the first Earth Day in 1970, influenced by Barry Commoner, and have been active as a designer, planner, and developer since trying to create better places. Over the last 20 years, I have been investing more time and effort into helping next generations activate and engage with the efforts that are needed to address climate change and social justice. I am President of Gotham Design Planning & Development Ltd.
View from your window:
A relative healthy village that began on the bank of the Hudson River in the mid-1660s when Jan Dobbs established a ferrry across the Hudson, ergo the name of the Village Dobbs Ferry. Dobbs is close to being a complete place where people can live, work, shop, learn, play, and worship. As a Hudson River town, it has an enticing natural character, albeit one that is developed as a community. If I go down to the water front, I can see Manhattan to the south and, if I turn and look north, I can see the new Tappen Zee Bridge, which is the gateway to rural New York State. Dobbs is a walkable community, but because it existed for 250 years before the automobile was invented and has a topography that made it problematic for sprawl development after WWII.
What's your contribution?
I have the training and skill sets to be able to strenthen existing communities so that they can have less of a negative impact on the environment, as well as be more socially just. I am an activist with a sense of humor, who has been successful in the past helping create groups and organizations that take up the good fight and actually accomplish things that are good. While I am now relatively old at 71, I don't act it and have an enthusiasm for helping younger people achieve success. I believe that the health of a community is measured in two ways: the desire and ability for young people to return to where they grew up to raise their families; and the willingness of old people to plant trees under whose shade they will never get to sit.
What brings you here?
I am part of developing PLACE Initiative. PLACE stands for Proactive Leadership Advocating for Climate and Equity. We started in 2019 and have grown to the extent that we conducted a United Nations Campus Thinkers Event last year. I am Chairing the Initiatives Partnership Committee and I am identifying organizations with which I think it would be good to partner. The Empty Square was recommended as being this by one of our members.
What's the most important?
Understanding that "most important" will always be relative to the person, instead of general goals, such as to help our species survive the transition, I prefer to match my "most important" to what I am committed to achieving myself. I have two personal perspectives on what is most important. The first is our need to create compact, complete, and complex places with a high level of connectively capable of building convivial communities. The second is that bad development cannot be prevented by preaching no development - only good development can stop bad development.