Needed: Community Innovation

Collective brainstorming brings great ideas. At least that's what the folks at Living City Block are betting on.

This week, the Denver-based organization with offices at the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation on Court Street, is hosting a 2-day "community innovation" workshop on how to build a more sustainable and "liveable city." 

By bringing a lot of interested parties together, the organizers hope the workshops can serve as incubators for good ideas.

"This stuff doesn't happen in isolation, it has to come from a community process," said David Krieger, Managing Director of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation. "We want to start with a dialogue."

Each day will be divided into two sessions, with break-out groups focusing on specific subjects and speakers and presentations throughout. Presenters include: Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, Policy Advisor, PlaNYC; Jessie Feller, Senior Planner Energy Policy Program, Regional Plan Association; Tom Glendening, Founder E3 NYC; Susan Leeds, CEO, NYC Energy Efficiency Corporation; Councilmember Brad Lander and Michael Sahm, UTC Fellow, United Technologies Corporation.

Topics for discussion include transportation, housing, green streets, energy efficiency, waste reduction, urban planning and community connectivity. 

since the winter to collectively convince and organize building owners to make their homes energy efficient. The first step is to find homeowners who are interested in joining the project. Once enough buildings are on board, Living City Block comes in with a team and advises on how to retrofit the buildings and help find financing.

Living City Block is currently looking at Court Street from Hamilton Avenue to 4th Place and 3rd Street from Smith Street to Third Avenue as potential blocks for the project.

Krieger says the goals of the workshops are to bring many people and organizations together in order to build connections, to create a positive environment in which to foster ideas and to come out of the workshops with "a catalog of ideas" for the future.

For Krieger, bringing together all the disparate groups with similar goals is especially important.

"We have more common interests here than we may realize," he said.

The workshops are on Wednesday and Thursday, from 12 - 8 p.m. and 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., at Gowanus Studio Space, 166 7th Street. The sessions are free, but RSVP is required: 646-397-6576, dkrieger@livingcityblock.org, vmeer@livingcityblock.org