WXY Senior Associate Majed Abdulsamad, AICP, recently led a walking tour along the East River for the Urban Land Institute’s Climate and Sustainability Council. As both a designer on the FDR Reimagined team for WXY and a community leader serving as Chair of Land Use and Waterfront at Manhattan Community Board Six, Majed brought a dual perspective to the conversation, one grounded in both design thinking and local insight.

FDR Reimagined, developed by WXY in collaboration with CB6, reconsiders a 45-block stretch of the FDR Drive as more than a traffic corridor. It envisions the highway as a platform for public space, environmental resilience, and neighborhood connection. The study responds to decades of disconnection along the East River, proposing short- and long-term strategies that include planted boulevards, overbuild parks, and activated spaces beneath the viaduct.

The walking tour offered a chance to see these conditions up close and discuss how design solutions could evolve alongside infrastructure and environmental goals. Participants reflected on how precedents like the East Midtown Greenway and the Bentway in Toronto can inform new approaches to mobility, access, and open space here in New York.

The project emerged from a fast-paced design sprint that prioritized community priorities and institutional input from day one. It is not a master plan, but a framework that can act as a starting point for reimagining the waterfront as a civic asset rather than a boundary.

Rethinking infrastructure at this scale means not just removing barriers, but building connections between neighborhoods, between systems, and between people and place.

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